FOOTSTEPS

ADVENTURES OF A

ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER

RICHARD HOLMES

HARPER PERENNIAL London, New York, Toronto and Sydney

Copyright

Harper Perennial

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

First published by Hodder & Stoughton 1985

Copyright © Richard Holmes 1985

Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007388547

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For Vicki and those children

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

ONE 1964: Travels

TWO 1968: Revolutions

THREE 1972: Exiles

FOUR 1976: Dreams

Author’s Note

Index

About the Author

ALSO BY RICHARD HOLMES

About the Publisher

ONE
1964 : Travels

1

All that night I heard footsteps: down by the river through the dark trees, or up on the moonlit road from Le Puy to Le Monastier. But I saw nothing except the stars, hanging over me where I wanted to be, with my head on a rucksack, and my rucksack on the grass, lying alone somewhere in the Massif Central of France, dreaming of the dead coming back to life again. I was eighteen.

I had started a travel-diary, teaching myself to write, and trying to find out what was happening to me, what I was feeling. I kept it simple:

Found a wide soft dry ditch under thorn hedge between the track and the little Loire. Here lit candle once more, studied ground for red ants, then set out bed-roll with all spare clothes between me and my waterproof cloak-sheet. Soon I was gazing up at stars, thinking of all the beats and tramps and travellers à la belle étoile from RLS to JK. Story of snakes that are drawn to body-heat and slide into your sleeping-bag. Cicadas and strange sounds river makes at night flowing over rocks. Slept fitfully but without disturbance from man or beast, except a spider in my ear. Saw a green glow-worm like a spark.

I woke at 5 a.m. in a glowing mist, my green sleeping-bag blackened with the dew, for the whole plateau of the Velay is above two thousand feet. I made a fire with twigs gathered the night before, and set water to boil for coffee, in a petit pots tin with wire twisted round it as a handle. Then I went down to the Loire, here little more than a stream, and sat naked in a pool cleaning my teeth. Behind me the sun came out and the woodfire smoke turned blue. I felt rapturous and slightly mad.

I reached Le Monastier two hours later, in the local grocer’s van, one of those square Citroëns like a corrugated garden privy, which smelt of camembert and apples. Monsieur Crèspy, chauffeur and patron, examined my pack and soaking bag as we jounced along through rolling uplands. Our conversation took place in a sort of no-man’s-land of irregular French. M. Crèspy’s patois and Midi twang battled for meaning against my stonewall classroom phrases. After initial skirmishing, he adopted a firm line of attack.

“You are walking on foot?” he said, leaning back into the depths of the van with one arm and presenting me with a huge yellow pear.

“Yes, yes. I am searching for un Ecossais, a Scotsman, a writer, who walked on foot through all this beautiful country.”

“He is a friend of yours? You have lost him?” enquired M. Crèspy with a little frown.

“No, no. Well … Yes. You see, I want to find him.” My chin streamed hopelessly with pear juice.

M. Crèspy nodded encouragingly: “The pear is good, n’est-ce pas?”

“Yes, it is very good.”

The Citroën lurched round a bend and plunged down towards a rocky valley, broken with trees and scattered stone farmhouses, with pink tiled roofs and goats tethered in small bright pastures where the sun struck and steamed. The spire of a church, perched on the far hillside, pointed the horizon.

“There is Le Monastier. Look! Perhaps your friend is waiting for you,” said M. Crèspy with great confidence.

“No, no, I don’t think so,” I said. But it was exactly what I hoped.

I rummaged in my rucksack. “You see, here is his book. It tells the story of his walk on foot.”

M. Crèspy peered at the little brown volume, and the Citroën swung back and forth across the road, the sound of rolling fruit growing thunderous behind us. I hastily propped the book up on the dashboard, being careful not to cover the St Christophe medal or the picture of Our Lady mounted above a cone of paper flowers. I ran my finger down the sketch map on the title page: Le Monastier, Pradelles, Langogne, Notre Dame des Neiges, Montagne du Goulet, Pic de Finiels, Le Pont-de-Montvert, Florae, Gorges du Tarn, St Jean-du-Gard—to me already magic names, a litany of hills and rivers, with a lone figure striding along them, laughing, beckoning, even mocking: follow! follow!

M. Crèspy considered the map, and then my face, then the map again, and changed gear with a reflective air. “It is far, it is far.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is two hundred and twenty kilometres.”

M. Crèspy raised a finger from the steering wheel. “And you, you are Scottish then?”

“No, no. I am English. My friend—that is to say, Mr Stevenson —was Scottish. He walked on foot with a donkey. He slept à la belle étoile. He …”

“Ah, that!” broke in M. Crèspy with a shout, taking both hands from the steering wheel, and striking his forehead. “I understand, I understand! You are on the traces of Monsieur Robert Louis Steamson. Bravo, bravo!”

“Yes, yes, I am following his paces!”

We both laughed and the Citroën proceeded by divine guidance.

“I understand, I understand,” repeated M. Crèspy. And I believe he was the first person who ever did.

Robert Louis Stevenson came to Le Monastier in September 1878. He was twenty-seven, spoke good French, and had already spent several summers abroad; near Fontainebleau, and on the canals of Holland, paddling a canoe with a friend. The experience had produced his first book, An Inland Voyage, which despite its whimsical style captured an attitude to travel that enthralled me, a child of the Sixties.

I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I make the Buddhists my sincere compliments … It may be best figured by supposing yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it … A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a better paradise for nothing! This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished.

That was the kind of travel which interested me too: as far out in Nirvana as possible. After ten years of English boarding schools, brought up by Roman Catholic monks, I was desperate to slip the leash. Free thought, free travel, free love was what I wanted. I suppose a foreign affaire de coeur would have been the best thing of all; and that, in a way, was what I got.

It did not immediately occur to me to wonder what Stevenson himself was doing in that remote little town “in the French highlands”. I knew he wanted to be a writer, had published essays in the London reviews, but was still struggling to establish his independence from his family in Edinburgh. They had brought him up a strict Calvinist, an outlook which he had rejected; and they had wanted him to be an engineer. Instead he had adopted the life of a literary bohemian, was a friend of Edmund Gosse and Sidney Colvin, affected wide-brimmed hats and velvet jackets, and fled to France whenever he could.

Staying at the little hotel at Le Monastier that autumn, he made friends with the local doctor and “Conductor of Roads and Bridges” and completed a little sketch of the place, A Mountain Town in France. His account had immediately captivated me.

Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute-Loire, the ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and church … It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the diligence in winter …

Stevenson had decided to pursue the road south himself, but on foot, in the company of a donkey to carry his baggage. This second voyage resulted in his second book—the little brown volume I now carried as my bible—his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.

At Le Monastier that morning, the question of Stevenson’s donkey bulked large. Unloaded from the van, I was taken into the backroom of the épicerie and given breakfast by Madame Crèspy.

“When Monsieur Steamson was here, they used to make lace,” she said, also using the local pronunciation. “But you will want your donkey, like him. You must go and see Le Docteur Ollier.”

Mlle Crèspy, who looked at me with dark dancing eyes, was deputed to take me to the doctor. “It’s no fun without the donkey,” she observed, prettily rolling the colloquial word, rigolo, and seizing me by the hand. Mlle Crèspy was about nine.

Le Docteur, a tall patient man, ushered me into his surgery and poured me a yellow medicine, which turned out to be a liqueur. “Of course, there is the question of the donkey. You will have to consult the Mayor. Everyone takes a donkey.”

“Everyone?”

“Mlle Singer took a donkey. She was lost in a storm, on the Lozère. It is high up there. The fire brigade from Bleymard went out to find her with lanterns.”

I accepted another yellow medicine. “This was recently, Miss Singer?”

“Oh yes, this was in 1949. You must pay attention to the vipers,” concluded Dr Ollier.

“So you desire to hire a donkey,” said the Mayor, as we paced in the cobbled courtyard of the old Bishop’s palace.

I looked abashed. “I am following Stevenson. But I have my sack.”

The Mayor reflected. “You see, Monsieur Steamson, he had a donkey. It is in his book. It is charming for a writer to have a donkey. It is his companion of the route.”

The sun beat down, the liqueur rose in my head, I had a vague sense that things were getting out of hand even before I had started. The reality of Stevenson’s presence in Le Monastier was uncanny. I asserted myself rather desperately. “No, no, I do not desire a donkey. My companion of the route—is Monsieur Stevenson himself!”

The Mayor stopped short, took off his small gold spectacles and tapped me on the chest. “Of course, of course,” he said, beaming suddenly. “You are young, indeed you are young, and I wish you a good journey with all my heart.” He replaced his spectacles and shook my hand many times, and I shook his quite as often. “You know,” added the Mayor as we parted, “Monsieur Steamson purchased his donkey for sixty-five francs. I could not easily find you such a bargain. But still, after all, if you should desire …”

Stevenson purchased his donkey for sixty-five francs “and a glass of brandy”. He christened her “Modestine”, and described her as the size of a large Newfoundland dog and the colour of “an ideal mouse”. She was to play a large part in his story. With her, he intended to cross over some of the highest and wildest country in France, moving across the remote borderlands of four départments— the Haute-Loire, the Lozère, the Ardèche, and Gard—and over the top of two notable peaks or highland ridges, the Goulet and the Pic de Finiels, between four and five and a half thousand feet. (For comparison, Snowdon is 3,650 feet and Ben Nevis 4,405 feet.) He intended to be solitary and self-sufficient, and loaded up his donkey with a huge sleeping-sack of his own design, six foot square of green waterproof cart-cloth, lined inside with blue sheep’s fur: “there was luxurious turning-room for one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two.” The last phrase seemed rather at odds with the rest of his plans. The sack had open sheep’s-fur flaps at both ends, to act as pillow and foot-warmer by night, and as the double mouth of an enormous saddle-bag by day.

I considered his equipment with professional interest, from the point of view of minimum necessities. It included the following items: two complete changes of warm clothing; several books, among them Father Peyrat’s Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert; a Scottish railway plaid; a spirit-lamp and cooking pan; a lantern and candles; a twenty-franc jack-knife with assorted blades, openers, and instruments for removing stones from donkey’s hooves; a leather water-flask; an eighty-page blue-lined schoolboy’s exercise book, which he used for the first draft of the Travels, composed en route usually in the mornings or at inns where he lunched; many blocks of black chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage (as hard rations); and, on his first morning, a basket containing a leg of cold mutton and a bottle of Beaujolais. He also packed an egg-whisk, to make the egg-and-brandy nog he loved to take at breakfast with his cafe au lait.

In the pocket of his country-velveteens he secreted a revolver, a brandy-flask and a large tin of tobacco and papers for rolling cigarettes. Most intriguing item of all, he wore on his wedding finger—though not married—a large silver gypsy ring. At first I assumed that he simply wanted to be taken for a gypsy or a pedlar himself, in the true “bohemian” spirit. Needless to say, I had started wearing one myself; to be exact, a large tin ring—being the best I could afford—previously bought from a gypsy stall at Les Saintes-Maries, two hundred miles south in the Camargue.

Stevenson’s journey lasted there twelve days. But its shortness was made up for by its intensity: it was a complete pilgrimage in miniature. He started from Le Monastier at dawn on Sunday, 22 September 1878—though Modestine’s reluctance to become his beast of burden meant that everyone had gone to midday church by the time he made any visible progress on the further hill; and eventually arrived at St Jean-du-Gard on the afternoon of 3 October. On his way, he spent three nights sleeping in the open—à la belle étoile; seven nights in country inns; and one at the Trappist monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges. He wrote some twenty-three thousand words of journal entries (slightly more than half the length of the final Travels); made a dozen or so pencil sketches; and expended—according to his frugal notes—eighty-five francs ten sous.

I set out to follow him as accurately as I could, without modern maps (until Florac) but going by the old tracks and roads between every village and hamlet that he mentioned. I also took twelve days, spending one night in a country hotel at Langogne; seven nights in fields and woods; two nights in barns; and one night—my last—under a venerable spreading chestnut tree in the valley of St Germain-de-Calberte. I spent ninety-eight francs fifty centimes—but I had only one hotel bill, and people gave me refreshments almost all the way. Most of my money went on the evening meal. I always saved a bit of bread, some sugar and sometimes a piece of pate for my dawn petit-déjeuner in the fields. Lunch was usually a bottle of Pelforth beer and a handful of black olives. At farms, when I asked for water for my bottle, I was almost invariably given cold citron or red wine as well; or black coffee made as in Greece, very strong, with sugar poured into it, from a saucepan often kept on an open-fire stove. I smoked a pipe, which was often a useful point of conversation with people I met on the road: shepherds, woodsmen, old grandfathers out for a stroll near the village cemetery, farmers working the corner of a remote upland field. I exchanged tobacco as many times as words, and English flake could be sweet under the loneliness of the stars.

