Before You Begin

Before you begin.

In a little place called Le Monastier, a young Scotsman bought a diminutive she-ass "not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw," christened her Modestine, and set off on foot into the high, lonely uplands of southern France. What follows is one of the most charming travel books ever written: the day-by-day record of twelve days, a hundred and twenty miles, and a contest of wills between a stubborn traveller and a still more stubborn donkey.

Robert Louis Stevenson was twenty-seven, restless, and not yet famous when he made this walk in the autumn of 1878. Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes helped invent the modern idea of travel for travel's sake — and gave the world the first true backpacker, with his hand-made sleeping-sack and his revolver, sleeping out under the pines and waking among the stars. The book endures because Stevenson is wonderful company: funny about his own mishaps, tender toward his unwilling companion, and unexpectedly moving when the journey ends.

But this is more than a comic walking tour. Stevenson is crossing haunted ground — the country of the Camisards, where Protestant peasants once waged a desperate guerrilla war for the right to their own faith. Along the way he sleeps in a Trappist monastery among monks sworn to silence, argues religion at peasant tables, and broods on solitude, friendship, and what it means to be at home nowhere and everywhere at once.

The illustrated companion that follows maps Stevenson's route across the Velay, the Gévaudan, and the Cévennes; introduces the real people and one famous donkey he met along the way; and unfolds the ideas — pilgrimage, tolerance, and the open road — that give this small book its lasting hold. Tighten the pack, take up the goad, and set out.