Footsteps. Richard Holmes
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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