I also wore a hat, a brown battered felt object, somewhat like an old fedora, with a wide brim, and a curious leather band round the crown which gave it a backwoods character. I have had many hats since, but except for a certain cap from Dublin none of them ever quite achieved such talismanic properties and powers. This hat, Le Brun, besides performing the normal hat-like functions of keeping sunstroke at bay, and mildly redirecting heavy rain on to my left or right shoulder (at choice), had several magical virtues. One was deflecting lightning. Another was helping me see in the dark. A third was giving me the most vivid dreams about Stevenson whenever I slept with it tipped over my nose.

But most important of all, perhaps, was Le Brun’s power to make other people laugh. It is a vital point. A stranger with a bag, when he appears at your door, perhaps at dusk; or knocks at your cafe window before the bread and milk have been delivered; or comes clambering over your gate, or surging out of your wood, or lumbering down your path making the dogs bark—such a stranger is not always a welcome figure. When he does not speak your language properly he is even more dubious and unwanted; and when he clumsily enquires about his friend “who came here a hundred years ago, with a donkey” you can be forgiven for thinking that you may have un fou ou un méchant on your hands. But not with Le Brun. It is quite impossible to be menaced by someone wearing Le Brun. You can only smile at such an apparition—un type au chapeau incroyable!

The girl in the pâtisserie at Florac, the prettiest blonde in the whole of the Cévennes, was so overcome with laughter at the way Le Brun doffed himself with a sudden farcical stream of rainwater flowing on to the polished tiles of her shop that she offered him a plate of eclairs gratuit if only Monsieur would go out and do it again in five minutes, “quand mon amie Sylvie est descendue.”

But these are lighter considerations. The beginning of the journey was hard for us both. For the whole of the first day, from Le Monastier to Le Bouchet, a distance of twenty-five kilometres over steep country roads, baked in hot golden dust, Stevenson had endless and humiliating trouble with Modestine. She refused to climb hills, she shed her saddle-bag at the least provocation, and in villages she swerved into the cool of the beaded shop-doors. He was forced to beat her relentlessly, first with his own walking-cane and then with a thorn-switch cut from a hedge by a peasant on the long hill up to Goudet. At Costaros, the villagers even tried to intervene, taking the side of French donkey against foreign tyrant: “‘Ah,’ they cried, ‘how tired she is, the poor beast!’” Stevenson lost his temper: “Mind your own affairs—unless you would like to help me carry my basket?” He departed amid laughter from the Sunday loiterers, who had just come out of church and were feeling charitable.

Yet as he flogged her over the rocky gorse-covered hillsides under a blazing afternoon sun Stevenson’s own heart revolted against the apparent brutality of donkey-driving. He later wrote in his route journal: “The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at Modestine, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who once loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my own cruelty.”

As I laboured up the same noviciate slopes, sweating under my own pack, I found myself puzzling over these words. Were they just the famous Stevensonian whimsy? Or was he thinking of some particular woman? It was intriguing; I would have liked to have asked him about it. But it is true that when travelling alone your mind fills up strangely with the people you are fond of, the people you have left behind.

Stevenson was soon made further aware of Modestine’s personality:

We encountered another donkey, ranging at will upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and stamp out the nascent romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would have fallen upon me tooth and nail; and this is a kind of consolation, he was plainly unworthy of Modestine’s affections. But the incident saddened me, as did everything that reminded me of my donkey’s sex.

He eventually discovered that Modestine was on heat for almost their entire journey. This disturbed him; for as I gradually came to suspect, problems of friendship, romance and sexuality were much on his mind throughout this lonely autumn tour.

Sitting up to my chin in the cool brown waters of the Loire tributary, on a sandy bank below the little bridge at Goudet, I mused on these questions and whistled to myself. I was wearing Le Brun, but nothing much else, and was dissolving in the glittering flowing water which seemed, for a moment, like time itself, a fluid gentle medium through which you might move at will, upstream and down, wherever you chose, with a lazy kick of your feet. A sharp giggle overhead recalled me: two children hung over the parapet pointing: “Mais qu’est-ce-que c’est que ça! c’est un nomade—non, c’est un fou!” I retreated to my clothes under the shadow of a tree, hot with embarrassment. Not so easy to slip out of time, or clothes, or conventions, even here. Le Brun hung on a branch and mocked me gently. I turned again to the dusty road.

Despite his donkey troubles, Stevenson got into the inn at Le Bouchet shortly after nightfall, well ahead of me on this first day’s run. I began to appreciate how physically tough he must have been. Coming down to Costaros, in a hot low red sun, I began to shiver with exhaustion and at one point tumbled headlong into a ditch. My shoulders were bruised from the pack, my right foot was spectacularly blistered, my morale low. I fell asleep on the bench of a little dark-panelled café, knocked over my green glass of sirop, and was turned out into the twilit street by an angry madame la patronne. I felt I was not managing things very well.

“Désolé, madame” I murmured; and that’s exactly how I felt: desolate. I was soon to grow familiar with this feeling. It is how every traveller feels at the approach of night, and the lighting up of windows in houses where he does not belong, and cannot enter in.

An old man stopped me, and talked, and took me by the arm. “Mais oui, la route de Monsieur Steamson—c’est par ici, prenez courage…” He led me to the outskirts of the town and showed me the vieux chemin, a glimmer of cart-track heading into the darkening, pine-fringed hills for Le Bouchet. Then, inexplicably, he took me back again, and. I was suddenly sitting in a little shoemaker’s cottage, under a yellow print of Millet’s Angelus, eating omelette and drinking red wine from a pitcher and laughing. I remember the old man’s dungaree blues, his black beret, his arthritic hands, still nimble and expressive, on the red check tablecloth. He was one of those who knew the story, as if it were part of village history. He spoke of Stevenson as if he had done his Travels in living memory, in some undefined time “avant la guerre” when he himself was a young lad, full of adventures.

“You see,” said the old man, “there is a time to kick up your heels and see the world a bit. I was like that too. And now I make shoes. That’s how things are, you will see.”

I slept out that night under an outcrop of pines, facing east on a slight incline, with the lights of Costaros far away to my left. The turf was springy, and the pine needles seemed to discourage insects. As I lay in my bag, a number of late rooks came winging in out of the gloaming, and settled in the pine branches, chuckling to each other. They gave me a sense of companionship, even security: nothing could move up through the trees below me without disturbing them. Once or twice I croaked up at them (it was the wine), and they croaked back: “Tais-toi, tais-toi.” This night I fell asleep quickly. Only once, waking, I drank two ice-cold mouthfuls of water from my can and, leaning back, saw the Milky Way astonishingly bright through the pine tops, and felt something indescribable—like falling upwards into someone’s arms.

At Le Bouchet, Stevenson slept in the same inn room as a married couple from Alais. They were travelling to seek work at St Etienne. Sharing rooms was normal practice in country auberges till the very end of the nineteenth century, but the woman was young and Stevenson was shy, for all his bohemian manners. “Honi soil qui mal y pense; but I was sufficiently sophisticated to feel abashed. I kept my eyes to myself as much as I could, and I know nothing of the woman except that she had beautiful arms, full white and shapely; whether she slept naked or in her slip, I declare I know not; only her arms were bare.”

In the morning the innkeeper made a goad for Modestine, while his wife briskly advised Stevenson about what should go into his travel-book. “‘Whether people harvest or not in such and such a place; if there were forests; studies of manners, what for example I or the master of the house say to you; the beauties of nature; and all that.’” Stevenson wrote her words down in his most winning manner, adding that the wife—unlike the husband—could read, had a share of brains, but was not half so pleasant. “‘My man knows nothing,’” he recorded her as saying with an angry toss of her chin. “‘He is like the beasts.’ And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head as if it were rather like a compliment.”

Their youngest daughter, who looked after the cattle, was rude and mischievous, until her father—without a flicker of expression—abruptly announced that he had sold her to the foreign monsieur to be his servant-girl. He appealed to Stevenson for confirmation.

Stevenson solemnly took up the game. “‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I paid ten half-pence; it was a little dear, but …’

‘But,’ the father cut in, ‘Monsieur was willing to make a sacrifice.’”

A little while after, the girl hurried out of the stone-flagged kitchen, and the sound of sobs came through from the stable next door, along with the munching and stamping of the cows and horses. Instantly Stevenson hurried after her, and put all right, closing the game in wild laughter. He had a quick rapport with children, and would play instinctively on their sense of mystery and adventure, half-entrancing and half-terrifying them. To be sold to a long-haired foreign traveller with a huge blue woollen sack was not much better than to be pursued by Blind Pew tap-tapping with his stick at the door of the Admiral Benbow inn.

Stevenson’s route now swung almost due south, up over the last high farmlands of the Velay to Pradelles, then down to the little market town of Langogne on the River Allier. Here he came to wild country, and a new phase in his pilgrimage of the heart.

He described the bleak prospect with the relish of an Edinburgh lowlander set free:

On the opposite bank of the Allier, the land kept mounting for miles to the horizon; a tanned or sallow autumn landscape, with black dots of firwood, and white roads wandering far into the Gévaudan. Over all this, the clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing … It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating for a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of the Velay, and all that I beheld lay in another county—wild Gévaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but recently disforested from the terror of wolves.

All that morning, as I tried to catch Stevenson up, I thought of wolves. Clambering over the flint farm-tracks, I watched the dark hills of Gévaudan before me, and saw no one but the figures of distant labourers working in the shimmering fields.

A curious gnawing pain began at my heel. Before Pradelles, the ball of my right foot split open, leaving something like a slice of best back bacon, which I held mournfully under the village pump. The doctor at Landos, with half-moon gold spectacles, hung out of his window and announced that he was having lunch. Then, seeing Le Brun very crestfallen, he added, “Mais montez, montez quand même.”

Scissors snapped, patent ointments oozed, and my proffered francs were waved aside. I limped out of Landos in a cloud of Pernod fumes, menthol and cocaine-gel.

Beyond Pradelles I bathed in another stream, this time discreetly shrouded by bulrushes. The heat was still stunning, and I lay back in the cool water, holding my bandaged foot solemnly in the air like a demented heron. I dozed, and the grumbling of distant thunder mixed in my dreams with the growling of those wolves of long ago.

But Stevenson was still three or four hours ahead of me. He crossed the stone bridge into Langogne in the early afternoon of Monday, 23 September 1878, “just as the promised rain was beginning to fall”. Here, however, he decided to settle for the rest of the day at the inn, and this I knew would give me my chance to catch up with him. Modestine was fed and stabled, and Stevenson sent his knapsack out for repair, then sank into a corner-seat to read up about the legendary “Beast of Gévaudan”.

This Napoleon Bonaparte of Wolves had terrorised the whole region in the mid-eighteenth century. Its exploits held a peculiar fascination for Stevenson. Roving in the remote hills between Langogne and Luc, it had viciously attacked small children guarding sheep, or lone women returning from markets at dusk. These attacks lasted throughout the 1760s. When the victims were found their bodies were always drained of blood, though not wholly devoured, and there were wild rumours of vampirism, or worse. The Bishop of Mende ordered public prayers to be said in the country churches on Sundays, and the Intendant of Languedoc organised armed wolf-hunts with parties of dragoons. The King himself eventually offered a reward of six thousand livres to whoever should slay the Beast.

It proved strangely elusive for several seasons, and the myths about the animal grew: its appearance on nights of the full moon, its liking for thunderstorms, its power to leap from one hilltop to the next or to appear in two places at once. Finally, in September 1765, a local shepherd called Antoine shot a huge wolf weighing nearly ten stone. Its body was stuffed and sent to the court at Versailles amidst great rejoicings. The local people felt a curse had been lifted from them.

How great was their horror when, less than two years later, in the spring of 1767, the attacks began again with even more frenzied violence. On the hills of the Lozère two teenage boys were virtually torn to pieces. The entire population of the Gévaudan lapsed into a state of superstitious panic; farming went neglected and almost no one would cross their doorsteps after dark.

