Under the Wide and Starry Sky

CHAPTER 26

When Louis planned it, a long walk seemed the best salve for his troubled heart. A twelveday 120-mile trek through the Cévennes would be daunting, but the sting he felt would not be soothed by meadows and summer. He needed to exercise himself against terrain that pushed back. The stretch of mountains in southern France matched the state of his soul— desolate and rocky, a cold expanse of steep hills and mournful valleys.
“I’m going for a walk,” he told his friends who questioned the wisdom of a trip into the wilderness alone. “A book is in it.” They knew it was peace he was after. He had been a sad case since Fanny left to return to the United States.

Louis could not make sense of her departure. He’d heard what Fanny said, but it did not satisfy. “I love you,” she had assured him. “But there are the feelings and needs of other people to consider.” While she was packing  her trunks to leave Paris, she was already framing their love a?air as a memory. “I shall never forget the time we’ve had together,” she said.

Louis looked dolefully at Modestine, the mouse-colored little pack donkey he had bought in  Le Monastier for sixty-?ve francs and a  glass of  brandy.  In  that small town  of  lace makers and wine-shop proprietors, the donkey was attested to as a ?ne specimen. Louis had fallen hard for her sweet eyes and austere elegance, but it wasn’t more than an hour into his journey that he discovered the nature of the beast: The donkey took small steps and few commands. In one day, the animal had grown deaf to Louis’s ongoing, one-sided, outloud conversation with Fanny, for she ignored her new master’s pleas to “Go!” as just more blather from the skinny human with the stick. She curled her lips back, baring her brown teeth as she enjoyed a healthy hee-haw at his predicament.

The  local  peasants  along  the  way  were  no  more  cooperative.  They  were  unfriendly, sometimes ignoring  his requests for directions. Even  the children  seemed contemptuous. Having gotten lost repeatedly while following stony mountain paths that seemed to circle back  from  whence  he  came,  Louis  felt  fury  in  his  gut.  He  and the  donkey  were  stuck together  in  this  most  inhospitable  corner  of  the  world  in  a  farce  worthy  of  Moliere. Modestine refused to move despite his exhortations. Louis realized he was a laughingstock when a passing peasant cut a switch, whacked the donkey’s rump, and yelled, “Proot!”
“You have to show her who is the boss,” the man said when he had gotten his laughter

under control.

“Argggh,”  Louis  groused.  He  didn’t  like  hitting  anything,  certainly  not  a  shuddering, winded creature, least of all a female creature. When he’d set out from Le Monastier a day earlier, he had taken her mincing steps as the gait of all donkeys and resigned himself to follow her pace through the wooded slopes and river-crossed valleys. But now, with the man applying his switch and Modestine leaping forward and running without pause, Louis suspected  he  had  been  fooled  by  the  Sarah  Bernhardt  of  hoofed  mammals.  Once  the peasant left the path and bid adieu, however, Modestine slowed. Louis found himself in an isolated dale with a steep hill to climb, and no amount of prooting could get the stubborn donkey to move faster. He was desperate to set up camp at a lake ahead before night fell. He  switched  the  animal  harder  and  was  immediately  sickened  by  his  own  brutality. Compounding  his  misery,  the  bag  he  had  made  for  sleeping,  strapped  as  it  was  over Modestine’s back, kept slipping off and scattering the provisions stuffed inside it.
One egg whisk, two loaves of black bread and a loaf of white, a bottle of brandy, a leg of mutton.  Spirit  lamp,  jackknife,  lantern,  leather  ?ask,  pilot  coat.  Tins  of  chocolate  and sausage. These were the necessaries he had packed in his clever sleeping sack and ?ung over the back of the wretched Modestine. The supplies yet again were strewn all over the dry and rocky ground where the ass grazed on tufts of grass.

Louis sat down, smoked a cigarette, and took a few swigs of brandy. “Ah, Fanny,” he said out loud. He pictured her sleeping right now, her eyelashes quivering as they did when she dreamed. Louis closed his own eyes and saw Sam Osbourne lying next to her. He leaped up, shook out his limbs to throw o? the image, and furiously retied the bag on the donkey. This time he loaded some of the supplies on his own shoulders and set out once more.
The walking was easier but Louis grew discouraged when darkness came on and he’d found  no  lake.  He  cursed  the  indi?erent  stars  as  they  began  to  appear.  In  time,  he happened upon an old stone inn at Bouchet St. Nicolas where he gladly took the one bed available in a room shared with a young married couple. He was so embarrassed by his proximity to the pair he averted his gaze, but not before glimpsing one pretty white arm hanging over the side of the bed. Louis didn’t know if she slept nude or in a gown, but he didn’t need the young woman’s nearness to stir thoughts of Fanny.

Why did you leave?

It mysti?ed him. They were so close to making their dream happen. Yes, there were

obstacles. Sam Osbourne was cutting o? money to Fanny until she returned. Sammy was eager to go back. And Louis wasn’t even close to being ?nancially independent. Still, none of it seemed insurmountable to him. Only a few weeks earlier, he had been ?lled with hope. He’d just published Inland Voyage and gotten positive reviews—reviews that startled him with their enthusiasm. True, no real money had materialized. But his meeting with his father had gone well, and he now had a modest monthly income to count on. Fanny was already  his  bride;  a  marriage  certi?cate  would be  a  mere  formality.  She  knew  he  was pledged to supporting her children as his own once he had his sea legs in publishing. Why, then, was she saying a union was out of the question? Why now, after resisting Sam for so long, had she given in and returned to California?

