DAY BY DAY

Farewell to the Parisian boats!

The newspapers announce the disappearance, in a very short time, of the Parisian boats. It is not without melancholy that we think of the mothers, who will no longer have the opportunity to answer their toddlers who want to know how the little boats work. The river itself will be sad, because it will have lost the "swallows" and the "flies" that crisscrossed it for the first time in 1867.

Before this date, the public could only navigate on paddle boats that left Paris, during the summer season, for distant destinations: Saint-Cloud, Corbeil or Melun.

The appearance of the first bateau-mouches was the greatest success. This service recorded up to 25 million travelers annually. Even before the war, Parisians could enjoy the charm of Paris and take an hour to go from Charenton to Auteuil. Today, the express buses, which take us from Passy to the Bourse in 13 minutes, barely satisfy us, and, passing like a hurricane, do not allow us to suspect the charms of our city.

Ah! what joy, when, very small, young Parisians that we were then, we climbed cautiously onto the pontoon, for a long, very long journey, it seemed to us! Our nostrils flared as we inhaled the fresh air, and we thought we were brushing against danger as soon as we had to go from the pontoon to the boat. The pontoon moved, our intrepidness did not think of seasickness and we were convinced that we had won a victory when we had set foot on the shifting ground of the ship that was about to cut through the waves, sometimes agitated by the passage of a tugboat.

The true Parisians of Paris, the old Parisians of yesteryear, do not recall without emotion the shrill sound of the bell that announced the stops. The voice of the commander, proclaiming the stations, filled the cabins in which we took refuge on rainy days. It evoked different ideas for each of us, and before our amazed eyes paraded our Paris: the Île Saint-Louis and its greenery, the towers of Notre-Dame which stood out majestically against the sky, the sharp profiles of the Palais de Justice, the tall trees of the Quai du Louvre which allowed us to glimpse, through the veil of their foliage, the imposing line of the Palais des Rois; opposite, the evocative dome of the Institute. Further away, the ruins of the Cour des Comptes, through which the blue sky laughed, seemed the tragic witness to a history which seemed to us mysterious and distant!