The end when it came was curiously muted. One late June evening in 1767, Jean Chastel, a local woodsman, out hunting for the Beast, was attacked in a forest clearing by a large wolf which he shot at point-blank range with a single musket-ball. The kill really did bring the reign of terror to an end, and Chastel became a folk hero. Yet this second wolf was a common enough animal, with a tatty pelt, and weighing two stone less than its predecessor. The mystery of the Beast of Gévaudan always remained, and continued to haunt the region even in Stevenson’s time. He read a novel on the subject by Elie Berthet at Langogne.

“If all wolves had been as this wolf,” Stevenson remarked thoughtfully, “they would have changed the history of man.”

Modern studies of the subject, rich in explanations, were each more fantastic than the last. One school followed a vampire theory; another proposed a sadistic Gévaudan landowner who terrorised his tenants with a trained pack of hunting wolves; and a third, deeply psychological, produced Jean Chastel himself as a pathological killer dressed up in wolf-hides. But my favourite had a sinister simplicity. It proposed, as a strict zoological possibility, a rogue family of three wolves (like The Three Bears) who, ostracised from the main pack, had tasted the delights of human flesh, and thereafter attacked in combination. Hence the inexplicable ferocity of the Beast; and also its ability to be in two places at once. This theory had the great attraction of leaving one wolf still unaccounted for. I liked this very much.

It was sheer coincidence that on the final leg of my walk over the hills to Langogne, I had my first brush with a Cévennes storm. These storms are peculiar to this highland region, local and intense, fast-moving from one hilltop to the next, and teethed with forked lightning that terrified me. It overtook me rapidly from the west, and seemed to chase me over the bare pastures, until to my immense relief I came upon a hamlet in the fold of the hill, with a tiny café-épicerie where I took shelter for an hour, while the storm passed, banging and snarling and flashing overhead.

The cafe-owner, a small man in an extravagantly dirty apron, polished glasses philosophically in the doorway. The rain beat on the green awning while we talked disjointedly of Stevenson and storms.

“It is not always wise to go over the hills,” he observed, while cigarette ash from his yellow papier-maïs fell on his apron in the hot damp wind. There was something lugubrious about his down-turned mouth. He craned his head outside, looked sharply up at the lowering clouds and shrugged. “There, he is clearing away now.” He returned to the little zinc-topped bar, flapped at the thunder flies, coughed, shook his head (more ash) and wished me well in his own fashion. “So, you are going into Gévaudan. You will see him again, alors.”

I departed, draped in my waterproof sheet, my hat at a combative angle. The sun came out, and I made the last descent to Langogne, through drenched fields of grass full of gleaming buttercups. I felt oddly elated.

At a little after eight in the evening I at last crossed the bridge over the Allier into Langogne, the shadows lengthening along the streets. The shopkeepers were closing up their stalls, and the air was full of the smell of crushed fruit and frying garlic. It was the biggest place I’d been in for days, with a fine eleventh-century church and a medieval covered market. It was cheerful and bustling, with family groups sitting out on the pavements, couples strolling arm in arm along the river and children fishing for minnows with pink and yellow nets.

But here something strange happened. The feeling that Stevenson was actually waiting for me, in person, grew overwhelmingly strong. It was almost like a hallucination. I began to look for him in the crowds, in the faces at the cafe doors, at hotel windows. I went back to the bridge, took off my hat, rather formally as if to meet a friend, and paced up and down, waiting for some sort of sign. People glanced at me: I felt an oddity, not knowing quite what I was doing, or looking for. The twilight thickened; bats began to dart over the river. I watched their flickering flight over the gleaming surface, from one bank to the other.

And then I saw it, quite clearly against the western sky, the old bridge of Langogne. It was about fifty yards downstream, and it was broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy. So Stevenson had crossed there, not on this modern bridge. There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this was the true sad sign.

The discovery put me in the blackest gloom. It was stupid, but I was almost tearful. I could not bear to stay in Langogne, and after a distracted supper I climbed the steep hill of rustling plane trees towards St Flour and Fouzilhac. It was pitch-black (my eyes had lost their “country” vision by dining under bright lights) but I was anxious to plunge into the Gévaudan. Below, to my left, I could hear a small river running through what I took to be a gentle-sloping water-meadow, and I fancied I would camp there. Turning off through the plane trees I jumped over a low stone wall and seemed to drop into a bottomless pit.

In fact, it was a fifteen-foot, stone-banked wall ending in a mass of thorn briars; below them, the ground shelved away directly into the river and, skidding and cursing through the blackness, I went with it. An hour later, wet to the waist, I was signing myself into the only hotel in Langogne that would take a doubtful traveller after midnight. Le Brun did his best, but the joke was thin. In my pocket I found my pipe broken off at the stem.

As I dropped off to sleep in my luxurious broom-cupboard I thought I would give the whole damn thing up.

I had mad dreams about children dancing round me in a mocking circle. They were waving nets and singing:

Sur le pont d’Avignon

On y danse, on y danse …

I thought a good deal about this dream. It seemed, in part, to be a projection of Stevenson’s own experiences, when, the following night, he was lost on the paths between Fouzilhac and Fouzilhic. He could find nowhere to stay as the darkness came on, and no one to give him directions. Instead he too met strange and dreamlike children.

As I came out on the skirts of the woods, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms. These were all silently following each other round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and reverences … at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and fantastic to behold.

Partly also I came to think that my dream was a warning: a warning not to be so childish and literal-minded in my pursuit of Stevenson. The children were dancing and singing of the old bridge of Avignon: the bridge that is broken, just like the old bridge of Langogne. You could not cross such bridges any more, just as one could not cross literally into the past.

Even in imagination the gap was there. It had to be recognised; it was no good pretending. You could not play-act into the past, you could not turn it into a game of make-believe. There had to be another way. Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact. The adult distance—the critical distance, the historical distance—had to be maintained. You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic.

Have I explained myself at all? It is the simplicity of the idea, the realisation, that I am after. It was important for me, because it was probably the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called “biography” really means. I had never thought about it before. “Biography” meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

I awoke next morning in a different mood, and climbed the same hill in bright sunlight, in the company of a shepherd with his small black-and-white collie dog. The shepherd had been on the road eight days, he said, going to his cousins’ farm across the Tarn. He mended my pipe with a piece of waxed twine, cunningly tied.

Stevenson had a rough day on those hills. The weather was bad. He fell into bogs, lost his way in woods and finally found himself benighted in a storm at the inhospitable village of Fouzilhac. No one would cross their doorsteps to put him on the path for Cheylard. “C’est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir,” they told him. Stevenson implies that it was memories of the Beast of Gévaudan that made the men so reluctant. But he himself could not have looked an inviting figure by then: gaunt, long bedraggled hair, trousers caked in mud, and a strong whiff of the brandy-flask. No wonder everyone refused his requests to be shown the way with a lantern. The hour grew later, the rain heavier. He blundered on, alone.

Stevenson, for all his reputation as a dilettante, was determined and resourceful. The Scottish grit came out in just such a minor crisis as this. Abandoning all thoughts of civilisation, he pitched camp alone in the howling wind, under the lee of a dry-stone wall, tethering Modestine to a nearby pine branch and carefully feeding her chunks of black bread. He spread his sleeping-sack by the light of his spirit-lamp tucked into a crack of the wall. After removing his soaking boots and gaiters, he drew on a pair of long, dry woollen stockings, stuck his knapsack under the canvas top flap of the bag for a pillow, slid down into the woolly interior of the bag (still containing his books, pistol and spare clothes) and strapped himself in with his belt “like a bambino”. Here he proceeded to dine on a tin of Bologna sausage and a cake of chocolate, washed down with plenty of brandy from his flask, rolled and smoked “one of the best cigarettes in the world”, and dropped off to sleep like a child, contentedly lulled by the stormy sounds of wild Gévaudan. It struck me as an admirable feat in the circumstances.

The next morning, Wednesday, 25 September, he woke warm and refreshed, beneath the clear grey light of dawn and a brisk dry wind. Closing his eyes, he reflected for a moment how well he had survived, without once losing his temper or feeling despair. Opening them again, he saw Modestine gazing across at him with an expression of studied patience and disapproval. Hastily pulling on his boots, he fed her the remaining black bread, and wandered about the little beech wood where he now found himself, cheerfully consuming more chocolate and brandy. He was filled by one of those sensations of early-morning rapture which seem to affect people who have slept rough in the open. He later wrote:

Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gévaudan—not knowing north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland castaway—was to find a fraction of my daydream realised.

I loved this idea of the “inland castaway”. It seemed to me such a subtle, almost poetic idea, as if real travel were concerned with disorientation rather than merely distance. It was losing yourself, then finding yourself again: casting yourself, at least for one moment, into the lap of the gods, and seeing what happened. Of course I could understand that his literary talk of Homer, and later Bunyan, was partly self-mockery. But then it seemed to me it was partly serious as well, and that the “daydream” was a real thing for Stevenson, and that his travels were also a pilgrimage.

What puzzled me again was that “goddess”. Did he have some particular Circe in mind? Some woman who had cast a spell over him, perhaps? Were his own thoughts secretly “unsettled” by her, and was this pilgrimage an attempt to escape her—or appease her? As I padded along the silent woodland trails, deeper and deeper into Gévaudan, it slowly dawned on me that I might be pursuing a woman as well. Beyond Fouzilhac, which I never found at all, even in daylight, I stopped for an adder slowly uncurling itself off a large flat rock in my path. It was small and handsomely zigged, glossy black on soft beige, and moved aside with perfect dignity. At Cheylard, which is little more than a clearing with a few farms and a shrine, I stood for a long time beneath the wooden statue of Our Lady of All Graces.

We were now heading for the Trappist monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges. Stevenson, I supposed, had a conscience to examine. Our path went eastwards, over high moorland beyond the shelter of the Forêt de Mercoire, to Luc; then turned south again down a remote valley of the Allier towards La Bastide, where the Trappists lived on a thickly wooded hillside, in their ancient vows of poverty, chastity, obedience—and silence. Lay people from the outside would occasionally be granted permission to stay there “on retreat”, sharing the monks’ harsh routine, meditating and praying, and taking stock of their lives. For a lapsed Calvinist like Stevenson it was a not entirely foreign idea; for a lapsed Catholic like me it was only too familiar. A brief visit seemed unavoidable.

This leg of the journey took two days, broken by a night at Luc.

Stevenson slept at the comfortable auberge, after his Fouzilhac adventure; while I crossed the river and camped in a fragrant barn full of new-mown hay. I had again been caught by a storm crossing the moors between Cheylard and Luc, and I was glad of a roof-beam and the friendly, reassuring sound of munching cattle.

I had another dream. My path was an endless track of grey stone chippings that mounted through mauve heather to a bare sky. It seemed deserted but was full of unknown presences and pine stumps, as far as the eye could see. All were lightning-struck, a dead and ghastly white. A storm approached me from behind, trailing fingers of rain. Thunder booms set me running and gasping as my pack grew heavier and heavier. Someone was coming, chasing me, and prongs of lightning snapped down on the hill—to my right, to my left, then directly overhead. My heart beat with fear, and I ran and ran over the lonely moor, and my hair turned snow-white. I sat up and it was the whiteness of dawn. The cattle were chomping and the hay smelt sweet.

In the morning a farmer gave me a large bowl of coffee and tartines, and I was sick. I went down to the Allier, and bathed from a rock, and scrubbed some clothes. A fisherman, carrying a long cane rod, walked by with a sideways glance, curious. Long after he was gone I could see the gleaming tip of the rod moving on down the valley in the direction of La Bastide, like the antenna of some predatory insect. I felt like another species myself, a sort of animal cut off from the human world. I lay on the rock all morning in the hot sun, listening to the call of peewits and the sounds of the river.

