I did not know this
myself, and it is safe to say he would not have cared, though he was an
excellent young fellow and treated me with more deference than, in our
relative positions, I was strictly entitled to.
He lowered a tender gaze on his banjo, and I went on looking through the
port-hole. The round opening framed in its brass rim a fragment of the
quays, with a row of casks ranged on the frozen ground and the tail end
of a great cart. A red-nosed carter in a blouse and a woollen night-cap
leaned against the wheel. An idle, strolling custom house guard, belted
over his blue capote, had the air of being depressed by exposure to the
weather and the monotony of official existence. The background of grimy
houses found a place in the picture framed by my port-hole, across a
wide stretch of paved quay brown with frozen mud. The colouring
was sombre, and the most conspicuous feature was a little cafe with
curtained windows and a shabby front of white woodwork, corresponding
with the squalor of these poorer quarters bordering the river. We had
been shifted down there from another berth in the neighbourhood of the
Opera House, where that same port-hole gave me a view of quite another
soft of cafe--the best in the town, I believe, and the very one where
the worthy Bovary and his wife, the romantic daughter of old Pere
Renault, had some refreshment after the memorable performance of an
opera which was the tragic story of Lucia di Lammermoor in a setting of
light music.
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