In a matter of seconds, a number of most unfortunate events occurred. Just as Ray was about to flick off the rope a large barge came hurtling downstream and started to blow at us frantically. There was just time to complete our manoeuvre but unfortunately Ray couldn’t get his line off, and so there was nothing to do but tie the rope to the stern of the tug again and go ahead, so that we went back to our original position – thus avoiding the leviathan that was bearing down on us. In the excitement of getting out of the way of the barge, we had both forgotten that we had moved the dinghy to the other side of the barge and now as we swung towards the quay, it was obvious that the dinghy was going to be crushed by the weight of the barge hitting the wall. Ray rushed up and succeeded in moving the dinghy forward but he was not able to avert the inevitable crunch. Luckily, the dinghy, which was a solid fibreglass dory, survived – although I have a flash-frame image in my mind of the moment of impact when the dinghy seemed to bend in half and then spring back again. Because we were now back to square one, we picked ourselves up and started all over again. Second time round, we succeeded.
In these days of voyaging, Ray and I were under way for upwards of twelve hours a day so that we could keep up to our schedule of getting to Vienna before the winter set in. The locks opened at 6.30 a.m. and closed at 7.30 p.m. with a flexible break at midday depending on the type of canal; the busy ones kept going all day, and on the Seine it was possible to travel at night for an extra charge. For us it was all free, except for the pourboire to the éclusier, which was not obligatory. The trick to speedy progress was to arrive at a lock just before it closed for the night and go through it. Then one could cover the stretch to the next lock that evening, where we would wait till morning for the lock to open. This usually meant making contact with the keeper of the lock where we intended to pass the night to tell him of our intentions. These evening chats were sometimes very amusing and sometimes downright dangerous, when guard dogs on extremely long chains would wait unseen till one was in their arc of attack, and then spring, gnashing their teeth and showing incipient signs of rabies. As a child in India, I had been bitten by a dog of questionable background, and had to have fourteen painful anti-rabies injections in the stomach. Since that time I have been extremely cautious of man’s faithful friends.
When morning came, breakfast would consist of coffee with honey and a running snack till midday when we would stop, if we could, for a meal of some sort – usually on the boat but sometimes in a café if there was one near the bank. In this way, providing there were not too many locks, we could cover about eighty kilometres a day. At the end of a day like this, there was no need whatsoever for sleeping pills.
I could tell that we were approaching Paris when, in Pontoise, I saw the first Vietnamese restaurant – a sure sign that we were close to a big city. We passed down the Oise and came to the barge capital of France, Conflans-Ste-Honorine, which lies at the junction of the Oise and the River Seine. Conflans has always been a favourite place of mine. The row upon row of barges moored there, with their brightly coloured bows and flags, are sadly increasing every time that I go. The barge people who used, when they retired, to be able to afford a little bungalow somewhere they had selected on their ceaseless roaming, were now, because of the decline of traffic on the waterways, only able to afford to live on their barges.
A complete barge community has been built up, even to the extent of having a chapel on a huge concrete barge called Je Sers. Père Duvallier is a massive priest of about sixty, who spends most of his days in a boilersuit helping his elderly parishioners to replace empty Calor-gas bottles, or mending generators for those who are not lucky enough to be positioned where they can get electricity from the town’s supply. This splendid priest told me of his voyages as a young man, and in particular about the Danube and all its hazards. It was he who first made me realize that the horrors of the Rhine would be nothing to those we would encounter on the Danube. As we stood beside the map of the waterways of Europe, he pointed out how the French government’s transport policies, ruled since the war by the railway and road lobbies, have isolated Paris from the rest of Europe as far as waterways for the now nearly standard 1300-ton barge are concerned. In the heyday of the French waterway system, the late nineteenth century, a French official called Freycinet had standardized the lock measurements so that a 350-ton barge could pass anywhere. Now the canals approaching Paris from the north and south were woefully small by modern standards and it was becoming harder and harder for the one-family-one-barge outfits to win freight away from their competitors on the railways and the roads. There was work but it usually meant waiting for at least fourteen days before they got another cargo.
In the stern of the church-barge, the ladies of the barge fraternity were having a jumble sale, and one of them told me about the graze on the side of the Padre’s face. He had caught a couple of louts trying to break into his church and given them a hiding such as they would never forget. He never told the police, of course.
The Padre told me to go to talk to Monsieur Noisette at the Bureau d’Affrètement to learn about the freight system on the French canals. M. Noisette was a small, intelligent and surprisingly young man who explained very clearly how it all worked. When a barge was unloaded it was allowed to put its name on the list waiting for a further cargo. Three times a week in a special hall (which looked a bit like the room where the bookmakers call over the prices of horses in the Classic races on the British Turf), the barge fraternity would gather to have a good grouse about how hard things were. The names of the barges would be called out and the captains would come forward and accept the freight, or they would pass and let someone else have it if they did not want to go to that destination. They did not lose their place in the queue for the next callover.
Freight rates are fixed by the various associations involved throughout France, representing the bateliers, the people who wanted their freight transported, and the government. To even things out, a ton of something very voluminous has a higher freight rate than a ton of sand and gravel.
