It is a long time since I have seen a mattress maker at work on the lower quays of the Seine and I never did see the poodle clipper. Perhaps he has gone with the laundry barges that used to be near the Pont Neuf. One or two of these abandoned laundries have been towed down beyond the Bois de Boulogne to become floating restaurants and cafés, for the French are always looking for new settings for their meals. It is a shock to find car parks along some stretches of the lower quays. But there are one or two trees on the Right Bank, close to the water and having large, conveniently shaped boles, that are specially suited to couples who like to be caught dramatically kissing against water and sunset. And, in addition to lovers, fishermen and tramps—the genuine Parisian clochard—are still there. In spite of all the old ballads, the true inhabitants of “sous les ponts de Paris” are the tramps. In winter the less hardy go up into the city and sleep on the pavement, preferring the metal covers of central-heating pipes; but the morning sun brings them down to the shelter of the arches, where they light their fires of twigs and start cooking breakfast in cans. There are far more fishermen, however, than tramps or lovers. Hundreds of rods can be seen between the Concorde and the Cité. There they stand, males of all ages from ten to eighty, in blue berets and leather jackets, flicking and dipping their rods, like little orchestras. It is a delusion that they catch nothing. Fish leap onto their lines, mainly, I’m afraid, mere cat fodder like the goujon and the little perch. But there are small bream too. And I need hardly say that a man near the Pont de Sully “only last Tuesday” had a carp “at least eighty centimeters long” and “which must have weighed four kilos”—but it got away. (The fisherman has the art of making much out of very little and fishing fulfills that profound and frugal French attachment to “le tranquil,” the word one hears dozens of times a day.) The dream of the Seine fisherman is a large carp or—unrealizable in Paris but possible between Rouen and Le Havre—an enormous brochet, the pike, that he can rush off and sell to a restaurant, though the pleasures of eating quenelles de brochet are wasted on me. I have even seen a woman fishing in the Seine, and everyone knows there was once a fishing cat, commemorated in that dirty little alley opposite Notre Dame—the Rue du Chat qui Pêche. The last fishing I saw on the Seine was off the Île St. Louis. A crane was doing it. Quite a crowd of us leaned on the wall wondering what would come up. It was a diver in a pink rubber suit with a load of tiles from a sunken barge. He opened his helmet and there was the little frogman’s tiny face grinning at the nursemaids and puffing at a cigarette. “Comme chez soi” I heard a soldier say. The diver was a perfect example of “le tranquil.”
Finally, there are the painters. There are two classic views on the Seine: the Pont Neuf with the arms of the river clasping the tall, leaning, crowded seventeenth-century houses of the islands. The other is Notre Dame. Is any other cathedral in the world so often painted, not only by masters, but by every student who ever came to Paris? Is any other cathedral painted every day? It is one of the compulsive subjects, one of the great clichés of the river and therefore one of the most excruciating tests. Day after day, imitators and sentimentalists go down to disaster before that foreground of green water between the stone walls, the hollow eye of the white bridge that crosses it and the two gray fretted towers with the mass of the cathedral rising above. And then, suddenly, some genius comes along and snatches one more secret out of the great Gothic platitude—a Matisse, for example, gazes at the cathedral from his studio atop the Quais des Grands Augustins, and floats that solid stone on fire.
There are two kinds of light in France: the tender, subtle light of the Île-de-France and the North, and the strong, unmisted and candid light of the South. They are the light of the Seine and the light of the Mediterranean, the former dappling and dissolving the sights of nature, the latter revealing their volume and density. Expressing this in terms of painters, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Seurat reveal the light of the Seine; Cézanne and Van Gogh mainly reveal that of the South. What poetry has been for the Thames, painting has been for this river. The Louvre is on its banks in the middle of Paris; the schools, the studios and galleries are on the Left Bank, in the little streets between the Institut and Saint-Germain-des-Prés; and then there are all those painters—a procession of palettes, easels, brushes and umbrellas—painting their way from Paris to Le Havre.
