Saturday was market day in Montargis, a little town about sixty miles southeast of Paris, and not a Libyan terrorist was in sight. This didn’t surprise the eighteen American passengers of the Lafayette, a 128-foot pleasure barge drifting slowly southward through the IIe-de-France on the Canal de Briare. Neither the Libyans nor the possibility of radioactive air from Chernobyl had discouraged them from making this cruise offered by Continental Waterways, the British-owned-and-operated outfit that has run three- and six-day excursions on French rivers and canals for two decades. “I figured the most dangerous part of the trip was from my house to the airport,” said John Barrow of Lexington, Kentucky. Not only was it safe to be in the French countryside, it was, according to Newsweek, safer than being alone at home eating your own food: 3,100 fatalities were caused by choking in 1984.
Terrorists had frightened some folks, The accountant for Continental Waterways, Ray Temple, along for the ride, said that at least one passenger on the Lafayette was originally scheduled for another tour that was scrapped after cancellations made it unprofitable.
The subject of safety arose because the Saturday morning mooring at Montargis made us feel both conspicuous and vulnerable for the first time since boarding the boat Wednesday afternoon at Melun, an hour’s drive south of Paris. As a tourist in Paris, you grow accustomed to the feeling of being a gawker; the Continental Waterways bus that picked us up at a hotel on Wednesday in Paris to take us to the mooring on the Seine had curved glass panels in the roof to facilitate our gawking. And since that afternoon, we had cruised through wonderfully charming and pleasant villages with musical names like Samois-sur-Seine, where French boys with their French dogs had waved to us from the towpath, inspiring some of us to wonder how to say “Fido” and spell a bark in French.
There had been gawking aplenty thus far, but until we moored at Montargis, we had not been gawked at. We had tried to gawk at the medieval walled town of Moret-sur-Loing, where Alfred Sisley had lived and painted for twenty years. Its narrow and winding cobblestone streets and position aside the Loing River had made it, according to an old Fodor’s in the ship’s library, “a weekend haunt of Parisians who remodel old mills in the environs.” Geoffrey Finch, our handsome and boyish captain, stood on a tree stump in a driving rain on the banks of the Loing to give five of us hardier tourists a snatch of a lecture about the famous bridge we could almost see through the curtain of rain, but the wind was tugging our umbrellas out of our grasps and we had to abandon the view in favor of shelter on the bus. We were a little disappointed; the morning before disembarking, my wife, Marcia, and I had gone to the Jeu de Paume in Paris expressly to see the Sisley paintings of Moret-sur-Loing, which included a rendering of the same bridge.
Then we had gawked at the famous chc-teau of French royalty at Fontainebleau with a goodly number of other tourists from other nations, all of us doing what one wag referred to as “the museum shuffle.” (It’s the way prisoners on a chain gang walk in lock step, only slower.) We gawked at the thick green forest of Fontainebleau while driving through it, and we gawked at the softly rolling fields of green wheat and yellow rape, a mustard-family plant whose oil is used in soaps and synthetic rubber. Riding in the bus along the French equivalent of farm-to-market roads, we went through two-store hamlets and past pear orchards with trees so thick in white blossoms you’d have thought the sky had just rained down some wonderfully aromatic snow. It was easy to imagine a frame around everything we gawked at; it was like inhabiting a living issue of National Geographic.
Aboard the Lafayette, cruising upstream on the Seine, then the Loing River and the Canal du Loing, we had marveled also at absences: the absence of noise from traffic, airplanes, radios (I didn’t hear a single jam box while in France), the absence of trash, billboards, even of people, really. The countryside spreading out from either side of the river and the canal had seemed oddly uninhabited, save for an occasional hiker in the patches of forest, some man in his undershirt tending a garden, or a fisherman leaning against one of the big sycamores that lined the banks of the canal.
Now and then as we sat in lounge chairs on the foredeck, we would pass working barges humming deeply downstream toward Paris, perhaps hauling potash as ours once had until it had been remodeled in 1982 into its present chocolate-on-your-pillow and flow-ers-on-your-nightstand state. The long black working barges had small square cabins on their aft decks with lace curtains in the windows and red potted geraniums by the doors. Normally, this barging business is a Mom and Pop operation, and usually either Mom or Pop-whoever was not at the wheel at the moment-would come on deck to give us a wave, one Brother of the Rudder to another. It seemed like a romantic kind of life for a man and wife, yo-hoing and heave-hoing on the ropes together, perhaps bedding down by candlelight after the ship’s generator had been silenced. But then it also seemed like the kind of life that looked far more romantic from the outside than it probably is, a suspicion confirmed by the wistful looks we sometimes got from the wives when we passed.
