From a Barge on the Seine to Monet’s Giverny

We are drifting down the Seine on a six-day trip aboard M/S Normandie, which sails between Paris and Honfleur at the mouth of the Seine and back again.

The cruiser will make alternate trips through summer and into the fall, one week in one direction heading from Paris to the landing beaches of 1944 facing the English Channel. Then it will return from Honfleur, that colorful town beloved by artists, winding through the locks to its dock in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.

The M/S Normandie is not the ocean-crossing queen of the French Line that met its sad end in New York City during World War II. This is a 300-foot-long, two-deck river cruiser dawdling between the poplars, the ruins of Norman castles and the cows that are essential to the splendid Norman cheeses.

It can carry 100 passengers, who pay $1,350 on the lower deck and $1,550 on the upper deck for a modest but perfectly livable stateroom that has a private bath and shower. There is ample space for stowing luggage, and a TV set that tells the day’s program and presents old films--”Top Hat” and “Brief Encounter” to mention two--for late-night viewing.

There’s a salon with tables, easy chairs, a bar and dance floor (some nights a band comes on board), and the price of drinks is fair. I paid $7 for a bottle of French beer at the Hotel Nikko opposite our dock in Paris. The same suds cost $3 on the ship.

The fare includes a Club Med-style breakfast--platters of sliced ham, trays of cheeses, cold cereals, eggs in two styles and brioche and croissants .

Lunch begins with a selection of hors d’oeuvre big enough to satisfy an omnivore, only to be followed by a main course and then an array of desserts. It will take a full afternoon of sightseeing to work up to a five-course dinner. Most nights we dock for a quiet night’s sleep, and most days we sail and stop to sightsee.

What must be the world’s most comfortable bus shows up at dockside for tours that are optional and cost extra. Our bus is a carpeted double-decker complete with compact plumbing--one flushes by stepping on a foot pedal and turns on the basin water by pushing a bar with one’s knee.

The crew is all-French, except for Philip Ryan, an Englishman who is the general overseer.

But Philippe Staelen is the chief purser and Christine the Fair is the young guide who bubbles over with more information than a talking encyclopedia.

On the other hand, the passengers are all Americans, including members of a garden club from Mississippi who are invading Normandy en bloc, and a passel of elegant women from California.

The garden-clubbers are in a special dither today, for we have docked and boarded the bus to see Giverny, the hamlet 40 miles from Paris where Claude Monet settled in April, 1883, when he was 43 years old and already had accumulated a household of 10.

He would rent this house that was said to have been built by a wealthy merchant from Guadeloupe and had a certain Caribbean air, which is certainly not visible today except that it is pink and green.

He would use the barn that had a dirt floor as his studio. He would face south toward the backlit gardens that he would develop into a botanical splendor. And he would live there for 43 years until he died Dec. 5, 1926.

Ultimately he would buy it and add a lily pond, weeping willows and a curving wooden bridge to summon illusions of Japan--all that only after considerable wrangling with the officials of the town.

The estate descended into ruin after he died. Later it was brought back to life by the Institute of France, backed by donations from Lila Wallace of Reader’s Digest and Walter Annenberg, the publisher who became the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James. It took four years to revive the house and the gardens.

The studio is enormous by any standards, hung with reproductions of his myriad works--not only of the garden, but many of the Rouen cathedral in various moods of light. The yellow dining room exudes an air of conviviality that must have existed there. There are chairs for 14. Looking down on the ghosts of guests is Rodin’s bust of Monet.

To maintain the Clos Normand, the expansive garden, requires six gardeners who produce a constant explosion of daffodils, tulips, azaleas, lilacs, zinnias, dahlias, lilies and nasturtiums--all blooming according to the season.

Some think these gardens in front of the house are overgrown in their profusion of blossoms, but they are a delight to the busloads of visitors who come here.

They see not only his flowers but his bedroom alongside the room where Alice, his second wife, slept. When he died they covered him in black.

When his friend Clemenceau (whose own bust is in the Monet studio) heard of it, he ordered the black shroud removed. “Cover him with flowers,” he ordered.

The visitor can muse of one man’s search for beauty while strolling the Japanese garden where the lily pads still catch the backlit sun and, in season, a feathery snowfall of wisteria hangs from the arched bridge.

Now the cruiser from distant lands will see the Seine in a different light, for it was the favorite of Corot, Pissarro, Sisley and, of course, Monet, who said: “I have painted the Seine all my life, at all hours of the day in every season.”

The boat he kept on the Ile aux Ortie, less than a mile from his house was, he said, “a floating studio.”

Here the river, with its ever-changing Norman sky, reflected the long files of poplars and the drooping willows calling out to be painted in a style that was to be called Impressionism--not historical allegory nor portraits of rich burghers, but what one writer has called “landscapes of emotion.”

For more information, contact French Cruise Lines at (800) 222-8664, or write 701 Lee St., Des Plaines, Ill. 60016.