From Sotheby's Catalogue, July 24, 1914, #587

AUTO. SCRAPS OF CONVERSATION...... In reference to these, Mr. Lloyd Osbourne says:

One might speak to him, but his replies had to be written. Looking back on those bedside scenes, it is strange to recall how jolly they were, and how much laughter went with them. Naturally in speaking to a man so dangerously ill, one tried to keep the conversation animated and cheerful, but R.L.S.'s incorrigible gaiety soon turned the pretence into reality.

CODE OF SIGNALS

(La Solitude, Hyeres. April 1884)

1. The crooked forefinger begs explanation, criticism, elucidation, opinion.

2. Violent pantomime is to be answered, not by remarks on the dumb person's impatience, but by a statement of what you understand him to wish. When he does not see you do it, he thinks himself misunderstood.

3. The case of the dumb is one of great inconvenience and suppressed wrath. When he has made a sign, you have failed to follow, and he shrugs his shoulders, *drop it forever*.

by authority

R. L. S.

Baron de Blazes
Secy.

What shall I do about Vidal? Only he said if it had not stopped, to send him a card. Now it has not, but still it is less.

O how I did suffer from rheumatism last night, red hot veins; and in the knee, knives cutting and bombs going off.

*It occupies my knee.*

Peut être une carte à l'hopital.

<table><tr><td>Mr. R L. S</td></tr></table>

A card, pictorial view.

Guess that as a conundrum? Who is it?

I have about her that feeling: that she is always *cold* with *out-of-doors*

NOTE

These pieces of paper, but two of many upon which Stevenson used
to write down remarks or carry on bedside conversations during or
following hemorrhages, when he was forbidden to speak, and preserved
by chance, bring one as close as it is possible to come to that per-
sonality who retained a sense of humour and great courage within
sound of "the creak of Charon's row-locks" and the darkness of "the
miasmas of the Styx."

It was not an unusual occurrence for R. L. S. to be confined to
bed and condemned to silence with pencil and paper or pantomimic gestures
as the only means of communication with his wife and friends, indeed, it
happened so frequently most of his intimates have left descriptions of
such scenes, but rare it is to find the actual fragments upon which he
scribbled the words he dare not say aloud.

A delicate childhood had made him familiar with the uselessness of
fretting in "the land of counterpane," and when later years found him
an even more frequent visitor, he was prepared to entertain himself,
when strength allowed, by modelling, sketching, or jotting down notes,
or playing games with a partner. Mr. Gosse relates that at one time,
when he was visiting the invalid, it was his custom to go to Louis' bed-
room after breakfast "where he sat up in bed, with dark flashing eyes
and ruffled hair, and we played chess on the coverlid. Not a word passed,

for he was strictly forbidden to speak in the early part of the day.
As soon as he felt tired-- often in the middle of a game-- he would
rap with peremptory knuckles on the board as a signal to stop, and
then Mrs. Stevenson or I would arrange his writing materials on the
bed..." There were other times, though, when it was not safe for him
to use his voice in the evening and total silence was enforced.

Mr. Graham Balfour, in his Life of Stevenson, tells of one piece
of paper on which Stevenson wrote while being choked by a flow of blood,
"Don't be frightened; if this is death, it is an easy one." This did
not relieve his wife who read it of her terror; she tried to measure
out the prescribed quantity of ergotine, but was unable to do so. R. L. S.
himself measured the correct dose with a steady hand, and gave the bottle
and glass back to her with a reassuring smile.

The first of the two little manuscripts here is the CODE OF SIGNALS;
it gives instruction, chiefly in fun, to any one who attempt to converse
with him while he must remain dumb, the rest of the MS. below the Code,
is his side of a conversation with his wife, doubtless. He mentions
Vidal-- "His own extremely clever doctor at Hyères," (Balfour's Life,
vol.i, p.253, N. Y., 1908) and asks what he shall do about him. R. L. S.
was perhaps wondering whether the doctor should be called, as the hemorr-
hage has not stopped, though it is less. Vidal had said to send him a
card, if it had not-- so the sick man thinks "perhaps a card to the hos-
pital"-- a pictorial one, may be the thing. Then he confides to the
person beside him that he had suffered the night before from rheumatism--
and sends much the same description of the pain to Henley in a letter

dated from La Solitude, April 20th, 1884:-

"Scientia is a word employed much by Shakespeare in a certain connection. 'Tis true, he was no physician, but as I read, he had smarted in his day. I, too, do smart. And yet this keen soprano of agony, these veins of fire and bombshell explosions in the knee, are as nothing to a certain dull, drowsy pain I had.... at Nice."

The last two lines of this manuscript are perhaps in reply to a question put to him regarding the identity of a lady; and that being settled, he gives his impression of her.

The second manuscript is a sickbed conversation, again doubtless with his wife, written during one of his frequent illnesses at Bournemouth, after his return from the Continent in July 1884 and before October.

The first two months of his stay at Bournemouth, he spent chiefly in the company of Henley, and they were devoted to collaboration over two plays; by October the drafts of Beau Austin and Admiral Guinea were complete and in type. In this manuscript, after complaining about the ill effect of the drug ergotine upon him, he writes:

> I wanted him to go on & leave that scene: but he won't. And then let him go on with the next scene. Far better; that is how to rest the brain...

Is Stevenson here complaining about W. E. Henley-- a Henley who insists upon proceeding in his own way in the joint authorship and disregarding

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