FROM a convivial conversation over a bottle or three of red wine in a Parisian garret came the idea for Stevenson’s Paris. For decades I have been an RLS addict, obsessed with finding out all I can about this most versatile and charismatic author. But my magnum opus on his life, all 198,000 words of it, lay languishing without a publisher like a beached whale in cyberspace. My son was then living La Vie de Bohème, hanging out in a bookshop in the city famous for its historic associations with Joyce, Hemingway and Fitzgerald who spent formative years there. But what about Stevenson, I exclaimed, through a miasma of ripe brie, baguette crumbs and Bordeaux. Did people realise he had a Paris period, too?
Before becoming famous as RLS, and so famously ill that many people imagine he spent his whole life in bed looking pale and saintly, Stevenson actually had a bloody good time in France. Ruddy-faced and in rude health, he hung out with artists and models in Paris cafés and Bohemian restaurants. He led an idyllic life boating, hiking and writing poetry in the enchanted forest of Fontainebleau, where a convivial company of unknown, mainly American young painters spent their summers seeking inspiration. Among them, of course, he met a married lady from California with whom he lived in Paris in the brothel district below Montmartre before pursuing her to the States and persuading her to divorce her philandering husband. There was plenty of living and loving to do before settling down to the life of an internationally acclaimed novelist, children’s author and globetrotting travel writer – and Paris was the fun part.
So why not write about it? My son suggested a short, enjoyable book, not another beached whale. Just pull together all the interesting stuff about Stevenson and his friends in Paris, his drunken experiences in French hotels, his hot-headed clashes with French bureaucracy, his Bohemian scorn for bankers and businessmen and all those who saw life as a commercial enterprise rather than a romantic adventure. So I set out to pull all that stuff together from the various corners where it lay buried in letters and forgotten newspaper articles and the memoirs of friends looking back on a golden, shared youth. Dust it down and put it all together and maybe it would shine like Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, evocative of its own time but speaking to succeeding generations. Have I succeeded? Only those who read the book can say. But I had a good time trying.
You can find Stevenson’s Paris for Kindle here
Stevenson's Paris 