travels with a donkey in the cévennes robert louis stevenson

This version includes the fragment 'A mountain town in France', originally intended as the opening chapter, but often omitted and published as a separate essay.įor further information, including links to online text, reader information, RSS feeds, CD cover or other formats (if available), please go to the LibriVox catalog page for this recording.įor more free audio books or to become a volunteer reader, visit it the rediscovery of Stevenson’s account of setting off on a walk with a donkey in 1878? The success of My Donkey, My Lover & I, a refreshing film relating the tragicomic adventures of a tourist with her four-legged friend? Or is it simply the call of the great outdoors? All of the above have contributed to the success of the Chemin de Stevenson. Travels With a Donkey is regarded as a classic of travel writing and an early inspiration for the idea of long-distance walking for pleasure - many a modern traveller follows the Stevenson Trail, now (as GR70) part of France's national network of long-distance walking routes. 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.

Travels with a donkey in the cévennes robert louis stevenson