Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes: New Annotated Edition

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Robert Louis Stevenson

New annotated edition with links, photos, illustrations and maps.

MarcoPolo Editions

2017

Title: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Notes and links: João Máximo and Luís Chainho

Based on the English edition of Herbert B. Turner & Co., Boston (1903).

Reference materials:Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikisource and others specifically mentioned to whom the editors are grateful. Map data: Google Maps.

Cover photo: detail of Cascades de la Pleureuse (right), de la Sauffaz (left) by Jerome Bon (CC BY 2.0 Attribution); source: Flickr. Photo of Robert Louis Stevenson (Public Domain); source: Wikimedia Commons. Illustrations from the frontspiece of the 1879 edition of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (Public Domain); source: Wikimedia Commons.

Publication date: February 20, 2017

Edition 1.00 of February 20, 2017

Copyright © João Máximo and Luís Chainho, 2017

All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced or shared, partially or totally, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording or any other information media or reproduction system, without the prior written consent of the publishers, except for brief quotations for critical articles or studies.

MarcoPolo Editions

marcopolo-travel.com

Lisboa, Portugal

ISBN: 978-989-8575-80-7

My Dear SIDNEY COLVIN,

THE journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world, – all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours,

R. L. S.

Introduction

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) is one of Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest published works and is considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature. It is also one of the earliest accounts of hiking and camping outdoors as a recreational activity. It tells of the commissioning of one of the first sleeping bags, large and heavy enough to require a donkey to carry, Modestine, a stubborn, manipulative she-donkey that Stevenson could never quite master.

Stevenson was in his late 20s and still dependent on his parents for support. His journey was designed to provide material for publication while allowing him to distance himself from a love affair with an American woman of which his friends and families did not approve and who had returned to her husband in California. Travels recounts Stevenson's 12-day, 200 kilometres (120 mi) solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France in 1878. He, himself, provides the reader with the philosophy behind his undertaking: "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?"

Beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, hikers – sometimes with donkeys – have retraced the route Stevenson took on hiking paths (Grande Randonée footpath GR 70), some of which were once transhumance routes taken annually by shepherds and their flocks.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses. A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks as the 26th most translated author in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Proust, Henry James, and many others. G. K. Chesterton said of him that he seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins.

Robert Louis Stevenson at the age of twenty-nine (1879)

Early Writing and Travels

In late 1873, on a visit to a cousin in England, Stevenson met two people who were to be of great importance to him, Sidney Colvin and Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell. Sitwell was a 34-year-old woman with a son, separated from her husband. She attracted the devotion of many who met her, including Colvin, who eventually married her in 1901. Stevenson was also drawn to her, and over several years they kept up a heated correspondence in which Stevenson wavered between the role of a suitor and a son (he came to address her as Madonna). Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser and after his death was the first editor of Stevenson's letters.

In November 1873, after Stevenson's health failed, he was sent to Menton on the French Riviera to recuperate. He returned in better health in April 1874 and settled down to his studies, but he returned to France several times after that. He made long and frequent trips to the neighbourhood of the Forest of Fontainebleau, staying at Barbizon, Grez-sur-Loing, and Nemours and becoming a member of the artists' colonies there, as well as to Paris to visit galleries and the theatres. He did qualify for the Scottish bar in July 1875, and his father added a brass plate with R.L. Stevenson, Advocate to the Heriot Row house. But although his law studies would influence his books, he never practised law. All his energies were now spent in travel and writing. One of his journeys, a canoe voyage in Belgium and France with Sir Walter Simpson, a friend from the Speculative Society and frequent travel companion, was the basis of his first real book, An Inland Voyage (1878).

Marriage

The canoe voyage with Simpson brought Stevenson to Grez in September 1876, where he first met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne (1840–1914). Born in Indianapolis, she had married at age seventeen and moved to Nevada to rejoin husband Samuel after his participation in the American Civil War. But anger over her husband's infidelities led to a number of separations. In 1875, she had taken her children to France, where she and Isobel studied art. Although Stevenson returned to Britain shortly after this first meeting, Fanny apparently remained in his thoughts. They met again early in 1877 and became lovers. Stevenson spent much of the following year with her and her children in France. In August 1878, Fanny returned to San Francisco, California. Stevenson at first remained in Europe, making the walking trip that would form the basis for Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). But in August 1879, he set off to join her, against the advice of his friends and without notifying his parents. He took second-class passage on the steamship Devonia, in part to save money but also to learn how others travelled and to increase the adventure of the journey. From New York City, he travelled overland by train to California. He later wrote about the experience in The Amateur Emigrant. Although it was good experience for his literature, it broke his health. He was near death when he arrived in Monterey, California, where some local ranchers nursed him back to health.

By December 1879, Stevenson had recovered his health enough to continue to San Francisco, where for several months he struggled all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts, in an effort to support himself through his writing. But by the end of the winter, his health was broken again and he found himself at death’s door. Fanny, now divorced and recovered from her own illness, came to Stevenson’s bedside and nursed him to recovery. After a while, he wrote, my spirit got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis and success. When his father heard of his condition, he cabled him money to help him through this period.

