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Fanny Vandergrift broke the rules, almost all of them, and that was her first and enduring charm. She was a spirit quite as original and adventurous as Stevenson. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in March 1840, she was thirty-six when she first met him at Grez in 1876. Her ancestors were Dutch and Swedish; her parents were pioneer farmers who let her run wild on a series of small ranches. They had her baptised in the Presbyterian faith—an interesting emotional link with Stevenson—in one of the total immersion ceremonies in the White River when she was two. By her teens she had grown up into a strong, dark-haired, gypsy-looking girl, who could ride, use a rifle, grow vegetables, make wine, and hand-roll cigarettes. Her passion was painting, and because she was not thought a belle her style was that of the tomboy artist, dashing and devil-may-care. She had big, dark eyes, a determined jaw, and a powerful, stocky body with great sexual presence that remained with her late into middle-age. “God made me ugly,” she used to say with sultry good humour, and the result was that everyone thought her a handsome gal of spirit. She was popular, and her sister Nellie recalled that “there was scarcely a tree in the place that did not bear somewhere the name or initials of Fanny Vandergrift”.
She was married at seventeen—probably already pregnant—to a young lieutenant on the Governor’s staff, Sam Osbourne. He was blond, six-foot, quixotic, amiable and incurably unfaithful, and she loved him passionately. They went West to seek their fortunes, living in mining towns in Nevada, and when the gold-boom was over settling in San Francisco, in 1866. Sam was frequently away, fighting Indians with the army, prospecting in Montana with friends, or having affairs with saloon ladies. But he was always back when the children were born: Isabel (“Belle”) in 1858; Lloyd in 1868; and Hervey in 1871. Jealous rows and passionate reconciliations became the pattern of the household, but gradually Fanny emerged as the stronger, more capable and more stable figure: her children were devoted to her, and remained emotionally dependent on her for the rest of their lives. Moreover Fanny, far from becoming embittered and frumpish, seemed almost to grow younger and more carefree as her family grew up. She lost none of her dash, good humour or energy; she always seemed game for anything. During the 1870s strangers often mistook her and Belle for sisters. When Belle was sent to finish her education at the San Francisco School of Design, Fanny enrolled too as a mature student, and a whole new circle of friendships opened out for her among the artistic “European” set in the city. In particular Fanny became friendly with a young Irish-American lawyer, Timothy Rearden, who was Head of the Mercantile Library, and knew writers like Bret Harte. Rearden became her mentor, possibly for a time her lover. He encouraged her to paint and write, read French and German, think about a new life—a second chance.
Fanny seized the opportunity in a way that would have been almost impossible for her contemporaries in Victorian England or Second Empire France. In 1875, when Belle was seventeen, Lloyd seven and Hervey four, she set off with her three children to study art in Antwerp. Sam Osbourne stayed behind in San Francisco, promising to pay a small allowance. Fanny was at last une femme indépendante, a triumph of spirit over circumstance. A photograph of her at this time shows a distinctly romantic heroine: a dark, determined woman apparently in her late twenties (she was actually thirty-five) with a mass of wild hair brushed impatiently back behind her ears. She wears a velvet-edged jacket over a tight-fitting black dress that carelessly shows off her figure. Knotted round her throat is a large white neckerchief, tied like a man’s tie, loose and full, faintly provocative. The eyes are large and frank, the mouth strong and beautifully formed. She combined force of character with a certain indefinable vulnerability. Her daughter Belle recalled that on the steamer from New York “when in any difficulty, she only had to look helpless and bewildered, and gallant strangers leaped to her assistance”.
Life was not easy in Antwerp. Money was scarce, the lodgings poor, and worst of all the Antwerp Academy would not accept women students. The American Consul tried to help her and Belle find private tuition, but then little Hervey fell ill with fever, and they were advised to take the child to a specialist in Paris. By December they were living in rooms in Montmartre, but in the spring of 1876 Hervey was still ailing, and Lloyd had vivid memories of hanging about hungrily outside patisserie windows because all their money was spent on doctors’ bills. Fanny sent a telegram to Sam Osbourne in San Francisco, telling him their son was dangerously ill. He arrived in Paris to be at Hervey’s death-bed. Bemused with grief, Fanny went back to her life-classes at the atelier, but had fainting fits and hallucinations, and trembled on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
Their French doctor strongly advised them to take Lloyd out of Paris to spend the summer in the country. Fanny discussed this with her friends at the atelier, and a young American sculptor told them about the Hotel Chevillon at Grez-sur-Loing. Sam agreed to come with them, at least for a time; they put their belongings in store and climbed aboard a train.
It was too early in the summer for many others to be in residence, and the hotel was quiet and friendly. Lloyd began to eat and run about like a young colt; Fanny and Belle sat peacefully painting riverscapes and walking in the water-meadows; Sam drank and chatted with Will Low. Gradually other painters turned up at the phalanstére, and each accepted the Osbournes as a picturesque addition to the bohemian enclave. Frank O’Meara fell in love with Belle, and there was much talk of what would happen when the mad Stevensons, Bob and Louis, finally arrived to complete the party. Days were spent swimming, lunching out under the trees, painting in the fields under white umbrellas.