I found that Stevenson wrote that day in his journal:

Why anyone should desire to go to Cheylard or to Luc is more than my much inventing spirit can embrace. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go; I travel for travel’s sake. And to write about it afterwards, if only the public will be so condescending as to read. But the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this feather bed of civilisation, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

It is one of his most memorable formulations, and I learnt it by heart. At night I would mumble it to myself, almost like a prayer, in the solitariness of my sleeping-bag. Again, I took it quite literally, on trust. Or rather, I was compelled to take it—this, I felt, is what I had to do; though if anyone had asked me why I could not have explained. The fact that Stevenson was also making something of a profession of his bohemian wanderings, and deliberately searching for picturesque copy, did not occur to me at first. (He did not use that sentence about his reading public in the published version of his Travels; it revealed his hand too clearly.) But I now think that my critical innocence allowed me to learn other things, far more important, about the personal life that is hidden in, and below, the printed page. To learn by heart has more than one meaning.

On Thursday, 26 September Stevenson turned east again away from the Allier, climbed along the high forested ridge above La Bastide, and with much misgivings came down with Modestine to the gateway of Our Lady of the Snows. He stayed there for one night and most of two days. I came to think of this as one of his most complicated human encounters. It threw into relief for me much of his Scottish inheritance and upbringing, and eventually revealed some of the deepest preoccupations of his journey.

The faintly jocular tone in his journal was, I was sure from the start, a disguise. I felt the same real twinges myself.

Here I struck left, and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me and creaking in my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence. I had not gone very far ‘ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a bell; and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the sound. I have rarely approached anything with more hearty terror than the convent of Our Lady of the Snows; this is what it is to have had a Protestant education.

His first sight of the monk Father Apollinaris planting out a long avenue of birch trees, in his flapping robed habit, immediately touched off childhood memories. It reminded him of the old prints of the medieval friars in the Edinburgh antique shops. The white gown, the black pointed hood, the half-revealed yellow pate, all stirred forgotten terrors. Moreover, what was the etiquette for dealing with the Trappist vow of silence? “I doffed my fur cap to him, with a faraway, superstitious reverence.”

He was surprised to find, however, that a foreign traveller was most kindly and indeed volubly greeted. Once it was established that he was not a pedlar “but a literary man” he was regaled with a liqueur, assigned a whitewashed cell in the guest wing, and bidden to attend the community services and meals at will. Father Apollinaris asked Stevenson if he were a Christian, “and when he found that I was not, or not after his way, he glossed over it with great goodwill”. Later, an Irish brother, when he heard that the guest was a Protestant, “only patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘You must be a Catholic and come to heaven’”.

Stevenson read the notice pinned over the table in his cell, for those attending official retreats, with a mixture of amusement and gravity. “What services they were to hear, when they were to tell their beads, or meditate, when they were to rise or go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.: ‘Le temps libre est employé à l’examen de conscience, à la confession, à faire de bonnes résolutions, etc.’” But he was decidedly impressed by the severe regime of the Trappists themselves: rising at two in the morning to sing the office of prime in the choir, then regulating the entire day between work duties and prayer accordingly as the bell rang, maintaining a sparse vegetarian diet and never speaking—except by special dispensation to strangers like himself.

At the same time La Trappe had its measure of worldly good sense. Every monk was encouraged, indeed required, to work at a hobby of his own choice. Stevenson found monks binding books, baking bread, developing photographs, keeping rabbits or peacefully cultivating potato patches. The monastery library was open to all, with a collection that included not only the sacred texts and holy fathers of the Church but Chateaubriand, Molière and the Odes et Ballades of Victor Hugo. “Let me whisper in addition what I only heard by way of a report, a great collection in another room, under orthodox lock and key, where Voltaire and Walter Scott, in God knows how many volumes, led the dance.”

That night, in the conduct of the kind old Irish brother, he attended the service of Compline in the candle-lit choir, greatly moved by the stern simplicity of the plain, white-painted chapel, and the “manly singing” of the cowled figures, alternately standing and bowed deep in prayer. “These things have a flavour and significance that cannot be rendered in words. Only to the faithful can this be made clear; or to one like myself who is faithful all the world over and finds no form of worship silly or distasteful.”

As he retired to his cell for the night Stevenson began to think about the force of prayer—a somewhat uneasy subject to his tolerant but sceptical mind. Partly he was thinking back to the old childish certainties of his Presbyterian boyhood, the attendance at the kirk, the teachings of his beloved nanny, Cummie, and the nostalgic confidences of the counterpane which he was to capture so brilliantly in the land of Leerie the Lamplighter, of A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). But partly also he was realising that, even as a man, he had continued to pray; only in a different sense. Not in the form of superstitious supplications or “gasping complaints”, which he could no longer regard as real prayers at all, but in the form of deliberate meditations, a particular turning and concentrating of the mind when alone. Sometimes, he recollected, he had even found himself taking pleasure in giving these prayers literary form, “as one would make a sonnet”.

He realised that his voyage through the Gévaudan had been peculiarly fruitful in this respect: that through the physical hardships and the plodding loneliness a particular kind of consciousness had been released in him. And this consciousness made him more, not less aware of his place in the scheme of things outside; of his friendships, his loves, his duties; of his common fate. He wrote: “As I walked beside my donkey on this voyage, I made a prayer to myself, which I here offer to the reader, as I offer him any other thought that sprung up in me by the way. A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.”

He then entered not one, but three short prayers in his journal, of which the last is a Prayer for Friends.

God, who hast given us the love of women and the friendship of men, keep alive in our hearts the sense of old fellowship and tenderness; make offences to be forgotten and services to be remembered; protect those whom we love in all things and follow them with kindness, so that they may lead simple and unsuffering lives, and in the end die easily with quiet minds.

I sensed in all this that Stevenson was telling himself, quite simply, that he was not made to be alone, either in the human or the divine scheme of things. Paradoxically, the Trappists were teaching him that he belonged outside: he belonged to other people, and especially to the people who loved him.

It is here that I later discovered one of the most suggestive differences between the original journal and the published Travels. For, on reflection, Stevenson removed all these passages from the published version. They were, I think, just too personal and became part of an emotional “autobiography” he was not prepared, at that date at least, to deliver up to his readers. Instead he struck a more romantic, raffish pose, remarking only of his feelings after the Compline service: “I am not surprised that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and stood like a man bewildered in the windy starry night.” Cutting out all mention of the prayers, he reverted to his bohemian persona, and added instead a snatch of bawdy French folk-song:

Que t’as de belles files, Giroflé Girofla!

It served to remind him, he said, that the Trappists were after all “the dead in life—there was a chill reflection”. He could only bless God that he was “free to wander, free to hope, and free to love”. An interesting contradiction.

But then La Trappe is full of contradictions. They knew all about Stevenson when I passed through: a hundred years, they told me, is not so long in the eyes of eternity. Father Apollinaris’s line of birch trees still stood. There were the white blocks of the monastic buildings perched bleakly on the forested hillside, rows of square unrelieved windows, part-military and part-industrial in appearance, and a bell chiming a flat commanding note—what memories it stirred!—from the rugged church tower. Yes, they said, it was all rather like a power-station: so think of it as a spiritual generator, pumping out prayers.

The original buildings which Stevenson saw had been burnt down in 1912. His small guest wing for travellers and retreat-makers had been replaced by a brightly painted cafe-reception house astride the main drive, constructed like a Swiss chalet, with a self-service food bar and souvenir counter. Under the trees a score of cars were parked, transistors played, and families picnicked at fixed wooden tables. I walked through like a ghost, dazed with disappointment, and headed for the church, remembering now what my farmer at Luc had said: “Ah, La Trappe, they make an affaire of the holy life up there” though he had added with a Gallic shrug, “But good luck to them. We must all live in our own way, and le Bon Dieu has always liked a little money, as proof of good intentions.”

In the church a young monk, with a Cicero haircut and penetrating grey eyes, suddenly rose out of the sacred bookstall and gently tugged at my rucksack. English? On the trail of Stevenson? Sleeping rough? Ah yes, he had wanted to be a writer himself. That too was a vocation! Well, it was a happy chance that had brought me to La Trappe. A happy Providence. So now I must lay down my burden (he said this with a smile, the grey eyes suddenly teasing) and he would take me to visit the monastery. But first things first! And here he peered at me with what I took to be a frown, and I thought I was to be put through my catechism. Le Brun, who had doffed himself politely enough at the church porch, now shifted uneasily from hand to hand, ready for a sharp retort and a swift retreat. Protestant, lapsed Catholic, atheist, poetic agnostic …

“You are hungry, my friend,” Father Ambrose cut into my thought, “so come with me.” And he gave me another of those Trappist smiles.

I was whisked away without ceremony to the kitchens, and sat down at a huge wooden table. Behind me, a large electric dishwasher turned like a Buddhist prayer-wheel. All round, tiles gleamed and scoured pots bubbled on brand-new gas ranges. The kitchen monk in a pressed white apron considered me thoughtfully. “One must feed the corpse as well as the spirit,” he observed in a heavy Provencal accent, and grinned seraphically. He was as thin as a fence-pole, with the marks of asceticism like the marks of an axe over his long face and frame. He disappeared into an echoing pantry and came out with plate after plate balanced on his arm. I could not believe such a feast, and later listed it all in my diary: dish of olives, black and green; earthenware bowl of country pate with wooden scoop; whole pink ham on the bone, with carving knife; plate of melon slices; bowl of hot garlic sausage and mash; bowl of salad and radishes; board of goats’ cheeses; basket of different breads; canister of home-made butter; two jugs of wine, one white, one red. Spécialité de la maison, thin slices of fresh baguette spread very thickly with a heavy honey-coloured paste which turned out to be pounded chestnuts, marrons, and tasted out of this world. I was told simply: “Mangez, mais mangez, tout ce que vous voudrez!” And he was right; I had the hunger of the devil.

Much later I smoked my pipe and fell asleep in the monastery gardens, under a mulberry tree, wondering at the wisdom of monks. Father Ambrose woke me as his sandals came tapping along the terrace. “Better now?” was his only comment. I was taken on a tour of the buildings: long bare corridors of polished pinewood, a chapter-house full of afternoon sunlight and smelling of beeswax, a library like an academic college with a special history section including the complete works of Winston Churchill. Then a large bleak dormitory, with iron bedsteads in rows of cubicles, which brought back bad memories; and a shadowy choir-stall with, for me, the eternally ambiguous smell of incense.

The monks’ timetable had shifted little since Stevenson’s day. Prime began a little later, at three thirty in the morning; but the vegetarian fast was maintained from January till Eastertide. Prayer and hard physical work remained the staple of their lives. The cemetery stood behind a wall of the vegetable garden, a cluster of plain white crosses on a neat lawn, like a war grave in Passchendaele.

“And here at La Trappe,” said Father Ambrose as we stood again upon the terrace, “the summer visitors soon depart. We are alone again with Our Lady. Her snows fall from November until April. Sometimes we are cut off for days. Cut off from everything … except from God. And sometimes it is so… But you must pray for us. Pray for us on your road. You will do that, my friend, I think? And come back again, we will be here. Your rucksack is a light one.”

Father Ambrose smiled and turned rapidly away, slipping his hands into the long white sleeves of his habit and stepping off into silence. The sound of his sandals retreated along the stone-flagged terrace. I was left strangely confounded, perplexed; this was not what I had expected. In a sense I felt they had found me out.

2

Stevenson’s reactions to the Trappists were greatly complicated by the presence of two other visitors in the guest wing, a local Catholic priest and a retired soldier. The priest had walked over from his country parish at Mende for four days’ solitude and prayer; the ancien militaire de guerre, a short, grizzled and somewhat peppery personage in his fifties, had come to La Trappe as a visitor—like Stevenson—and remained to study as a novice. Neither had the simplicity or the wisdom of the monks; they were “bitter and narrow and upright” in their beliefs, “like the worst of Scotsmen”, reflected Stevenson. But it was only in the morning that they discovered that a Protestant heretic was in their midst: “My kindly and admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us, and a certain Jesuitical slipperiness of speech,” observed Stevenson slily, “which I had permitted myself in my strange quarters, had probably deceived them, and it was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out.” There was an immediate explosion. “Et vous prétendez mourir dans cette espèce de croyance?” burst out the priest.

