Читать книгу Footsteps - Richard Holmes - Страница 7

All that night I heard footsteps: down by the river through the dark trees, or up on the moonlit road from Le Puy to Le Monastier. But I saw nothing except the stars, hanging over me where I wanted to be, with my head on a rucksack, and my rucksack on the grass, lying alone somewhere in the Massif Central of France, dreaming of the dead coming back to life again. I was eighteen.

I had started a travel-diary, teaching myself to write, and trying to find out what was happening to me, what I was feeling. I kept it simple:

Found a wide soft dry ditch under thorn hedge between the track and the little Loire. Here lit candle once more, studied ground for red ants, then set out bed-roll with all spare clothes between me and my waterproof cloak-sheet. Soon I was gazing up at stars, thinking of all the beats and tramps and travellers à la belle étoile from RLS to JK. Story of snakes that are drawn to body-heat and slide into your sleeping-bag. Cicadas and strange sounds river makes at night flowing over rocks. Slept fitfully but without disturbance from man or beast, except a spider in my ear. Saw a green glow-worm like a spark.

I woke at 5 a.m. in a glowing mist, my green sleeping-bag blackened with the dew, for the whole plateau of the Velay is above two thousand feet. I made a fire with twigs gathered the night before, and set water to boil for coffee, in a petit pots tin with wire twisted round it as a handle. Then I went down to the Loire, here little more than a stream, and sat naked in a pool cleaning my teeth. Behind me the sun came out and the woodfire smoke turned blue. I felt rapturous and slightly mad.

I reached Le Monastier two hours later, in the local grocer’s van, one of those square Citroëns like a corrugated garden privy, which smelt of camembert and apples. Monsieur Crèspy, chauffeur and patron, examined my pack and soaking bag as we jounced along through rolling uplands. Our conversation took place in a sort of no-man’s-land of irregular French. M. Crèspy’s patois and Midi twang battled for meaning against my stonewall classroom phrases. After initial skirmishing, he adopted a firm line of attack.

“You are walking on foot?” he said, leaning back into the depths of the van with one arm and presenting me with a huge yellow pear.

“Yes, yes. I am searching for un Ecossais, a Scotsman, a writer, who walked on foot through all this beautiful country.”

“He is a friend of yours? You have lost him?” enquired M. Crèspy with a little frown.

“No, no. Well … Yes. You see, I want to find him.” My chin streamed hopelessly with pear juice.

M. Crèspy nodded encouragingly: “The pear is good, n’est-ce pas?”

“Yes, it is very good.”

The Citroën lurched round a bend and plunged down towards a rocky valley, broken with trees and scattered stone farmhouses, with pink tiled roofs and goats tethered in small bright pastures where the sun struck and steamed. The spire of a church, perched on the far hillside, pointed the horizon.

“There is Le Monastier. Look! Perhaps your friend is waiting for you,” said M. Crèspy with great confidence.

“No, no, I don’t think so,” I said. But it was exactly what I hoped.

I rummaged in my rucksack. “You see, here is his book. It tells the story of his walk on foot.”

M. Crèspy peered at the little brown volume, and the Citroën swung back and forth across the road, the sound of rolling fruit growing thunderous behind us. I hastily propped the book up on the dashboard, being careful not to cover the St Christophe medal or the picture of Our Lady mounted above a cone of paper flowers. I ran my finger down the sketch map on the title page: Le Monastier, Pradelles, Langogne, Notre Dame des Neiges, Montagne du Goulet, Pic de Finiels, Le Pont-de-Montvert, Florae, Gorges du Tarn, St Jean-du-Gard—to me already magic names, a litany of hills and rivers, with a lone figure striding along them, laughing, beckoning, even mocking: follow! follow!

M. Crèspy considered the map, and then my face, then the map again, and changed gear with a reflective air. “It is far, it is far.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is two hundred and twenty kilometres.”

M. Crèspy raised a finger from the steering wheel. “And you, you are Scottish then?”

“No, no. I am English. My friend—that is to say, Mr Stevenson —was Scottish. He walked on foot with a donkey. He slept à la belle étoile. He …”

“Ah, that!” broke in M. Crèspy with a shout, taking both hands from the steering wheel, and striking his forehead. “I understand, I understand! You are on the traces of Monsieur Robert Louis Steamson. Bravo, bravo!”

“Yes, yes, I am following his paces!”

We both laughed and the Citroën proceeded by divine guidance.

“I understand, I understand,” repeated M. Crèspy. And I believe he was the first person who ever did.

Robert Louis Stevenson came to Le Monastier in September 1878. He was twenty-seven, spoke good French, and had already spent several summers abroad; near Fontainebleau, and on the canals of Holland, paddling a canoe with a friend. The experience had produced his first book, An Inland Voyage, which despite its whimsical style captured an attitude to travel that enthralled me, a child of the Sixties.

I take it, in short, that I was about as near Nirvana as would be convenient in practical life; and if this be so, I make the Buddhists my sincere compliments … It may be best figured by supposing yourself to get dead drunk, and yet keep sober to enjoy it … A pity to go to the expense of laudanum, when here is a better paradise for nothing! This frame of mind was the great exploit of our voyage, take it all in all. It was the farthest piece of travel accomplished.

That was the kind of travel which interested me too: as far out in Nirvana as possible. After ten years of English boarding schools, brought up by Roman Catholic monks, I was desperate to slip the leash. Free thought, free travel, free love was what I wanted. I suppose a foreign affaire de coeur would have been the best thing of all; and that, in a way, was what I got.

It did not immediately occur to me to wonder what Stevenson himself was doing in that remote little town “in the French highlands”. I knew he wanted to be a writer, had published essays in the London reviews, but was still struggling to establish his independence from his family in Edinburgh. They had brought him up a strict Calvinist, an outlook which he had rejected; and they had wanted him to be an engineer. Instead he had adopted the life of a literary bohemian, was a friend of Edmund Gosse and Sidney Colvin, affected wide-brimmed hats and velvet jackets, and fled to France whenever he could.

Staying at the little hotel at Le Monastier that autumn, he made friends with the local doctor and “Conductor of Roads and Bridges” and completed a little sketch of the place, A Mountain Town in France. His account had immediately captivated me.