A minute’s walk from the river, there are two little temples in the Tuileries, close to the Place de la Concorde, that commemorate this extraordinary conjunction of genius and the river. In the Orangerie one sees the final expression of Monet’s lifelong passion for this water—the two oval rooms that contain simply the murals he worked on year after year in the last quarter of his life: the Nymphéas. No other pictures are in these rooms. Generally you are alone in them; it is like being underwater and you think of the eyes of the master, gradually failing but—almost like the eyes of Balzac’s fanatic genius of Le Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu—tormented by his obsession with the elusive movement of the water. Caught by it when he was young, when Boudin, the pilot’s son, had shown Monet, the grocer’s son, the seas breaking in the harbor at Le Havre or the changing forms of the Seine estuary; entranced by the suburban river at Argenteuil; held in its grip when he and Renoir painted the floating cabaret, La Grenouillère, setting out in his studio boat with its little blue cabin; making his lily pool and Japanese garden at Giverny, Monet is inseparable from the Seine. It is his mistress.
Opposite the Orangerie is the Jeu de Paume, where the other Impressionists are permanently shown. It contains the Déjeuner sur l’ Herbe which caused one of the earliest scandals. Travel by river steamer out of Paris toward Le Havre and you will see hardly a village or town that has not been touched by the brushes of painters: Bougival, Marly, Saint-Germain, Argenteuil, Pontoise, Mantes, Vétheuil, Vernon, La Roche-Guyon and on to Rouen and Honfleur. Every old railway bridge, every picnic, every skiff and rowboat, the gaudy swimming parties, the river cafés, every stretch of poplars and willows, every chalk bluff and every apple orchard in flower in the Normandy spring recall their work. Look at a battle map of World War II; the Allied armies seemed to choose the painters’ favorite spots for crossing the river: Mantes, Vétheuil and all that country between the La Roche-Guyon and Rouen. Enclosed in calm green country that rises to hills, the Seine widens and narrows, takes its broad bends and tight loops, leaves its willow-silvered islands, drops through its locks while the wash of scores of barges sucks and gurgles at its banks.
I went down the Seine as far as Rouen recently on one of those little three-hundred-ton seagoing cargo boats of the Compagnie Maritime de la Seine that ply between Paris and London: and though I gave a reverent salute to Argenteuil in honor of Monet—and of Maupassant too, for his weekends of rowdy rowing parties—and to hallowed suburban places, I was glad the painters could not see the changes of time. The factories pour their filth into the bather’s stream. The gracious curving of the river cannot be lost—but, oh God! what a terrible slum of ruined shacks the Grande Jatte has become, and where is there grass to picnic on near Asnières ? There must be some, but who would dare go into that water? Maupassant of course would have noted for some story that grotesque little Île de Clichy that is occupied entirely by a dog’s cemetery and checkered with little tombstones—the last fond absurdity of the bourgeois. It was a Saturday afternoon when we passed it and processions of people were solemnly carrying wreaths and bunches of flowers to the graves of their pets.
There was the ghostly feeling of being on the edge of one of Maupassant’s river stories in my journey down the Seine to Rouen. How often he must have gone by river when he went to Flaubert’s house at Croisset to learn to write. Were those two rival, derelict-looking restaurants just below the Renault factory—A la Pêche Miraculeuse and A la Pêche Merveilleuse— thriving in his time?
There was a gay little scene aboard our ship, the Gâtinais, just before we sailed. The retiring commandant came to say good-bye to his ship, after the
best part of a lifetime in her. We drank his health in port and then in champagne and talked about motors and income tax, made salty remarks about the young assistant engineer who had just married and whose bride was making the trip with him, and then, after the commandant had been hugged and kissed by the jolly secretary of the company, the brave man jumped ashore in his best navy-blue suit, with her lipstick on his face, carrying a little case and a couple of coat hangers in the best seamanly fashion. No longer would they swing and tap on his cabin wall.