Clergyman and army officer now attempted to convert Stevenson with righteous fervour. They took it for granted that he was secretly ashamed of his faith as a Protestant; disdained all theological discussion, brushed aside Stevenson’s appeal to family loyalties, and crudely urged the horrors of hell-fire. He must go to the Prior of La Trappe and declare his intention to convert; there was not a moment to lose; he must instantly become a Catholic. The atmosphere became quite embarrassing. “For me who was in a frame of mind bordering on the effusively fraternal, the situation thus created was painful and a little humiliating.” He escaped on a long walk round the monastery grounds, but on returning for lunch was again attacked by the proselytising pair. This time they began to mock him for his stubbornness and ignorance, and unwisely referred to his beliefs as those of a “sect”—for they thought “it would be doing it too much honour to call it a religion”. His attempts at explanation were received with “a kind of ecclesiastical titter”. Finally Stevenson’s temper—which could be formidable: he had once broken a bottle of wine against a wall in a Paris cafe during an argument with the management—began to get the better of him. Trembling with emotion and going rather white, he leant across the table to the parish priest: “I shall continue to answer your questions with all politeness; but I must ask you not to laugh. Your laughter seems to me misplaced; and you forget that I am describing the faith of my mother.” An awkward silence fell, and the priest, remarked Stevenson, “was sadly discountenanced”.

However, dignity was restored, the ancien militaire de guerre—no doubt recognising another kind of fighter—made soothing noises, and the cure hastily assured him that he had no other feeling but interest in Stevenson’s soul. The incident was closed, and they parted on friendly terms. But Stevenson was probably taught something after all: for here he was hotly defending a religion, the Presbyterianism of his childhood, in which he had supposed he had no formal belief whatsoever. It led him to reflect, towards the end of his journey, on the mysterious nature of belief itself, on its profound roots in the heart and the sense of identity; and the degree to which formal creeds were inadequate to contain and express one’s deepest moral convictions.

In the Travels he added a friendly, if somewhat patronising, envoi to the priest as a fellow-traveller on the rough road of life:

Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver; but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread Gévaudan with his kilted skirts—a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.

The experience of the monastic life, even—and perhaps especially—in a passing glimpse, was both vivid and unsettling for Stevenson. In some ways it was weird, even repellant: Father Apollinaris’s “ghastly eccentricity” as he suddenly raised his arms and flapped his fingers above his tonsured head, to indicate that the vow of silence had come back into force at the monastery gate, became a comic symbol of this. Yet in other ways it was obviously attractive to Stevenson. And what it attracted, I think, was paradoxically not the religious man, but the artist in him. He was drawn and fascinated by the idea of the celibate life within a community. The ascetic standards—the silence, the physical discipline, the solitary spiritual endeavour—appealed to him as a writer. The clarity of purpose, the absence of distraction, the lifelong sense of self-commitment were exactly the kind of ideals he felt he should be nourishing in himself as a professional author. The monks represented a sort of Flaubertian perfection. In their own way they had given up the world for an art form. Should he not do the same?

To begin with I had conceived of Stevenson’s journey—and experienced it for myself—as a physical trial, a piece of deliberate “adventuring”, a bet undertaken against himself, that he could survive on his own. His ill-health, his struggle against consumption, together with the real wildness of the Cévennes a hundred years ago made this trial a genuine enough affair.

But here was a new element, a metaphysical one. Stevenson was making a pilgrimage into the recesses of his own heart. He was asking himself what sort of man he should be, what life-pattern he should follow. Many hints had already suggested strongly to me that he was in love with someone. The incident with the young married couple in the inn at Le Bouchet was one obvious pointer; and the whole slightly mannered drama with Modestine seemed to me to contain some element of a private joke, a comic (but none the less serious) little allegory about his relations with the opposite sex.

The question he seemed to be formulating at La Trappe came down to this. As a writer, as an artist, should he be living and working on his own, celibate (or at least unmarried) and dedicated purely to the ideals of a literary community? Or should he commit himself emotionally to something, and someone else: to domesticated love, to marriage, to a professional life undertaken in partnership? For a young and ambitious Victorian writer this was no light or hypothetical question. He could survive comfortably as a single man on an allowance from relatively wealthy and well-meaning parents; and artistically he could flourish in the London literary world of clubs, pubs, reviews and masculine “bohemia”. It required the most fundamental decisions about his future. Most of all, from a man of Stevenson’s unusual temperament, to whom the enclosed Scottish world of his boyhood was so imaginatively important, it meant a choice about how far he could afford to grow up, to come fully into man’s estate.

Reflecting on the life of the Trappists, Stevenson added a revealing passage to the Travels. Once again its lightness of tone was curiously deceptive. He wrote:

… Apart from any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay phalansteries of an artistic not to say bacchanalian, character; and seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch and go association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent.

What was this lay “phalanstère” or commune to which Stevenson was referring? (The odd term was invented by the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier, and always appealed to the dreamer in Stevenson.) More important, to whom did the “two sweet eyes” belong? From my reading of his letters I could now guess a little at this.

The “artistic not to say bacchanalian” place was the village of Grez, some sixty miles south-west of Paris on the River Loing. Grez lies on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, on the opposite side from the more fashionable Barbizon, already beginning to be associated with the Impressionists and “plein-air” school of painters. Stevenson had spent a part of the three previous summers at Grez, taking rooms at the Hotel Chevillon, idyllically placed by the low stone bridge, with its shadowy arches, over the placid river. He and his dashing elder cousin, Bob Stevenson, and a small group of Francophile painters, mostly Irish or American, including William Low and Frank O’Meara, all ate and worked in common in the grounds of the hotel. The place was soon to become famous for its resident artists—Delius was later to do much of his composing at Grez, and Sisley to commemorate it in his sunlit pictures. It was in the early days of this phalanstère that Stevenson met the Osbourne family from San Francisco, with their two young children. And it was the eyes of Mrs Osbourne which had entranced him—for life, as it turned out. As he later wrote in his Songs of Travel:

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,

With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,

Steel-true and blade-straight,

The great Artificer made my mate …

3

I knew little of Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne at the time I followed Stevenson through the Gévaudan. The story of their tempestuous but largely successful marriage—which took them through California, back to Edinburgh, down to Hyères, and finally out again to America, the South Seas, Tahiti and Samoa, with Stevenson all the time writing, his professional path found, Treasure Island (1883), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and the posthumous Weir of Hermiston (1889)—belongs to the mature part of his biography. But what I subsequently learned of Fanny’s early life, and her personality, confirmed a great deal of what I was already seeing in Stevenson’s own nature at this time—his needs, his strengths, his weaknesses. The difficulties of their early love affair also showed me more clearly the hidden significance of his pilgrimage through the Cévennes: a preparation for his journey of emigration the following year to San Francisco—also undertaken alone—to claim his bride.

Fanny Vandergrift broke the rules, almost all of them, and that was her first and enduring charm. She was a spirit quite as original and adventurous as Stevenson. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in March 1840, she was thirty-six when she first met him at Grez in 1876. Her ancestors were Dutch and Swedish; her parents were pioneer farmers who let her run wild on a series of small ranches. They had her baptised in the Presbyterian faith—an interesting emotional link with Stevenson—in one of the total immersion ceremonies in the White River when she was two. By her teens she had grown up into a strong, dark-haired, gypsy-looking girl, who could ride, use a rifle, grow vegetables, make wine, and hand-roll cigarettes. Her passion was painting, and because she was not thought a belle her style was that of the tomboy artist, dashing and devil-may-care. She had big, dark eyes, a determined jaw, and a powerful, stocky body with great sexual presence that remained with her late into middle-age. “God made me ugly,” she used to say with sultry good humour, and the result was that everyone thought her a handsome gal of spirit. She was popular, and her sister Nellie recalled that “there was scarcely a tree in the place that did not bear somewhere the name or initials of Fanny Vandergrift”.

She was married at seventeen—probably already pregnant—to a young lieutenant on the Governor’s staff, Sam Osbourne. He was blond, six-foot, quixotic, amiable and incurably unfaithful, and she loved him passionately. They went West to seek their fortunes, living in mining towns in Nevada, and when the gold-boom was over settling in San Francisco, in 1866. Sam was frequently away, fighting Indians with the army, prospecting in Montana with friends, or having affairs with saloon ladies. But he was always back when the children were born: Isabel (“Belle”) in 1858; Lloyd in 1868; and Hervey in 1871. Jealous rows and passionate reconciliations became the pattern of the household, but gradually Fanny emerged as the stronger, more capable and more stable figure: her children were devoted to her, and remained emotionally dependent on her for the rest of their lives. Moreover Fanny, far from becoming embittered and frumpish, seemed almost to grow younger and more carefree as her family grew up. She lost none of her dash, good humour or energy; she always seemed game for anything. During the 1870s strangers often mistook her and Belle for sisters. When Belle was sent to finish her education at the San Francisco School of Design, Fanny enrolled too as a mature student, and a whole new circle of friendships opened out for her among the artistic “European” set in the city. In particular Fanny became friendly with a young Irish-American lawyer, Timothy Rearden, who was Head of the Mercantile Library, and knew writers like Bret Harte. Rearden became her mentor, possibly for a time her lover. He encouraged her to paint and write, read French and German, think about a new life—a second chance.

Fanny seized the opportunity in a way that would have been almost impossible for her contemporaries in Victorian England or Second Empire France. In 1875, when Belle was seventeen, Lloyd seven and Hervey four, she set off with her three children to study art in Antwerp. Sam Osbourne stayed behind in San Francisco, promising to pay a small allowance. Fanny was at last une femme indépendante, a triumph of spirit over circumstance. A photograph of her at this time shows a distinctly romantic heroine: a dark, determined woman apparently in her late twenties (she was actually thirty-five) with a mass of wild hair brushed impatiently back behind her ears. She wears a velvet-edged jacket over a tight-fitting black dress that carelessly shows off her figure. Knotted round her throat is a large white neckerchief, tied like a man’s tie, loose and full, faintly provocative. The eyes are large and frank, the mouth strong and beautifully formed. She combined force of character with a certain indefinable vulnerability. Her daughter Belle recalled that on the steamer from New York “when in any difficulty, she only had to look helpless and bewildered, and gallant strangers leaped to her assistance”.

Life was not easy in Antwerp. Money was scarce, the lodgings poor, and worst of all the Antwerp Academy would not accept women students. The American Consul tried to help her and Belle find private tuition, but then little Hervey fell ill with fever, and they were advised to take the child to a specialist in Paris. By December they were living in rooms in Montmartre, but in the spring of 1876 Hervey was still ailing, and Lloyd had vivid memories of hanging about hungrily outside patisserie windows because all their money was spent on doctors’ bills. Fanny sent a telegram to Sam Osbourne in San Francisco, telling him their son was dangerously ill. He arrived in Paris to be at Hervey’s death-bed. Bemused with grief, Fanny went back to her life-classes at the atelier, but had fainting fits and hallucinations, and trembled on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Their French doctor strongly advised them to take Lloyd out of Paris to spend the summer in the country. Fanny discussed this with her friends at the atelier, and a young American sculptor told them about the Hotel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing. Sam agreed to come with them, at least for a time; they put their belongings in store and climbed aboard a train.

It was too early in the summer for many others to be in residence, and the hotel was quiet and friendly. Lloyd began to eat and run about like a young colt; Fanny and Belle sat peacefully painting riverscapes and walking in the water-meadows; Sam drank and chatted with Will Low. Gradually other painters turned up at the phalanstére, and each accepted the Osbournes as a picturesque addition to the bohemian enclave. Frank O’Meara fell in love with Belle, and there was much talk of what would happen when the mad Stevensons, Bob and Louis, finally arrived to complete the party. Days were spent swimming, lunching out under the trees, painting in the fields under white umbrellas.

First to arrive at Grez was Bob Stevenson, a tall erratic figure with Mexican moustaches and a ceaseless, brilliant flow of mocking talk. He was generally regarded as the “genius” of the two cousins: painter, musician, linguist, drinker and unreformed rake. He dazzled but also rather frightened Fanny; she described him as “exactly like one of Ouida’s heroes”.