Le Monastier is the chief place of a hilly canton in Haute-Loire, the ancient Velay. As the name betokens, the town is of monastic origin; and it still contains a towered bulk of monastery and church … It stands on the side of a hill above the river Gazeille, about fifteen miles from Le Puy, up a steep road where the wolves sometimes pursue the diligence in winter …

Stevenson had decided to pursue the road south himself, but on foot, in the company of a donkey to carry his baggage. This second voyage resulted in his second book—the little brown volume I now carried as my bible—his Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.

At Le Monastier that morning, the question of Stevenson’s donkey bulked large. Unloaded from the van, I was taken into the backroom of the épicerie and given breakfast by Madame Crèspy.

“When Monsieur Steamson was here, they used to make lace,” she said, also using the local pronunciation. “But you will want your donkey, like him. You must go and see Le Docteur Ollier.”

Mlle Crèspy, who looked at me with dark dancing eyes, was deputed to take me to the doctor. “It’s no fun without the donkey,” she observed, prettily rolling the colloquial word, rigolo, and seizing me by the hand. Mlle Crèspy was about nine.

Le Docteur, a tall patient man, ushered me into his surgery and poured me a yellow medicine, which turned out to be a liqueur. “Of course, there is the question of the donkey. You will have to consult the Mayor. Everyone takes a donkey.”

“Everyone?”

“Mlle Singer took a donkey. She was lost in a storm, on the Lozère. It is high up there. The fire brigade from Bleymard went out to find her with lanterns.”

I accepted another yellow medicine. “This was recently, Miss Singer?”

“Oh yes, this was in 1949. You must pay attention to the vipers,” concluded Dr Ollier.

“So you desire to hire a donkey,” said the Mayor, as we paced in the cobbled courtyard of the old Bishop’s palace.

I looked abashed. “I am following Stevenson. But I have my sack.”

The Mayor reflected. “You see, Monsieur Steamson, he had a donkey. It is in his book. It is charming for a writer to have a donkey. It is his companion of the route.”

The sun beat down, the liqueur rose in my head, I had a vague sense that things were getting out of hand even before I had started. The reality of Stevenson’s presence in Le Monastier was uncanny. I asserted myself rather desperately. “No, no, I do not desire a donkey. My companion of the route—is Monsieur Stevenson himself!”

The Mayor stopped short, took off his small gold spectacles and tapped me on the chest. “Of course, of course,” he said, beaming suddenly. “You are young, indeed you are young, and I wish you a good journey with all my heart.” He replaced his spectacles and shook my hand many times, and I shook his quite as often. “You know,” added the Mayor as we parted, “Monsieur Steamson purchased his donkey for sixty-five francs. I could not easily find you such a bargain. But still, after all, if you should desire …”

Stevenson purchased his donkey for sixty-five francs “and a glass of brandy”. He christened her “Modestine”, and described her as the size of a large Newfoundland dog and the colour of “an ideal mouse”. She was to play a large part in his story. With her, he intended to cross over some of the highest and wildest country in France, moving across the remote borderlands of four départments— the Haute-Loire, the Lozère, the Ardèche, and Gard—and over the top of two notable peaks or highland ridges, the Goulet and the Pic de Finiels, between four and five and a half thousand feet. (For comparison, Snowdon is 3,650 feet and Ben Nevis 4,405 feet.) He intended to be solitary and self-sufficient, and loaded up his donkey with a huge sleeping-sack of his own design, six foot square of green waterproof cart-cloth, lined inside with blue sheep’s fur: “there was luxurious turning-room for one; and at a pinch the thing might serve for two.” The last phrase seemed rather at odds with the rest of his plans. The sack had open sheep’s-fur flaps at both ends, to act as pillow and foot-warmer by night, and as the double mouth of an enormous saddle-bag by day.

I considered his equipment with professional interest, from the point of view of minimum necessities. It included the following items: two complete changes of warm clothing; several books, among them Father Peyrat’s Histoire des Pasteurs du Désert; a Scottish railway plaid; a spirit-lamp and cooking pan; a lantern and candles; a twenty-franc jack-knife with assorted blades, openers, and instruments for removing stones from donkey’s hooves; a leather water-flask; an eighty-page blue-lined schoolboy’s exercise book, which he used for the first draft of the Travels, composed en route usually in the mornings or at inns where he lunched; many blocks of black chocolate and tins of Bologna sausage (as hard rations); and, on his first morning, a basket containing a leg of cold mutton and a bottle of Beaujolais. He also packed an egg-whisk, to make the egg-and-brandy nog he loved to take at breakfast with his cafe au lait.

In the pocket of his country-velveteens he secreted a revolver, a brandy-flask and a large tin of tobacco and papers for rolling cigarettes. Most intriguing item of all, he wore on his wedding finger—though not married—a large silver gypsy ring. At first I assumed that he simply wanted to be taken for a gypsy or a pedlar himself, in the true “bohemian” spirit. Needless to say, I had started wearing one myself; to be exact, a large tin ring—being the best I could afford—previously bought from a gypsy stall at Les Saintes-Maries, two hundred miles south in the Camargue.

Stevenson’s journey lasted there twelve days. But its shortness was made up for by its intensity: it was a complete pilgrimage in miniature. He started from Le Monastier at dawn on Sunday, 22 September 1878—though Modestine’s reluctance to become his beast of burden meant that everyone had gone to midday church by the time he made any visible progress on the further hill; and eventually arrived at St Jean-du-Gard on the afternoon of 3 October. On his way, he spent three nights sleeping in the open—à la belle étoile; seven nights in country inns; and one at the Trappist monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges. He wrote some twenty-three thousand words of journal entries (slightly more than half the length of the final Travels); made a dozen or so pencil sketches; and expended—according to his frugal notes—eighty-five francs ten sous.

I set out to follow him as accurately as I could, without modern maps (until Florac) but going by the old tracks and roads between every village and hamlet that he mentioned. I also took twelve days, spending one night in a country hotel at Langogne; seven nights in fields and woods; two nights in barns; and one night—my last—under a venerable spreading chestnut tree in the valley of St Germain-de-Calberte. I spent ninety-eight francs fifty centimes—but I had only one hotel bill, and people gave me refreshments almost all the way. Most of my money went on the evening meal. I always saved a bit of bread, some sugar and sometimes a piece of pate for my dawn petit-déjeuner in the fields. Lunch was usually a bottle of Pelforth beer and a handful of black olives. At farms, when I asked for water for my bottle, I was almost invariably given cold citron or red wine as well; or black coffee made as in Greece, very strong, with sugar poured into it, from a saucepan often kept on an open-fire stove. I smoked a pipe, which was often a useful point of conversation with people I met on the road: shepherds, woodsmen, old grandfathers out for a stroll near the village cemetery, farmers working the corner of a remote upland field. I exchanged tobacco as many times as words, and English flake could be sweet under the loneliness of the stars.

