Rounding the edge of a wooded island, a weird object came floating toward me, silhouetted against the copperish red disk of the setting sun. It was a strange craft, a short squat boat sunk deep in the water, carrying a black lugger sail, and steered by an old man grizzled and bent with age. A tawny, yellowish mass was loaded across the middle of the boat. As it drew nearer, I saw the body of a lioness, her head resting on her great paws. She was dead. Her long life of captivity had ended in the menagerie of some fête foraine down the river. Here was a breath of the twilight air and the cool smell of the fresh woods and freedom, but for her they were too late. Father Time was steering her down the golden river to her grave. As she drifted close by, the old man neither spoke nor raised his eyes. Slowly the boat of the dead drifted by, and the bend of the river hid it from view.
The fair wind, which so far had driven me before it, suddenly changed, and for hours the boat crept against a head wind that roused itself into a stiff river gale and slapped the tops of running waves across the bow. The breeze held its position so persistently for a succeeding one hundred and fifty miles, that often it was a daily fight to keep from shore.
So tortuous is the course of the Seine, so many twists and turns does it take to reach a few kilometers nearer the sea, that the excellent chart supplied by the nautical journal, “Le Yacht,” looks like the track of a snake in a box.
I managed to reach Argenteuil that night.
Near the picturesque bridge there was the comfortable inn of Le Drapeau—jolly, as I entered, with a bourgeois wedding supper. The party had arrived from Paris in high two-wheeled carts filled with chairs. These lumbering festival vehicles were stowed under the shed of the courtyard, while, as a precaution against the upsetting of a friendly glass of wine, many of the women present had hung their overskirts in a barn adjoining. It was late when the guests departed, and during the remainder of the night other high two-wheeled carts rumbled by, loaded with vegetables for the Paris halles, and shaking the very ground as they passed. When I awoke, two automobiles were cooling under the shed, and a partie carrée of smartly dressed Parisians had ordered breakfast under one of the pretty kiosks in the garden.
It was Sunday, and the waiters were hurrying about setting extra tables for the expected guests. Soon smart traps and bourgeois carts began to arrive, the horses being unharnessed and led from the shafts in front of the little tables.
Photo by F. Berkeley Smith
A TYPICAL SEINE HOTEL
The landlord whose dual role of cook and proprietor kept him as busy as the innkeeper in a comic opera, bustled among his guests or flew to his kitchen, to look after his poulets and his sauces.