Lestampes. Mont Goulet. (Photo provided)

“My dear Sidney Colvin–the journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travelers in the wilderness of this world–all, too, travelers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson,

October 1878

In this case, Sidney Colvin was the honest friend and mentor. He was 5 years older than Robert Louis Stevenson and just the man to guide this aspiring young author through the hoops, so to speak, to getting properly recognized and published. “The journey which this little book is to describe” is called “Travels With A Donkey,” a walking narrative and second published book by the future author of “Treasure Island.” It is still in print and a testimony to what they call the “personableness” of Stevenson’s style, why so many of his fans through generations have called him a friend.

Here is one person’s expression of that empathy in verse:

Chasserades. (Photo provided)

R.L.S.

I never knew him face to face

One day I read the words he left

And knew his heart though he was dead.

I never knew him. What care I?

“Our Lady of the Snows” monastery. Burned to the ground on a cold night in February 1911. (Photo provided)

Until the end his brave words grip my very soul–

I call him friend.

The journey in this book is a 12-day walking tour through a remote, rugged, sparsely populated and economically depressed region in southern France, a mountainous plateau called the Cevennes. It is the home of Paleolithic painted caves like Lascaux, and Les Trois Freres. In Stevenson’s day it was a dangerous trip even for a healthy man.

Louis really ought not to have been there, from a practical position. He was a certified invalid who went around telling his friends that his illness was something separate from himself and then did whatever he wanted until his illness smacked him down again. Meanwhile, Louis lied to his parents again by letting them believe that he was safe and sound with his friends in their favorite haunts in Paris and Fontainebleau. He did not want Thomas and Margaret, “Maggie,” to know that he would be walking solo through a faraway wilderness region known to harbor bandits and wolves; but he did carry a one shot pistol while many of his admirers like to think that it was a guardian angel that saved him more than once throughout his short life.

“Travels With A Donkey,” the “journey” is a reflex to Stevenson’s forced break-up with his married (separated) American girlfriend, also mother of two, whom he had met in France in the summer of 1876.

Market Place in Le Monastier, where Robert Louis Stevenson bought Modestine. (Photo provided)

Lack of funds drove her to return to California and there, “Fanny” would be in proximity of her husband “Sam.” Louis had met Sam when he came to France and he saw how good-looking he was. In one of his essays from “Virginibus Puerisque,” Stevenson confesses he knows jealousy. It seems that Stevenson was pretty messed up when he snuck off to the Cevennes to buy a donkey, a female named “Modestine.”

This jaunt in southern France would turn out to be a rehearsal for the epic voyage Louis would embark upon, exactly a year later to the New World, on his make or break hero’s journey to Silverado, the stunt that almost killed him. This whole affair, the mess Stevenson’s father said was “mad, sinful business,” mushroomed into one of the more enduring true love stories to come out of the 19th century. For anyone interested, two best-selling historical novels on the subject are still available: “Romance of Destiny” by Alexandre La Pierre and “Under the Wide and Starry Sky” by Nancy Horan.

The “pied piper” aspect of Robert Louis Stevenson is evidenced by the number of his fans who actually go to the Cevennes to retrace his steps. National Geographic made a feature story about it in October 1978, the 100th anniversary. What started as a trickle has become an online travel destination for tours and lodgings and everything that could stimulate the economy of an impoverished region; all because a love-sick genius walked through and wrote about it, another example of the RLS mystique.

One Englishman who followed the donkey trail in his youth came to see the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial Cottage in Saranac Lake in the summer of 1956. Eventually he sent a letter with photos to the museum curator, John F. Delahant, Sr. His signature is illegible while this is his address–Uplands. Shipham. Winscombe. Somerset. England.

“Dear Sir–It is now more than twelve months since I called at your R.L.S. Cottage and promised to send you what photographs I could collect of my lone hike in the steps of the A** and the Author in 1909; exactly 30 years after Stevenson had made his journey. I regret this delay … Meantime please accept the enclosed prints.”