Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  On the road to Florac, pensive after his bad night, Stevenson was rewarded by his last significant encounter of the route. As it stands in his journal it has an almost proverbial quality. He fell in with an old man in a brown nightcap—“clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with an excited smile”—who was driving two sheep and a goat to market, accompanied by a little girl, his grand-daughter.

  “Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?” the old man began briskly, and started to question Stevenson about his faith. This strange figure, whom Stevenson later described as “my mountain Plymouth Brother”, turned out to be a member of an obscure but genial Protestant sect, and for some reason took the Scotsman to be of the same persuasion. Far from embarrassing him, their halting, somewhat inspired conversation served to confirm Stevenson in his pantheistic beliefs and in the principle of tolerance which he had been meditating on ever since La Trappe. The old man also seemed to appreciate the saving grace of a life lived in the open, free from formalities and conventional creeds.

  I could not help thinking that Stevenson, for all his troubles, had brought down from the high hills a transcendental glow. “The old man cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy alehouse, ‘Now I see you know the Lord!’ “It struck me that their conversation along the winding road was ideally the kind of talk that Stevenson, in other circumstances, would have liked to have had with his father. He felt there was no real dishonesty in sliding over their differences and trying to keep to common ground: “I declare myself a Morave, with this Moravian, just as I tried to persuade the priest at Our Lady of the Snows that I was, in essential things, a Catholic; it is not my fault if they put me out, I continue to knock at the door, I will be in; there is no sect in the world I do not count mine.”

  Adding to this in the Travels, Stevenson drew the lesson more explicitly, giving the incident a weight and universality that he associated with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the models for his own book:

  For charity begins blindfold: and only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our fellow men. If I deceived the good old man, in the like manner I would willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again. Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down upon a hamlet on the Tarn.

  This I suppose is the most public meaning of the Travels, its formal declaration of informality in faith, with the stress on charity and good fellowship as the most profound virtues for the journey of life. In a sense it is a quite deliberate contradiction of his stiff Presbyterian upbringing, and it was not without irony that Stevenson remarks: “I scarcely knew I was so good a preacher.” And is the “good old man” his father (in the journal he addresses him as “mon père”)?

  Perhaps: it is particularly difficult to appreciate the degree to which religious differences could rend an otherwise close and loving family a hundred years ago. Differences of politics, morality, even career ambition—yes, these can still be felt from the inside; but differences of creed, these are almost lost to us. Unless of course you happen like me to have been brought up within a powerful “sect” like Catholicism and know from within the struggle and sense of guilt involved in breaking away. It did not surprise me to discover that when Stevenson first announced his agnosticism (although a very Christian form of it) to his father the latter wrote bleakly: “You have rendered my whole life a failure.”

  Their interview in Paris in February 1878 had much improved this situation. But Stevenson still felt the need for some kind of intermediary figure, like the old Plymouth Brother; and in this sense, while much of the Travels is “mere protestations” to Fanny, so much else in the book is still the appeal of a wayward son, “mere protestations” to Thomas Stevenson. As he put it in the journal: “‘My father,’ said I, ‘it is not easy to say who knows the Lord, and it is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics and even people who worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him, for He has made us all.’”

  At Florac Stevenson again lunched at the inn, where he was received as something of a portent. “My knife, my cane, my sack, all my arrangements were cordially admired.” The village schoolmaster came in to question him, and the young innkeeper—unmarried, living with his sister—struck an amusing note: “‘Tout ce que vous avez est joli,’ said the young man, ‘et vous l’êtes’”—which Stevenson let pass with a smile. But again I sensed his hurry: he pressed on down the road towards Cassagnas—overtaken by that “black care” on his knapsack—and once again the dusk found him groping for a camp in the valley of the Mimente: “I slipped down to the river, which looked very black among its rocks to fill my can; and then I dined with good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light my lantern in the near neighbourhood of a house … All night, a strong wind blew up the valley and the acorns fell pattering over me from the oak.”

  This was his penultimate night on the road—and peace fell from the stars, he says, on to his spirit “like a dew”. But he was much disturbed by the barking of a watch-dog from that nearby house, and the first hints of returning civilisation were upon him. “To a tramp like myself,” he noted, “the dog represents the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of the clergyman or the lawyer in the engaging animal.”

  I made a little fire among the rocks by the river, and slept in the doorway of an isolated barn. My diary notes “a solitary star below the door-lintel, a little rain, and an occasional blink of lightning over the oak trees”.

  The same dog, the messenger of civilisation, woke Stevenson early on the morning of Wednesday, 2 October, and already beginning to think of the letters awaiting him at Alais he was packed and on the road for Cassagnas before the sun had slid into the valley. It was one of his longest day’s walks, he was clearly close to exhaustion—like Modestine—and his final journal entries are desultory.

