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 café 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