Then, one evening in early July 1876, cousin Louis made his appearance. Young Lloyd Osbourne, who was soon to hero-worship him, remembered the scene vividly. It was dinner-time, with some fifteen of the phalanstére sitting round the long wooden table in the main room of the Chevillon. Oil-lamps stood along the board, pitchers of wine circulated, laughter flew back and forth. The main windows of the dining-room stood open to let in the sweet night air. Occasionally moths flew in from the darkness and fluttered against the bright glass chimneys of the lamps. Fanny and Belle were the only women in the company, and all attention was on them. Then little Lloyd heard a faint noise outside the window, and saw a shadow moving and hesitating beyond the light. There was a clatter of boots, a thin brown forearm on the window-sill, a sharp exclamation, and a dusty figure wearing a slouch hat and carrying a knapsack vaulted lightly into the room. Bob rose gravely from his chair and, turning to the Osbournes, announced like a conjuror: “My cousin, Mr Louis Stevenson.” It was a grand entrance, never to be forgotten, and often to be embroidered. Stevenson himself later said he had waited many minutes outside in the dark, gazing into the bright room, transfixed by Fanny’s face, acknowledging his destiny. Perhaps he did. Certainly Sam Osbourne left Grez and returned to America in September; and when Fanny returned with Belle and Lloyd for the winter to her lodgings at 5 rue Douay in Montmartre, Stevenson soon moved to rooms nearby. As Lloyd put it with delight, “Luly is coming.”

Yet the affair took two years, with much coming and going between Paris and London and Grez, before it became really serious for both of them. Stevenson had other elder Muse figures on hand, notably Mrs Fanny Sitwell, the confidante and future wife of his friend Sidney Colvin. While Fanny Osbourne, for her part, was equally attracted by Bob Stevenson to begin with. Indeed, there is some reason to think that initially Bob was the favourite. She described them both, in a suitably colourful style, in a letter of April 1877 to Timothy Rearden, in San Francisco. It told me a good deal about the Stevenson family penchant for romancing about themselves, and playing incorrigible, boyish bohemians. She wrote:

Bob Stevenson is the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life, and yet somehow, reminds me of you. He spent a large fortune at the rate of eight thousand pounds a year … studied music and did wonderful things as a musician, took holy orders to please his mother, quit in disgust, studied painting and did some fine work, and is now dying from the effects of dissipation and is considered a little mad. [In fact Bob soon married, had a family, and comfortably outlived Louis.]

Louis, his cousin, the hysterical fellow, is a tall gaunt Scotchman with a face like Raphael, and between over-education and dissipation has ruined his health, and is dying of consumption. Louis reformed his habits a couple of years ago, and Bob, this winter. Louis is the heir to an immense fortune which he will never live to inherit. His father and mother, cousins, are both threatened with insanity, and I am quite sure the son is.

Madness, sickness, lost fortunes and wasted genius: it all sounded like a delicious game to Fanny. Yet pretending that she will never meet them again (both cousins had returned home to Britain until the next summer), she added a warmer and truer note:

… The two mad Stevensons with all their suffering are men of spirits, but so filled with joyfulness of there living that their presence is exhilarating … I never heard one of them say a cynical thing, nor knew them to do an unkind thing. With all the wild stories I have heard of them fresh in my mind, I still consider them the truest gentlemen …

“Gentlemen” she uses in an American sense; not snobbishly, but virtuously—men of honour, manners, sincerity.

Fanny became serious about Louis Stevenson after the second summer at Grez. Bob went back to Edinburgh, but Louis returned with her again to Montmartre, and here he was really taken ill, not with consumption, but with a form of conjunctivitis which threatened to leave him blind. Fanny, suddenly thrown into the role of nurse and mother, took one of her headstrong decisions which even in Paris might have been considered socially foolhardy. She moved Stevenson into her own apartment, put him to bed and throughout October 1877 looked after him like one of her own family. When he grew no better she sent another of her telegrams to Sidney Colvin in London, and in November took Stevenson over on the boat-train. It was thus that she suddenly found herself introduced into Stevenson’s London literary circle—meeting Colvin himself, Henley, Gosse, and even his Muse Mrs Sitwell.

Fanny was now dealing with the realities, as well as the dreams, of Stevenson’s existence. She was his nurse as much as his mistress; though Stevenson himself hardly seems to have been aware of this subtle shift of emotional balance. What he saw was a beloved companion who had proved herself true and practical, and utterly regardless of conventions. What his friends saw—and they all liked her instantly—was summed up by Sidney Colvin:

Her personality was almost as vivid as his. She was small, dark-complexioned, eager, devoted; of squarish build—supple and elastic; her hands and feet were small and beautifully modelled, though busy; her head a crop of close-waving thick black hair. She had a build and character that somehow suggested Napoleon, with a firm setting of jaw and beautifully precise and delicate modelling of the nose and lips; her eyes were full of sex and mystery as they changed from fire or fun to gloom or tenderness.

In fact Fanny was rather formidable.

Stevenson recovered his health, if not his heart, and went back to Edinburgh for a parental Christmas, while Fanny returned to Paris. It was at this time that Stevenson finally spoke of the relationship to his father and mother, and it seems clear that he was now thinking of marriage. They were hardly pleased: an American woman ten years older than Louis, and moreover a married woman with two children to support. In January 1878 Stevenson went back to Paris, and in February his father Thomas Stevenson joined him there for a man-to-man talk. “Don’t be astonished,” Stevenson wrote to Sidney Colvin, “but admire my courage and Fanny’s. We wish to be right with the world as far as we can.” There is no evidence that his father actually met Fanny, but in the event the vital allowance of a hundred pounds a year was not cut off, as Stevenson had feared; and he seems to have reached a better understanding with his father about his free-thinking religious beliefs.

But what was going on in Stevenson’s mind? By far the most revealing document to me consisted of a linked series of four essays which he wrote for the Cornhill magazine and Henley’s London magazine between 1877 and 1879. He later collected them in 1881 under the general title of Virginibus Puerisque (“To Youths and Maidens”). The first two essays concern marriage and the marriage relationship; the third is headed “On Falling in Love”, with the Shakespearian epigraph—“What fools these mortals be!”; and the fourth is called, severely, “Truth of Intercourse”. But all four are evidently drawn from his passion for Fanny, and they represent an entirely new note in his work and outlook.

The tone Stevenson adopted was ironic, mildly facetious, even slightly misogynic. Considering the circumstances under which he was composing this surprised me very much. It runs right through all four essays, from the famous definition of marriage as “a sort of friendship recognised by the police” to the long peroration on the terrors of the righteous wife. “Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave … To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.” What is one to make of all this?

Part of the answer seems to be that Stevenson, having really fallen in love with Fanny, was genuinely frightened—even terrified—by the implications. She was not the first woman he had flirted with, played bohemians with or slept with. But she was undoubtedly the first woman to become so important to him that she made his life incomplete, and challenged his identity. All the rapid shuttlings between England and France vividly suggest this, and everywhere the essays bear it out.

There is the frank avowal: “The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts to marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.” Or there is the mocking paradox: “Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.” There is even the rather knowing and hopeful: “It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much better educated to a woman’s hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.”

Above all, there is Stevenson’s hymn to the eternally boyish in man, the Peter Panish element (though that is an anachronism), which he felt intuitively it was dangerous, even a crime, to deny. The true threat of marriage, as he saw it, came down finally to this: that it would kill the boy in him. This passage is one of the best in the Virginibus Puerisque, and evidently links with Stevenson’s meditations on those threats to “the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth” during his night at La Trappe. He is considering the “unfading boyishness of hope”, what he defines as the piratical quality, the refusal to be quite tamed or rational or responsible, Tom Sawyer’s “Ah, if he could only die temporarily. Turning aside for a moment from the imminent threat of marriage, he suddenly stops to wonder if boyishness is not, after all, an irreducible quality even in the most sage and settled of his fellow-citizens. The thought develops in a now characteristic way, in which a journey through a harsh landscape is already foreseen, even predicted:

Here we recognise the thought of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased—well, when?—not, I think, at twenty; nor perhaps altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.

In a literary way, this idea is central not only to the kind of books Stevenson went on to write (with their mixture of boyish adventure and very adult nostalgia), but to a whole tradition of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and Rudyard Kipling are all foreseen. But I saw only the immediate and personal situation.

The spring of 1878 did not bring Stevenson anywhere nearer a practical decision about Fanny. Though he had published An Inland Voyage in May, and gone some way to establishing himself in his own eyes as a professional author, their shared future still seemed unassured. Stevenson returned to London to work as an assistant editor on Henley’s London magazine, and suddenly in July Fanny announced that she was returning to California. If it was an ultimatum Stevenson did not respond; but it is likely that Fanny—still married to Sam—was in just as much turmoil as he. Lloyd recalled with feeling: “I had not the slightest perception of the quandary my mother and RLS were in, nor what agonies of mind their approaching separation was bringing.”

The three Osbournes left on the boat-train from London in August, and Stevenson, pale and silent, came to see them off. He could not bear to wait till the train pulled out but, wrapping his long brown ulster coat round his thin shoulders, strode off down the platform without glancing back. In September he reached the Cévennes, and only then did he dare to look about him.

4

After La Trappe there seemed to be a new sense of determination about Stevenson’s route. He was rested, and certain issues must now have been clearly in the forefront of his mind. He and Modestine now embarked on the great upland peaks of the central Cévennes: the Montagne du Goulet at 4,700 feet; and, a day’s walk beyond it, the Pic de Finiels at 5,600 feet. It is a different landscape from the Gévaudan, bolder, wilder, more dramatically plotted. It is visionary highland country: steep woods of scented pine climb sharply upwards to windy expanse of bare moorland, heath, rolling grass or scree; then drop back down in precipitous alpine meadows, or rocky gorges, rushing streams and deep green-and-gold terraces of chestnut trees. You walk against the sky, with chain after chain of hills rolling southwards at your feet.

This is also the beginning of the “country of the Camisards”, the Protestant rebels of the regional insurrection of 1702-3, whose history had fascinated Stevenson from adolescence, when he sketched out The Pentland Rising about a similar upheaval in the eighteenth-century Scottish highlands.

The last eight chapters of the Travels are largely concerned with this Camisard history, together with Stevenson’s reflections on the nature of religious belief and bigotry. The effect of this in the published text is to give the last third of his journey a curiously impersonal feel, an essay in regional history, which is quite at odds with the almost confessional tone of the previous days. He retells the stories of the various Camisard commanders—“Spirit” Séguier, Roland and Joani—together with the atrocities performed by the Catholic generals like Maréchal Julien in suppressing the movement (despite promised English aid) on the orders of the French King. It is a saga not unlike that of twelfth-century Cathars, persecuted by the armed forces of the Inquisition, further south in the Basses-Pyrenees; and it shows the nascent historical novelist in Stevenson.

When he stands on the top of Mont Mars, after a long, lonely, exhausting climb, his reflections appear to be totally absorbed in the long-ago struggles of these French covenanters:

I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me, was the watershed of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozère, you may see in clear weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons, and perhaps from here the soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five legions camped all round it and almost within view—Salomon and Joani to the north, Roland and Castanet to the south—and when Julien had finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cévennes, which lasted all through November and October, 1703, and during which four hundred and sixty villages were utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked forth on a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land.

It is a vivid picture; and standing on the same high, lost ridge myself, it was easy to imagine Stevenson’s gaze traversing the wild horizon, and conjuring up the shades of the lost Camisards: Spirit Séguier leaping to his death from the window of a surrounded house in Le Pont de Montvert, Roland fighting to the end with his back against an olive tree.

Yet such an image of Stevenson, immersed in historical reflections on his last days, struck me as false. In his original journal there is only one single glancing mention of the Camisards, while he is talking to a poacher—“a dark military-looking wayfarer, who carried a game-bag on a baldrick”—on the general theme of the local Protestantism. For the rest, the colourful accounts and anecdotes of Camisard history are much later additions to the text, worked up from Peyrat’s Pasteurs, the novels of Dinocourt and Fanny Reybaud, and half a dozen other sources, long after Stevenson’s return to England.

The visions of the Camisards in fact serve to cover up Stevenson’s completely different preoccupations at the time. The original journal becomes brief, disjointed, dreamlike and in places highly emotional. Though he travels with increasing speed and purpose he is sunk in his own thoughts, physically driving himself—and Modestine—towards the point of exhaustion.

As I followed him, I was aware of a man possessed, shut in on himself, more and more difficult to make contact with. The narrative of the trip became at the same time more intense, more beautiful, and on occasions almost surreal. His wayside meetings were fewer, but obviously more significant to him. The general descriptions take on a visionary quality: strangely awestruck meditations on the huge, shadowy chestnut trees overhanging his route; the dusty track glowing eerily white under the moon (it is noticeable how often now he seems to be travelling after dark); a solemn night spent high up amidst the pines on the side of Mont Lozère; another deeply troubled camp with drawn pistol on the precipitous terraces above the gorge of the Tarn; and a period of black depression walking through the deserted valley of the Mimente below Mont Mars:

But black care was sitting on my knapsack; the thoughts would not flow evenly in my mind; sometimes the stream ceased and left me for a second like a dead man; and sometimes they would spring up upon me without preparation as if from behind a door … the ill humours got uppermost and kept me black and apprehensive. I felt sure I must be going to be ill; and at the same time, I was well aware that a night in the open air and the arrival of holy and healthy dawn would put me all right again with the world and myself.