I also wore a hat, a brown battered felt object, somewhat like an old fedora, with a wide brim, and a curious leather band round the crown which gave it a backwoods character. I have had many hats since, but except for a certain cap from Dublin none of them ever quite achieved such talismanic properties and powers. This hat, Le Brun, besides performing the normal hat-like functions of keeping sunstroke at bay, and mildly redirecting heavy rain on to my left or right shoulder (at choice), had several magical virtues. One was deflecting lightning. Another was helping me see in the dark. A third was giving me the most vivid dreams about Stevenson whenever I slept with it tipped over my nose.

But most important of all, perhaps, was Le Brun’s power to make other people laugh. It is a vital point. A stranger with a bag, when he appears at your door, perhaps at dusk; or knocks at your cafe window before the bread and milk have been delivered; or comes clambering over your gate, or surging out of your wood, or lumbering down your path making the dogs bark—such a stranger is not always a welcome figure. When he does not speak your language properly he is even more dubious and unwanted; and when he clumsily enquires about his friend “who came here a hundred years ago, with a donkey” you can be forgiven for thinking that you may have un fou ou un méchant on your hands. But not with Le Brun. It is quite impossible to be menaced by someone wearing Le Brun. You can only smile at such an apparition—un type au chapeau incroyable!

The girl in the pâtisserie at Florac, the prettiest blonde in the whole of the Cévennes, was so overcome with laughter at the way Le Brun doffed himself with a sudden farcical stream of rainwater flowing on to the polished tiles of her shop that she offered him a plate of eclairs gratuit if only Monsieur would go out and do it again in five minutes, “quand mon amie Sylvie est descendue.”

But these are lighter considerations. The beginning of the journey was hard for us both. For the whole of the first day, from Le Monastier to Le Bouchet, a distance of twenty-five kilometres over steep country roads, baked in hot golden dust, Stevenson had endless and humiliating trouble with Modestine. She refused to climb hills, she shed her saddle-bag at the least provocation, and in villages she swerved into the cool of the beaded shop-doors. He was forced to beat her relentlessly, first with his own walking-cane and then with a thorn-switch cut from a hedge by a peasant on the long hill up to Goudet. At Costaros, the villagers even tried to intervene, taking the side of French donkey against foreign tyrant: “‘Ah,’ they cried, ‘how tired she is, the poor beast!’” Stevenson lost his temper: “Mind your own affairs—unless you would like to help me carry my basket?” He departed amid laughter from the Sunday loiterers, who had just come out of church and were feeling charitable.

Yet as he flogged her over the rocky gorse-covered hillsides under a blazing afternoon sun Stevenson’s own heart revolted against the apparent brutality of donkey-driving. He later wrote in his route journal: “The sound of my own blows sickened me. Once when I looked at Modestine, she had a faint resemblance to a lady of my acquaintance who once loaded me with kindness; and this increased my horror of my own cruelty.”

As I laboured up the same noviciate slopes, sweating under my own pack, I found myself puzzling over these words. Were they just the famous Stevensonian whimsy? Or was he thinking of some particular woman? It was intriguing; I would have liked to have asked him about it. But it is true that when travelling alone your mind fills up strangely with the people you are fond of, the people you have left behind.

Stevenson was soon made further aware of Modestine’s personality:

We encountered another donkey, ranging at will upon the roadside; and this other donkey chanced to be a gentleman. He and Modestine met nickering for joy, and I had to separate the pair and stamp out the nascent romance with a renewed and feverish bastinado. If the other donkey had had the heart of a male under his hide, he would have fallen upon me tooth and nail; and this is a kind of consolation, he was plainly unworthy of Modestine’s affections. But the incident saddened me, as did everything that reminded me of my donkey’s sex.

He eventually discovered that Modestine was on heat for almost their entire journey. This disturbed him; for as I gradually came to suspect, problems of friendship, romance and sexuality were much on his mind throughout this lonely autumn tour.

Sitting up to my chin in the cool brown waters of the Loire tributary, on a sandy bank below the little bridge at Goudet, I mused on these questions and whistled to myself. I was wearing Le Brun, but nothing much else, and was dissolving in the glittering flowing water which seemed, for a moment, like time itself, a fluid gentle medium through which you might move at will, upstream and down, wherever you chose, with a lazy kick of your feet. A sharp giggle overhead recalled me: two children hung over the parapet pointing: “Mais qu’est-ce-que c’est que ça! c’est un nomade—non, c’est un fou!” I retreated to my clothes under the shadow of a tree, hot with embarrassment. Not so easy to slip out of time, or clothes, or conventions, even here. Le Brun hung on a branch and mocked me gently. I turned again to the dusty road.

Despite his donkey troubles, Stevenson got into the inn at Le Bouchet shortly after nightfall, well ahead of me on this first day’s run. I began to appreciate how physically tough he must have been. Coming down to Costaros, in a hot low red sun, I began to shiver with exhaustion and at one point tumbled headlong into a ditch. My shoulders were bruised from the pack, my right foot was spectacularly blistered, my morale low. I fell asleep on the bench of a little dark-panelled café, knocked over my green glass of sirop, and was turned out into the twilit street by an angry madame la patronne. I felt I was not managing things very well.

“Désolé, madame” I murmured; and that’s exactly how I felt: desolate. I was soon to grow familiar with this feeling. It is how every traveller feels at the approach of night, and the lighting up of windows in houses where he does not belong, and cannot enter in.

An old man stopped me, and talked, and took me by the arm. “Mais oui, la route de Monsieur Steamson—c’est par ici, prenez courage…” He led me to the outskirts of the town and showed me the vieux chemin, a glimmer of cart-track heading into the darkening, pine-fringed hills for Le Bouchet. Then, inexplicably, he took me back again, and. I was suddenly sitting in a little shoemaker’s cottage, under a yellow print of Millet’s Angelus, eating omelette and drinking red wine from a pitcher and laughing. I remember the old man’s dungaree blues, his black beret, his arthritic hands, still nimble and expressive, on the red check tablecloth. He was one of those who knew the story, as if it were part of village history. He spoke of Stevenson as if he had done his Travels in living memory, in some undefined time “avant la guerre” when he himself was a young lad, full of adventures.

