Sailing the Seine - traveling the waterways of France by riverboat - Column

National Review, Feb 21, 1994 by Priscilla Buckley

A NEW way to travel French rivers is by river boats that carry a hundred or more passengers. The French Cruise Line, anxious to move in on the burgeoning barge-hotel business, designed and built two river boats three or four years ago, the M/S Arlene, which cruises the Rhone and Saone rivers in Burgundy, and the M/S Normandie, which plies the Seine from Paris to Honfleur and back.

My sister Jane and I joined the M/S Normandie one hot June evening at the Quai de Grenelle in Paris, just west of the Eiffel Tower. The Normandie is a spick-and-span white two-decker, 91 meters (299 feet) long and 10.2 meters (33 feet) wide, with fifty small but pleasant double cabins, each with its own bathroom. The public rooms include a large, tastefully decorated, and comfortable lounge, a good-sized dining room, and an upper sundeck, half covered, half open, with a roof that slides down to permit the Normandie to squeeze under the low bridges of Paris and its delighted passengers to view the City of Light at night.

The six-night trip from Paris to the Normandy fishing village of Honfleur costs $2,000 a person when you add in wine, liquor, tips, and various well-planned side trips ($40 to $50 each).

We skip the trips to Versailles and to Miniature France and spend the first lazy morning watching the river traffic--mostly working barges, peniches they are called. We are moving along at about nine knots and tie up at the town of Vernon, not too far from Monet's home, at Giverny. After dinner, on a walk through Vernon's ancient streets, we are drawn to the flamboyant-Gothic Eglise Notre Dame by a choir singing. We enter the church just behind the high altar, on which sits, jauntily, a shiny black helmet. The choir, a motley group in civvies, stands under a bright light over the altar. The choirmaster brings out the best they have, which is very good indeed, and clips off the last note with the precision that shows his mastery of his craft. We listen to a second offering, the Gloria, then slip out unnoticed, uplifted.

At 9:30 the next morning, a small group of us is let into Claude Monet's Japanese garden ahead of the morning crowd of tourists. We saunter through the gardens and lily ponds and over the Japanese bridge, exploring small paths, and generally luxuriating in the rich smells and sights and sounds of a scene that anyone who loves Monet's painting knows so well. A cuckoo obligingly coo-coos for us.

We stroll up through a far more conventional French garden to the Clos Normand, Monet's spacious manor house, and explore the house and the bright and roomy studio he built at the end of the yard to accommodate his final huge paintings of the water lilies. (It was the paintings found at the Clos Normand, by the way, that form the basic collection at the Marmottan Museum in Paris.)

When Richard the Lion-Heart built the huge Chateau Gaillard on a promontory above the Seine near Les Andelys, he vowed that he could defend it even if its walls were made of butter. But after his death Philippe Auguste took it (by guile), and eventually Henri IV had its battlements dismantled. But even in ruins it is formidable, dominating a long stretch of the Seine as it winds and twists below. The day is misty and the landscape beyond the castle looks for all the world like an Impressionist painting.

After a ride through the Foret de Lyons, the hunting grounds of the Dukes of Normandy, and a walk around Lyons-la-Foret's well-preserved half-timbered houses and covered market, we come to the Chateau Vascoeuil, the kind of attraction you will certainly miss unless taken by hand, as we are, and shown it.

Vascoeuil is a delight. Its owner, whose name never appears on the brochure, restored the small chateau but himself lives in a thatched-roof home he built on its grounds. The chateau, when we were there, housed an extraordinary exhibition by a master of trompe-l'oeil, Jacques Poirier. One painting, the life of Helen of Troy, is accompanied by a brief history of the lady's complicated life and adventures, concluding that when she returned to Greece after the fall of Troy she was "tres agee."

Throughout the manicured gardens and around a swift flowing stream and a beautiful dovecote, Mr. Nameless has scattered manic sculptures to make one chortle with delight: sculptures, among others, by Braque, Dali, and Leger. But we must cut short our visit, as the rains that will dog us from here on out arrive.

From Les Andelys to Rouen the scenery is lovely. Double rows of tall poplars line country roads and lanes. The river twists and turns and doubles nearly back on itself. Small villages, each with a church and steeple, hug the hillsides, encased in green meadows and, it being Normandy, in apple orchards. A couple of turns later we come upon a steep escarpment of rock on our left, its ragged peaks like the ghosts of ancient turrets. We glimpse the occasional stone chateau, sitting back from the river, almost hidden from view by its encompassing woods and protective iron grilles. The sun is fighting to break through low, grey clouds, but it is a losing battle. Even so, as we approach the port of Rouen the water turns lighter and clearer. The tidal flow, we are told, can be felt this far inland.