Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo (French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, V. 13)

Walking and the French Romantics: Rousseau to Sand and Hugo

C. W. Thompson

PETER LANG

Walking and the French Romantics

FRENCHSTUDIES of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Edited by: Professor Malcolm Cook and Dr James Kearns, Department of French, University of Exeter Volume 13

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien

C. W. Thompson

Walking and the French Romantics Rousseau to Sand and Hugo

PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at ‹http://dnb.ddb.de›. British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA

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ISSN 1422-7320 ISBN 3-03910-078-5 US-ISBN 0-8204-6894-0

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For Jacquie

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Contents

Abbreviations Preface

9 11

Part I Walking and the French before and after 1800

17

Walking and Romanticism

25

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

27

Étienne Pivert de Senancour

31

French Romanticism from Charles Nodier to George Sand

39

Charles Didier

63

Part II Introduction

71

George Sand

73

Gérard de Nerval

95

Victor Hugo

107

Rodolphe Töpffer

129

Conclusion

143

Select Bibliography

145

Index

157

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Abbreviations

O.A.

George Sand, Œuvres autobiographiques, ed. Georges Lubin, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970–1971, 2 vols.

O.C.

Gérard de Nerval, Œuvres complètes, eds. Jean Guillaume and Claude Pichois, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1989–1993, 3 vols.

O.P.C.

Alphonse de Lamartine, Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. Marie-François Guyard, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963.

Corr.

George Sand, Correspondance, ed. Georges Lubin, Paris, Garnier, 1964–1991.

V.Z.

Rodolphe Töpffer, Voyages en zigzag, Paris, Dubochet, 1844.

N.V.Z.

Rodolphe Töpffer, Nouveaux Voyages en zigzag, Paris, Victor Lecou, 1854.

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Preface

French Romantics wrote more travel books than their fellows in England and Germany and celebrated in their fifty-odd volumes the same pleasures of liberty, change, variety and reverie which Romantics everywhere recognized in travel.1 But did the French also walk as enthusiastically as the Lake poets and the young writers of Jena, Heidelberg, Dresden and Berlin? Did they too find in the adventures of the road the inspiration and an essential figure for innumerable stories, poems and lieder – those quintessential expressions of Romantic musicality so often centred on a wanderer? Despite the importance to Romanticism of journeying and the sense of movement, the question seems never to have been asked, nor indeed is there any history of rambling in nineteenth-century France. This is no doubt because all recognize the exceptional hold that Paris had on French literary culture and the comparative slowness of the French as a whole to take, for instance, to the Alps, let alone to any new fashion for ‘pedestrianism’. A detailed exploration of the subject reveals, however, more country walks by writers than are at first apparent, and more successful literary uses than one might imagine of the figure of the walker. How then to approach such a study? In England, a small country, there was at the end of the eighteenth century a notable cult of pedestrianism to which many writers openly subscribed for political as well as poetic reasons and as a result historians of English Romanticism have paid attention to the practice of writers as well as to literary uses of the theme.2 For equally good historical reasons,

1

2

For a bibliography, see Friedrich Wolfzettel, Ce Désir de vagabondage cosmopolite. Wege und Entwicklung des französischen Reiseberichts im 19. Jahrhundert, Tübingen, Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986. For the British Romantics and walking, see Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture. The Origins and Use of Peripatetic in the

Germans have felt able to take for granted the country walking of their authors and to concentrate on the literary study of relevant prose and verse, irrespective of writers’ practices.3 And this seems all the more justified in that there is of course a long tradition of literary and philosophical walks which goes back beyond Petrarch to Plato, and that the quality of the works produced in this vein by German writers encourages critics to focus on textual analysis in the light of this tradition, without regard to concomitant biographical and social realities. But in the case of French Romanticism, where the silence of historians on the slow growth of walking for pleasure makes it hard to take writers’ practice for granted or to follow the evolution of French readers’ expectations, analysis of texts needs to be supplemented. This study will therefore be concerned with the social history and realities of walking as well as with the critical reading of relevant novels, travel books and poetry. And this seems all the more necessary in that some critics have chosen to highlight censoriously that both Hugo and Sand told of walks which they never did and of distances which they could hardly have covered. But what is interesting about such pretences is not of course the petty deceit but what they reveal about the imaginations at work and about the various considerations which were then shaping the authors’ writing. Ultimately, a key aspect of all Romantic creation which must not be lost from sight is the tension between their belief in the rights of the imagination and their thirst for real experience.

3

12

Nineteenth Century, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1993, and Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, London, Macmillan, 1997. For the German Romantics and walking, see Angelika Wellmann, Der Spaziergang. Stationen eines poetischen Codes, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1991; Wolfgang Riebel, ‘Der Spaziergang’. Ästhetik der Landschaft und Geschichtsphilosophie der Natur bei Schiller, Würzburg, Königshausen und Neumann, 1989; Thomas Koebner, ‘Versuch über den literarischen Spaziergang’, in Wolfgang Adam ed., Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert. Facetten einer Epoche, Heidelberg, Carl Winter Universitäts Verlag, 1988, 39–76; K. Wölfel, ‘Kosmopolitische Einsamkeit. Über den Spaziergang als poetische Handlung’, Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft, 15 (1980), 28–54, and ‘Andeutende Materialen zu einer Poetik des Spaziergangs von Kafka’s Frühwerk zu Goethes Werther’, in T. Elm and G. Hemmerich eds., Zur Geschichtlichkeit der Moderne, Munich, W. Fink, 1982, 69–90.

The story of this branch of travel to which French Romantics responded apparently with less enthusiasm than their English and German counterparts is in any case significant in view of their overabundant production of travel narratives of other sorts.4 For this does not only tell us much about the long-term cultural triumph in France of the progressively minded city flâneur and of urban Bohemianism over more rural sentimental dreams. This different balance of activities and production among French writers also suggests a greater hunger for the obviously exotic as one result for urban readers of the collapse of their Empire. The wish of readers, specially Parisians, to be taken by prestigious authors to Italy, Germany, Spain and the Middle East seems to have been far stronger than any desire for armchair walking. Two other features of this study call for special comment. The first is the decision to include two writers who are Swiss and arguably tangential to Romanticism in France (Sainte-Beuve spoke of Töpffer as ‘en réaction contre la littérature française de la capitale’).5 However it was in Paris that Didier and Töpffer chose to publish their exploits and their presence on this scene is so marked that omitting them seems historically wrong – quite apart from the comparisons they offer which highlight the particular character of French pedestrian literature. The second is that in this study there will be no attempt to add to the innumerable distinctions which one might apply to walking.6 It is mainly concerned with longer walks in the country, from one-day jaunts to stiffer hikes, and the distinctions needed for the book will become clear as the story unfolds.

4 5 6

This study springs from a larger work in progress on French Romantic travel writing as a whole. Sainte-Beuve, ‘Notice sur Töpffer considéré comme paysagiste’, reproduced at the head of the Nouveaux Voyages en zigzag (1854). See for instance, Jean Grenier, ‘La promenade’, Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française, 12, 143 (1 novembre 1964), 818–828.

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Part I

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Walking and the French before and after 1800

By the end of the eighteenth century, the French had acquired the reputation of being ‘the most stationary people upon earth’, in the famous words of the agronomist Arthur Young.1 This was a view of their stay-at-home character and apparent reluctance to travel anywhere that would be praised and blamed by Anglo-Saxon visitors long into the nineteenth century.2 The very size of the country which so impressed foreigners obviously fostered such sedentariness and the excellent highways which had been built to serve the government and cities did little to ease traffic in the great and seemingly empty spaces separating these arteries, whether wild or cultivated.3 Roger Thabault’s evocation of the miserable roads and tracks serving a village in the Gâtinais is eloquent on the subject: in 1849 a tilbury was to be the first vehicle there designed for transporting people.4 It is not surprising that until the 1820s it was still rare in summer, either for the rich to venture far beyond their country homes established close to towns, or for the modestly off to spend on inconvenient transport beyond the nearest meadows and inns. And it has even been possible to show that in painting, such was the pull of Paris and Versailles and so varied and unfamilar the nation’s geography that it was not until

1 2

3

4

Travels during the Years 1787, 1788 and 1789, Bury St. Edmunds, J. Rackham, 1792, I, 61 and 8, 11, 21, 38–39, 40, 56. Donald Grant Mitchell, Fresh Gleanings (1847), quoted by G. de Bertier de Sauvigny in La France et les Français vus par les voyageurs américains. 1814– 1848, Paris, Flammarion, 1985, II, 24–25. Ibid., I, 304–305 and Thomas Frognall Dibdin, A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, London, Shakespeare Press, 1821, 3 vols, I, 258. Roger Thabault, Mon village. Ses hommes, ses routes, son école, Paris, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1993 [1943], 59–60.

after 1830 that France belatedly acquired a notion of its ‘national landscape’.5 Nevertheless, Young had exaggerated somewhat the sedentary character of the French, being mainly concerned with trade as reflected in the number of vehicles and not with the various movements on foot of peasants, labourers, tradesmen and the poor. These woodcutters, carpenters, hunters, chimney sweeps, booksellers, showmen, pilgrims, soldiers, itinerant tradesmen and compagnons doing their tour de France moved in any case as much on the paths and tracks which served the real needs of the countryside as on the highways used by Young, as George Sand remembered and Eugen Weber has stressed.6 So extensive indeed was the movement on foot in France that little shame was attached to it as Wordsworth and the Shelleys were pleased to note7 and young bourgeois did not hesitate to travel on foot when necessary in the recollections of Michelet, Quinet 5

6

7

18

Such as had long been formed by the Dutch and the British. See Françoise Cachin, ‘Le Paysage du peintre’, in Pierre Nora ed., Les Lieux de mémoire, Paris, Gallimard-Quarto, 1997, I, 957–996. In Nanon, Sand wrote: ‘nous avons, nous autres Marchois, un sens particulier pour voyager à vol d’oiseau. Il n’y a pas bien longtemps que nos émigrations d’ouvriers allaient encore ainsi à Paris et dans toutes les grandes villes […] Avant les chemins de fer, on les rencontrait par grandes ou petites bandes sur tout le territoire, et, comme ils passaient partout à travers champs, on s’en plaignait beaucoup’ (Meylan, Les Éditions de l’Aurore, 1987, 143). See Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen. The Modernization of Rural France, 1870– 1914, Stanford, Stanford UP, 1976, 195–198 and the evocation of an annual migration of masons in Jean Anglade, Le Massif Central au XIXe siècle, Paris, Hachette, 1996, 40–45. William to Dorothy: ‘we had not once [to complain of] the smallest deficiency of courtesy in any person, much less of any positive rudeness’ (6 September 1790. The Early Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1935, 35); Shelley, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (London, Hookham, 1817), 13, 16–17. It is true that in 1840, when making a virtue of necessity by completing on foot part of the journey back from Vienna to Strasbourg, Nerval asked Alphonse Karr not to broadcast the fact, but that can be ascribed to Nerval’s insecurity and in any case, by 1852 he felt able to exploit the issue in Lorely for ironic effect (Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Guillaume and Jean Pichois, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1989–1993, I, 1347; III, 20–21).

and Dumas.8 Such walkers mostly lacked perhaps the stamina of a Berlioz capable in 1831 of choosing to hike the whole way from Naples to Rome,9 but painters for instance were a significant group of educated young with a long tradition of going far on foot to attractive sites and even to Italy.10 Their contribution to the eventual development in Hugo of a literary pedestrianism will prove significant. Moreover, even by the time of Arthur Young’s tours, the taste for rural pleasures which Rousseau, The Sorrows of Young Werther and English literature had made fashionable had already increased the numbers going for short country walks, even if for Parisians these were limited at first to the immediate country, still rural enough in 1826–1827 to surprise Hazlitt and Fenimore Cooper.11 The disruptions of the Revolution and Empire had further familiarized many with the rather different habits of the English, Germans and Americans and

8

9

10

11

Michelet, Ma Jeunesse, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1884, 273, 307; Quinet, Introduction by Willy Aeschimann to La Grèce moderne et ses rapports avec l’antiquité, Paris, Société d’Edition ‘Les Belles Lettres’, 1984, XV–XVI; Dumas, Mes Mémoires, ed. Claude Schopp and Pierre Josserand, Paris, Laffont, 1989, II, 858, 867–868. Taking a route via Subiaco of more than 240 kilometres. See David Cairns, Berlioz, London, Penguin, 2000, I, 519–521. Berlioz’s prowess as a walker reminds us too that it was not so long since the composer Grétry walked from Liège to Rome in 1759 to complete his education (Alexis Belloc, La Manière de voyager autrefois et de nos jours, Paris, Delagrave, 1904, 227). So in 1817 Michallon is known to have tramped through Normandy and in 1820 Gigoux went from Besançon on foot to Switzerland and the Savoy. See Jacques Lethève, La Vie quotidienne des artistes français au XIXe siècle, Paris, Hachette, 1968, 99–103; Marcia Poynton, The Bonington Circle. English Watercolour and French Landscape, 1790–1855, Brighton, The Hendon Press, 1985, 48, 59; Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, London, Phaidon, l971, 47. Daniel Mornet, Le Sentiment de la nature en France, de J.-J. Rousseau à Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Paris, Hachette, 1907. Madame Roland, for instance, was always to return when she could to the walks she had done as a girl at Meudon (ibid., 105–106). For Cooper’s walk round Paris, see G. de Bertier de Sauvigny, op. cit., I, 303, and for Hazlitt’s surprise, see his Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (Collected Works, ed. A.R. Waller and Arnold Glover, London, Dent, 1903), IX, 158 (Chapter X).

19

taught some just how far one can walk when there is no choice.12 Another factor making for the spread of more energetic habits at the turn of the century was of course the fashion for the mountainous sublime which had swept Europe since Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse and helped the Swiss, Germans and English to introduce the French to that taste for hill-walking which they had been the first to indulge in the Alps and Pyrenees. Few French would then have endorsed the onslaught of Chateaubriand on walking over ‘inhuman’ rocks as a materialist fashion,13 and most were thoroughly enthused by the climbing of Mont-Blanc (1786), by the pioneering studies of Bourrit, de Saussure and Ramond de Carbonnières and by travel books such as William Coxe’s Voyage en Suisse (1789).14 The French, preoccupied as they were by revolution and empire, might have been late in flocking to the mountains, but they too absorbed in turn the impact of Macpherson’s Ossian, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and Byron’s Manfred and Childe Harold. Between 1800 and 1850 nearly 500 books were published in France on the Alps.15 In literature, the gain for walking would soon be reflected in the botanical and entomological rambles of the young Nodier in the hills of the Jura (1794–1802) and in Senancour’s Oberman of 1804.16 12

13

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15

16

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Such as Chateaubriand wounded at the siege of Thionville and fleeing through the Ardennes (Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 1ère partie, livres IX, ch. 16 and X, ch. 1). ‘Mais les montagnes sont le séjour de la rêverie? j’en doute; je doute qu’on puisse rêver lorsque la promenade est une fatigue; lorsque l’attention que vous êtes obligé de donner à vos pas occupe entièrement votre esprit’ (‘Voyage au Mont-Blanc’ [1805], Œuvres complètes, XIII, Paris, Pourrat, 1836, 137). H.B. de Saussure, Voyage dans les Alpes, Neuchâtel, S. Fauche, 1779–1796; M.-Th. Bourrit, Nouvelle Description des glacières et glaciers de Savoye, Geneva, P. Barde, 1785; L. Ramond de Carbonnières, Observations faites dans les Pyrenées pour servir à des observations sur les Alpes, in Lettres de W. Coxe sur la Suisse, Paris, Belin, 1789 and Voyages au Mont-Perdu, Paris, Belin, 1801. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, Les Alpes romantiques. Le Thème des Alpes dans la littérature française de 1800 à 1850, 2 vols, Geneva, Slatkine, 1981, I, 206– 207. Nodier, Correspondance de jeunesse, ed. J.-R. Dahan, Geneva, Droz, 1995, I, 55, 58, 117, 174, 184.

A few years on, after Waterloo, transport from the capital to favourite places for walking began to improve, from the introduction in 1816 of steam boats to Montereau to the building in 1837 of a railway to Saint-Germain. The population of Paris kept growing, as did the number of bourgeois maisons de campagne and popular bals, guingettes and auberges outside the city walls, generating what Rodolphe Töpffer was to call ‘le champêtre municipal’.17 Senancour’s haunting of Fontainebleau and gripes about vulgar trippers there in 1804 had been early signs of developments which would eventually lead over thirty years later to Denecourt’s opening of new paths and vistas in the forest.18 The story is well known, and we simply need to remind ourselves that where the capital was concerned such pressures outwards were at work in every direction, towards Meudon and SaintCloud as towards Montmorency, Enghien, Romainville and Sceaux.19 The importance of fresh air and exercise had increasingly been stressed by doctors since the eighteenth century,20 and slowly, very slowly, the extreme confinement still characteristic of most French schooling in the early part of the century was to be modified in the interest of regular holidays and occasional excursions to the country.21 A telling indication of the steady spread of pedestrianism in the first two decades of the century is the engaging record, published 17

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Voyages en zigzag, Paris, Dubochet, 1844, 274. In 1819, his own Sunday walks in Paris had often been beyond the barrières (Paul Chaponnière, Notre Töpffer, Lausanne, Payot, 1930, 41–42). Oberman (1804), Letter XXII (ed. André Monglond, Grenoble/Paris, B. Arthaud, 1947), I, 98. See Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature, Manchester University Press, 1990, 84–89, 171–178 and C.F. Denecourt’s Guide du voyageur dans la forêt de Fontainebleau, ou choix des promenades les plus pittoresques, Paris, Delauny; Fontainebleau, chez l’auteur, 1840. Cf. E. Jouy, L’Ermite de la Chaussée d’Antin, Paris, Pillet, 1815, II, 212–221 ‘La partie de campagne’; Émile de Labédollière, Histoire des environs du nouveau Paris, Paris, Barba, 1861. P.F. Vidalin, Traité d’hygiène domestique redigé d’après les principes de la doctrine physiologique, Paris, Delaunay, 1825, 243–244 ‘De la marche’. See also Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et la jonquille, Paris, Flammarion ‘Champs’, 1986 and Le Territoire du vide, Paris, Flammarion ‘Champs’, 1988. See André Rauch, who signals key developments in 1834 and 1838 in his Vacances en France de 1830 à nos jours, Paris, Hachette, 1996, 60–63.

21

anonymously in 1819, of a partly walked tour undertaken by the young son, father and grandfather of a middle-class Parisian family to Beauvais, Dieppe, Rouen and back.22 While not devoid of the conservative and improving intentions which would continue to mark much of such writing for the young throughout the century,23 this narrative is full of lively detail about travel on foot at the time, and testifies amply to the growing taste for walking for pleasure among respectable classes. Another sign confirming the trend is the translation and popularity of such English works as T.C. Grattan’s Contes sur les grandes et petites routes, par un voyageur à pied, revealingly still celebrated in the entry on ‘sentiers’ in Pierre Larousse’s Grande Encyclopédie du XIXe siècle.24 The Anglomania of the 1830s which would encourage sports and the keeping of pets gave a further boost to the fashion, and practical advice on suitable clothing and boots for rougher terrains was increasingly disseminated by such as J.G. Ebel in his Manuel du voyageur en Suisse, translated in 1805 and reprinted eight times by 1835: il vaut toujours mieux encore porter l’espèce de souliers de montagnes dont nous allons parler […] Les semelles de ces souliers doivent avoir au moins six lignes d’épaisseur. L’empeigne qui doit être d’un cuir fort mais souple, et recouvrir tout les dessus du pied, sera recouverte tout autour d’une bande de cuir d’un pouce à un pouce et demi de hauteur, afin de prémunir d’autant mieux les pieds contre le danger des chocs. Il ne faut pas souffrir que les coutures intérieures fassent la moindre saillie; car il n’en faut pas davantage pour fouler le pied, ou écorcher la peau. Il conviendra d’essayer ces souliers, de s’y accoutumer en s’en servant pour quelques longues promenades avant de se mettre en route. Au moment de partir, on se pourvoira de trois douzaines de 22 23

24

22

M***, Le Premier Voyage d’un parisien, ou Promenade d’un écolier en vacances, à Beauvais, Dieppe, Le Havre, Rouen, Paris, Nepveu, 1819. From Eugène Genoude’s Voyage dans la Vendée et dans le midi de la France (1821) and Rodolphe Töpffer’s Voyages en zigzag (1843–1844) to Augustine Fouillée’s famous Le Tour de France par deux enfants (1877). Didier Masseau insists a little one-sidedly in Le Voyage en France on the didactic and propagandistic side of Le Premier Voyage d’un parisien, missing entirely the interest of the text for the unwritten history of French walking (eds. J.M. Goulemot, P. Lidsky, D. Masseau, Paris, Laffont, 1997, II, 717–718). ‘traduit de l’anglais sur la troisième édition par le traducteur des romans de sir Walter Scott’, 3 vols, Paris, Haut-Cœur et Gayet jeune, 1825.

gros clous d’acier dont les points soient à vis, et dont les têtes larges au moins de quatre lignes et demie forment une large pyramide tronquée à quatre faces, avec une fente profonde au milieu, comme en est fait toujours une sur la tête de sa vis. On fait entrer douze de ces clous dans la semelle de chaque soulier, en les plaçant à intervalles égaux […] Dans les intervalles que ces clous d’acier laissent entre eux, on a coutume de planter une rangée de clous ordinaires à large tête, assez près les uns des autres pour se toucher tous. Ces souliers-là sont également propres à assurer les pas des voyageurs sur les granits, sur la glace et sur l’herbe glissante; ils sont solides et ne sont nullement incommodes.25

By the time that Rodolphe Töpffer’s first Voyages en zigzag appeared in 1843–1844, the French middle classes had nearly caught up with the nineteenth-century vogue for pedestrianism.

25

Manuel du voyageur en Suisse (Paris, Renouard, 2nd edition in 4 vols, 1805) I, 63–65.

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Walking and Romanticism

The interest of the French Romantics in walking followed the pace of this slow development and echoed its main features. Some had been brought up deep in the country, notably Nodier, Sand and Lamartine, but for the others it was through the environs of Paris that they discovered it, with visits to the Alps and Pyrenees as decisive experiences for Hugo and Sand in 1825 and later for Dumas.1 Political troubles had delayed the general growth of Romanticism in France, but there were also particular factors which militated against any specially rapid and decisive involvement of young French writers in walking. Unlike English and German universities, the French produced no sub-culture of rambling such as had encouraged Wordsworth to tour France on foot and such as would suggest to Heine a ‘Harzreise’ after Göttingen. Nor had France seen anything similar to the eighteenth-century enclosures in Britain which prompted ‘political’ walking among English Romantics in defence of public footpaths and rights of way.2 Granted, the Restoration years were to see the beginnings in France of increasing regulation and control of the countryside which did eventually produce popular protests about evictions from woods and common grounds.3 But footpaths were not 1

2 3

Hugo, ‘Fragment d’un voyage aux Alpes’, Revue de Paris, 5 (August 1829), 289–318; ‘Fragment d’un voyage aux Alpes (août 1825)’, Revue des deux mondes, 3 (1831), 393–402. Sand, Œuvres autobiographiques (O.A.), ed. Georges Lubin, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970–1971, II, 58–72 (Histoire de ma vie; the account is based on a contemporary diary). Dumas, Impressions de voyage [Suisse], 1834. On the walking of English Romantics and the great enclosures, see Wallace, op. cit., 67–71, 114–118, and Jarvis, op. cit., 33–34, 128. See Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites. The War of the Demoiselles in NineteenthCentury France, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U.P., 1994. For the laws and customs concerning footpaths and tracks of all sorts in France, see Auguste Bourguignat, Traité complet du droit rural appliqué, Paris, Ve BouchardHuzard, 1852.

such a crucial issue in France and Parisian writers seem to have been largely unaware of such protests. Their later occasional comparison of themselves on the road to compagnons was to have more to do with sentimental affectations of solidarity with artisans and of ‘Bohemian’ freedom than with committed protest. Altogether, the effect of these factors was that none of them undertook the sort of lengthy tours which held no fears for Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt and De Quincey or, for that matter, for Charles Didier when walking in 1827– 1830 round the heel and toe of Italy, inspired by the habits of his native Switzerland.4 That narrative of a gruelling encounter with a profoundly alien land while fighting off depression was to have no parallel in France for many years to come. Altogether, it is not too surprising that whereas by the late 1780s the fashion for walking was firmly established among English and German writers, in France the Romantic movement, when it finally arrived, was not to focus until much later, indeed until towards the end of the 1830s, on what was still culturally such a marginal activity.5 Not too surprising, that is, except for one thing: that in Rousseau French literature had had the figure who was for all Europeans the most significant ideologist of walking for pleasure, and in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Senancour, Restif de la Bretonne, Louis Sébastien Mercier and Charles Nodier followers well placed to build on and transmit his enthusiasm for real and literary pedestrianism to the coming Romantic generations.

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A text first published as separate chapters in the collective Italie pittoresque published in 1834–1836 by J.M. de Norvins, C. Nodier, A. Dumas, C. Didier, et al. (Paris, Amable Costes, 1834–1836). It has recently been assembled for the first time as a book by Annie Brudo under the title Voyage en Italie (Paris and Geneva, Slatkine, ‘Fleuron’, 1996). None of them could have written like Peacock to Thomas Jefferson Hogg that ‘a due mixture of tea Greek and pedestrianism’ constitute the ‘summum bonum’ (N.A. Joukovsky ed., Letters of Thomas Love Peacock, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001, I, 116)!

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau’s ‘manie ambulante’ is well known and the importance of the Confessions, the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire and Émile for the practice and writing of walking for pleasure would not need to be stressed, but for the desirability of highlighting here the many features which would recur in French Romantic walking: La chose que je regrette le plus dans les détails de ma vie dont j’ai perdu la mémoire est de n’avoir pas fait des journaux de mes voyages. Jamais je n’ai tant pensé, tant existé, tant vécu, tant été moi, si j’ose ainsi dire, que dans ceux que j’ai faits seul et à pied. La marche a quelque chose qui anime et avive mes idées: je ne puis presque penser quand je reste en place; il faut que mon corps soit en branle pour y mettre mon esprit. La vue de la campagne, la succession des aspects agréables, le grand air, le grand appétit, la bonne santé que je gagne en marchant, la liberté du cabaret, l’éloignement de tout ce qui me fait sentir ma dépendance, de tout ce qui me rappelle à ma situation, tout cela dégage mon âme, me donne une plus grande audace de penser, me jette en quelque sorte dans l’immensité des êtres pour les combiner, les choisir, me les approprier à mon gré sans gêne et sans crainte. Je dispose en maître de la nature entière; mon cœur […] s’enivre de sentiments délicieux. Si pour les fixer je m’amuse à les décrire en moi-même, quelle vigueur de pinceau […] quelle énergie d’expression je leur donne!1

The passage is justly famous, and its themes echo in numerous pages of the Confessions.2 Here is the exhilaration of a consciousness freed from concern with others and stimulated by bodily movement to expand and master the world in imagination. Here is the experience of a self responding intensely to the successive encounters of a walk and prompted by them to thought and words. The Rêveries were to elaborate on this and on Rousseau’s inability to meditate otherwise than on the move – ‘ma tête ne va qu’avec mes pieds’ as he put it 1 2

Les Confessions, in Œuvres complètes I, ed. Marcel Raymond, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959, 162. Ibid., 54, 58–59, 158, 172, 388, 394, 641.

elsewhere – his eye repeatedly alerted to the diversity of nature and his mind jogged by the rhythm of his walk into creative associations of words and images.3 Now one can argue about the amount of real day-dreaming, as opposed to contentious wrangling, that actually occurs in the Rêveries, and even about the amount of precise attention paid to the physical experience of walking in a text where going for a stroll is as much an activity of the mind and of language ranging at will through time and space as the tangible experience of moving through a particular place. But there is no disputing the impetus given by Rousseau to solitary travel on foot as an ideal for all those, especially artists and writers, suffering conflicts with the world. Everywhere in art and literature the twin figures of the writer as country walker and of the country walker as reader began to multiply. And thanks to his writings walking would increasingly be seen all over Europe as an important way of reconciling spirit and body, thought and feeling, past and present, self and everyday nature, and of recovering something of that original unity supposedly known by ‘primitive’ man and by children. And if there was a risk of solipsism here, it was compensated for in the seventh Promenade and Émile ou de l’éducation by Rousseau’s passion for botany and by his insistence on all that travel could teach about the everyday world: Voyager à pied, c’est voyager comme Thalès, Platon et Pythagore. J’ai peine à comprendre comment un philosophe peut se résoudre à voyager autrement, et s’arracher à l’examen des richesses qu’il foule aux pieds […] Qui est-ce qui, ayant un peu de goût pour l’histoire naturelle, peut se résoudre à passer un terrain sans l’examiner, un rocher sans l’écorner, des montagnes sans herboriser, des cailloux sans chercher des fossiles?4

At the end of the century, the perambulations of Sébastien Mercier and Restif de la Bretonne would owe much to Rousseau, and in Switzerland Jean-Henri Pestalozzi would transmitt to Rodolphe Töpffer, author of the famous Voyages en zigzag, his stress on

3 4

28

Ibid., 410. Émile ou de l’éducation, ed. François et Pierre Richard, Paris, Garnier, 1961, 523.

walking as essential for a rounded education.5 Even for ordinary Parisians, memories of Rousseau were to shape the choice of Montmorency, Ermenonville and Enghien as favourite places to walk near Paris. A marvellous guide of 1807, J.-L. Thuillier’s Le Botaniste voyageur aux environs de Paris, would give an excellent map and directions as to where specific plants were to be found, and when they would be in flower.6 But for this study it is perhaps most useful to stress the directness of Rousseau’s impact on the actions and writings of the authors who most concern us. It is not just that Nodier’s early botanizing walks in the Jura and George Sand’s at Nohant would hardly have happened without Rousseau and his pupil Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, or that Hugo reminded Vigny of Jean-Jacques when in 1821 he walked the 80 kilometres from Paris to Dreux in pursuit of Adèle.7 More important is that four of the key texts for Romantic walking – Hugo’s letter XX in Le Rhin, Nerval’s Sylvie and Promenades et souvenirs and George Sand’s portrayal of Consuelo’s trek to Vienna – are shaped by an acute awareness of the Rêveries and the Confessions. Some writers were of course closer than others to Rousseau’s love of walking as a way to take stock of one’s self and its experience of time and the diversity of life (Senancour, Nerval and Maurice de Guérin). Some were more extrovert in their walking, whether in search of ‘sublime’ dramas or more absorbed in the strangeness of nature and of others (Nodier, Hugo and Sand). But all responded to the element of revolt against urban civilization in 5

6

7

Rousseau was of course not the first to stress the importance of physical education, but of the influence of Émile there can be no doubt. See Louis Burgener, L’Éducation corporelle selon Rousseau et Pestalozzi, Paris, Vrin, 1973. Paris, Pillot jeune, 1807. He recommends the ‘herborisations publiques’ given from spring to autumn by ‘le c. Jussieu […] le jeudi chaque semaine, tantôt le matin seulement, tantôt la journée entière’ in the outskirts (Xn–XIn). This Jussieu was presumably the celebrated botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu (1748–1836) of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle who had apparently requested publicity for the walks. According to Quérard and Michaud, the knowledgeable but uneducated gardener, collector and florist Jean-Louis Thuillier (1757–1822) was given help to produce his books, notably by Louis-Claude-Marie Richard. Letter to Hugo of 8 August 1821 (Correspondance d’Alfred de Vigny, ed. Madeleine Ambrière, Paris, P.U.F. 1989, 66–68).

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Rousseau’s wanderings, and to the random freedom they celebrated of thought, memory and desire. Moreover, the fact that Rousseau had written in prose contributed to the Romantics’ preference for that form when evoking walks, and the loose, fragmentary and digressive pattern for which walking is a model in the Rêveries determined the shape of much ‘pedestrian’ writing by Hugo, Nerval and Sand. It is even possible that the very prestige of Rousseau’s texts as the canonical scriptures of walking persuaded French Romantics initially that no further manifestos were needed.

