the road to Florac, pensive after his bad night, Stevenson was rewarded by his last significant encounter of the route. As it stands in his journal it has an almost proverbial quality. He fell in with an old man in a brown nightcap—“clear-eyed, weather-beaten, with an excited smile”—who was driving two sheep and a goat to market, accompanied by a little girl, his grand-daughter.
“Connaissez-vous le Seigneur?” the old man began briskly, and started to question Stevenson about his faith. This strange figure, whom Stevenson later described as “my mountain Plymouth Brother”, turned out to be a member of an obscure but genial Protestant sect, and for some reason took the Scotsman to be of the same persuasion. Far from embarrassing him, their halting, somewhat inspired conversation served to confirm Stevenson in his pantheistic beliefs and in the principle of tolerance which he had been meditating on ever since La Trappe. The old man also seemed to appreciate the saving grace of a life lived in the open, free from formalities and conventional creeds.
I could not help thinking that Stevenson, for all his troubles, had brought down from the high hills a transcendental glow. “The old man cried out, when I told him I sometimes preferred sleeping under the stars to a close and noisy alehouse, ‘Now I see you know the Lord!’ “It struck me that their conversation along the winding road was ideally the kind of talk that Stevenson, in other circumstances, would have liked to have had with his father. He felt there was no real dishonesty in sliding over their differences and trying to keep to common ground: “I declare myself a Morave, with this Moravian, just as I tried to persuade the priest at Our Lady of the Snows that I was, in essential things, a Catholic; it is not my fault if they put me out, I continue to knock at the door, I will be in; there is no sect in the world I do not count mine.”
Adding to this in the Travels, Stevenson drew the lesson more explicitly, giving the incident a weight and universality that he associated with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the models for his own book:
For charity begins blindfold: and only through a series of similar misapprehensions rises at length into a settled principle of love and patience, and a firm belief in all our fellow men. If I deceived the good old man, in the like manner I would willingly go on to deceive others. And if ever at length, out of our separate and sad ways, we should all come together into one common house, I have a hope, to which I cling dearly, that my mountain Plymouth Brother will hasten to shake hands with me again. Thus, talking like Christian and Faithful by the way, he and I came down upon a hamlet on the Tarn.
This I suppose is the most public meaning of the Travels, its formal declaration of informality in faith, with the stress on charity and good fellowship as the most profound virtues for the journey of life. In a sense it is a quite deliberate contradiction of his stiff Presbyterian upbringing, and it was not without irony that Stevenson remarks: “I scarcely knew I was so good a preacher.” And is the “good old man” his father (in the journal he addresses him as “mon père”)?
Perhaps: it is particularly difficult to appreciate the degree to which religious differences could rend an otherwise close and loving family a hundred years ago. Differences of politics, morality, even career ambition—yes, these can still be felt from the inside; but differences of creed, these are almost lost to us. Unless of course you happen like me to have been brought up within a powerful “sect” like Catholicism and know from within the struggle and sense of guilt involved in breaking away. It did not surprise me to discover that when Stevenson first announced his agnosticism (although a very Christian form of it) to his father the latter wrote bleakly: “You have rendered my whole life a failure.”
Their interview in Paris in February 1878 had much improved this situation. But Stevenson still felt the need for some kind of intermediary figure, like the old Plymouth Brother; and in this sense, while much of the Travels is “mere protestations” to Fanny, so much else in the book is still the appeal of a wayward son, “mere protestations” to Thomas Stevenson. As he put it in the journal: “‘My father,’ said I, ‘it is not easy to say who knows the Lord, and it is none of our business. Protestants and Catholics and even people who worship stones, may know Him and be known by Him, for He has made us all.’”
At Florac Stevenson again lunched at the inn, where he was received as something of a portent. “My knife, my cane, my sack, all my arrangements were cordially admired.” The village schoolmaster came in to question him, and the young innkeeper—unmarried, living with his sister—struck an amusing note: “‘Tout ce que vous avez est joli,’ said the young man, ‘et vous l’êtes’”—which Stevenson let pass with a smile. But again I sensed his hurry: he pressed on down the road towards Cassagnas—overtaken by that “black care” on his knapsack—and once again the dusk found him groping for a camp in the valley of the Mimente: “I slipped down to the river, which looked very black among its rocks to fill my can; and then I dined with good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light my lantern in the near neighbourhood of a house … All night, a strong wind blew up the valley and the acorns fell pattering over me from the oak.”
This was his penultimate night on the road—and peace fell from the stars, he says, on to his spirit “like a dew”. But he was much disturbed by the barking of a watch-dog from that nearby house, and the first hints of returning civilisation were upon him. “To a tramp like myself,” he noted, “the dog represents the sedentary and respectable world in its most hostile form. There is something of the clergyman or the lawyer in the engaging animal.”
I made a little fire among the rocks by the river, and slept in the doorway of an isolated barn. My diary notes “a solitary star below the door-lintel, a little rain, and an occasional blink of lightning over the oak trees”.
The same dog, the messenger of civilisation, woke Stevenson early on the morning of Wednesday, 2 October, and already beginning to think of the letters awaiting him at Alais he was packed and on the road for Cassagnas before the sun had slid into the valley. It was one of his longest day’s walks, he was clearly close to exhaustion—like Modestine—and his final journal entries are desultory.
At Cassagnas, “a black village on the mountainside”—again that note of drained colour—he dined with the local gendarme and a travelling merchant at the inn. There was some gossip of a renegade Catholic curé, who had given up his ministry and “taken to his bosom” the local schoolmistress; the villagers, though almost all Protestant, showed little sympathy for the man’s predicament, despite the fact that their own Protestant priests were allowed and indeed encouraged to marry. The general sentiment seemed to be that “it is a bad idea for a man to go back on his engagements”—even if it was such an unnatural one as Catholic celibacy. Stevenson remarks wryly that “perhaps the bad idea was to enter into them at the first” and continues with a brief, rather hazy passage about the “holy simplicity” of physical desires and needs. “The world gives liberally of things to eat; it is all over spouting fountains; and a man need not travel very far ere he finds a woman to whom his soul can cling. If he can but lay aside some dismal ascetic standards, and a few hollow aspirations …”
But he was pleased to find that both the policeman and the merchant were more than a little shocked to discover that he had been sleeping in the open. There was talk of wolves and thieves—“the English always have long purses”—and general head-shaking. To all Stevenson’s smiling and shrugging—” ‘God,’ said I, ‘is everywhere’”—the merchant replied in grave, flattering disapproval: “Cependant, coucher dehors!” and finally asked for one of Stevenson’s visiting cards, saying that “it would be something to talk about in the future, this donkey-driving, English amateur vagrant.” Stevenson was charmed to comply.
Without further delay, he then crossed back over the Mimente to the southern side of the valley and began to climb the ragged path that leads steeply up through “sliding stone and heather tufts” to the huge, long
