Notes from the Cévennes, page 9
‘Ah, voilà,’ he said. One of the peaks punctured the limit. He stretched the trace like elastic, examined it as a doctor would a scan, noted precisely when it had happened the previous night, and nodded. I vaguely recalled a drunken gaillard striking a bollard with something metal, but kept quiet. ‘That’s it,’ he went on. ‘That’s all we need.’ I asked him if he was sure it was the clearing of the terrasse.
He traced the summits with his finger.
‘Without any doubt,’ he said, in the assured way of a French nuclear physicist.
Henri appeared in court for disturbing the peace, and claimed the timing was all wrong, but before the considerable fine was upheld at appeal, he moved.
Soon after, in the top-floor café-restaurant of the city’s swish médiatheque, I was admiring the view of the Maison Carrée below, when Henri’s son loomed up to my table in creamy waiter’s uniform.
We were equally startled, but recovered our poise. He was polite. His father had landed on his feet in this prestigious place as principal chef.
My coffee, when eventually it arrived, tasted a touch bitter.
11
All that Rough Music
A colleague at the art school took me aside one day. ‘I’ve made a video. Could you do a voice-over? J’ai besoin d’un accent anglais.’ Videos in the context of the École Superieure des Beaux Arts usually involve protracted, repetitive scenes of puzzling import, but Frédérique assured me that this was just ‘a home thing for a local cycling website. A few extracts from Robert Louis Stevenson.’
The elliptical nature of his reference to Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes was telling: Stevenson’s account of his twelve-day trek with the overburdened and intractable donkey, Modestine, through the wildest stretch of France is embedded in local mythology. This was true when Richard Holmes tramped the same route in 1964 and evocatively recounted it 20 years later in Footsteps; it is even more so now. Apart from a choice of translations, the 120-mile voyage exists as comic book, theatre show, a TV series, a dedicated Topoguide for hikers (which scolds the ex-Calvinist for overlooking the Catholic masterpieces on the way) and an association developing the tourist potential of le Chemin de Stevenson GR70.
René and Christine, old friends of ours, make a precarious living from hiring out donkeys up near Florac, sending their clients off with their own Modestines – ‘docile and intelligent’, they claim. The overnight stays along the way are prearranged, which seems to defeat the object, but wild camping (which Stevenson fell back on nervously) is technically illegal in France. I presumed that our friends’ clients would be largely my compatriots. ‘No,’ said René, ‘mainly German and Dutch. It just takes one article in a magazine, and c’est l’effet boule de neige. And they all know Treasure Island.’ At least, I suggested, those Brits who do come are probably ready to rough it a little in the spirit of the original. ‘Mais non,’ came the laughing reply from Christine. Apparently, the British prefer organised tour groups, whose agents are demanding. Last year, two came from London to inspect the hébergement for a group of 20; they fussed that some places were more primitive than others, that all the overnights had to be of the same standard. They then insisted, with months still to go, and displaying a disarming ignorance of Cévenol ways, that the whole circuit had to be booked within two days flat, or they would pull out. Which they did, by now so far from the spirit of the original that they might as well have been planning a package tour to Majorca.
I shook my head in familiar shame: Brits in general are the least popular with gîte-owners, too, tending to over-imbibe and jape around. Anecdotes abound. After one party had left the smart house in question a wreck from a birthday weekend, with all the garden furniture in the pool, the young Englishman in charge responded to the complaints with a fat cheque. ‘Les Anglais seem to be rich, but sans politesse,’ was our friend’s comment. And this was before Brexit.
I told René and Christine that my own Stevensonian voyage in the drought year of 1976 was conducted on an even more docile Puch 1.5 HP moped: kickstarted with the pedal, cruising at 30mph, sounding like a wasp caught in the ear, it similarly took me to unplanned places inside myself as I buzzed between poplars and plane trees down long French country roads, the reassuring road signs still in concrete and blue-lettered enamel, my face masked in dark-brown dust.
