Transport: Flies’ End

From canoes to coal barges, Parisians are sentimental about anything that floats on the oily Seine. But best-loved of all their chowchow river traffic were the slim little green-and-white bateaux mouches (fly boats), which took to the water during the 1900 exposition, have since ferried some 42,000,000 beer-bibbing, brioche-munching joyriders downriver to suburban Suresnes and back. Three francs (about 8¢) bought pleasant conveyance for travelers with business at in-between stops, all-day outings for romancing youngsters, tourists bargain-shopping for local color. Tremulous were the moonlit nights with the sighing of accordion bands from riverside bals musettes, whispery the riverside dingles with the billing & cooing of pic-necking couples. As Bear Mountain boats to Manhattan outers were the Seine fly boats to Parisians.

But the years of Anschluss, appeasement, decree laws have not favored amorous cockleshells. As serious travelers in crisis-harried Paris resorted more & more to busses and the Métro, abandoned the fly boats’ decks to languid romancers, the Société Nouvelle des Bateaux Parisiens sailed into the red. Year ago the company announced suspensions of service, shortly went into receivership. When ten surviving fly boats, including gangplanks, copper megaphones, pontoons and the skippers’ hats were sold at auction for a piddling 225,000 francs ($5,962), oldtimers thronged the shore, made sad sounds. Mused L’Oeuvre (see p. 38) quoting Poet-of-the-People Laurent Tailhade:

On the little fly boat

The bourgeois are jammed together,

With their kids whose noses are blown,

Whose noses are blown not often

enough.

Last week the fly boats made their last trip, as tugs towed them upriver where purchasers waited to convert them into houseboats.