Part 5

Florac is a small town of white houses, cuddled between the eastern front of the Causse Méjan and the western foothills of the Cevennes, with the river Tarnon, joined by the Mimente to the south, running northward on its outskirts. There are only two thousand inhabitants, but the number and excellence of Florac's hotels are accounted for by its being an important centre for tourists visiting the gorges of the Tarn, which, totally unknown to the outer world at the time of Stevenson's journey, are now admitted to possess the finest scenery in Europe. Our French guide-book frankly stated that Florac is a place "of few attractions," but R. L. S. makes the most of these in a sentence or two, describing the town as possessing "an old castle, an alley of planes, many quaint street-corners, and a live fountain welling from the hill." The old castle is quite without interest, and is indeed the local prison, while the alley of planes, called the Esplanade, is a dusty open space, with many cafés lining it, and the grey, featureless Protestant Temple at its southern end.

"It is notable, besides," he adds, "for handsome women, and as one of two capitals, Alais being the other, of the country of the Camisards." I do not recall having noticed an unusual number of handsome women, though the wife of the Free Church minister was quite the prettiest French woman we saw in the Cevennes, and the Established Church pastor's wife perhaps the most cultured. R. L. S. found the townsfolk anxious to talk of the part played by Florac in the days of the Camisards, and was delighted to see Catholic and Protestant living together in peace and amity. But it may be that the conspicuous absence of all windows from the lower parts of the Protestant churches is a memorial of times when the adherents of the reformed religion were subjected to the prying eyes and perchance the more dangerous attentions of the Catholics without. Most of the public officials were named to us as Protestants, and the religious differences are as strongly marked between the two sects of the latter as between them and their townsmen of the Roman communion. The larger and State-supported church is Rationalistic, corresponding to our Unitarian, and the smaller a Free Church, with a symbol of the open Bible above its doorway.

In what we might call the Free Manse, really an extension of the church for the housing of the minister, a door communicating between the place of worship and the domestic apartments, we found M. Illaire and his wife at play with their children--homely folk, who gave us a cordial welcome, the heartier for the fact that Mme. Illaire had stayed for a year in that "quaint, grey-castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat"--Stevenson's own romantic birth-town. She could thus speak our native tongue, and my companion, for once in a way, needed none of my interpreting. M. Illaire, an essential Frenchman, swarthy of features, slight of build, voluble and gesticulative, discoursed with shining eyes of Protestantism, but was something of a pessimist, and seemed to think that at best a cold, bloodless Dieism would rule the intellectual France of the future. I gathered that, as in the old days of enmity between the Established and Free kirks of Scotland, there was no traffic between the two Protestant churches in Florac, for Mme. Illaire confessed that she had never seen the inside of the Temple, which we had thoroughly inspected earlier in the afternoon, receiving the key from the pastor's wife, whose husband unfortunately was absent on a visit to Montpellier.

XXIII.

The route of R. L. S. now lay along the valley of the Mimente, which branches eastward a little south of Florac, and penetrates a country very similar to that traversed between the Lozère and this point. It was only a few miles from Florac that he spent his last night _à la belle étoile_ in the valley of this little river, noting in one of his finest sentences the coming of night: "A grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at a little distance grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other; and the darkness was rising steadily like an exhalation." At Cassagnas he was in the very heart of the Camisard country, where there is little to engage one but the historic associations of the district. At St. Germain de Calberte, six miles to the south-west, reached by a rough and difficult road more suitable for the foot than the wheel, he slept at the inn, and the next afternoon (Thursday, 3rd October) he accomplished the eight remaining miles through the waterless valley of the Gardon to St. Jean du Gard--"fifteen miles and a stiff hill in little beyond six hours."

There came the parting with the companion of his travels, Modestine finding a ready purchaser at much below prime cost. "For twelve days we had been fast companions," he writes on his last page: "we had travelled upwards of a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road. After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own. Farewell! and if for ever---- Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with the stage driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion."

We are to imagine R. L. S. thus tearfully occupied in the stage-coach bearing him east to Alais, an important industrial town on the main line northward through Le Puy, whither there is no call to follow him. We have the romantic regions of the Causses and the Tarn gorges still to explore. Our way, no longer a pilgrim's path, lies westward.

