Even some English words that I had not seen before. This book occasionally digresses into local history and uses foreign words and phrases without translation. Maps would have been helpful to the reader. Being pelted with rain was “revivifying” to the youthful RLS. I thought Stevenson was a semi-invalid, but in this book he survives some very arduous travel, even to an elevation of 5,600 feet above sea level, while smoking tobacco, drinking brandy, and eating a substandard diet. Wolves were an issue in Stevenson’s day, but they didn’t even occur to me. But I was good at making myself invisible that is not so easily done when traveling with a donkey. I found it strange that he felt the need to carry a revolver! I felt no such need when I hitchhiked through that part of Europe with a pup tent.
But this is must reading for Stevenson fans as it gives unique insights into the author, his thoughts and his lifestyle, even his diet. Not everyone will appreciate the elegance of the writing and philosophizing here not everyone will find it clear or even intelligible. In the end he concludes that the journey was "very agreeable and fortunate for me."Ī slow and mellow read. Rebuffed by innkeepers, who take him for a peddler or worse, he decides that "trees are the most civil society" and rediscovers in nature "those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists." At Our Lady of the Snows monastery he is hospitably received but "annoyed beyond endurance" by proselytizing. In some places he encounters hospitality, in others fear and hostility, but everywhere, curiosity. With humor and irritation he describes his interactions with locals and reflects on their class consciousness. These non-fiction accounts of camping and canoeing in France and Belgium were written in the refined and polished prose we have come to expect from Robert Louis Stevenson.
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