Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes is Robert Louis Stevenson’s travel memoir of a walking journey through the Cévennes mountains with a donkey named Modestine. It combines landscape observations, humorous mishaps, and quiet reflections on companionship. Readers who enjoy gentle, observant travel writing will find it rewarding.
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Cover illustration generated by AI.
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
Transcribed by David Price, email [email protected] Second proof by Margaret Price. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson A New Impression with a Frontispiece by Walter Crane London: Chatto & Windus, 1907 Frontispiece, by Walter Crane My Dear Sidney Colvin, The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent. Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped for them in every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage. Yet though the letter is directed to all, we have an old and kindly custom of addressing it on the outside to one. Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? And so, my dear Sidney Colvin, it is with pride that I sign myself affectionately yours, R. L. S.
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