Mouche
A Boating Man’s Reminiscence
He said to us:
“What queer things and queer women I have seen in those long-ago days when I used to go on the river! Many a time I have longed to write a little book, called On the Seine, describing the athletic carefree life, gay and penniless, a vigorous, roisterings holiday life, that I led between twenty and thirty.
“I was a penniless clerk: now I am a successful man who can throw away vast sums of money to gratify a moment’s whim. I had a thousand modest unattainable desires in my heart, which gilded my whole existence with all the imaginary hopes in the world. Today, I don’t really know what fancy could make me rise from the armchair where I sit nodding. How simple and pleasant, and difficult, it is to live so, between an office in Paris and the river at Argenteuil! For ten years, my great, my only, my absorbing passion was the Seine. Oh, the lovely, calm, varied and stinking river, filled with mirage and all uncleanliness! I think I loved it so much because it did, it seems to me, give me a sense of life. Oh, the strolls along the flowery banks, my friends the frogs dreaming on a water-lily leaf, their stomachs in the cool, and the frail coquettish water-lilies in the middle of tall fine grasses that all at once, behind a willow, opened to my eyes a leaf from a Japanese album as a kingfisher darted past me like a blue flame. I loved it all, with an instinctive sight-born love that spread through my body in a deep natural joy.
“As others cherish the memories of tender nights, I cherish memories of sunrises on misty mornings, floating wandering vapours, white as the dead before dawn; then, a first ray gliding over the meadows, lit with a rosy light that took the heart with gladness; and I cherish memories of a moon that silvered the quivering running water, of a glimmering radiance where all dreams came to life.
“And all that, symbol of the eternal illusion, was born, for me, from the foul water that drifted all the sewage of Paris down to the sea.
“And what a gay life I and the other boys led! There were five of us, a little circle of friends, serious-minded men today; and as we were all poor, we had founded in a frightful pothouse at Argenteuil an indescribable colony that possessed nothing but a dormitory bedroom where I have spent what were certainly the maddest evenings of my life. We cared for nothing but amusing ourselves and rowing, for we all, with no exception, looked upon rowing as a religion. I remember such singular adventures, such incredible jests invented by those five vagabonds, that no one could believe them today. You never get anything like it now, even on the Seine, for the whimsical madness that kept us brimful of life has died out of the modern spirit.
“We five owned one boat between us, bought with immense effort, and over which we have laughed as we shall never laugh again. It was a big yawl, rather heavy, but solid, roomy and comfortable. I won’t describe my comrades to you. There was one small, very mischievous fellow, nicknamed Petit Bleu; a tall fellow, of uncivilised appearance, with grey eyes and black hair, nicknamed Tomahawk; another, an indolent witty fellow, nicknamed La Toque, the only one who never touched an oar, on the excuse that he would capsize the boat; a thin, elegant, very well-groomed young man, nicknamed N’a-qu’un-Œil, in memory of a just-published novel by Claudel, and because he wore a monocle; and myself, Joseph Prunier by name. We lived in perfect harmony, our sole regret being that we had not a helmswoman. One woman is indispensable in a river boat. Indispensable because she keeps wits and hearts awake, because she livens, amuses, distracts, sets an edge to life, and produces a decorative effect, with a red sunshade gliding past the green banks. But we did not want an ordinary woman cox, we five who were like no one else in the world. We had to have something unexpected, uncommon, ready for anything, almost unfindable, in fact. We had tried several without success, girls at the helm, not helmswomen, idiotic river girls who always preferred the thin wine that went to their heads to the running water that bore the yawls. You kept them one Sunday, then dismissed them in disgust.
“But one Saturday evening, N’a-qu’un-Œil brought us a little slender creature, lively, quick on her feet, loose-tongued and full of japes, the japes that pass for wit among the jackanapes, male and female, hatched on the sidewalks of Paris. She was pleasant-looking, not pretty, a mere sketch of a woman that had got no farther, one of those silhouettes that draughtsmen pencil in three strokes on a napkin in a restaurant after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature makes them like that sometimes.
“The first evening, she astonished and amused us, and was so unexpected in her ways that we could come to no conclusion about her. Dropped into this nest of men, who were ready for any mad prank, she quickly made herself mistress of the situation, and with the next day, she had made a complete conquest of us.
“She was, moreover, quite crazy, born with a glass of absinth in her stomach, that her mother had drunk when she was brought to bed, and she had never been overcome by drink since, for her nurse, she said, enriched her blood with draughts of rum; and she herself never called all the bottles ranged behind the wine merchant’s counter by any other name than ‘my holy