When we got tired of gawking, collectively we did our needlepoint, played bridge, sat and flapped our tongues on deck, slipped below to nap on the nice, firm bunks in our staterooms, or plucked something from the bookcase at the end of the dining room that made up the ship’s eclectic library (I took an Edna O’Brien novel from between a wine atlas and a history of the Russian revolution). Drinking from the endlessly open bar was likewise a popular after-gawking sport for a few too many passengers, who were later inclined to fill an otherwise perfectly acceptable silence with a lot of witless babble.
But then we moored at Montargis, where we became the gawkees. The town, which by the look of it might equal Wichita Falls in size, is known as “The Venice of the Gati-nais” because of its many bridges over the canals that course through the heart of the city. Saturday morning many people from the countryside surrounding Montargis had come in to shop, and dozens of them stood on the arching stone bridges over the canal staring at our large red and white craft while it struggled to negotiate sharp turns in the stone-banked waterway. It was a little like watching someone try to parallel park a Cadillac in a VW-sized space.
Because we wanted to avoid going around in a herd (unlike most of the passengers, we were very unused to group tours), Marcia and I literally leaped from the deck of the barge and onto the quay before the gangplank was out and strode off on our own. The streets were crowded with pedestrians, but the sun was shining, the air was cool, and-everyone seemed to be in good humor. Off the main street lay a network of smaller passageways in which vendors had set up stalls to dispense shoes, soap, scarves, soup, umbrellas, pastry, and, among other things, baby goats and flip-flops. A lot of cheap cotton clothing was being sold at very high prices. At a used-book booth I bought a Scrooge McDuck and a Superman comic in French (a grateful survivor thanks our hero: “Merci, Superman! Si vous passez a Hack-ensack, venez diner avec nous. Ma femme fait un pate!”). We picked up a few small items in a grocery, a stationery store, a gift shop, a bakery, and in each case the shopkeeper was unfailingly warm, polite, and patient with our struggles with the language. Two of them asked, without prompting, “C’est un cadeaux?” and when we answered “Oui,” they gift-wrapped our purchases without extra charge. (Tourists whose knowledge of the French people is limited to Parisians shouldn’t miss an opportunity to learn just how gracious and courteous many of the French people truly are.) We loitered about in the grounds of the local city hall, where vivid displays of multicolored tulips separated walking paths, until it was time to return to the barge for lunch.
We didn’t want to miss lunch, that’s for sure, or any other of Canadian chef Penny Murray’s awesome meals. We eagerly seated ourselves in the ship’s small yet not cramped dining room and began with artichokes the size of grapefruits, with two side dishes of dressing or dip, one richly pungent with garlic. This noon’s white wine was a Bour-gogne Blanc, the red a Bourgogne Rouge (both from 1984). (These are two of the twenty some-odd wines we had during the trip, not counting those encountered at an official wine-tasting in a cave near Sancerre.) After the artichoke, we trooped to the buffet table for arugula salad, three cheeses (twenty-nine in all over the week), a cold rice curry, fish pate”, ham pate, a red cabbage salad with a cutting vinegar dressing, cucumbers and cream, ripe cantaloupe slices with rolls of prosciutto-like French ham in their hollows. And, as always, bread from the local markets so fresh it must have been steaming when it was brought aboard. (And that’s just lunch-a typical dinner of four courses stretched over two hours of every evening.)
While we ate, the barge moved upstream. As it went in and out of locks, some passengers got off to ride the ship’s bicycles along the tow path or to hike through the lushly green countryside. Some of us went aboard the bus back to Montargis to the museum dedicated to the painter Girardet, which was a disappointment (a few murky Rubenses), but when we came out into the courtyard we got to watch the members of a wedding stream out of a nearby chapel.
For some, the onshore excursions didn’t always offer sufficient temptation to leave their naps, their books, or the bar. The brochure for the trip had detailed all the excursions, but upon arrival we had learned that the original itinerary had been scrapped due to, crew members said, flood damage on the Yonne River and canal, on which we had been scheduled to travel. Our revised itinerary was apparently far less firm, and it seemed to keep twenty-nine-year-old Geoffrey Finch, on his first tour of duty as a captain, hopping from moment to moment. Having to wing it didn’t sit well with some passengers who felt that after paying $1,540 apiece for a six-day trip (or, as one fellow kept saying, “$11.50 a minute”), they were entitled to something more formal and codified. In the crew’s defense, the excursions were usually worth making. Besides Fon-tainebleau, we also visited Vaux-le-Vicomte, a smaller and more attractive chateau originally built by Fouquet (and both were on the original itinerary, as was Moret-sur-Loing); we went to an international hunting museum in Gien on a hill overlooking the Loire River (dozens of rooms filled with muskets and stag heads); we went shopping in Montargis and Gien, and we eventually returned to Moret-sur-Loing for a rather hurried walking tour through sights we had missed earlier because of the rain, My favorite official excursion was to a kooky, offbeat museum in the village of Dicy about 135 kilometers south of Paris known as La Fabuloserie, where architect and sculptor Alain Bourbon-nais and his wife had refashioned an ancient barn into very attractive housing for droll, whimsical folk art and more sophisticated work by contemporary artists in collage, assemblage painting, and sculpture.
