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.
