Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  “You are hungry, my friend,” Father Ambrose cut into my thought, “so come with me.” And he gave me another of those Trappist smiles.

  I was whisked away without ceremony to the kitchens, and sat down at a huge wooden table. Behind me, a large electric dishwasher turned like a Buddhist prayer-wheel. All round, tiles gleamed and scoured pots bubbled on brand-new gas ranges. The kitchen monk in a pressed white apron considered me thoughtfully. “One must feed the corpse as well as the spirit,” he observed in a heavy Provencal accent, and grinned seraphically. He was as thin as a fence-pole, with the marks of asceticism like the marks of an axe over his long face and frame. He disappeared into an echoing pantry and came out with plate after plate balanced on his arm. I could not believe such a feast, and later listed it all in my diary: dish of olives, black and green; earthenware bowl of country pate with wooden scoop; whole pink ham on the bone, with carving knife; plate of melon slices; bowl of hot garlic sausage and mash; bowl of salad and radishes; board of goats’ cheeses; basket of different breads; canister of home-made butter; two jugs of wine, one white, one red. Spécialité de la maison, thin slices of fresh baguette spread very thickly with a heavy honey-coloured paste which turned out to be pounded chestnuts, marrons, and tasted out of this world. I was told simply: “Mangez, mais mangez, tout ce que vous voudrez!” And he was right; I had the hunger of the devil.

  Much later I smoked my pipe and fell asleep in the monastery gardens, under a mulberry tree, wondering at the wisdom of monks. Father Ambrose woke me as his sandals came tapping along the terrace. “Better now?” was his only comment. I was taken on a tour of the buildings: long bare corridors of polished pinewood, a chapter-house full of afternoon sunlight and smelling of beeswax, a library like an academic college with a special history section including the complete works of Winston Churchill. Then a large bleak dormitory, with iron bedsteads in rows of cubicles, which brought back bad memories; and a shadowy choir-stall with, for me, the eternally ambiguous smell of incense.

  The monks’ timetable had shifted little since Stevenson’s day. Prime began a little later, at three thirty in the morning; but the vegetarian fast was maintained from January till Eastertide. Prayer and hard physical work remained the staple of their lives. The cemetery stood behind a wall of the vegetable garden, a cluster of plain white crosses on a neat lawn, like a war grave in Passchendaele.

  “And here at La Trappe,” said Father Ambrose as we stood again upon the terrace, “the summer visitors soon depart. We are alone again with Our Lady. Her snows fall from November until April. Sometimes we are cut off for days. Cut off from everything … except from God. And sometimes it is so… But you must pray for us. Pray for us on your road. You will do that, my friend, I think? And come back again, we will be here. Your rucksack is a light one.”

  Father Ambrose smiled and turned rapidly away, slipping his hands into the long white sleeves of his habit and stepping off into silence. The sound of his sandals retreated along the stone-flagged terrace. I was left strangely confounded, perplexed; this was not what I had expected. In a sense I felt they had found me out.

  2

  Stevenson’s reactions to the Trappists were greatly complicated by the presence of two other visitors in the guest wing, a local Catholic priest and a retired soldier. The priest had walked over from his country parish at Mende for four days’ solitude and prayer; the ancien militaire de guerre, a short, grizzled and somewhat peppery personage in his fifties, had come to La Trappe as a visitor—like Stevenson—and remained to study as a novice. Neither had the simplicity or the wisdom of the monks; they were “bitter and narrow and upright” in their beliefs, “like the worst of Scotsmen”, reflected Stevenson. But it was only in the morning that they discovered that a Protestant heretic was in their midst: “My kindly and admiring expressions as to the monastic life around us, and a certain Jesuitical slipperiness of speech,” observed Stevenson slily, “which I had permitted myself in my strange quarters, had probably deceived them, and it was only by a point-blank question that the truth came out.” There was an immediate explosion. “Et vous prétendez mourir dans cette espèce de croyance?” burst out the priest.