“You see,” said the old man, “there is a time to kick up your heels and see the world a bit. I was like that too. And now I make shoes. That’s how things are, you will see.”

I slept out that night under an outcrop of pines, facing east on a slight incline, with the lights of Costaros far away to my left. The turf was springy, and the pine needles seemed to discourage insects. As I lay in my bag, a number of late rooks came winging in out of the gloaming, and settled in the pine branches, chuckling to each other. They gave me a sense of companionship, even security: nothing could move up through the trees below me without disturbing them. Once or twice I croaked up at them (it was the wine), and they croaked back: “Tais-toi, tais-toi.” This night I fell asleep quickly. Only once, waking, I drank two ice-cold mouthfuls of water from my can and, leaning back, saw the Milky Way astonishingly bright through the pine tops, and felt something indescribable—like falling upwards into someone’s arms.

At Le Bouchet, Stevenson slept in the same inn room as a married couple from Alais. They were travelling to seek work at St Etienne. Sharing rooms was normal practice in country auberges till the very end of the nineteenth century, but the woman was young and Stevenson was shy, for all his bohemian manners. “Honi soil qui mal y pense; but I was sufficiently sophisticated to feel abashed. I kept my eyes to myself as much as I could, and I know nothing of the woman except that she had beautiful arms, full white and shapely; whether she slept naked or in her slip, I declare I know not; only her arms were bare.”

In the morning the innkeeper made a goad for Modestine, while his wife briskly advised Stevenson about what should go into his travel-book. “‘Whether people harvest or not in such and such a place; if there were forests; studies of manners, what for example I or the master of the house say to you; the beauties of nature; and all that.’” Stevenson wrote her words down in his most winning manner, adding that the wife—unlike the husband—could read, had a share of brains, but was not half so pleasant. “‘My man knows nothing,’” he recorded her as saying with an angry toss of her chin. “‘He is like the beasts.’ And the old gentleman signified acquiescence with his head as if it were rather like a compliment.”

Their youngest daughter, who looked after the cattle, was rude and mischievous, until her father—without a flicker of expression—abruptly announced that he had sold her to the foreign monsieur to be his servant-girl. He appealed to Stevenson for confirmation.

Stevenson solemnly took up the game. “‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I paid ten half-pence; it was a little dear, but …’

‘But,’ the father cut in, ‘Monsieur was willing to make a sacrifice.’”

A little while after, the girl hurried out of the stone-flagged kitchen, and the sound of sobs came through from the stable next door, along with the munching and stamping of the cows and horses. Instantly Stevenson hurried after her, and put all right, closing the game in wild laughter. He had a quick rapport with children, and would play instinctively on their sense of mystery and adventure, half-entrancing and half-terrifying them. To be sold to a long-haired foreign traveller with a huge blue woollen sack was not much better than to be pursued by Blind Pew tap-tapping with his stick at the door of the Admiral Benbow inn.

Stevenson’s route now swung almost due south, up over the last high farmlands of the Velay to Pradelles, then down to the little market town of Langogne on the River Allier. Here he came to wild country, and a new phase in his pilgrimage of the heart.

He described the bleak prospect with the relish of an Edinburgh lowlander set free:

On the opposite bank of the Allier, the land kept mounting for miles to the horizon; a tanned or sallow autumn landscape, with black dots of firwood, and white roads wandering far into the Gévaudan. Over all this, the clouds shed a uniform and purplish shadow, sad and somewhat menacing … It was a cheerless prospect, but one stimulating for a traveller. For I was now upon the limit of the Velay, and all that I beheld lay in another county—wild Gévaudan, mountainous, uncultivated, and but recently disforested from the terror of wolves.

All that morning, as I tried to catch Stevenson up, I thought of wolves. Clambering over the flint farm-tracks, I watched the dark hills of Gévaudan before me, and saw no one but the figures of distant labourers working in the shimmering fields.

A curious gnawing pain began at my heel. Before Pradelles, the ball of my right foot split open, leaving something like a slice of best back bacon, which I held mournfully under the village pump. The doctor at Landos, with half-moon gold spectacles, hung out of his window and announced that he was having lunch. Then, seeing Le Brun very crestfallen, he added, “Mais montez, montez quand même.”

Scissors snapped, patent ointments oozed, and my proffered francs were waved aside. I limped out of Landos in a cloud of Pernod fumes, menthol and cocaine-gel.

Beyond Pradelles I bathed in another stream, this time discreetly shrouded by bulrushes. The heat was still stunning, and I lay back in the cool water, holding my bandaged foot solemnly in the air like a demented heron. I dozed, and the grumbling of distant thunder mixed in my dreams with the growling of those wolves of long ago.

But Stevenson was still three or four hours ahead of me. He crossed the stone bridge into Langogne in the early afternoon of Monday, 23 September 1878, “just as the promised rain was beginning to fall”. Here, however, he decided to settle for the rest of the day at the inn, and this I knew would give me my chance to catch up with him. Modestine was fed and stabled, and Stevenson sent his knapsack out for repair, then sank into a corner-seat to read up about the legendary “Beast of Gévaudan”.

This Napoleon Bonaparte of Wolves had terrorised the whole region in the mid-eighteenth century. Its exploits held a peculiar fascination for Stevenson. Roving in the remote hills between Langogne and Luc, it had viciously attacked small children guarding sheep, or lone women returning from markets at dusk. These attacks lasted throughout the 1760s. When the victims were found their bodies were always drained of blood, though not wholly devoured, and there were wild rumours of vampirism, or worse. The Bishop of Mende ordered public prayers to be said in the country churches on Sundays, and the Intendant of Languedoc organised armed wolf-hunts with parties of dragoons. The King himself eventually offered a reward of six thousand livres to whoever should slay the Beast.

