The Loing, or River Loing, is the winding river at Moret that provides the setting for a summer episode in Philip Carey’s artistic life. Seen from the terrace of the Ecu d’Or and heard during long, sleepless evenings, it becomes more than scenery: beside its water Philip paints and reads, while the stillness sharpens his awareness of desire, jealousy, and the gap between imagined love and actual intimacy.

Setting and Landscape

Moret is described as an old-fashioned town of one street, at the edge of the forest of Fontainebleau. The Ecu d’Or, with the decayed air of the Ancien Régime, faces the Loing; Ruth Chalice’s room has a small terrace overlooking the river, the old bridge, and its fortified gateway. A narrow canal bordered by poplars runs into the river nearby, giving the painters a second waterside setting for their work.

After their days of painting, Philip, Lawson, and Ruth sit on the terrace over coffee and cigarettes, discussing art. In the heat of summer they remain there long after conversation has run out, listening to the river’s murmur as the church clock strikes one, two, and sometimes three. The Loing’s presence is thus registered through the episode’s recurring quiet: water, darkness, and the company of the three artists make an intimate setting in which unspoken relations become perceptible.

Painting Beside the Water

Philip begins painting in oils and takes pleasure in the medium. He goes out with Lawson in the morning, carrying his small paint-box, and sits beside him to paint a panel. Yet the pleasure of working beside the river does not amount to artistic independence: Philip is copying Lawson, so thoroughly under his influence that he sees through his friend’s eyes. Their shared vision turns the grass’s emerald into dark velvet and the bright sky into a brooding ultramarine.

The canal and its poplars are familiar subjects, painted by Sisley and Monet, but the artists fear the picturesque beauty they associate with conventional art. Ruth tries to evade that prettiness by leaving the tops of the trees out of her picture; Lawson places a large blue Menier chocolate advertisement in his foreground to assert his rejection of the chocolate-box view. Against this deliberate resistance to scenic charm, the Loing remains a source of genuine pleasure for Philip. In the July heat he often sits in the poplar shade, reads a few lines, and then drifts into half-hour stretches of daydreaming, unable to work as his mind fills with other thoughts.

Desire and Disillusionment

The terrace beside the river is where Philip gradually recognizes that Ruth and Lawson are lovers. He reads the intimacy in the way Ruth looks at Lawson and in Lawson’s air of possession; sitting with them, Philip senses the charged closeness between the two. The discovery shocks him. He had liked Ruth as a companion but had not considered her attractive in that way, and now he feels envious of Lawson—not so much of Ruth herself as of the experience of being in love.

Away from Ruth, as he lies by the canal or stays awake at night, Philip imagines her beauty and pictures himself in her arms. In her presence, however, the fantasy fails: he notices details that repel him and cannot imagine kissing her. The contrast leaves him wondering whether he can love only in absence, when desire is protected from the reality of another person. When the weather turns and marks the end of summer, he is not sorry to leave Moret with Lawson and Ruth for Paris. The Loing episode therefore joins an idyllic landscape to an inward reversal: the river’s calm becomes the backdrop to Philip’s recognition that longing, in itself, does not guarantee love or the capacity to act on it.