He tried to put himself into Fanny’s shoes. Any woman in her position would be fearful. There was much to lose on a nameless chap like himself. Maybe she felt their di?erences were too great, that her very soul was at risk. He remembered something she’d said once: “I’m not remotely close to being Scottish or French, Louis. I’m made from different clay.”
God knows there  have  been enough missteps on my part to frighten her away. The bottlesmashing scene in the café hadn’t helped his cause. He cringed at the memory of another moment. Early on during their time together in Paris, they were in a carriage when one of his fits of laughter overtook him.

“Pull back my fingers,” he had said to her between gasps. “I won’t,” she replied. “Now stop this nonsense.”

Louis’s voice kept rising as he laughed. “Dammit, Fanny, bend my hand! I mean it! If you don’t, I shall bend yours back until I break every bone.” He grabbed her hand and did indeed bent back her fingers until they clearly hurt.

“Stop it!” she shouted. She pulled his hand to her mouth and bit it hard, breaking the ?esh and causing him to cry out. The shock of seeing blood rise up out of his punctured skin had brought him to his senses.

What a stupid, immature fool I was! And yet she had not left him then. He’d asked her forgiveness, and she had given it.

In the weeks leading up to her departure, their life together in Paris had been heaven and hell. She’d con?ded to Louis that she was going to return soon to the U.S. so she could begin divorce proceedings. He was stunned but comforted himself with the thought, At last. The wheels are moving. As the days wore on, though, her intentions became less clear. She

seemed to be struggling mightily within herself. “You’re a dowie lass,” he said, “ain’t ye?” She admitted she was depressed. And then one day, as they sat in a café on Boulevard de Clichy, he saw a calmness come over her for no apparent reason. After that day, she turned her gaze to California with a stony resolve.

Belle, who had no idea that her mother was intent on moving them back, was stricken with anger and hurt, but Fanny seemed to ignore the girl’s pleadings. By the time Louis put her and the children on the train, headed for a steamer, Fanny was o?ering no him words of encouragement. Walking down the platform away from the train that day, he could not bring himself to look back at Sammy leaning out the window, waving to him with a small paper American flag that someone had given him.

turned his back to the couple’s bed and slept ?tfully. In the morning, the innkeeper’s husband, a simple, gentle man who once worked as a muleteer, fashioned a goad for Louis. “The problem, is she can’t feel your switches on her hide,” he said. The goad had a tiny metal  point,  only  an  eighth-inch  high,  whose  prick  was  all  the  motivation  Modestine needed to move.  “The goad is not the only thing,” the man said. He argued that Louis should discard the bulk of his sleeping sack and distribute the remaining weight evenly on her  back. “Do  you  see  how  hard  it  wears  on  her?”  the  man  asked  with  surprising compassion, given the metal point he had just honed. Indeed, Louis could see raw spots on the  mule’s  hindquarters.  Out  went  the  mutton,  the  empty  bottle,  the  white  bread  for himself.  He  kept  the  loaves  of  black  bread  to  feed  the  donkey.  After  that  adjustment, Modestine went on at a steady trot, with the help of the occasional prick. She was freer without the heavy load, and he felt a new sense of freedom, too, out in the cold air with miles ahead—free to walk, free to love, free to hope.

In the nights that followed, the sack he had concocted allowed him to sleep, in spite of roaring winds. He congratulated himself again on its cleverness: a six-foot-square bag made of green cart cloth on the outside and blue sheep’s fur inside that kept him warm and dry. The landscape began to work its spell on him. In the mornings, he woke with wonder at each new setting.

Near the end of his trip, he camped among a stand of pines. It was late by the time he fed the donkey and spread out his setup. The pines formed walls that encircled him, and the sky was a ceiling of jittering stars. He laughed to himself over his absurd meal: a bite of

Bologna sausage alternated with a bite of chocolate, washed down with sips from his single precious bottle of Beaujolais. He listened to the sound of water tripping over stones in a burn nearby, listened to the last calls of birds as darkness blacked out his sylvan room.
A year ago he had written an essay arguing that the best way to walk was alone. Who wanted  to  have  one’s  solitude  disturbed  by  someone  else’s  talk?  Lying  in  his  bag,  he thought it was a different man who had written those words.

Louis dug through his pack in the darkness, feeling for his journal and a taper he carried. He rolled over and struck a match. The brightness was sudden, almost alarming. He lit the candle and began to write.

I wish a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made  perfect. And to live  out of doors  with the  woman a man loves  is  of all lives  the  most complete and free.

That night, as on every night of his journey, he fell asleep with Fanny as his pillowthought. How happy they had been in Paris! Talking, laughing, walking together for hours through the streets until the night cast them into their bed, where they were happiest.
At sunrise, he reread what he had written so far during the journey and realized it was filled with private coded messages to her: I love you. I want you. Don’t forget. Don’t forget.
He tied up his pack and looked around at the green ?oor of the glade, and the walls of spired pines. It was one of the loveliest chambers in which he had ever passed a night, and it had been entirely free. He felt a sense of gratitude and debt to someone for the privilege of the accommodations. Louis reached into his knapsack and pulled out a handful of coins, then arranged them in a pile at the center of the room. Hopefully, they would fall into the unexpecting hands of someone in want of them.