The extracts I had to record for Frédérique were among my best loved: the artless finesse of the originals came through in translation. I didn’t tell him that I tend to avoid many stretches of the famous route, preferring solitude; according to Laurence Sterne, solitude enables the mind to ‘lean upon itself’ and be strengthened. On any other Cévenol path you scarcely meet a soul apart from the odd shepherd and his tintinnabulary flock, with the occasional scrambler bike to shake your fist at through a squall of exhaust fumes and noise.
Things have changed since Holmes’s day, let alone Stevenson’s: the future of these beleaguered hills is in eco-tourism – with RLS, having pioneered ‘coming down off the feather-bed of civilization’, showing the way. However, his route is partly guesswork: the descriptions in Travels are rarely detailed enough for anyone to know for certain if the path is the genuine article. In 1878, the roads would have been rough and unpaved where they are now slick with tarmac: if they snake through the hills in just the same often precipitous manner, they are made hopelessly unsuitable for pedestrians by the world of cars. The chemin de Stevenson is an inevitable compromise. Deviations are necessary. Given that his journey was as much of the soul as the body, this only matters to literary groupies, but it also triggers a wider regret.
Take the last day’s march, between the remote village of Saint-Étienne-Vallée-Française and Stevenson’s endpoint in Saint-Jean-du-Gard – a mere 20 minutes from our own village. His final ‘long descent’ to Saint-Jean followed ‘a long and steep ascent’ to the high col de Saint-Pierre, where he and Modestine ate their last and moonlit snack together. In 1994, as recounted in his equally haunting To Travel Hopefully, a grief-stricken Christopher Rush and his donkey found the climb ‘the rockiest and steepest yet of the entire journey’ (but the endeavour, as for the consumptive and lovelorn Stevenson, was a healing one).
A dented, semi-legible sign on the col itself, the meeting place for every wind going, is currently the only visible clue: Chem . . . venson. Despite superb views (arriving at dusk, our tired pilgrim could only see ‘the yawning valley, gulfed in blackness … like a hole in created nature at my feet’), the col has lost its vibes thanks to a speeding D road. The latter, in its former ponderous and dusty guise, was clearly RLS’s actual route down off the top. This is where the regret comes in – for what progress has demanded that we sacrifice.
Fortunately, the only way he could have climbed up from Saint-Étienne is by the present path, which switches from forester’s track to a thin trail authentically matted by embedded stones. On our latest walk there a few weeks ago, I took my battered 1914 copy of Travels and read the relevant passages aloud to Jo. On Stevenson’s climb to the col he was shadowed by an empty carriage, the driver convinced he was a pedlar; on the descent to Saint-Jean he ‘met no one but a carter, visible afar off by the glint of the moon on his extinguished lantern’, a detail anticipating Treasure Island’s terrifying opening chapters (which, when I read them as a boy, reached subliminal depths and stayed put). We met no one at all in the wintry sunlight.
Saint-Étienne, a huddle of stone houses under a medieval chateau, must have changed little in appearance, although like all such places it has, in fact, changed utterly. Half the buildings have the artificial-coma look of summer residences, there are home-made signs pointing to various craft ateliers, and it doesn’t smell of dung or imperfect drainage (as rural French villages still did, I remember, in the 1960s, and as ours did when we first arrived). The sole residents visible were a few teenagers kicking a football in the road. The wonky little church was open and much of its mouldering interior would have been recognised by Stevenson, as would the tiny square that its off-centre clock stared down upon, where we ate our sandwiches.
The place always reminds me of another ramshackle village on Stevenson’s route: Le Bleymard lies at the foot of towering Mont Lozère. Many years ago we would holiday there off-season to hike through the heather. We were chiefly attracted to it because, somewhere in the forest around Bleymard, Stevenson famously slept out ‘under the pines’ in his self-devised sleeping bag. His account of this ‘new pleasure’ (if less confessional than in his travel notebook) memorably weaves physical sensation and metaphysical speculation to the whiffs of a cigarette under the stars. Like those to whom Holmes had talked thirty-odd years earlier, the garage man in Bleymard knew all about the long-haired author. When I mentioned ‘that donkey’ he said, ‘Ah! Modestine!’ and laughed as if at some personal recollection. I almost asked if he had met them. ‘Do you have any idea where he actually slept out?’ Glancing around at the fir-clad slopes, he shook his head. ‘No one does. I slept out myself as a boy, dans la nature. It’s magic,’ he added, through the petrol fumes.
