Footsteps. Richard Holmes
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.
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