But of all that went on at Grez the talks are remembered as the best, for, notwithstanding their merry fooling in their idle hours, there were brilliant minds among the company, and the conversation sparkled with rare conceits.
Three summers the Osbournes returned to spend at Grez, lingering on the last time until the snow came. A short visit was made to Barbizon, too, and once when there the whole party had their silhouettes drawn on the walls of the dining-room. This was done by placing a lamp so that it threw a shadow of the face in profile on the wall, then outlining the shadow and filling it in with black. Louis Stevenson wrote verses to them all. The place was repainted the next spring, which was to be regretted, for the walls were completely covered with the most interesting silhouettes and drawings by painters who later became famous, to say nothing of the verses made by Stevenson, which would now have been a priceless memorial of those youthful days.
Among the joyous coterie was the American painter Will H. Low, who writes thus of Fanny Osbourne in his _Chronicle of Friendships_:
"One evening at Grez we saw two new faces, mother and daughter, though in appearance more like sisters; the elder, slight, with delicately moulded features and vivid eyes gleaming from under a mass of dark hair; the younger of more robust type, in the first precocious bloom of womanhood."
Another of the company, Mr. Birge Harrison, writing in the _Century Magazine_ of December, 1916, expresses his mature judgment of her as he knew her at the little French village:
[Illustration: Robert Louis Stevenson in the French days.]
"Among a few women who were doing serious work at this place was the lady, 'Trusty, dusky, vivid, and true,' to whom Robert Louis Stevenson inscribed the most beautiful love song of our time. Mrs. Osbourne could not have been at that time more than thirty-five years of age--a grave and remarkable type of womanhood, with eyes of a depth and sombre beauty that I have never seen equalled--eyes, nevertheless, that upon occasion could sparkle with humor and brim over with laughter. Yet upon the whole Mrs. Osbourne impressed me as first of all a woman of profound character and serious judgment, who could, if occasion called, have been the leader in some great movement. But she belonged to the quattrocento rather than to the nineteenth century. Had she been born a Medici, she would have held rank as one of the remarkable women of all time. That she was a woman of intellectual attainments is proved by the fact that she was already a magazine writer of recognized ability, and that at the moment when Stevenson first came into her life she was making a living for herself and her two children with her pen. But this, after all, is a more or less ordinary accomplishment, and Mrs. Osbourne was in no sense ordinary. Indeed, she was gifted with a mysterious sort of over-intelligence, which is almost impossible to describe, but which impressed itself upon every one who came within the radius of her influence. Napoleon had much of this; likewise his arch enemy, the great Duke of Wellington; and among women, Catherine of Russia and perhaps Elizabeth of England. She was therefore both physically and mentally the very antithesis of the gay, hilarious, open-minded and open-hearted Stevenson, and for that very reason perhaps the woman in all the world best fitted to be his life comrade and helpmate. At any rate we may well ask ourselves if anywhere else he would have found the kind of understanding and devotion which she gave him from the day of their first meeting at Grez until the day of his death in far-away Samoa; if anywhere else there was a woman of equal attainments who would willingly, nay gladly, throw aside all of the pleasures and comforts of civilization to live among savages, and the still rougher whites of the South Pacific, in order that her husband might have just a little more oxygen for his failing lungs, a little more _chance_ for a respite and an extension of his shortening years? Probably no one ever better deserved than she the noble tribute of verse which her husband gave her, and from which I have quoted the opening line."