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| Illustration based on photo from hotelsafloat.com |
In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Berton Roueché’s leisurely “Janine” (October 22, 1984).
In this immensely enjoyable piece, Roueché travels to the heart of Burgundy aboard the passenger barge Janine. The hundred-and-sixty-mile trip takes six days. He starts in Lyon, goes up the river Saône, through the Canal de Bourgogne, and ends in Dijon. We meet Janine’s captain and crew. We meet the other passengers. We get a tour of the barge:
The Janine has an open forward deck (furnished with white iron garden chairs and matching parasoled tables), which opens into a red plush salon, a small bar, and a dining room with six tables, each of them seating four. Aft of the dining room (I later learned) is the galley, and aft of that, up some steep steps, is the pilothouse. The cabins are below— at the waterline, in fact—and all of them have names reflective of the region. I was assigned to Beaune. There were two small, head-high windows (with the river lapping almost to the sills), two narrow bunks, arranged foot-to-foot in an L formation, and a small closet. There was a plastic bottle of Evian mineral water on the washstand, a red rosebud in a vase on a shelf, and three framed reproductions of lifelike fruit and flower arrangements by Redouté on the walls. I stowed away my luggage and went back up on deck. Most of my fellow-passengers were already there, sitting or standing and chattering cocktail-party talk. Two or three idlers watched with interest from the street above the seawall and the quay. A pretty, dark-haired, blue-eyed, hugely smiling French girl (named Bernadette) passed among us with a tray of tall glasses of kir.
The trip gets underway:
We were moving. We had cast off and were sliding away from shore. The party chatter faltered. The Saône at Lyons is a beautiful river, and I stood and watched it reveal itself as we reached midstream and gently chugged upriver through a green allée, between orderly rows of leafy plane trees that lined the gray stone quays. Beyond the trees were rows of apartment houses—dusty yellow and faded orange, with tall windows flanked by faded blue shutters—in the formal style of the middle nineteenth century, and rising beyond the apartments were the delicate towers and spires and belfries of churches. The party chatter began again. We crept under a bridge. A racing scull appeared in the distance. It came skimming closer. And closer. And suddenly darted for shore, to sit there bucking and bouncing in our wake. The women from Michigan smiled and waved. The oarsman hunched his shoulders and looked away. The sky to the west brightened into a sunset blaze. A star came out.
I love that detail about the racing scull. Roueché writes simply, but vividly – in the tradition of Chekov and Hemingway. Yes, he’s that good. His words call up pictures. Here’s his description of a pretty stretch of river between Tournus and Chalon-sur-Saône:
There was a feel of deep and peaceful country, but it was country ordered by man. The rows of plane trees, the poplar allées, even the patches of woods and the meadows of grazing sheep, had a look of arrangement, of traditional design. There were swans floating here and there along the riverbanks, geese grazing in the sheep meadows. A heron flapped from shore to shore. A flock of some cootlike ducks dived under our bow. A couple on horseback—a man and a woman in immaculate riding clothes—appeared on the left bank and cantered away on a path among the poplars. A village appeared on the right: thirteen stone houses, some long and low, some tall and thin, but all of them the color of yellowy autumn leaves, all of them with faded blue shutters, all of them roofed with rusty-black tiles—strung out in a tight little row behind a column of shapely plane trees, above a long stone quay.
The river journey features side-trips to a vineyard, an ancient abbey, a prestigious restaurant, an outdoor market. Sometimes, after the Janine ties up, Roueché goes for walks. Here, he walks Mâcon:
There were big wrought-iron planters spaced along the seawall, with geraniums and begonias in brilliant bloom. There was a large park with gardens and shade trees. Across the Saône I could see another old stone seawall and an orderly mass of forest. Mâcon is not a village. It is a town— an industrial town—with a population of almost forty thousand, and it has been an important river port for centuries. Walking under the trees and past the flowering planters, and looking out at the bright-green water, I thought of the river towns I had known at home, and their dingy and desolate waterfronts.
