Footsteps. Richard Holmes
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.
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