A contemporary donkey caravan following the Stevenson trail in the Cevennes.

“Danger, enterprise, hope…are dearer to man than regular meals.” — RLS

On Aug. 22, 2007, a huge, muscular young man in a bright yellow T-shirt momentarily filled the entrance into the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage in Saranac Lake. Fortunately he was friendly, had brought with him a friend and the first thing he said in a prideful way was put on paper an hour later when he wrote in the guestbook:

“Francoise Becker and Claude Pegeot – We visited the cottage, we come from the region of ‘Le Puy,’ (France) where Stevenson travelled with his donkey. Thanks very much for the visit! Bye!”

Francoise also brought a souvenir of sorts from his hometown, apparently with the intent to leave it at the Cottage, perhaps to bear witness to the ever-expanding universe of Stevensonia. It is a 36-page comprehensive guide for tourists who go to the region just to follow the Stevenson trail that the author made famous with his second book called “Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes.” It is full of color pictures and good maps while the table of contents give the impression that the wandering of Robert Louis Stevenson for 12 days in 1878 has generated a tourism industry in a part of France that can really use it. Some people like to say that that’s just another way that this former resident of Saranac Lake lives on in his books. People who have the time and money and desire to indulge in such an adventure, including their own personal donkey, can find out if the Association Sur le Chemin de Robert Louis Stevenson is still there at asso.stevenson@gmail.com, TEL: 04 66 45 86 31. A preview of the journey can be had at any public library that stocks National Geographic Magazine, Vol. 154, No. 4, October 1978.

Stevenson probably wasn’t thinking about the local economy on Oct. 3, 1878, when he sold Modestine, his donkey, at the end of his trail, the village of St. Jean du Gard. We know that he was still coming to grips with the disturbing fact that his American girlfriend, Mrs. Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, whom he wanted to marry as much as he wanted to write, was already married though separated. She was also six thousand miles away in Oakland, California, and her proximity there to Sam Osbourne, Fanny’s husband, filled Louis with jealousy, which he didn’t hide because, like everything else, he put it in writing.

But writing was still Stevenson’s first reason to be and he went home to Scotland, to write his second book. Nicholas Rankin is the current British representative of the Stevenson Society of America in Saranac Lake. An author of several historical books who now lives in Ramsgate, England, Rankin first came to Baker’s in 1984 while researching his acclaimed biography, “Dead Man’s Chest: Travels After Robert Louis Stevenson” in which he says, “Very different books are produced by travelers who write, and writers who travel. Stevenson’s “Travels With a Donkey” is among the first of a genre of literary travel-writing which has become a British specialty … Stevenson’s specialty is to strike up a personal relationship with the reader, sharing every experience, even down to the glow of his night-time cigarette reflected in the silver ring on his hand. He is a palpable self in the darkness; an immediate living presence throughout the book. RLS has also become a Pied Piper with the power to make others follow him.”

“Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes” went public in June 1879. In a letter to his cousin Bob, Louis declares that, “My book is through the press. It has good passages. I can say no more…But lots of it is mere protestations to F. (Fanny), most of which I think you will understand. That is to me the main thread of interest.” About the same time he wrote to Sidney Colvin, saying, “I can do no work. It all lies aside. I want–I want–I want a holiday; I want to be happy; I want the moon, or the sun, or something. I want the object of my affections badly, anyway …”

Love-struck Louis was stuck in Edinburgh, “my cage,” he called it and he knew he was withering on the vine. All of him except his pathetic excuse for a body was an ocean and a continent away. He had his old friend and college drinking buddy, also fellow member of the LJR Club, lawyer and personal ‘fixer,’ Charles Baxter, secretly send money to Fanny via her brother, Jacob Vandegrift, Riverside, California. It was just a matter of time. Then came the telegram.