This encounter already seems many leagues back in time. I thought of it as we puffed back up to the col recently, and of Holmes’s predecessor, J. A. Hammerton, who found Bleymard ‘mean and featureless’ in 1903. Paying his homage by bicycle rather than on foot, he occasionally met those who had crossed paths with the young Scot; the pastor in Pont de Montvert even produced a glum-looking photo of Clarisse, the auberge waitress so lingeringly described in Travels. Hammerton’s book, In the Track of R. L. Stevenson and Elsewhere, makes for fascinating reading: he likewise regrets the changes that have occurred over 25 years, yet in 1903 the peasantry still wear wooden sabots and speak in dialect, the women are all in black, the floors are earthen, the village streets are ‘filth-sodden’ and stink of the byre (and are often jammed by sheep), snatches of song can be heard, there is work in the fields and orchards, and everyone argues and drinks too much.
Traces of this deep rurality were still intact in 1964, when Holmes set out – as they were to a certain extent in 1990, when we came to live here. The dialect, for instance: there were three old men who would occasionally sit on the stone bench in front of the café, chatting in Occitan. I distinctly recall the last time I heard them; only two were left, and it was up on the path near our house. A knot of the past that soon slipped and let all that rough music go, and I’m not sure anyone noticed.
With the help of mobile phone masts and EU rules, the Cévennes are cleaned up, less eccentrically particular – easier on the Dutch, one might say. The jobs are as few as the songs, our département being one of the poorest in France. A continuing influx of back-to-the-earthers has scarcely made up for the chronic exodus to the urbs, already started in Stevenson’s time, and now biblical drought is promised from climate change. Not coming down off that feather-bed has been a costly business, I reflected, as we reached the tarmac and our ever-docile car.
12
Erudition
We were sitting in our favourite café in our favourite village. Not our own village, but another huddle of houses in the neighbouring commune: under four miles as the crow flies, if the crow doesn’t mind gaining altitude fast, but 20 minutes by car; the road meanders severely as it climbs through chestnut and beech woods. The village is not limestone like ours but granite. The air is different, as if you’re suddenly in an Alpine resort. The vegetation plays along with this illusion: a lot of pines and spruce in dark green swathes on the higher slopes, and tumbling streams among the great boulders, and the odd solitary eagle eyeing us from the level of the peaks. We never considered living there because there’d been no school for years, and a lot of the houses are uninhabited most of the year. The second-homers arrived in the 1960s from Germany, Holland and Belgium. These early adventurers are now elderly or worse, but their children and grandchildren are not interested in a remote, frequently chilly sector of the French South. So the ancient houses are empty, and often unsellable.
The café’s owners greet us warmly. The place is quiet tonight. We spot Cédric’s shaved head in the brownish gloam. We have walked up to the village on sandy paths through the woods, leaving the car as usual where the tarmac runs out just above the col. It’s our favourite shortish walk, with several minor alternatives, and lasts about three hours there and back; this time we decided to climb a little further into the village itself and have a beer before the downhill return. We met Cédric in his battered little Renault just before the village: he is a fashion designer whose annual summer défilé takes place high up in the pasture of a huge old farmhouse where he now lives alone, renting a few rooms from the venerable lady still running the place: the parade is an essential date in the local calendar. Over the years he has moved from extravagant commissions, to which he gives his own even wilder and inimitable touch in unexpected materials, to prêt-à-porter. He now finds this boring, he tells us, with a wink, so this year’s parade will be back to form, with jackets of lace, silk shirts almost as long as robes, roomy trousers in primary colours and shimmering silvery dresses struggling to be tamed in the wind that always pours over the lonely peak on the big day.