The moody fluctuations of this entry are typical: the way the real river has become confused with the inward stream of his thoughts; the way the knapsack has become a more than physical weight; the way he longs for a “holy and a healthy” dawn. These were all, I knew, symptoms of the solitary walker travelling too long alone in high bare places. But for Stevenson they had a special source, a specific pain. Introspection had reached a critical point, and I was hardly surprised to discover one entry which refers to “this disgusting journal”. I followed him now with a kind of trepidation.

Over the first of the “high ridges”, the Montagne du Goulet, Stevenson abandoned the zigzag donkey track, and tried to push Modestine straight up through the trees, beating her—“the cursed brute”—with a savagery he later shamefully regretted. She was bleeding frequently now “from the poop”, but it seems to have been some time still before he realised she was on heat. He crossed over the high bare crest, marked only by upright stones posted for the drovers, and came down to Le Bleymard, tucked in the valley, with “no company but a lark or two”.

I crossed the same ridge shortly after dawn, having spent the night on a corner of the village green at L’Estampe, observed by a patient farm dog, who accompanied me almost all the way up, grinning at Le Brun and chasing rabbits. After he left, the sound of cocks crowing and wood being chopped rose from far below, clear and minute, like tiny bubbles of sound bursting up through liquid. I felt alone in the world, half-floating, tethered by some fragile thread, sweating and light-headed. My diary remarks tersely: “Homesick. White stones on the track scattered like broken trail, tramps’ messages. Read RLS poems out loud to attentive clouds. But when I come to ‘Dark brown is the river, Golden is the sand’ I burst into tears. Go down the track crying. What a fool. At Bleymard write letters.”

I am still not sure quite what significance that little poem had. But it is to do with travelling, or at least a childish dream of travel; and perhaps even more the idea of landfall, of coming home. I suppose it is intolerably sentimental, yet it does capture something pristine about the Stevenson notion of “going away”, and just because it was written for children by a thirty-year-old man (it comes from A Child’s Garden of Verses) this does not make the core of the feeling any less permanent a part of Stevenson’s adult make-up. It is called “Where Go the Boats?” and I give it here as a kind of touchstone:

Dark brown is the river,

Golden is the sand.

It flows along forever,

With trees on either hand.

Green leaves a-floating,

Castles of the foam,

Boats of mine a-boating—

Where will all come home?

On goes the river,

And out past the mill,

Away down the valley,

Away down the hill.

Away down the river,

A hundred miles or more,

Other little children

Shall bring my boats ashore.

Stevenson was restless at Le Bleymard, and although it was already late in the afternoon he set out to scale a portion of the Lozère. Objects continued to strike him in an odd way: the ox carts coming down from hills, packed with fir-wood for the winter stocks, stood out against the sky strangely: “dwarfed into nothing by the length and bushiness of what they carried; and to see one of them at a steep corner reliefed against the sky, was like seeing a dragon half-erected on his hind feet with forepaws in the air.” This was in fact the first of all his nights in which Stevenson deliberately set out to lose himself in the remote landscape and camp out alone. (The night at Fouzilhac had been faute de mieux.) The experience dominates these latter days, and produced by far the longest consecutive entry in the original journal. It is of decisive importance in his pilgrimage.

Stevenson pushed on past the dragons, out of the woods, and struck east along a stony ridge through the gathering dusk. The ground here is very high, some four and a half thousand feet, on the last fold before the Pic de Finiels, the topmost point of the entire Cévennes. The highland nature of the country gives way to something much more sweeping and alpine, with curving rocky crests, distant cairns of stone and constant rushing winds. The whole place is alive with streams, that spring directly from the steep turf. The source of each spring is marked by a perfectly round, clear pool of water, not more than two foot across but perhaps twice as deep, and still as glass except for a tiny twirl of movement dancing across the bottom. This constant pulse of life is formed from a cone of fine, golden gravel. I have never drunk water so sweet and cold and refreshing—like pure peppermint—as from these springs of Finiels; they remain for me the archetype of the word “la source”—whether as literal water or as some metaphor of origins.

Stevenson followed the sound of one of these tiny streams a little way back down the ridge into “a dell of green turf, below the wind-line, and three-quarters surrounded by pines: “There was no outlook except north-eastward upon distant hilltops, or straight upward to the sky; and the encampment felt secure and private like a room.” The streamlet made a little spout over some stones “to serve me as a water tap”. Modestine was tethered, watered and fed black bread; the big blue wool sack spread. Stevenson buckled himself in with his supper of sausage, chocolate, brandy and water; and as soon as the flush of sunset disappeared from the upper air he pulled his cap over his eyes and went to sleep, exhausted.

He awoke some five hours later, at 2 a.m. It was the hour of the Monks, what is usually considered the dead of night. Yet in the open air, on Finiels, he described it as the moment of “resurrection”, a secret time known only to shepherds and countrymen: “Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on dewy hillsides, and change to a new lair among the ferns; and houseless men, who have lain down with the fowls, open their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.” He was thirsty, and sitting up in his sack he drank half the tin of spring water lying in the grass at his side. He pulled out his pouch and began meditatively to roll a cigarette. At his feet he could see the dark shape of Modestine, tethered by the pack saddle, gently turning in a circle and munching the grass. Above him were the black fretted points of the pines, and the faint silvery vapour of the Milky Way; the stars were clear and coloured, “neither sharp nor frosty” there was no moon. Apart from Modestine’s soft cropping “there was not another sound, except the indescribable, quiet talk of the runnel over the stones.”

He lay back, lit his cigarette and studied the sky. He was wearing his silver gypsy ring, “to be like a pedlar if possible”, and the cigarette cupped in his hand put a bright point of light in the band of metal. “This I could see faintly shining as I lowered and raised my cigarette, and at each whiff, the inside of my hand was lit up, and became for a moment the highest light on the landscape.”

Stevenson later looked back at this moment as one of almost mystical significance. He was utterly alone and quiet and self-contained, deliberately cut off from his friends, his family, his fellow-men, as isolated as any monk, but also perfectly free, perched on a high hill under the stars, attuned to the faintest stirrings of the natural world. But at the same time the bright point of light on the silver ring, glowing and fading in time with his own breath, indicated the true centre of his thoughts and being: the band of human love.

The following morning, at dawn, as Modestine munched a new supply of black bread and the first sunlight caught the upper clouds above the Pic, Stevenson sat by his streamlet chewing chocolate and jotting a long, eloquent entry in his journal:

In the whole of my life I have never tasted a more perfect hour of life … O sancta Solitudo! I was such a world away from the roaring streets, the delivery of cruel letters, and the saloons where people love to talk, that it seemed to me as if life had begun again afresh, and I knew no one in all the universe but the almighty maker. I promised myself, as Jacob set up an altar, that I should never again sleep under a roof when I could help it, so gentle, so cool, so singularly peaceful and large, were my sensations.

The religious tone of this—the reference is to Genesis 28, “surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not”—a sort of dreamy pantheism, seemed to me to arise quite naturally from his circumstances, a sudden release from his moments of “black care” and physical exhaustion.

But it was the immediate qualification of this state of sublime content that struck me as so decisive. Stevenson wrote on:

And yet even as I thought the words, I was aware of a strange lack. I could have wished for a companion, to be near me in the starlight, silent and not moving if you like, but ever near and within touch. For there is, after all, a sort of fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

Then at last he becomes explicit:

The woman whom a man has learned to love wholly, in and out, with utter comprehension, is no longer another person in the troublous sense. What there is of exacting in other companionship has disappeared; there is no need to speak; a look or a word stand for such a world of feeling; and where the two watches go so nicely together, beat for beat, thought for thought, there is no call to conform the minute hands and make an eternal trifling compromise of life.

It was, in effect, a proposal of marriage to Fanny Osbourne.

For me this passage came to represent the central experience of Stevenson’s Cévennes journey. Against it, in his notebook, he wrote in French “à développer”, to be filled out—which in a sense he did for the rest of his life.

Yet in the published text of the Travels he added only one further ringing sentence: “And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free”—which points directly to his honeymoon with Fanny in 1880, as the pair of “Silverado Squatters” in California. Far from developing the rest of the entry, he cut it back to a few lines, omitting both the religious and the amorous meanderings of his thoughts and replacing them with a brisk, even somewhat self-mocking observation. “I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists: at the least I had discovered a new pleasure for myself.”

Once again I glimpsed Stevenson deliberately covering his tracks. The truth of the Pic de Finiels experience lay in its exposed, sweeping emotions. The toning down, the correcting and balancing, hid exactly that boyish hope and mysticism which finally rushed out towards the figure of Fanny, the ideal “companion” of Stevenson’s future adventuring, and which was indeed made permanent reality in the exotic, open-air and strongly matriarchal last encampment of the Vailima house, in Samoa, with its sprawling airy verandahs, its alfresco feasts, its native ceremonials and expeditions. The sacred “green dell of turf” on Finiels, for ever withdrawn from ordinary society—focused, as it were, on the possibilities of starlight—was a real found place in Stevenson’s heart. That he later hid it from his reading public gave me some measure of the gap between the social and the private self, even in supposedly “autobiographical” writing.

Stevenson crossed the Lozère on Sunday, 29 September into a new land of blue, tumbled hills, and plunging down a breakneck slope turning “like a corkscrew” descended into the valley of the River Tarn. “All the time,” he wrote, “I had this feeling of the Sabbath strong upon my soul; and heard in spirit the church bells clamouring all over Christendom, and the psalms of a thousand churches.”

Part of that feeling came, I knew, from the very sensation of being so high up in that country, that you feel you can see and hear for a hundred, a thousand miles, and that the wind will bring you news from everywhere. It is a mad, visionary sensation, and is partly a product of sheer physical exertion, a sort of oxygen “high”. But Stevenson’s mind was still running much on religious matters, and the thought of bells always turned him towards home.

At Le Pont de Montvert, with its fine stone bridge, the first thing he noticed was the Protestant temple; but the second thing was the perfume of French Sunday déjeuner at the inn, and “we must have been nearly a score of us at dinner by eleven before noon”. This clubbable note of good food and good company came as quite a shock to me after the high-flown solitary meditations of the night before. But Stevenson’s appreciation of the “roaring table-d’hôte” is typical of his quicksilver changes of mood, and the grave or sacred note is never long sustained even on the harshest parts of this last leg of his journey.

Indeed, after all those night declarations of ideal love, he promptly set up a comic flirtation with the serving-girl at the inn, a slow heavy blonde girl called Clarisse, which caused much amusement among his fellow-diners. Stevenson is rude about her, in a teasing amorous way, and I did not find it hard to read some sexual interest in this bantering account:

What shall I say of Clarisse? She waited the table with a heavy, placable nonchalance, like an educated cow; but her huge grey eyes were steeped in a sort of amorous languor; her features, although they were fleshy, were carefully designed; her mouth had a curl, her nostril was a personal nostril that belonged to herself and not to all the world, her cheek fell into strange and interesting lines. It was a face capable of strong emotion and, with training, it offered a promise of delicate sentiments. It seemed to me pitiful that so good a model should be left to country admirers and a country way of thought … Before I left, I assured Clarisse of my hearty admiration; she took it like milk, without embarrassment or surprise, merely looking at me steadily with her great eyes; and I felt glad I was going away. If Clarisse could read English, I should not dare to add that her figure was unworthy of her face; hers was a case for stays; but that will grow better as she gets up in life.

