Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

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Map of route

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) is one of Robert Louis Stevenson's earliest published works and is considered a pioneering classic of outdoor literature.

Stevenson was in his late 20s and still dependent on his parents for support. Travels was both meant to raise money he needed to be with the woman he loved, and provide adventure Stevenson craved, being sickly much of his life.

Travels recounts Stevenson's 12-day, 120-mile solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France. The character of Modestine, a stubborn, manipulative donkey he could never quite get the better of, is memorable. It is one of the earliest accounts which presented hiking and camping outdoors as a recreational activity. It also tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags, large and heavy enough to require a donkey to carry.

Historically the Cévennes saw a Protestant rebellion around 1702, severely repressed by Catholic Louis XIV. The Protestant insurgents, a minority population in the region, were known as the Camisards. Stevenson was well-versed in the history, romantically imagining scenes from the rebellion along the way. He notes that the Catholics and the Protestants, at the time of his travels, lived peaceably but with an absolute divide between the two communities. A young Catholic man who married a Protestant girl and changed his faith in the process was unanimously condemned for this breach of loyalty, an example of the sentiment "change is not good" pervading the rural country.

Stevenson himself was Protestant, and both the geography of the Cévennes with its barren rocky heather-filled hillsides, and the history of religious strife that lay over the land, were familiar ground for the Scot native.

[edit] Main parts of the journey

Today Stevenson fans retrace the route Stevenson took on hiking paths (GR footpath GR 70), some of which are transhumance routes taken annually by shepherds and their flocks.

[edit] In the arts

In the John Steinbeck novel The Pastures of Heaven, one of the characters regards Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes as one of the single greatest works of English literature and eventually names his infant son Robert Louis. Later on, Steinbeck may have been inspired by Stevenson in choosing to title his account of his cross-country voyage with a gray-haired poodle in the 1960's, Travels With Charley: In Search of America.