Marcia and I were by far the least experienced tourists in this travel-savvy group. Between them, they had cruised rivers in Holland, Germany, France, and even the Soviet Union; they had gone to the Arctic Circle, to Africa, to Alaska, to the Caribbean, and one had just returned from traveling on the Orient Express. Some sailed their own ships, flew their own planes, raised Arabian horses, and collected Louis XV antiques. Generally, they were over sixty, obviously affluent, well dressed, often well read and well versed about many subjects, and they seemed to presume that their affluence had purchased the right to be demanding. The men had made the money while the women had raised the children, although some wives had elevated their own hobbies into what might be called “careerettes” such as interior design consulting. Surprisingly, seven were unapologetic cigarette smokers, five smoked cigars, and a few had obvious drinking problems. (Crew members insisted it was unusual for a group of passengers to drink and smoke so heavily.) This is worth noting only because a ship 128 feet long doesn’t offer boundless opportunity for escaping close, continual contact with others aboard it. Individually, our fellow passengers were delightful; as a group, they were sometimes a trial.
The visit to La Fabuloserie was my favorite official excursion, but nothing described on the itinerary would quite match the unscheduled, ineffable pleasures we enjoyed while moored in a tiny village called Mont-bouy. This was more enjoyable even than the final evening we spent coasting over the Loire River on the Canal de Briare (the canal goes over the river on a bridge!), toasting ourselves with champagne and cassis while, easily visible from our high perch, about a mile away on the bank of the Loire five of our passengers and a balloon pilot lifted off for an hour’s ride in the twilight. When they landed, hundreds of locals rushed out into the fields to greet them. One passenger said he felt like Lindbergh landing in France.
In Montbouy, we set out our gangplank sometime in late afternoon just beside an old church. The sky had been overcast for about forty-eight hours, but during the afternoon it had cleared to give us one of those seemingly endless French evenings where the light dies so slowly and quietly that even at ten o’clock there is still a soft, fluorescent tinge to the sky. After dinner, we left the barge and strolled past the church and along the hamlet’s one main street. It seemed deserted; there was a blacksmith shop and a “public works” building with a courtyard that harbored an old truck and a vegetable garden. We crossed a small bridge over the canal and strolled past several houses whose tiny front yards also showed carefully tended plantings of lettuce and onion and other things not peeking up yet, and the gardens were outlined with a thick border of astonishingly blue violets. Each house had at least one flowering fruit tree beside it. Alone on the street, feeling invisible, we padded softly past one house in the twilight where an open kitchen window allowed us a glimpse of normal life: a family of six or so were seated around a table, lingering over a dinner that we guessed must have been finished for a while, and on a nearby counter was an old nineteen-inch black and white television set that was playing something that looked like an episode of “Rawhide.” We had been privileged to get a first-hand glimpse of real life elsewhere on the globe, and we floated along like ghosts, taking mental snapshots.
When we returned to the barge, a French professor and his wife were standing at the foot of the gangplank engaged in a primitive exchange with some of our fellow passengers. They had been out walking and had been drawn to our barge out of curiosity. If you pooled the passengers’ knowledge of French with ours, together we could say perhaps fifteen coherent sentences, and my wife and I had possession of about a dozen of those. One way or another, somebody asked the French couple aboard for a visit, and soon we were all standing in the bar offering them up rather sheepishly to Captain Geoffrey (who spoke fluent French), a little like children who have brought home a pair of stray puppies and are hopeful but uncertain of their reception. Permission was politely granted to extend an invitation to tour the ship, so they were taken below, where they expressed delight in the staterooms. The woman, it seems, had a sister in Detroit. They were in the village tonight visiting someone.
When they came back to the bar, they were offered wine or coffee, which they politely declined. There followed a great profusion of compliments and whatnot, with our Frenchless American companions bobbing their heads to signify a desire to please in lieu of language. Finally the French professor’s wife said, in French, slowly, so we could understand, “We love our country and think it is beautiful. We hope you do, too.”
We told her we did.