Along the Route of "An Inland Voyage"

"Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone. If you go in company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name. It is something else, and more in the nature of a picnic. A walking tour should be gone upon alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that as the freak takes you, and because you must have your own pace, and neither tramp alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl. And then you must be open to all impressions, and let yourself take colour from what you see. You should be as a pipe for any wind to play upon."

I.

Thus wrote Stevenson in one of his essays, but I doubt if he ever put into practice this engaging theory of his. He came nearest to being alone when he undertook his famous tour through the Cevennes; yet a donkey, and one of so much character as his Modestine, is company of a sort. When he made the first of his little journeys with a literary end in view, he had a companion after his own heart in the late Sir Walter Simpson, to whom the first of his books, _An Inland Voyage_, is dedicated. That was, however, an enterprise of some adventure, and it was well that the author had a companion, for had he fared forth alone in his frail canoe, as did his great exemplar John MacGregor, in the _Rob Roy_, it is doubtful if _An Inland Voyage_--not to say all that came after it--had ever been written. In a letter sent from Compiègne during the voyage, he gives a very cheerless picture of the business: "We have had deplorable weather, quite steady ever since the start; not one day without heavy showers, and generally much wind and cold wind forby.... Indeed, I do not know if I would have stuck to it as I have done if it had not been for professional purposes." I suspect that no less potent an influence than "professional purposes" in raising his courage to the height of the occasion, was the companionship of "My dear Cigarette," as he addresses Sir Walter, whose canoe had been named _Cigarette_, that of Stevenson sporting the classic title _Arethusa_. Fortunately for the reading world, the voyage, despite its discomforts, had happy issue in one of the most charming books that came from the pen of the essayist, and although hints are not lacking of the shadows through which the canoeists passed, the sunshine of a gay and bright spirit is radiant on every page.

As it had been my pleasant fortune in the summer of 1903, together with a friend, to follow the footsteps of Stevenson in his travels among the Cevennes, and the pilgrimage having proved plentiful of literary interest, it seemed to me that one might find in a journey by road along the route of "An Inland Voyage" as much of interest, and certainly some measure of personal pleasure. Moreover, with the disciple's daring, often greater than the master's, I desired to test the plan of going alone. But it was more by happy chance than any planning of mine that I betook myself, with my bicycle, to Antwerp at precisely the same season that, eight-and-twenty years before, Stevenson and his companion set out upon their canoe voyage by river and canal, from that ancient port to the town of Pontoise, near the junction of the Seine and Oise, and within hail of Paris.

In the preface to the first edition of _An Inland Voyage_, its author expresses the fear that he "might not only be the first to read these pages, but the last as well," and that he "might have pioneered this very smiling tract of country all in vain, and found not a soul to follow in my steps." That others have been before me in my late pilgrimage is more than probable, although I have found no trace of them; but perhaps I have not searched with care, for I would fain flatter myself that here, as in the Cevennes, I found a field of interest where there had been no passing of many feet.

II.

Antwerp seems a town so antique that no change of modern handiwork can alter in any vital way its grey old features. Yet in my own acquaintance with it, on its outward quarters at least, it has taken on surprisingly the veneer of modern Brussels, though by the river-side it remains much as it was when, in the later days of August, 1876, the _Cigarette_ and the _Arethusa_, with their adventurous occupants, were launched into the Scheldt to the no small excitement of the loungers about the docks. There must have been some excitement, too, in the breasts of the voyagers, but, like the true Scots they were, we can well believe they gave no show of it. Stevenson had never been in a canoe under sail before, and to tie his sheet in so frail a craft in the middle of a wide and busy river called for no contemptible degree of courage. But he tied his sheet.

"I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself," he writes. "Of course, in company with the rest of my fellow-men, I had always tied the sheet in a sailing-boat; but in so little and crank a concern as a canoe, and with these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find myself follow the same principle, and it inspired me with some contemptuous views of our regard for life. It is certainly easier to smoke with the sheet fastened; but I had never before weighed a comfortable pipe of tobacco against an obvious risk, and gravely elected for the comfortable pipe. It is a common-place that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought."