  Clergyman and army officer now attempted to convert Stevenson with righteous fervour. They took it for granted that he was secretly ashamed of his faith as a Protestant; disdained all theological discussion, brushed aside Stevenson’s appeal to family loyalties, and crudely urged the horrors of hell-fire. He must go to the Prior of La Trappe and declare his intention to convert; there was not a moment to lose; he must instantly become a Catholic. The atmosphere became quite embarrassing. “For me who was in a frame of mind bordering on the effusively fraternal, the situation thus created was painful and a little humiliating.” He escaped on a long walk round the monastery grounds, but on returning for lunch was again attacked by the proselytising pair. This time they began to mock him for his stubbornness and ignorance, and unwisely referred to his beliefs as those of a “sect”—for they thought “it would be doing it too much honour to call it a religion”. His attempts at explanation were received with “a kind of ecclesiastical titter”. Finally Stevenson’s temper—which could be formidable: he had once broken a bottle of wine against a wall in a Paris cafe during an argument with the management—began to get the better of him. Trembling with emotion and going rather white, he leant across the table to the parish priest: “I shall continue to answer your questions with all politeness; but I must ask you not to laugh. Your laughter seems to me misplaced; and you forget that I am describing the faith of my mother.” An awkward silence fell, and the priest, remarked Stevenson, “was sadly discountenanced”.

  However, dignity was restored, the ancien militaire de guerre—no doubt recognising another kind of fighter—made soothing noises, and the cure hastily assured him that he had no other feeling but interest in Stevenson’s soul. The incident was closed, and they parted on friendly terms. But Stevenson was probably taught something after all: for here he was hotly defending a religion, the Presbyterianism of his childhood, in which he had supposed he had no formal belief whatsoever. It led him to reflect, towards the end of his journey, on the mysterious nature of belief itself, on its profound roots in the heart and the sense of identity; and the degree to which formal creeds were inadequate to contain and express one’s deepest moral convictions.

  In the Travels he added a friendly, if somewhat patronising, envoi to the priest as a fellow-traveller on the rough road of life:

  Honest man! he was no dangerous deceiver; but a country parson, full of zeal and faith. Long may he tread Gévaudan with his kilted skirts—a man strong to walk and strong to comfort his parishioners in death! I daresay he would beat bravely through a snowstorm where his duty called him; and it is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.

  The experience of the monastic life, even—and perhaps especially—in a passing glimpse, was both vivid and unsettling for Stevenson. In some ways it was weird, even repellant: Father Apollinaris’s “ghastly eccentricity” as he suddenly raised his arms and flapped his fingers above his tonsured head, to indicate that the vow of silence had come back into force at the monastery gate, became a comic symbol of this. Yet in other ways it was obviously attractive to Stevenson. And what it attracted, I think, was paradoxically not the religious man, but the artist in him. He was drawn and fascinated by the idea of the celibate life within a community. The ascetic standards—the silence, the physical discipline, the solitary spiritual endeavour—appealed to him as a writer. The clarity of purpose, the absence of distraction, the lifelong sense of self-commitment were exactly the kind of ideals he felt he should be nourishing in himself as a professional author. The monks represented a sort of Flaubertian perfection. In their own way they had given up the world for an art form. Should he not do the same?

  To begin with I had conceived of Stevenson’s journey—and experienced it for myself—as a physical trial, a piece of deliberate “adventurin
g”, a bet undertaken against himself, that he could survive on his own. His ill-health, his struggle against consumption, together with the real wildness of the Cévennes a hundred years ago made this trial a genuine enough affair.

  But here was a new element, a metaphysical one. Stevenson was making a pilgrimage into the recesses of his own heart. He was asking himself what sort of man he should be, what life-pattern he should follow. Many hints had already suggested strongly to me that he was in love with someone. The incident with the young married couple in the inn at Le Bouchet was one obvious pointer; and the whole slightly mannered drama with Modestine seemed to me to contain some element of a private joke, a comic (but none the less serious) little allegory about his relations with the opposite sex.

