Richard Holmes – Footsteps (страница 1)
FOOTSTEPS
ADVENTURES OF A
ROMANTIC BIOGRAPHER
RICHARD HOLMES
Harper Perennial
An imprint of HarperCollins
This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005
First published by Hodder & Stoughton 1985
Copyright © Richard Holmes 1985
Richard Holmes asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007388547
Version: 2018-05-21
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For Vicki and those children
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
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
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
“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,
“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
“Ah,
“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,
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
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,
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 …