Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

FONTAINEBLEAU
waiting to reconduct you, now blazed upon a tree,
now posted in the corner of a rock. But your
security from interruption is complete ; you might
camp for weeks, if there were only water, and not a
soul suspect your presence ; and if I may suppose
the reader to have committed some great crime and
come to me for aid, I think I could still find my
way to a small cavern, fitted with a hearth and
chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed.
A confederate landscape-painter might daily supply
him with food ; for water, he would have to make a
nightly tramp as far as to the nearest pond ; and at
last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he
might get gently on the train at some side station,
work round by a series of junctions, and be quietly
captured at the frontier.
Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a
pleasure-ground, and although, in favourable weather,
and in the more celebrated quarters, it Hterally
buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the im-
munities and offers some of the repose of natural
forests. And the solitary, although he must return
at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day
with his own thoughts in the companionable silence
of the trees. The demands of tfie imagination vary ;
some can be alone in a back garden looked upon by
windows ; others, like the ostrich, are content with
a solitude that meets the eye ; and others, again,
expand in fancy to the very borders of their desert,
and are irritably conscious of a hunter's camp in an
adjacent county. To these last, of course, Fontaine-
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