The meals are très French and très delicious. Day 2 of the trip, here’s dinner on the Janine:
It began with a soup: a mussel bisque. The main course was roast veal with a sauce au poivre. There was a green salad with a port-wine vinaigrette, and a selection of cheeses. Dessert was two Bavarian creams, apricot and vanilla, with a purée of whortleberries. With the roast we drank a Côte du Rhône. The white wine—golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts—was a Saint-Véran. When I went down to my cabin, I found a bedtime snack on my pillow: a chocolate thin-mint.
That "golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts" is very fine.
We had come through half a dozen locks on the Saône, but they were modern locks, of generous size, lined with steel and equipped with great steel sluice gates that were opened and closed by a lockkeeper at a console in a control tower high overhead. The Canal de Bourgogne is a nineteenth-century canal, and its gates are operated by levers and wheels turned entirely by human weight and muscle. We crawled into a slot only inches wider than the Janine and with hardly a foot of clearance fore and aft. We sat for minutes deep down between two walls of dripping stone. There was the sound of rushing water. We began to rise. The earth slopes gently up to Dijon from the Saône at Saint-Jean-de-Losne. This was the first of twenty-two lifts, which would raise us a total of a hundred and ninety feet. We rose slowly, slowly, as slowly as an ancient freight elevator. My eyes came even with the top of the lock wall, with the top of an iron bollard. We kept rising. The lock-keeper’s house appeared, a small stone square with a red tile roof and a life preserver in a glass case. Above the door was a sign: “Écluse St.-Jean-de-Losne-Duon 29.4 km. St.-Jean-de-Losne 0 km.” We came gently to rest. The lockkeeper, a woman, was working a long iron lever. She was a burly figure in a long dress and a thick sweater. The canal stretched straight ahead, a boulevard of shining water lined with poplars, on a kind of causeway ten feet or more above the surrounding countryside.
Roueché has breakfast. By the time he’s finished, the barge is moving into its second lock, Écluse Viranne. He can see the next lock in the distance. He says, “The towpath beckoned. It would be an easy walk.” He and several of his fellow-travellers leave the Janine, still sitting in the lock, and set off along the path. Roueché writes,
We walked in the dappled shade of the poplars. It was a countryside of plowed autumn fields and still, green pastures and scattered groves and flocking rooks and, far away, the clustered rooftops of a village. The canal was a deep, oceanic green. Its grassy banks were abloom with wildflowers: something blue that looked like chicory, something pink that looked like thistle, something yellow that looked like asters, and a delicate lavender flower that I had never seen before but somehow recognized on sight—an autumn crocus. We reached the next lock (Écluse Brazey) well before the Janine and walked on.
Back on the Janine, Roueché goes through Écluse Beauregard and Écluse Longvic. The piece ends sensuously:
We passed a barge headed down-canal. It was a family barge—a load of gravel forward, and a cabin with white curtains at the windows just aft of the pilothouse. Its name was lettered on the stern: Espérance. We climbed through Écluse Romelet. There was a sudden rise of apartment buildings up ahead on the right. On the left were what looked like warehouses. The canal ran unchanged between its rows of trees, beside the grassy banks and the towpath. But the country was giving way. Beyond the apartments was a tract of identical little white houses with identical geranium gardens. Beyond the warehouses were storage tanks: “ESSO.” “TOTAL.” “MOBIL.” “ELF.” We climbed through Écluse Colombières. The canal still had its flanking trees, but the grassy banks had become a quay, and the towpath was now a street. Steep-roofed buildings rose up all around us. I became aware of a smell in the air. It was a pleasant smell, and a familiar smell. It was a smell I knew very well. But it was a smell I had never smelled in the open air before. And then I realized. This was Dijon. The smell was the smell of mustard.
A delectable conclusion to a delectable piece. Pure pleasure!
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