Footsteps by Richard Holmes
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
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 squa
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 …