Fanny has been ill, but is much better again; she now goes donkey rides with an old woman, who compliments her on her French. That old woman—seventy odd—is in a parlous spiritual state. Pretty soon, in the new sixpenny illustrated magazine, Wogg’s picture is to appear: this is a great honour! And the poor soul whose vanity would just explode if he could understand it, will never be a bit the wiser!—With much love, in which Fanny joins, believe me, your affectionate boy, ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. TO W. E. HENLEY _La Solitude_, _Hyères_, _Summer_ 1883. DEAR LAD,—Snatches in return for yours; for this little once, I’m well to windward of you. Seventeen chapters of _Otto_ are now drafted, and finding I was working through my voice and getting screechy, I have turned back again to rewrite the earlier part. It has, I do believe, some merit: of what order, of course, I am the last to know; and, triumph of triumphs, my wife—my wife who hates and loathes and slates my women—admits a great part of my Countess to be on the spot. Yes, I could borrow, but it is the joy of being before the public, for once. Really, £100 is a sight more than _Treasure Island_ is worth. The reason of my _dèche_? Well, if you begin one house, have to desert it, begin another, and are eight months without doing any work, you will be in a _dèche_ too. I am not in a _dèche_, however; _distinguo_—I would fain distinguish; I am rather a swell, but _not solvent_. At a touch the edifice, _ædificium_, might collapse. If my creditors began to babble around me, I would sink with a slow strain of music into the crimson west. The difficulty in my elegant villa is to find oil, _oleum_, for the dam axles. But I’ve paid my rent until September; and beyond the chemist, the grocer, the baker, the doctor, the gardener, Lloyd’s teacher, and the great thief creditor Death, I can snap my fingers at all men. Why will people spring bills on you? I try to make ’em charge me at the moment; they won’t, the money goes, the debt remains.—The Required Play is in the _Merry Men_. Q. E. F. I thus render honour to your _flair_; it came on me of a clap; I do not see it yet beyond a kind of sunset glory. But it’s there: passion, romance, the picturesque, involved: startling, simple, horrid: a sea-pink in sea-froth! _S’agit de la désenterrer_. ‘Help!’ cries a buried masterpiece. Once I see my way to the year’s end, clear, I turn to plays; till then I grind at letters; finish _Otto_; write, say, a couple of my _Traveller’s Tales_; and then, if all my ships come home, I will attack the drama in earnest. I cannot mix the skeins. Thus, though I’m morally sure there is a play in _Otto_, I dare not look for it: I shoot straight at the story.