  The question he seemed to be formulating at La Trappe came down to this. As a writer, as an artist, should he be living and working on his own, celibate (or at least unmarried) and dedicated purely to the ideals of a literary community? Or should he commit himself emotionally to something, and someone else: to domesticated love, to marriage, to a professional life undertaken in partnership? For a young and ambitious Victorian writer this was no light or hypothetical question. He could survive comfortably as a single man on an allowance from relatively wealthy and well-meaning parents; and artistically he could flourish in the London literary world of clubs, pubs, reviews and masculine “bohemia”. It required the most fundamental decisions about his future. Most of all, from a man of Stevenson’s unusual temperament, to whom the enclosed Scottish world of his boyhood was so imaginatively important, it meant a choice about how far he could afford to grow up, to come fully into man’s estate.

  Reflecting on the life of the Trappists, Stevenson added a revealing passage to the Travels. Once again its lightness of tone was curiously deceptive. He wrote:

  … Apart from any view of mortification, I can see a certain policy, not only in the exclusion of women, but in this vow of silence. I have had some experience of lay phalansteries of an artistic not to say bacchanalian, character; and seen more than one association easily formed and yet more easily dispersed. With a Cistercian rule, perhaps they might have lasted longer. In the neighbourhood of women it is but a touch and go association that can be formed among defenceless men; the stronger electricity is sure to triumph; the dreams of boyhood, the schemes of youth, are abandoned after an interview of ten minutes, and the arts and sciences, and professional male jollity, deserted at once for two sweet eyes and a caressing accent.

  What was this lay “phalanstère” or commune to which Stevenson was referring? (The odd term was invented by the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier, and always appealed to the dreamer in Stevenson.) More important, to whom did the “two sweet eyes” belong? From my reading of his letters I could now guess a little at this.

  The “artistic not to say bacchanalian” place was the village of Grez, some sixty miles south-west of Paris on the River Loing. Grez lies on the edge of the Fontainebleau forest, on the opposite side from the more fashionable Barbizon, already beginning to be associated with the Impressionists and “plein-air” school of painters. Stevenson had spent a part of the three previous summers at Grez, taking rooms at the Hotel Chevillon, idyllically placed by the low stone bridge, with its shadowy arches, over the placid river. He and his dashing elder cousin, Bob Stevenson, and a small group of Francophile painters, mostly Irish or American, including William Low and Frank O’Meara, all ate and worked in common in the grounds of the hotel. The place was soon to become famous for its resident artists—Delius was later to do much of his composing at Grez, and Sisley to commemorate it in his sunlit pictures. It was in the early days of this phalanstère that Stevenson met the Osbourne family from San Francisco, with their two young children. And it was the eyes of Mrs Osbourne which had entranced him—for life, as it turned out. As he later wrote in his Songs of Travel:

  Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,

  With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,

  Steel-true and blade-straight,

  The great Artificer made my mate …

  3

  I knew little of Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne at the time I followed Stevenson through the Gévaudan. The story of their tempestuous but largely successful marriage—which took them through California, back to Edinburgh, down to Hyères, and finally out again to America, the South Seas, Tahiti and Samoa, with Stevenson all the time writing, his professional path found, Treasure Island (1883), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Master of Ballantrae (1889) and the posthumous Weir of Hermiston (1889)—belongs to the mature part of his biography. But what I subsequently learned of Fanny’s early life, and her personality, confirmed a great deal of what I was already seeing in Stevenson’s own nature at this time—his needs, his strengths, his weaknesses. The difficulties of their early love affair also showed me more clearly the hidden significance of his pilgrimage through the Cévennes: a preparation for his journey of emigration the following year to San Francisco—also undertaken alone—to claim his bride.