Fanny and Robert were married in May 1880, although, as he said, he was a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom. With his new wife and her son, Lloyd, he travelled north of San Francisco to Napa Valley and spent a summer honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. He wrote about this experience in The Silverado Squatters. In August 1880, he sailed with Fanny and Lloyd from New York to Britain and found his parents and his friend Sidney Colvin on the wharf at Liverpool, happy to see him return home. Gradually, his new wife was able to patch up differences between father and son and make herself a part of the new family through her charm and wit.

Attempted settlement in Europe and the US

For the next seven years, between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson searched in vain for a place of residence suitable to his state of health. He spent his summers at various places in Scotland and England. It was during his time in Bournemouth that he wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the story which established his wider reputation. In the wintertime, Stevenson travelled to France and lived at Davos Platz and the Chalet de Solitude at Hyères, where, for a time, he enjoyed almost complete happiness. I have so many things to make life sweet for me, he wrote, it seems a pity I cannot have that other one thing – health. In spite of his ill health, he produced the bulk of his best-known work during these years: Treasure Island, his first widely popular book; Kidnapped; The Black Arrow; and two volumes of verse, A Child's Garden of Verses and Underwoods.

When his father died in 1887, Stevenson felt free to follow the advice of his physician to try a complete change of climate, and he started with his mother and family for Colorado. But after landing in New York, they decided to spend the winter at Saranac Lake, New York, in the Adirondacks at a cure cottage now known as Stevenson Cottage. During the intensely cold winter, Stevenson wrote some of his best essays, including Pulvis et Umbra, began The Master of Ballantrae, and lightheartedly planned, for the following summer, a cruise to the southern Pacific Ocean.

Journey to the Pacific

In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht Casco and set sail with his family from San Francisco. The vessel plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help. The sea air and thrill of adventure for a time restored his health, and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands, where he spent much time with and became a good friend of King Kalākaua. He befriended the king’s niece, Princess Victoria Kaiulani, who also had a link to Scottish heritage. He spent time at the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand, and the Samoan Islands. During this period, he completed The Master of Ballantrae, composed two ballads based on the legends of the islanders, and wrote The Bottle Imp. He preserved the experience of these years in his various letters and in his In the South Seas (which was published posthumously), an account of the 1888 cruise which Stevenson and Fanny undertook on the Casco from the Hawaiian Islands to the Marquesas and Tuamotu islands. In April 1890, Stevenson left Sydney on the Janet Nicoll for his third and final voyage among the South Seas islands.

Last years

In 1890, Stevenson purchased a tract of about 400 acres (1.6 sq. km) in Upolu, an island in Samoa. Here, after two aborted attempts to visit Scotland, he established himself, after much work, upon his estate in the village of Vailima. He took the native name Tusitala (Samoan for Teller of Tales). His influence spread to the Samoans, who consulted him for advice, and he soon became involved in local politics. He was convinced the European officials appointed to rule the Samoans were incompetent, and after many futile attempts to resolve the matter, he published A Footnote to History. In addition to building his house and clearing his land and helping the Samoans, he found time to work at his writing. He wrote The Beach of Falesa, Catriona (titled David Balfour in the US), The Ebb-Tide, and the Vailima Letters during this period.

Stevenson grew depressed and wondered if he had exhausted his creative vein as he had been overworked bitterly. He felt that with each fresh attempt, the best he could write was ditch-water. He then suddenly had a return of his old energy and he began work on Weir of Hermiston. It's so good that it frightens me, he is reported to have exclaimed. On 3 December 1894, Stevenson was talking to his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine when he suddenly exclaimed, What's that! asking his wife Does my face look strange? and collapsed. He died within a few hours, probably of a cerebral haemorrhage. He was forty-four years old. The Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing their Tusitala upon their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. Stevenson had always wanted his Requiem inscribed on his tomb:

Under the wide and starry sky,

Dig the grave and let me lie.

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;

Home is the sailor, home from sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

Stevenson was loved by the Samoans, and his tombstone epigraph was translated to a Samoan song of grief which is well-known and still sung in Samoa.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

Velay

Many are the mighty things, and nought is more mighty

than man… He masters by his devices

the tenant of the fields. – Sophocles

Who hath loosed the hands of the wild ass? – Job

The Donkey, The Pack, And The Pack-Saddle

IN a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of language, and for unparalleled political dissension. There are adherents of each of the four French parties – Legitimists, Orleanists, Imperialists, and Republicans – in this little mountain-town; and they all hate, loathe, decry, and calumniate each other. Except for business purposes, or to give each other the lie in a tavern brawl, they have laid aside even the civility of speech. ‘Tis a mere mountain Poland. In the midst of this Babylon I found myself a rallying-point; every one was anxious to be kind and helpful to the stranger. This was not merely from the natural hospitality of mountain people, nor even from the surprise with which I was regarded as a man living of his own free