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Étienne Pivert de Senancour

If in Rousseau walking was always portrayed in a more or less positive light, his admirer Senancour seems mostly to have had recourse to it in utter desperation at his own loss of all certainty. Walking was nevertheless at the centre of Senancour’s view of the world, ever since childhood summers at Ermenonville and Fontainebleau and later stays in the Alps. Thanks to these early experiences as well as to the ideas he absorbed from Rousseau and Ramond de Carbonnières, the young Senancour set out with high hopes of roaming.1 But so precarious was his sense of his own unity, so tenuous his hold on the solidity of the world, so constant his veering between hope and despair, illusion and scepticism, that ultimately what movement on foot could bring was no more (and no less) than the best relief available for the unbearable tension he felt between the reassuring attractions of stasis and the residual need to move.2 So developing from an early blend of sceptical materialism and affective Sturm und Drang to a conservative mysticism close to Ballanche, Senancour endlessly retrod his walks and re-worked the representation of them in successive editions of his writings. This and the fragmentary nature of his works make it almost impossible to follow the twists and turns of his thinking and that undoubtedly set a limit to the influence he was to have when Sainte-Beuve, Nodier and George Sand succeeded in relaunching Oberman in the 1830s. Their rediscovery of Senancour nevertheless helps to mark the years when more adventurous walking began to be more fashionable for Romantic 1

2

As is made clear in Oberman (1804, ed. André Monglod, Grenoble/Paris, B. Arthaud, 1947), I, 15–16 (letter III). When young, Senancour had hoped to travel beyond Switzerland to ‘exotic’ countries. On Senancour see Marcel Raymond, Senancour. Sensations et révélations (Paris, J. Corti, 1965), Béatrice Le Gall, L’Imaginaire chez Senancour (Paris, J. Corti, 1966) and André Monglond, Le Journal intime d’Oberman (Grenoble/Paris, B. Arthaud, 1947).

writers and this troubled figure is in other ways too an essential link in this development. For the connection in his work between walking and retrieving the past reinforced the association created by Rousseau between walking and a tragic awareness of time which we shall see Hugo, Nerval and Musset express. And the potential conservatism of pedestrianism which becomes so manifest in Senancour’s work as a whole was undoubtedly an issue of which writers would become aware. Like the Romantics, Senancour and his alter ego Oberman felt that a crucial attraction of travel was the stripping down to essentials and testing one’s capacity to act.3 For him as for them, solitude was therefore an important promise of all travel and especially of walking, but in other respects his experience of walks took a particular tragic form. For in Senancour there combined disastrously the pretension to be a sage and a prophet with constant doubts and hesitations which kept undermining his search for the primitive order of nature and the hidden harmonies of the world. The resulting conflict was explored in his and Oberman’s repeated failures to keep hold both on the revelations of the Alps and even at times on such consolations as were subsequently offered by the Fontainebleau forest. In order to bring out the most enduring features of Senancour’s walking it is useful to recall first the contradictions in his childhood experiences which he made creative use of in Letters XI–XV of Oberman, set in Fontainebleau. From 1784 to 1788 Senancour had spent his summers happily at Ermenonville and then Fontainebleau, but those early memories conflicted with the more unsatisfactory impressions made by the forest on him on his return from Switzerland in 1797–1798, a disenchantment appropriately exploited for the purposes of the novel.4 Sometime later there seems to have been another three-year stay by the forest which proved somewhat more comforting, as attested in the relevant article of 1812 for the Mercure de France and in the Méditations of 1819 which owed so much to his 3 4

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Oberman, I, 46 (letter VII), 63–64 (letter XI) and letter XCI added to the novel in 1840. See Le Gall, L’Imaginaire chez Senancour, I, 42–51. Senancour seems to have made several more stays in Switzerland around 1793 before a final one in 1802.

woodland reveries.5 Walking the forest was therefore a practice and an image which would continue to haunt him in a way that climbing hills would not, but it was the failure of his initial quest in the Alps that ultimately coloured his outlook and sent him back for some sort of consolation to the familiar paths of the woods. In the Alps Senancour had not simply sought, as all Europe was beginning to do, the exhilaration of climbing to some vague sensation of infinite space, but a more particular sense of the enduring order and fixity transcending time and change which the mountains could convey, a quest which is best expressed in Oberman’s initiatory ascent of the Dent du Midi and momentary experience there of cosmic order and silence.6 But from this climb onwards, it is the gradual collapse of Oberman’s aspirations that the novel traces, with special emphasis on his insatiable desire for the certainty of Alpine rocks.7 In the Oberman of 1804 there are therefore few of the physically and morally satisfying excursions which Victor Hugo and George Sand were later to evoke. Senancour’s hero is ultimately overwhelmed by the massive otherness of the landscape he would be one with, and progressively reduces the range of his walks, resigning himself to a reclusion only occasionally redeemed by intuitions of cosmic harmony. The end of the novel resolves nothing, neither in the first nor in later versions, and after 1804 Alpine walks and the memory of them more or less disappeared from Senancour’s writings.8 But the early memories of strolls at Fontainebleau which had ultimately been dismissed in the Oberman of 1804 as not wild or sublime enough compared to Alpine outings gradually returned to impose themselves 5 6

7

8

‘Sur Fontainebleau’, Mercure de France, L, 4 janvier 1812, 13–19. Oberman, I, 50–54 (letter VII) and see Marcel Raymond, op. cit., 19–25. His last heroine Isabelle would also aspire to ‘l’image d’un monde où le mouvement ne serait plus’ and ‘les lieux où paraît finir le désordre du monde’ (ed. B. Didier, Paris and Geneva, Ressources, 1980, 197, 199). Later, the Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme of 1833 would warn against just such excessive demands for certainty (Paris, Abel Ledoux, 101– 103). That is, until the addition in 1840 in a final supplément to Oberman of a rare happy excursion in the Italian Alps first published elsewhere in 1834 which jars with the deep design of the novel (letter XCI, II, 273–279).

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on his imagination as some of the least bad consolations available, along with autumnal walks in Père Lachaise.9 It is the persistent features of these and other local walks from 1804 to his very last texts which must now concern us. Treading the sand and rocks of the Fontainebleau forest was crucial to Senancour’s pleasure there, and to the balance he could sometimes achieved between mind and body. So Oberman wandered ‘sans suivre de sentiers’, taking immediate pleasure in the succession of open and secluded spaces, in the sight of favourite trees and animals, but also in the sheer resistance of the ground underfoot on a scorching day: Entendez-vous bien le plaisir que je sens quand mon pied s’enfonce dans un sable mobile et brûlant, quand j’avance avec peine, et qu’il n’y a point d’eau, point de fraîcheur, point d’ombrage? (I, 67 letter XII)

Such alternations of ease and effort sometimes allowed him to feel connected to the hidden order of a wilderness which had as yet barely been touched, either by Napoleon’s broom or by the flocking of artists to Barbizon.10 Rousseauistic reveries of social regeneration might follow, as well as melancholic reflections on the passage of time and the ghosts of the past – hence some of the twilight and autumnal character which the forest already had for him. So at the low point of his life represented in the Oberman of 1804, the happy memories of childhood walks in Letters XI and XII which brought his hero back to Fontainebleau are increasingly overwhelmed, from Letter XIII onwards, by Oberman’s present turmoil and consequent inability to loose himself as before in such a temperate countryside:

9 10

34

Mercure du XIXe siècle, III, 1823, 154–167: ‘Promenade en octobre’. In his article of 1812 on the forest in the Mercure de France, Senancour commented adversely on the exploitation and tidying up going on under Napoleon (‘Sur Fontainebleau’, L [janvier 1812], 17–18). It seems to have been Stamati Voulgaris who started the drift of painters there in the 1820s; see the Souvenirs de Stamati Bulgari/Voulgaris, Paris, A. Pihan de la Forest/Delaunay, 1835, 11–13.

ce séjour ne saurait convenir réellement qu’à celui qui ne connaît et n’imagine rien de plus. (I, 105; letter XXV) J’ai bien une terre libre à parcourir; mais elle n’est pas assez sauvage, assez imposante. Les formes en sont basses; les roches petites et monotones; la végétation n’y a pas en général cette force, cette profusion qui est nécessaire […] Rien ne m’opprime ici, rien ne me satisfait. Je crois même que l’ennui augmente: c’est que je ne souffre pas assez. (I, 81; letter XVIII)

Had the story of his involvement with the forest ended there, the local authorities might never have honoured him with a ‘route Senancour’. But as he strove with age for a viable balance in his life, it was the nearby forest, not the far, unforgiving mountains to which his thoughts and steps would return, as attested by the Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme of 1809 and 1833, the Libres Méditations d’un solitaire inconnu of 1819, 1830 and 1834 as well as by various articles in the press. In these writings he would now show a greater appreciation of the ‘force lente et durable’ of nature at work in the forest, its year-long wintry silence and its pleasant capacity for provoking dreams of exotic countries.11 The Rêveries of 1799/1800 (An VIII) and Oberman had in fact already evoked some of the pedestrian strategies which the older man now recommended for coping with the disappointments of life. For walking was inseparable, as Marcel Raymond saw, from the regular, moderate habits at the core of these later counsels:12 Je ne m’assiérai point auprès du fracas des cataractes ou sur un tertre qui domine une plaine illimitée; mais je choisirai, dans un site bien circonscrit, la pierre mouillée par une onde qui roule seule dans le silence du vallon; ou bien un tronc vieilli, couché dans la profondeur des forêts […] Je marcherai doucement, allant et revenant le long d’un sentier obscur et abandonné […]13

Moreover this early circonscription of a place would soon be amplified in the circular walking he was to celebrate in Letter XII of 11 12 13

Mercure de France, 1812, art. cit., 16, 18. Senancour. Sensations et révélations,102. Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme (An VIII, 1799/1800), ed. Joachim Merlant, Paris, Droz, 1939, I, 44 (Troisième Rêverie). My emphasis.

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Oberman as best resolving the tensions he experienced between freedom and order, movement and stasis: Il y a un chemin que j’aime à suivre: il décrit un cercle comme la forêt ellemême, en sorte qu’il ne va ni aux plaines ni à la ville; il ne suit aucune direction ordinaire; il n’est ni dans les vallons, ni sur les hauteurs; il semble n’avoir point de fin; il passe à travers tout, et n’arrive à rien: je crois que j’y marcherais toute ma vie. (I, 67; letter XII)

The securing enclosure of this walk, reproducing the circle of the wood, even finds an echo in a much grander twenty-day expedition in the course of which Oberman and a friend almost complete a circle round Paris on foot, from Charenton to the forests of Bondy and Vincennes and then on to Montmorency, Saint-Germain, Marly, Versailles, the valley of the Bièvre and finally Antony: Suivez-nous sur un plan des environs de Paris. Imaginez un cercle dont le centre soit le beau pont de Neuilly près de Paris, vers le couchant d’été. Ce cercle est coupé deux fois par la Seine et une fois par la Marne. (II, 56–57; letter LII)

In the 1830s such comforting rambles would remain at the heart of his remarks in the last editions of the Rêveries and the Libres Méditations on the most real and durable pleasures that can be hoped for in life, with autumnal walking in the countryside confirmed as the best way to meditate on natural and divine orders: Le juste équilibre de forces, la santé est le premier des biens dans l’ordre visible, et la source la plus générale du bonheur. Nous aimons le sable qui cède sous nos pas, la pierre qui nous soutient sans fléchir, les roches que nous gravissons avec effort, et le sol uni où la marche sera facile. Nous nous plaisons dans une épaisse forêt parce qu’elle voile l’éclat du jour, et sur un canal embrasé des feux de l’aurore parce qu’on est ébloui de cette double lumière […] Nous adoptons pour ainsi dire la nature entière; nous approuvons, nous admirons tout ce qui existe, parce que tout devient l’occasion de notre activité, ou l’aliment de notre pensée. Mais le léger souffle de l’air avant l’aurore, mais le vol d’une mouche industrieuse, et le chant du bouvreuil sur l’épine fleurie, et la marche confiante

36

d’un homme qui a plus de candeur que d’expérience, ce sont des indices de ce qui devrait être; ce sont des traces d’un premier dessein, des témoignages de la volonté majestueuse qui soutient toute chose […]14

One can see why the Sainte-Beuve of Volupté and the George Sand of the Lettres d’un voyageur should have liked Senancour.15 And the combination in Senancour’s style of fragmentation, digression and progressive accumulation certainly confirmed the lesson of Rousseau with respect to the form of prose perhaps most suitable to a literature of walking, a lesson most completely learnt by Hugo and Nerval. The latter also responded to the acute awareness of time which walking stirred in Oberman.16 But the impact of Senancour, such as it was to be, was delayed not only because of his reclusiveness and resistance to new trends in literature,17 but also because of the initial lack of emphasis in French Romanticism on ideas and images of walking.

14

15

16

17

Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme (1833), ed. cit., XIe, ‘Simplicité’, 103–104; XXXVIe, ‘Mélodie générale’, 313. See also VIIIe and XVIIe, and Libres Méditations (ed. B. Le Gall), 158–159 (XVIe Méditation). Sainte-Beuve praised Oberman in the Revue de Paris of 22 January 1832 (34, 210–222). Senancour is twice invoked in Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur and she was to write a sensitive preface for the 1840 edition of the novel (O.A., II, 800, 887). See Béatrice Didier, ‘Nerval et Senancour, ou la nostalgie du XVIIIe siècle’, in Le Rêve et la vie. ‘Aurélia’, ‘ Sylvie’, ‘Les Chimères’ de Gérard de Nerval, Paris, SEDES, 1986, 5–15. See his satirical ‘Petit voyage romantique’ in L’Abeille, 4, 1821, 99–107.

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French Romanticism from Charles Nodier to George Sand

Just how and why this lack of emphasis first occurred in spite of Senancour and Rousseau needs now to be more fully considered in an overview of the issue, from Nodier’s contribution in the earliest days to the final emergence of more positive patterns of thought and usage after 1837. We can distinguish three phases in this development. The first centres on Nodier, Hugo and painters from about 1818 to 1829. The next lasts from 1830 to 1836 and is a phase of individual experiments and some casual discussion in the Cénacle and elsewhere, accompanied however by increasing dissent on the part of the new generation. The last, from 1837 onwards, is one of more widespread and acknowledged practice on the part of Hugo, Sand and others (in accordance with the wider social trends we have noted), culminating in the important statements of Le Rhin and Consuelo. Charles Nodier undoubtedly played a crucial role in transmitting the heritage of Rousseau and Senancour to Hugo and putting the latter in touch with painters who were inveterate walkers. As a boy Nodier had learnt to botanize and study insects in the mountains of the Jura.1 The Souvenirs de jeunesse recall in a wonderfully vivid and detailed way his training in natural history by Justin Girod de Chantrans: Notre journée d’investigations commençait régulièrement à midi, après le repas du matin, et durait jusqu’à la nuit; car nous étions d’intrépides marcheurs. Nous allions et nous revenions en courant, moi, questionnant […] lui, répondant […] Il n’y avait pas un fait naturel qui ne fournît matière à une leçon, pas une leçon qui ne fît sur moi l’effet d’un plaisir nouveau et inattendu […]

1

See Antoine Magnin, Charles Nodier naturaliste, Paris, Hermann, 1911, who brings out clearly the debts of young Nodier as a naturalist to Justin Girod de Chantrans and F.-M.-J. Luzcot de la Thébaudais, as well as listing his scientific publications.

Il n’y a point d’expression pour rendre la joie de ces innocentes usurpations de la science sur la nature rebelle et mystérieuse […] Encore aujourd’hui, je me prends quelquefois à frémir d’un voluptueux saisissement en me rappelant la vue du premier carabus auronitens qui me soit apparu dans l’ombre humide que portait le tronc d’un vieux chêne renversé, sous lequel il reposait éblouissant comme une escarboucle tombée de l’aigrette du Mogol. (‘Séraphine’) 2

The intensity of this late evocation by a fantasist such as Nodier must of course be treated with caution and raises questions to which we shall return. Memories of later expeditions no doubt fused with the original, but the essential truth of his passion for these outings is amply confirmed by letters exchanged at the time with Girod de Chantrans and S.-F. Lacroix, as well as later with his sister Élise and his lifelong friend Charles Weiss.3 Moreover he was long to remain a ‘marcheur infatigable’ in the words of his daughter, who recalled being told of his 92-kilometre round trip between Dôle and Besançon in twenty hours to collect certificates necessary for his marriage in 1808.4 His repeated visits to Giromagny in the Vosges from 1799 and especially his later stays at Quintigny, near Lons-le-Saunier, in 1809, 1810–1812 and 1818 were clearly prompted in part by the pleasures of solitary reverie and collecting in the hills.5 Another intensely dramatic evocation in the Souvenirs de la révolution et de l’empire of a nighttime flight from Napoleon’s gendarmes across flooded fields no doubt also drew on his experiences during six months spent in 1805 as a political fugitive in the Jura.6 Nodier was in other words a walker in the tradition of Rousseau who had also learnt from Girod de Chantrans to appreciate the Shakespearian diversity of nature,7 and shared with Senancour (whom he later befriended) that experience of 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Souvenirs de jeunesse, ed. Hubert Juin, Paris, Aubier, 1992, 40–41. Correspondance de jeunesse, ed. cit., I, 55, 58, 117, 174. Marie Mennessier-Nodier, Charles Nodier. Épisodes et souvenirs de sa vie, Paris, Didier, 1867, 96–97. A. Richard Oliver, Charles Nodier. Pilot of Romanticism, Syracuse, Syracuse U.P., 1964, 64–65. Paris, Charpentier, s.d., II, 92–98 ‘Suites d’un mandat d’arrêt’. A. Richard Oliver (op. cit., 85) noted that Girod de Chantrans introduced Nodier to Shakespeare as well as to great areas of natural history.

walking in mountains which was to prove so decisive for Sand and Dumas. Of later Romantics, the only one with a comparable passion for natural history would however be George Sand – without any of the scientific ambitions shown in Nodier’s publications. Between 1813, when the family finally moved to Paris, and 1820 Nodier’s passion for entomology and botany gradually receded, replaced by bibliophily and the love of popular legends and history which would be so significant for the Voyages pittoresques.8 He continued to like walking, but increasingly chose shorter outings, as Maurice Alhoy remembered: Nodier, comme Jean-Jacques, comme Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, aimait les bois de Montmorency et les Près-Saint-Gervais, mais la proximité de ces derniers leur attribuait souvent la préférence; on partait avec la volonté ferme de parler du drame en germe [a staging of Smarra], mais la marche ne le fécondait pas […] pendant trois ans je n’ai[e] jamais songé à lui rappeler, dans nos excursions, que je venais là pour autre chose que pour écouter la douce mélodie de ses récits […] 9

The last long tour Nodier did was to prove the journey to Scotland which he undertook in 1820 with Taylor, de Cailleux and Eugène Isabey. On that occasion he went off on his own to Glasgow to meet the famous Dr. William Hooker at the Botanical Gardens (he missed him) and then to do a guided expedition of about 8 days from Glasgow to Loch Lomond, Tarbet, Ben Lomond, Loch Katrine, Arrochar, Lochs Long and Goil and back along the Clyde. Such walking as was done on this tour no doubt happened on the route from Tarbet to Loch Katrine over the shoulder of Ben Lomond (camping one night on the way) and then back to Arrochar, most of the rest being easily done in boats and coaches.10 Of the longer sweep north

8 9 10

Antoine Magnin, Charles Nodier naturaliste, 56. Les Environs de Paris, eds. Charles Nodier and Louis Lurine, Paris, P. Boizard and G. Kugelmann, s.d. [1844], 204. Promenade de Dieppe aux montagnes d’Ecosse, Paris, Barba, 1821, 227–275. For a much more detailed and unromantic account of an ascent of Ben Lomond shortly after, see Custine, Mémoires et voyages, Paris, François Bourin, 1992, 333–339.

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through the glens undertaken by his fellow Frenchmen, he wrote to his wife on June 25: Il lui faut [Taylor] pour sa satisfaction une excursion de soixante à quatre-vingts lieues dans les montagnes Noires, et il les fera sans moi. Quoique je me porte très-bien, et que je puisse supporter sans inconvénients la fatigue des nouvelles courses que j’entreprends dans la montagne, je ne suis point disposé à pénétrer dans un climat glacial, où il faudra peut-être bivouacer dix fois de suite, pour ne rien dire de plus extraordinaire que ce qui est à la portée de mes forces et dans les convenances de mes plaisirs.11

He was already looking older, as Charles Weiss noted on a visit in 1822, a consequence perhaps of having inherited Addison’s Disease, and from 1826 his health deteriorated seriously.12 He probably therefore did not do that much walking in the Franche-Comté and the Alps in 1824, or when back there the following year with Victor Hugo’s family.13 And since by 1834 he was quite housebound, Nodier certainly did not do any excursions for the later volumes to which he lent a preface, such as La Seine et ses bords (1836) and Les Environs de Paris (1844).14 Before that, in the 1820s, he had however already acquired a quite different celebrity as an urban flâneur, daily on the hunt for rare books, as Dumas remembered: ‘Nodier était prodigue, insouciant, flâneur; oh! mais flâneur avec délices, comme Figaro était

11

12

13

14

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Bulletin du Bibliophile, juillet 1857, 385–386. On this trip, see also Juan Plazaola, Le baron Taylor, Portrait d’un homme d’avenir, Paris, Fondation Taylor, 1989, 50–51. Georges Gazier, ‘Nodier à l’Arsenal d’après les Carnets de Voyage de son ami Ch. Weiss’, Revue de l’histoire littéraire de la France, XXXI (1924), 422; A. Richard Oliver, op. cit., 8; Correspondance inédite, ed. A. Estignard, Paris, Moniteur Universel, 1876, 186, 191–192, 220. Even though the third volume of the Voyages pittoresques on the FrancheComté which Nodier was preparing in 1824 was full of memories of the walks done in his youth, as of the recent ones in Scotland. For Nodier’s walking on the 1825 trip, see Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, Brussels and Leipzig, A. Lacroix and Verboeckhoven, 1863, II, 102–103, 127– 128, and the slightly contradictory account by his daughter in op. cit., 278–280, 281. A. Richard Oliver, op. cit., 227, 248.

paresseux.’15 As so often with Nodier, this biographical evolution from hill-walker to city flâneur was to prove ahead of its time.16 The walks done by Nodier up to 1820 remained strong memories, as witnessed by references to Scotland in his book on the Franche-Comté, the descriptions in Trilby, ou le lutin d’Argail and the evocations of naturalists at work in a number of short stories.17 The really interesting trace of these walks in Nodier’s writings comes however elsewhere, in the decision in 1831–1832 to cast the Souvenirs de jeunesse which we have already cited in the form of five short stories named after fictional childhood loves, four of which involve the narrator in lengthy cross-country walks. Not only do these stories give us more intense synthetic recreations of his early rambles than are to be found in his letters and other fictions. They also use these to express effectively strong adolescent feelings of fear and desire in a world made exceptionally chaotic by the random persecutions, violence and repression of the Revolution and Empire.18 Moreover the appearance of this volume undoubtedly reflects a growing interest in 1832 among Nodier’s friends in the creative resources offered by longer treks such as he remembered. And a further lesson was that the more intimate past might be most effectively revisited by blending sentimental fictions with memories of landscapes traversed in

15

16

17

18

Dumas, Mes Mémoires, Paris, Laffont, 1989, I, 955. See also Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, Paris, Adolphe Delahaye, 1858, 261: ‘Nodier, le premier badaud du monde’. If one accepts that in 1832 the anonymous celebration of the flâneur in Paris, ou Le Livre des cent-et-un (Paris, Ladvocat, 1831–1834, VI, 95–110 ‘Le Flâneur à Paris’) marks the consecration by Romantics of a figure steadily growing in cultural significance ever since Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Le Tableau de Paris (1781–1789). See also subsequently in the Livre des cent-etun the article ‘Une Journée de flâneur sur les boulevards du nord’ by Amaury Duval, with its tribute both to the above celebration and to Mercier (XII, 1833, 55–107). Voyages pittoresques, III, Franche-Comté, 1825, 58, 117; Trilby, in Nodier, Contes, ed. P.-G. Castex, Paris, Garnier, 1961, 114–115, 126–129. For naturalists, see for instance La Filleule du Seigneur and La Fée aux Miettes in Contes, 11, 197, 199. Ed. cit., 44, 46, 50–51, 57–59, 61–62, 102, 142–143.

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childhood.19 The suggestion would not be lost on Nerval and reinforced the recurring association in French Romanticism between walking and revisiting the past.20 This was to be a major contribution to the French literature of walking, but meanwhile Nodier’s love of history as well as the country had brought him by 1818 to another project which would stimulate Hugo’s taste for travel on foot. This project was the collaboration with artists on the illustrated and very romantic Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820–1878).21 The illustrators of the first three volumes comprised most of the leading young painters of the day, many of whom became Nodier’s friends and introduced him progressively to new talents emerging. So we have seen him going to Scotland in 1820 with the three artists Taylor, de Cailleux and Eugène Isabey and these, together with the latter’s father and other of his ‘innombrables camarades les peintres en vogue’22 were to be met at his home even before the move in April 1824 to the more spacious Arsenal where Boulanger, Delacroix, David d’Angers, Dauzats, Gigoux, Gudin, Gué, the Devéria brothers and the Johannots would soon be regular visitors. So significant for Romanticism was Nodier’s collaboration with the illustrators of the Voyages pittoresques that it even earned him a place as the only writer portrayed alongside leading painters in F.-J. Heim’s canvas La

19 20

21

22

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His dedication of the book to Lamartine calls it ‘le plus intime de mes livres, celui qui est le plus mien, et que j’aime le mieux.’ Nerval certainly remembered the Souvenirs when composing his autobiographical fictions and in ‘El Desdichado’ cannot have forgotten Nodier’s calling attention in ‘Clémentine’ to the ancolie hidden in mélancolie (ed. cit., 104). Published with the help of Taylor and de Cailleux. See the fine new edition of Jean Adhémar’s 1937 study La France Romantique. Les lithographies de paysage au XIXe siècle, Paris, Somogy, 1997, and Juan Plazaola, Le baron Taylor, 48–77. The volumes were romantic thanks to Nodier’s stress on it all being a ‘voyage d’impressions’ (I, 5) and to the corresponding exploitation of new possibilities offered by lithography of preserving the spontaneous selfexpression of sketches (I, 10). Letter to Charles Weiss of 23 July 1822, in Correspondance inédite, 159.

Distribution des récompenses au Salon de 1824.23 Now the importance of this for us is that it was thanks to their meeting in 1823 that Hugo made his first contacts in Romantic studios with artists used to touring on foot. On Nodier’s expedition to Scotland we have seen that it was the painters who left him for a longer trek through the North. When Victor Hugo met Nodier it is true that the poet was already familiar with some outlying villages and had done one three-day hike in pursuit of his fiancée.24 But little of this had fed as yet into his poetry and novels.25 That the growing friendship with Nodier and his artist friends encouraged Hugo’s walks in the following years is suggested by his regular excursions beyond the walls in 1826–1827 to the cabaret of la mère Saguet frequented by such young artists as Louis Boulanger, the Devéria brothers, T.-N. Charlet and David d’Angers, as well as by the presence again the following year of Boulanger on his walks at sunset.26 Boulanger was indeed to become specially associated with Hugo’s travels, both as a dedicatee of poems on the theme and as a privileged recipient of reports home:

23 24

25

26

See Paul Lafond, ‘F.-J. Heim’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 3e série, 1896, XVI, 449. Lafond was unable to explain his presence. He was quite proud of his tramp to Dreux in pursuit of Adèle and wrote to Vigny on the 20 July 1821: ‘J’ai fait tout le voyage à pied, par un soleil ardent et des chemins sans ombre d’ombre. Je suis harassé, mais tout glorieux d’avoir fait vingt lieues sur mes jambes’ (Correspondance d’Alfred de Vigny, ed. cit., I, 66). He had made brief visits from 1819 to Sceaux, Montfort l’Amaury, La Roche-Guyon and Gentilly, conventional enough destinations for short holidays (for details, Pierre Miquel, Victor Hugo touriste, 1819–1824, Paris and Geneva, La Palatine, 1958). The one significant exception being ‘Au vallon de Chérizy’, a rhythmically varied portrayal of his weary self taking heart from an idyllic valley towards the end of his walk to Dreux (Poésies, I, 259–261). Adèle Hugo, Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie, Brussels and Leipzig, A. Lacroix and Verboeckhoven, 1863, II, 142, 157. For the short walks of 1828–1829, see also the preface to Les Orientales (Poésies, I, 412), the letter of 24 June 1836 to Boulanger (Voyages, 572), and the poems ‘Pluie d’été’ (Poésies, I, 305–307, June 1828) and ‘Soleils couchants’ (Poésies, I, 649–653, April 1829).

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Nous, tandis que de joie au loin tout vibre et tremble, Allons dans la forêt, et là, marchant ensemble, Si vous voulez, nous songerons. (‘Avril – A Louis B.’)27

This association of painters and travel in Hugo’s life was continued in 1836 when the engraver Célestin Nanteuil accompanied Hugo and Juliette Drouet on part of their summer holiday. The poet was no doubt anxious to learn from the graphic skills of these friends, but that is no reason to doubt that from 1829 onwards their example had encouraged him to walk.28 For it is surely no accident that the only pedestrian reference in the prefaces and criticism of Victor Hugo, Émile Deschamps, the Jeunes-France and Sainte-Beuve until 1842 and Le Rhin was the brief one of 1829 in the preface to Les Orientales to the sunset walks so often taken in the company of Boulanger when the poet was planning to ‘s’aller promener en Orient pendant tout un volume’ (Poésies, I, 412). This close association of Hugo with painters at the end of the Restoration also points us however to the manner in which other preoccupations of the Cénacle effectively marginalized walking. Chief among these was of course the need for freedom of expression in poetry, prose and drama, an issue on which these writers often made common cause with the struggle of painters against the Academy. Between 1827 and 1830 their polemics tended therefore to invoke analogies with sister arts rather than with rambling – as in Hugo’s preface to Cromwell and Sainte-Beuve’s pleas in Joseph Delorme for more colourful description. Indeed none of them ever compared the informal rhythms of walkers with the more varied cadences which they now sought in verse.29 The silence of Sainte-Beuve on the subject 27

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Poésies, I, 857. Five poems were dedicated to Boulanger in the Les Feuilles d’automne, Les Chants du crépuscule and Les Voix intérieures. He was to be a recipient of letters from Hugo’s journeys in 1835, 1836 and 1837. It was in the following year that he would also insert the famous ‘Soleils couchants’, inspired by walks at sunset in 1828–1829 and headed with an epigraph from Nodier, into the Les Feuilles d’automne (Poésies, I, 649). In England the first Romantic generation seems by comparison to have shown a marked appreciation of the resources which blank verse offered to a poetry of walking (Robin Jarvis, op. cit., 83, 109, 139).

in the Vie, poésies et pensées de Joseph Delorme of 1829 is particularly telling, since he admired what he knew of the English ‘Lakistes’ and Wordsworth in particular. However, none of his poems adapted from, or inspired by Wordsworth at this time feature significant walking and he was never to show any special interest in The Excursion or in relevant poems from Lyrical Ballads.30 The relatively obscure Maurice de Guérin seems to have been for many years almost the only admirer of Senancour who was also attracted to Wordsworth’s poems of walking brought to his attention by friends in Brittany,31 though this may also have been true of the Breton poet Auguste Brizeux.32 Even Lamartine, along with George Sand the most country-bred of all the major writers and married to an active English country woman,33 seems to have looked to Sainte-Beuve himself rather than to Wordsworth when evoking in poems of 1828–1829 the paths he wandered as a child.34 However all the evidence shows that Lamartine’s real passion was riding and this taste for being transported swiftly and with a minimum of effort corresponds no

30

31

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Such as ‘The Old Cumberland Beggar’. See T.G.S. Combe, Sainte-Beuve poète et les poètes anglais, Bordeaux, Delmas, 1937. The pensées of Joseph Delorme ignore country rambles and the main walking of the hero is done on the melancholy boulevards extérieurs. It is noticeable that in these early poems the poet mostly prefers to imagine himself as a boatman, rather than a walker. According to Bernard d’Harcourt in his edition of the Œuvres complètes de Maurice de Guérin, Paris, Société Les Belles Lettres, 1947, I, XXIX, 308–315. See ‘Promenade à travers la lande’ (1833), 102–107; ‘Promenade aux bords de la Rance’ (1834), 127–131. In such eponymous poems of Marie (1832) as the ones beginning ‘Assez, sonneur, assez!’, ‘Humble et bon vieux curé’, ‘Du bois de Kerêlô’, ‘Jamais je n’oublîrai’, ‘O maison du Moustoir!’. See the Dédicace of 1825 to Le Dernier Chant du pèlerinage d’Harold which recalls their climbing the Salève together: ‘Dans un étroit sentier qui pend sur un abîme/Nous posions en tremblant nos pas mal assurés’ (Œuvres poétiques complètes, ed. M.-F. Guyard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963, 195). See ‘Milly ou la terre natale’ (1827), ‘Souvenir d’enfance ou la vie cachée’ (1828) and ‘Épître à M. de Sainte-Beuve’ (1829), in O.P.C. 379, 396, 416, 418. See also Henri Guillemin’s thorough review of Lamartine’s relation to the ‘Lakistes’ and negative conclusion in Le ‘Jocelyn’ de Lamartine. Étude historique et critique avec des documents inédits, Paris, Boivin, 1936, 587–595.