‘See you in the café,’ he said.
Next to him at the bar is an enthusiastic man in his late thirties with a close-cut beard, whom I vaguely recognise. We talk about beech martens; about the nocturnal, black-spotted, mysterious genettes; and whether the slender snakes in the rivers are dangerous – a subject which particularly exercises Jo. The man’s name is Léon. He appears to be an expert on wildlife: he knows, for instance, that the cat-sized genet is neither feline nor vulpine but from a distinct family, the viverrids. ‘And it is very smelly,’ he adds. The only specimen I have seen was dead and in a photo, sent to me by a friend who found the cadaver near his house in the Montagne Noir. It looked like a fantasy creature stitched together from commoner species, with a fox’s nose.
Léon turns out to be a member of the main tribe in the village, rivals to our own main tribe ‘down below’, as he pointedly puts it. He unpacks the family surname, its etymology, its linguistic variants. ‘It derives from Latin villanus,’ he says. ‘Not a thief originally, but the servant that came with the villa you bought. Chained to it, like a dog. A slave, really. Nothing but trouble. The lowest of the low. Villains, that’s us.’
‘Villein,’ I proffer, ‘in English. A kind of serf.’
‘In fact,’ Cédric points out, ‘English is mostly French.’
‘Guillaume le Conquérant,’ the other explains. There then follows an expert analysis, not only of William the Conqueror’s brutality (psychologically deriving from his bastard origins), but of the Battle of Hastings and its ruthless aftermath. Very few people in France have even heard of Hastings: the date 1066 strikes no chords.
‘Yes, I’ve always thought of him as a psychopath,’ I break in, turning the hand wheel on the vintage peanut dispenser, holding the little plastic plate to catch my 20 centimes-worth.
‘No,’ says Léon, in apparent teacher mode, ‘he wasn’t. That’s the point.’
He then embarks on the complexity of noble blood-ties that meandered towards the Hundred Years War, the coldly fanatical Henry V, and the Battle of Agincourt – or Azencourt, as the French more accurately call it, for whom this slaughter is a mere detail in that ghastly conflict, and frequently less than that: a blank. Again, and ever surprisingly, Léon treats us to a succinct description of the battle itself, miming the high angle at which the English longbowmen released their arrows to swoop down from the arc into the flower of French chivalry. The bar’s beamed ceiling takes their imagined impact with customary imperturbability. Up to 10,000 men died or were wounded in an ear-splitting orgy of killing: infamously, many of the French were slain after being taken prisoner (on Henry’s panicked orders). It may all have been over in an hour. I only know this because I wrote and presented a programme for the 600th anniversary on BBC Radio Three, walking about in the vast field’s aptly glutinous mud as I played the expert. But I avoid mentioning this to Léon: he seems to know more about the battle, or at least my country’s royal genealogy, than I do. I don’t fancy being rumbled as an ignoramus britannique on my own historical territory.
He cradles his Pelforth beer and dwells on Jeanne d’Arc: did we know that she didn’t burn at all but was rescued? ‘And now appears as Marine Le Pen,’ I comment, realising too late that there are several regulars within earshot, half-hidden in the shadows. But no one reacts. Survival of martyrs, especially this freakish martyr – a demure teenage shepherdess leading the battered French to victory in polished steel armour – is an old favourite of conspiracy theorists, but Léon begins another trail that sounds much more scholarly than the usual wishful thinking. As ever, I am willing to entertain the idea that she was smuggled away.
‘Perhaps it was the same angels,’ I suggest, ‘who guarded the Camisards a couple of centuries later.’
‘We all need our angels,’ says Cédric, pulling a face. He is struggling somewhat with high fashion in the rural wastes.
As we pick through our remaining ration of peanuts, contemplating the hike back, Léon tells us that Louis XIV’s dragoons were stationed in the village for 40 years, keeping an eye on those filthy Prots: their billet was the huge, four-square building at the bottom of the lane (strikingly similar to the one yards from our own house called Le Fort, which once played the same role).
