They began to ask about our voyage. You should have seen how they sympathised. They seemed half ready to give up their barge and follow us. But these canaletti are only gypsies semi-domesticated. The semi-domestication came out in rather a pretty form. Suddenly Madam’s brow darkened. ‘Cependant,’ she began, and then stopped; and then began again by asking me if I were single?
‘Yes,’ said I.
‘And your friend who went by just now?’
He also was unmarried.
O then—all was well. She could not have wives left alone at home; but since there were no wives in the question, we were doing the best we could.
‘To see about one in the world,’ said the husband, ‘il n’y a que ça—there is nothing else worth while. A man, look you, who sticks in his own village like a bear,’ he went on, ‘—very well, he sees nothing. And then death is the end of all. And he has seen nothing.’
Madame reminded her husband of an Englishman who had come up this canal in a steamer.
‘Perhaps Mr. Moens in the Ytene,’ I suggested.
‘That’s it,’ assented the husband. ‘He had his wife and family with him, and servants. He came ashore at all the locks and asked the name of the villages, whether from boatmen or lock-keepers; and then he wrote, wrote them down. Oh, he wrote enormously! I suppose it was a wager.’
A wager was a common enough explanation for our own exploits, but it seemed an original reason for taking notes.