Footsteps. Richard Holmes
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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