First to arrive at Grez was Bob Stevenson, a tall erratic figure with Mexican moustaches and a ceaseless, brilliant flow of mocking talk. He was generally regarded as the “genius” of the two cousins: painter, musician, linguist, drinker and unreformed rake. He dazzled but also rather frightened Fanny; she described him as “exactly like one of Ouida’s heroes”.
Then, one evening in early July 1876, cousin Louis made his appearance. Young Lloyd Osbourne, who was soon to hero-worship him, remembered the scene vividly. It was dinner-time, with some fifteen of the phalanstére sitting round the long wooden table in the main room of the Chevillon. Oil-lamps stood along the board, pitchers of wine circulated, laughter flew back and forth. The main windows of the dining-room stood open to let in the sweet night air. Occasionally moths flew in from the darkness and fluttered against the bright glass chimneys of the lamps. Fanny and Belle were the only women in the company, and all attention was on them. Then little Lloyd heard a faint noise outside the window, and saw a shadow moving and hesitating beyond the light. There was a clatter of boots, a thin brown forearm on the window-sill, a sharp exclamation, and a dusty figure wearing a slouch hat and carrying a knapsack vaulted lightly into the room. Bob rose gravely from his chair and, turning to the Osbournes, announced like a conjuror: “My cousin, Mr Louis Stevenson.” It was a grand entrance, never to be forgotten, and often to be embroidered. Stevenson himself later said he had waited many minutes outside in the dark, gazing into the bright room, transfixed by Fanny’s face, acknowledging his destiny. Perhaps he did. Certainly Sam Osbourne left Grez and returned to America in September; and when Fanny returned with Belle and Lloyd for the winter to her lodgings at 5 rue Douay in Montmartre, Stevenson soon moved to rooms nearby. As Lloyd put it with delight, “Luly is coming.”
Yet the affair took two years, with much coming and going between Paris and London and Grez, before it became really serious for both of them. Stevenson had other elder Muse figures on hand, notably Mrs Fanny Sitwell, the confidante and future wife of his friend Sidney Colvin. While Fanny Osbourne, for her part, was equally attracted by Bob Stevenson to begin with. Indeed, there is some reason to think that initially Bob was the favourite. She described them both, in a suitably colourful style, in a letter of April 1877 to Timothy Rearden, in San Francisco. It told me a good deal about the Stevenson family penchant for romancing about themselves, and playing incorrigible, boyish bohemians. She wrote:
Bob Stevenson is the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life, and yet somehow, reminds me of you. He spent a large fortune at the rate of eight thousand pounds a year … studied music and did wonderful things as a musician, took holy orders to please his mother, quit in disgust, studied painting and did some fine work, and is now dying from the effects of dissipation and is considered a little mad. [In fact Bob soon married, had a family, and comfortably outlived Louis.]
Louis, his cousin, the hysterical fellow, is a tall gaunt Scotchman with a face like Raphael, and between over-education and dissipation has ruined his health, and is dying of consumption. Louis reformed his habits a couple of years ago, and Bob, this winter. Louis is the heir to an immense fortune which he will never live to inherit. His father and mother, cousins, are both threatened with insanity, and I am quite sure the son is.
Madness, sickness, lost fortunes and wasted genius: it all sounded like a delicious game to Fanny. Yet pretending that she will never meet them again (both cousins had returned home to Britain until the next summer), she added a warmer and truer note:
… The two mad Stevensons with all their suffering are men of spirits, but so filled with joyfulness of there living that their presence is exhilarating … I never heard one of them say a cynical thing, nor knew them to do an unkind thing. With all the wild stories I have heard of them fresh in my mind, I still consider them the truest gentlemen …
“Gentlemen” she uses in an American sense; not snobbishly, but virtuously—men of honour, manners, sincerity.
Fanny became serious about Louis Stevenson after the second summer at Grez. Bob went back to Edinburgh, but Louis returned with her again to Montmartre, and here he was really taken ill, not with consumption, but with a form of conjunctivitis which threatened to leave him blind. Fanny, suddenly thrown into the role of nurse and mother, took one of her headstrong decisions which even in Paris might have been considered socially foolhardy. She moved Stevenson into her own apartment, put him to bed and throughout October 1877 looked after him like one of her own family. When he grew no better she sent another of her telegrams to Sidney Colvin in London, and in November took Stevenson over on the boat-train. It was thus that she suddenly found herself introduced into Stevenson’s London literary circle—meeting Colvin himself, Henley, Gosse, and even his Muse Mrs Sitwell.
