Floating through Europe - author's barge cruise from Strasbourg to Nancy

National Review, Dec 31, 1989 by Priscilla L. Buckley

Barge life is unhurried. You can take a walk or ride the bikes they keep on deck, or just sit and gaze at the unfolding countryside: we wave back at five picnicking fishermen who raise their glasses of strong, dark red wine to us in salute, point out to each other the great blue heron that is lifting its heavy body so clumsily into the air at our approach, catch a fleeting glimpse of three quail running along the towpath ahead of us. The coutryside here in eastern Lorraine is different, less intensively cultivated than Alsace. Huge meadows roll away from the banks of the canal toward distant low-lying hills, providing pasture for black-faced sheep and dairy herds. A man, walking a field, bucket on arm, is picking mushrooms.

And so the days pass with their small incidents and adventures. Along one desolate stretch, the radar that informs the automatic lock that we await passage, operateth not, and it is quite some time before distress calls summon a human, a smart young man in a smart blue truck, who enters the lock house and sets the machinery back on track. It is the same young man in the same smart blue truck who will--an hour later--release us form the concrete sarcophagus in which we sit, immobilized, 14 feet deep in the bowels of a lock, the front gate of which has failed to open on schedule.

Finally Nancy, the maginificent. But first, as Michelin insists, un peu d'histoire. When Stanislas Leczczynski was ousted as King of Poland in the mind eighteenth century, his son-in-law, Louis XV, made a trade: Louis gave Ferdinand III, the childless Duke of Lorraine, Tuscany--which France controlled at that time--in exchange for Lorraine, which he bestowed on Stanislas, a coony move in that when Stanislas died in 1766, the French crown inherited the top-that-poing independent Duchy of Lorraine. Stanislas, so far as one can tell, spent the rest of his life building a smaller-scale version of the Chateau de Versailles at Luneville, and beautifying Nancy.

After dinner my sister Jan and I stroll with Gordon, a charming Louisianan, into Nancy through an almost grotesquely rococo-ized arch, past the cathedral with its odd towers, and into Stanislas Square. It is--as we first saw it that night, illuminated--quite simply to take one's breath away. Stanislas Square has a symmetry of line and form, an architectural unity not unlike the Place des Vosges in Paris. But most striking is the extraordinary grillwork of the eighteenth-century ironmaster Jean Lamour. It is everywhere, in the elaborate black and gold entrances to the square, on the dozens of balconies around it, ornamenting and highlighting the opulent fountains of Neptune and Aphrodite at the far corners. Tonight, water splashing down into fountains catches the light and disintegrates into incandescence. Everything is spitpolish perfect, freshly painted, gloriously re-gilded to celebrate the two-hundredth anniversary of a revolution that effectively ended the kind of regal profligacy that made the wonder of Stanislas Square possible.