  Fanny Vandergrift broke the rules, almost all of them, and that was her first and enduring charm. She was a spirit quite as original and adventurous as Stevenson. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in March 1840, she was thirty-six when she first met him at Grez in 1876. Her ancestors were Dutch and Swedish; her parents were pioneer farmers who let her run wild on a series of small ranches. They had her baptised in the Presbyterian faith—an interesting emotional link with Stevenson—in one of the total immersion ceremonies in the White River when she was two. By her teens she had grown up into a strong, dark-haired, gypsy-looking girl, who could ride, use a rifle, grow vegetables, make wine, and hand-roll cigarettes. Her passion was painting, and because she was not thought a belle her style was that of the tomboy artist, dashing and devil-may-care. She had big, dark eyes, a determined jaw, and a powerful, stocky body with great sexual presence that remained with her late into middle-age. “God made me ugly,” she used to say with sultry good humour, and the result was that everyone thought her a handsome gal of spirit. She was popular, and her sister Nellie recalled that “there was scarcely a tree in the place that did not bear somewhere the name or initials of Fanny Vandergrift”.

  She was married at seventeen—probably already pregnant—to a young lieutenant on the Governor’s staff, Sam Osbourne. He was blond, six-foot, quixotic, amiable and incurably unfaithful, and she loved him passionately. They went West to seek their fortunes, living in mining towns in Nevada, and when the gold-boom was over settling in San Francisco, in 1866. Sam was frequently away, fighting Indians with the army, prospecting in Montana with friends, or having affairs with saloon ladies. But he was always back when the children were born: Isabel (“Belle”) in 1858; Lloyd in 1868; and Hervey in 1871. Jealous rows and passionate reconciliations became the pattern of the household, but gradually Fanny emerged as the stronger, more capable and more stable figure: her children were devoted to her, and remained emotionally dependent on her for the rest of their lives. Moreover Fanny, far from becoming embittered and frumpish, seemed almost to grow younger and more carefree as her family grew up. She lost none of her dash, good humour or energy; she always seemed game for anything. During the 1870s strangers often mistook her and Belle for sisters. When Belle was sent to finish her education at the San Francisco School of Design, Fanny enrolled too as a mature student, and a whole new circle of friendships opened out for her among the artistic “European” set in the city. In particular Fanny became friendly with a young Irish-American lawyer, Timothy Rearden, who was Head of the Mercantile Library, and knew writers like Bret Harte. Rearden became her mentor, possibly for a time her lover. He encouraged her to paint and write, read French and German, think about a new life—a second chance.

  Fanny seized the opportunity in a way that would have been almost impossible for her contemporaries in Victorian England or Second Empire France. In 1875, when Belle was seventeen, Lloyd seven and Hervey four, she set off with her three children to study art in Antwerp
. Sam Osbourne stayed behind in San Francisco, promising to pay a small allowance. Fanny was at last une femme indépendante, a triumph of spirit over circumstance. A photograph of her at this time shows a distinctly romantic heroine: a dark, determined woman apparently in her late twenties (she was actually thirty-five) with a mass of wild hair brushed impatiently back behind her ears. She wears a velvet-edged jacket over a tight-fitting black dress that carelessly shows off her figure. Knotted round her throat is a large white neckerchief, tied like a man’s tie, loose and full, faintly provocative. The eyes are large and frank, the mouth strong and beautifully formed. She combined force of character with a certain indefinable vulnerability. Her daughter Belle recalled that on the steamer from New York “when in any difficulty, she only had to look helpless and bewildered, and gallant strangers leaped to her assistance”.

  Life was not easy in Antwerp. Money was scarce, the lodgings poor, and worst of all the Antwerp Academy would not accept women students. The American Consul tried to help her and Belle find private tuition, but then little Hervey fell ill with fever, and they were advised to take the child to a specialist in Paris. By December they were living in rooms in Montmartre, but in the spring of 1876 Hervey was still ailing, and Lloyd had vivid memories of hanging about hungrily outside patisserie windows because all their money was spent on doctors’ bills. Fanny sent a telegram to Sam Osbourne in San Francisco, telling him their son was dangerously ill. He arrived in Paris to be at Hervey’s death-bed. Bemused with grief, Fanny went back to her life-classes at the atelier, but had fainting fits and hallucinations, and trembled on the edge of a nervous breakdown.