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doubt to the musicality of his finest work in which voices and desires soar freely to the heavens.35 The somewhat negative picture above is nevertheless not the whole story in the second phase of our development from 1830 onwards, when all Parisians went more to the country and the pull of the Alps and Pyrenees continued to make several authors try more demanding walking, as Lamartine, Vigny, Quinet and Hugo had all done in their youth.36 For there are some indications that while the focus of the Romantics’ critical attention was elsewhere, they did sometimes discuss the topic, as well as writing some poetic promenades (and related poems such as Vigny’s ‘Les Amants de Montmorency’ [1830]) while Nodier composed his Souvenirs de 35

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For Lamartine’s life at Milly up to 1820, see the marquis de Luppé, Les Travaux et les jours d’Alphonse de Lamartine, Paris, Albin Michel, 1942, 22, 24, 70, and for his life at Saint-Point in the 1830s, see ibid., 215–219, 229, 231– 232. It would seem therefore that we should set aside as a rare piece of juvenile enthusiasm the letter of 24 september 1807 in which he wrote to Guichard de Benassis: ‘Il y a huit jours que je suis arrivé à Macon; j’ai fait plus de la moitié du chemin à pied […] chantant comme un troubadour quelque vieille romance; j’en composais même en marchant […] C’est vraiment une manière de voyager tout-à-fait charmant’ (Correspondance, ed. Madame Valentine de Lamartine, Paris, Hachette, 1873–1874, I, 4). Lamartine’s memories of the French and Swiss Alps fed Jocelyn and Vigny’s of the Pyrenees (Chapter XXII of Cinq-Mars). Quinet walked round lake Geneva in 1823 and to the Grande Chartreuse the following year (La Grèce moderne, XV–XVI). Nodier’s and Hugo’s well-known family outing to the Alps in 1825 is typical of such trips with women and children at the time in that there was a lot of riding in carriages and on mules and it is uncertain how much real walking the two writers were able to do. Apparently both walked at least from visiting Lamartine at Saint-Point back to Macon and from Montenvers on to the Mer de Glace; Nodier did some more later on the Tête Noire, the Saint-Bernard and back down to Martigny. See from Nodier: ‘Les Bosquets de Maglan’, Les Annales romantiques, 1827–1828, 187–201; ‘Voyage à la Tête-Noire’, Revue des deux mondes, 4 (1831), 117–132; ‘Le Mont Saint-Bernard’, Revue des deux mondes, 4 (1831), 268–278. See from Hugo: ‘Fragment d’un voyage aux Alpes (août 1825)’, Revue de Paris, 5 (August 1829), 289–318 and ‘Fragment d’un voyage aux Alpes’, Revue des deux mondes, 3 (1831), 393–402 (Hugo’s articles were reprinted in Victor Hugo raconté, XLII, but we will cite from their reprinting in Voyages, Laffont). Also to be referred to is the account by Nodier’s daughter, op. cit., 267–281.

jeunesse and Dumas celebrated longer rambles in his Impressions de voyage [Suisse] (1833–1834).37 Sainte-Beuve himself followed hints in Hugo’s rather than Wordsworth’s poetry in four works evoking walks in Joseph Delorme, one of which, ‘Promenade’, was to prove his most sustained piece of pedestrianism until Pensées d’août (1837) and contrasted the pleasure he took in ordinary, quiet country with the sublime and exotic scenes hitherto favoured by Romantics.38 Théophile Gautier too, at a time when he still sometimes responded to Sainte-Beuve’s views,39 produced some light poems celebrating rural pleasures, a few of which – ‘Le Sentier’, ‘Pensées d’automne’, ‘Enfantillage’ – avoid the more usual impression he gives of immobility and show the poet on the move through the countryside: A Romainville, – ou bien dans les près Saint-Gervais, Curieux de savoir si l’aubépine blanche A déjà fait neiger son givre sur la branche, Par l’herbe et la rosée, en pépiant, je vais […] (‘Enfantillage’)40

37

38

39 40

Athletic in his youth and a fanatical hunter, Dumas presented himself in his Swiss journey as ever ready to undertake treks of up to 40 kilometres, narrated with verve and sufficient detail to be perfectly credible. If he did not do them all – being accompanied by Belle Kreilssamner for the first month and being more interested in a good tale than absolute veracity – he can be believed to have done many (Impressions de voyage [Suisse], 2 vols, Paris, Maspero, 1982, I, 105–108, Martigny to Chamonix; I, 167–168, part of the road from Sembrancher to the hospice of the Grand Saint-Bernard; I, 188, Aosta to SaintDizier; I, 338–341, up the Faulhorn; II, 65–68, up the Rigi). For the chronology of his journey, see Claude Schopp, Alexandre Dumas. Le génie de la vie, Paris, Fayard, 1997, 232–244. Poésies complètes de Sainte-Beuve, Paris, Charpentier, 1869, 77–79. See also ‘Bonheur champêtre’ (56–59), ‘Le Creux de la vallée’ (103–104), ‘Pensée d’automne’ (114–115). Joseph Delorme’s imagination is presented as having been nurtured originally ‘à l’écart […] le long d’un petit sentier’ and ‘aux champs’ (6–7). Most obviously in the poems ‘Point de vue’ and ‘Pan de mur’ which could almost serve as illustrations for Pensée XVI. Poésies complètes, ed. R. Jasinski, 3 vols, Paris, Firmin-Didot, 1932, I, 16–17, 38–39, 87.

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And Hugo reinforced the example set by the evocations of childhood in Lamartine’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (1830) when in Les Feuilles d’automne (1831) and subsequent volumes he told how short strolls outside Paris were beginning to open his eyes to the secret life of the country. In this respect he repeatedly acknowledged his debt to holidays spent from 1831 at L.-F. Bertin’s estate Les Roches between the river Bièvre and the Meudon forest.41 The poems directly naming Les Roches or the Bièvre and others revealingly dated to the summer of 1831 present this period as a renewal of his youth and are strongly marked by two traits.42 The first is the closeness of contact with named trees and flowers as his steps and thoughts wandered.43 Two poems of Les Contemplations clearly referring to Les Roches – ‘Le poète s’en va dans les champs’ and ‘Oui, je suis le rêveur’ – testify to this new-found intimacy, feeling of communication and creation of reverie.44 The other trait is a youthful, joyous celebration of the erotic vigour of nature in the valley of the Bièvre and indeed in the whole surrounding country from Meudon to the Pré-Saint-Gervais, Chelles and Ville d’Avray.45 Hugo found this renewed vitality well before 41

42

43 44

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To 1835. See Victor Hugo raconté, II, 163: ‘Aux Roches, on se réunissait à table et après dîner. Le reste de la journée était à la liberté. On s’occupait comme on voulait; on restait dans sa chambre, ou l’on se promenait dans le parc, plein de chênes séculaires, de gazons, de fleurs, de kiosques dans les branches.’ For Hugo’s sense of relief from the city, see in Les Feuilles d’automne, ‘Quand le livre où s’endort’ (Poésies, I, 606). The following poems were addressed as from Les Roches, or mention the Bièvre: in Les Feuilles d’automne, ‘Bièvre’ (Poésies, I, 645–648); in Les Contemplations, I, II ‘Le poète s’en va’ (backdated to June 1831 from 1843); I, V, ‘A André Chénier’ (backdated to July 1830 [necessarily an error for 1831] at Les Roches from 1854); I, XXVII ‘Oui, je suis le rêveur’ (backdated to August 1835 at Les Roches from 1854) (Poésies, II, 258–259, 260–261, 294–295). In Les Feuilles d’automne, ‘Pan’ is attributed to November 1831 (Poésies, I, 669– 671). See Les Feuilles d’automne: ‘Bièvre. A Mademoiselle Louise B.’ (6 juillet 1831) (Poésies, I, 645–648). Les Contemplations, I, XXVII, (Poésies, II, 294–295); I, II, (ibid., 258–259). For this theme, see also ‘A un riche’ (May 1837), in Les Voix intérieures (Poésies, I, 867–871). See in Les Feuilles d’automne, ‘Pan’ (Nov. 1831) (Poésies, I, 669–671); in Les Contemplations, I, V, ‘A André Chénier’ (Les Roches, July 1830) (Poésies, II,

meeting Juliette Drouet, but the fact that in the summers of 1834 and 1835 Juliette quartered herself conveniently close to Les Roches and the Meudon woods no doubt intensified the mood and encouraged the backdating of relevant poems in Les Contemplations. Other places where the lovers walked over the next few years deepened and broadened Hugo’s reading of the countryside,46 but it is to the strolls at Les Roches and the assignations nearby that he constantly renewed his tributes. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that the only verse of this decade to clearly link the rhythms of walking with the emerging ideas of a poem was also written in November 1831: Oh! rien ne rend cela! – Quand il s’en va cherchant Ces pensers de hasard que l’on trouve en marchant, Et qui font que le soir l’artiste chez son hôte Rentre le cœur plus fier et la tête plus haute; Quand il sort pour rêver, et qu’il erre incertain, Soit dans les prés lustrés au gazon de satin, Soit dans un bois qu’emplit cette chanson sonore Que le petit oiseau chante à la jeune aurore, […] Toujours au fond de tout, toujours dans son esprit, Même quand l’art le tient, l’enivre et lui sourit, Même dans ses chansons, même dans ses pensées Les plus joyeusement écloses et bercées, Il retrouve, attristé, le regret morne et froid Du passé disparu, du passé, quel qu’il soit!47

The more sophisticated use of walking in this poem which anticipates the poet’s sorrowful retreading of the past in ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’

46

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260–261). See also in Chansons des rues et des bois the much later poems full of memories of the period ‘Le poète bat aux champs’ and ‘Chelles’ (Poésies, II, 848–852, 903). Such as Fontainebleau (Les Contemplations, II, X, Poésies, II, 307–308). A sign that Hugo came to prefer other areas is perhaps to be found in his slightly off-hand response to the request for a contribution to the memorial volume in honour of Denecourt to which George Sand, Musset, Nerval, Gautier, Baudelaire and other authors contributed handsomely (Auguste Luchet ed., Hommage à C.F. Denecourt, Paris, Hachette, 1855, 49–52). ‘Un jour vient où soudain’, Les Feuilles d’automne (Poésies, I, 654–655).

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(1837) may well therefore also reflect something of the conversations taking place about this time in which Nodier, Hugo and probably Sainte-Beuve discussed problems of description in ‘la poésie pédestre des modernes’ – no doubt already facetiously misappropriating the musa pedestris of Horace who was more properly ‘homely’ and ‘prosaic’ – as Hugo would later do in Le Rhin.48 Altogether, it is not surprising that it seems to have been these very years which appeared in retrospect to George Sand to have been full of poetic promenades.49 But as a whole, until 1837, such reflections and initiatives remained strictly personal rather than the result of collective enthusiasms. A sign of the extent to which this was so is the rapid divergence of most younger poets away from their elders’ growing interest in the countryside. The Petit Cénacle and Jeunes-France undoubtedly spent some time in robinsonnades on the heights of Rochechouart and with 48

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See Nodier in ‘Voyage à la Tête-Noire. (1826 [sic]). A M. Victor Hugo’ (Revue des deux mondes, 4 [1831], 117–118): ‘Vous conveniez avec moi l’autre jour, mon bon ami, qu’il est difficile de comprendre au pied du Mont-Blanc les prétentions ambitieuses de la peinture, de la poésie, de la prose pittoresque […] Votre raison vous a fait apprécier ces difficultés d’un ordre si nouveau pour la poésie pédestre des modernes’. L’autre jour here probably means 1830–1831, since the first text Nodier published in 1827–1828 about their journey to the Alps two years before discussed description with reference to painting and classical models rather than to walking (‘Les Bosquets de Maglan’, Les Annales romantiques, 1827–1828, 187–201). Horace’s musa pedestris which Hugo would remember when celebrating walking in Letter XX of Le Rhin (Voyages, 136) appears in his Satires, Bk. II, VI: ‘quid prius illustrem satiris musaque pedestri?’ (See The Satires of Horace, ed. Arthur Palmer, London, Macmillan, 1883, and Palmer’s note on 343.) It is clearly not by mistake that in Les Contemplations, Hugo chose to redate ‘A propos d’Horace’, also so relevant to our theme, from 1855 to May 1831. Gautier betrays the same moulding of their rural experiences by classical and bookish culture when he drew from Catullus’s poem XLVI his epigraph for Voyage: ‘Jam mens praetrepidans avet vagari, / Jam laeti studio pedes vigescunt’. Sand, Correspondance, ed. Georges Lubin, Paris, Garnier, 1964–1991, VII, 222 [1845?]: ‘Il y a dix et quinze ans […] en poésie, les promenades, les recueillements étaient le besoin du moment, besoin fort explicable après l’Empire et les Cosaques, et la Restauration.’

friends at Fontainebleau. But while these rendezvous imply some retreat on their part from the vile utilitarian city these writers were nevertheless far from committed to the country. Gautier for one had from the start had reservations about country life, despite happy memories of youthful holidays at Mauperthuis, pleasure in swimming, occasional enjoyment of nature’s decorative effects and initial sympathy for the Pensée XVI on description of Joseph Delorme. The poem ‘Le Retour’ shows this already in 1831. A celebration of summer outdoors ends there with a sharp rejection of the pleasures on offer in winter: ‘– Autant et mieux, ma foi, vaudrait être pendu / Que rester enfoui dans ce pays perdu.’50 Nor does this poem hesitate to view all nature as a ‘mélodrame à grand spectacle’ and a ‘vrai panorama vivant et bigarré’, a truculent foregrounding of the sort of deliberately metropolitan and theatrical perspective analysed by Nicholas Green in The Spectacle of Nature which leaves the reader unsurprised that Gautier should choose to present himself in the 1832 preface to Albertus ou l’âme et le péché as an essentially urban wordsmith for whom: Le manteau de la cheminée est son ciel; la plaque son horizon. Il n’a vu du monde que ce que l’on en voit par la fenêtre, et il n’a pas eu envie d’en voir davantage […] Il aime mieux être assis que debout, couché qu’assis.51

By that year, which is also that of his similar preface to the JeunesFrance, Gautier’s interests had shifted decisively away from nature in its ordinary guises.52 Improving on the latter and seeking better alternative worlds, whether artificial or simply distant had instead become his main preoccupation and seemed the very promise and purpose of art, making even landscape-painting preferable to the real 50 51 52

Ed. cit., I, 94–96 (1831). Ibid., 81. ‘Je ne comprends pas quel plaisir champêtre peut valoir celui de regarder les caricatures au vitrage de Martinet ou de Susse, et je ne trouve pas le soleil de beaucoup supérieur au gaz’; ‘Je déteste la campagne; toujours des arbres, de la terre, du gazon!’ (Les Jeunes-France, Paris, Éditions des autres, 1979, VIII and IX).

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thing.53 In such a perspective, walking lost the little interest it had had for him, and in retrospect one notes that even in the pastoral poems of his 1830 collection the poet mostly preferred to present himself seated or reclining. In Gautier, it is mostly the eye that does the roaming: J’aime à m’écouter vivre, et libre de soucis, Loin des chemins poudreux, à demeurer assis Sur un moelleux tapis de fougère et de mousse, Au bord des bois touffus où la chaleur s’émousse; Là, pour tuer le temps, j’observe la fourmi […] (‘Far niente’ 1830)54

From the beginning, it is therefore a rare poem that links walking with the making of poetry, or walking and description, even before Gautier’s crystallization on marble as the perfect symbol of the hard form to be attained by art.55 And this rejection of nature in favour of art seen as inherently rebellious was characteristic of all the writers of the Petit Cénacle and Jeunes-France at the time. Borel’s ‘Sentier creux, promenoir solitaire / De mon clandestin mal’ is an abstract allegory, as are the tracks across desert sands of his Adventurer (Rhapsodies: ‘Hymne au soleil’, ‘L’Aventurier’) and there is no sign that the authors of this first avant-garde were anything other than urban in mentality or felt that the countryside was useful to invoke in their battle with society. Even Nerval, soon to become the greatest poet of the Île-de-France and of walks recovering there a sense of local and personal identity, was not ready yet to put this area at the 53

54

55

54

See Robert Snell, Théophile Gautier. A Romantic Critic of the Visual Arts, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, 6, 10 and 140, 158. So the landscape of ‘Point de vue’ seems to have been inspired not by a place seen, but by a landscape of L.-N. Cabat. Ed. cit., I, 26 and see for the same sedentarism ‘Ballade’ (1830) and ‘Imitation de Byron’ (1830), as well as the remark in the preface to Les Jeunes-France: ‘J’ai en horreur la locomotion’ (ed. cit., XI). The exceptions would be ‘Le Jardin des plantes’ (1830) and ‘Le Retour’ (1831). Gautier’s contribution to the memorial volume for Denecourt, the pathmaker of Fontainebleau, is also quite revealing. In a pleasant conceit inspired by Heine, Gautier imagines Denecourt as an ancient forest god resurrected, but he fails to show any feeling for walking on the paths this deity had created (op. cit., ‘Sylvain’ 346–351).

centre of his work and serve the slow muse of country paths, intent as he still was on more exotic travel when not busy building his career as a man of letters and the theatre.56 It is revealing that in 1838 his magisterial review of the history of French travel writing should not have had a word to say about pedestrian travel.57 It was not to be until the end of the following decade that he began sentimentally to associate the liberty his generation sought for art and artists with the Bohemian and artisan freedoms of the open road. Before 1837, most of the younger generation were therefore not following Nodier, Lamartine and Hugo out into the country and Guérin and Brizeux remained minor provincial anomalies. On the contrary, their resistance to the potential conservatism of pedestrianism and nature worship and their political belligerence tempted them rather to become urban flâneurs and to follow the alternative suggestion in Sainte-Beuve’s Joseph Delorme: that of describing the glummer landscapes also to be found just beyond the walls (northwards especially) where the city had laid waste the country with the quarries, knackers’ yards, grim windmills and refuse dumps painted by Georges Michel. Already in 1829, Joseph Delorme had pushed his walking beyond the desolate outer boulevards of ‘Les Rayons jaunes’ to that ghastly plain: C’est au premier coup d’œil une morne étendue, Sans couleur; çà et là quelque maison perdue, Murs frêles, pignons blancs en tuiles recouverts; Une haie à l’entour en buissons jadis verts; Point de fumée au toit ni de lueur dans l’âtre; Des grands tas aux rebords des carrières de plâtre; Des moulins qui n’ont rien à moudre, ou ne pouvant 56

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It is true that in his early almost annual journeys abroad from 1834 to 1840 he sometimes found long walks a necessity, as perhaps in 1834 to Provence and Italy and in 1840 returning from Vienna. Was he exaggerating when he wrote from Provence to his father in 1834 ‘Je prends toutes sortes de moyens pour rendre le voyage le moins coûteux possible, par les bateaux, les pataches ou à pied. C’est plus long, mais on voit le pays’? Perhaps, but he certainly wore out his boots in Italy and in 1840 he undoubtedly walked three days in the Black Forest to Strasbourg (O.C. I, 1289, 1295, 1344, 1347 and notes). O.C., I, 453–456.

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Qu’à peine remuer leurs quatre ailes au vent, Et loin, sur les coteaux, au-dessus des villages, Des longs bois couronnés des derniers feuillages. (‘La Plaine’)58

Gautier occasionally also tried this deliberately barren manner (‘Paysage’), and in 1838 crowned such provocation with three brutal feuilletons on the horrors to be found ‘hors barrières’ which anticipate later texts by Baudelaire, Zola and Huysmans: Cette baraque tigrée de boue et de sang, avec ses tas d’os mal dépouillés, ses chaudières noires et grasses où l’on cuisine d’abominables mixtures, vous paraîtra un riant ermitage, une blanche villa, une retraite souhaitable; du misérable, vous allez passer au fétide, du fétide à l’horrible; vous n’avez encore les pieds que dans la boue, tout à l’heure vous les aurez dans le fumier, puis dans le sang et la sanie.59

These articles outdo Jules Janin’s melodramatic L’Âne mort et la femme guillotinée of 1829 and remain shocking in their detailed reporting of the butchered horses, cats and dogs, the rats and the noisome trades in fish-glue, maggots and manure to be found on an excursion to Montfaucon of gallows fame, off the road to Pantin.60 That Gautier is posturing cynically for satirical effect, rather than trying to speak meaningfully of the reverse of city life becomes all too evident in the last article where he archly commends the bear-, wolfand bull-baiting at the Barrière du Combat as morally healthier theatre than all the imaginary horrors of contemporary melodrama.61 Did the readers of La Presse object to the patent sadism of these pieces? Perhaps, because the series was never completed, but in any case the time was not ripe for literary walks to such foul places. By the time the rails were being laid for the line to SaintGermain (1837), the outlook of most other Romantics had however 58 59

60 61

56

Ed. cit., 125. Caprices et zigzags, Paris, Victor Lecou, 1852, 274–275 (‘Voyage hors barrières. I. Montfaucon’). See also ‘II. La ville des rats’ and ‘III. La Barrière du combat’. All are from 1838. They also outdo Eugène de Monglave’s ‘Montfaucon’ of 1834 in Paris, ou Le Livre des cent-et-un, XIV, 199–240. Ibid., 291–292.

begun to change decisively and this introduces our third and most positive phase of development. The signs pointing to this change are clear and multiple and they coincide with a growing fashion for travelling ‘en artiste’ and then ‘en compagnon’ among mildly disaffected young bourgeois playing at rebellion and fascinated by the rites of trade-guilds.62 In poetry, Hugo was to crown his earlier promenades with the troubled return, mocked by the indifference of nature and time, to first memories of Juliette at Meudon in ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ (1837): La forêt ici manque et là s’est agrandie. De tout ce qui fut nous presque rien n’est vivant; Et, comme un tas de cendre éteinte et refroidie, L’amas des souvenirs se disperse à tout vent! N’existons-nous donc plus? Avons-nous eu notre heure? Rien ne la rendra-t-il à nos cris superflus? L’air joue avec la branche au moment où je pleure; Ma maison me regarde et ne me connaît plus. D’autres vont maintenant passer où nous passâmes. Nous y sommes venus, d’autres vont y venir; Et le songe qu’avaient ébauchés nos deux âmes, Ils le continueront sans pouvoir le finir! […] Oh! dites-moi, ravins, frais ruisseaux, treilles mûres, Rameaux chargés de nids, grottes, forêts, buissons, Est-ce que vous ferez pour d’autres vos murmures? Est-ce que vous direz à d’autres vos chansons? 63

To this grandly rhetorical, but still touching lament Musset would later provide a lyrical echo in ‘Souvenir’ (1841), written in memory of 62

63

See Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris. Culture, Politics and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life, 1830–1930 (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 11, 58, and Gautier’s mockery in ‘Les voyages littéraires’, La Charte de 1830, 6 janvier 1837 (reprinted in Fusains et eaux-fortes, Paris, Charpentier, 1880, 36–37). Les Rayons et les ombres, dated October 183[7] (Poésies, I, 1011–1012).

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days spent riding and walking with Sand at Fontainebleau.64 SainteBeuve had no such command of rhythms, but in 1837 after a summer in Switzerland, did include several lyrical poems featuring strolling, rambling or hill-walking in Pensées d’août.65 In prose, it is also in 1837 that Hugo started to think of publishing accounts of his regular summer journeys and of including the long walks he had done that year along the dunes from Furnes to Dunkirk and across the Hâble d’Ault in the Somme, while Dumas for his part published chaotically between 1837 and 1841 the text of his Midi de la France which continues the celebration of travel on foot begun in his book on Switzerland: Heureusement qu’une course de quatre lieues de pays n’était pas de nature à nous effrayer; nous acceptions, au contraire, avec grand plaisir ces occasions de voir le terrain pied à pied; et n’eût été l’impossibilité de transporter avec nous le bagage nécessaire à un voyage d’un an, je crois même que nous n’eussions jamais adopté d’autre mode de locomotion. En effet, j’en appelle à tous ceux qui ont voyagé l’album du poëte sous le bras et le carton du dessinateur sur l’épaule: y a-t-il bonheur comparable à celui de cette vie vagabonde, libre d’elle-même, qui se tourne indifféremment vers le point de l’horizon qui lui plaît, s’arrête où elle trouve moisson, s’éloigne au premier ennui sans regret de la veille, emportant sa richesse du jour, et sans crainte du lendemain, certaine qu’elle est que chaque aurore amènera sa rosée, chaque midi son soleil, et chaque soir son crépuscule et sa fraîcheur? Je n’ai jamais compris que ce soit ceux qui pourraient voyager toujours qui ne voyagent presque jamais.66

64

65 66

58

Œuvres complètes, ed P. Van Tieghem, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1963, ‘Souvenir’ [1841], 188–190. See also La Confession d’un enfant du siècle, ibid., IV, 3, 609–611 and Sand, Elle et lui, ed. T. Bodin, Meylan, Éditions de l’Aurore, 1986, 87–92. They both contributed to the memorial to Denecourt: Musset a ‘Souvenir’ and Sand a fine letter about a week riding in the forest with her son in 1837 (op. cit., 37–46, 80–83). Pensées d’août, ‘A Madame la D. de R. I & II’, ‘A M.J. Maurice’, ‘A M. Paulin Limayrac’, ‘A M. Pantin’, ‘A J.-J. Ampère’. Paris, Éditions François Bourrin, 1991, 217. Dumas would return to this topic in De Paris à Cadix. Impressions de voyage (Paris, Éditions François Bourrin, 1989), 56: ‘Giraud et Desbarolles venaient de faire un voyage merveilleux, à pied toujours; un voyage d’artiste dans toute la force du terme: le carton en bandoulière, le crayon à la main, l’escopette sur l’épaule’.

Finally, it was in 1837 too that Sand collected in the Lettres d’un voyageur both her famous letter of 1834 on walking in the Italian Alps and her letter of 1836 on touring in Switzerland.67 Four years later it was again to be an excursion on foot to a sublime panorama which provided the positive climax in part 3, chapter IV to Un Hiver à Mayorque. What were for writers the special factors which had helped to bring this breakthrough about, apart from the general ones already mentioned which were beginning to draw all Parisians to the deeper country and mountains? Among texts, the following had no doubt specially helped to spread the idea of literary pedestrianism in the intervening years. The republication of Oberman in 1833 thanks to Nodier and Sainte-Beuve had been followed in 1834 by several texts contributing strongly to the fashion for walking: Heine’s ‘Harzreise’ in book form,68 the first of Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur on walking in the Italian Alps, Dumas’s Impressions de voyage [Suisse] (completed in 1834) and Didier’s tour of the Mezzogiorno in the Italie pittoresque sponsored by Nodier (only completed in 1836).69 It can hardly be by accident that in 1836 Janin entitled a novel Le Chemin de traverse70 and that in the same year Lamartine’s Jocelyn drew on early memories of the Alps to picture the struggle of peasant life lived along harsh 67 68

69

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Letter I, Revue des deux mondes, 15 May 1834; Letter X, Revue des deux mondes, 15 November 1836. The first extracts and translations in French of the ‘Harzreise’ were published by F.-A. Loève-Veimars and Joseph Willm in 1832 (Revue des deux mondes, 15 June; Nouvelle Revue germanique, numbers for June and July). In 1834 Renduel published a version on which Heine collaborated (Reisebilder. Tableaux de voyage). Didier’s text was first published as separate chapters on ‘Calabre’, ‘Terre d’Otrante’, ‘Basilicata’, ‘Les Abruzzes’, ‘Les Pouilles’ and ‘Sicile’ in this collective Italie pittoresque published in 1834–1836 by J.M. de Norvins, C. Nodier, A. Dumas, C. Didier, et al. (Paris, Amable Costes, 1834–1836). These have recently been assembled for the first time as a book by Annie Brudo under the title Voyage en Italie (Paris and Geneva, Slatkine, ‘Fleuron’, 1996). A sign of the topicality of Didier’s narrative is Di Fiori’s advice to Mérimée in 1835 to tour Calabria on foot, advice which Mérimée rejected (Stendhal, Correspondance, V, 501, 30 april 1835). 1836 (1841 edition, Paris, Jules Chapelle).

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upland tracks. In its own way, this volume might well have proved France’s strongest challenge to Wordsworth, had not the politics and anti-clericalism been so crude and had not the writing been so hurried and slack at key moments such as Laurence’s funeral, disappointing even those most ready to sympathize and reach like Sainte-Beuve for comparisons with the ‘Lakistes’:71 Les sentiers creux, glissants, sous une fine pluie, Buvaient les brouillards froids que la montagne essuie; Les nuages rasaient les arbres dans leur vol, La feuille en tourbillon ondoyait sur le sol; Les vents lourds de l’hiver, qui soufflaient par rafales, Échappés des ravins, hurlaient par intervalles, Secouaient le cercueil dans les bras des porteurs, Et, détachant du drap la couronne de fleurs Qu’avaient mise au linceul les femmes du village, M’en jetaient en sifflant les feuilles au visage, Symbole affreux du sort qui jette avec mépris Au front de l’homme heureux son bonheur en débris! (O.P.C., 768–769)

Of the above, it seems clear that the two most immediately influential were Dumas’s Impressions de voyage [Suisse], which set a new standard for the walking that might be expected of a Romantic author, and Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur. In spite of confusing gaps and contradictions, the first of the latter describes vividly Sand’s search for distraction from the end of her affair with Musset in an Alpine excursion and gives a depth to the experience of walking not to be found in the extrovert Dumas. With the awkwardness of lived experience, her account manages to combine walking as a woman’s rite of passage with walking as the cleansing necessary for rebirth to health and new artistic vision. For all its imperfections (of which more later) the result is the most complex use of walking since Senancour and clearly the most important document for French romantic

71

60

See A.G. Lehmann, Sainte-Beuve. A Portrait of the Critic, 1804–1842, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, 269–271. In any case Guillemin was right to discount any such deliberate rivalry on Lamartine’s part in Le ‘Jocelyn’ de Lamartine, 587–595.

pedestrianism until Letter XX of Le Rhin and Consuelo’s trek to Vienna. Analysis of these key texts is best left to the individual studies of Sand and Hugo in the next part of this book and it is preferable to conclude here with a glance at the tour of Southern Italy which the young Swiss Charles Didier published between 1834 and 1836 in the heavily illustrated and very romantic Italie pittoresque. For this tour which drew on pedestrian traditions more akin to the British and German than the French, both exemplifies the sort of adventure which would long remain rare for writers in France and yet which appearing in the very years of Dumas’s triumph as a travel writer was bound to reinforce the latter’s promotion of journeys on foot. Didier’s later abortive affair with George Sand at the time when she was cultivating her image as a voyageur underlines his part in the story – her Letter X on touring the Swiss Alps was initially addressed to him.72 In addition, his text gives us a measure against which to judge the quality of Hugo’s, Sand’s and Nerval’s insights into the experience of walking and into encounters with alien cultures.

72

He was very hurt when in the book she substituted another addressee.

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Charles Didier

Didier’s narrative of his trek on foot round Southern Italy in 1829– 1830 had been completely forgotten until its recent republication but is certainly one of the best accounts in French of a pedestrian tour in the nineteenth century.1 Nowadays Didier is remembered, if at all, for his novel Rome souterraine of 1833 and his brief affair with George Sand in 1836–1837, but in the nineteenth century it was for his travel writings on Spain, Morocco, Arabia and Egypt that he was best known.2 In fact, none of these later books are as good as his first ‘odyssée pédestre’ at the age of 23 to Basilicata, Calabria, Puglia and Abruzzo.3 Even the tour of Sicily which he did on horseback just before leaving Italy cannot compare with his tramp a few months earlier round the southern mainland, a rugged feat of mental and physical endurance and sometimes fraught encounters with radically different others which makes Denon and Custine in the Mezzogiorno seem bland and Dumas frivolous.4 Didier is of course a further link in the chain from Senancour to Töpffer which makes Swiss traditions and the Alps such determining factors in the general growth of French pedestrianism. Walking alone for most of the time, Didier makes us share the effects of rain, snow, heat and sun:

1 2 3 4

References are to the edition prefaced and published by Annie Brudo as Voyage en Italie, Paris and Geneva, Slatkine, ‘Fleuron’, 1996. See J. Sellards, Dans le sillage du romantisme: Charles Didier (1805–1864), Paris, Champion, 1933. Voyage en Italie, 76. V. Denon, Voyage au royaume de Naples, ed. M. Couty, Paris, Perrin, 1997 (1778); A. de Custine, Mémoires et voyages, 104–199 (1812); A. Dumas, Voyage en Calabre, ed. C. Schopp, Paris, Complexe, 1989 (1835). It is also fair to say that the first three parts of Didier’s book (on Basilicata, Calabria and the ‘terre d’Otrante’) are the best and that the last show signs of haste.