  At Cassagnas, “a black village on the mountainside”—again that note of drained colour—he dined with the local gendarme and a travelling merchant at the inn. There was some gossip of a renegade Catholic curé, who had given up his ministry and “taken to his bosom” the local schoolmistress; the villagers, though almost all Protestant, showed little sympathy for the man’s predicament, despite the fact that their own Protestant priests were allowed and indeed encouraged to marry. The general sentiment seemed to be that “it is a bad idea for a man to go back on his engagements”—even if it was such an unnatural one as Catholic celibacy. Stevenson remarks wryly that “perhaps the bad idea was to enter into them at the first” and continues with a brief, rather hazy passage about the “holy simplicity” of physical desires and needs. “The world gives liberally of things to eat; it is all over spouting fountains; and a man need not travel very far ere he finds a woman to whom his soul can cling. If he can but lay aside some dismal ascetic standards, and a few hollow aspirations …”

  But he was pleased to find that both the policeman and the merchant were more than a little shocked to discover that he had been sleeping in the open. There was talk of wolves and thieves—“the English always have long purses”—and general head-shaking. To all Stevenson’s smiling and shrugging—” ‘God,’ said I, ‘is everywhere’”—the merchant replied in grave, flattering disapproval: “Cependant, coucher dehors!” and finally asked for one of Stevenson’s visiting cards, saying that “it would be something to talk about in the future, this donkey-driving, English amateur vagrant.” Stevenson was charmed to comply.

  Without further delay, he then crossed back over the Mimente to the southern side of the valley and began to climb the ragged path that leads steeply up through “sliding stone and heather tufts” to the huge, long escarpment known as Mont Mars. It took him nearly all afternoon to g
et over the crest and discover the astonishing panorama of hills on the other side, dominated by the Plan de Fontmort where the Camisards fought their last, bloody and suicidal battle.

  To me this was the single most impressive view of the entire journey. I scrawled wildly in my diary:

  Like gasping for breath in a rolling blue sea of hills going southwards as far as the sky and further—being washed entirely away by it all—exalted and lonely as hell—stood on a rock of the heathery col drinking toast to RLS—tin cup held up to horizon—somewhere he must have heard—black cicadas exploding all round with shiny red wings in the sunlight.

  Obscurely I felt that the whole trip “made sense beyond metaphor of explanation”, in that high, bright, windy place of the Cévennes. I lay for hours on my back in the heather watching the clouds troop endlessly and majestically overhead in the blue. If you were dead and buried, I thought, that is how life would go on around you; that is how Stevenson would see it. And of course I recited his epitaph, known by heart, to generations of English children like me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  Stevenson arrived on the edge of Mont Mars when it was already late in the afternoon. He was deeply moved too by the realisation that his journey must be near its end; he could not continue it much longer. “It was perhaps the wildest view of my journey; peak upon peak, chain upon chain of hills ran surging southward, channelled and guttered by winter streams, feathered from head to foot with chestnuts and here and there breaking out into a coronal of cliffs.” The sun was setting behind the Plan de Fontmort and the darkness was filling up the valleys. “Away across the highest peaks, to the south-west, lay Alais, my destination.” An old shepherd hobbling on a pair of sticks and wearing a black cap of liberty, “as if in honour of his neighbourhood to the grave”, directed him to the road for St Germain-de-Calberte.

  Here Stevenson was to spend his final night, and his journal ends with a description of the long descent to the village, through high terraces of chestnut trees, as the dusk fell and the moon came up. The road glimmered white, “carpeted with noiseless dust”, and Stevenson drank mouthfuls of Volnay wine until he was no longer conscious of his limbs. He arrived just as the landlady of the inn was putting her chickens to bed. “The fire was already out and had, not without grumbling, to be rekindled; quarter of an hour later and I must have gone supperless to roost.”

  He met no one on this last, light-headed stretch; but he heard a voice, the voice of a woman singing, somewhere below him through the rustling chestnut trees. In a sense, of course, it was Fanny’s voice, and he wished he could have responded. “I could barely catch the words, but there was something about a bel amoureux, a handsome lover. I wished I could take up the strain and answer her, as I went on my invisible woodland way. If a traveller could only sing, he would pay his way literally, it seems to me.”

  In the Travels Stevenson gently elaborates on this last encounter, describing the song as “some sad, old, endless ballad” (was he thinking of Wordsworth’s “solitary highland lass” heard singing in the fields?) and wondering what he might have said to her: “Little enough; and yet all the heart requires. How the world gives and takes away, and brings sweethearts near only to separate them again into distant and strange lands; but to love is the great amulet which makes the world a garden; and ‘hope, which comes to all’, outwears the accidents of life …”

  The following day, Thursday, 3 October, he took the carriage road over the Col de St Pierre to St Jean-du-Gard. Here Modestine was declared unfit to travel by the farrier, and Stevenson found his journey had come abruptly to an end. His relief is evident. He sold his “lady friend” for thirty-five francs, boxed up his belongings and caught the afternoon diligence—“now eager to reach Alais for my letters”. His envoi is light-hearted: “It was not until I was fairly seated by the driver, and rattling through a rocky valley with dwarf olives, that I became aware of my bereavement. I had lost Modestine. Up to that moment I had thought I hated her; but now she was gone—‘And oh! The difference to me!’” This time the reference is explicit, to Wordsworth’s Lucy poems. Stevenson adds mockingly that “being alone with a stage-driver” and four or five other passengers he wept openly for his loss.