We saluted the Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma and cursed those huge blocks of flats that have ruined Passy but, save for them, we did not look at Paris. We were too interested in our andouille, our colin mayonnaise, our tête de veau and in sampling cheeses to notice much until we were off the Bois de Boulogne. Also we were dumbstruck by Pico, the ship’s boy. This youth, with straight black hair combed forward and the eyes of an astonished doll, had picked up a new bit of slang. This was, I suppose, his first day with the new word. It came out scores of times. The word was “saignant”—raw, bleeding, bloody. “Saignant!” he would exclaim if we passed a pretty girl, a car, or if he spoke of a film he’d just seen. It was “Saignant!” when the light went red against us at the first lock; it was “Saignant!” when it turned green. It was “Saignant!” when we listened to a quiz on Radio Luxembourg. If he fell asleep for a quarter of an hour he would wake up and shout “Saignant!”, as if to remind himself that he was alive. He caught a cold halfway to Rouen; only that stopped him. Pico had worked in one of those smart petrol barges that go between Paris and Rouen in huge fleets and which pay very high wages. He preferred lower wages in a real boat.
Nine members of the crew were solid Bretons from St.-Malo and Brest, but two were Normans: the melancholy, chain-smoking engineer and the pilot ceremoniously referred to as M. le Pilote. The engineer was a sad fellow with loose teeth who had knocked about Africa and who detested the modern world. We often stood on deck smoking a last cigarette, just before going to bed, and blundering through arguments on economics, while the country dogs barked on the banks. The pilot was quite different. Enormous, pink and old, his little blue eyes well bedded-down in pink cheeks, he came of a family who had been pilots for generations. He lived in the little Normandy village of Poses, at the last lock above Rouen, and he loved to talk about food, wine and fishing. He honored us by opening his own bottle of plum eau de vie from his village of Poses on the second night, and he gave it the reverence due Napoleon brandy. This courtly old gentleman had had a tragic life. When we got to Poses he pointed out the red roof of his home.
It was a new house. His wife and three of his children had been killed in the Allied bombing, when we were smashing Rommel’s armies in the Falaise pocket. With that rational sense of self-definition for which the French have a natural gift, he said to me: “I never remarried. I now live for myself.” For his stomach, the Chef said, but with respect.
The charm of these river voyages is their monotony. The only drama was getting into the locks, waiting for the lights to change on the lock towers and hearing the loudspeaker bawl across the water, “Attention, attention, bateau de mer.” We had precedence, but there would be as many as five barges with us in some of the locks, with Pico crying “Saignant!” and scampering to tie us up. There was a tremendous jam of barges at Conflans at the junction of the Oise, which is one of the great barge stations of the lower Seine. They looked like rows of black, red and blue beetles on the water. (It was here our new commandant told Pico, who hadn’t heard an order, that his “Portuguese” had sand in them—real docker’s slang, “ears” being “huîtres portugaises” or Portuguese oysters.) The sight of the barges at Conflans was astonishing. There were scores of long black hulls with their few inches of freeboard, their steel-gray, blue, red or green decks, and their handsome deck cabins with neat curtains, their pots of flowers and ferns and their shining brasses at the stern, with the children sitting there reading their Sunday books. There were Dutchmen bound for Amsterdam by canal, Belgians for Ostend, Frenchmen for all parts of France. The women were hanging out the enormous family wash, or hauling in buckets of water and mopping the decks. They are the hardest-working women I have ever seen. They and the children have to stop whatever they are doing and jump ashore with the ropes at the locks or to put out the rope fenders. At night they tie up: the law prohibits navigation then because of the impossibility of working in shifts. Many of the crews are made up of families. It is a gypsy life, hard on the children’s education. But it seems a happy life too; when they pass friends on the river they shout, wave and call messages across the water. The barge people are a race, a nation in themselves. All watermen are. While waiting at the locks I listened to a lot of argument about the effect the doubling of the Havre-to-Paris pipeline is having on the barges. But the wine barges and those that haul brick, cement and sand have an eternity before them.
