Robert Louis Stevenson
Famous writer and traveler who lived several years in Hyeres
Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and The Strange Case of Dr Jekylland Hyde, wrote of his time on the French Riviera with nostalgia.
‘I was only happy once, and that was at Hyeres’.
Robert was an ill child, thought to have tuberculosis. He first visited Nice and Menton when he was 12 years old, where the climate was thought to aid his chest condition. As an adult, his health started to fail again, so he returned to the Riviera. He spent a brief and terrible time in Marseilles in a damp house which wreaked havoc on his health, and where his beloved wife Fanny once once found a dead body dumped on the doorstep.
Unsurprisingly, they moved along the coast to Hyeres soon after. In this pretty coastal resort long frequented by the French elite, they lived in a tiny pseudo-Swiss folly perched on a cliff. The house itself had a bizarre story: it had been a show home on display at the 1878 Parisian exhibition, where a man had seen it, loved it and had it shipped to the South of France. Robert and Fanny loved it too: It was miniscule- never meant for living in at all- but in Chalet de la Solitude, Robert Louis Stevenson found happiness.
‘It was the loveliest house you ever saw, with a garden like a fairy story and a view like a classical landscape.’
He also wrote that ‘This spot, our garden and our view, are sub-celestial. I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, ‘I dwell already the next door to heaven!’ If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my olives, and my view over a plain, and my view of certain mountains…you would not think this phrase exaggerated.’
In this location, looking out across the Mediterranean Sea, he worked on The Silverado Squatters, A Child’s Garden of Verses, The Black Arrow and Kidnapped. They spent 16 months in this magical place, until Fanny spied an article talking of a cholera outbreak in Hyeres. Fearing for her husband’s health, she pulled a reluctant Robert away from the folly and their ‘sub-celestial view’, not realising that cholera was pretty much a permanent summertime fixture in Hyeres. Robert Louis Stevenson would not return to France, moving on to adventures in the South Pacific, eventually settling in Samoa.
While he would always miss Hyeres, he loved the Samoans and they loved him. When he was on a high, working on the last book he would ever write, he wrote that:"sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little ... take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time.”
The Chalet de la Solitude stands still, hanging onto the edge of the cliff with its view of mountains and sea. the favourite view on earth of a man who travelled the South Seas and the Americas, but still just wanted to come home to Hyeres, and make the mock epitaph he had written for himself could become true.
Here lies
The Carcas
Of
Robert Louis Stevenson
An active, asture and not inelegant
writer,
who
owned it to be his crowning favour
TO INHABIT
LA SOLITUDE