The position with barges from another country is more complicated. A Belgian barge, for instance, can only take a cargo back to Belgium, and not take freight to another part of France. I must say I doubt very much whether this sort of restriction will change in 1992 when all these rules are meant to be swept away. It seems unlikely, for example, that Ray will be able to take a cargo in a British barge from one side of France to another.
Many of the bateliers have, in recent years, turned their barges into pusher barges with dumb barges at the front, like one of the bateliers whom I met in Conflans, M. Ollivier of the Baikal. This allows them to take bigger cargoes, but it limits where they can go because they cannot fit into one of M. Freycinet’s smaller locks. I went to visit the Baikal which had been laid up in the shipyard because Ollivier had struck a floating tree and smashed his propeller, which was now being changed. He had met his pretty wife on the canals and they had done what many courting couples amongst the batelier families do: they had scribbled secret messages on the lock gates whilst waiting for the locks to fill up. Barge families tend to stick together, with families marrying into each other and fathers leaving their barges to sons-in-law they approve of. The women have as much to do with navigation and generally running the boat as the men nowadays. In some cases I have seen whole crews made up of women, but they must be pretty tough because there is inevitably a lot of heavy work to be done, from time to time.
Mme Ollivier had told me that, for her wedding, her parents had looked about for a friend’s barge which had been recently transporting flour. The residue of white dust inside the hold had given a suitably bridal aura, and a tradition had been extended for another generation. ‘Today’ she told me, ‘it would be much more difficult to find such a barge, because flour is transported by road and rail.’
Weddings are very important to barge people, and a certain M. Chantre told me of how his parents had made arches of roses up the gangway for the
bride to walk through. M. Chantre is the grand old man of the batelier world and had known that I would knock on his door: I suspect that there was very little that went on on the river that he did not know about. He has written books about his life on the waterways and he paints a great deal, mostly in oils. One of the lasting images that all voyagers have is of the great piles that are driven into the sides of the rivers, away from the banks, for barges to moor against while they are waiting for a lock to open. Usually, when the batelier gets up in the morning, these are the first things that he sees, and that is why they are called ‘les dues de l’aube’, the dukes of the dawn. M. Chantre had included these in most of his evocative paintings which he proudly showed me in the minuscule studio at the back of his council flat in Conflans. He told me that there were many poets amongst his colleagues because barge people are very often alone in the midst of nature and have time to think grand thoughts. He also told me proudly that his feet did not touch terra firma till he was fifteen days old. He had been born in Le Havre and his brother had been born in the south, at Sète. His grandparents had been buried where they died, so his family had been dotted all over France, but nowadays, with refrigeration, everyone came home to Conflans. Sainte Honorine herself had been martyred in Le Havre at the mouth of the Seine and the monks had brought her bones to Conflans by barge.
He told me stories for hours about the old days on the canals, of how in the Bourgogne, where I planned to go, the bateliers would have a complicated double act which they performed with great skill. The area fifty metres either side of a lock is generally regarded as being in the gift of the lock-keeper, and therefore the fishing belongs to them. The best place to catch fish on a canal is close to a lock because that is where the best food supplies are, so while their barge went through, one of the bateliers would get on to the bank and engage the lock-keeper in some enthralling story which kept his mind off what was happening in the lock, where the other batelier was busily hauling in his net full of fish.
In those days, before the internal combustion engine, the barges were either drawn by man or donkey. Horses were only used on the bigger rivers where there was a land-based service for hauling barges. This was because the bateliers had to take their animals with them when they drifted down the bigger rivers, and they could not fit horses very easily into their barges. During M. Chantre’s tales I began to realize how fiercely independent the barge people were, and how proud they were of their métier. Something that struck me very strongly when I got to France was the tremendous pride people had in their jobs: they did not have the attitude that seems to prevail in the UK where people decry what they do as a necessary evil forced on them between sessions of watching television.
Conflans is built on a spur, and on the top is a fine nineteenth-century merchant’s house, that has been turned into a museum of barges. Barges are one of the oldest types of transport and this museum has some fine models, but what interested me most was the development of the onetime barge. On the Dordogne in south-western France, the bargemen would build a wooden raft in the bed of the river and wait for the rains to come and sweep the barge and them down to the sea. Here they would unload their cargoes and sell the timber from which the raft was made for building materials. This technique was incredibly dangerous and there were many accidents: it must have been a bit like shooting the rapids in a 300-ton inflatable boat. Some of these French daredevils started a very good business on the Mississippi, building rafts in Tennessee and floating them down to Natchez. Many of the buildings on the foreshore today are built with the timbers from these rafts. On their way home they walked up a path called the Natchez trail which has been brilliantly preserved by the US government.
Conflans has many things to recommend it; one is the excellent collection of charcutiers: I suppose that delicious snacks for the journey must be something that any good French batelier would go a long way to find. Another is a really excellent chandler, who sells serious gadgets for barges and little mini items for plastic boats. I decided to treat the Leo to an enormous chrome foghorn called a ‘Super Boeuf’, so named because it had an air compressor which gave its voice the requisite lowing quality. I wanted the Leo to sound serious, even if she did look a bit odd.