Fanny was now dealing with the realities, as well as the dreams, of Stevenson’s existence. She was his nurse as much as his mistress; though Stevenson himself hardly seems to have been aware of this subtle shift of emotional balance. What he saw was a beloved companion who had proved herself true and practical, and utterly regardless of conventions. What his friends saw—and they all liked her instantly—was summed up by Sidney Colvin:
Her personality was almost as vivid as his. She was small, dark-complexioned, eager, devoted; of squarish build—supple and elastic; her hands and feet were small and beautifully modelled, though busy; her head a crop of close-waving thick black hair. She had a build and character that somehow suggested Napoleon, with a firm setting of jaw and beautifully precise and delicate modelling of the nose and lips; her eyes were full of sex and mystery as they changed from fire or fun to gloom or tenderness.
In fact Fanny was rather formidable.
Stevenson recovered his health, if not his heart, and went back to Edinburgh for a parental Christmas, while Fanny returned to Paris. It was at this time that Stevenson finally spoke of the relationship to his father and mother, and it seems clear that he was now thinking of marriage. They were hardly pleased: an American woman ten years older than Louis, and moreover a married woman with two children to support. In January 1878 Stevenson went back to Paris, and in February his father Thomas Stevenson joined him there for a man-to-man talk. “Don’t be astonished,” Stevenson wrote to Sidney Colvin, “but admire my courage and Fanny’s. We wish to be right with the world as far as we can.” There is no evidence that his father actually met Fanny, but in the event the vital allowance of a hundred pounds a year was not cut off, as Stevenson had feared; and he seems to have reached a better understanding with his father about his free-thinking religious beliefs.
But what was going on in Stevenson’s mind? By far the most revealing document to me consisted of a linked series of four essays which he wrote for the Cornhill magazine and Henley’s London magazine between 1877 and 1879. He later collected them in 1881 under the general title of Virginibus Puerisque (“To Youths and Maidens”). The first two essays concern marriage and the marriage relationship; the third is headed “On Falling in Love”, with the Shakespearian epigraph—“What fools these mortals be!”; and the fourth is called, severely, “Truth of Intercourse”. But all four are evidently drawn from his passion for Fanny, and they represent an entirely new note in his work and outlook.
The tone Stevenson adopted was ironic, mildly facetious, even slightly misogynic. Considering the circumstances under which he was composing this surprised me very much. It runs right through all four essays, from the famous definition of marriage as “a sort of friendship recognised by the police” to the long peroration on the terrors of the righteous wife. “Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave … To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel. Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide, but to be good.” What is one to make of all this?
Part of the answer seems to be that Stevenson, having really fallen in love with Fanny, was genuinely frightened—even terrified—by the implications. She was not the first woman he had flirted with, played bohemians with or slept with. But she was undoubtedly the first woman to become so important to him that she made his life incomplete, and challenged his identity. All the rapid shuttlings between England and France vividly suggest this, and everywhere the essays bear it out.
There is the frank avowal: “The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts to marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.” Or there is the mocking paradox: “Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.” There is even the rather knowing and hopeful: “It is to be noticed that those who have loved once or twice already are so much better educated to a woman’s hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of civilising.”
Above all, there is Stevenson’s hymn to the eternally boyish in man, the Peter Panish element (though that is an anachronism), which he felt intuitively it was dangerous, even a crime, to deny. The true threat of marriage, as he saw it, came down finally to this: that it would kill the boy in him. This passage is one of the best in the Virginibus Puerisque, and evidently links with Stevenson’s meditations on those threats to “the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth” during his night at La Trappe. He is considering the “unfading boyishness of hope”, what he defines as the piratical quality, the refusal to be quite tamed or rational or responsible, Tom Sawyer’s “Ah, if he could only die temporarily. Turning aside for a moment from the imminent threat of marriage, he suddenly stops to wonder if boyishness is not, after all, an irreducible quality even in the most sage and settled of his fellow-citizens. The thought develops in a now characteristic way, in which a journey through a harsh landscape is already foreseen, even predicted:
Here we recognise the thought of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased—well, when?—not, I think, at twenty; nor perhaps altogether at twenty-five; nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; 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 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 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 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 discussed local wine (“le rouge de Cahors est tellement fort…”), Cézanne, Swiss army penknives, the Beatles, and of course English girls. Later we camped down by the Tarn, made a fire, and got gently drunk. Le Paille admitted he wanted to be a great painter, and Le Brun muttered most strangely about being a great poet. “C’est égal,” said Le Paille, “on le fera.” I forgot all about Stevenson and slept like a log
In the dawn, over bread and black coffee, somewhat penitential, I explained about Stevenson’s travels and Modestine. Le Paille regarded me indulgently: “Mais vraiment tu es plus fou que moi. Il faut vivre ta propre vie à toi. Sinon…” We parted cheerfully, with mock flourishes of the hats, repeated at several turns in the road, as we moved off in opposite directions. Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Bonjour Monsieur Steamson. But I have often thought of that “sinon…” since.
On 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.