It proved strangely elusive for several seasons, and the myths about the animal grew: its appearance on nights of the full moon, its liking for thunderstorms, its power to leap from one hilltop to the next or to appear in two places at once. Finally, in September 1765, a local shepherd called Antoine shot a huge wolf weighing nearly ten stone. Its body was stuffed and sent to the court at Versailles amidst great rejoicings. The local people felt a curse had been lifted from them.

How great was their horror when, less than two years later, in the spring of 1767, the attacks began again with even more frenzied violence. On the hills of the Lozère two teenage boys were virtually torn to pieces. The entire population of the Gévaudan lapsed into a state of superstitious panic; farming went neglected and almost no one would cross their doorsteps after dark.

The end when it came was curiously muted. One late June evening in 1767, Jean Chastel, a local woodsman, out hunting for the Beast, was attacked in a forest clearing by a large wolf which he shot at point-blank range with a single musket-ball. The kill really did bring the reign of terror to an end, and Chastel became a folk hero. Yet this second wolf was a common enough animal, with a tatty pelt, and weighing two stone less than its predecessor. The mystery of the Beast of Gévaudan always remained, and continued to haunt the region even in Stevenson’s time. He read a novel on the subject by Elie Berthet at Langogne.

“If all wolves had been as this wolf,” Stevenson remarked thoughtfully, “they would have changed the history of man.”

Modern studies of the subject, rich in explanations, were each more fantastic than the last. One school followed a vampire theory; another proposed a sadistic Gévaudan landowner who terrorised his tenants with a trained pack of hunting wolves; and a third, deeply psychological, produced Jean Chastel himself as a pathological killer dressed up in wolf-hides. But my favourite had a sinister simplicity. It proposed, as a strict zoological possibility, a rogue family of three wolves (like The Three Bears) who, ostracised from the main pack, had tasted the delights of human flesh, and thereafter attacked in combination. Hence the inexplicable ferocity of the Beast; and also its ability to be in two places at once. This theory had the great attraction of leaving one wolf still unaccounted for. I liked this very much.

It was sheer coincidence that on the final leg of my walk over the hills to Langogne, I had my first brush with a Cévennes storm. These storms are peculiar to this highland region, local and intense, fast-moving from one hilltop to the next, and teethed with forked lightning that terrified me. It overtook me rapidly from the west, and seemed to chase me over the bare pastures, until to my immense relief I came upon a hamlet in the fold of the hill, with a tiny café-épicerie where I took shelter for an hour, while the storm passed, banging and snarling and flashing overhead.

The cafe-owner, a small man in an extravagantly dirty apron, polished glasses philosophically in the doorway. The rain beat on the green awning while we talked disjointedly of Stevenson and storms.

“It is not always wise to go over the hills,” he observed, while cigarette ash from his yellow papier-maïs fell on his apron in the hot damp wind. There was something lugubrious about his down-turned mouth. He craned his head outside, looked sharply up at the lowering clouds and shrugged. “There, he is clearing away now.” He returned to the little zinc-topped bar, flapped at the thunder flies, coughed, shook his head (more ash) and wished me well in his own fashion. “So, you are going into Gévaudan. You will see him again, alors.”

I departed, draped in my waterproof sheet, my hat at a combative angle. The sun came out, and I made the last descent to Langogne, through drenched fields of grass full of gleaming buttercups. I felt oddly elated.

At a little after eight in the evening I at last crossed the bridge over the Allier into Langogne, the shadows lengthening along the streets. The shopkeepers were closing up their stalls, and the air was full of the smell of crushed fruit and frying garlic. It was the biggest place I’d been in for days, with a fine eleventh-century church and a medieval covered market. It was cheerful and bustling, with family groups sitting out on the pavements, couples strolling arm in arm along the river and children fishing for minnows with pink and yellow nets.

But here something strange happened. The feeling that Stevenson was actually waiting for me, in person, grew overwhelmingly strong. It was almost like a hallucination. I began to look for him in the crowds, in the faces at the cafe doors, at hotel windows. I went back to the bridge, took off my hat, rather formally as if to meet a friend, and paced up and down, waiting for some sort of sign. People glanced at me: I felt an oddity, not knowing quite what I was doing, or looking for. The twilight thickened; bats began to dart over the river. I watched their flickering flight over the gleaming surface, from one bank to the other.

And then I saw it, quite clearly against the western sky, the old bridge of Langogne. It was about fifty yards downstream, and it was broken, crumbling, and covered with ivy. So Stevenson had crossed there, not on this modern bridge. There was no way of following him, no way of meeting him. His bridge was down. It was beyond my reach over time, and this was the true sad sign.

The discovery put me in the blackest gloom. It was stupid, but I was almost tearful. I could not bear to stay in Langogne, and after a distracted supper I climbed the steep hill of rustling plane trees towards St Flour and Fouzilhac. It was pitch-black (my eyes had lost their “country” vision by dining under bright lights) but I was anxious to plunge into the Gévaudan. Below, to my left, I could hear a small river running through what I took to be a gentle-sloping water-meadow, and I fancied I would camp there. Turning off through the plane trees I jumped over a low stone wall and seemed to drop into a bottomless pit.

In fact, it was a fifteen-foot, stone-banked wall ending in a mass of thorn briars; below them, the ground shelved away directly into the river and, skidding and cursing through the blackness, I went with it. An hour later, wet to the waist, I was signing myself into the only hotel in Langogne that would take a doubtful traveller after midnight. Le Brun did his best, but the joke was thin. In my pocket I found my pipe broken off at the stem.

As I dropped off to sleep in my luxurious broom-cupboard I thought I would give the whole damn thing up.

I had mad dreams about children dancing round me in a mocking circle. They were waving nets and singing:

Sur le pont d’Avignon

On y danse, on y danse …

I thought a good deal about this dream. It seemed, in part, to be a projection of Stevenson’s own experiences, when, the following night, he was lost on the paths between Fouzilhac and Fouzilhic. He could find nowhere to stay as the darkness came on, and no one to give him directions. Instead he too met strange and dreamlike children.

As I came out on the skirts of the woods, I saw near upon a dozen cows and perhaps as many more black figures, which I conjectured to be children, although the mist had almost unrecognisably exaggerated their forms. These were all silently following each other round in a circle, now taking hands, now breaking up with chains and reverences … at nightfall on the marshes, the thing was eerie and fantastic to behold.