Les nuées avaient crevé; il pleuvait; il plut bientôt par torrents. Je marchais dans l’eau, et je n’apercevais ni toit ni refuge. Je montais depuis quatre grandes heures, et je n’avais pas rencontré un seul visage humain; ma première rencontre fut un franciscain qui retournait à son couvent, et qui me dit que Nicastro où je comptais coucher était encore à vingt milles. Je repris donc courage et doublai le pas. Cependant la pluie tombait toujours; j’étais las, j’avais faim, et je ne voyais pas un pâtre qui pût partager avec moi son pain noir. Je marchais avec ravissement au sein de ces solitudes muettes et grandioses. Tout à coup je m’arrêtai; l’admiration m’avait aveuglé, et l’impétuosité de mes enchantements jeté hors du sentier. Je m’en aperçus trop tard pour y rentrer. Je ne le retrouvai point, caché qu’il était sous la neige. Je revins sur mes pas; j’errai longtemps en tous sens, prenant et quittant successivement tous les sentiers qui s’offraient à moi; je m’égarai tout à fait. J’appelle; ma voix va mourir en d’invisibles profondeurs; et le silence, un silence inflexible reprend possession du désert. J’entends un bruit, j’écoute; le bruit redouble; je crois que c’est un pâtre qui fuit; je m’élance à sa poursuite, c’était un sanglier. Je perdis trop tôt la mer de vue, et je fus condamné à traverser une vaste plaine de lin dont la teinte bleuâtre figurait de loin des étangs; l’alouette chantait dans la nue, mais la campagne était muette et n’est point pittoresque. La route sans ombre est chargée de mica qui étincelait comme de l’argent et me fatiguait les yeux autant qu’aurait pu faire la neige des glaciers. Mais j’eus bientôt lieu de regretter les bois où je m’étais perdu; car après avoir franchi quelques ravins secs et sans autre verdure que de chétifs oliviers sans ombrage, j’eus à gravir en plein midi une côte roide, chaude et sablonneuse, où je crus rester tant le soleil y dardait à-plomb. (39, 90–91, 60, 61)

We listen with him to ‘le bruit de mes pas dans les feuilles mortes’ (142) and stumble with him on the paths of Basilicata: Des sentiers escarpés, fangeux en hiver, poudreux en été, rocailleux en tout temps, serpentent péniblement de montagne en montagne, coupés de torrents où l’on court risque de se noyer vingt fois par jour; à défaut de ponts et des chariots qui les remplacent dans la plaine, on en est réduit, pour les passer, à l’âne du moulin voisin ou aux épaules de louage du manant posté là en guise de bac: c’est l’usage du pays. (147)

It is true that the solitude is not always unwelcome and that the walker also feels elation and pride when he has clambered up to one of those 64

‘sublime’ panoramas for which he had a marked taste (67–68, 238– 240), but what is unusual is the honesty with which at other times Didier records his loneliness and boredom on the empty roads: Cette route, longue et uniforme, eût été insupportable si la mandore des pâtres toujours invisible au sein des bois, n’en eût abrégé pour moi la longueur, et égayé la tristesse. Mais le soir, quand les pâtres se turent, je rentrai dans le silence, et n’eus plus pour m’escorter que le chant lugubre du petit-duc. Préoccupé que j’étais toujours d’imaginations funestes, les troncs dépouillés me causaient parfois, dans les ténèbres, d’étranges illusions. Je ne me rappelle pas avoir rencontré sur cette interminable route un seul homme, et je dus même, pour coucher, recourir à l’hospitalité des gendarmes.5

If the preceding quotations make his journey seem more depressing than exhilarating, this is not altogether misleading, since the overall impression is of a traveller given to putting himself in difficult situations and showing occasional signs of stress: ‘je regrettais amèrement les douceurs et les affectueuses habitudes de la vie sociale; je me reprochais d’avoir brisé tout cela et d’avoir cédé à ces instincts nomades qui depuis trois longues années, me promenaient de privations en privations, de périls en périls’ (132). The preoccupation with ‘imaginations funestes’ which we have just seen him admitting to, found a correlative in the malarial marshes of Brindisi and Taranto which ‘règnent toutes les deux comme Rome sur le désert et sur la mort’, just as it was later to draw him in Sicily to the tombs of Ispica.6 We know in fact from Sellards’s biography that Didier had set out for Italy in 1827 on learning that he was illegitimate.7 These early journeys must therefore have been spent coming to terms with this uncomfortable truth, a need which may well have dictated the urge to strip down to essentials in solitary travel to a primitive country. Didier may have thought that he chose the Mezzogiorno for its ‘merveilles de la nature’, but our knowledge of his problems and the sad course of 5 6

7

Ibid., 35. See also 108, 132, 148. Ibid., 166, 316–322. In his Voyage en Sicile, Denon had also commented on this gorge lined with tombs (ed. Patrick Mauriès, Paris, Gallimard, ‘Le Promeneur’, 1993, 188–196). Op. cit., 1–10. His father was a hard protestant lawyer whom he disliked and his mother the latter’s housekeeper.

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his future life allow us to guess that his despair was one source of his painful frankness about the harsh conditions as well as of the tensions in his narrative between morbidity and elation.8 With hindsight, are his private preoccupations not evident in the following comment on the interest of genealogy? Que l’incrédulité, à l’œil torve, rejette la science des peut-être au rang des sciences occultes, il n’y en a pas moins pour l’homme un charme ineffable à rechercher ses origines. Qui ne serait jaloux de connaître son père et son berceau? Un amour vague, une tendresse instinctive lie l’homme à l’homme à travers les âges. (176)

Just as interesting as the psychological drives behind this journey are however Didier’s encounters with others on it. He paints as graphically as he can the utter poverty and ignorance of the peasants and shepherds on whom he relies and does not conceal that in some areas, notably Basilicata, he finds a brutalized self-absorption which kills all sympathy: je tombai dans une sale petit hameau, nommé Terra Nova. Je doutais du chemin: je le demandai à un vieux paysan, qui, pour toute réponse, s’enfuit épouvanté […] Je restai donc seul au milieu du village, sans pouvoir obtenir aucun renseignement. Portes et fenêtres se fermaient à mon approche; je créais le désert autour de moi comme une bête malfaisante. Pourtant je n’étais pas bien formidable, car j’étais seul, et je n’avais pas même à la main un bâton de voyage. Mais l’imagination de ces campagnards était frappée; j’étais pour eux un esprit malin, un sorcier… qui sait même si ma botte ne cachait pas le pied noir et fourchu de Belzébuth! J’atteignis ainsi le bourg d’Avigliano; j’y entrai par des rues désastreuses, vrais cloaques, pleins de fange et d’immondices. Bientôt je fus entouré de la population; mais cette fois elle était en force, et au lieu de fuir devant moi, comme à Terra Nova et ailleurs, c’est moi qu’elle voulut mettre en fuite. Je fus insulté, pousuivi, presque lapidé par cette insolente canaille; mais je n’en était encore qu’à l’exorde […] 9 8 9

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Voyage en Italie, 31. His marriage in 1838 was a disaster and at 59 he committed suicide. Ibid., 138, 151. On the poverty, see also 77–78.

While almost all are surprised by the arrival of this foreigner and consequently wary, the responses nevertheless differ widely. In the following example, the caution of the stolid reactions does not preclude a minimum of practical hospitality: Tout à coup je vis poindre au milieu d’une clairière un bâtiment de bois bas et grossier: c’était une étable de buffles, une Buffaleria […] Je trouvai là une dizaine de pâtres sauvages, vêtus de peaux comme les Lestrigons et aussi farouches qu’eux; ils étaient accroupis ou couchés en rond autour d’un feu de paille qui flamboyait au milieu de l’étable. Ils ne se dérangèrent point à mon approche: ils ne m’adressèrent pas une parole; ils jetaient sur moi des regards étonnés et méfiants. Cependant on me fit place au coin de l’âtre; et l’un d’eux, moins inhospitalier que les autres, parce qu’il était Abruzzais et pas Basilisque, m’apporta dans une écuelle de bois du laitage de buffalesse, buffalessa: pour du pain, il n’y en avait pas. Tout cela se fit en silence, sans que j’eusse rien demandé, et avec une gravité singulière. Quand je fus réchauffé, je partis comme j’étais arrivé, sans que la conversation se fût engagée. (143)

Elsewhere the response is warmer and a genuine personal and cultural encounter can happen near Nicastro between Didier, his guitar-playing host and inquisitive villager dancers. Je ne sais comment le bruit de mon arrivée s’était répandu au village voisin, mais je vis arriver à la file les montagnards des environs. Ils venaient, malgré la pluie, rendre visite au voyageur. Ils étaient enveloppés tous dans leurs manteaux bruns et coiffés du chapeau conique. Rassemblés autour de moi, ils me pressaient de questions sur mon pays, sur mon voyage, sur tout ce qui en moi éveillait leur curiosité, mais la guitare de mon hôte agit bientôt sur eux, et ils se mirent à danser la pécorée. (42)

The young Swiss thus avoids imposing a uniform view of the way southern Italians react to their poverty, even if as a protestant democrat he has no doubt about the responsibility of the government and of the exceptionally reactionary Catholic church.10 What room can there be for optimism when this government and its vexatious police are forever hunting carbonari while utterly failing to control the bandits laying waste Crotona?11 Didier is not able to go much beyond 10 11

Ibid., 31, 36–37, 110–111, 214–216. Ibid., 110–112, 134, 140, 150.

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such liberal analysis of the south, but he does at least present the varied and irreducible otherness of the inhabitants and does not attempt to deny this otherness by sentimental assimilations to himself or easy expressions of sympathy. The result is one of the best records of the period of personal encounters with radical difference. We owe this doubtless both to the fact that the troubled young man was clinging for security to a naive record, and to the fact that walking brought him as close as possible to another Italy.

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Part II

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Introduction

Walking being for most Romantics (and not only for them) an essentially solitary experience, it is the individual experience of the most creative walkers which we shall now concentrate on in studies of Sand, Nerval and Hugo. To these we shall add in a coda the Swiss Rodolphe Töpffer, the popularity of whose books marks the beginning of the end in France of any particular association between walking and Romanticism. This selection may do a certain injustice to the efforts already mentioned of minor provincial poets such as Auguste Brizeux and Maurice de Guérin, both of whom seem to have found in Breton life and culture unusual affinities and even contact with the British Romantic cult of pedestrianism and poems of walking. But while acknowledging that there may be more to discover about Breton exceptionalism then and later,1 for the present study concentration on major authors and texts has seemed the most important in order to bring out the essential relation of French Romanticism to walking as experience and motif. Certain themes already encountered will figure strongly in these pages. Like Nerval, Hugo often associated walking with a return to the past. Sand and Nerval both echoed and contributed to the emergence of a sentimental dream irresistible to bourgeois imaginations of a Bohemian space of artistic freedom transcending classes and especially the hostile, urban territories of the avant-gardes. Finally, Victor Hugo returned repeatedly in his travel books, novels and poems to chance encounters with alien figures such as Southern Italy had richly offered Charles Didier.

1

In his recent groundbreaking article on walking in twentieth-century French literature, Charles Forsdick cites extensively pages from Brittany by Saint-PaulRoux and Jean-Claude Bourlès (‘A quoi bon marcher: Uses of the Peripatetic in Contemporary Travel Literature in French’, Sites, 5.1 [Spring 2001], 47–62).

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George Sand

Brought up in the country, George Sand remained for much of her life an energetic walker in the Alps and Pyrenees, in the ‘vallée noire’ of her native Berry and around Gargilesse. For the young girl, walking was one the few distractions available from the boredom of life with her ailing grandmother; for the tomboy she long remained it continued to provide the chance for occasional escapades and for the amateur naturalist she became it would always be a source of pleasure.1 The early holiday in the Pyrenees revealed how exhilarating walking in hills and mountains was for someone with her energy and taste for danger,2 almost as much so indeed as riding, undoubtedly her greatest passion.3 Later in life, walking in the Berry and the Creuse was not only sometimes a necessity on the still poor tracks and roads but often also an escape from domestic problems.4 The records of these excursions are ample and it is of minor importance that not all her 1

2

3 4

See Corr., I, 58 (To Apollonie de Bruges, 1821): ‘Vraie campagnarde, sortant en sabots, et tête nue par tous les temps, à pied, à cheval, dans nos boues du Berry qui sont affreuses, je vais, je viens sans but ni plaisir’. See also ‘Voyage chez M. Blaise’ (O.A., II, 559–560) and for escapades with Hippolyte, see ‘Nuit d’hiver’ (O.A., II, 546, 551); for happy walks with Sandeau and other friends in 1830, see ‘Les Couperies’ (O.A., II, 575–581); for excursions as a naturalist with her friend and teacher Jules Néraud, see the Lettres d’un voyageur (O.A., II, 798–800); for her lifelong love of botany see ‘Le pays des anémones’ (Nouvelles lettres d’un voyageur, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1877, 29–91). She was also interested in entomology and mineralogy. O.A. II, 60 (Histoire de ma vie): ‘Tout cela m’a paru horrible et délicieux en même temps. J’avais peur, une peur inouïe et sans cause, une peur de vertige qui n’était pas sans charme.’ Corr., I, 162–163, 165–166. On riding, see O.A., II, 65–66 and Corr., I, 211–212; IV, 71–72, 81, 161, 175 (1837); V, 344 (1841). On the poor roads, see for example O.A., I, 683–687. So she writes in 1837 that she has just walked 7 leagues, i.e. about 28 kilometres, to see a friend when her horse was not well (Corr., IV, 82) and on an earlier occasion that year ‘cinq lieues à pied’, i.e. about about 20 kilometres (O.A., II, 979).

claims convince as to routes and distances covered and that in the Histoire de ma vie of 1854–1855 she aims to promote her image as a voyageur who still prefers walking and climbing while her letters show her naturally doing much less since 1841.5 The variety of narratives in her letters, manuscripts, memoirs and novels, whether contemporary, recollected or adapted to fiction, is enough to convince us that she was indeed a person likely to fantasize in 1835 to SainteBeuve about touring Switzerland alone and on foot: ‘mon intention est d’aller à Genève, de faire à pied et seule le tour de la Suisse.’6 It is not surprising then that in her Lettres d’un voyageur and Consuelo. La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, Sand should have produced key texts of Romantic pedestrianism, at dates – 1837 and 1842–1844 – which frame the moment of its cultural breakthrough in France. By her passion for the Alps and for natural history, by the interest she increasingly took from 1838 in the peripatetic lives of the compagnons,7 by her literary tastes, Sand found herself in fact positioned as close as she could be to the various sources of literary pedestrianism in France. Had she not remained more involved than most with the heritage of Rousseau and played – with Sainte-Beuve and Nodier – a special role in the fashion for Senancour’s Oberman in

5

6 7

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As far as her claims go, it is not always clear in the Lettres d’un voyageur, for instance, whether she is riding or walking and the claims of a regular 8 and more leagues, that is 32-odd kilometres, walked each day in the foothills of the Tyrol are far from accurate (O.A., II, 665 and note 3, 1434–1435; Corr., II, 556–557, 559). See also Annarosa Poli, L’Italie dans la vie et dans l’œuvre de George Sand, Paris, Armand Colin, 1960, 90–95. In 1841 she wrote to Néraud, her mentor on early naturalist forays that ‘à force de rester immobile devant une table, mes jambes se sont amollies, et je ne puis aller que sur les pattes de mon prochain, c’est-à-dire à cheval ou âne’ (Corr., V, 266) and this slowing down is confirmed later (ibid., 344, 349; VII, 94–95 [1845]). She nevertheless continued to do many shorter walks in the Berry and the Creuse and as late as 1861 on holiday in the Var after a severe illness, she still walked as much as she could (Voyage dit du midi, ed. Maurice Jean, Ville de la Valette-du-Var, 1991, 21–22, 41, 51, 61). Corr., II, 824 (to Sainte-Beuve, March 1835). Resulting in Le Compagnon du tour de France of 1841.

the 1830s?8 Was not Charles Didier, author as we have seen of the best walking tour of the period in French, to be (briefly) a lover? Above all, throughout her life Sand was to cultivate walking and climbing as key features of the image she promoted of herself as Artist and ‘Voyageur’, something which Hugo was never to do to the same extent with his walking. The habit began in the Lettres d’un voyageur with the accounts in Letters I and X of her expeditions in the Alps, continued in the Hiver à Mayorque with her clamber at the end to a heroic panorama and came to a climax in the Histoire de ma vie with the retelling of childhood walks in the Berry and the Pyrenees. The articles she kept publishing on life in the Berry and holidays at Gargilesse simply reinforced the image.9 Part of Sand’s reasons for insisting on this feature was evidently the manly and emancipated turn it gave her.10 In her autobiography she presented herself and her cousin as as having had in childhood an ‘esprit avide d’émotions viriles’ and herself as travelling in the Alps in 1834 with trousers ready for a chance of climbing.11 Another reason for the insistence was clearly the wish to underpin her description of herself as a voyageur, an identity she had less claim to than most contemporary 8

9

10

11

In 1841 she admitted in ‘Quelques réflexions sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ destined to preface the Charpentier edition of the Confessions that ‘quant à moi, oui, je lui reste fidèle, ou plutôt je suis revenue à lui après un refroidissement de quelques années’ (Revue des deux mondes, 4e série, XXVI, 1 juin 1841, 705). She wrote a sensitive preface for the 1840 edition of Senancour’s Oberman and invoked his name twice in the Lettres d’un voyageur (O.A., II, 800, 887). See the articles collected by her in, for instance, Autour de la table (Dentu, 1862), Laura. Voyages et impressions (C. Lévy, 1881) and Promenades autour d’un village (Hachette, 1860, re-edited by G. Lubin in 1992, Saint-Cyr-surLoire, Christian Pirot) and now by Denise Brahimi as La Vallée noire (SaintCyr-sur-Loire, Christian Pirot, 1998). See Musset’s memories of her in La Confession d’un enfant du siècle: ‘Quand il s’agissait de ces grandes courses, elle prenait une blouse bleue et des habits d’homme’; ‘Il semblait, une fois lancée, qu’elle eût à accomplir une tâche difficile, mais sacrée; elle allait devant comme un soldat, les bras ballants et chantant à tue-tête’ (Œuvres complètes, ed. P. van Tieghem, Paris, Seuil, 1963, 609). O.A., I, 543 and II, 213. See also the competitive nature of her riding in 1825 in the Pyrenees (O.A., II, 64–66).

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authors.12 Nevertheless, one cannot doubt the importance for Sand herself of the ideas of walking, climbing and travel; she even went as far as to maintain, a bit naively but typically of the times, that all art was an imaginary journey, that artists needed to travel and that more opportunities for it would have benefited her own writing greatly: L’artiste est né voyageur; tout est voyage pour son esprit, et, sans quitter le coin du feu ou les ombrages de son jardin, il est autorisé à parcourir tous les chemins du monde. Le seul sacrifice qui m’ait un peu coûté, c’est de renoncer aux voyages, que j’aurais aimé de passion, et qui m’eussent développée comme artiste; mais dont j’ai dû m’abstenir, à moins de nécessité pour les autres.13

The allegorical climbs beyond Bassano in the first letter of the Voyageur and at the end of Un Hiver à Mayorque leave little room for doubt about the profound connections existing for Sand between climbing and idealism, walking and freedom, connections which are echoed in novel after novel. It was these associations that added 12

13

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Jeanne Goldin has done her best to spell out and defend the extent of Sand’s travels, but this does seem misguided since there is no comparison made and since she clearly did less than most contemporary authors, for reasons partly beyond her control (‘George Sand voyageur’, in George Sand. Voyage et écriture, Études françaises, XXIV, 1 (Spring 1988), 3–7. Nicole Mozet seems better advised when stressing rather the many imaginative forms which the appeal of travel and the image of herself as traveller took for Sand (‘Le Voyageur sandien en quête d’un lieu d’écriture’ Ibid., 41–55). Sand herself called the author of the Lettres a ‘problématique voyageur’ (O.A., II, 647) and the essential point about this imaginative and literary identification seems to be that Sand was deeply attracted to the view of life as a journey and of herself as a pilgrim on foot in it (ibid., 657, 761, 784, 817), as well as to the image of the artist as a Bohemian on the road (see below). It is not surprising therefore that she adopted Chateaubriand’s presentation of himself and René as voyageurs: ‘un secret instinct me tourmentait; je sentais que je n’étais moi-même qu’un voyageur’ (René, in Œuvres Romanesques et voyages, ed. Maurice Regard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1969, I, 130). In the Histoire de ma vie Sand admitted that ‘il me sembla que René, c’était moi’ (O.A., I, 1092). Laura, voyage dans le cristal, ed. cit., 4; O.A., II, 193 (Histoire de ma vie). For the benefit to all artists, see Les Maîtres sonneurs, eds. P. Salomon and P. Mallion, Paris, Garnier, 1968, 99–100, 132, 159, 254, 261, 365.

passion to her promotion of the mythical affinity between artists, Bohemia and the open road to which we shall return in a moment. The nature of Sand’s involvement with walking lends itself study along two axes: the one, aspirational and idealistic in its yearning for heights; the other, more prosaically involved with pursuing on the flat some better knowledge of self and the world. George Sand constantly felt herself pulled between the need for a calm and sedentary life such as she enjoyed at Nohant and the urge to avoid the attendant benumbment by throwing herself into movement and adventures of the sort that mountain walks provided. We have already noted her taste for danger in connection with the Pyrenees; it is in evidence again on her trips to Italy and Mayorca: Je conviens que je suis de ceux qui se casseraient volontiers le cou par bravade, et qu’il n’est pas d’écolier plus vain que moi de son courage et de son agilité. Cela tient à l’exiguïté de ma stature et à l’envie qu’éprouvent tous les petits hommes de faire ce que font les hommes forts. Tout à coup je ne vis plus rien devant moi et au-dessus de moi que la mer toute bleue […] Un pas de plus, et je fusse descendu beaucoup plus vite qu’il ne fallait […] car les rochers où je m’aventurais surplombaient le petit golfe, et la base de l’île était rongée profondément au-dessous. Quand je vis le danger où j’avais failli entraîner mes enfants, j’eus une peur épouvantable, et je me dépêchai de remonter avec eux; mais, quand je les eus mis en sûreté […] il me prit une nouvelle rage de revoir le fond de l’anse et le dessous de l’excavation.14

Involved here is clearly the urge to test oneself to the limit and play out a heroic role of the sort mostly confined to men. But awesome heights also appealed to Sand’s imagination and triggered romantic dreams of more heroic and beautiful worlds, exotic sometimes but above all more pure than contemporary reality. Ever since her convent days Sand had in any case had a penchant for dreaming up such ascents and the sort of dramatic adventures and ‘promenades imaginaires’ that would be needed for her romances.15 The latter use 14 15

O.A., II, 655 (Lettres d’un voyageur); 1168–1169 (Un Hiver à Mayorque). See also the Voyage en Auvergne (O.A., II, 515). See O.A., I, 890–891, and the ‘promenades imaginaires’ she enjoyed (‘Les Charmettes’ in Laura. Voyages et impressions, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1881,

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in fact repeatedly the topos of dangerous adventures and descents into underworlds which traditionally test the heroes of romance and it is notably expeditions on foot that Sand tends to invent for these passages, whether they take the form of treks through snow-bound or barren mountains and woods, as in Carl, François le champi and Le Marquis de Villemer,16 or of courageous explorations of ruined castles, labyrinths and grottoes, as in Consuelo, Malgrétout and La Daniella.17 Sometimes these journeys which her heroines undertake with all the courage that Sand herself had needed when exploring the grottoes of Lourdes18 are vivid and effective, as at the end of François le champi or when Consuelo explores the maze under the Schreckenstein. But in Sand’s romances such adventures are often in danger of seeming formulaic, and one can feel that the most interesting of the symbolic treks in her writings are the autobiographical climbs to vision at the beginning of the Lettres d’un voyageur and the end of Un Hiver à Mayorque. The excursion along the Brenta and in the foothills above Bassano in the first of the Lettres d’un voyageur have been much commented on, albeit with insufficient attention to the reticences, contradictions, gaps and excesses which make this haunted text a fascinating example of the will to write oneself back into some sort of equilibrium and health. And what makes it of special interest to us is Sand’s use of mountain panoramas as constant emblems of her idealism and climbs to these as the symbol of her determination to compete with men and maintain her ideals in spite of errors and disasters.

16

17 18

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199). See also her more general comment about travel and the novel at the beginning of La Daniella (Paris, Librairie Nouvelle, 1857, I, 1): ‘ce que nous allons transcrire sera, pour le lecteur, un roman et un voyage, soit un voyage pendant un roman, soit un roman pendant un voyage.’ Carl, Paris, M. Lévy, 1869, 247–251; François le champi, ed. P. Salomon et J. Mallion, Classiques Garnier, 1962, 326–330; Le Marquis de Villemer, Paris, M. Lévy, 1862, 281–286. Malgrétout, Paris, M. Lévy, 1870, 226–235; La Daniella, I, 275–280, 316–317, II, 30–31; Consuelo, I, 259–260, 292–314. O.A., II, 71–72 (Histoire de ma vie).

The letter as a whole must have left ordinary contemporaries feeling confused yet aware that their confusions arose from some inability or unwillingness on the part of the author (not uncommon in such texts of the period) to confess all. Who is the tu who the writer addresses and what relation has this tu to the common friend of the writer and doctor who is said to have recently left them?19 Why this talk of the dangers of hill-walking when one is depressed and why the long digression comparing the toi addressed in the letter to a river which degenerates from its crystalline origins (655–656, 662–663)? The practicalities of a walking tour are first remembered and then forgotten – what ever happened to the author’s intention of moving only at night and sleeping daytime in the open (659 and 667–668)? Even contemporaries may have suspected that the ‘docteur’ did not leave George Sand at Bassano but accompanied her throughout, as Pagello had indeed done, without fully understanding just why she needed to spare Musset’s pride and her own reputation. And yet this very incoherence and the ebb and flow of doubt and self-assertion can seem very human and far from out of place within the permissive forms of letter- and travel-writing. This wouldn’t be the first ‘crise morale’ (656) to have prompted the invention of a largely mythical pilgrimage and journey of expiation and this one is moreover enriched by several connotations. In the first place it is presented as Sand’s response to the masculine challenge thrown down by the doctor as to what so small a person can do (654–655). In the second place the text suggests that this journey is a return to nature much needed by Sand after overindulgence in art in Venice (652). And lastly, it would seem that her recent life in that ‘ville marécageuse’ had made desireable a return from some murky moral depths to heights of marble and snow reminding her of forgotten ideals (652, 653, 656). Now Sand tells us that the symbolic value of these uplands has its origin in the reveries of her childhood and in musical dreams of the Tyrol that was once the catalyst of her ‘songes dorés’ (659). This ideal Tyrol of her imagination Sand will not reach on this journey, for reasons which in the text are obscure but clearly include the 19

O.A., II, 655 (Lettres d’un voyageur).

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underlying guilt and need for expiation created by Musset’s illness and the amorous triangle with Pagello. For what eventually takes the place in this letter of a successful climb to the Tyrol is her hysterically extended address to Musset, followed by the confrontation in a grotto at Oliero with the threat of petrification suggested to her by the reflection of her face in the ‘bloc d’émeraude’ of a pool (666–667). After this turning point Sand tries to to take stock and gradually recovers with the help, first of various consoling memories and then of a brutal reminder of reality in the shape of a thief (668–673). This halting process of recovery carries conviction as her walk then takes her on to wilder and more inhospitable ground where her imagination takes flight to American jungles and Andean peaks with an accompanying feeling of energies and desires reviving: Ce voyage d’Amérique avait déroulé, en cinq minutes, un immense avenir devant moi; et quand je me réveillai sur une cime des Alpes, il me sembla que, de mon pied, j’allais repousser la terre et m’élancer dans l’immensité. Ces belles plaines de la Vénétie, cette mer Adriatique qui flottait comme un voile de brume à l’horizon, tout cela m’apparut comme une conquête épuisée, comme un espace déjà franchi. Je m’imaginai que, si je voulais, je serais demain sur la cime des Andes. (674)

The journey closes with one last panorama ‘au faîte d’une crête de rochers’, this time over Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, an appealing representative for Sand of the idealistic artist by virtue of his upland and peasant origins and preference for working in marble (674–677). His case moreover reminds her of the pressures of society on art, embodied here in the betrayal of Canova’s legacy by his executors. This recall of harsh realities is the final touch needed before her return to the lowlands and Venice at the end of a symbolic journey in the course of which the writer as walker has successfully challenged masculine disdain, survived moral and physical threats and reaffirmed her need for ideals as well as for a balance in her life between nature and art. Riven by tensions which were in fact as yet far from resolved, the text is a memorable testament to Sand’s determination to survive but also to the way in which walking and climbing became the favourite figures in her imagination for the will

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to live idealistically, as symbolized by dreams of mountains, handsome rocks and precious stones. Three years later, Un Hiver à Mayorque would confirm the profound connection in Sand’s imagination between climbing and idealism, as we have already glimpsed. The narrative of the four months which she and Chopin spent in Mayorca in 1838–1839 is structurally cleaner and more transparent than the Lettres d’un voyageur although careful study reveals that it too is full of strong and sometimes contradictory emotions generated not only by various events of that disastrous holiday but also by the deteriorating state of her relationship with Chopin in 1840, the time of writing. Responsibility for the dire sequence of events was on reflection largely still laid by Sand on what she saw as the greed and selfishness of ‘primitive’ Mayorcans, on the ignorance of their reaction to Chopin’s consumption and on their intolerance of their irreligious and bohemian ménage and as a result Un Hiver à Mayorque is often violent satire.20 The satisfactions of satire are however severely qualified in the second half of the book by the constant threat of death and by Sand’s own feelings of guilt at having exposed Chopin to so many dangers.21 Moreover, there are even signs of the later tensions between Sand and Chopin at the time of writing over political and sexual matters and as in the Lettres d’un voyageur all these undercurrents finally trigger at the end of the book a need in Sand for positive self-assertion – a self-assertion finally directed at the time of writing as much against the composer as against Mayorcans. That at least is what is suggested in the final allegorical excursion, on which Chopin does not come, and on which their stay on the island closes (O.A., II, 1167–1170). This excursion takes her and the children beyond the hills of Valldemosa to a point of the cliffs of the Northern coast from where a heroic panorama is discovered over the sea: ‘Nous tournâmes avec le sentier, et, comme par enchantement, nous nous 20

21

For details of this argument, see my ‘With George Sand on the Island of Pigs: Travel Writing and Autobiography’, in Autobiography, Historiography, Rhetoric, eds. Mary Donaldson-Evans et al., Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1994, 251– 263. Ibid., 259–260.

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trouvâmes au-dessus de la mer, au-dessus de l’immensité, avec un autre rivage à une lieue de distance sous nos pieds.’ They had indeed arrived there ‘comme par enchantement’, having made their mythical way from Valldemosa and the labyrinth of paths leading to it, as is clear from the presence at the entrance of the final stretch of ‘trois pastourelles, peut-être trois fées travesties’, the evil fairies Dentue and Carabosse and the good fairy Galatea (the latter nymph in Raphaël apparently an emblem of the soul triumphant) who will show the author the way to a vertiginous revelation: Je n’avais rien vu de semblable à ce que je pressentais là, et mon imagination prenait le grand galop. Je descendis par un autre sentier, m’accrochant aux ronces et embrassant les aiguilles de pierre dont chacune marquait une nouvelle cascade du sentier. Enfin, je commençais à entrevoir la bouche immense de l’excavation où les vagues se précipitaient avec une harmonie étrange. Je ne sais quels accords magiques je croyais entendre, ni quel monde inconnu je me flattais de découvrir, lorsque mon fils, effrayé et un peu furieux, vint me tirer violemment en arrière. Des arbres d’une vigueur prodigieuse, mais tous déjetés et à moitié déracinés par les vents, se penchaient sur l’abîme, et du fond de cet abîme une autre montagne s’élevait à pic jusqu’au ciel, une montagne de cristal, de diamant et de saphir. La mer, vue d’une hauteur considérable, produit cette illusion, comme chacun sait, de paraître un plan vertical. (1169–1170)

Once again George Sand’s ability to endure, assert herself and to survive is embodied in the allegory of a dangerous and traditionally masculine ascent to vision and once again the idealism of this vision is embodied in the hardness and glitter of precious stones and, specially, of crystals. Eventually Sand would elaborate on this vision in her initiatory and hoffmannesque ‘conte bleu’ of 1864 Laura, le voyage dans le cristal, in which the narrator dreams of a ‘monde fantastique où tout serait transparence et cristallization’22 and where crystal becomes an emblem of the universal soul and enduring beauty uniting the material and the spiritual, the finite and the infinite. But that story is a fantastic one and the journeys imagined in it purely of the mind. To follow the second axis of our study of Sand’s walks – those on the 22

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Laura, le voyage dans le cristal, ed. cit., 7.

flat to some better knowledge of self and the world – we must turn back to earlier texts. For Sand as for other Romantics as we have learnt to see, solitude was to some degree one of the joys offered by walking and one which she valued especially for the concentrated attention it allowed her on the world around. A note in the Lettres du voyageur recalls characteristically the individual effort needed to consign a special scene to memory: ‘Je fermai les yeux, comme je fais souvent, pour résumer les diverses impressions de ma promenade’ (734). Remoteness or night could both intensify this concentration to a point where it seemed to her close to the pleasure of listening to music, so apt itself to stimulate some ‘beaux rêves de voyage et de solitude’ (658–660) and an early text such as the Voyage chez M. Blaise (1829) leaves little doubt as to the intensity of her enjoyment of the opportunity for concentrated attention which seclusion in the country offered: A travers le fouillis des branches, je découvrais un des sites les plus mélancoliques et les plus doux de notre vallée, les eaux frissonnantes de la Vauvre avec ses buissons de presle, ses prés coupés d’arbres et ses petits moulins d’où s’échappent de minces filets de fumée bleue. Pas un seul village, pas de clocher, pas de maison bourgeoise, pas de ruines, pas de routes, rien que des sentiers encaissés et bordés d’épine, des troupeaux blancs sur des prés verts, des ponts de bois sur la rivière, des oies devisant gravement sur le sable des rives, des horizons fermés d’arbres, rien pour le peintre, rien pour le chroniqueur; et, sur tout ce paysage positivement simple et sans intérêt, planait pourtant je ne sais quelle poésie qui se sent et ne peut guère se traduire. Est-ce le sentiment de l’isolement intellectuel? Peut-être. On peut marcher ici du matin à la nuit sans rencontrer une trace de civilisation. Le pays est pourtant cultivé partout et plus habité qu’il ne paraît […] Le sentiment qui s’empare de nous autres liseurs, quand nous pénétrons dans ces retraites bocagères, est celui-ci: le repos dans l’oubli. Et ne t’en déplaise, si c’est une pensée égoïste, elle est diablement douce et salubre.23

In this text Sand may enjoy being alone, but she is far from turning her back on the countryside and it is characteristic that however much she savoured any chance to devote herself to her own thoughts and 23

O.A., II, 559–560 (Voyage chez M. Blaise).