These lower reaches of the Seine are placid and sweeping. For tens of miles the willows lean and the poplars stand in their quivering, silvering curtains. The nests of mistletoe in the trees give a touch of folly and lightness to the landscape. In the thirty years I have known this river there have been changes. The old bridges at Poissy, at Mantes and at Triel—that pretty place of regattas—have gone. They were too low. Towns like Poissy, resorts like Villenne and Meulan have grown enormously. The Seine has no dramatic falls or gorges, but the chalk cliffs draw close together in Normandy. At La Roche-Guyon—where Rommel had his headquarters—there are a castle and a château and there are deep caves in the hills. Pissarro painted there. We tied up one night at Les Andelys, a pretty place under steep cliffs on which Richard Coeur de Lion built a castle. It is a reminder that this part of France was once English—that is to say, when the English were much more French than they are today. Learned friends tell me that Henry V must have made his famous speech before Harfleur in French. And when Normandy wasn’t English, the English for centuries were fighting there. They built a church in Harfleur and I won’t mention what they did in the marketplace of Rouen. The castle at Les Andelys was built to defend Normandy—against France!
It stands at the entrance to a few miles of the nearest thing the Seine can offer to a gorge—a row of high cliffs with droll chalk bluffs sticking out over the river like clowns’ faces. They looked strange in the white river fog that held us up outside M. le Pilote’s village of Poses. At Elbeuf we entered the smoke of the Rouen neighborhood and the Gâtinais men bet me that the cloth of my suit came from this old weaving town. It didn’t—but there’s nothing like patriotism! This is the region of textiles; Flaubert made a great point of Madame Bovary’s taste in clothing and curtains and tablecloths and the amount of money she spent on them when she went into Rouen. After Poses, you feel the first touch of the tide. At Rouen you even feel the mascaret, or “bore,” the tidal wave that comes in sixteen feet high at Le Havre. It has been tamed now by new breakwaters at the mouth. The big ships come up as far as Rouen—we tied up beside a monster from Africa—and I stared at a city I did not recognize. Nearly all the quayside district of Rouen and much of the rest of the city were destroyed by the Allies when Rommel’s transport was trapped there. A new city has sprung up, but a good deal of the old, timbered part of Rouen is left. Le Havre also suffered severely. It is all rich woodland, cliffs, meadows of cattle, Normandy butter, cheese and cider from Rouen to Le Havre. The Seine smiles as it widens to its difficult mouth of shifting sandbanks.
Like the Thames and Tiber, the Seine has gathered more delight and intensity of meaning in its few miles than any other of the monstrous, helpless, swirling drains of the other great continents. Even in France, so far as length and volume go, the Seine is inferior to the Rhône and the Loire; and it can be argued that without the luck of having Paris on its banks, the Seine would be simply one more river to cross. But the argument is feeble. There is no luck in it at all. Paris did not grow out of luck but out of judgment. When the Romans conquered Gaul, they saw in the Seine basin a nat
ural barrier between Latin civilizations and the barbarians of the north; and the little island called Lutetia became the decisive outpost. Centuries later Clovis, the Merovingian king, confirmed their foresight by making Paris the capital.
Four hundred and eighty-two winding water miles from the sea, in the Burgundian hills northwest of Dijon, is a little grotto that was built by the City of Paris in the nineteenth century. (The sins of art in the nineteenth century were always municipal.) In the grotto reclines a plain, stone nymph with stone leaves on her head and her hair parted in the middle, dangling a bunch of grapes from a hand that rests on her raised knee. Below the stone on which she lies water oozes out of the earth. It is one of the half-dozen springs nearby that are the source of the Seine. This ground is almost holy, for we are at the source of those waters that washed the walls of the earliest Western civilization … that were drunk by the monks of Cluny… in which François Villon occasionally must have washed his face ... on which Maupassant, centuries later, rowed his boat… that Monet painted… and that have carried away something of the hearts of hundreds of thousands of us foreigners who have made love or talked our heads off on its banks.
At Home and Abroad Page 11
