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.
– Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey.

Do you enjoy travel books? Do you like camping? It's quite a grand old tradition, reading about travel, and you can pick up some good tips, too. Like, 'if your sleeping bag is too big to carry, why not take a donkey along?'

Robert Louis Stevenson invented the first sleeping bag known to modern travel literature. We would like to point out that RLS was a writer, not a product designer. This might account for the fact that his sleeping bag was six feet square, roomy but bulky. It was also lined with blue 'sheep's fur'¹. Whether the sheep were originally blue, or dye was involved, is not recorded. The logic behind the sleeping bag was this: Stevenson complained that if local people could tell he was on a camping trip, they'd drop in on his campsite at all hours of the night, and wake him up to talk. So the sleeping bag served a triple purpose: bed at night, luggage by day, and camouflage against nosy parkers.

How Stevenson met Modestine

Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was a young and relatively unknown writer in 1878, when he undertook his 12-day journey through the Cévennes region of France. In the 19th Century this area was rural, with sheep and cows predominating, but it had been the scene of some religious turbulence in the early 18th Century, and the author's route took him through an area in which Protestants and Catholics still did not mix cordially. It was also a place where some villagers were superstitious and afraid of strangers. He took a pistol along, although it was an antique and it was not clear what he thought he could do with it.

Stevenson liked to travel: it was good for his health, it took his mind off his complicated relationship with a married woman, and he made interesting acquaintances. One of these acquaintances was of the four-legged variety: Modestine the French donkey. Stevenson took an instant shine to her:

...a diminutive she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the colour of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw. There was something neat and high-bred, a quakerish elegance, about the rogue that hit my fancy on the spot.

After some haggling with the donkey's elderly owner, the camper bought her for 65 francs and a brandy. The sleeping bag had already cost '80 francs and two glasses of beer', so Modestine was cheaper. Stevenson reckoned that this was the way it should be, because the donkey was really 'only an appurtenance of my mattress, or self-acting bedstead on four castors.' Poor Modestine: only part of the furniture.

That's what he thought.

What Modestine Taught Stevenson

During the journey from Le Monastier² to St-Jean-du-Gard, Modestine taught Stevenson the following things:

• Donkeys can act. On their first day out, Modestine had the gullible Scotsman convinced that she couldn't walk any faster than, say, a grandmother with a walker. If he tried to hurry her, she would pant and shake. The soft-hearted pedestrian was resigned to reaching his goal sometime in 1879 – that is, until a savvy peasant came by and demonstrated how fast a donkey can run, quite happily, when given firm encouragement with a switch. Stevenson felt bad about hitting the little donkey across the hindquarters with a tree branch, but he did want to get to the next village before dark. Lessons learned: Donkeys are almost as sneaky as people, and you know what? You can actually learn things from foreigners.
• There is an art to everything. Even donkey-pushing. All that switching was tiring on the arm. The right tool for the job turned out to be a goad – a wooden rod with a sharp metal point on the end. Yes, people had known this for thousands of years (it's even in the Bible). But even modern people can learn occasionally. This simple bit of technology massively improves human-donkey communication. Modestine got the, er, point.
• Donkeys are cleverer than you give them credit for. For instance, they can tell the weather as well as a human. If the wind picks up, and the sky darkens, they walk faster to get to the next village.
• In an argument with a donkey, you won't win unless you're bigger, and possibly stronger, than the donkey. It was only by pushing and shoving that Stevenson often got his bossy quadruped to use the 'short cuts' he'd mapped out, rather than the more sensible road. Even the goad failed here, and he had to heave the protesting Modestine up the hills. She was probably thinking, 'But there's a perfectly good road, you Scots idiot...'
• Donkeys are realists. While the locals feared the 'Beast of Gévaudan', a wolf, or pack of wolves, that had killed scores of people a hundred years previously, Modestine was unconcerned. Either she had a better calendar, or she didn't smell any ravening wolves.
• You never know how much someone means to you until they're gone. More than one French person had assured Stevenson that he'd fall in love with that donkey – that within a few days, she'd be like a dog to him. The author believed himself to be made of sterner stuff than that. Okay, she was pretty. Okay, it was cute when she ate out of his hand. But he was in a hurry to get home on the stagecoach, and he, practical Briton that he was, was perfectly content to sell Modestine for 35 francs and no beverages, and cherish his freedom as he sauntered away. Adieu, Modestine.
  And then it hit him...
  

  For twelve days we had been fast companions; we had travelled upwards of a hundred and twenty miles, crossed several respectable ridges, and jogged along with our six legs by many a rocky and many a boggy by-road. After the first day, although sometimes I was hurt and distant in manner, I still kept my patience; and as for her, poor soul! she had come to regard me as a god. She loved to eat out of my hand. She was patient, elegant in form, the colour of an ideal mouse, and inimitably small. Her faults were those of her race and sex; her virtues were her own. Farewell, and if for ever –
  Father Adam wept when he sold her to me; after I had sold her in my turn, I was tempted to follow his example; and being alone with a stage-driver and four or five agreeable young men, I did not hesitate to yield to my emotion.

Perhaps Modestine's greatest accomplishment in life was that she'd made a hard-hearted Scotsman cry. Good for her.

We hope the next owner didn't have a sleeping bag.