Footsteps. Richard Holmes
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