Partly also I came to think that my dream was a warning: a warning not to be so childish and literal-minded in my pursuit of Stevenson. The children were dancing and singing of the old bridge of Avignon: the bridge that is broken, just like the old bridge of Langogne. You could not cross such bridges any more, just as one could not cross literally into the past.

Even in imagination the gap was there. It had to be recognised; it was no good pretending. You could not play-act into the past, you could not turn it into a game of make-believe. There had to be another way. Somehow you had to produce the living effect, while remaining true to the dead fact. The adult distance—the critical distance, the historical distance—had to be maintained. You stood at the end of the broken bridge and looked across carefully, objectively, into the unattainable past on the other side. You brought it alive, brought it back, by other sorts of skills and crafts and sensible magic.

Have I explained myself at all? It is the simplicity of the idea, the realisation, that I am after. It was important for me, because it was probably the first time that I caught an inkling of what a process (indeed an entire vocation) called “biography” really means. I had never thought about it before. “Biography” meant a book about someone’s life. Only, for me, it was to become a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps. You would never catch them; no, you would never quite catch them. But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.

I awoke next morning in a different mood, and climbed the same hill in bright sunlight, in the company of a shepherd with his small black-and-white collie dog. The shepherd had been on the road eight days, he said, going to his cousins’ farm across the Tarn. He mended my pipe with a piece of waxed twine, cunningly tied.

Stevenson had a rough day on those hills. The weather was bad. He fell into bogs, lost his way in woods and finally found himself benighted in a storm at the inhospitable village of Fouzilhac. No one would cross their doorsteps to put him on the path for Cheylard. “C’est que, voyez-vous, il fait noir,” they told him. Stevenson implies that it was memories of the Beast of Gévaudan that made the men so reluctant. But he himself could not have looked an inviting figure by then: gaunt, long bedraggled hair, trousers caked in mud, and a strong whiff of the brandy-flask. No wonder everyone refused his requests to be shown the way with a lantern. The hour grew later, the rain heavier. He blundered on, alone.

Stevenson, for all his reputation as a dilettante, was determined and resourceful. The Scottish grit came out in just such a minor crisis as this. Abandoning all thoughts of civilisation, he pitched camp alone in the howling wind, under the lee of a dry-stone wall, tethering Modestine to a nearby pine branch and carefully feeding her chunks of black bread. He spread his sleeping-sack by the light of his spirit-lamp tucked into a crack of the wall. After removing his soaking boots and gaiters, he drew on a pair of long, dry woollen stockings, stuck his knapsack under the canvas top flap of the bag for a pillow, slid down into the woolly interior of the bag (still containing his books, pistol and spare clothes) and strapped himself in with his belt “like a bambino”. Here he proceeded to dine on a tin of Bologna sausage and a cake of chocolate, washed down with plenty of brandy from his flask, rolled and smoked “one of the best cigarettes in the world”, and dropped off to sleep like a child, contentedly lulled by the stormy sounds of wild Gévaudan. It struck me as an admirable feat in the circumstances.

The next morning, Wednesday, 25 September, he woke warm and refreshed, beneath the clear grey light of dawn and a brisk dry wind. Closing his eyes, he reflected for a moment how well he had survived, without once losing his temper or feeling despair. Opening them again, he saw Modestine gazing across at him with an expression of studied patience and disapproval. Hastily pulling on his boots, he fed her the remaining black bread, and wandered about the little beech wood where he now found himself, cheerfully consuming more chocolate and brandy. He was filled by one of those sensations of early-morning rapture which seem to affect people who have slept rough in the open. He later wrote:

Ulysses, left on Ithaca, and with a mind unsettled by the goddess, was not more pleasantly astray. I have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers; and thus to be found by morning in a random woodside nook in Gévaudan—not knowing north from south, as strange to my surroundings as the first man upon the earth, an inland castaway—was to find a fraction of my daydream realised.

I loved this idea of the “inland castaway”. It seemed to me such a subtle, almost poetic idea, as if real travel were concerned with disorientation rather than merely distance. It was losing yourself, then finding yourself again: casting yourself, at least for one moment, into the lap of the gods, and seeing what happened. Of course I could understand that his literary talk of Homer, and later Bunyan, was partly self-mockery. But then it seemed to me it was partly serious as well, and that the “daydream” was a real thing for Stevenson, and that his travels were also a pilgrimage.

What puzzled me again was that “goddess”. Did he have some particular Circe in mind? Some woman who had cast a spell over him, perhaps? Were his own thoughts secretly “unsettled” by her, and was this pilgrimage an attempt to escape her—or appease her? As I padded along the silent woodland trails, deeper and deeper into Gévaudan, it slowly dawned on me that I might be pursuing a woman as well. Beyond Fouzilhac, which I never found at all, even in daylight, I stopped for an adder slowly uncurling itself off a large flat rock in my path. It was small and handsomely zigged, glossy black on soft beige, and moved aside with perfect dignity. At Cheylard, which is little more than a clearing with a few farms and a shrine, I stood for a long time beneath the wooden statue of Our Lady of All Graces.

We were now heading for the Trappist monastery of Notre Dame des Neiges. Stevenson, I supposed, had a conscience to examine. Our path went eastwards, over high moorland beyond the shelter of the Forêt de Mercoire, to Luc; then turned south again down a remote valley of the Allier towards La Bastide, where the Trappists lived on a thickly wooded hillside, in their ancient vows of poverty, chastity, obedience—and silence. Lay people from the outside would occasionally be granted permission to stay there “on retreat”, sharing the monks’ harsh routine, meditating and praying, and taking stock of their lives. For a lapsed Calvinist like Stevenson it was a not entirely foreign idea; for a lapsed Catholic like me it was only too familiar. A brief visit seemed unavoidable.

This leg of the journey took two days, broken by a night at Luc.

Stevenson slept at the comfortable auberge, after his Fouzilhac adventure; while I crossed the river and camped in a fragrant barn full of new-mown hay. I had again been caught by a storm crossing the moors between Cheylard and Luc, and I was glad of a roof-beam and the friendly, reassuring sound of munching cattle.

I had another dream. My path was an endless track of grey stone chippings that mounted through mauve heather to a bare sky. It seemed deserted but was full of unknown presences and pine stumps, as far as the eye could see. All were lightning-struck, a dead and ghastly white. A storm approached me from behind, trailing fingers of rain. Thunder booms set me running and gasping as my pack grew heavier and heavier. Someone was coming, chasing me, and prongs of lightning snapped down on the hill—to my right, to my left, then directly overhead. My heart beat with fear, and I ran and ran over the lonely moor, and my hair turned snow-white. I sat up and it was the whiteness of dawn. The cattle were chomping and the hay smelt sweet.