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observations she mostly walked in the company of friends and family and was certainly exceptionally open to the details of life around her, both natural and social. She liked indeed to wander slowly in the Berry and around Gargilesse,24 applying and adding to the knowledge she had acquired in natural history from friends such as Jules Néraud: Quelles belles courses nous faisions à l’automne, le long des bords de l’Indre, dans les prés humides de la Vallée Noire! Je me souviens d’un automne qui fut tout consacré à l’étude des champignons, et d’un autre automne qui ne suffit pas à l’étude des mousses et des lichens. Nous avions pour bagage une loupe, un livre, une boîte de fer-blanc destinée à recevoir et à conserver les plantes fraîches.25

Her scientific knowledge was of a respectable breadth for an amateur (if it could not compete with Nodier’s) but nature seemed to her above all a source of endless fertility with which she identified and a goddess who spoke always of the consoling pantheism of its ‘éternelle vitalité’.26 Such informed enjoyment of nature is what one might expect of a writer who spent so much time in the country and reinvented the pastoral novel. Her eyes seem however to have been equally open to the social life of the countryside which remained so little known to Parisian readers. A novel such as Les Maîtres sonneurs should be enough to convince anyone of her detailed knowledge of country life and customs and has been confirmed by later research.27 Most striking however in this respect from the point of view of walking is perhaps her defence in 1857 just after Madame Bovary in the feuilletons published as Promenades autour d’un village of her determinedly balanced view of peasants and their lives. For these articles seize the opportunity offered by a holiday filled with short walks around the 24 25 26

27

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Carnets de voyage à Gargilesse, ed. G. Lubin, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, Christian Pirot, 1999, 25, 62; Promenades autour d’un village, 42, 53. O.A., II, 799–800 (Lettres d’un voyageur). See also Promenades autour d’un village, 46–47; Carnets de voyage à Gargilesse, 12, 19, 41, 72–74. Ce que dit le ruisseau in Laura. Voyages et impressions, 342 and see 345, 348. See also Voyage en Auvergne (O.A., II, 512) and Promenades autour d’un village, 17: ‘la terre est femelle, puisqu’elle est essentiellement mère’. Louise Vincent, George Sand et le Berry, Paris, Champion, 1919, 2 vols.

remote village of Gargilesse in the Creuse to defend herself against the accusation of having ignored the real and darker ‘vie morale du paysan’, his hard life and sufferings, and to attack the extreme pictures of both realists and idealists: Si les réalistes voient parfois le paysan plus grossier qu’il ne l’est réellement, il est certain que les idéalistes l’ont parfois quintessencié. Mais quelle est cette prétention de le voir sous un jour exclusif et de le définir comme un échantillon d’histoire naturelle, comme une pierre, comme un insecte? Le paysan offre autant de caractères variés et d’esprits divers que tout autre genre ou tribu de la race humaine. Ce n’est pas un troupeau de moutons, et se vanter de connaître à fond le paysan, c’est se vanter de connaître à fond le cœur humain; ce qui n’est pas une modeste affirmation. Il y a, j’en conviens, un grand air de famille qui provient de l’uniformité d’éducation et d’occupations. L’air simple et malin en même temps, la prudence et la lenteur des idées et des résolutions, voilà le cachet général. Ces hommes des champs sont-ils meilleurs ou pires que ceux des villes? Je n’ai jamais prétendu qu’ils fussent des bergers de Théocrite […] mais je vois et crois savoir que […] dans la véritable vie des champs, il y a moins de causes de corruption qu’ailleurs.28

The portrait of the fisherman and local factotum Moreau, the picture she paints of the peasant women’s lives, the corrections she is at pains to make to sentimental views of itinerant traders,29 convince the reader that she has seen clearly and has the right to choose to present what seems to her worthwhile in reality, including the happy state of this particular village: D’autres peuvent prendre le réel par ce côté âpre et triste, et avoir du talent pour le peindre. Mais ce qui me plaît et me charme dans la réalité est tout aussi réel que ce qui pourrait m’y choquer.30

This plea for a balanced and juste-milieu approach to the portrayal of the peasantry certainly lacks esthetic sophistication in its reaction to 28

29 30

Promenades autour d’un village, 63, and see 59. See also her article ‘La Vallée Noir’ of 1846, ed. D. Brahimi, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, Christian Pirot, 1998, 27– 28. Promenades autour d’un village, 19–20, 35–39, 68, 54, 96–99. Ibid., 66.

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the realism of Champfleury and Courbet. But what matters here is that whatever force the argument has arises from the fact that Sand is writing from a precise rural standpoint and after a close exploration on foot of a particular area. That gives these views an immediacy which distinguishes them from the theoretical reactions to realism by urban critics and however sentimental they in some ways are, her rural novels such as La Mare au diable, François le champi and La Petite Fadette are full of everyday details of peasant lives of the kind that habitual walking provides. If strolling alone or in company gave George Sand more knowledge of the world around her, at other times solitary walking clearly provided some relief from personal problems and an opportunity for occasionally painful introspection. But although Sand is sometimes pleased to present herself quite misleadingly as a ‘voyageur solitaire’ who follows ‘des routes désertes’31 and regularly makes her heroines flee with suicidal thoughts,32 what is just as characteristic of her and them is the continuation of a fluid exchange with the outside world, a persistance of dialogue with nature and society which works slowly towards a resolution and which is quite different from those heroic self-assertions in climbs which we have looked at in the Lettres d’un voyageur and Un Hiver à Mayorque. Consuelo gives us a perfect example of this, in the long walk which takes the singer and the young Joseph Haydn from Bohemia to Vienna.33 Consuelo. La Comtesse de Rudolstadt constantly shifts its action from Venice to Bohemia, Austria and Prussia to tell the story of movement and slow change which the education of a great musical talent entails. Consuelo’s gift was born on the road where her mother sang for a living and the road becomes the central symbol in the novel of life, natural growth and freedom for artists and ordinary people to pursue their destinies away from oppressive social prisons (I, 390– 391). So despite her initial triumph in Venice, Consuelo has to move 31 32 33

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O.A., II, 820 (Lettres d’un voyageur, VIII). Le Marquis de Villemer, 286; Malgrétout, Paris, M. Lévy, 232–233. Consuelo. La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, ed. L. Cellier and L. Guichard, Paris, Garnier, 1959, II, 90–272.

on to escape and resolve the various contradictory pressures on her. In her heart she is torn between what she owes to herself as an artist, as opposed to what she might give to a man in love and loyalty. In her art she is pulled in different directions by the teachings of Porpora and Albert, by the musical cultures of the South and the North, by the spontaneity of folkmusic and the glamorous slavery of opera. At the beginning of the long walk of some 250 kilometres from Bohemia to Vienna which takes place at the centre of this long Bildungsroman – the only authentically Goethean one in French – Consuelo decides to flee on foot the different threats of personal and musical subjugation represented in her life by the too idealistic Albert and the facilely charming Anzoleto in order to be alone and to struggle with the various calls on her art and person. The journey to Vienna proves dangerous for a woman and a true test of her courage, but Consuelo will emerge triumphant from the trial and singing better than ever, having learnt the lessons of the open road on freedom, equality and the gifts of nature (II, 100–101, 165–183). It is however entirely characteristic of Sand’s idealistic craving for friendship and community even where acute issues of personal and artistic identity are at stake that Consuelo is in the end not required to complete the trip alone but finds herself miraculously befriending on the road the young Joseph Haydn in an innocent and generous partnership of gender and talents which distinctly echoes George Sand’s androgynous ideals as well as further suggesting the need for each artist to learn from the other’s musical heritage and marry the traditions of the South and the North (had Chopin spoken to her about his own blending of features from Bach and Italian opera?). As Haydn and Consuelo move West breathing in ‘le grand air du vagabondage sur les cimes du Boehmerwald’, what are the lessons that they learn (II, 300)? The first is the freedom given by the road for them to be themselves and to protect their essential being as they see fit. For Consuelo, as so often for Sand, this means dressing as a man and choosing a pseudonym, actions which not only protect but add to her pleasures: Ainsi qu’il arrive aux acteurs dès qu’ils ont revêtu leur costume, elle se sentit dans son rôle, et s’identifia même avec le personnage qu’elle allait jouer, au

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point d’éprouver en elle-même comme l’insouciance, le plaisir d’un vagabondage innocent, la gaîté, la vigueur et la légèreté de corps d’un garçon faisant l’école buissonnière. (II, 122 and 125)

This freedom also allows them to join the essential democracy of those who travel modestly on foot – ‘il y a partout des sentiers pour les piétons et des chaumières pour recueillir les gens sobres et courts d’argent’ (II, 120) – and their arrival at one farm will face them with the social realities of agricultural life ignored by those who travel comfortably: Elle avait soupiré un instant en se représentant la douceur de ces mœurs patriarcales dont sa profession active et vagabonde l’éloignait si fort. Mais en observant ces pauvres femmes se tenant debout derrière leurs maris, les servir avec respect, et manger ensuite leurs restes avec gaîté, les unes allaitant un petit, les autres esclaves déjà, par instinct, de leurs jeunes garçons, s’occupant d’eux avant de songer à leurs filles et à elles-mêmes, elle ne vit plus dans tous ces bons cultivateurs que des sujets de la faim et de la nécessité; les mâles enchaînés à la terre, valets de charrue et de bestiaux; les femelles enchaînées au maître, c’est-a-dire à l’homme, cloîtrées à la maison, servantes à perpétuité, et condamnées à un travail sans relâche au milieu des souffrances et des embarras de la maternité. D’un côté le possesseur de la terre, pressant ou rançonnant le travailleur jusqu’à lui ôter le nécessaire dans les profits de son aride labeur; de l’autre l’avarice et la peur qui se communiquent du maître au tenancier, et condamnent celui-ci à gouverner despotiquement et parcimonieusement sa propre famille et sa propre vie. (II, 132)

Consuelo concludes from this scene that ‘il valait mieux être artiste ou bohémien, que seigneur ou paysan’ but that does not alter her instinctive wish as a musician to keep the contact her mother had with popular music, as she and Haydn show when starting a village dance (II, 214–215). The final lesson of a tour which will remind Haydn of Rousseau’s Confessions is of course that of nature herself (II, 141). Together the two musicians discuss their respective gifts ‘durant les longues haltes qu’ils firent dans les beaux jours, sous les solitaires ombrages du Boehmer-Wald’, one outcome of which will eventually

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be Haydn’s compositions for children.34 Another will be for Consuelo the development of her interest in the hoffmannesque harmonies of flowers and music which she shows for the first time towards the end of this journey in the garden of the music-mad canon: En examinant leurs diverses attitudes et l’expression du sentiment que chacune de leurs physionomies semblait traduire, elle cherchait dans son esprit le rapport de la musique avec les fleurs, et voulait se rendre compte de l’association de ces deux instincts dans l’organisation de son hôte. Il y avait longtemps que l’harmonie des sons lui avait semblé répondre d’une certaine manière à l’harmonie des couleurs; mais l’harmonie de ces harmonies, il lui sembla que c’était le parfum. (II, 246)

All of the above, and all that George Sand has wished to express about walking as an ‘éducation ambulante’ and as an opportunity for gradual change and growth (II, 149) comes together at the end of Chapter LXXIII in an impassioned meditation by the narrator on the value for the artist of solitary or truly companionable walking: Elle était trop artiste par toutes les fibres de son organisation, pour ne pas aimer la liberté, les hasards, les actes de courage et d’adresse, le spectacle continuel et varié de cette nature que le piéton seul possède entièrement, enfin toute l’activité romanesque de la vie errante et isolée. Je l’appelle isolée, lecteur, pour exprimer une impression secrète et mystérieuse qu’il est plus facile à vous de comprendre qu’à moi de définir. C’est, je crois, un état de l’âme qui n’a pas été nommé dans notre langue, mais que vous devez vous rappeler, si vous avez voyagé à pied, au loin, et tout seul, ou avec un autre vous-même, ou enfin, comme Consuelo, avec un compagnon facile, enjoué, complaisant, et monté à l’unisson de votre cerveau. Dans ces moments-là, si vous étiez dégagé de toute sollicitude immédiate, de tout motif inquiétant, vous avez, je n’en doute pas, ressenti une sorte de joie étrange, peutêtre égoïste tant soit peu, en vous disant: A l’heure qu’il est, personne ne s’embarrasse de moi, et personne ne m’embarrasse. Nul ne sait où je suis […] Je m’appartiens entièrement, et comme maître et comme esclave. Ces heures nonchalantes sont bien nécessaires à l’homme actif et courageux pour retremper ses forces; et je dis que, plus votre cœur est dévoré du zèle de la 34

Ibid., 146 and 148: ‘C’est là peut-être qu’il conçut le génie de ces compositions enfantines et mignonnes qu’il fit plus tard pour les marionnettes des petits princes Esterhazy’.

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maison de Dieu (qui n’est autre que l’humanité), plus vous être propre à apprécier quelques instants d’isolement pour rentrer en possession de vousmême. (II, 205–206)

The whole passage could be quoted, since it sums up all Sand’s experience of walking as a calmer road to liberty, self-possession and knowledge of self and the world, as well as being one of the finest expressions in French of Rousseau’s heritage and of literary pedestrianism in the Romantic era. Walking then is at the centre of Sand’s greatest literary achievement and this may prompt a moment of reflection on the connection in her imagination between that pastime and her talent for literary forms peculiarly open to long and repeated digressions. Sand’s approach to the final organization of the Lettres d’un voyageur in book form was clearly influenced by her admiration for Sterne but was far from having his essential rigour.35 For she carried her love of artistic freedom and her cult of improvisation as the highest expression of genius into her attitude towards literary forms,36 and it is perhaps not surprising that the relatively open form of the Bildungsroman discovered in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, as expansive and sinuous as a life, should have suited her in many ways better than the more tightly structured romance that she otherwise favoured.37 Given moreover her insistent view of life as a road, of herself as a traveller and of writing as travel and given her fondness for the itinerant musician as an image of the artist, it is not surprising that these strands coalesced most happily in the journeying of Consuelo, a novel in whose narrative and symbolic scheme the Bohemia of history and legend is prominent. The time has then finally come to look more closely at Sand’s notion of Bohemia, its relation to walking and the question of its historical importance. George Sand was certainly one of the first in France to present herself and her friends in the Lettres d’un voyageur 35 36 37

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On Sterne, see Corr., II, 349 (1833). Malgrétout, 82. On this discovery, see the introduction to Consuelo, I, XVII–XX. The first full translation of the Lehrjahre had been published by Théodore Toussenel in 1829.

as free and idealistic spirits comparable to her beloved birds38 whose ‘sans-gêne’ was essentially ‘bohémien’ and comparable to the legendary itinerancy of gypsy entertainers:39 Nous sommes faits comme cela, nous autres artistes bohémiens, bilieux et nerveux. Nous bondissons comme vous dites à la manière des volants et des balles élastiques. C’est dire que nous touchons la Terre un instant pour remonter plus haut dans le ciel, et parce que nous avons des plumes pour nos volants, nous nous imaginons que nous avons des ailes et que nous volons comme des oiseaux […] 40

It is because artists and gypsies are supposed to share this passion for freedom,41 that Consuelo becomes an honorary ‘bohémienne’ who may have sung at first ‘dans les rues ou sur les chemins’ (I, 11) but is in fact only ‘non de race, mais de condition, une sorte de Zingara’.42 The Bohemia of that novel becomes indeed almost as much a Shakespearian utopia of strong and popular musical traditions as the historical country of religious wars (I, 280, 380–381; II, 22–26) and in Sand’s work as a whole these different strands combine to produce an ideal composite image of the artist as a popular musician on the road in some ‘verte Bohême’ (O.A., II, 818). That is the image of of him

38

39

40 41 42

On the artist free as a bird, see O.A., I, 18; II, 780, 875 and Louise Dulude, ‘L’Envol de la femme-plume’, Études françaises, XXIV, 1 (Spring 1988), 9– 15. O.A., II, 892. When Sand spoke of her favourite artists as bohémiens from 1834 onwards, the term, used ever since the seventeenth century for any unsettled, disorderly and insecure life, had not yet been adopted by, or for, members of the Petit Cénacle and Jeunes-France in spite of Nodier’s Sternian Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux (1830). As we shall see, that was to happen later. Sand was probably encouraged to use bohémien for her particular utopian dream of a community of artists by Théodore Toussenel’s translation in 1829 of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Paris, J. Lefèvre). Helmut Kreuzer’s article ‘Zum Begriff der Bohème’ is a historical survey which makes useful distinctions (Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 38 [1964], 170–207). To Delacroix in September 1838 (Corr., IV, 483). Corr., I, 818. Consuelo, I, 1, 339. Consuelo is in fact half Spanish (I, 13–14).

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(and of her) that we are given, not only in volume two of Consuelo, but also in Les Maîtres sonneurs and Malgrétout.43 This image is evidently sentimental, as is Sand’s later choice of the term ‘troubadours’ for Flaubert and herself,44 but both the gypsy spirit invoked and the ideal space of Bohemia are worth further comment. Implied in the gypsy spirit is some hostility to the conventional world, especially that of the bourgeoisie, a quasiplebeian insubordination which made her own mother something of an honorary ‘Bohemian’: Elle était de la race vagabonde et avilie des Bohémiens de ce monde. Elle était danseuse, moins que danseuse, comparse sur le dernier des théâtres du boulevard de Paris, lorsque l’amour d’un riche vint la tirer de cette abjection. (Corr., VI, 327)

But this hostility also gave ‘Bohemians’ a touch of independence and of aristocratic pride and in this way Sand’s concept of them echoes her dream of combining the aristocratic and plebeian veins of her dual heritage in opposition to the utilitarian middle classes. If her ‘Bohemians’ thus transcended class, the ideal space of their freedom, the utopian ‘verte Bohème’ of mountains and forests, also transcended in her dreams national frontiers and the urban spaces of the radical avant-garde.45 As the Voyageur wrote to Liszt in letter VI when dreaming of travel beyond Switzerland and Germany to Greece, Egypt and Turkey: ‘ô verte Bohême! patrie fantastique des âmes sans ambition et sans entraves, je vais donc te revoir! J’ai erré souvent dans tes montagnes et voltigé sur la cime

43 44 45

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Malgrétout, 40; the story of Les Maîtres sonneurs turns on the need for artists to travel (ed. cit., 254, 261, 365). Correspondance entre George Sand et Flaubert, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, s.d., 54, 106, 127, 144. Those urban spaces are not, of course, the great boulevards whose crowds of ambitious but as yet unknown and impecunious young talents of all sorts were to be considered – rather eccentrically – by Balzac in Un Prince de la Bohème (1840) as yet another sort of more amorphous Bohemia, distinct from that of the rebellious avant-garde.

de tes sapins; je m’en souviens fort bien, quoique je ne fusse pas encore né parmi les hommes. (O.A., II, 817)

The community thus dreamt of is free-floating and above all a moral one united across all barriers of class and nationality by the cult of art and higher ideals46 and is somewhat analogous to her recurring dream of an ideal communtiy of kindred souls protected from outside on some ‘île enchantée au milieu de la vie réelle’.47 Albeit no doubt a useful model for beginning to rethink politics with in the late 1830s48 this utopia is of course devoid of all social reality and ultimately impossible, as Sand herself later recognized: L’idéal serait de se réunir quand on veut, et pas seulement quand on peut […] de courir le monde ensemble, de se reposer ensemble, chacun pouvant transporter son inspiration et son exécution avec soi pour les mettre en contact avec les artistes qu’il admire et chérit. Ce serait là le paradis sur la terre, et, de ce contact des esprits et des cœurs, il sortirait des chefs-d’œuvre dans tous les genres. Mais la Bohème poétique d’à-présent est trop grande, on s’y perd, et on ne s’y rencontre que par hasard.49

Now for present purposes the interest of Sand’s version of this utopia is that it is not just the caravan dreamt of by Vigny in ‘La maison du berger’ and Hugo in L’Homme qui rit, but the juncture between artists and humble country journeying on foot that creates in Sand the notion of an expanding and idealistic Bohemia democratically open to all talents which might transcend the conflicts of the city. But it is also true that the middle classes were not slow to sense the harmlessness of such dreams and to adopt them as their sentimental alternative to the 46

47

48

49

See Evlyn Gould, ‘George Sand’s Forgotten Bohemia’ (in David Powell, Le Siècle de George Sand, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1998, 357–365) who rather overestimates however the importance of La Dernière Aldini. See Valentine (in Romans de 1830, Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1991) 334 on the ‘pavillon’. See also Nanon, chapters XVI and XVII, on their ‘oasis de granit et de verdure’ (143). As Michèle Hecquet recognized in ‘Enfants de Bohème: naissance et légitimation chez Sand’, Revue des sciences humaines, 226 (avril–juin 1992), 101. Corr., VII, 469 (29 August 1846 to Pauline Viardot).

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more threatening challenges of the urban avant-garde (think only of the heroes of A nous la liberté taking finally to the road as tramps). We shall see in the next section that by the 1840s Nerval too was tempted to reinterpret the early history of the avant-garde and absorb it into a not dissimilar pastoral and rose-coloured dream of artistic Bohemia.

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Gérard de Nerval

Nerval’s addiction from his earliest days to movement, journeys and urban flânerie is notorious, as are the exceptionally close links between his writings and travel. In 1838 his impressive review of French travel writing proclaimed that ‘il y a dans tout grand poète un voyageur sublime’ and in 1844 he would write to a friend that ‘je ne m’amuse plus qu’en voyage’.1 It was nevertheless not until comparatively late that Nerval, usually an impatient traveller, was to find rewarding ways to slot slow walks into his writings alongside other sorts of journeys to self-knowledge. But when he finally came to do so, it would be with an intensity of commitment and with an acute awareness of relevant literary traditions that few contemporaries could match. So while Nodier seems hardly to have reflected on the possible relevance to his satirical fantasies and Sternian digressions of the pleasure he had once taken in straying across the countryside,2 and while Töpffer carefully limited the freedom he granted himself to zigzag in his discourse as freely as a Swiss mountain path, Nerval experimented ceaselessly in texts such as La Bohême galante, Angélique, Sylvie and Promenades et souvenirs with that progressive accumulation of fragments and digressions which had since Rousseau 1 2

O.C., I, 455 (Le Messager, 18 September 1838); ibid., 1411: letter of February 1844 to Louis Desessart. Nodier’s more eccentric texts were of course inspired by the satirical travels of Cyrano de Bergerac, Chapelle and Bachaumont, Swift, Sterne and Xavier de Maistre and he probably made unconscious connections between walking and this literary tradition which refused all linearity. But he seems never to have made such an association explicit and in his Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux, for instance, his digressions were paralleled with the leaps of a goat rather than the wanderings of a rambler (cf. Daniel Sangsue, Le Récit excentrique, Paris, J. Corti, 1987, 248–250). Similarly, in the Souvenirs de jeunesse the ‘méthode de désordre’ and ‘plan réglé d’irrégularité’ by which he lived was defended without any reference to the zigzagging walks of his youth (ed. cit., 162).

and Senancour become especially associated in France with imaginative travel and pedestrianism. In particular, what seems to have captured Nerval’s imagination most in walking was the dramatic illustration it provided of our multiple relations to time, a feature admirably analysed by Charles Rosen in his study of the great Romantic song cycles.3 For walking can set up a double movement more intense than in other travel and highlighted by Romantic lieder whereby this progress links in the imagination of the walker his own past to his future prospects, while moving him simultaneously through landscapes speaking of geological, botanical and human time. This was the special drama of walking and time that Senancour and Ramond de Carbonnières had illustrated so powerfully in Oberman and the Observations faites dans les Pyrenées, a drama that Hugo and Musset echoed in the fine poems of walking and remembering which we have already mentioned, ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ and ‘Souvenir’, and which Nerval was to reenact in a characteristically personal blend of literary genres. Before returning in the 1850s to memories of his childhood walks in the Valois and to retreading those walks, Nerval seems however, like other Jeunes-France, to have walked relatively little outside of cities, whether in France or elsewhere. It is true that it is hard to be sure about this, for Nerval was sometimes shy of talking about longer treks which might simply be taken as confirmation of his poverty. In 1840, when making a virtue of necessity by completing on foot the journey back from Vienna to Strasbourg, he asked Alphonse Karr not to broadcast the fact: Je viens de traverser à pied le Wurtemberg et le duché de Bade; je vous prie de n’en rien dire, mais c’est comme cela. Je viens de faire à pied dix lieues par jour, pendant trois jours; je m’y fais assez; cependant j’ai peur que cela ne me coûte plus cher que par les voitures, mais

3

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Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation, London, Fontana Press, 1996, Chapter 3.

c’est une idée que je voulais satisfaire à tout prix; n’en parlez pas surtout, cela nuirait à ma considération actuelle.4

That Nerval, psychologically so insecure, should have been more sensitive than most to the prejudice which he felt persisted in France against travellers on foot is perhaps not surprising, although twelve years later he would feel able to exploit the issue in Lorely for ironic effect (O.C., III, 20–21). But that caution did not prevent him from pretending elsewhere when necessary to have done much walking, whether privately in 1834 to reassure his father about his expenditure in the Midi,5 or to give a Germanic touch to Lorely in 1852 with the help of memories of 1840,6 or to give variety to the Voyage en Orient.7 And yet when all is said and done it does not seem sensible to dispute that Nerval did do some longer walks, if probably none as long as the 1840 trek in the Black Forest.8 On coming back in November 1834 from Italy, his letters refer to shoes worn out9 and we 4

5

6

7

8 9

O.C., I, 1347. This letter was addressed from Ettlingen, north of Baden-Baden, around March 10 1840. Nerval had left Vienna on March 1, intending to travel via Regensburg (Ratisbonne) and Nürnberg (O.C., I, 1346). If he did so, and if, as this letter suggests, he continued on foot from around March 7 as his funds ran out and as he approached the Black Forest, it seems likely that it was from the region of Heilbronn that he walked to Strasbourg to save money but also to share an experience celebrated by German Romantics (‘une idée que je voulais satisfaire à tout prix’). A letter to his father fourteen years later speaks of three days spent walking in the forest (O.C., III, 863–864). This at least is my interpretation of his insistence to his father that ‘je prends toutes sortes de moyens pour rendre le voyage le moins coûteux possible, par les bateaux, les pataches ou à pied’ where he seems to have had little opportunity for the latter mode of travel (O.C., I, 1289). O.C., III, 24–27 ‘Les voyages à pied’. This journey on foot from Strasbourg to Baden-Baden reverses the journey of 1840 and does seem rely on hazy memories as well as being coloured by a reading of Pückler-Muskau (ibid., 977). In which he pretended to have walked on the island of Cythera he never saw and to have climbed the hills of Syra where he had had no time to walk (O.C., II, 245–249, 252 and 1458). One can therefore also doubt whether he did indeed also do the walks referred to in Lebanon, as opposed to riding like other travellers (O.C., II, 458). Alluded to in Les Faux Saulniers and in Lorely (O.C., II, 34 and III, 45). O.C., I, 1295 (to Renduel, Duseigneur, Gautier and Nanteuil).

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really have no reason to doubt that at one time or another (and perhaps more than once) he had done the walks at Saint-Germain as well as those from from Dammartin to Soissons and from Senlis to Ermenonville and beyond which he first evoked in Les Faux Saulniers and then reworked in La Bohême galante, Angélique, Sylvie and more allusively in Promenades et souvenirs – even if these pages owe much to Rousseau (O.C., II, 102–108, 115–117; III, 291–309, 478, 516–536, 678). Above all, it is clear that most of Nerval’s country walking was done near Paris and in the Valois, rather than further afield in Italy or Germany, and that it was there that this traveller so often in a hurry finally found the best personal and literary reasons for going on foot. Previous to this late crystallization on the practice, it is striking that Nerval said little either about the actual experience of walking or about its place in travel writing and fiction. Notably revealing in this respect is the ample review of the literature of travel which he wrote in 1838 at the start of his first journey to Germany (O.C., I, 453–456). There his survey of its various earlier traditions – satirical, philosophical, sentimental, galant and picturesque – as well as of the contemporary impressions of different voyageurs enthousiastes ends with by then conventional praise of openness to hasard in travel and an admission of personal addiction to urban flânerie without having one word to say about country walking, whether real or literary. This is moreover all the more striking in that Nerval owed so much to key figures in the rise of literary pedestrianism in France – to Rousseau, Senancour and Restif de la Brétonne, but also to Hoffmann, Hugo and Heine – and in that Rousseau and Senancour would eventually exert their influence in this respect too, once Nerval turned decisively towards reexploring the Valois.10 Two traditions in particular would prove important for Nerval’s eventual use of country walks: the first, the autobiographical one of 10

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See below on references in 1850 to Rousseau’s walks. On Senancour, cf. O.C., II, 100; III, 678. On Restif, cf . ‘Les confidences de Nicolas’ in Les Illuminés, II, 946–1074. Hugo’s ‘admirables Lettres sur le Rhin’ (O.C., II, 1239) obviously encouraged Nerval to put the chapter on ‘Les voyages à pied’ into Lorely (O.C., III, 24–27), and he admitted to writing ‘à la manière allemande’ as soon as he found himself in Germany (O.C., II, 1187).

Rousseau and Senancour; the second, what we might now call with Ross Chambers the ‘loiterly’ and endlessly digressive one which ran at that time from Sterne to Xavier de Maistre.11 Nerval found a use for country walks in developing and enriching both traditions in his own way. The ‘loiterly’ he would build on to reinforce the new association growing for some since the late 1830s between Bohemianism and the open road. The autobiographical one he would deepen with an intense feeling for that double exposure to time echoed in the lieder analysed by Charles Rosen and with a very personal exploration of walking as a way of rediscovering and renewing the roots of a life and a narrative. From the late 1840s, Nerval pursued when he could his ‘pérégrinations autour de Paris’ (O.C., II, 735 [Aurélia]) and Ross Chambers has given us an admirable study of Nerval’s use of this errancy of his feet and thoughts and the ‘digressions qui sont naturelles à ma façon d’écrire’ in the ‘loiterly’ Les Nuits d’octobre (1852).12 The capricious real and textual journey of that story’s narrator through the edges of the city and its environs successfully focuses our attention to the detriment of all hierarchy, discipline and system on the marginal, the trivial and the absurd, from the Café des Aveugles to the vaguely masonic Société lyrique des troubadours of Pantin and the fairground femme mérinos. As such, it can indeed be taken to illustrate a ‘flâneur realism’ close to Baudelaire’s prose poems, as Chambers would have it.13 And yet this description simplifies excessively a highly ironic text which is certainly pleased to take a mildly subversive view of the oddities of Parisian life, but which also mocks implicitly the exaggerations of the fashion for melodramatic feuilletons on the horrors at the margins of the city which we have already met in Gautier’s Voyage hors barrières (1838). Focusing on the theme of walking in the text alerts one moreover to the fact that Les Nuits d’octobre also manages to be delightfully ironic on the subject of urban fantasies about rural 11

12 13

O.C., II, 72 (Les Faux Saulniers) and Ross Chambers, Loiterature, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1999. See Nerval’s celebration of the tradition in Angélique (O.C., III, 535). Chambers, op. cit., 66–70. Ibid., 57.

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excursions. Once out of Paris, the narrator will fail to do any walks whatsoever, first because of rain at Nanteuil-le-Haudouin and then for lack of a passport (III, 345–346). Indeed his final entry into Senlis will be in chains, escorted by gendarmes on horseback (III, 349–350). Relaxing strolls, Nerval apparently suggests, are best enjoyed in the modern city. Ultimately, Les Nuits d’octobre reflects therefore the literary triumph in mid-century France of urban flânerie over country walking. But the satirical stance towards the latter in this story also assures us that the positive things Nerval was saying elsewhere at the very same time about rambling were felt by him to be complementary and no less true. The material of Les Faux Saulniers (1850) that was endlessly reworked in La Bohême galante (1852), Sylvie (1853), Angélique (1853–1854) and alluded to in Promenades et souvenirs (1854–1855) would finally give rural walking a resonance it had never had in Nerval.14 The Jeunes-France of the 1830s and related groups of young writers had not, as we recall, seen values associated with country life as particularly relevant to their dissidence or to the forms of their protest. But the late 1830s brought change in this respect too as a wider and looser sub-culture of mildly rebellious young bourgeois appropriated some of the style of these artists to express their social unease.15 And while this new ‘Bohemia’ remained an essentially urban phenomenon, like the Jeunes-France before it, it was nevertheless affected by the growth of more positive attitudes towards provincial life and by social romanticism’s rediscovery of the rites and journeys of apprentices to trade-guilds, thanks to Agricol Perdiguier’s Le Livre du compagnonnage (1839). In her first musings of 1834 about Bohemia Sand had anticipated this trend, just as her later

14

15

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Although related in so many ways to this series, the Petits Châteaux de Bohême (1853) does not figure in the development we are tracing because country walking in the Valois does not enter into that anthology’s more restricted evocation of the Parisian avant-garde of the 1830s placed under the sign of Nodier’s Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux. Jerrold Seigel, Bohemian Paris, 11, 58.

fantasy of blending her itinerant ‘Bohemians’ with the freedom and loyalty of the compagnons would prove typical of its day.16 That Nerval, who in common with others of the Petit Cénacle and the Jeunes-France had rarely used the term bohèmes for themselves in the 1830s, should have begun to do so later in his writings about the Valois and notably in La Bohême galante of 1852, one of his most complex montages of old and new texts, is therefore of obvious interest for the place of walking in this new Bohemia so appealing to the bourgeois imagination.17 This volume of ‘vagabondage poétique’ placed under the sign of Sterne (III, 309, 243) retraces in fact through the memories of the narrator and the history of his poetry and tastes the development of the romantic avant-garde from its immediate origins in the meetings of artists and writers at the cabaret of la mère Saguet and in the later colony of the Impasse du Doyenné through to a recent walk from Senlis to Ver (III, 242, 236– 277, 290–304). That Nerval aimed to draw our attention to this progression in his life from the Doyenné to walking in the Valois – a progression that was psychologically of course also a regression to his childhood – is all the more evident from the fact that this montage appeared in the very same year as the satire on rural walks in Les Nuits d’octobre. And whereas in the latter Nerval seemed to have been confining good flânerie to cities, La Bohême galante extends the realm of the ‘loiterly’ to the country and deliberately marries the older tradition of the voyage galant well known to Nerval with the fashion we have been sketching for a dream Bohemia of the open road.18 The 16 17

18

See her Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840) and Seigel on Courbet’s later self-identification with such vagabondage (op. cit., 87, 96). That Arsène Houssaye undoubtedly had a hand in the choosing of the title and in the creation of the patchwork so typical of Nerval which makes up La Bohême galante is not relevant to the aspect of the complex structure studied here (cf. Jacques Bony in O.C., III, 1079–1083). Nerval was clearly happy to follow the fashion of the 1840s by applying the term bohême to the JeunesFrance – see Gautier in ‘Marilhat’, Revue des deux mondes, 1 July 1848 – since the following year he employed it again for them in the Petits Châteaux de Bohême. He referred in passing to Chapelle and Bachaumont’s Voyage en Provence (1663) in his 1838 review of travel literature (O.C., I, 454).

