The route of R. L. S. now lay along the valley of the Mimente, which branches eastward a little south of Florac, and penetrates a country very similar to that traversed between the Lozère and this point. It was only a few miles from Florac that he spent his last night à la belle étoile in the valley of this little river, noting in one of his finest sentences the coming of night: "A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other; and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation." At Cassagnas he was in the very heart of the Camisard country, where there is little to engage one but the historic associations of the district. At St. Germain de Calberte, six miles to the south-west, reached by a rough and difficult road more suitable for the foot than the wheel, he slept at the inn, and the next afternoon (Thursday, 3rd October) he accomplished the eight remaining miles through the waterless valley of the Gardon to St. Jean du Gard—"fifteen miles and a stiff hill in little beyond six hours."
There came the parting with the companion of his travels, Modestine finding a ready purchaser at much below prime cost. "For twelve days we had been fast companions," he writes on his last page: "we had travelled upwards of a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road. After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own. Farewell! and if for ever—— Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with the stage driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion."
We are to imagine R. L. S. thus tearfully occupied in the stage-coach bearing him east to Alais, an important industrial town on the main line northward through Le Puy, whither there is no call to follow him. We have the romantic regions of the Causses and the Tarn gorges still to explore. Our way, no longer a pilgrim's path, lies westward.
Along the Route of "An Inland Voyage"
"Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name. It is something else, and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that as the freak takes you, and because you must have your own pace, and neither tramp alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions, and let yourself take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon."
I.
Thus wrote Stevenson in one of his essays, but I doubt if he ever put into practice this engaging theory of his. He came nearest to being alone when he undertook his famous tour through the Cevennes; yet a donkey, and one of so much character as his Modestine, is company of a sort. When he made the first of his little journeys with a literary end in view, he had a companion after his own heart in the late Sir Walter Simpson, to whom the first of his books, An Inland Voyage, is dedicated. That was, however, an enterprise of some adventure, and it was well that the author had a companion, for had he fared forth alone in his frail canoe, as did his great exemplar John MacGregor, in the Rob Roy, it is doubtful if An Inland Voyage—not to say all that came after it—had ever been written. In a letter sent from Compiègne during the voyage, he gives a very cheerless picture of the business: "We have had deplorable weather, quite steady ever since the start; not one day without heavy showers, and generally much wind and cold wind forby.... Indeed, I do not know if I would have stuck to it as I have done if it had not been for professional purposes." I suspect that no less potent an influence than "professional purposes" in raising his courage to the height of the occasion, was the companionship of "My dear Cigarette," as he addresses Sir Walter, whose canoe had been named Cigarette, that of Stevenson sporting the classic title Arethusa. Fortunately for the reading world, the voyage, despite its discomforts, had happy issue in one of the most charming books that came from the pen of the essayist, and although hints are not lacking of the shadows through which the canoeists passed, the sunshine of a gay and bright spirit is radiant on every page.