In the morning a farmer gave me a large bowl of coffee and tartines, and I was sick. I went down to the Allier, and bathed from a rock, and scrubbed some clothes. A fisherman, carrying a long cane rod, walked by with a sideways glance, curious. Long after he was gone I could see the gleaming tip of the rod moving on down the valley in the direction of La Bastide, like the antenna of some predatory insect. I felt like another species myself, a sort of animal cut off from the human world. I lay on the rock all morning in the hot sun, listening to the call of peewits and the sounds of the river.

I found that Stevenson wrote that day in his journal:

Why anyone should desire to go to Cheylard or to Luc is more than my much inventing spirit can embrace. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go; I travel for travel’s sake. And to write about it afterwards, if only the public will be so condescending as to read. But the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this feather bed of civilisation, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

It is one of his most memorable formulations, and I learnt it by heart. At night I would mumble it to myself, almost like a prayer, in the solitariness of my sleeping-bag. Again, I took it quite literally, on trust. Or rather, I was compelled to take it—this, I felt, is what I had to do; though if anyone had asked me why I could not have explained. The fact that Stevenson was also making something of a profession of his bohemian wanderings, and deliberately searching for picturesque copy, did not occur to me at first. (He did not use that sentence about his reading public in the published version of his Travels; it revealed his hand too clearly.) But I now think that my critical innocence allowed me to learn other things, far more important, about the personal life that is hidden in, and below, the printed page. To learn by heart has more than one meaning.

On Thursday, 26 September Stevenson turned east again away from the Allier, climbed along the high forested ridge above La Bastide, and with much misgivings came down with Modestine to the gateway of Our Lady of the Snows. He stayed there for one night and most of two days. I came to think of this as one of his most complicated human encounters. It threw into relief for me much of his Scottish inheritance and upbringing, and eventually revealed some of the deepest preoccupations of his journey.

The faintly jocular tone in his journal was, I was sure from the start, a disguise. I felt the same real twinges myself.

Here I struck left, and pursued my way, driving my secular donkey before me and creaking in my secular boots and gaiters, towards the asylum of silence. I had not gone very far ‘ere the wind brought to me the clanging of a bell; and somehow, I can scarce tell why, my heart sank within me at the sound. I have rarely approached anything with more hearty terror than the convent of Our Lady of the Snows; this is what it is to have had a Protestant education.

His first sight of the monk Father Apollinaris planting out a long avenue of birch trees, in his flapping robed habit, immediately touched off childhood memories. It reminded him of the old prints of the medieval friars in the Edinburgh antique shops. The white gown, the black pointed hood, the half-revealed yellow pate, all stirred forgotten terrors. Moreover, what was the etiquette for dealing with the Trappist vow of silence? “I doffed my fur cap to him, with a faraway, superstitious reverence.”

He was surprised to find, however, that a foreign traveller was most kindly and indeed volubly greeted. Once it was established that he was not a pedlar “but a literary man” he was regaled with a liqueur, assigned a whitewashed cell in the guest wing, and bidden to attend the community services and meals at will. Father Apollinaris asked Stevenson if he were a Christian, “and when he found that I was not, or not after his way, he glossed over it with great goodwill”. Later, an Irish brother, when he heard that the guest was a Protestant, “only patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘You must be a Catholic and come to heaven’”.

Stevenson read the notice pinned over the table in his cell, for those attending official retreats, with a mixture of amusement and gravity. “What services they were to hear, when they were to tell their beads, or meditate, when they were to rise or go to rest. At the foot was a notable N.B.: ‘Le temps libre est employé à l’examen de conscience, à la confession, à faire de bonnes résolutions, etc.’” But he was decidedly impressed by the severe regime of the Trappists themselves: rising at two in the morning to sing the office of prime in the choir, then regulating the entire day between work duties and prayer accordingly as the bell rang, maintaining a sparse vegetarian diet and never speaking—except by special dispensation to strangers like himself.

At the same time La Trappe had its measure of worldly good sense. Every monk was encouraged, indeed required, to work at a hobby of his own choice. Stevenson found monks binding books, baking bread, developing photographs, keeping rabbits or peacefully cultivating potato patches. The monastery library was open to all, with a collection that included not only the sacred texts and holy fathers of the Church but Chateaubriand, Molière and the Odes et Ballades of Victor Hugo. “Let me whisper in addition what I only heard by way of a report, a great collection in another room, under orthodox lock and key, where Voltaire and Walter Scott, in God knows how many volumes, led the dance.”

That night, in the conduct of the kind old Irish brother, he attended the service of Compline in the candle-lit choir, greatly moved by the stern simplicity of the plain, white-painted chapel, and the “manly singing” of the cowled figures, alternately standing and bowed deep in prayer. “These things have a flavour and significance that cannot be rendered in words. Only to the faithful can this be made clear; or to one like myself who is faithful all the world over and finds no form of worship silly or distasteful.”

As he retired to his cell for the night Stevenson began to think about the force of prayer—a somewhat uneasy subject to his tolerant but sceptical mind. Partly he was thinking back to the old childish certainties of his Presbyterian boyhood, the attendance at the kirk, the teachings of his beloved nanny, Cummie, and the nostalgic confidences of the counterpane which he was to capture so brilliantly in the land of Leerie the Lamplighter, of A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885). But partly also he was realising that, even as a man, he had continued to pray; only in a different sense. Not in the form of superstitious supplications or “gasping complaints”, which he could no longer regard as real prayers at all, but in the form of deliberate meditations, a particular turning and concentrating of the mind when alone. Sometimes, he recollected, he had even found himself taking pleasure in giving these prayers literary form, “as one would make a sonnet”.

He realised that his voyage through the Gévaudan had been peculiarly fruitful in this respect: that through the physical hardships and the plodding loneliness a particular kind of consciousness had been released in him. And this consciousness made him more, not less aware of his place in the scheme of things outside; of his friendships, his loves, his duties; of his common fate. He wrote: “As I walked beside my donkey on this voyage, I made a prayer to myself, which I here offer to the reader, as I offer him any other thought that sprung up in me by the way. A voyage is a piece of autobiography at best.”