There is but little of interest up the river, which waters a level, unpicturesque country to Rupelmonde, where the canoeists would bid good-bye to the Scheldt and steer to the south-east up the Rupel, a broad and smooth-flowing stream that joins the greater water at this point. Against the current they would urge their tiny prows until they arrived after a journey of a few miles at the town of Boom, whence the canal extends to Brussels in an almost straight line:

As I made my way that grey autumn morning through the little villages and along the tree-lined highway, the brown leaves flickering down in the cold wind that stirred among the branches, it pleased me to fancy how Stevenson, had his youth fallen in the days of the bicycle, would have enjoyed the privilege of riding on the Belgian footpath, which to us who live in a land where no cyclist dare mount his machine except on the highway affords a delightful sensation of lawlessness. It is well to observe, however, that but for this right of the footpath there would be no cyclist in all Flanders or Northern France, since highways and by-ways there are made of the most indiscriminate cobbles, and in the remote country places a cart on the lonely road moves with as great a clatter as one on the stony streets of Edinburgh.

III.

I was no great way from Boom when I saw advancing a high and narrow structure, drawn by a horse, that progressed to the weird and irregular clangor of a heavy bell, reminding me curiously of Stevenson's moving description of the leper bell in _The Black Arrow_. When I came up with the horse and its burden, I found the latter to consist of a large circular tank, set on four wheels, with a tall box in front for the driver, above whose head a large bell was suspended. The word "Petrol," painted on the tank, indicated its contents. Here, surely, was something that made the days of the canoe voyage seem remote indeed; the peddling vendor of petrol belongs emphatically to the new century.

"Boom is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing: that the majority of the habitants have a private opinion that they can speak English, which is not justified by fact." I can heartily endorse our canoeist's opinion of the town, but this linguistic pride of its inhabitants is surely a vanity of the past. I found none--and I spoke to several--who had any delusions as to their knowledge of English, and, indeed, few of them had more than a smattering of French. A pleasant fellow on a cycle, who had insisted on riding close to me through the outlying districts of the town, which are entirely taken up by extensive brickworks, where I noticed the labourers all went bare-footed, I found capable of understanding a few words of broad Scots, and when I said, "Boom, is't richt on?" or "Watter, richt on?" he nodded brightly, and replied in Flemish, which was comically like the Scots.

The Hôtel de la Navigation, where the paddlers put up for the night, and of which Stevenson gives so bad an account, I found no trace of, nor did I tarry any length of time in Boom, since its attractions were so meagre. The "great church with a clock, and a wooden bridge over the river," remain the outstanding features of the town, and viewed from the south side of the river, it makes by no means an unpleasing picture.

IV.

The canal was simply packed with barges and great ungainly scows in the vicinity of the town, awaiting their turn to slip through the locks into the freer water of the Rupel, and heigh! for Antwerp, or even the coastwise towns of Holland. It was good to feel as one proceeded along the tow-path that here, in this world of change, was a stream of life flowing onward through the generations serene and changeless. "Every now and then we met or overtook a long string of boats with great green tillers; high sterns with a window on either side of the rudder, and perhaps a jug or flowerpot in one of the windows; a dinghy following behind; a woman busied about the day's dinner, and a handful of children." Every day since R. L. S. paddled in this same stretch of water the canal has presented the same picture of life, and thirty years hence, it is safe to prophesy, the wayfarer will find no change, as these canals remain the great highways of Belgium and France for the transport of goods that are in no haste; and when we come to think of it, a great proportion of the commodities of life may be carried from place to place in no gasping hurry for prompt delivery.

Stevenson has many profitable reflections on the life of the canal-folk, with which in the course of his journey he was to become so familiar. "Of all the creatures of commercial enterprise," he writes, "a canal barge is by far the most delightful to consider. It may spread its sails, and then you see it sailing high above the tree-tops and the windmill, sailing on the aqueduct, sailing through the green corn-lands, the most picturesque of things amphibious. Or the horse plods along at a foot-pace, as if there were no such thing as business in the world; and the man dreaming at the tiller sees the same spire on the horizon all day long.... There should be many contented spirits on board, for such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.... I am sure I would rather be a bargee than occupy any position under heaven that required attendance at an office. There are few callings, I should say, where a man gives up less of his liberty in return for regular meals." But our philosopher, when he goes on to enhance his comfortable picture of a bargee's life, is scarcely correct in saying that "he can never be kept beating off a lee shore a whole frosty night when the sheets are as hard as iron." For these great clumsy craft know well the scent of the brine, and there are times when the snug outlook on the towing-path, and the slow business of passing through innumerable locks are changed for floundering in heavy seas and a straining look-out for a safe harbour. Not all their days are smooth and placid, and sometimes, we may imagine, the dainty pots of geraniums, that look so gay against the windows as we pass, must be removed to safer places, while the family washing, drying on deck to-day, has to be stowed elsewhere, and the tow-haired children, now playing around the dog-kennel on the top of the hatches, have to be sent below when salt waves break over the squat prow of the vessel.

