“Send them,” cried one, “to the Rue Pique-Monte.”
“Or to the ‘Little Cat,’” said another.
“Or to the ‘Widow Come Here.’”
“Or to the Gate of the Chestnuts.”
“Don’t mock us, my dears,” said I. “We want some quiet little place within the reach of anybody, where honest people go.”
“Very well,” said a fat man seated on a post, smoking his pipe, with a face coloured like a beggar’s gourd, “why not go to Counënc’s? See here, gentlemen, I will conduct you,” he continued, rising and shaking out his pipe; “I have to go by that way. It is on the other side of the Rhône, in the suburb of Trinquetaille. It is not an hotel of the first order, my faith, but the watermen, the bargees and the boatmen who come from Condrieu, feed there and are not discontented. The owner is from Combs, a village near Beaucaire, which supplies some bargemen. I myself, who have the honour of addressing you, am master of a boat, and I have done my share of sailing.”
We inquired if he had been far afield.
“Oh no,” he replied, “I have only sailed in the small coasting trade as far as Havre-de-Grace, but it is a true saying that there is never a boatman who does not face danger—and for sure, had it not been for the Great Saintes-Maries, who have always protected me, there are many times, my friends, when we should have gone under.”
“And they call you?”
“Master Gafet! Always at your service should you at any time run down to Sambuc or to Graz to see the vessels embedded in the sand at the river’s mouth.”