The Lamp of Adventure: Robert Louis Stevenson

Abstract

Bedridden, he explored other places, other times. To Madame de Caraman-Chimay he writes a wistful letter, a mere two years after moving into the Boulevard Haussmann and commencing his self-imposed regime of cork-lined solitude. The Princess is off on a holiday spree, and Proust would love to join her but, alas, his illness as usual detains him. What reading should she take with her, she fondly asks? Useless to ask him, since the only books he ever reads nowadays are those that enable him to pursue in fantasy what she is about to perform in fact, namely travel. ‘Princess, what point is there in asking me for the titles of books when for many years now all I’ve read are travel guides… geography, catalogues of castles, everything that allows me to elaborate journeys, to seek new towns… and never to set forth.’ He has plans to visit Brittany again this year, but the upheaval is too much even to think of. Oh for the ability to travel while staying all the while exactly where one is. Would not this be perfection? ‘How I envy those people who are able to possess yachts and see everything without moving from the same room, but the thought of going to the Lamballe hotel and the Morlaix hotel and the Quimper hotel and the Ploermel hotel delights my imagination but horrifies my asthma’ (Cor, VII, 224).