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narrator’s final walk with Sylvain from Senlis through the Ermenonville forest, an excursion made so vivid (in this particular version) by details of directions lost and of mud and undergrowth encountered, has the two travellers mistaken for artists, singing the same traditional songs as the compagnons and finally sharing in peasant veillées in a manner openly reminiscent of George Sand’s pastorals (III, 293, 302, 304–309). An essentially sentimental vision of rural works and lives thus emerges at the end of this story which shows Nerval’s ‘vagabondage poétique’ contributing to the absorption of the myths of freedom on the open road into the new edulcorated version of ‘artistic’ Bohemia.19 Another strand in the complex montage of La Bohême galante not related to such myths is however the drama of multiple time and memory, whether in terms of a powerful presence of the literary and cultural past (from sixteenth-century poets and eighteenth-century Illuminés to the Châalis of Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Ermenonville of Rousseau), or in terms of the narrator’s reflections on the fragmentation threatening his life. Before the walk to Ermenonville, the narrator dips back in his memory to the rebelllious youth of his generation of artists and the early forms of the nation’s poetry. This travel in time is then followed by a wander through the space of the forest which takes the two walkers back into the places of their childhood as well as into the past of the region as preserved in names, songs, memories and legends. In this way, the walk functions as the logical climax to the volume, expressing in the rhythm of their progress a harmony between the different movements of walking, writing and remembering. Subsequently, Nerval would develop his feeling for this harmony in Sylvie, Angélique and Promenades et souvenirs. As Nerval’s passion cooled for the freedom and escapism of more exotic travel and as the tracks of his childhood in the Valois reasserted their pull, the example and challenge presented by 19

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See for the connection between the cult of such vagabondage in France and some famous cases of disturbed fugueurs in the late nineteenth century, Ian Hacking’s Mad Travelers (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1998), 27–28, 62–70.

Rousseau inevitably represented itself, complicated and enriched by his inscription in the landscape and folk memories of Ermenonville.20 In 1850, the original version in Les Faux Saulniers of Nerval’s walks in the Valois was prefaced with a nod to Rousseau’s excursions and in the same year the visit to Saint-Denis which opens ‘Quintus Aucler’ in Les Illuminés evokes more generally ‘ces promenades austères que faisaient jadis les rêveurs de l’école de J.-J. Rousseau’ (O.C., II, 101, 1135). In 1854–1855, the Promenades et souvenirs would set the seal on this association between Rousseau, walking and Nerval’s autobiographical writings: dans les intervalles de mes promenades, j’ai tracé quelques souvenirs que je n’ose intituler Mémoires, et qui seraient plutôt conçus selon le plan des promenades solitaires de Jean-Jacques. Je les terminerai dans le pays même où j’ai été élevé, et où il est mort. (O.C., III, 678)

But the memory of Rousseau did not only weigh on these walks as an exemplary autobiographer and as an (ultimately misleading) guide to the return to nature; he also did so as yet another manifestation of the past among the many such which haunted Nerval in the Valois. And the same might be said for his admirer Senancour whose childhood stay near Châalis had contributed to Oberman and whose desperate search for safety in walking from the mutabilities of self and the world must in some respects have seemed closer than ever to Nerval’s imagination.21 Both authors gave powerful encouragement to a multidimensional use of walking in literature and to an appreciation of it as a uniquely valuable theme. In Aurélia Nerval confessed to the purely therapeutic function which walking had had for him in the 1850s, a function of relaxation and release from obsessive preoccupations, regardless of destinations, which it had always had for Rousseau and Senancour:

20 21

See Monique Streiff Moretti, Le Rousseau de Nerval. Mythe, légende, idéologie, Bologna, R. Pàtron; Paris, Nizet, 1976. Ibid., 285–286. See also B. Didier, ‘Nerval et Senancour, ou la nostalgie du XVIIIe siècle’, in Le Rêve et la vie. ‘Aurélia’, ‘Sylvie’, ‘Les Chimères’ de Gérard de Nerval, Paris, SEDES, 1986, 5–15.

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Je suis allé promener mes peines et mes remords tardifs dans la campagne, cherchant dans la marche et dans la fatigue l’engourdissement de la pensée, la certitude peut-être pour la nuit suivante d’un sommeil moins funeste. (O.C., III, 728)

This primary movement is much in evidence in Sylvie – in for instance a moonlit walk after the ‘voyage à Cythère’ along the edge of the Ermenonville forest which leaves the narrator sleeping rough in the dark protective depths of the countryside, restoring him for an excursion the following morning through a natural paradise to Sylvie’s great-aunt at Othys (O.C., III, 547–548). Rousseau presided directly and indirectly over this reinvigorating plunge back into nature at its most unspoilt (O.C., III, 548). But it is soon followed in Sylvie by a melancholic recrossing of the very same landscape, made sombre now for the narrator by the death of love and by the corruption of nature by culture, even by Rousseau’s own works (O.C., III, 554–555). Later still, a return to the forest of Ermenonville will reinforce the sense of decay and a walk to Châalis with Sylvie will take place with the country girl now led like a lady on a donkey (O.C., III, 559–560). So even in the country of Rousseau, walking does not always allow a simple, refreshing return to nature. But this is not only because linear time seems to rule our lives and nature. The issue is much more complex and the sense of time affecting the walks in Angélique and Sylvie is a more diverse phenomenon. On the one hand, the walks of the narrator are disturbed by a sense of the passage of time which he is only rarely able to muffle in order to concentrate on the enjoyment of the immediate present. Here the walls of a convent will suddenly remind him of Adrienne in the middle of an otherwise blissful stroll; there feelings of frustration about his own future are no less destructive of all present pleasure (O.C., III, 547, 555). There is at the same time in all these stories an ambiguous sense of time shaping the human and natural landscape through which the walker is passing which may for a moment dismay by changes which further destabilize the fragmented self, but which may also comfort through the sense of continuity provided:

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A droite et à gauche, des lisières de forêts sans routes tracées, et toujours devant moi ces roches druidiques de la contrée qui gardent le souvenir des fils d’Armen exterminés par les Romains! Du haut de ces entassements sublimes, je voyais les étangs lointains se découper comme des miroirs sur la plaine brumeuse, sans pouvoir distinguer celui même où s’était passée la fête. (O.C., III, 547)

The experience of time which is repeated with musical variations throughout the walks of these texts can thus be a healing one which far from denying loss seeks to integrate it into a deeper landscape of time and place which the narrator can fix and move through. And that retreading those paths had become for Nerval a particularly important part of seeking to renew the roots of his self and his story in a ‘thick’ description of the places of his childhood is only confirmed by the feeling shown in Angélique for the native clay sticking to his boots and in Promenades et souvenirs for the joy of standing again on ancestral soil: Au sortir de la forêt, nous nous sommes trouvés dans les terres labourées. Nous emportions beaucoup de notre patrie à la semelle de nos souliers; – mais nous finissions par le rendre plus loin dans les prairies… Tout cela m’attendrit et me charme; il me semble que je respire un autre air; et en mettant le pied sur le sol, j’éprouve un sentiment plus vif encore que celui qui m’animait naguère en repassant le Rhin: la terre paternelle, c’est deux fois la patrie. (O.C., III, 528, 687)

Walking is indeed such an integral part of this return to roots that Nerval goes so far as to repeatedly evoke the past walks of elders and relatives through this same landscape: the walks he did with his uncle at Ermenonville and those he did at the end of the Empire with one of his father’s soldiers ‘sur les collines voisines de Paris’, even the flight on foot of his grandfather across the forest of Compiègne to find a better home near Châalis (O.C., III, 557, 679–680, 681). Long neglected by Nerval as a practice and a theme, at the end of his life walking in the Valois thus came to supersede in his imagination all the fantasies about the life of an artist which had previously crystallized in the image of a Bohemian caravan when reading Wilhelm Meister and Le Roman comique (O.C., III, 451–458). Nerval’s ultimate rejection of 105

just such a caravan at the end of Promenades et souvenirs makes the change clear: En passant devant la porte de Reims, j’ai rencontré une de ces énormes voitures de saltimbanques qui promènent de foire en foire toute une famille artistique, son matériel et son ménage. Il s’était mis à pleuvoir, et l’on m’offrit cordialement un abri. En regardant les deux jeune filles, l’une, vive et brune, l’autre, blonde et rieuse, je me mis à penser à Mignon et Philine dans Wilhelm Meister, et voilà un rêve germanique qui me revient entre la perspective des bois et l’antique profil de Senlis. Pourquoi ne pas rester dans cette maison errante à défaut d’un domicile parisien? Mais il n’est plus temps d’obéir à ces fantaisies de la verte Bohème; et j’ai pris congé de mes hôtes, car la pluie avait cessé. (O.C., III, 691)

For him, the very Romantic dream of the artist as nomad had in the end had to give way to the more nourishing experience of walking in one’s own land.

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Victor Hugo

In an age when French authors travelled much and far, Hugo was comparatively sedentary, never – after the short spell in Madrid as a child – venturing far beyond the frontiers of France even when exile might have encouraged more adventurous journeys. I have spoken elsewhere of the psychological reasons for this hugging of France’s frontiers1 but this limited urge to travel does not alter the fact that the only French Romantics who could compete with his walking were Dumas and George Sand. We shall see that Hugo could be justifiably proud of his prowess as a ‘flâneur de grandes routes’ even if he sometimes lied to his family and readers about walks which travelling with Juliette had made impossible (Voyages, 338). His prose, poetry and drawings all bear witness to the debt of his creative output to these excursions. The passant in his writings who observes and bears witness to everyday life and history in the making is predominantly a walker and Jean Valjean is the most important heroic walker of the French nineteenth-century novel. We have seen how the attractions of walking had grown with Hugo’s contacts with young painters in the 1820s, with summers at La Bièvre from 1831 and later with holidays in the company of Juliette Drouet. Celebrations of walking nevertheless remained scarce in his published texts until Le Rhin, although poems and travel writings remaining in manuscript show an interest in using the theme growing markedly from 1837.2 Hugo was therefore slower than Sand to proclaim the value he attached to rambling (as she had already done in 1 2

‘Victor Hugo rôdeur des barrières et des frontières’, in James Hiddleston, ed., Victor Hugo, romancier de l’abîme, Oxford, Legenda, 2002, 179–195. So, for instance, his walk on holiday in 1837 along the dunes from Furnes to Dunkirk (Voyages, 631–634), and poem XXXVII of 1839 in Toute la lyre: ‘Ô poëte! pourquoi tes stances favorites / Marchent-elles toujours cueillant des marguerites, / Toujours des liserons et toujours des bleuets, / Et vont-elles s’asseoir au fond des bois muets’ (Poésies, IV, 227).

the first of her Lettres d’un voyageur of 1834) and it is clear that when he finally moved to pay homage to the muse of walking in Letter XX of Le Rhin in connection with an excursion never done, he was responding to the literary fashion for such writing growing since the 1830s as well as to its association with Germany.3 Even later, although happy to present the narrator of Les Misérables as a ‘promeneur solitaire’ in the manner of Rousseau,4 Hugo was on the whole chary of invoking walking in his criticism and did not do so, for example, as one might have expected when defending the ‘aller au delà’ of fulsome writers in Promontorium somnii 5 or when painting his most elaborate portrait of a ‘Bohemian’ artist in the showman Ursus of L’Homme qui rit. This does not alter the fact that from 1834 onwards walking was contributing ever more to his poetry, prose and graphic work. ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ of 1837 is one testimony to this and Jean Tréjean’s walks in Les Misères another, even before Les Misérables of 1862 and the fine pedestrian poems which would appear in Les Contemplations in the section headed En marche. We left Hugo in the early 1830s about to embark with Juliette on the first of many longer summer expeditions, holidays recorded to begin with in notebooks, drawings and discreet letters to his family and a few close friends.6 In relation to the topics which concern us here – walking and the wish to publish accounts of such walks – these holidays fall into two groups. On the trips of 1834, 1835 and 1836 to Brittany, Picardy and Normandy there are grounds for thinking that lack of time and travelling with Juliette prevented the poet doing the whole of certain longer walks he wrote home about, such as the ‘huit 3 4

5 6

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For a rebuttal of his claim to have done the walk, see Jean Gaudon in the introduction to his edition of Le Rhin (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1985), I, 16. Romans, II, Les Misérables (Laffont), 339. In his edition of Le Rhin Jean Gaudon has pointed out the implicit tributes to Book II of Rousseau’s Confessions and Book V of Émile in Letter XX (I, 425). Critique, 651. And this in spite of what we shall have to say below about the implications of walking in ‘Pasteurs et troupeaux’. The friends who received letters in 1834–1836 were Louise Bertin, the engraver Célestin Nanteuil (who joined the poet and Juliette for part of the 1836 trip) and Louis Boulanger, the painter whose special complicity with Hugo in matters of travel and walking has already been noted.

bonnes lieues’ to Locmariaquer and the 14 kilometres from SaintGermain to Versailles in 1834, the 19 kilometres from Soissons to Coucy-le-château the following year and in 1836, the walks from Dolde-Bretagne to Saint-Malo, Barneville to Courseulles and along the coast from Cherbourg to Sainte-Mère-Église.7 But others have given rise to no such doubts, such as the mere 6 kilometres from Pithiviers to Yèvre-le-Châtel in 1834 (Voyages, 526), the 40-odd kilometres from Fécamp to Étretat and Montivilliers in 1835 (Voyages, 553) and the solid trudge by Portbail in 1836 (Voyages, 581). The second group of holidays runs from 1837 in Picardy and Belgium to 1838, 1839 and 1840 in Belgium, Germany and Switzerland and 1843 in the Pyrenees and Basque country. Here there are clear changes. In the first place, there seems to be little reason to doubt that on these holidays the poet did more and longer walks, beginning with the splendid excursion in 1837 along the dunes from near Furnes (Veurne) to Dunkirk and later across the Hâble d’Ault in the Somme.8 This was followed in 1839 by an ascent of the Rigi on foot9 (whatever other walks Hugo may or may not have done in his Rhineland years)10 and in 1843 by his exploration of the hillside tracks of Pasajes (Voyages, 806–820). In the second place, from 1837 onwards most of his writings about those trips were shaped with an 7

8 9 10

Voyages: 1834: p. 523 to Locmariaquer; p. 527 Saint-Germain to Versailles. In his edition of the Correspondance familiale, II (1828–1839) (Paris, Laffont, 1991), Jean Gaudon has shown that Hugo did not have time to do the whole of the first and certainly did not do the second (ibid., II, 166, 190–191); 1835: p. 547 Soissons to Coucy-le-château-Auffrique. Jean Gaudon has again refused to credit this (op. cit., II, 214, note 4); 1836: p. 573 ‘six lieues’ from Dol-deBretagne to Saint-Malo; pp. 584–585, ‘quatre lieues (de pays!)’ from Barneville to Les Pieux; pp. 582–583, the coast from Cherbourg to Sainte-Mère-Église – all of which Gaudon has refused to credit (op. cit., II, 290n, 308n, 317n). Voyages, 631–634 (‘sept lieues’), 650. Voyages, 673–4. This three-hour climb was not that unusual, although most tourists chose to ride up. The itinerary of 1838 does not seem to have left Hugo much time for walking. In 1840 he seems to have put in a claim of walking from Sedan to Mézières as false as his later claim of footing it from Lorch to Bingen (J. Gaudon, ed., Le Rhin, I, 119 and 410). But some short promenades were no doubt done: see in Voyages, 43, 83–84, 94–96, 121, 278–283, 286–289.

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eye on publication, a fact which soon obliged Adèle to insist on a clear separation between private missives and such drafts.11 The journey to the Pyrenees of 1843 was similarly intended to end in a book, complete with a fictitious return from the Basque country by Roncevaux in the company of picturesque bandits, if its interruption by the news of Léopoldine’s death had not made commercial exploitation of the trip emotionally taboo.12 While this second group of holidays establishes Hugo’s credentials as a walker interested in more than short strolls around Paris, the question obviously remains of why he continued to plan for fictional walks as late as 1843, by which date Juliette seems to have accepted his need for the occasional solitary excursion while she rested or went ahead by coach. In the earlier walks when Hugo had no publication in mind, these lies seem essentially to have represented excursions which he would have liked to have done and which suggested he was travelling alone, told to family and friends who knew what to expect of his tastes. But from 1837 onwards when thinking ever more of going into print, Hugo seems to have responded to the fashion fed by publications such as Dumas’s Impressions de voyage [Suisse] (1834), Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur (from 1834) and the translations of Heine’s ‘Harzreise’ (from 1832) for packing travel books with walks both for the sake of variety and for the authority that such down-to-earth perspectives give. Moreover Hugo was as interested as other Romantics in the close relation of fiction to travel writing and it is surely no accident that the walk he imagined from Lorch to Bingen is followed immediately by the Légende du beau Pécopin et de la belle Bauldour (Letter XXI). In other words, the walks that Hugo dreamt up for his readers because ‘la pensée a ses mirages. Les voyages que la diligence-Dotézac ne fait pas, l’imagination les fait’ must be understood in the wider context of the sort of experiences Hugo sought and found in travel and more especially in walking (Voyages, 761 [1843]). To draw these out we will do well to analyse at some length the programmatic Letter XX 11 12

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In 1840; see Jean Gaudon, ed., Le Rhin, I, 12. On the fictional trek planned, see Voyages, 839–884, 1268. Corinne Chuat comments on his guilt at 1269.

just referred to which is also the most important on the subject from a French Romantic. There may be some overlap between Hugo’s celebration of walking in it and the sort of pleasures he derived from all travel, but the specially close connection with walking foregrounded here is confirmed by other journeys and by the use made of walks in his poems and novels. That the importance the letter had in Hugo’s eyes should not be denied on the grounds that it happens to have been written at leisure when back home in Paris is suggested by its length and intricate construction as well as by the role it has in introducing the fiction which follows in Letter XXI. In spite of the striking evocations of Jean Valjean’s long walks up to Digne and later in the woods at Montfermeil, the stress in Hugo’s travel writing (unlike in Charles Didier’s) is rarely on the physical process of walking – except when trying to persuade his wife that walking was taking most of his energy13 – and that is again true of this letter, where the emphasis is all on the general freedom and creative benefits of travel on foot: A pied! – On s’appartient, on est libre, on est joyeux; on est tout entier et sans partage aux incidents de la route, à la ferme où l’on déjeune, à l’arbre où l’on s’abrite, à l’église où l’on se recueille. On part, on s’arrête, on repart; rien ne gêne, rien ne retient. (Voyages, 135)

This celebration of freedom is entirely expected but carries with it a notable emphasis on a concomitant freedom from others (‘on s’appartient’). Without that there cannot be a fully independent choice of route and rhythm (‘on s’arrête, on repart; rien ne gêne, rien ne retient’) and Hugo was certainly one of the Romantics who most genuinely appreciated the solitude of walking and the opportunity it gave to to wander capriciously and zigzag according to fantasy: Je vais et je viens, je ne veux laisser échapper aucune de ces vieilles villes […] Cela me fait faire des zigzags sans fin. Mon voyage dessine à travers la Belgique une extravagante arabesque. (1837)

13

Voyages, 523, 526, 573, 581, 585.

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La gorge qui mène de Tolosa à Pampelune serait célèbre si on la voyait. Mais c’est une de ces routes que personne ne prend. Un voyage en zig-zag en Espagne serait un voyage de découvertes. (1843)14

Hugo was moreover fully conscious of the obvious analogy between such errancy and his taste for literary digression. An important feature of Letter XX is accordingly the number of long digressions which draw the narrator off into memories of past walks and adventures, into history and legend as well as into diversionary visits to the Falkenburg and the Mäuseturm, all of which prepare the reader for the major digression in the following letter that is La Légende du beau Pécopin et la belle Bauldour, that cautionary tale of errancy. The place of digression in travel writing and its affinity with walking could hardly be shown more gracefully and the analogy is reinforced at the beginning of Letter XXII, after the digression on Pécopin and Bauldour: Ce petit compte réglé, je reviens d’Épernay à Bingen. La transition est brusque et le pas est large; mais vous êtes de ces écouteurs intelligents et doux, pénétrés de la nécessité des choses et de la loi des natures, qui accordent aux poètes les enjambements et aux rêveurs les enjambées. (Voyages, 203)

Freedom on the road from the demands of others is however also presented as essential for concentration on the ‘incidents de la route […] la ferme où l’on déjeune […] l’arbre où l’on s’abrite’, and if all travel represented for Hugo a chance to change his ideas and exercise his curiosity (Voyages, 148, 601), walking had the additional advantage of allowing him to scrutinize the ‘book of nature’ more closely.15 That had been the lesson of painters and as well as of the summers at La Bièvre, a lesson which Hugo choses to commemorate in this letter by recalling an amusing excursion to the Gâtinais with an

14

15

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Voyages, 619–620, 826. Of course, Hugo’s theoretical defence of the poet’s total freedom to roam the byways of his fantasy began in the preface to Les Orientales when setting out to ‘s’aller promener en Orient pendant tout un volume’. The old image is everywhere in Hugo: Poésies, II, 342–343, 427–428.

old ‘poète-savant’ passionate about natural history.16 The story of that excursion – the second long digression in the letter – becomes an opportunity for the narrator to underline a walker’s chance to catch the antitheses and minor ironies observable in nature as well as the seething life which he can see as if in the ‘microscope’ of the itinerant showman met (Voyages, 141). Such close-ups, the letter would remind us, led Hugo to dialogues with the natural world not open to those who pass rapidly by and keep their distance:17 A ma droite s’ouvrait étroitement entre deux rochers un charmant ravin plein d’ombre; un tas de petits oiseaux y babillaient à qui mieux mieux […]; un ruisseau d’eau vive grossi par les pluies, tombant de pierre en pierre, prenait des airs de torrent, dévastait les paquerettes, épouvantait les moucherons […] je distinguais vaguement le long de ce ruisseau […] un sentier que mille fleurs sauvages, le liseron, le passe-velours, l’hélicryson, le glaïeul aux lancéoles cannelées, la flambe aux neuf feuilles perses cachaient pour le profane et tapissaient pour le poète. Vous savez qu’il y a des moments où je crois presque à l’intelligence des choses; il me semblait qu’une foule de voix murmuraient dans ce ravin et me disaient: – Où vas-tu? tu cherches les endroits où il y a peu de pas humains et où il y a beaucoup de traces divines; tu veux mettre ton âme en équilibre avec l’âme de la solitude […] tu cherches le lieu où le verbe s’épanouit dans le silence, où l’on voit la vie à la surface de tout et où l’on sent l’éternité au fond […] Eh bien! entre. Ce sentier est ton chemin. Je ne me suis pas fait prier long-temps, je suis entré dans le ravin.18

16

17 18

Voyages, 139–143. We do not know if the G… in question was Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, nor does it matter, just as it does not matter that the fantastical names of animals referred to in this story were drawn from the 1660 Le Monde, ou la Description générale de ses quatre parties by Pierre Davity and JeanBaptiste Rocoles, as Jean Gaudon has stressed. Such as the wealthy owner of a fine garden in ‘A un riche’ (Poésies, I, 867– 871). See also ‘Aux arbres’ (Poésies, II, 363). Voyages, 146 and see the further note from around 1842: ‘Les bois ont cela d’étrange que le sentiment de la solitude y est profond, et que cependant, je ne sais quelle communication s’établit entre l’âme et cette multitude d’arbres qui se penche sur vous, vivent, s’agitent, semblent vous écouter et paraissent vous répondre. On éprouve dans une forêt la double sensation de la foule et du désert’ (Océan, 48).

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The concentration of the solitary walker’s attention has led here to a vision so intense as to be dream-like – ‘la pensée est un œil, la rêverie est un microscope’ (Voyages, 739 [1839]) – and reverie and dreaming are seen from the outset of Letter XX as a sort of second state inseparable from the poet’s walk: ‘On va et on rêve devant soi. La marche berce la rêverie; la rêverie voile la fatigue’ (Voyages, 135). The point is a familiar one in Hugo: J’allais ainsi, regardant et songeant, montant et descendant sans cesse, les talons enfouis dans le sable, arrachant de temps en temps un épi d’ivraie quand il n’y avait ni maison dans la dune ni voile en mer […] rêvant ainsi, à tout et à rien. (Voyages, 633 [1837])

The fluid and uncontrolled nature of this reverie leads to the capricious waywardness of steps and text which the letter illustrates, just as it allows memory to roam over the private and public past: Tout, dans ces montagnes, se mêlait à ma méditation et se combinait avec ma rêverie: la verdure, les masures, les fantômes, le paysage, les souvenirs, les hommes qui ont passé dans ces solitudes, l’histoire qui a flamboyé là, le soleil qui rayonne toujours. (Voyages, 147)

As ‘Tristesse d’Olympio’ showed, this can be as saddening as stimulating, but reverie can also lead to the esthetic exhilaration of fantasy embroidering at will on images, shapes, ideas and words, a playfulness that can produce rococo art and the grotesques of Callot as well as the amusing charlatanism of the mountebank met in the Gâtinais. At other times, the reverie of the solitary walker leads less arbitrarily to a revealing interplay between external stimulae and the movement of inward reflections, as already illustrated in this letter by Hugo’s plunge into a buzzing ravine and as further explained in 1843: Une route s’était présentée, je l’avais acceptée au hasard, et j’allais. Je marchais dans la montagne sans trop savoir où j’étais; peu à peu le paysage extérieur que je regardais vaguement avait développé en moi cet autre paysage intérieur que nous nommons la rêverie; j’avais l’œil tourné et ouvert au dedans de moi, et je ne voyais plus la nature, je voyais mon esprit. Je ne pourrais dire ce que je faisais dans cet état auquel vous me savez sujet; je me rappelle seulement d’une manière confuse que je suis resté quelques

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minutes arrêté devant un liseron dans lequel allait et venait une fourmi et que dans ma rêverie ce spectacle se traduisait en cette pensée: – une fourmi dans un liseron. Le travail et le parfum. Deux grands mystères, deux grands conseils. (Voyages, 791–792 [1843])

In this particular instance the outcome may have been bathetic, but that does not belie how typical of Hugo’s walks such reverie is. Elsewhere it can produce ‘Pan’ and ‘Pasteurs et troupeaux’ and Hugo’s writing is famously effective when responding to the equivocal transformations of trees and rocks at dusk: J’ai toujours aimé ces voyages à l’heure crépusculaire. C’est le moment où la nature se déforme et devient fantastique. Les maisons ont des yeux lumineux, les ormes ont des profils sinistres ou se renversent en éclatant de rire […] (Voyages, 651 [1837])

In this blend of effort and reverie which is for Hugo peculiar to the walker, his progress may begin to seem something like a religious initiation, with deaths and rebirths at every step: ‘voyager dans des lieux qu’on n’a jamais vus et qu’on ne reverra plus, c’est naître et mourir à chaque instant’.19 Sometimes the walker may be rewarded by the vision of an equivocal scene on the border between this world and the next, between heaven and hell, as when climbing later in Le Rhin to the place called Heidenloch (Voyages, 280–283). Elsewhere the revelation may be more patently divine as in the ‘demi-révélations’ of the buzzing ravine or in those numerous panoramas where Hugo felt that with the dramatic change of perspective ‘l’homme s’évanouit’, one no longer has anything in mind but God and can ‘voir faire la roue à ce paon magnifique qu’on appelle la nature’ (Voyages, 146, 147– 148).20 In a later climb up the Geissberg in Letter XXVIII to a panorama where ‘il m’est venu un de ces éblouissements de la nature que doivent avoir, dans leur contemplation profonde, ces aigles qu’on aperçoit le soir immobiles au sommet des Alpes ou de l’Atlas’ 19 20

Album of 1840, in Gaudon edition of Le Rhin, II, 390. See in Les Quatre Vents de l’esprit, the 4 poems of ‘Promenades dans les rochers’ inspired by his contemplation of panoramas while walking in 1843 at Pasajes (Poésies, III, 1349–1352).

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(Voyages, 290), Hugo’s reverie expands beyond the sublime present to embrace the past of Heidelberg in eleven close pages of description and meditation which make coextensive in the reader’s imagination the movement of digressive writing and the movement of a walker’s reverie: ‘vous m’avez oublié sans doute sur la colline du petit Geissberg […] et je m’y suis oublié moi-même, tant j’y avais été saisi d’une rêverie profonde’ (Voyages, 303). Yet however much such walks to vision may lead to a ‘marée montante d’idées qui vous envahit peu à peu et qui submerge presque l’intelligence’ (Voyages, 290), the burden of Letter XX is finally to insist on the need to discriminate between day and night, reality and hallucination (Voyages, 136, 157). An album entry from those years makes clear the complementarity Hugo sought between reason and reverie: Le rêveur exagère, mais c’est afin de faire saillir les détails du vrai invisibles à l’œil nu. L’esprit vraiment complet, c’est un penseur doublé d’un rêveur. (Voyages, 739)

The debt of Hugo’s reverie to walking since 1831 and especially since 1837 which Letter XX of Le Rhin suggests is corroborated by the echoes of the real walks of these years in the prose and poetry of Les Misérables and Les Contemplations to which we shall return in a moment, as well as by the many shifts from writing to drawing in the margins of various albums and manuscripts.21 This letter also makes clear that the fictions – or poems – which are prompted by the reverie of the walker may be as appropriate an expression of a walk as any traveller’s tale (Voyages, 158). Did Hugo really meet the six bears, bulldogs and keepers from the ‘cirque de la barrière du Combat’ when returning one day on foot to Paris through the forest of Bondy (Voyages, 136–138)? We shall never know, but true or false, the story of these ‘pauvres ours saltimbanques’, the first long digression of the letter, argues persuasively for the contemporary traveller on foot still being able to meet with adventures and marvels as Dante and the travellers of antiquity did (Voyages, 138). Did Hugo as a child have 21

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See Claude Gély, ed., Voyages. France et Belgique (1834–1837), Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1974, 260, 302.

hanging over his bed that terrifying picture of the Mäuseturm [the Mice Tower] he claims to remember (Voyages, 155)? It would seem not,22 but the story allows him to dramatize well the lurid expectations and misreadings of reality created by the reputation of the tower: ‘Les ruines font vivre les contes, et les contes le leur rendent’ (Voyages, 154). So the letter – itself a tall story for the few in the know – prepares the reader for the whole chapter of fiction which follows in Le Rhin. Other strands in this long and rich letter include a nod to the pedestrian dimension being added at this time to one idea of Bohemia. For the story of the circus animals on the loose in the forest also shows some sympathy on Hugo’s part for the association we spoke of in connection with Sand and Nerval between the social and imaginative freedom of the dissident artist with ‘Bohemian’ freedoms of movement in nature and on the road. For Hugo’s sympathy is real for these poor animal ‘acteurs en congé’ and the encounter with them suggests an affinity between the freedom of the poet’s feet and thoughts and the freedom that is the birthright of all bears and dogs (Voyages, 138). Further on, the wonderfully fluid and inventive speech of the travelling mountebank admired in the Gâtinais has a similar affinity with art which looks forward to the satirical monologues of Ursus, the peripatetic and no less ‘savantasse’ showman of L’Homme qui rit. It is therefore no surprise that the letter goes on to pay tribute to youth and hope in the persons of German artists and students the poet had met travelling on foot, no doubt like Hugo himself with a notebook at hand (Voyages, 145). There is however another attraction of pedestrian travel for Hugo which is only briefly alluded to in his opening celebration of the lone walker’s ability to concentrate on the ‘incidents de la route’ and the ‘ferme où l’on déjeune’. That is the very much closer attention which a walker can give to the everyday lives of others as Hugo will do to the lives of the blacksmiths of the Mäuseturm (Voyages, 161–162). It is hard to overestimate the importance of this for the growth of Hugo’s social awareness in the 1840s as reflected in Les Misères, the first draft of Les Misérables which he started in 1845. Encounters on these 22

See Gaudon in his edition of Le Rhin, I, 428.

