His account of notable episodes in Camisard history foreshadows the storyteller he was to become in Treasure Island, Kidnapped and other novels. Stevenson's tour explored the country's history of brutal religious war - specifically, the resistance of the Camisards to Louis XIV's repression of Protestantism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, so similar to the treatment of the Covenanters in Stevenson's native Scotland at around the same time.

There is also a young man's earnestness in the poetic lyricism with which he describes the landscape and scenery of the region, and above all in the core of the book: an extended discussion of religious tolerance and intolerance.

Stevenson writes with a characteristic wry humour on his own failings as a traveller (who else would admit to hiking with an egg-whisk?), on his travails with Modestine the self-willed donkey (animal-lovers should brace themselves for nineteenth-century attitudes to beasts of burden) and on the discomforts of travel in the age before mass tourism and with, perhaps, a certain youthful (he was 24) condescension in his observations of peasant life on the cusp of modernity. Stevenson's account of his extended walk, in 1878, through uplands and mountains in south-western France amply fulfils this declaration of intent. The great affair is to move to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

Read by Patrick Wallace.įor my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. LibriVox recording of Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Stevenson donkey