He notes that the Catholics and the Protestants, at the time of his travels, live peaceably alongside one another, though each community is faithful to its own traditions and its version of the region's history. Stevenson was well-versed in the history and evokes scenes from the rebellion as he passes through the area of the rebellion during the final days of his trek. Stevenson was Protestant by upbringing, and a non-believer by philosophy. The Protestant insurgents were known as the Camisards.
The Cévennes was the site of a Protestant rebellion around 1702, severely suppressed by Catholic Louis XIV. And when the present is so exacting who can annoy himself about the future? To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for.
The great affair is to move to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. Stevenson provides the reader with the philosophy behind his undertaking: įor my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. Some locals are horrified that he would sleep outdoors and suggest it is dangerous to do so because of wolves or robbers. Stevenson is several times mistaken for a peddler, the usual occupation of someone traveling in his fashion. It also tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags, large and heavy enough to require a donkey to carry. It is one of the earliest accounts to present hiking and camping outdoors as a recreational activity. The other principal character is Modestine, a stubborn, manipulative donkey he could never quite master. The terrain, with its barren rocky heather-filled hillsides, he often compared to parts of Scotland. Travels recounts Stevenson's 12-day, 200-kilometre (120 mi) solo hiking journey through the sparsely populated and impoverished areas of the Cévennes mountains in south-central France in 1878. His journey was designed to provide material for publication while allowing him to distance himself from a love affair with an American woman of which his friends and families did not approve and who had returned to her husband in California. Stevenson was in his late 20s and still dependent on his parents for support. 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.
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