The journey along the canal bank was to me a very pleasant one, and I had hopes of being more fortunate than the canoeists in reaching Brussels with a dry skin. They had to paddle in an almost continual drizzle, and even made shift to lunch in a ditch, with the rain pattering on their waterproofs. But when I got as far as Villevorde, where gangs of men were labouring on the extensive works in connection with the railway and the new water supply, the rain began, and I was wet to the skin long before I had reached the royal suburb of Laeken, where, for evidence of Belgium's industrial progress, witness the splendid improvement on the canal at this point, soon to become a system of docks and water-ways resembling in extent a great railway junction.

V.

One of the most amusing episodes in "An Inland Voyage" was the encounter of the canoeists with the young boatmen of the "Royal Sport Nautique," who in their enthusiasm for rowing gave a warm welcome to the strangers, and by assuming the latter to be mighty men of the paddle, led them into the most unwarranted boasting about the sport. "We are all employed in commerce during the day," said the Belgians, "but in the evening, _voyez-vous, nous sommes sérieux_." An admirable opening for a characteristic bit of Stevensonian philosophy: "For will anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling among boats?"

Whether or not the newer generation of Brussels boatmen are as serious as the youths of thirty years ago I cannot say. The next afternoon, being Sunday, I came out again from Brussels to make enquiries concerning the "Royal Sport Nautique," and found a commodious brick building occupying the site of the boathouse wherein Stevenson had been entertained, but no signs of nautical life about it. There was the slip where the _Cigarette_ and the _Arethusa_ were drawn up out of the canal, and on the roadway opposite stood this new boathouse and clubroom, with the dates 1865--94 indicating, as the only member whom I found on the premises explained, that the club had been founded in the former year, and the building erected in the latter. But he was a churlish fellow, this coxcomb in his Sunday dress, and barely answered my questions. If I too, had paddled my own canoe, perhaps it might have been otherwise! The day was fine, and the canal was busy with little excursion steamers that were well patronised by holiday-makers, and were covered almost to the water-line with flaring advertisements of Scotch whiskies and English soaps, only one out of a dozen advertisements being of local origin: a circumstance that would, we may be sure, have drawn from Stevenson some pages of gay philosophy.

VI.

Following the example of the original travellers, I took train from Brussels to the French frontier town of Maubeuge, where in real earnest their canoe voyage began. To the traveller who has wandered the highways of France south and west of Paris, such a town as this presents some uncommon features, and I cannot but think that R. L. S. gives a wrong impression of it. "There was nothing to do, nothing to see," he tells us, and his only joy seems to have been that he got excellent meals at the "Grand Cerf," where he encountered the dissatisfied driver of the hotel omnibus, who said to him: "Here I am. I drive to the station. Well! Then I drive back again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My God! is that life?" And you remember Stevenson's comment: "Better a thousand times that he should be a tramp, and mend pots and pans by the wayside, and sleep under the trees, and see the dawn and the sunset every day above a new horizon." Here spoke the lover of romance; but the facts are quite otherwise.

Maubeuge I found a bright little town, surrounded by mighty ramparts with spacious gates and bridges over the fosse. It is picturesquely situated on the river Sambre, on whose banks stand large warehouses and manufactories, while the shops bear evidence of prosperity. Even _l'art nouveau_ has reached out from Paris and affected the business architecture of the town. There is a bustling market-place, a handsome little square with a spirited monument to the sons of the country-side who have fallen for France, a grey old church, and a pleasure-ground with a band-stand and elaborate arrangements for illumination on gala nights. Indeed, I can imagine life to be very tolerable in Maubeuge, which is really the residential centre of an immense industrial district resembling more closely than any other part of France our own Black Country.