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