"At eighteen, just out of and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ', as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the , following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a , sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The is like a French version of the , wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle toile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a for fifty s in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began."