Mother Barbeau’s remarks vexed him. At least I had no attack of nausea this time.
After this conversation he abandoned agricultural life for a time and decided to take me to the lake which we had not yet explored. He led me thither with no enthusiasm.
“It is a closed-in water,” he said contemptuously.
Were there open waters then? Of course—there was the sea. Until now the word had not impressed me and I attributed no meaning to it. When the mist hid the opposite shore the lake used to seem endless, and I had heard people around me say, “it’s like the sea.” I had paid no attention. Grandfather’s disdainful description brought to my imagination by contrast a free immensity. Later, when at last I saw the sea—it was at Dieppe, from the top of the cliff—I felt no surprise. It was simply an open water.
“Would you like a row?” grandfather asked one day.
Would I! I desired it all the more because such an expedition represented to me in some sort a substitution of the individual life for the family life. My parents had forbidden me to go out in a boat, after the fall into the water which had brought on my pleurisy. They were afraid both of the dampness and of my awkwardness. Once again, then, I was the fair child who had escaped from his mother’s arms. The maiden with golden wings who enticed me was my own good pleasure.
We took a canoe and rowed out of the port. Grandfather, who used the oars irregularly (which by no means reassured me), soon laid them down and left us to float.
“Where are we going?” I asked, somewhat uneasily.
“I don’t know.”
Uncertainty increased the mystery of the water. I amused myself with leaning over the gunwale, and dipping my hands in the water. The cold caress it gave me and the small danger we were encountering, or which I thought we were encountering, gave me a mingled but very exciting sensation.