William Wharton - Houseboat on the Seine

First we lived in a very small apartment in Paris, three hundred square feet, which we bought with my retirement money from the Los Angeles schools. We were very mobile, Paris in spring and fall, Bavaria in summer and for Christmas, then southern Spain for winter. It sounds like a millionaire’s life, but we were doing all this on three hundred dollars a month, plus my disability pension from World War II. Yes, if you’re careful, it can be done. For us, the poverty line is way above our heads.

When we had three children, we moved into an old carpenter’s workshop that we fixed up as an apartment. When I say ‘ we ’, I mean anyone in the family who could swing a hammer or spread paint with a brush. It was something like the boat project, mostly a family affair.

First, I build up that side with the water sloshing in. Then I clean out and scrape or scrap all the charred interior. This involves, among other things, replacing forty-five small mullioned windowpanes. There are also two huge plate-glass view windows that are so smoke- and soot-covered, nothing can be seen through them – two more days of scrubbing there. The walls of what served as a living room and bedroom are beyond mere painting; they will take more serious treatment.

I find a bolt of gold brocade cloth at the Marché Aligré, a street market near our apartment-cum-studio in Paris. For some reason, this brocade is only about the price of burlap, so I buy it all, three bolts full. I begin to know I’m going crazy because I look forward to sticking this cloth over all the black walls and ceilings. I’m being carried away. Perhaps the entire boat is enchanted.

I use paste to cover the walls and ceiling so I can attach the gold brocade – it does cover a multitude of sins. I buy inexpensive light fixtures with amber lightbulbs, and, after some considerable electrical work, much beyond my skill level, manage to fix them so they actually light, even turn on and off with primitive switches.

I call in the rest of the family on weekends to scrub out the bathroom, the kitchen, the usual comfort necessities. These are all a uniform smoke-brownish hue. Before the school year ends, late in June, we have the boat finished. According to my wife, it looks like a drunken pirate’s private whorehouse – she’s very conservative in these kinds of things.

The layout of the houseboat is quite simple. After one comes up the gangplank, one goes through a low oaken door, about five-feet six-inches high. I’m five-foot-ten. After bumping my head the tenth time, I consider wearing a hard hat permanently, or maybe an old-time bowler.

The door opens onto a tiny vestibule. Turning right, one goes through two swinging mahogany doors with beautiful brass fittings, very boatlike. These doors lead down two steps into the main room. On the left, looking out over the river, now, after much scraping, is one of two large plate windows. It’s about seven feet wide and four feet high.

The living room is approximately twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. At the far end, on the river side, is an entry to a small kitchen. In the center of that end wall is another pair of mahogany doors like those opening from the vestibule. These doors lead to a narrow hall with a bathroom, complete with toilet, sink and shower, opening on the right, the shore side.

Directly ahead are three steps up to the bedroom. Here we find the second of the large plate windows, also looking out on the river.

All along the shore side are small windows, four in all, opening onto the quay. These are house-type windows with shutters. There is also a window of the same design opening onto the kitchen on the river side.

It must have been a lovely place for the French explorer and his lady friend. I’m not sure how it’s going to work with a family of five, though.

We rent the boat out for the summer to a young woman (another witch) who works for the Foire de Trône, a sort of yearly carnival in Le Bois de Vincennes. My contract for our boat location stipulates someone must be on the boat at all times. The river-navigation people are already very suspicious of this crippled craft.

We leave for our usual summer vacation to the old water mill we’d bought in Burgundy when we first came to France. We paid the huge sum of two thousand dollars for this place. It was another romantic coup de foudre . Actually, the mill is only a three-hundred-year-old stone tent, but that’s another story.

Disenchantment!

We hadn’t been at the mill three weeks when we receive a telegram, our first French telegram. It’s from an elderly English couple who live two boats downriver from us. I don’t know why they wrote it in French. It says:

Votre bateau a coulé.

That’s said coo-lay, as in Kool-Aid.

I run across the street to a French neighbor hoping to find out what the word ‘coulé’ means. As if I didn’t know! I just don’t want to believe it.

I immediately take the train up to Paris, then the bus out to where the boat is. It is, indeed, coulé . Only a small corner of the roof is sticking above water. There is a medium-sized crowd along the bank. They surround the boat, babbling in French. Each seems to have a different idea as to why the boat has sunk. All of them, in French fashion, are convinced there must be a reason, C’est logique, n’est-ce pas ?

After much running around, trying to find someone to lift the boat out of the water and getting nowhere, someone tells me about specialists in this kind of work, bringing up sunken boats. They are called les frères Teurnier . I phone them from the café on the corner. This town of Le Port Marly has seven restaurants, but only one café. It’s directly across the street from the boule courts, which are on the chemin de halage , or path, next to our boat. There are also two restaurants de routiers , sort of truck stops that double as cafés.

The next day, a broken down old ‘ deux chevaux ’ pulls up on the chemin de halage beside the boat. I’d camped, somewhat chillily, on la berge overnight. The man who climbs out of this car is in his sixties and about five feet tall. He’s wearing French workmen’s blues, filthy, stiff with oil and sweat, and a mariner’s cap, also filthy.

He shakes my hand, jabbers away, smiles, then pulls down a plank from the top of his car. He slides down the steep riverbank and throws the plank out across the water, between the land and the projecting bit of boat roof. I’m convinced he’s going to sink the whole business, but he walks like an acrobat, muttering to himself, out on that board. After looking down all sides of the boat, seeing I can’t imagine what, except dirty, black water, he comes back to me and, in a complex mixture of Breton, French, my broken French and his violent pantomime, I come to know he thinks he can raise the boat for two thousand francs (at that time about four hundred dollars).

This represents the amount we still owe on the boat and were hoping to pay off in September. I actually have it in my pocket in one-hundred-franc bills, twenty of them, plus some change. At the moment, it represents virtually our total capital.

In French and in pantomime again, he tells me he will wrap the boat with a large cloth, then pump the water out so the boat can come to the surface and we can see what’s wrong. It sounds crazy. However, he insists that before he can put the pumps in the boat to pump out the water, I must go down inside and remove anything floating in there. If I don’t, they’ll jam his pumps.

With this advice, he leaves, promising he’ll be back in three days to commence the rescue operation.

Losing My Suntan