The ribbing tone is worthy of Bob Stevenson—it is suddenly the philandering bohemian painter’s voice, an echo of the laughter at Grez, with its talk of “model”, “lines”, and “flesh” and its knowing wink: if he had remained, who knows, he might have made a casual conquest. Nor did Stevenson suppress any of this in the Travels; even the remark about stays for Clarisse’s bovine haunches remains. For this was acceptable Victorian smoking-room bavardage about buxom serving-wenches and perky laundry-girls, which goes back in the travellers’ tradition beyond Byron’s Swiss chambermaids to Sterne’s supple French milliners in A Sentimental Journey. Stevenson manages it with a flourish, and yet the effect is not wholly happy or convincing. There is something a little awkward and defensive about the episode, and I think this was because Stevenson was no longer one of the boys in the usual sense. In particular the undertone of class superiority comes uneasily from him, and is not at all in keeping with the rest of the journal, or with the man who was to travel steerage to New York in the Amateur Emigrant. What Clarisse really brought out in him, I think, was his intense sexual loneliness and longing for Fanny Osbourne.

At all events, Stevenson did not remain at Le Pont de Montvert, but hurried on down the steep, twisting road through the Gorges du Tarn towards Florac, and spent one of his worst nights camped on the steep chestnut terraces which shelve out above the river. The place was so narrow that he had to lay his sack on a little plateau formed by the roots of a tree, while tethering Modestine several yards higher up on another shelf. The position was unpleasantly exposed to the road, the air heavy with the noise of frogs and mosquitos, the ground alive with ants, and the fallen chestnut leaves full of inexplicable sounds and scurryings which he afterwards put down to rats. For the first time during his journey Stevenson admits that he was frightened—“profoundly shaken”—and unable to sleep. He fingered his pistol and tossed uneasily, listening to the river running below in the darkness: “I perspired by fits, my limbs trembled, fever got into my mind and prevented all continuous and happy thinking; I was only conscious of broken, vanishing thoughts travelling through my mind as if upon a whirlwind …”

Nothing ill occurred, except in the morning he was surprised in the act of packing by two labourers come to prune the trees. One of the men demanded in unfriendly tones why Stevenson had slept there. “My faith,” said Stevenson pulling on his gaiters and trying to hide his pistol, “I was tired.” They watched, swinging their pruning knives at the next tree but one, until Stevenson and Modestine had stumbled back down on to the road.

I had a sort of superstitious fear of this same night, and it was the one time I looked for company. Le Brun picked out a rather jaunting chapeau de paille leaning over the bridge at Montvert; it belonged to a tall smiling chap carrying a backpack and old painter’s case with brass locks. We went to the cafe and discussed local wine (“le rouge de Cahors est tellement fort…”), Cézanne, Swiss army penknives, the Beatles, and of course English girls. Later we camped down by the Tarn, made a fire, and got gently drunk. Le Paille admitted he wanted to be a great painter, and Le Brun muttered most strangely about being a great poet. “C’est égal,” said Le Paille, “on le fera.” I forgot all about Stevenson and slept like a log

In the dawn, over bread and black coffee, somewhat penitential, I explained about Stevenson’s travels and Modestine. Le Paille regarded me indulgently: “Mais vraiment tu es plus fou que moi. Il faut vivre ta propre vie à toi. Sinon…” We parted cheerfully, with mock flourishes of the hats, repeated at several turns in the road, as we moved off in opposite directions. Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Bonjour Monsieur Steamson. But I have often thought of that “sinon…” since.

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 get 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.

For Stevenson himself there remains no doubt now in my own mind that the whole Cévennes experience was a kind of initiation ceremony: a grappling with physical hardships, loneliness, religious doubts, the influence of his parents, and the overwhelming question of whether he should take the enormous risk of travelling to America and throwing his life in with Fanny’s—“for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health”. In the desperate summer months of 1879, immediately prior to his departure for New York, the memory of the trip was obviously much in his mind. He wrote to a friend: “I can do no work. It all lies aside. I want—I want—a holiday; I want to be happy; I want the moon or the sun or something. I want the object of my affections badly anyway; and a big forest; fine, breathing, sweating, sunny walks; and the trees all crying aloud in the summer wind and a camp under the stars.”

So the pilgrimage begun at Le Monastier ended six thousand miles away in a honeymoon on the wooded hills of the Pacific coast of California. But that is another story, as eventually told in The Silverado Squatters.

For me, the Cévennes was a different initiation. I embarked on it, and finished it, in all innocence from a literary point of view. It never crossed my mind that I might write about Stevenson; or that my diary should be anything more than a “route-journal”, a record of my road and camps. If I wrote anything at all, I thought, it would be poems about walking, swimming, climbing hills and sleeping under the stars. But what happened was something quite other, something almost entirely unexpected. Instead of writing poems I wrote prose meditations. These concerned not so much the outward physical experiences of my travels but inward mental ones that were often profoundly upsetting. The full record of my black depressions, intense almost disabling moments of despair, and childish weeping fits, still seems inexplicable and embarrassing. The corresponding moments of intoxication and mad delight are still vivid to me twenty years afterwards, so that my pulse-rate increases when I write about them, even now. But all these inward emotions were concentrated and focused on one totally unforeseen thing: the growth of a friendship with Stevenson, which is to say, the growth of an imaginary relationship with a non-existent person, or at least a dead one.

In this sense, what I experienced and recorded in the Cévennes in the summer of 1964 was a haunting. Nothing of course that would make a Gothic story, or interest the Society for Psychical Research; but an act of deliberate psychological trespass, an invasion or encroachment of the present upon the past, and in some sense the past upon the present. And in this experience of haunting I first encountered—without then realising it—what I now think of as the essential process of biography.

As far as I can tell, this process has two main elements, or closely entwined strands. The first is the gathering of factual materials, the assembling in chronological order of a man’s “journey” through the world—the actions, the words, the recorded thoughts, the places and faces through which he moved: the “life and letters”. The second is the creation of a fictional or imaginary relationship between the biographer and his subject; not merely a “point of view” or an “interpretation”, but a continuous living dialogue between the two as they move over the same historical ground, the same trail of events. There is between them a ceaseless discussion, a reviewing and questioning of motives and actions and consequences, a steady if subliminal exchange of attitudes, judgments and conclusions. It is fictional, imaginary, because of course the subject cannot really, literally, talk back; but the biographer must come to act and think of his subject as if he can.

The first stage of such a living, fictional relationship is in my experience a degree of more or less conscious identification with the subject. More or less, because the real elements of self-identification are often much more subtle and subliminal than one originally thinks. This, strictly speaking, is pre-biographic: it is a primitive form, a type of hero- or heroine-worship, which easily develops into a kind of love affair. Looking back at the Cévennes, I can now see that I went straight into that phase with Stevenson, passionately identifying with what I saw as his love of bohemian adventuring, getting out “on the road”, and sharing with him his delight in all things French, original, eccentric. I saw him, naively, as a direct predecessor of figures like Jack Kerouac—though the European Kerouac, the Kerouac of Lonesome Traveller, a bit lost and a bit uncertain of himself, not the roaring American romantic of On the Road. The Kerouac who, at the very end of his drunken career, comes back to France looking for his lost family roots in Brittany, searching for the Lebris de Kéroack in Satori in Paris.

My real reasons for self-identification I now see as rather different: they involved the confrontation with religious upbringing and lost faith, Stevenson’s Calvinism having some equivalence to my Catholicism. They also involved a natural struggle to free myself from parental influences—benign ones, but nevertheless encroaching. Hence I suspect the powerful note struck by Stevenson’s exploration of the “dream childhood” theme, the poetry of homesickness—of travelling far away over blue hills and brown rivers, only to find yourself once more back on the final wooded ridge above the natal valley, the small boy wanting to come home.

This form of identification or self-projection is pre-biographic and in a sense pre-literate: but it is an essential motive for following in the footsteps, for attempting to re-create the pathway, the journey, of someone else’s life through the physical past. If you are not in love with them you will not follow them—not very far, anyway. But the true biographic process begins precisely at the moment, at the places, where this naive form of love and identification breaks down. The moment of personal disillusion is the moment of impersonal, objective re-creation. For me, almost the earliest occasion was that bridge at Langogne, the old broken bridge that I could not cross, and the sudden physical sense that the past was indeed “another country”.

The past does retain a physical presence for the biographer—in landscapes, buildings, photographs, and above all the actual trace of handwriting on original letters or journals. Anything a hand has touched is for some reason peculiarly charged with personality—Thomas Hardy’s simple steel-tipped pens, each carved with a novel’s name; Shelley’s guitar, presented to Jane Williams; Balzac’s blue china coffee-pot, with its spirit-heater, used through the long nights of Le Père Goriot and Les Illusions Perdues; other writers’ signet rings, worn walking-sticks, Coleridge’s annotated books, Stevenson’s flageolet and tortoise-shell “Tusitala” ring. It is as if the act of repeated touching, especially in the process of daily work or creation, imparts a personal “virtue” to an inanimate object, gives it a fetichistic power in the anthropological sense, which is peculiarly impervious to the passage of time. Gautier wrote in a story that the most powerful images of past life in the whole of Pompeii were the brown, circular prints left by drinkers’ glasses on the marble slabs of the second-century taverna.

But this physical presence is none the less extremely deceptive. The material surfaces of life are continually breaking down, sloughing off, changing, almost as fast as human skin. A building is restored, a bridge is rebuilt or replaced, a road is widened or rerouted, a forest is cut down, a wooded hill is built over, a village green becomes a town centre. Stevenson’s La Trappe had been burnt down, redesigned and rebuilt; many of his donkey-tracks had become tarred roads; his wild upland heaths had been planted over; and even his terraces of deep chestnut trees had been replaced by the commercial foresting of young pines.

The well-meaning attempt to conserve or recover the past can be more subtly destructive. Since the centenary of Stevenson’s Travels I am told the whole route has been marked out, by the local Syndicats d’Initiative, with a series of blazed stakes which lead the pilgrim from one picturesque point de vue to the next, and bring him safely down each evening to some recommended hotel, Carte Touristique, hot bath, and Souvenirs Cévenols. I have not had the heart to go back and see.

Beyond this sense of physical presences growing upon the biographer—which includes the whole aura of personal body influence, the sound of Stevenson’s voice, his particular loose-limbed gait, his mixture of frail boniness and hectic energy, the large mobile brown eyes, the quick thin wrists and ankles, the smell of tobacco and cognac and cologne and sweaty Scottish tweed mixed with the rank odour of Modestine—there is the growing awareness of psychological complication.

This is the second factor that awakens the necessary objectivity of the biographer. My gradual discovery of Fanny Osbourne, and her hidden importance in Stevenson’s journey, made me realise how Stevenson fitted into the enormously intricate emotional web of other people’s lives. The single subject of biography is in this sense a chimera, almost as much as the Noble Savage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, living in splendid asocial isolation. The truth is almost the reverse: that Stevenson existed very largely in, and through, his contact with other people: his books are written for his public; his letters for his friends; even his private journal is a way of giving social expression—externalising—his otherwise inarticulated thoughts. It is in this sense that all real biographical evidence is “third party” evidence; evidence that is witnessed. Just as the biographer cannot make up dialogue, if he is to avoid fiction; so he cannot really say that his subject “thought” or “felt” a particular thing. When he uses these forms of narration it is actually a type of agreed shorthand, which must mean—if it means anything factual—that “there is evidence from his letters or journals or reported conversations that he thought, or that he felt, such-and-such a thing at this time …” In this way the biographer is continually being excluded from, or thrown out of, the fictional rapport he has established with his subject. He is like the news reporter who is told something in confidence, “off the record”, and then can do nothing about it until he has found independent evidence from other sources. His lips are sealed, his hands tied. Otherwise he is dishonourable and prosecutable, not only in the courts of Justice, but in the courts of Truth as well.

My final lesson from the Cévennes is as much metaphysical as literary. It is the paradox that the more closely and scrupulously you follow someone’s footsteps through the past the more conscious do you become that they never existed wholly in any one place along the recorded path. You cannot freeze them, you cannot pinpoint them, at any particular turn in the road, bend of the river, view from the window. They are always in motion, carrying their past lives over into the future. It is like the sub-atomic particle in nuclear physics that can be defined only in terms of a wave-motion. If I try to fix Stevenson in his green magic dell in the Lozère, or his whitewashed cell at La Trappe, or under his chestnut tree below Mont Mars; if I try to say—this man, thinking and feeling these things, was at this place, at this moment—then at once I have to go backwards and forwards, tracing him at other and corresponding places and times—his childhood bedroom at No 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, or his honeymoon ranch at Silverado, California.

So without knowing it, my youthful journey through the Cévennes led me over the hills and far away into the undiscovered land of other men’s and women’s lives. It led me towards biography.

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