Now I had no such opportunity for gallantry, being compelled to eat alone in a solemn dining-room. But Sabbath stillness was never entirely to his liking, and he was glad enough to exchange it, temporarily at least, for the goodfellowship of the little inn, where he could play squire to a lady in distress because of the boisterous merriment around her. It was a Sunday when Stevenson made his way down from the north into Pont de Montvert, where he found a noisy sociability in rude contrast with the Sabbath stillness which he had left behind in the mountains. And at the end of the day’s tramp he would find, as I did, the genial welcome of the only inn in Pont de Montvert, and in a soft bed, in a room looking over the brawling stream the clamor of which lulled him to sleep, he would dream dreams woven of the history of the valley, of the Camisards, and Pope Urban the Fifth, and Stevenson - and mayhap of Modestine. The man who wrote about the delights of botanizing from a car window would be enraptured to walk through the gorgeous floral panorama of the valley of the Tarn. Never before had the wild flowers of the high altitudes seemed so lovely to me. Purples and yellows are the prevailing colors of the mountain flora. Here and there the drab of t he roadside was relieved by patches of dwarf purple heather that the bees seemed to love. To the south rose the heights of the Romponenche and the greater bulk of the Cévennes, and by gazing hard I could almost see Mount Aigoual, where only the day before I had stood and looked southward beyond Montpellier to the sea.Ībove and below me were immense groves of those Spanish chestnuts which Stevenson so much admired and under which he camped for a night.
To the north lay the rugged slopes and rolling summits of Lozère. My knapsack was heavy and the lift of the road pulled on my legs but, tired and sweaty as I was, I did not fail to notice the beauties of the landscape. I made it between one o’clock and seven, with a few pauses at kilometre-stones to rest. It is a good fifteen miles from Florac to Pont de Montvert, following the road up the valley of the Tarn. Everyone who has read the narrative of that journey, as he has recorded it in his Travels with a Donkey, remains everlastingly under the spell of it and some there are who have wished because of it to see that same mountain country and walk those same mountain roads. IN September 1878, Robert Louis Stevenson, after a month’s sojourn at Monastier, near Le Puy, freighted Modestine, his donkey, with bedding and provisions and fared forth to high adventure, walking south and west through the Cévennes.
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