He then entered not one, but three short prayers in his journal, of which the last is a Prayer for Friends.

God, who hast given us the love of women and the friendship of men, keep alive in our hearts the sense of old fellowship and tenderness; make offences to be forgotten and services to be remembered; protect those whom we love in all things and follow them with kindness, so that they may lead simple and unsuffering lives, and in the end die easily with quiet minds.

I sensed in all this that Stevenson was telling himself, quite simply, that he was not made to be alone, either in the human or the divine scheme of things. Paradoxically, the Trappists were teaching him that he belonged outside: he belonged to other people, and especially to the people who loved him.

It is here that I later discovered one of the most suggestive differences between the original journal and the published Travels. For, on reflection, Stevenson removed all these passages from the published version. They were, I think, just too personal and became part of an emotional “autobiography” he was not prepared, at that date at least, to deliver up to his readers. Instead he struck a more romantic, raffish pose, remarking only of his feelings after the Compline service: “I am not surprised that I made my escape into the court with somewhat whirling fancies, and stood like a man bewildered in the windy starry night.” Cutting out all mention of the prayers, he reverted to his bohemian persona, and added instead a snatch of bawdy French folk-song:

Que t’as de belles files, Giroflé Girofla!

It served to remind him, he said, that the Trappists were after all “the dead in life—there was a chill reflection”. He could only bless God that he was “free to wander, free to hope, and free to love”. An interesting contradiction.

But then La Trappe is full of contradictions. They knew all about Stevenson when I passed through: a hundred years, they told me, is not so long in the eyes of eternity. Father Apollinaris’s line of birch trees still stood. There were the white blocks of the monastic buildings perched bleakly on the forested hillside, rows of square unrelieved windows, part-military and part-industrial in appearance, and a bell chiming a flat commanding note—what memories it stirred!—from the rugged church tower. Yes, they said, it was all rather like a power-station: so think of it as a spiritual generator, pumping out prayers.

The original buildings which Stevenson saw had been burnt down in 1912. His small guest wing for travellers and retreat-makers had been replaced by a brightly painted cafe-reception house astride the main drive, constructed like a Swiss chalet, with a self-service food bar and souvenir counter. Under the trees a score of cars were parked, transistors played, and families picnicked at fixed wooden tables. I walked through like a ghost, dazed with disappointment, and headed for the church, remembering now what my farmer at Luc had said: “Ah, La Trappe, they make an affaire of the holy life up there” though he had added with a Gallic shrug, “But good luck to them. We must all live in our own way, and le Bon Dieu has always liked a little money, as proof of good intentions.”

In the church a young monk, with a Cicero haircut and penetrating grey eyes, suddenly rose out of the sacred bookstall and gently tugged at my rucksack. English? On the trail of Stevenson? Sleeping rough? Ah yes, he had wanted to be a writer himself. That too was a vocation! Well, it was a happy chance that had brought me to La Trappe. A happy Providence. So now I must lay down my burden (he said this with a smile, the grey eyes suddenly teasing) and he would take me to visit the monastery. But first things first! And here he peered at me with what I took to be a frown, and I thought I was to be put through my catechism. Le Brun, who had doffed himself politely enough at the church porch, now shifted uneasily from hand to hand, ready for a sharp retort and a swift retreat. Protestant, lapsed Catholic, atheist, poetic agnostic …

“You are hungry, my friend,” Father Ambrose cut into my thought, “so come with me.” And he gave me another of those Trappist smiles.

I was whisked away without ceremony to the kitchens, and sat down at a huge wooden table. Behind me, a large electric dishwasher turned like a Buddhist prayer-wheel. All round, tiles gleamed and scoured pots bubbled on brand-new gas ranges. The kitchen monk in a pressed white apron considered me thoughtfully. “One must feed the corpse as well as the spirit,” he observed in a heavy Provencal accent, and grinned seraphically. He was as thin as a fence-pole, with the marks of asceticism like the marks of an axe over his long face and frame. He disappeared into an echoing pantry and came out with plate after plate balanced on his arm. I could not believe such a feast, and later listed it all in my diary: dish of olives, black and green; earthenware bowl of country pate with wooden scoop; whole pink ham on the bone, with carving knife; plate of melon slices; bowl of hot garlic sausage and mash; bowl of salad and radishes; board of goats’ cheeses; basket of different breads; canister of home-made butter; two jugs of wine, one white, one red. Spécialité de la maison, thin slices of fresh baguette spread very thickly with a heavy honey-coloured paste which turned out to be pounded chestnuts, marrons, and tasted out of this world. I was told simply: “Mangez, mais mangez, tout ce que vous voudrez!” And he was right; I had the hunger of the devil.

Much later I smoked my pipe and fell asleep in the monastery gardens, under a mulberry tree, wondering at the wisdom of monks. Father Ambrose woke me as his sandals came tapping along the terrace. “Better now?” was his only comment. I was taken on a tour of the buildings: long bare corridors of polished pinewood, a chapter-house full of afternoon sunlight and smelling of beeswax, a library like an academic college with a special history section including the complete works of Winston Churchill. Then a large bleak dormitory, with iron bedsteads in rows of cubicles, which brought back bad memories; and a shadowy choir-stall with, for me, the eternally ambiguous smell of incense.

The monks’ timetable had shifted little since Stevenson’s day. Prime began a little later, at three thirty in the morning; but the vegetarian fast was maintained from January till Eastertide. Prayer and hard physical work remained the staple of their lives. The cemetery stood behind a wall of the vegetable garden, a cluster of plain white crosses on a neat lawn, like a war grave in Passchendaele.

“And here at La Trappe,” said Father Ambrose as we stood again upon the terrace, “the summer visitors soon depart. We are alone again with Our Lady. Her snows fall from November until April. Sometimes we are cut off for days. Cut off from everything … except from God. And sometimes it is so… But you must pray for us. Pray for us on your road. You will do that, my friend, I think? And come back again, we will be here. Your rucksack is a light one.”

Father Ambrose smiled and turned rapidly away, slipping his hands into the long white sleeves of his habit and stepping off into silence. The sound of his sandals retreated along the stone-flagged terrace. I was left strangely confounded, perplexed; this was not what I had expected. In a sense I felt they had found me out.