“We five only possessed one boat, which we had bought with great difficulty, and on which we laughed, as we shall never laugh again.  It was a large yawl, called The Leaf Turned Upside Down, rather heavy, but spacious and comfortable.  I shall not describe my companions to you.  There was one little fellow, called Petit Bleu, who was very sharp; a tall man, with a savage look, gray eyes and black hair, who was nick-named Tomahawk, the only one who never touched an oar, as he said he should upset the boat; a slender, elegant man, who was very careful about his person, and whom we called Only-One-Eye, in remembrance of a recent story about Cladel, and because he wore a single eyeglass, and, lastly, I, who had been baptized Joseph Prunier.  We lived together in perfect harmony, and our only regret was that we had no boatwoman, for a woman’s presence is almost indispensable on a boat, because it keeps the men’s wits and hearts on the alert, because it animates them, and wakes them up and she looks well walking on the green banks with a red parasol.  But we did not want an ordinary boatwoman for us five, for we were not very like the rest of the world.  We wanted something unexpected, funny, ready for everything, something, in short, which it would be almost impossible to find.  We had tried many without success, girls who had held the tiller, imbecile boatwomen who always preferred wine that intoxicates to water which flows and carries the yawls.  We kept them for one Sunday, and then got rid of them in disgust.

“Well, one Saturday afternoon, Only-One-Eye brought us a little thin, lively, jumping, chattering girl, full of drollery, of that drollery which is the substitute for wit among the youthful male and female workpeople who have developed in the streets of Paris.  She was nice looking without being pretty, the outline of a woman who had some of everything, one of those silhouettes which draftsmen draw in three strokes on the table in a cafe after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette.  Nature is like that, sometimes.

“The first evening she surprised us, amused us, and we could not form any opinion about her, so unexpectedly had she come among us; but having fallen into this nest of men, who were all ready for any folly, she was soon mistress of the situation, and the very next day she made a conquest of each one of us.  She was quite cracked, into the bargain, and must have been born with a glass of absinthe in her stomach, which her mother drank at the moment she was being delivered, and she never got sober since, for her wet nurse, so she said, recruited her strength with draughts of rum, and she never called the bottles which were standing in a line at the back of the wine merchant’s shop anything but ’My holy family.’

“I do not know which of us gave her the name of Fly, nor why it was given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her, and our yawl every week carried five merry, strong young fellows on the Seine between Asnieres and Maison Lafitte, who were ruled from under a parasol of colored paper, by a lively and madcap young person, who treated us like slaves whose business it was to row her about, and whom we were all very fond of.