travels with a donkey in the cévennes pdf

(Footsteps 19)ģ Finally, as recently as the summer of 2006, France-Inter broadcast the ten-part Voyage avec un Âne in which Hervé Pauchon pursued the same route in the company of a four-legged friend named Sardane.Ĥ Stevenson dedicated his account of his walking tour to his friend Sidney Colvin, writing that 'we are all travellers in what Bunyan called the wilderness of this world' (RLS Travels, 5). A third was giving me the most vivid dreams about Stevenson whenever I slept with it tipped over my nose.īut most important of all, perhaps, was Le Brun’s power to make other people laugh.

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.

In a passage imbued with Stevensonian whimsy, he writes: In Holmes’ case the ass was replaced by a pet hat named Le Brun which, although not possessed of Modestine’s unforgettable mélange of obstinacy and patient forbearance, in the course of his travels took on a personality of its own, allowing Holmes to develop pleasant relationships with those he met on his way. Holmes’ account of his 1964 walking tour only appeared twenty years later, in 1985, as part of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer. Evans’ Across the Cévennes in the Footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson and his Donkey (1965). Skinner’s In the Cévennes Without a Donkey (1926) and Andrew J.

Stevenson had tramped through the area for twelve days in the autumn of 1878 in the company of Modestine, a diminutive, mouse-coloured donkey purchased at the beginning of his expedition.Ģ Holmes was neither the first person nor the last to attempt to re-live Stevenson’s pedestrian excursion: at least two brochures were published by walkers inspired by Stevenson’s Travels with A Donkey in the Cévennes (1879): there was Robert T.

1 Holmes's books include: Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) Coleridge (1982) Dr Johnson and Mr Savage (19 (.)ġ In 1964 when he was eighteen, Richard Holmes, later to become the biographer of Shelley and Coleridge as well as the elucidator of Samuel Johnson’s relations with his biographical subject Richard Savage, 1 set off in the footsteps of Robert Louis Stevenson across the mountainous region of the Cévennes.

Travels with a donkey in the cévennes pdf