and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.
In a literary way, this idea is central not only to the kind of books Stevenson went on to write (with their mixture of boyish adventure and very adult nostalgia), but to a whole tradition of late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. J. M. Barrie, Kenneth Grahame and Rudyard Kipling are all foreseen. But I saw only the immediate and personal situation.
The spring of 1878 did not bring Stevenson anywhere nearer a practical decision about Fanny. Though he had published An Inland Voyage in May, and gone some way to establishing himself in his own eyes as a professional author, their shared future still seemed unassured. Stevenson returned to London to work as an assistant editor on Henley’s London magazine, and suddenly in July Fanny announced that she was returning to California. If it was an ultimatum Stevenson did not respond; but it is likely that Fanny—still married to Sam—was in just as much turmoil as he. Lloyd recalled with feeling: “I had not the slightest perception of the quandary my mother and RLS were in, nor what agonies of mind their approaching separation was bringing.”
The three Osbournes left on the boat-train from London in August, and Stevenson, pale and silent, came to see them off. He could not bear to wait till the train pulled out but, wrapping his long brown ulster coat round his thin shoulders, strode off down the platform without glancing back. In September he reached the Cévennes, and only then did he dare to look about him.
4
After La Trappe there seemed to be a new sense of determination about Stevenson’s route. He was rested, and certain issues must now have been clearly in the forefront of his mind. He and Modestine now embarked on the great upland peaks of the central Cévennes: the Montagne du Goulet at 4,700 feet; and, a day’s walk beyond it, the Pic de Finiels at 5,600 feet. It is a different landscape from the Gévaudan, bolder, wilder, more dramatically plotted. It is visionary highland country: steep woods of scented pine climb sharply upwards to windy expanse of bare moorland, heath, rolling grass or scree; then drop back down in precipitous alpine meadows, or rocky gorges, rushing streams and deep green-and-gold terraces of chestnut trees. You walk against the sky, with chain after chain of hills rolling southwards at your feet.
This is also the beginning of the “country of the Camisards”, the Protestant rebels of the regional insurrection of 1702-3, whose history had fascinated Stevenson from adolescence, when he sketched out The Pentland Rising about a similar upheaval in the eighteenth-century Scottish highlands.
The last eight chapters of the Travels are largely concerned with this Camisard history, together with Stevenson’s reflections on the nature of religious belief and bigotry. The effect of this in the published text is to give the last third of his journey a curiously impersonal feel, an essay in regional history, which is quite at odds with the almost confessional tone of the previous days. He retells the stories of the various Camisard commanders—“Spirit” Séguier, Roland and Joani—together with the atrocities performed by the Catholic generals like Maréchal Julien in suppressing the movement (despite promised English aid) on the orders of the French King. It is a saga not unlike that of twelfth-century Cathars, persecuted by the armed forces of the Inquisition, further south in the Basses-Pyrenees; and it shows the nascent historical novelist in Stevenson.
When he stands on the top of Mont Mars, after a long, lonely, exhausting climb, his reflections appear to be totally absorbed in the long-ago struggles of these French covenanters:
I was now on the separation of two vast watersheds; behind me all the streams were bound for the Garonne and the Western Ocean; before me, was the watershed of the Rhone. Hence, as from the Lozère, you may see in clear weather the shining of the Gulf of Lyons, and perhaps from here the soldiers of Salomon may have watched for the topsails of Sir Cloudesley Shovel, and the long-promised aid from England. You may take this ridge as lying in the heart of the country of the Camisards; four of the five legions camped all round it and almost within view—Salomon and Joani to the north, Roland and Castanet to the south—and when Julien had finished his famous work, the devastation of the High Cévennes, which lasted all through November and October, 1703, and during which four hundred and sixty villages were utterly subverted, a man standing on this eminence would have looked forth on a silent, smokeless, and dispeopled land.
It 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