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journeys like that at Granville of a mother and daughter accused of murder and howled at by a crowd (1836; 579), like that at Portbail of an epileptic prevented from drowning herself (1836; 581), like that in Gamaches of two women arrested for smuggling tobacco (1837; 645) had an immediacy for the poet which they would surely not have had if he had mostly cocooned himself in coaches and help to explain that shift to the Left which occured in his views from around 1845. These encounters on the roads of France which lowered social barriers for the walker and brought him close to the many who were forced to travel on foot by reason of trade or some disadvantage bring us to a central figure of Hugo’s vision: the ‘passant’ or passer-by. As traveller, poet and narrator Hugo adopted this persona rather more frequently than that of ‘flâneur’ or ‘rôdeur’ because it was a role which he regarded as hardly less essential than that of prophetic ‘visionnaire’. His use of the word (and related use of the verb ‘passer’) goes back to at least ‘A un passant’ of 1825 (Poésies, I, 343– 344), but it occurs with increasing frequency from around 183023 and is continually used of himself on the journeys from 1834 onwards.24 From then on it recurs everywhere in his prose and poetry. So what was the significance for Hugo of a ‘passant’ and of the people ‘qui passent’, a significance so great that he often wished to identify himself with it? From the beginning, the ‘passant’ is anonymous and thoroughly ordinary25 and he will remain to the end something of an obscure Everyman – which is why he can be a blockhead as well as a hero,26 a Jean Valjean as well as a poet,27 even, in the largest scale of things, an insect.28 Because he shares the ordinary lot of animals, Hugo’s image of this Everyman is coloured by a Christian perception of the ‘passant’s’ mortality: 23

24 25 26 27 28

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Poésies, I, 655: ‘– Car Paris et la foule ont aussi leur beauté, / Et les passants ne sont, le soir, sur les quais sombres, / Qu’un flux et reflux de lumières et d’ombres’ (‘Un jour vient où soudain’, November 1831). Voyages, 555 (1835); 647 (1837). Poésies, II, 456–457; Voyages, 44, 59 (Le Rhin). Poésies, I, 775; Romans, II, 934. Romans, II, 49, 63, 330–331; Poésies, II, 290. In Quatrevingt-Treize a woodlouse is a ‘passant’ for the children held hostage (Romans, III, 976).

Nous passons les uns auprès des autres, et nous nous effaçons comme des fumées dans le ciel profond et bleu de l’éternité. Les hommes sont dans l’espace ce que les heures sont dans le temps.29

And that, Hugo stresses is as true for the ‘passant glorieux’ that Napoleon was as for the poet and for the woodlouse.30 Now the essence of the ‘passant’ is that he is in movement, and in a tangential relation to events as he or she moves by and on. Arriving on a scene by chance while pursuing his own life is what gives the ‘passant’ an opportunity to catch in the act great and obscure dramas and to be the irrefutable witness that only chance can provide. Such witnessing by an innocent spectator of society’s and history’s deeds is evidently felt by Hugo to be of great importance, since he is always imagining it and likes to see himself in this very role. The obsession betrays both a laudable concern for democratic justice and a no less strong belief in the writer’s duty to witness, a double concern which early produced, well before the notes of Choses vues, the poem ‘Rêverie d’un passant à propos d’un roi’, in which an ancient crone and the author both bear witness to monarchy’s urgent need to adapt (Poésies, I, 572–574). In this poem both the crone and the poet happen to be on foot and it is undoubtedly significant that elsewhere too Hugo’s ‘passant’ is often a walker, whether in the city or on the open road. Moreover walking was to become a notable feature of the stories of several of his protagonists, from Jean Valjean to Gwynplaine and the poet of Les Contemplations. It is to these we must now turn to catch in them reflections of the experiences we have been tracing. The debt of Hugo’s mature work to the journeys with Juliette in the 1830s and 1840s has long been recognized, though without any

29

30

Voyages, 766 (1843); see also Poésies, I, 653: ‘Tous ces jours passeront; ils passeront en foule / Sur la face des mers, sur la face des monts’; ‘Mais moi, sous chaque jour courbant plus bas ma tête, / Je passe, et refroidi sous ce soleil joyeux, / Je m’en irai bientôt, au milieu de la fête’ (‘Soleils couchants’, April 1829). The Christian touch to Hugo’s perception of this Everyman is apparent also from the fact that he is even capable of representing a caring God as ‘ce passant, ce pasteur’ of humanity in the cosmos (Poésies, I, 663). Poésies, I, 638; see also Voyages, 32 (Le Rhin).

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special focus on pedestrianism.31 Yet it cannot be a coincidence that when finally starting to write Les Misères in 1845, just after publishing the second, expanded version of Le Rhin, Hugo should have chosen to make walking a defining feature of his hero as it is perhaps of no other hero of French nineteenth-century fiction and should have kept this feature through to the final draft of a novel structured by symbolic journeying on foot and in carriages.32 Is it any wonder that travel books will be the favourite reading of his courageous pilgrim (Romans, II, 723)? Jean Valjean manages indeed to represent many of the sorts of traveller met by Hugo on French roads (Vagabonds was one idea for the title [Chantiers, 918]) and the narrator will claim that the truthfulness of his testimony is that of a casual ‘passant’ (Romans, II, 241, 248). In his youth the hero trudges roads like any other peasant on his many tasks (Romans, II, 68–69); as an ex-convict on the road from Toulon, he is one of the many outcasts and ‘rôdeur(s) de mauvaise mine’ forced to move across France on foot (Romans, II, 59); as the ‘promeneur nocturne’ of the capital (Romans, II, 735) he becomes just another of its ‘passants’ – while Gavroche’s excursions stand for much of the city’s ‘flânerie’ (Romans, II, 460–461, 519, 725). Moreover, as an Everyman ‘qui passe’ – as the bishop of Digne has it33 – Jean Valjean soon becomes the model of an unassuming Christian witness of social suffering and injustice – whether of the near crushing of a workman under his cart, or of Cosette’s martyrdom at the hands of the Thénardier, or of 31 32

33

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That is also true of Françoise Chenet-Faugeras’s otherwise excellent study of travel and space ‘Les Misérables’ ou l’espace sans fond, Paris, Nizet, 1995. It would obviously be preferable to confine our references to the manuscript of Les Misères as it stood in 1848, before Hugo reopened it in 1860. However it is not possible to do this, since Gustave Simon’s edition is not satisfactory (Paris, Éditions Baudinière, 1927) and reproduces at best, as Guy Rosa points out, only the very first draft of this part, which Hugo had already added much to by 1848 (in Romans, II, 1164, following René Journet and Guy Robert, Le Manuscrit des ‘Misérables’, 9–10). However, a consultation of Journet’s and Robert’s work, as well as that of Simon, does at least broadly assure us that whatever the changes made by 1848 and after 1860, the features which concern us here were essentially there from the start, whatever further elaborations took place before the final version of 1862, which we shall cite. Romans, II, 63: ‘vous qui passez’.

poverty at the barrière d’Italie or of the insurrection on the barricades.34 As such, his symbolic stature keeps growing, from being merely one of many sufferers on ‘le grand voyage humain et terrestre vers le céleste et le divin’ (Romans, II, 975) to being a penitent pilgrim after his conversion and finally a Herculean saint Christopher in the sewers of Paris.35 Many of the features which we have seen Hugo appreciate in walking – the solitude, the introspection, the closeness to nature and society, the hallucinatory reverie – also appear in Jean Valjean’s walks from the first draft of 1845. In particular, one may note how at the beginning Hugo makes use not only of the solitude of walking and its potential for introspection, but also of the physical weariness about which he had said so little in earlier writings, to create and make convincing the hardened ex-convict’s decisive breakdown after his pardon by the bishop and relapse into stealing. For Hugo makes clear that Jean Valjean has been physically exhausted by four days of walking under the sun from Toulon and by more dazed wandering after his moral relapse. It is this exhaustion which hastens the crumbling of his psychic defences and the onset of change: ses jarrets fléchirent brusquement sous lui comme si une puissance invisible l’accablait tout à coup du poids de sa mauvaise conscience; il tomba épuisé sur une grosse pierre. (Romans, II, 90)

In the same way Cosette’s terrified dash for water through the nightime fields and woods of Montfermeil echoes Hugo’s own experiences of the hallucinatory weight of the dark and its fearful transformations for the lonely walker: Le frémissement nocturne de la forêt l’enveloppait tout entière. Elle ne pensait plus, elle ne voyait plus. Un vent froid soufflait de la plaine. Le bois était ténébreux, sans aucun froissement de feuilles, sans aucune de ces vagues et fraîches lueurs de l’été. De

34 35

For Jean Valjean as a passant at Montfermeil, see Romans, II, 330–331. A sketch for the preface also had him as a modern Job, addressing, as in The Lamentations of Jeremiah (I, 12), ‘vous qui passez par le chemin’ [‘ô vos omnes qui transitis per viam’] (Chantiers, 747).

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grands branchages s’y dressaient affreusement. Des buissons chétifs et difformes sifflaient dans les clairières. L’obscurité est vertigineuse. Il faut à l’homme de la clarté. Quiconque s’enfonce dans le contraire du jour se sent le cœur serré. Quand l’œil voit noir, l’esprit voit trouble. Dans l’éclipse, dans la nuit, dans l’opacité fuligineuse, il y a de l’anxiété, même pour les plus forts. Nul ne marche seul la nuit dans la forêt sans tremblement. Ombres et arbres, deux épaisseurs redoutables. Une réalité chimérique apparaît dans la profondeur indistincte. Sans se rendre compte de ce qu’elle éprouvait, Cosette se sentait saisir par cette énormité noire de la nature. Ce n’était plus seulement de la terreur qui la gagnait, c’était quelque chose de plus terrible même que la terreur. Elle frissonnait. Les expressions manquent pour dire ce qu’avait d’étrange ce frisson qui la glaçait jusqu’au fond du cœur. (Romans, II, 307–308)

Jean Valjean’s later narrow escape from being sucked down into a subsidence in the sewers similarly builds on Hugo’s memories from the 1830s of treacherous sands on the western coast: Il arrive parfois, sur de certaines côtes de Bretagne ou d’Écosse, qu’un homme, un voyageur ou un pêcheur, cheminant à marée basse sur la grève loin du rivage, s’aperçoit soudainement que depuis plusieurs minutes il marche avec quelque peine. La plage est sous ses pieds comme de la poix; la semelle s’y attache; ce n’est plus de la sable, c’est de la glu. La grève est parfaitment sèche, mais à chaque pas qu’on fait, dès qu’on a levé le pied, l’empreinte qu’il laisse se remplit d’eau. (Romans, II, 1018–1019)

In Les Misérables, walking thus became a powerful and essential, if at times melodramatic means of expressing the central drama (as it would do again at the beginning of Gwynplaine’s story in L’Homme qui rit and in the telling of Michelle Fléchard’s desperate quest in Quatrevingt-Treize). In Les Contemplations, it was rather to be memories of subtler effects that Hugo’s imagination drew on. The collection is famously shaped as a journey through life from Autrefois to Aujourd’hui, from youth and love to death and exile, from carefree excursions to pilgrimages and sombre walks filled with resentful sorrow. In it, the poet is an Everyman passant among other passants

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as much as he is a visionnaire,36 with a constant need to struggle in order to overcome tragedy and remain en marche. Now however tidy it would be to find all the poems of walking collected in the part of Les Contemplations which carries this pedestrian tag, the architecture of the whole volume avoids such obvious logic. Hugo knows very well that there are walks for all seasons and so it is that the section Aurore has songs of young pastoral idylls as well as memories of excursions to la mère Saguet and strolls at Les Roches.37 After Aurore, the finest pedestrian poems do nevertheless come in Pauca meae and En marche and this no doubt reflects, among other things, a deep congruence between the emotional space created by walking and the effective expression of regret and melancholic contemplation. The first of these poems is ‘Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,’ which to begin with sends the reader off on an exhilarating dash to the absent beloved before transforming this dash in the second stanza into the morose trudge of a grieving pilgrim to the grave of the loved one. The force of the poem lies in this contrast between the apparent dynamism of the dawn departure – all determined future tenses and forceful repetitions – and the later depressing refusal of all the world’s wonders by the unconsolable pilgrim (‘Je ne regarderai ni l’or du soir qui tombe, / Ni les voiles au loin descendant vers Harfleur’). The two walks and their different drives, the first all haste and desire, the second all misery and devotion, can only take place in the poet’s imagination, cut off as he is by some unnamed gulph from the tomb of his beloved. Consequently, they become for us slightly abstract representations of two basic and opposed tendencies of human peregrination – the ecstatic and the melancholic – caught in a dialectic that only the tomb can resolve. In the poems of En marche the sad, bent progress of ‘Demain, dès l’aube’ reappears in ‘Paroles sur la dune’ under an even greater weight of time and memories. This poem of 1854 seems however to 36 37

Poésies, II, 440, 456–457, 557. ‘Le poète s’en va’ 1843 dated to 1831; ‘Oui, je suis le rêveur’ 1854 dated to 1835; ‘Vieille chanson du jeune temps’ 1855 dated to 1834; ‘Elle était déchaussée’ 1853 dated to 183*. The tribute to Horace is also relevant: ‘A propos d’Horace’ 1855 dated to 1831.

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have no direct connection with Hugo’s walk on the dunes of the Channel coast in 1837, unlike a related poem of the same years ‘J’ai cueilli cette fleur pour toi sur la colline’. The latter poem clearly does have its first origin in a letter of 1837 to Léopoldine from Étaples, enriched by the later memory of picking the only flower on a Spanish mountain for one of his sons in 1843: J’ai passé Dunkerque, j’ai passé Calais, j’ai passé Boulogne-sur-Mer, ma Didine bien-aimée […] J’ai cueilli pour toi cette fleur dans la dune. C’est une pensée sauvage qu’a arrosée plus d’une fois l’écume de l’océan. Garde-la pour l’amour de ton petit père qui t’aime tant. (1837) Il n’y avait que cette fleur […] Toute la grâce de la montagne était là. (1843) J’ai cueilli cette fleur pour toi sur la colline. Dans l’âpre escarpement qui sur le flot s’incline, Que l’aigle connaît seul et peut seul approcher, Paisible, elle croissait aux fentes du rocher. (1852/5)38

Such a direct connection with earlier walks is well worth having, but ‘J’ai cueilli cette fleur’ brings immeasurable enrichment to the bare idea of a mountain flower plucked and sent as a token of love. The steep climb up ‘l’âpre escarpement’ is left to the reader to imagine from the heroic height at which the flower grows and the majestic panorama which is being swallowed up by advancing night: Je voyais, comme on dresse au lieu d’une victoire Un grand arc de triomphe éclatant et vermeil, A l’endroit où s’était englouti le soleil, La sombre nuit bâtir une porche de nuées. Des voiles s’enfuyaient, au loin diminuées; Quelques toits, s’éclairant au fond d’un entonnoir, Semblaient craindre de luire et de se laisser voir.

This climb, the expression of the poet’s longing and its tragic inadequacy, brings him close to the pale and ghostly flower precariously maintaining its place in the cycle of nature, as 38

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Voyages, 635; letter of 9 August 1843 to Victor (in Jean Massin’s chronological edition, VI, 2, 1238); Poésies, II, 454–455.

Léopoldine had.39 There he decides to intervene in the harsh destiny of the flower (‘Tu devrais t’en aller dans cet immense abîme / Où l’algue et le nuage et les voiles s’en vont’) and to do so in the name of love, a gesture he nonetheless fears may be inadequate in a cosmos where darkness and not light is the norm, and where death and evil retain their power: Oh! comme j’étais triste au fond de ma pensée Tandis que je songeais, et que le gouffre noir M’entrait dans l’âme avec tous les frissons du soir!

If in ‘J’ai cueilli cette fleur’ a determined climb brought the poet face to face with the cruelty of life for the weak, in ‘Pasteurs et troupeaux’ a long excursion through a valley with a ‘sourire triste’ achieves a more complete expression of the balance of powers in the cosmos which the poet intuits, as well as of that growth and deepening of experience which the volume as a whole is designed to convey. Moreover, if in ‘J’ai ceuilli cette fleur’ the symbolic and emotional synthesis entailed sacrificing all details of the climber’s progress, ‘Pasteurs et troupeaux’ draws on just such detail to suggest strongly the interconnectedness of everything and the need to go on living and learning (En marche). The stroll of this last poem takes the author through a valley rich with the contradictions and ironies of life: abundance and poverty, love and labour, youth and age, flowers and thorns, the great and the small: Une petite mare est là, ridant sa face, Prenant des airs de flot pour la fourmi qui passe, Ironie étalée au milieu du gazon, Qu’ignore l’océan grondant à l’horizon.

Hugo accepts these contradictions and notes that at every level a pattern is repeated of challenges to survival and protection from these, be it the little shepherdess protecting her flock or the great promontory doing its best to shelter the rocks and waves at its feet: 39

She becomes a ‘sombre fleur de l’abîme’ in ‘A celle qui est restée en France’ (Poésies, II, 557).

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Et là-bas, devant moi, le vieux gardien pensif De l’écume, du flot, de l’algue, du récif, Et des vagues sans trêve et sans fin remuées, Le pâtre promontoire au chapeau de nuées […]

The final irony being that this promontory too cannot protect the seas against even greater natural forces which are defended in their turn, no doubt, by some higher pasteur: Pendant que l’ombre tremble, et que l’âpre rafale Disperse à tous les vents avec son souffle amer La laine des moutons sinistres de la mer.

This progress from observation to vision echoes the overall structure of Les Contemplations and suggests the place which walking had come to take in Hugo’s life. But this poem is also more particularly the expression of an encounter between a solitary walker and other, equally solitary existences – whether that of the little shepherdess, of the fourmi qui passe or of the pâtre promontoire – and an encounter that finally leads to a renewed awareness of the variety of connections which nevertheless exist if one only has the imagination to see them – whether these take the form of the rites of spring in this remote valley or of the various forms of protection exercised at every level in a harsh world. And while the poet thus knits together the walk as the occasion of this encounter and the poem as the means of its expression, he also implies more generally that if poets on walks can make sense of such encounters that is ultimately thanks to the deep sympathy between their own extravagant imaginations and the extravagance of the Creator: Car Dieu fait un poème avec des variantes; Comme le vieil Homère, il rabâche parfois, Mais c’est avec les fleurs, les monts, l’onde et les bois!

This extravagance – this ‘aller au delà’ – is for Hugo of the essence of the walker, the poet and the Creator. There could be no stronger expression of the ultimate centrality of walking to Hugo’s vision than ‘Pasteurs et troupeaux’. 126

Cast in the shifting rhythms of Hugo’s lively alexandrines, these poems in no way suggest that Hugo thought that drawing on the experience of walking necessarily entailed any formal experiment other perhaps than multiplying digressions in his prose. The growing place of real and imagined walking on the holidays with Juliette can nevertheless be seen to have contributed to some major novels and poems in a way that undoubtedly made Hugo the outstanding creative walker of French Romanticism.

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Rodolphe Töpffer

By the time all this was coming to fruition in Le Rhin, whatever special link may finally have come to be felt in France between walking and Romanticism was beginning to dissolve, as more energetic pedestrianism was fully absorbed into bourgeois culture and began to enter school curricula.1 Neither the walking done in 1847– 1848 by Flaubert and Maxime du Camp in Par les champs et par les grèves nor the less strenuous excursions of Taine in his Voyage aux eaux des Pyrénées of 1855 can necessarily be taken as a sign of romantic affiliations. The major sign of this absorption of rambling into mainstream class culture is the huge success in the years immediately after Le Rhin of Rodolphe Töpffer’s Voyage en zigzag (1843–1844),2 to be followed posthumously in 1854 by the no less triumphant Nouveaux voyages en zigzag,3 a publishing phenomenon of undoubted significance but one that is highly ambiguous and needs to be read in multiple ways, especially from the point of view of Romanticism. For Töpffer had on the one hand a clear affinity with the Romantics: he shared their veneration of Rousseau and Senancour4 and drew like them on the tradition of self-conscious and whimsical travel that ran from Horace to Sterne and de Maistre.5 In that sense the 1

2 3 4

5

An example of this change is the young Flaubert on holiday in the Pyrenees in 1840 walking from Assat to Les Eaux-Chaudes ‘le long du gave’ (Œuvres de jeunesse [Œuvres complètes, I], éd. Claudine Gothot-Mersch et Guy Sagnes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2001, 665). Paris, Dubochet, 1844: hereafter V.Z. Paris, Victor Lecou, 1854: hereafter N.V.Z. His debt throughout to Rousseau is evident, even if in his last conservative years he attempted to distance himself a bit from this father of modern egalitarianism (N.V.Z., 442–444). On his friendship with Xavier de Maistre, who saw him as his successor, see De Maistre’s preface for the Nouvelles genevoises, his Lettres inédites à son ami Töpffer (Geneva, Skira, 1945), his biographer Paul Chaponnière, Notre Töpffer, Lausanne, Payot, 1930, 124–128, and Léopold Gautier, Töpffer en zigzag:

publication of the Voyages en zigzag, coming after the success of Dumas’s Impressions de voyage [Suisse] and Hugo’s Le Rhin could simply be said to mark the absorption of romantic travel writing into middle class culture which would be why Gautier didn’t hesitate to echo Töpffer’s title in his own Zigzags of 1845. But on the other hand Töpffer didn’t flinch from showing his dislike for the fantasies and excesses of Dumas, Lamartine, Sand and Hugo and in that sense his success could be said to mark the recovery of this literary terrain by a patriotic conservatism with strong appeal to the middle classes. This distancing of himself from Romanticism became especially marked in his very last texts of the 1840s and this introduces another factor which complicates the image of Töpffer in the nineteenth century. For there is a younger Töpffer, the liberal republican who was a frustrated painter, experimental raconteur and inventor of the comic strip and this Töpffer of the early manuscripts is rather different from the older author the middle classes knew and took to their hearts. This is not just a question of Töpffer having watered down the satire of his comic strips before publishing them – as he did with Docteur Festus and Monsieur Jabot – it is above all a matter of each volume published in the nineteenth century containing several of the more reactionary albums of the 1840s and none from before 1833.6 This adds to the ambiguity of the triumph in France of the Voyages en zigzag and Nouveaux voyages en zigzag and it is this Töpffer known to contemporary readers who must concern us here, not the full figure who can now be studied in all his diversity on the basis of manuscripts and the édition du centenaire.7 From his very first account of a hike with students Töpffer would prove a far more experimental writer than his countryman Charles Didier, but his achievements also built on the traditions which so

6

7

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chroniques et études, Geneva, Société d’études töpffériennes, 1977, 13–15, 25– 30. V.Z.: 1837, 1838, 1839, 1840, 1841 (in order to make a satisfying sequence the second trip of 1841, to Venice, was redated in the volume to 1842: see Auguste Blondel, Rodolphe Töpffer. L’écrivain, l’artiste et l’homme, Geneva, Slatkine, 1976 [1886], 357 , 364–365). N.V.Z.: 1833, 1843, 1834. Œuvres complètes de Rodolphe Töpffer, 16 vols, Geneva, A. Skira (P. Cailler), 1942–1957.

encouraged walking in Switzerland. The son of a professional painter, Rodolphe Töpffer learnt to draw when accompanying his father to rural pitches but was forced by poor eyesight to abandon painting.8 He then turned to teaching and started an international pensionnat with children who often stayed for the summer and whom he occupied by rambles in the Alps. This was not a new idea: similarly inspired by Rousseau and Pestalozzi, a headmaster called Gerlach had started such tours in Geneva at the beginning of the century, and in 1823 Töpffer himself was introduced to them while sous-maître in another pensionnat.9 What was to be different in Töpffer’s own school was the illustrated albums in which he recorded such tours for the pleasure of participants from 1825 to 1842. The first of these pictured seven boys on a fourteen-day journey with Töpffer and his wife, but as the years went by, the groups grew bigger while trips, texts and digressions all lengthened and a cheap way was found to reproduce the hundred or so copies needed.10 The experimental dimension of these albums derived however, not from Swiss customs but from more personal traits. Töpffer had a moralizing bent which made his Nouvelles genevoises an international best-seller (1833), but he also had a sense of humour which found expression in whimsical caricatures as well as in amateur dramatics. His invention of satirical stories told in caricatures such as Les Amours de Monsieur Vieux-Bois (1827, publ. 1837), Les Voyages et aventures du Docteur Festus (1829, publ. 1840) and Histoire de Monsieur Jabot (publ. 1833/1835) was in fact to be praised by Goethe and make Töpffer the acknowledged father of the modern comic

8

9 10

See the fictionalized autobiography ‘La bibliothèque de mon oncle’ in Nouvelles genevoises, Paris, Hachette, 1855, 150–152. In his last tour of 1842 round Mont-Blanc, Töpffer claimed that his first visit to the hospice at the top of the Grand Saint-Bernard had been in 1817, at the age of 18 (N.V.Z., 152). See André Rauch, Vacances et pratiques corporelles. La naissance des morales du dépaysement, Paris, P.U.F., 1988, 118 for Gerlach, and N.V.Z., 61. The manuscript of the first was reproduced by Slatkine (Geneva) in 1981 (Voyage pittoresque dédié à Madame K. Töpffer par R. Töpffer. 1825). For the method of reproduction before they were printed, see L. Gautier, op. cit., 55–62: ‘Töpffer emprunte à l’épicier du coin son procédé de gravure’.

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strip.11 It was also the success of these and the Nouvelles genevoises which by 1841 had made him sufficiently known in France to risk printing some of his albums as the first Voyages en zigzag (1843– 1844). These certainly marked a breakthrough of sorts for walking in France, but one that admits of more than one interpretation and needs to be looked at from three perspectives: those of education and social trends as well as of aesthetic tastes. In schools, André Rauch has shown how the popularity of these texts encouraged a healthier balance of activities and a better use of excursions to teach natural history and geography.12 The moral lessons to be derived from such expeditions depended, according to Töpffer, on a careful alternation of effort and reward, fantasies and basic satisfactions, and sought the development of endurance, good humour and cooperation. But Töpffer clearly also thought that such tours had the advantage of directing children’s attention to the everyday life of ordinary people, away from exceptional temples of culture: Et par cette observation attrayante des objets répandus partout, toujours semblables par leur nature, et sans cesse différents par leurs accessoires ou par leurs accidents, n’arrivé-je pas à une sorte de savoir plus sensé, plus réel, aussi fécond que celui où parviennent ceux qui courent les curiosités et les merveilles? Tous les hommes, peut-être, n’ont pas ce penchant à observer; chez plusieurs, l’égoïsme le tue; chez un grand nombre, il n’a jamais été cultivé; nous n’hésitons pas à penser que les voyages à pied sont un des moyens les plus efficaces pour le faire naître. (V.Z., 108–109)13

The civic and democratic virtues bred by walks included therefore random encounters with humble ‘bonnes gens’ – ‘ici un manant qui tire de l’eau d’un puits; là, un garçon d’étable qui bouchonne une rosse; plus loin, un faucheur, un bouvier, un savetier, une vieille qui file, un fermier qui attelle’ (N.V.Z., 274) – and a chance to talk to them directly, free of urban social pretensions:

11 12 13

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See David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip. The Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, Chapter 2, 28–71. See André Rauch, op. cit., 91–119. For Töpffer’s dislike of the growing tourist trade, see also V.Z., 106–108, 320– 321.

Ah! alors, c’est plaisir que de converser, car c’est d’homme à homme, et non plus de masque à masque, qu’on s’entretient; les idées, les opinions, les sentiments s’expriment dans leur vérité, sous leur forme native, avec leur accent propre, et insensiblement, toutes barrières ôtées, l’on se sent comme si, échappé de cette prison de comédiens que dans les villes on appelle le monde, l’on avait enfin rencontré son semblable réel, en chair en en os, en âme et en cœur. (N.V.Z., 275)

Now it is true that in the very last and most conservative Voyages of the 1840s, Töpffer became both increasingly sentimental, as when echoing Rousseau on the virtues of rural Swiss communities (N.V.Z., 202–209 [1842]), and more glibly satirical and even hard-hearted about foreigners or convicts (N.V.Z., 95–98 [1842]; V.Z., 467 [1841]). But a notable feature of the earlier tours was nevertheless the variety and vividness of the portraits sketched. One remembers from the albums of 1833 and 1838 the shepherdess of Nantbourant (V.Z., 28– 29), the shoe-polisher in Milan (V.Z., 80), the inspector of roads at Lostallo (V.Z., 158–159) and Töpffer’s sympathetic portrayal of the handicapped of the Valais (V.Z., 98–99; N.V.Z., 52–54). For although such encounters are mostly observed and depicted without the benefit of dialogue, they are nevertheless recounted with sympathy and with none of the satirical edge brought to bear on English tourists and unhelpful guides (V.Z., 22, 43–44). Only occasionally in these earlier albums did Töpffer’s generosity fail, as when sharing his students’ laughter at the boastfulness of one poor cripple (V.Z., 131 [1838]). Despite such lapses, on the whole the earlier tours communicate a willingness to meet and recognize the humanity of others without sacrificing judgement or, indeed, spontaneous laughter. There is no question then about the positive contribution of Töpffer’s views to education, communicated as they also were through amusing texts and pictures. And beyond the field of education, socially the success of his books set the seal on a much wider acceptance in France of the interest of long-distance walking, not least for women, such as had long been established in Switzerland and other northern countries (V.Z., 7, 109–110, 271). The Voyages en zigzag brought moreover a sense of realism to the question of hillwalking by not sparing the reader details either about the effort required or about the varied responses of his charges to these 133

expeditions. There is therefore much in these albums on sore feet, tired muscles, sunburn, rain and insect bites and much on the patience needed to cross hostile terrains: Plusieurs s’engagent dans une spéculation par la vieille route.14 Cette route remonte le fond de la vallée en compagnie du torrent, qui tantôt la longe, tantôt la traverse; et de là tout le mal! En effet, la division Henri s’embrouille, passe le fleuve aux mauvais endroits, manque la route aux bons, se rallie sur des îles sauvages, et manque le pied sec à tous momens. Découragé par ces événements, M. Henri côtoie la rive droite sans rencontrer de gué; on lui fait des signaux, mais il semble décidé à remonter le fleuve jusqu’à sa source, pour mieux tourner la difficulté. D’autre part, Harrison passe et repasse l’eau, écrase les poissons, éclabousse les rochers, et toujours il arrive à des îles d’où il faut encore, pour sortir, écraser, éclabousser. Harrison n’y comprend rien et proteste. A la fin, il se lance d’île en île et arrive à la terre ferme, naufragé de la tête aux pieds, tandis que la division Henri y arrive enfin par la voie sèche. Mais, pour qui a un havre-sac sur le dos et rien dans l’estomac, la terre ferme est de mince secours, et de bien peu d’agrément. Au bout de deux heures, une effroyable démoralisation s’empare de tous les voyageurs; vainement M. Töpffer essaye de distraire ces malheureux par des considérations tirées soit de la beauté des aspects, soit des douceurs prochaines du déjeuner. Ventre affamé n’a point d’oreilles. Le vulgaire halte à chaque pas, plusieurs déclarent qu’il leur est impossible d’aller plus loin; les plus courageux ont des mines creuses, affligées, et marchent d’un air vieille garde revenant de Russie.15

Sometimes, the mountain paths become dangerous, and continually there are choices to make between flooded lanes and marshy fields, the monotony of straight roads and the rewards of mountain passes (V.Z., 20, 245–246): La poussière, ce fléau des plaines, ne se rencontre nulle part dans les montagnes. Le ruban ou chemin en ligne droite n’y est ni connu, ni possible. Or, deux heures de marche sur une route tortueuse où le paysage change à chaque tournant, paraissent plus courtes qu’une demi-heure de marche sur une ligne monotone et uniforme. Enfin, le chemin plat et de plus bien damé, comme l’est la grande route, n’exerçant qu’une sorte de muscles et qu’une même partie de la plante du pied, fatigue au bout de quelques heures et la plante et les

14 15

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Spéculation was the school’s term for a short cut. V.Z., 147. See also V.Z., 27–28, 166; N.V.Z., 51–52, 269–270, 277, 298–299, 343.

jarrets; tandis que les sentiers de montagnes, constamment variés de pente, de nature et de sol, exercent tous les muscles, reposent l’un par l’autre, et permettent de faire sans fatigue ni souffrance des journées de dix, onze et douze lieues. (V.Z., 117)

Equally, Töpffer was always informative about routes and distances covered as well as about inns (V.Z., 14, 34–35, 42, 117–118, 121, 262), even though it was only later when publication was in prospect that he began to anticipate being used as a guide (V.Z., 200–201, 307 [1839 and 1840]). The ambiguity of the Voyages en zigzag for romantic tastes should already be apparent. Töpffer’s practical realism led him to resist the sublime and the romantic in spite of their attractions, a resistance which helped to bring to an end the heroic age of Alpine literature by promoting what Sainte-Beuve called the ‘région moyenne’ of the Alps and the collective pleasures of hill-walking, as opposed to solitary derring-do.16 Töpffer was of course far from blind to the beauties of the MontBlanc, Mont Rose and the Dent du Midi, or to the vistas everywhere around him (V.Z.: 307; N.V.Z.: 118, 127–128, 148, 240–241), but he nevertheless showed the genuine preference of a temperate and cautious man who happened also to suffer from vertigo for such moderate touring as was in any case dictated by concern for his pensionnaires, never pushing higher than the Grand Saint-Bernard.17 Time and again he undercut the seductions of the sublime with the basic human need for water, food and rest without which the sublime went for nought. So after a lengthy commentary on the magnificent Mont Cervin, the narrator continues:

16

17

Sainte-Beuve, ‘Notice sur Töpffer considéré comme paysagiste’, N.V.Z., V–VI. The market for Alpine literature had in fact already peaked: see LacosteVeysseyre, op. cit., I, 207. Even so, Töpffer never stayed for long on such heights, as Sainte-Beuve stressed in the article cited (N.V.Z., X). For his ultimately moderate taste in landscape, see his preference for the vaguer but more lasting pleasures of Annecy lake over the ‘sauvage nudité’ and sublime beauty of the ‘promontoire de Finale’ (N.V.Z., 404–405).

