“I don’t know which of us christened her ‘Mouche,’ nor why this name was given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her. And our yawl, which was called Feuille-à-l’Envers, bore on the Seine every week, between Asnières and Maisons-Lafitte, five youngsters, happy and healthy, ruled from under a painted paper parasol by a lively madcap young person who treated us as if we were slaves whose duty was to take her on the river, and whom we adored.
“We adored her, to begin with, for a thousand reasons, and afterwards for only one. She was a sort of little mill of talk in the stern of our craft, chattering to the wind that slipped over the water. She babbled endlessly, with the light continuous sound of those mechanical wings that turn in the breeze; and she said heedlessly the most unexpected, the most ridiculous and the most amazing things. In her mind, all the parts of which seemed disparate like rags of all kinds and colours, not sewn together but only tacked, you got the whimsical imagination of a fairytale, spiced wit, wantonness, impudence, things unexpected and things comical, and air—air and scenery like travelling in a balloon.
“We used to ask her questions to provoke answers found goodness knows where. The one with which we most often worried her was this:
“ ‘Why are you called Mouche?’
“She produced such fantastic reasons that we stopped rowing to laugh at it.
“She pleased us as a woman, too; and La Toque, who never rowed, and spent the whole day seated at her side in the helmsman’s seat, one day answered the usual question: ‘Why are you called Mouche?’ by saying:
“ ‘Because she’s a little blister-fly.’
“Yes, a little buzzing fever-bearing cantharis, not the classic poisoned cantharis, gleaming and sheathed, but a little red-winged cantharis who was beginning to trouble the entire crew of the Feuille-à-l’Envers strangely.
“What senseless jests were perpetrated, though, on the leaf where this Mouche had alighted!
“Since the arrival of Mouche in the boat, N’a-qu’un-Œil had assumed a superior and preponderant role among us, the role of a gentleman who had a woman among four others who have not. He abused this privilege sometimes to the point of exasperating us by embracing Mouche under our eyes, seating her on his knees at the end of a meal, and by various other prerogatives as humiliating as irritating.
“We had made a separate place for them in the dormitory by a curtain.
“But I soon realised that my companions and I must be turning over the same arguments in our bachelor heads: ‘Why, by virtue of what law of exceptions, on what inadmissible principle, should Mouche, who appeared unembarrassed by any sort of prejudice, be faithful to her lover when women of better classes were not faithful to their husbands?’
“Our reflection was justified. We were soon convinced of it. We only ought to have done it earlier, to save us from regret for lost time. Mouche deceived N’a-qu’un-Œil with all the other sailors of the Feuille-à-l’Envers.
“She deceived him without difficulty and without making any resistance, at the first word of request from each of us.
“Prudish folk are profoundly shocked, my God! Why? What fashionable courtesan who has not a dozen lovers, and which of those lovers is stupid enough to be in ignorance of it? Is it not the fashion to spend an evening with a celebrated and sought-after woman, as one spends an evening at the Opéra, at the Français or the Odéon, because they are playing the minor classics there? Ten men combine together to keep a cocotte who finds it difficult to share out her time, as they club together to own a racehorse whom no one rides but a jockey, the equivalent of the amant de cœur.
“From motives of delicacy, we left Mouche to N’a-qu’un-Œil from Saturday evening to Monday morning. The days on the river were his. We only betrayed him during the week, in Paris, far from the Seine, which, for rowing men like us, was almost no betrayal at all.
“The situation was peculiar in this one way, that the four robbers of Mouche’s favours were fully aware of the way they were shared out, and talked about it among themselves, and even to her, in veiled allusions that made her laugh heartily. Only N’a-qu’un-Œil seemed to know nothing about it; and this special position produced a certain awkwardness between him and us; it seemed to set him apart, isolate him, raise a barrier across our old confidence and our old intimacy. It gave him in our eyes a difficult and rather ridiculous part to play, the part of deceived lover, almost the part of husband.
“As he was very intelligent, and possessed of a peculiarly malicious wit, we sometimes wondered, not without a certain uneasiness, whether he had not his suspicions.
“He took care to enlighten us, in a fashion that was very painful for us. We were going to dine at Bougival, and we were rowing vigorously, when La Toque, who wore that morning the triumphant aspect of a satisfied man and, sitting side by side with the helmswoman, seemed to be pressing himself against her a little too freely in our opinion, halted the rowing, crying: ‘Stop.’
“Eight oars were lifted out of the water.
“Then, turning to his neighbour, he demanded:
“ ‘Why are you called Mouche?’
“Before she could reply, the voice of N’a-qu’un-Œil, seated in the bows, observed dryly:
“ ‘Because she settles on every sort of carrion.’
“There was profound silence at first, and a sense of embarrassment followed by an attempt at laughter. Mouche herself remained quite unmoved.
“Then La Toque ordered:
“ ‘All together.’
“The boat shot forward again.
“The incident was closed, the air cleared.
“This little adventure occasioned no change in our habits. Its only effect was to reestablish the cordiality between N’a-qu’un-Œil and ourselves. He became once more the honoured proprietor of Mouche, from Saturday evening to Monday morning, his superiority over us having been firmly established by this definition, which closured, moreover, the period allotted to questions about
