[Rarebooks] FS: Important Robert Louis Stevenson SIGNED Letter

[Charles Agvent]

STEVENSON, Robert Louis. AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED (ALS): "one regrets 
one's youth more sharply in England than in France" n.p., n.d. An 
important two-page letter in Stevenson's hand and SIGNED twice by him 
with his initials "R.L.S." on two sides of a 9" x 8" sheet of paper so 
that each page of writing has a blank verso. Interesting and 
characteristic content addressed to his cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray 
Stevenson, about his health and contrasting England and France. In part: 
"I have not got the cold. Fanny is better.... I am so dry-rotten that I 
can do nothing. I have been as dry-rotten in the Savile Club (the old 
building) where it was endemic, like hospital gangrene; but never 
anywhere else. It is blame cold. As soon as you have got the pontoon 
started, better let me see. Do not be stumped by difficulty of 
beginning; remember that is always hard.... Dry rot is, I think, 
English; though I have felt its hand in Parry on the gay bullyvard. The 
cure is a voyage.... It is odd: one regrets one's youth more sharply in 
England than in France. The Climate calls more for exercise, activity, 
the tightened nerve, change of scene, a little hardship, and much open 
air. In France I was quite willing to become ventripotent, sluggish and 
quadragenarian; here I want to leap, and run, and --- can't." A bit of 
staining in the margins. Near Fine, framed between two pieces of glass 
with a 1917 auction description for this letter glued to one side over 
blank space.

Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as "Bob") was perhaps the most 
important person in RLS's life when he was a student at the University 
of Edinburgh studying engineering. Bob forsake the family profession to 
study art, and he must have played some part in RLS abandoning both 
engineering and Christianity to become a writer and a Bohemian. The two 
were members of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) Club whose 
constitution stated: "Disregard everything our parents have taught us." 
Among their friends at the time was the painter John Singer Sargent. 
(#017293)        $5,000

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