FLY

RECOLLECTIONS OF A BOATMAN

He said to us:  “I saw some very funny things and some funny girls when I was a boatman, and I have often been tempted to write a little book to be called On the Seine, telling all about that careless and vigorous, that merry and poor life, a life of robust and noisy enjoyment, which I led from the time I was twenty until I was thirty.

“I was a mere understrapper without a half-penny, and now I am a man who has made his money, who has spent large sums on a momentary caprice.  In my heart, I had a thousand modest and unrealizable desires which gilded my existence with imaginary hopes, though now, I really do not know that any fancy would make me get out of my armchair where I am dozing.  How simple and nice and good it is to live like this, between my office in Paris, and the river at Argenteuil.  For ten years, the Seine was my only, my absorbing passion.  Ah! that beautiful, calm, diversified and stinking river, full of mirage and filth.  I think I loved it so much because it seemed to give me a sense of life.  Oh! what walks I had along the grassy banks, where my friends the frogs were dreaming on the leaf of a nenuphar, and where the coquettish and delicate water lilies suddenly opened to me, behind a willow, a leaf of a Japanese album, and when the kingfisher flashed past me like a blue flame!  How I loved it all, with the instinctive love of eyes which seemed to be all over my body, and with a natural and profound joy.

“Just as other men keep the recollection of sweet and tender nights, so I remember sunrises in the morning mist, floating, wandering vapors, which were as pale as death, before the sun rose, and then as its first rays glided over the meadows, lighted up with a rosy tint, which delighted the heart.  And then again, I have recollections of the moon silvering the running, trembling water, with a brightness which made dreams flourish.  And all this, the symbol of eternal illusions, rose up in me on that turbid water, which was carrying all the filth of Paris towards the sea.

“And then, what a merry life it was, with my companions.  There were five of us, a band of grave men we are now; and as we were all poor, we had founded an inexpressible colony in a horrible eating house at Argenteuil, and which possessed only one bedroom, where I have certainly spent some of the maddest nights of my life.  We cared for nothing except for amusing ourselves and rowing, for we all worshiped the oar, with one exception.  I remember such singular adventures, such unlikely tricks invented by those five rascals, that no one would believe them at present.  People do not live like that any longer, even on the Seine, for our mad fancies which we kept up, have died out now.