We were moored on the very tip of the junction of the Oise and the Seine where, day and night, huge barges would skilfully take the sharp corner and float round with the current. They always show their blue signs when doing this because it is impossible for them to pass oncoming traffic port side to port side, which is the norm. The largest vessel that I saw on this stretch of the Seine was the Renault car-delivery ship which takes upwards of five hundred cars from one Renault plant to another up and down the Seine. These ships look enormous when they are coming straight towards you, and you imagine that the helmsman cannot see you, but he is actually able to raise and lower his entire wheelhouse hydraulically, and have a good look.
The big barges that go up and down the Seine these days are on such a tight schedule that they have to be refuelled while they pass up the main water street of Conflans. Jean-Michel and his uncle have started an enterprising service with their tanker barge, the Piranha. They supply fuel and water and all those other requirements like bottled gas for cooking and the inevitable crate of beer. Channel 12 on the VHF is forever crackling with demands for the Piranha to stand by and service the barges as they come through; all spoken in the most impenetrable argot of the batelier. Jean-Michel had heard of our impending arrival in Conflans long before we got there. The bush telegraph on the waterways is extremely effective, and woe betide anyone who tries to get away without paying a bill. On all my voyages I have often left my boat unlocked for long periods in France, and I have never had anything stolen.
We left Conflans on the first of June, refreshed by the contact with the professional world of the river – but I had been saddened to see how much the traffic had declined since I was there last. The Seine meanders its way into Paris in great loops. The banks are lined with bungalows and then quite suddenly the bungalows give way to a gravel tip or a racecourse. As we approached Paris we came to a suburb at a place called Châtou where there’s a little island in the middle of the river which is famous for the Maison Fournier. Alphonse Fournier was a boatman who hired out day boats for people to row on the Seine. His business blossomed when the railway put his establishment within reach of the daytrippers from the big city. He soon started a restaurant and, blessed with a beautiful daughter and a practical son, became very successful with the writers and painters of the day.
We moored at the old quay outside an isolated house which was in the process of being repaired by a conservation group from Châtou, led by Henrietta Claudel – whose husband was once France’s Ambassador to Washington. As we wandered round, a charming and urbane diplomat arrived to check on how the repairs were progressing, and was soon telling us of all the painters and writers that had sat on the balcony a century or so ago. Renoir painted some of his most famous pictures there, Maupassant kept a room in the attic, Monet, Manet and the rest of that famous group all used to catch the train to Châtou on a Sunday. They liked the light, the girls and Alphonse Fournier, who was very kind to the penniless artists. His daughter, economically named Alphonsine, figures in Renoir’s painting The Boating Party, as does his son, also called Alphonse. No wonder an A was woven into the wrought-iron design of the famous balcony.
The house itself had fallen into disrepair and had been squatted by many Algerian families until the conservationists of Châtou decided to repair it, and start a restaurant there once more. The Claudels kindly gave us a very good meal which Mme Claudel had prepared herself in their beautiful house at Châtou, bought by M. Claudel’s famous playwright father from the family who had built it in 1634. His aunt was the famous sculptress Camille Claudel, who had such a torridly tortuous affair with Rodin. Now the second generation were restoring the house where penniless young painters had sponged on Fournier for a meal and a little fresh air. I wonder whether th
ere was an impressionist amongst the Algerian squatters who were thrown out.
There is, at times, a three-or four-knot current in the Seine from Conflans up to Paris – a journey of some seventy kilometres because of the enormous bends in the river. In the 1840s a heavy chain was laid on the bed of the river, to which a barge with a motorized capstan was attached. This device was able to tow fifteen laden barges at the same time up to Paris. The motor of this contraption was driven by a small, forty-horsepower steam turbine, which was, by today’s standards, incredibly efficient: the normal Freycinet 350-ton barges require at least 250 horsepower to push them up against the Seine’s current to Paris.
Given the loops, it would take us a while to reach Paris from Conflans, even though as the crow flies it’s practically inside the city. That night we stopped near Sèvres because I had always wanted to see what the famed manufacture was like. There is a museum, at this world-renowned porcelain factory, full of rather monumental objects, which I suppose is great if you are the head of state somewhere and have a need for suitably grandiose urns in your hallway. Behind the museum it becomes more interesting. Here, there are a great number of double-storey eighteenth-century buildings where the work is done in large, airy workshops with huge windows. Everything is covered with a very fine, powdery dust from the porcelain, which has a most pleasing effect on the red-brick floors.
The great secret of the porcelain manufacturers is the way they decorate their wares. It is not a closely guarded secret, but simply something that requires a very considerable amount of experience of what happens to the colours on the china when it is put in the kilns. The most important part of any apprentice’s examination is getting his palette correct. He has to know what the effect of the various kilns will be on these discs of china which are painted with little squares of shaded colour. The very hot firings can take as much as ten days, the cooler ones five, so there must be a lot of angst while an object that may have taken months to paint is locked away in the kiln. The kilns are brick, banded by huge metal straps, and until very recently heated by oak logs. They look like giant beehives and are built inside the main structure of the factory, which keeps everything dry in the winter.
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