In fact some of it comes close to conveying a sense of misery. The Voyage was undertaken with a like-minded friend and the simple fact that there are two of them gives the narrative all sorts of dynamics, as one experiences setbacks which the other one fixes or falls around laughing at, as one goes off to find accommodation while the other is stared at by half a dozen mute peasant children, and so on.īut travelling by yourself in a foreign country is a much more intense and existential experience and Travels is, accordingly, a lot less light and funny. This book is more famous that An Inland Voyage but, in my opinion, less enjoyable.
It took him 12 days (Monday September 23rd to Friday 3rd October, according to the text, which is written in diary format). In 1877, having had some success with his first book, An Inland Voyage, but racked with unhappiness that the woman he had fallen in love with – the married but separated American Fanny Osbourne – had returned to the States without him, Stevenson took himself off to the inaccessible countryside west of Avignon in the south of France, on a madcap scheme to walk 120 miles with a donkey and write another travel book about it.
The food is sometimes spare hard fish and omelette have been my portion more than once the wine is of the smallest, the brandy abominable to man and the visit of a fat sow, grouting under the table and rubbing against your legs, is no impossible accompaniment to dinner… Any one who has a fancy to wash must do so in public at the common table. In the kitchen cooking and eating go forward side by side, and the family sleep at night. Imagine a cottage of two stories, with a bench before the door the stable and kitchen in a suite, so that Modestine and I could hear each other dining furniture of the plainest, earthern floors, a single bedchamber for travellers, and that without any convenience but beds. Indeed, it was typical of these French highlands.
Nicolas was among the least pretentious I have ever visited but I saw many more of the like upon my journey.
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…ģ. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose. I have been after an adventure all my life, a pure dispassionate adventure, such as befell early and heroic voyagers…Ģ.
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