  I spent my last night under one of those huge spreading chestnut trees, off the old coaching road—now no more than a track—beyond St Germain-de-Calberte. I had walked along for an hour in the moonlight, after supper at the auberge, listening for the sounds of singing. I was tired and slept well, to be woken after six by a red squirrel skittering in the branches overhead. I immediately felt alone: Stevenson had departed. I cooked my last coffee with strange sensations of mixed relief and abandonment. Then as I packed up my rucksack a wild happiness filled me, and a sense of achievement. I had done it, I had followed him, I had made a mark. Very deliberately and self-consciously I stuck my bone-handled sheath-knife deep into the bark of the old chestnut, and left it there like a trophy.

  I walked over the Col de St Pierre in six hours, and came down to St Jean-du-Gard, a modern market town on the high road between Ales and Millau, no longer in the magic département of Lozère. Suddenly I was back in civilisation. I had two beers at a café, one for Stevenson and one for Modestine, and seeing my silver ring and long hair the garçon addressed me charmingly throughout as “Monsieur Clochard”. Indeed I was no longer quite sure who I was, except a stranger back in the modern world like Rip van Winkle.

  The sense of having been away, somewhere quite else, was extraordinarily strong: my first experience of biographer’s “time-warp”. I hitch-hiked home to my vine-farmers, in the south-east beyond Nîmes, riding in the open back of a big lorry carrying red Calor-gas cans. Facing backwards, my pack swaying at my feet, the cans clanging like sea-buoys, the wind plucking at Le Brun, I watched the dark-brown line of the Cévennes drop below the north-west horizon like “a sea-coast in Bohemia”. My head was full of poems I would write.

  5

  Stevenson published his Travels with a Donkey some six months later, in the spring of 1879. He spent several weeks working on it during the autumn, in Cambridge, at Sidney Colvin’s rooms in Trinity; and then, over Christmas, at home in Edinburgh. All this time he had no news of Fanny in San Francisco. His aim was to expand his original journal from some twenty thousand words to a small volume of about double that length. To this purpose he filled in topographical details from guide-books and added the Camisard history from Napoléon Peyrat and other sources; he carefully rewrote his religious reflections (partly so as not to shock his father) and rehandled the encounters with the monks and the priest at La Trappe, and the old Plymouth Brother at Florac; finally, he deleted or generalised the amorous reflections that were originally written with Fanny in mind—so effectively that even a recent modern biographer has concluded that “there is only one passage in which we are made aware of the fact that he was missing Fanny intensely”.

  The book was dedicated to Sidney Colvin, in one of those warm, enigmatic public letters of introduction that Stevenson could write so well, hinting at Romantic mysteries and philosophies but leaving everything half-explained, half in shadow:

  The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck in the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls this wilderness of the world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend … Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped at every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage …

  In private Stevenson was much more explicit, writing to cousin Bob in June 1879, in his downright and devil-take-it style. He makes no pretences as to who is at the centre of the work
:

  My book is through the press. It has good passages, I can say no more. A chapter called ‘The Monks’, and then ‘A Camp in the Dark’, a third, ‘A Night in the Pines’. Each of these has I think some stuff in the way of writing. But lots of it is there protestations to F., most of which I think you will understand. That is to me the main thread of interest. Whether the damned public—But that’s all one. I’ve got 30 quid for it, and should have had 50.

  His preoccupation with money had a simple explanation. For he had at last secretly determined to rejoin Fanny in San Francisco, and once her divorce from Sam Osbourne was through to marry her. Two months later, on 7 August 1879, he bought a second-cabin steerage ticket to New York for eight guineas, and without telling his parents embarked on his second pilgrimage: the greatest adventure of his life.

  For the “damned public” the book has remained essentially an exercise in style, “agreeably mannered”, and a model of polite essay-writing for generations of English and Scottish schoolchildren. My own little brown-backed copy, printed in 1936, still gives as likely essay-subjects, in an appendix after the text, such lines of enquiry as: “What are the respective advantages of a walking, cycling, motoring, and caravaning tour?” And, “What is Stevenson’s religious position, and can a charge of affectation be made against it?” However, I do like one suggestion: “Put yourself in Modestine’s place, and write a character study of your Master.” It might lead on to deeper matters.