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Assis sur l’herbe sauvage de cette sommité, aux charmes si vrais de la contemplation nous mêlons les agréments pas du tout mensongers de la bonne chère, et c’est sans perdre un coup de dent que nous éprouvons ces poétiques ravissements.18

Again and again he emphasizes the all too human reluctance of his charges to climb, as well as the ridiculous turn of many a descent: La pente est roide tout autant; seulement, au lieu de gazons, ce sont tantôt des cailloux qui roulent sous les pieds, tantôt des roches polies sur lesquelles la plante ne trouve ni arrêt ni assiette, et à trois pas le vide, l’abîme, la géhenne d’un casse-cou tout prêt et tout prochain. En vérité, c’est à s’y jeter la tête la première pour en finir, pour n’avoir plus la fatigue de lutter, l’angoisse de craindre, la catastrophe de s’y croire déjà! Sur ces entrefaites, voilà Rayat qui chancelle en se contournant pour tâcher de tomber bien; voilà M. Töpffer qui, voyant Rayat chanceler, chancelle aussi, se contourne aussi […] (N.V.Z., 243– 244; see also 153–156)

Töpffer thus humanized the Alps and substituted for epic climbs the mock-epic of youngsters on an outing, with an emphasis on the importance of the ordinary and a marked dislike of the exaggerations of Romantic egos, whether the fabrications of a Dumas, the windy pretensions of a George Sand, the carelessness of Lamartine in Jocelyn, the supposed ‘materialism’ of Hugo or the propensity of all of them to allow encounters with alien places to become simply encounters with endless stories and legends.19 Yet Töpffer was in his level-headed way as appreciative as the next walker of the views of his native land, and as critical as any Romantic of sciences which

18

19

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N.V.Z., 242; see also 94–95 and the hymn to the fine hunger of hill-walkers on 187: ‘Muse, redis-moi qui se distingua le plus dans cette guerre aux pâtés, dans ce carnage des volatiles? ou plutôt, muse, redis à tous qu’il n’est de banquets qu’aux montagnes, de voracités énergiques, splendides, qu’aux montagnes!’. On Dumas, V.Z., 65; on Sand, V.Z., 78, 477, 482; N.V.Z., 160–162 (Töpffer’s critique of Sand is clearly also coloured by dislike of her literal and moral crossdressing); on Jocelyn, N.V.Z., 230; on Hugo, N.V.Z., 136, 230–231. So Töpffer rarely recalls legends, though understandably, pride made him refer to his own stories when these were inspired by the place at hand (V.Z., 15–16, 220).

lacked the imagination to grasp the poetry of such landscapes.20 It was thus above all for him a matter of reacting against those excesses which blinded and of grounding appreciation in an understanding of the terrain, a lesson he sought to dispense with humour by also turning the participants in the tour into the characters of a comedy, classified according to their anatomy, appetite and behaviour.21 While realism made him criticize romantic excesses, Töpffer’s irony and whimsical humour were nevertheless traits that he shared to some extent with a Nodier and a Nerval. In his autobiographical ‘La bibliothèque de mon oncle’, the hero celebrates like De Maistre in Voyage autour de ma chambre the freedom of thoughts to roam out of a window,22 and in the Voyages Laurence Sterne is never far away, whether in the funeral oration to a sugar-loaf (V.Z., 23), in the celebration of zigzags (V.Z., 117) or in the caricatures of types of tourist (N.V.Z., 81–84, 158–162). Cervantes is also recalled as the paragon of novelists who learnt from walking: Quand on voyage à notre façon, c’est-à-dire selon une méthode qui accroît la vivacité de toutes les impressions, en même temps qu’elle met en contact direct avec la nature, avec les hommes, avec la vie, l’on est porté à se persuader que certains romanciers, par exemple Cervantès, n’auraient pu, avec leur génie tout seul, imaginer, décrire, peindre comme ils l’ont fait; et que tout au moins les vicissitudes de leur destinée, sinon des tournées pédestres et laborieuses, en leur procurant des avantages analogues, les ont enrichis de cette prodigieuse quantité d’observations justes, de sentiments naturels, d’impressions vraies, dont ils ont semé le meilleur dans leurs ouvrages.23

20

21

22 23

See N.V.Z., 17, and in particular his attempt to elucidate the psychological attractions of a ‘sublime’ sight such as that of the Mont Cervin (N.V.Z., 241– 242). For Töpffer’s dramatization of his pupils for the purpose of an amusing album, see the cast-list for each expedition and the comparison published by L. Gautier between Töpffer’s account of the 1825 expedition and the diary of a participant: ‘Rodolphe Töpffer et Georges Picot. Deux récits du même voyage’ (op. cit., 97– 99). For Töpffer’s observation of varied responses among his pupils, see V.Z., 115–116. Nouvelles genevoises, Paris, Hachette, 1855, 89–90. N.V.Z., 39–40, and see 35, 97, 147; V.Z., 86, 145.

137

Tom Jones and Fielding’s introductory ‘Bill of Fare to the Feast’ is likewise present behind Töpffer’s initial comparison of one journey to a meal – ‘eh bien, voyageur, à ce beau banquet il y a encore un splendide dessert’ (V.Z., 5) – a recall all the more significant in that Töpffer’s mock-epic tours clearly owe much to the condescending banter of the English novelist. The choice of third-person narration allows Töpffer to multiply his own persona with jocular irony and even to treat as real the characters of his own comic-strips (V.Z., 90, 136). The self-consciousness of the Voyages en zigzag is not however merely a matter of such surface signals, or of the mise-en-abyme of the genre in 1837 (V.Z., 2–4) and of the redoubling of many episodes in pictures. It is more a matter of Töpffer’s awareness of the deeper analogy between the development of the tour and that of the text, between the zigzags of mountain roads, the zigzagging of his chosen routes and the zigzagging of his digressions,24 an awareness that clearly echoes the cult by French Romantic travellers of caprice and chance – ‘hasard’ was the word most commonly used – as a sign of their ostensible submission to the dictates of their imagination. In Töpffer’s Voyages, the word zigzag – promoted by eighteenth-century admirers of rococo art – refers most immediately to the serpentine lines of mountain roads (V.Z., 149, 248, 450), but the author manages to suggest that the invigorating pleasure of following such inflected lines has wider connotations: Or, c’est toujours une bonne fortune pour des voyageurs à pied, que d’avoir à franchir ces belles montagnes, où la marche est si légère, si animée, où les spectacles sont si variés et si beaux. On se lasse un peu, à la longue, de tournoyer dans les échelons en spirale du Dôme, mais on ne se lasse pas de serpenter dans les hautes vallées, de s’élever au travers des bois, des rocs, des cascades, jusqu’à ces sommités chauves et solitaires où la nature est moins parée, mais bien plus grande, et au-delà desquelles on se retrouve, au bout de deux ou trois heures de facile descente, rendu aux charmes un peu suspects de 24

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V.Z., 55–56: ‘Le pays cesse d’être pittoresque ou seulement varié, et la route est une suite continue de longs rubans; aussi est-il d’usage antique et immémorial que d’Ivrée à Milan nous prenons des voitures […] nous allons tâcher aussi de mener notre narration plus rapidement’. See also the witty presentation of the endless friendly banter that fills walking time with ‘une discussion qui a déjà deux lieues de long’ (V.Z., 243–244).

la civilisation, et aussi aux charmes plus vrais d’une végétation admirable de vigueur et d’éclat. (V.Z., 200)

The deviations made by his students are accordingly always treated with sympathy and one remembers that in his Nouvelles genevoises, Töpffer had already betrayed the extent of his taste for the digressions and flâneries of the mind and the eye:25 Il y a pourtant certains chemins qui semblent abréviatifs, et que nous appelons spéculations, qui sont des pièges toujours offerts aux jeunes touristes; car les jeunes touristes sont tous du goût des chèvres; ils préfèrent le zigzag à la ligne droite, l’ardu au plain, le sinueux à l’uni et les broussailles aux prairies. Les touristes de sens rassis, comme M. Töpffer, combattent souvent ce goût […] (V.Z., 117)

As the narrator observes, even the most tolerant leader of a pack of schoolboys needs to rein them in from time to time, just as an author has to put an end to his digressions, and it is characteristic of the schoolmasterly Töpffer that there turns out to be rather less randomness and fewer digressions in his texts and itineraries than one might have expected. On this question Töpffer is not as misleading as Théophile Gautier but his digressions are never as extravagant as some of Nerval and Hugo, let alone of Cervantes and Sterne.26 And although Töpffer never ceases to deplore excessive planning and the predictable routes of painters and tourists, his school mostly sticks to its projects, just as the text progresses logically in time and space. On closer inspection, the geographical and textual digressions of the Voyages en zigzag are therefore less subversive than their title and rhetoric suggest. The final moderation and conservatism of the text is confirmed by the narrator’s distinctive tone throughout the albums. The humorous multiplication of his persona by third-person narration implies a standpoint removed from and above that of any participant – 25

26

Nouvelles genevoises, Paris, Hachette, 1855: 90–91, 174 (digressions) and 98, 94 (flâneries). See also N.V.Z., 362, on the meaning for Töpffer of ‘la symétrie et le cordeau’ in architecture and town planning. Among the longer ones are those from the tour to Genoa on illustrations and imagery (N.V.Z., 320–322 [1834]), and from the last tour of 1842 round MontBlanc on music and on pencils and drawing styles (N.V.Z., 223–225, 226–228).

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‘Pour M. Töpffer, il est dans ses transes’ (V.Z., 186) – a standpoint which allows a full range of comic effects from farce and nonsense to caricature and wordplay.27 As the narrator comments: Rit-on des choses spirituelles comme des grosses bêtises que dicte une folle gaieté? C’est douteux. Esprit sur esprit, ça fatigue; bêtise sur bêtise, ça désopile. Mais ce qui est vrai, c’est que l’esprit s’écrit, s’imprime, sans perdre trop de son agrément; la bêtise, la bonne bêtise, une fois sur le papier n’est plus que bête et c’est un mérite petit, outre qu’il est commun. (V.Z., 12)

This narrative stance and tone are suited to the Fieldingesque mockepic that these treks sometimes become and allow master and pupils to be portrayed with a humour that can be pointed as well as warm: Il s’agit pareillement de savoir qui payera le rossoglio, de Harrison ou de M. Töpffer. En vertu d’un contrat fait entre les parties avant le départ, il est convenu que Harrison porte, et que M. Töpffer paye. Harrison porte bien, mais, d’autre part, M. Töpffer ne boit pas, soit parce que Harrison a tout bu, soit parce que M. Töpffer, qui est à l’arrière-garde, ne saurait atteindre à son rossoglio, qui marche à l’avant-garde. Discussion-procès qui est encore pendante et florissante à l’heure qu’il est.28

At times however, this tone becomes rather too cosy in its fondness for neologisms and private codes and irritates with the self-assurance of humorous school-reports (V.Z., 111–115).29 Beneath this slightly self-satisfied irony, there lurks the conviction that children come and children go, but deep down humanity is not about to change, a conviction typical, as we know, of many satirists. However light the touch Töpffer tries to bring to his moralizing, his tone thus implies a 27

28 29

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V.Z., 18: ‘Nous y trouvons aussi pour sentier un couloir de cailloux, où le centre se disloque […] Plusieurs font des chutes qui leur macadamisent les régions charnues’; N.V.Z., 400: ‘Du reste, dans toute cette partie de la route, la caravane marche divisée en deux corps: les uns qui suivent la Corniche et marchent dans les hauteurs, les autres, non moins cornichons pour cela, qui suivent le bord de la mer pour y ramasser des coquillages’. V.Z., 242–243, and see also the mock-epic search for the key of a wine cellar in N.V.Z., 352–353. The school jargon includes spéculer for short cuts, buvette for halts with snacks, ruban for straight roads, and kangourous for fleas, midges and all biting insects.

conservative outlook which is confirmed elsewhere by his persistent reticence about modernity, change and capitalism (V.Z., 195, 209, 362–363, 454, 495–496) and by the patriotism which fuels these walks (V.Z., 253–254, 340–341, 401–402). Touches of his early liberalism survive in his contempt for social grandees and in his instinctive rejection of the great winners of history, be they Roman or British, but the seeds of his last conservatism were there from early on. However positive his influence on education and pedestrianism in France, for Romanticism Töpffer’s success was thus an ambiguous phenomenon. One is not too surprised that most Romantic writers ignored him (with the exception of Sainte-Beuve) and that he refused to be called either classic or romantic and championed juste milieu art.30 Ultimately, his success was in many ways the success of the sort of conservatism which wished to counter the excesses of urban romanticism with provincial, middle class values, a conservatism which also held that the patriotism of children could be nourished by pedestrian tours. In that sense the Voyages en zigzag constituted a delayed triumph for reactionaries like Eugène Genoude who early in the Restoration had encouraged Frenchmen to repossess their homeland on foot after the displacements of Revolution and Empire31 and prepared the way for the role to be played in the Third Republic after the disasters of 1870–1871 by Augustine Fouillée’s (G. Bruno’s) Le Tour de France par deux enfants.32

30

31 32

See Chaponnière on his avoidance of being called either classic or romantic (op. cit., 57, 120–121) and his Réflexions et menus propos d’un peintre génevois ou Essai sur le beau dans les arts of 1848. Eugène Genoude, Voyage dans la Vendée et dans le midi de la France, Paris, Henri Nicolle, 1821. See Jacques et Mona Ozouf, ‘Le Tour de France par deux enfants. Le petit livre de la République’, in Les Lieux de mémoire, I, 277–301. Hermione Quinet’s republican Sentiers de France (Paris, Dentu, 1875) also used patriotic walking, both literal and metaphorical, as a way of repossessing ‘la France profonde’ on her return from exile in 1871. See also how, much later, the Paris–Strasbourg walking race would be started in 1926 to affirm the territorial integrity of France (André Rauch and Jean-Claude Richez, ‘Paris–Strasbourg: vers les provinces reconquises’, in A. Rauch, La Marche, la vie, 141–147).

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Conclusion

In spite of Rousseau, then, walking never became as central a preoccupation of French Romantic writers as of the German and English, whether as practice or as theme. As walkers, none of them could compete with Berlioz in his prime, let alone with the Swiss or Wordsworth. This does not matter from a literary point of view, but in such a perspective what is revealing is that the theme did not inspire them either as much as it did the writers of those countries. Indeed their relative lack of interest in the theme must have contributed to Wordsworth’s lack of success in France. The size of the country, the heat of the Midi, the hold of Paris over cultural life and the emergence in the capital of the world’s first avant-garde devoted to urban forms of provocation mainly account for this. The pedestrian heritage of Rousseau was nevertheless not entirely lost and there proves to be a story of French Romantic walking. While this is often a tale of tracks ignored and of opportunities for cultural protest lost it nonetheless turns out to have had its importance for the exploration of man’s relation to the physical world by Nodier, Sand and Hugo and for the revelation by the last two of another France and of lives on the margin. Moreover, one cannot fail to be struck by how often walking became associated by them with the exploration of personal identity in dramas of time, memory and belonging which recall Romantic lieder. Lastly, country walking and its mythology turns out to have nourished the growth in the French middle classes of a sentimental myth of artistic Bohemia distinct from, and more conservative than, the radical urban alternative. Each in their own way, Sand, Hugo and Nerval did have contributions to make to the literature of walking, especially in prose, although the neglect of Consuelo has led to Sand receiving less than her full due. And they opened paths in prose and poetry soon to be followed in France by Flaubert, Du Camp, Rimbaud and others. These later writers’ interest in walking became however personal matters which hardly fit any

overall pattern of much significance other than that of often having strong provincial roots. And this is so until the twentieth century, when walking in near and far lands and other slow ways of touring become for authors such as Saint-Pol-Roux and Jacques Réda ways of recovering some of the poetry of travel in the face of the entropy of the exotic and of ever faster and more disembodied journeys.

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Rousseau Émile ou de l’éducation, ed. François and Pierre Richard, Paris, Garnier, 1961. Œuvres complètes, I, ed. Marcel Raymond, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1959. Burgener, Louis, L’Éducation corporelle selon Rousseau et Pestalozzi, Paris, Vrin, 1973. O’Neal, John C. ‘The Perceptual Metamorphosis of the Solitary Walker’, L’Esprit Créateur, 2.24 (Summer 1984), 92–102. Raymond, Marcel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. La quête de soi et la rêverie, Paris, Corti, 1962. Ricatte, Robert, Réflexions sur les ‘Rêveries’, Paris, Corti, 1960. Starobinski, Jean, J.-J. Rousseau. La transparence et l’obstacle, Paris, Gallimard, 1971. Tripet, Arnaud, La Rêverie littéraire. Essai sur Rousseau, Geneva, Droz, 1979.

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Sand Œuvres autobiographiques, ed. Georges Lubin, Paris, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1970–1971, 2 vols. Correspondance, ed. Georges Lubin, Paris, Garnier, 1964–1991. Correspondance entre George Sand et Flaubert, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, s.d. Autour de la table, Paris, Dentu, 1862. Carnets de voyage à Gargilesse, ed. G. Lubin, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, Christian Pirot, 1999. Carl, Paris, M. Lévy, 1869. Le Compagnon du tour de France (1841), ed. René Bourgeois et al., Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1988. Consuelo. La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, ed. L. Cellier and L. Guichard, Paris, Garnier, 1959, 3 vols. La Daniella, Paris, Librairie Nouvelle, 1857, 2 vols. Elle et lui, ed. T. Bodin, Meylan, Éditions de l’Aurore, 1986. François le champi, ed. P. Salomon and J. Mallion, Paris, Garnier, 1962. Laura. Voyages et impressions, Paris, C. Lévy, 1881. Nanon, Meylan, Éditions de l’Aurore, 1987. Les Maîtres sonneurs, eds. P. Salomon and P. Mallion, Paris, Garnier, 1968. Malgrétout, Paris, M. Lévy, 1870. Le Marquis de Villemer, Paris, M. Lévy, 1862. Nouvelles lettres d’un voyageur, Paris, Calmann Lévy, 1877. Promenades autour d’un village, (Paris, Hachette, 1860), ed. G. Lubin, SaintCyr-sur-Loire, Christian Pirot, 1992. Valentine in Romans de 1830, Paris, Presses de la Cité, 1991. La Vallée noire, ed. Denise Brahimi, Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire, Christian Pirot, 1998. Voyage dit du midi, ed. Maurice Jean, Ville de la Valette-du-Var, 1991. ‘Quelques réflexions sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, Revue des deux mondes, 4e série, XXVI, 1 juin 1841. Dulude, Louise, ‘L’Envol de la femme-plume’, Études françaises, XXIV.1 (Spring 1988), 9–15. Goldin, Jeanne, ‘George Sand voyageur’, Études françaises, XXIV.1 (Spring 1988), 3–7. Gould, Evlyn, ‘George Sand’s Forgotten Bohemia’, in David Powell, Le Siècle de George Sand, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1998, 357–365. Hecquet, Michèle, ‘Enfants de Bohème: naissance et légitimation chez Sand’, Revue des sciences humaines, 226 ( avril–juin 1992), 99–116.

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Senancour Isabelle, ed. B. Didier, Paris and Geneva, Ressources, 1980. Oberman (1804), Le Journal intime d’Oberman, ed. André Monglond, Grenoble/Paris, B. Arthaud, 1947, 3 vols. Libres Méditations d’un solitaire inconnu, ed. B. Le Gall, Geneva, Droz, 1970. Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme (An VIII, 1799/1800), ed. Joachim Merlant, Paris, Droz, 1939. Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme, Paris, Abel Ledoux, 1833. ‘Sur Fontainebleau’, Mercure de France, L, 4 janvier 1812, 13–19. ‘Petit voyage romantique’, L’Abeille, 4, 1821, 99–107. ‘Promenade en octobre’, Mercure du XIXe siècle, III, 1823, 154–167. Le Gall, Béatrice, L’Imaginaire chez Senancour, Paris, J. Corti, 1966, 2 vols. Raymond, Marcel, Senancour. Sensations et révélations, Paris, J. Corti, 1965. Sainte-Beuve, ‘Oberman’, Revue de Paris, 34 (22 janvier 1832), 210–222.

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Index

Adhémar, Jean 44 Alhoy, Maurice 41 Amaury-Duval, Eugène-Emmanuel 43 Anglade, Jean 18 Bach, Johann Sebastian 87 Bachaumont, Louis Petit de 95, 101 Ballanche, Pierre Simon 31 Balzac, Honoré de 92 Baudelaire, Charles 51, 56, 99 Belloc, Alexis 19 Berlioz, Hector 19, 143 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Jacques Henri 26, 29, 41 Bertier de Sauvigny, Guillaume André de 17, 19 Bertin, Louis-François 50 Bertin, Louise 108 Blondel, Auguste 130 Boime, Albert 19 Bony, Jacques, 101 Borel, Petrus 54 Boulanger, Louis 44, 45–46, 108 Bourguignat, Auguste 25 Bourlès, Jean-Claude 71 Bourrit, Marc-Théodore 20 Brizeux, Julien-Auguste-Pélage 47, 55, 71 Burgener, Louis 29 Byron, George Gordon Noël, lord 20 Cabat, Louis-Nicolas 54 Cachin, Françoise 18 Cailleux, Alexandre-Achille-Alphonse de 41, 44 Cairns, David 19 Callot, Jacques 114

Canova, Antonio 80 Catullus 52 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 137, 139 Chambers, Ross 99 Champfleury, Jules Husson, dit 86 Chapelle, C.-E. Luillier, dit 95, 101 Chaponnière, Paul 21, 129, 141 Charlet, Toussaint-Nicolas 45 Chateaubriand, François-René de 20, 76 Chatiron, Hippolyte 73 Chenet-Faugeras, Françoise 120 Chopin, Frédéric-François 81, 87 Chuat, Corinne 110 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 26 Combe, Thomas G.S. 47 Cooper, James Fenimore 19 Corbin, Alain 21 Courbet, Gustave 86, 101 Coxe, William 20 Custine, Astolphe de 41, 63 Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien 95 Dante Alighieri 116 Dauzats, Adrien 44 David d’Angers, Pierre-Jean 44, 45 Davity, Pierre 113 Delacroix, Eugène 44, 91 Denecourt, Claude François 21, 51, 54, 58 Denon, Dominique Vivant 63, 65 De Quincey, Thomas 26 Desbarolles, Adolphe 58 Deschamps, Émile 46 Devéria, Achille et Eugène 44, 45 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall 17 Didier, Béatrice 37, 103

Didier, Charles 13, 26, 59, 61, 63–68, 75, 111, 130 Di Fiori, Domenico 59 Drouet, Juliette 46, 51, 57, 107, 108, 110, 119, 127 Du Camp, Maxime 129, 143 Dulude, Louise 91 Dumas, Alexandre 19, 25, 41, 42, 43, 49, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 107, 110, 130, 136 Ebel, Johann Gottfried 22 Estrées, Gabrielle d’ 102 Fielding, Henry 138, 140 Flaubert, Gustave 84, 92, 129, 143 Forsdick, Charles 71 Fouillée, Augustine 22, 141 Fournel, Victor 43 Gaudon, Jean 108, 109, 110, 113, 117 Gautier, Léopold 129, 131, 137 Gautier, Théophile 49, 51, 52, 53–54, 56, 57, 99, 101, 130, 139 Gazier, Georges 42 Gély, Claude 116 Genoude, Eugène 22, 141 Gigoux, Jean 19, 44 Giraud, Pierre-François-Eugène 58 Girod de Chantrans, Justin 39, 40 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 19, 87, 90, 105–106, 131 Goldin, Jeanne 76 Gould, Evlyn 93 Grattan, Thomas Colley 22 Green, Nicholas 21, 53 Grenier, Jean 13 Grétry, André-Ernest-Modeste 19 Gudin, Théodore 44 Gué, Jean-Michel 44 Guérin, Georges-Pierre-Maurice de 29, 47, 55, 71 Guichard de Benassis, Prosper 48

158

Guillemin, Henri 47, 60 Hacking, Ian 102 Harcourt, Bernard d’ 47 Haydn, Franz Joseph 86–89 Hazlitt, William 19, 26 Hecquet, Michèle 93 Heim, François-Joseph 44 Heine, Heinrich 25, 54, 59, 98, 110 Hoffmann, Ernest-Théodore-Amédée 89, 98 Hogg, Thomas Jefferson 26 Hooker, William 41 Horace 52, 129 Houssaye, Arsène 101 Hugo, Adèle 29, 42, 45, 110 Hugo, Léopoldine 110, 124, 125 Hugo, Victor 12, 25, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 42, 44, 45–46, 48, 49, 50–52, 55, 57, 58, 61, 71, 75, 93, 96, 98, 107– 127, 130, 136, 139, 143 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 56 Isabey, Eugène 41, 44 Janin, Jules 56, 59 Jarvis, Robin 12, 25, 46 Johannot, Charles, Alfred and Tony 44 Journet, René 120 Jouy, Victor-Joseph, Étienne de 21 Jussieu, Antoine-Laurent de 29 Karr, Alphonse 18, 96 Koebner, Thomas 12 Kreilssamner, Belle 49 Kreuzer, Helmut 91 Kunzle, David 132 Labédollière, Émile de 21 Lacoste-Veysseyre, Claudine 20, 135 Lacroix, Sylvestre-François 40 Lafond, Paul 45

Lamartine, Alphonse de 25, 44, 47–48, 50, 55, 59–60, 130, 136 Larousse, Pierre 22 Le Gall, Béatrice 31, 32 Lehmann, Andrew George 60 Lethève, Jacques 19 Liszt, Franz 92 Loève-Veimars, François-Adolphe 59 Luppé, Albert Marie Pierre de 48 Luzcot de la Thébaudais, FrançoisMarie-Julien 39 M*** 22 Macpherson, James 20 Magnin, Antoine 39, 41 Maistre, Xavier de 95, 99, 129, 137 Masseau, Didier 22 Mennessier-Nodier, Marie 40, 42, 48 Mercier, Louis Sébastien 26, 28, 43 Mérimée, Prosper 59 Michallon, Achille-Etna 19 Michel, Georges 55 Michelet, Jules 18, 19 Miquel, Pierre 45 Mitchell, Donald Grant 17 Monglave, Eugène de 56 Monglond, André 31 Mornet, Daniel 19 Mozet, Nicole 76 Musset, Alfred de 32, 51, 57–58, 60, 75, 79–80, 96 Nanteuil, Célestin 46, 108 Napoleon Bonaparte 34, 40, 119 Neraud, Jules 73, 74, 84 Nerval, Gérard de 18, 29, 30, 32, 37, 44, 51, 54–55, 61, 71, 94, 95–106, 117, 137, 143 Nodier, Charles 20, 25, 26, 29, 31, 39– 45, 46, 48, 52, 55, 59, 74, 84, 91, 95, 100, 137 Nodier, Élise 40

Oliver, A. Richard 40, 42 Ozouf, Jacques and Mona 141 Pagello, Pietro 79–80 Palmer, Arthur 52 Peacock, Thomas Love 26 Perdiguier, Agricol 100 Pestalozzi, Jean-Henri 28, 131 Petrarch 12 Pivert de Senancour, Étienne 20, 21, 26, 29, 31–37, 39, 40, 47, 59, 60, 63, 74, 75, 96, 98, 99, 103, 129 Plato 12 Plazaola, Juan 42, 44 Poli, Annarosa 74 Poynton, Marcia 19 Pückler-Muskau, Herman Ludwig Heinrich von, prince 97 Quinet, Edgar 18, 19 Quinet, Hermione 48, 141 Ramond de Carbonnières, Louis 20, 31, 96 Raphaël, Raffaello Sanzio 82 Rauch, André 21, 131, 132, 141 Raymond, Marcel 31, 33, 35 Réda, Jacques 144 Restif de la Bretonne, Nicolas 26, 28, 98 Richard, Louis-Claude-Marie 29 Richez, Jean-Claude 141 Riebel, Wolfgang 12 Rimbaud, Arthur 143 Rocoles, Jean-Baptiste 113 Robert, Guy 120 Roland de la Platière, Jeanne-Manon 19 Rosa, Guy 120 Rosen, Charles 96, 99 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 19, 20, 26, 27– 30, 31, 32, 34, 39, 40, 41, 74, 75, 88, 90, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103–104, 108, 129, 131, 133, 143

159

Sahlins, Peter 25 Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy de 113 Saint-Pol-Roux, Paul Roux dit 71, 144 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin de 13, 31, 37, 46–47, 49, 52, 55, 58, 59, 60, 74, 135, 141 Sand, George 12, 18, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 37, 39, 41, 47, 52, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 71, 73–94, 100, 102, 107, 110, 117, 130, 143 Sandeau, Jules 73 Sangsue, Daniel 95 Saussure, Horace-Bénédict de 20 Scarron, Paul 105 Schiller, Friedrich 20 Schopp, Claude 49 Seigel, Jerrold 57, 100, 101 Sellards, John 63, 65 Shakespeare, William 40, 91 Shelley, Mary 18 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 18 Simon, Gustave 120 Snell, Robert 54 Sterne, Laurence 90, 91, 95, 99, 101, 129, 137, 139 Streiff Moretti, Monique 103 Swift, Jonathan 95

Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe 129 Taylor, Isidore-Justin-Séverin, baron 41, 42, 44 Thabault, Roger 17 Thuillier, Jean-Louis 29 Töpffer, Rodolphe 13, 21, 22, 23, 28, 63, 71, 95, 129–141 Toussenel, Théodore 90, 91 Vidalin, Pierre Félix 21 Vigny, Alfred de 29, 45, 48, 93 Vincent, Louise 84 Voulgaris, Stamati 34 Wallace, Anne D. 11, 25 Weber, Eugen 18 Weiss, Charles 40, 42, 44 Wellmann, Angelika 12 Willm, Joseph 59 Wölfel, Kurt 12 Wolfzettel, Friedrich 11 Wordsworth, Dorothy 18 Wordsworth, William 18, 25, 26, 47, 49, 60, 143 Young, Arthur 17, 18, 19 Zola, Émile 56

160

French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Edited by: Professor Malcolm Cook and Dr James Kearns, Department of French, University of Exeter

This series publishes the latest research by teachers and researchers working in all the disciplines which constitute French studies in this period, in the form of monographs, revised dissertations, collected papers and conference proceedings. Adhering to the highest academic standards, it provides a vehicle for established scholars with specialised research projects but also encourages younger academics who may be publishing for the first time. The Editors take a broad view of French studies and intend to examine literary and cultural phenomena of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, excluding the Romantic movement, against their historical, political and social background in all the French-speaking countries.

Volume 1

Malcolm Cook and Annie Jourdan (éds.): Journalisme et fiction au 18e siècle 241 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906761-50-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4221-6

Volume 2

Paul Rowe: A Mirror on the Rhine? The Nouvelle revue germanique, Strasbourg 1829–1837 340 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906762-39-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4233-X

Volume 3

Rachael Langford: Jules Vallès and the Narration of History. Contesting the French Third Republic in the Jacques Vingtras Trilogy. 271 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-99-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4249-6

Volume 4

Malcolm Cook et Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval (éds): Réécritures 1700–1820. 298 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-28-7

Volume 5

Malcolm Cook et Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval (éds): Anecdotes, Faits-Divers, Contes, Nouvelles 1700–1820. 302 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906765-08-3

Volume 6

Timothy Unwin: Textes réfléchissants. Réalisme et réflexivité au dix-neuvième siècle. 217 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-30-3

Volume 7

Derek Connon and George Evans (eds.): Essays on French Comic Drama from the 1640s to the 1780s. 236 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-49-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5071-5

Volume 8

Philip Robinson (éd.): Beaumarchais: homme de lettres, homme de société. 298 pages. 2000, 2002 ISBN 3-906768-90-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5883-X

Volume 9

William Gallois: Zola: The History of Capitalism 296 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-60-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5077-4

Volume 10 David Kinloch and Gordon Millan (eds.): Situating Mallarmé 191 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906766-18-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5320-X

Volume 11 Derek Connon: Diderot’s Endgames 333 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-35-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-5623-3 Volume 12 Robin Howells: Playing Simplicity. Polemical Stupidity in the Writing of the French Enlightenment 331 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906768-36-8 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5624-1 Volume 13 C. W. Thompson: Walking and the French Romantics. Rousseau to Sand and Hugo 160 pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-078-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6894-0 Volume 14 Nigel Harkness, Paul Rowe, Tim Unwin and Jennifer Yee (eds): Visions/Revisions. Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Culture ??? pages. 2003. ISBN 3-03910-140-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6950-5