There are books you remember from youthful reading, and when you come to them a long time after, they are not quite as you had pictured them in memory. So it was with Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a donkey in the Cevennes. Yes, the same RLS (1850-94) who wrote those touching verses about his childhood with all its sickness and dreams. Of course he is also the RLS who wrote Treasure Island: "Fifteen men on the dead man's chest,/ Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum." One of the best boy's stories ever written.
But the Travels with a Donkey were remembered as more peaceful, almost elegiac. Stevenson was a sensitive man and we can take some of his rage with his donkey as largely for literary and comic effect. The Cevennes are a beautiful part of France, and some of the places mentioned not so much changed in more than a century. A frontispiece shows a peaceful scene with the writer lying comfortably on his back in his capacious sleeping bag, fur cap on head, obviously at peace with the world, while the donkey browses nearby. He needed the donkey, as his sleeping-bag was large and heavy and he had with him cooking utensils and not a little provision. He had bought the donkey for 65 francs and a glass of brandy. The creature had to bear on its back not only sleeping-bag and change of clothes but cakes of chocolate, tins of Bologna sausages, a leg of cold mutton, a bottle of Beaujolais and a considerable quantity of black bread and white.
He called the she-ass Modestine. "Not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse with a kindly eye and determined under-jaw." There was "a quakerish elegance about the rogue that hit my fancy". He was to change his mind, for on the first day they went off slower than walking pace. If he stopped she stopped. A man took pity, cut a switch from a bush and "laced her about the sternworks". And off she went. He taught Stevenson the "true cry or Masonic word of donkey-drivers; `proot'". It was a help but not until he got a real goad cut by an expert with "an eighth of a inch of pin" did all go smoothly. "Thenceforward Modestine was my slave." Quite a bit about the religious wars of the past in this area, but enough fresh air, lovely scenery and his mock-war with Modestine to revive fond memories.
When he sold her, for all their altercations, he wept. She lives on in this most-easy-to-read short book.