Leontyne (11 page)

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 there 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.

The French government own and subsidize this model of enlightened factory building, and I had a very strong feeling of an established group isolated from the outside world. In return for cocooning these talented people, the government is able to have the plates missing from the Sèvres services belonging to friendly despots replaced. These patient experts have been painting spring flowers from one generation to the next, never writing down the steps they take, but rather working with an apprentice till he (or she) is ready to start on his own. Probably the thing that impressed me most in this fascinating place was the engraver who was doing a design for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, using a design which he had just been to collect from the archives of 1793. I very much doubt whether any upheaval in the outside world makes the slightest difference to this Shangri-la in the suburbs of Paris. I watched a girl with red hair and pretty ankles climb a ladder in the paint store to collect a jar of powder that had been mixed in 1906. When I asked what
she painted at the weekend, after five days of flowers, she replied sweetly that she painted more flowers. She said she liked flowers.

When I got back to the boat, I found Ray, who had stayed there to wait for an electrician to arrive, having a fierce argument with the man. Ray did not speak French and the electrician, who was installing an electrical supply for the Super Boeuf, spoke no English. The electrician had brought his teenage nephew along to assist him, however; the boy was acting as the go-between, and, I suspect, slanting the translation to favour his irascible uncle's position. The electrician had told Ray that he thought that the British Navy had just been lucky and were really not all they were cracked up to be; the French on the other hand were tactically superior. He had read a great deal on this subject and we were no match for him, except that from our insular point of view all that he was saying was clearly tosh.

I reminded Ray of his colleague Reggie on the Thames who had a passion for geographical place names, pointing out that this man was of a similar type: we would never persuade him that his point of view was simply not correct. I suggested to Ray that he make a cup of British tea all round, hoping that this would not provoke another argument about the origin and superiority of various forms of tea. Later, with a hot mugful cooling his temper, the electrician demonstrated his work, and the Super Boeuf bellowed satisfactorily. He certainly knew his negative from his positive, even if he was not so hot on his history.

That night we moored at Port Levallois which has a very large Algerian population. The bars were full of dangerous-looking men, with flashing gold teeth and brilliantined hair, their women discreetly apart and dressed for some kind of Arabian
Come Dancing
festival. Ray and I had a beer and were eyed with a great deal of suspicion while we drank. We were the only Northern Europeans in this crowded bar: I had forgotten how much Paris is split up into its
quartiers
. Many
people I know feel very strange outside their own little world in Paris, and I suppose the same is true of London. Cab drivers have often cautioned me, when I have taken a cab home to Rotherhithe, that I had better look out down there because the place is only inhabited by rogues and villains.

After a little shopping in the garish Arab shops, we clambered back over an enormous barge which a wiry lady psychiatrist appeared to be converting single-handed. She had moored her barge on the right bank of the river because during the floods of the previous winter, the water level had risen so much that her barge had been in danger of being marooned on the towpath like a huge beached whale. The flood water rises quite alarmingly quickly on the Seine and, these days, almost always catches the houseboat population unawares, as many of the barges are owned by well-heeled jetsetters who leave them unattended while on holiday in the sun. I had an animated conversation with the psychiatrist's daughter who had just taken her finals in medicine and was very keen to go on to a career in medical research. She had a revulsion for actually coming into contact with the sick, which I found very odd. She said that she felt she could honour her Hippocratic oath perfectly well without laying hands on live patients, and I suppose in today's medicine it is a very good thing that there are people who only want to work in laboratories.

The morning that we entered Paris was brilliant. As we chugged up the river past the Bois de Boulogne, we saw a display of the most fanciful houseboats and floating restaurants. Designers and individualists have had a field day with some of these hulls; it would be too much to call them boats. There are men-of-war from the eighteenth century, enormous modern gravel barges converted into palaces with swimming pools, even a submarine's conning-tower section with the end cut off. On the other side of these strange craft, I could see the cars slowing to have a closer look at the girls parading themselves for custom along the edge of the Bois
de Boulogne. Then suddenly, over the trees, we saw the Eiffel Tower – that everlasting symbol of Paris – towering over the city like a great giraffe. We had arrived.

Arriving in the heart of Paris by river after a journey of six weeks must surely be one of the most exciting things that I have ever done. By the time we had passed the Eiffel Tower, the sun was already setting and there was a golden glow on the Pont Alexandre III. All the familiar buildings were, somehow surprisingly, still there. I could see the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, the Louvre, the Gare d'Orsay (now a museum). Behind the
Leo
the sun was shining through the glass roof of the Grand Palais, making it look as though it were on fire. The last determined sunbathers were rolling up their towels on the
quais
, lights from the pleasure boats, or
bateaux mouches
, were starting to pick out the stonework under the arches, and everywhere was the unique sound of Parisian traffic which, from the river, was reduced to a muffled roar.