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 The sacred “green dell of turf” on Finiels, for ever withdrawn from ordinary society—focused, as it were, on the possibilities of starlight—was a real found place in Stevenson’s heart.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 is suddenly the philandering bohemian painter’s voice, an echo of the laughter at Grez, with its talk of “model”, “lines”, and “flesh” and its knowing wink: if he had remained, who knows, he might have made a casual conquest. Nor did Stevenson suppress any of this in the Travels; even the remark about stays for Clarisse’s bovine haunches remains. For this was acceptable Victorian smoking-room bavardage about buxom serving-wenches and perky laundry-girls, which goes back in the travellers’ tradition beyond Byron’s Swiss chambermaids to Sterne’s supple French milliners in A Sentimental Journey. Stevenson manages it with a flourish, and yet the effect is not wholly happy or convincing. There is something a little awkward and defensive about the episode, and I think this was because Stevenson was no longer one of the boys in the usual sense. In particular the undertone of class superiority comes uneasily from him, and is not at all in keeping with the rest of the journal, or with the man who was to travel steerage to New York in the Amateur Emigrant. What Clarisse really brought out in him, I think, was his intense sexual loneliness and longing for Fanny Osbourne.
At all events, Stevenson did not remain at Le Pont de Montvert, but hurried on down the steep, twisting road through the Gorges du Tarn towards Florac, and spent one of his worst nights camped on the steep chestnut terraces which shelve out above the river. The place was so narrow that he had to lay his sack on a little plateau formed by the roots of a tree, while tethering Modestine several yards higher up on another shelf. The position was unpleasantly exposed to the road, the air heavy with the noise of frogs and mosquitos, the ground alive with ants, and the fallen chestnut leaves full of inexplicable sounds and scurryings which he afterwards put down to rats. For the first time during his journey Stevenson admits that he was frightened—“profoundly shaken”—and unable to sleep. He fingered his pistol and tossed uneasily, listening to the river running below in the darkness: “I perspired by fits, my limbs trembled, fever got into my mind and prevented all continuous and happy thinking; I was only conscious of broken, vanishing thoughts travelling through my mind as if upon a whirlwind …”
Nothing ill occurred, except in the morning he was surprised in the act of packing by two labourers come to prune the trees. One of the men demanded in unfriendly tones why Stevenson had slept there. “My faith,” said Stevenson pulling on his gaiters and trying to hide his pistol, “I was tired.” They watched, swinging their pruning knives at the next tree but one, until Stevenson and Modestine had stumbled back down on to the road.
I had a sort of superstitious fear of this same night, and it was the one time I looked for company. Le Brun picked out a rather jaunting chapeau de paille leaning over the bridge at Montvert; it belonged to a tall smiling chap carrying a backpack and old painter’s case with brass locks. We went to the cafe and
