It was très bourgeois, but that was what we wanted, and, after a couple of hours eating and lolling about and playing with the cats and talking to the parrot,—a Martinique parrot who knew some English,—we took to the river again, and, after passing the locks at Bonnières, arrived at Mantes at five o'clock.
The nights draw in quickly, even in the early days of September, and we were bound to push on, if we were to reach Triel that night. We could have reached it, but were delayed at a lock, while it emptied itself and half a score of downriver barges, and, spying a gem of a riverside restaurant at Meulan, overhanging the very water itself, and hung with great golden orange globes of light (so-called Japanese lanterns, and nothing more), we were sentimentally enough inclined to want to dine with such Claude Melnotte accessories. This we did, and hunted up lodgings in the town for the night, vowing to get an extra early start in the morning to make up for lost time.
The Seine at Meulan takes on a certain luxuryous aspect so far as river-boating goes. There is even a "Cercle à la Voile," with yachts which, in the narrow confines of the river, look like the real thing, but which after all are very diminutive members of the family.
From this point the course of the Seine is a complicated winding among iles and ilots, which gives it that elongation which makes necessary hours of journeying by boat as against a quarter of the time by the road—as the crow flies—to the lower fortifications of Paris.
On either side, however, are chemins vicinales, which continually produce unthought-of vistas which automobilists who are making a record from Trouville to Paris know nothing of.
Triel possesses an imposing thirteenth-century Gothic church and an abominably ugly suspension-bridge of wire rope. It is a good place to buy a boat or a cargo of gypsum, which we know as "plaster of Paris;" otherwise the town is not remarkable, though charmingly situated.
The Oise is the first really great commercial tributary of the Seine. There is a mighty flow of commerce which ascends and descends the bosom of the Oise, extending even to the Low Countries and the German Ocean, through the Sambre to Antwerp and the Scheldt.
The Oise is classed as flottable from Beautor to Chauny, a distance of twenty kilometres, and navigable from Chauny to the Seine. Mostly it runs through the great plain of Picardie and forms the natural northern boundary to the ancient Ile de France. The navigable portion forms two sections. One, of fifty-five kilometres, extends between Chauny and Janville, and has been generally abandoned by water-craft because of the opening of the Canal Lateral à la Oise; the other section, of one hundred and four kilometres, is canalized in that it has been straightened here and there at sharp corners, dredged and endowed with seven locks.
The barge traffic of the Oise is mostly towed in convoys of six, but there is a chemin de halage, a tow-path, throughout the river's length. In general, the boats are of moderate size, the péniches being perhaps a hundred and twenty feet in length, the bateaux picards somewhat longer, and the chalands approximating one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy-five feet.
While, as stated above, the traction is generally by steam towboat, the more picturesque, if slower and more humble, tow-horse is more largely in evidence here than elsewhere in France.