The Seine
Page 1
The Seine
THE RIVER THAT MADE PARIS
Elaine Sciolino
TO ANDREW
The best traveling companion ever . . .
On the road, in life
Contents
The Seine
PART ONE
THE SEINE IS FRANCE
1Poetry in Motion
2The Most Romantic River in the World
3The Main Street of France
PART TWO
WESTWARD FROM BURGUNDY
4The Ancient Source
5The Legend of the River
6Champagne on the Seine
7Paths to Paris
PART THREE
THE SPINE OF PARIS
8It Started with a Canoe
9The Beating Heart of Paris
10Clean Enough for a Swim?
11The Zen of Rowing and Fishing
12Paris la Nuit
13What’s Sex Got to Do with It?
14The Seine Also Rises
15A Bend in the River
16Scenes on the Seine
17River of Song
18Capturing the Moment
19Selling Books, Selling Dreams
20Guardians of the Peace
21The Unknown Woman of the Seine
22Island-Hopping
PART FOUR
FROM CITY TO SEA
23River of Light
24The Port That Rivaled Paris
25Tsunami on the Seine
26Windmills and War
27No End to the Seine?
PART FIVE
RIVER OF DREAMS
28Reinventing the River
29The Joy of Life
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Index
PART ONE
The Seine Is France
Notre-Dame Cathedral framed by the stone underpass of the Pont Saint-Michel. DARIUS KHONDJI.
ONE
Poetry in Motion
I could spend my whole life
Watching the Seine flow by. . . .
It is a poem of Paris.
—BLAISE CENDRARS, “La Seine”
IN THE SPRING OF 1978, I was seduced by a river. I had come to Paris from Chicago to be a foreign correspondent for Newsweek magazine. I arrived with no sources, no lovers, no family, no friends, no mission except to start fresh in a city all the world loves.
There had been a husband in Chicago, but he’d announced one day that he was leaving. I let him take the BMW, the butcher block table, the full-sized mattress, the Wassily armchairs, the walnut rolltop desk, the darkroom equipment, and a set of Wedgwood china. I kept the antique brass bed frame, a carpet, and much of the rest of the furniture. Four months later, he remarried. I recounted the story of our breakup over and over until it became as smooth and harmless as a stone worn down by the sea.
I was twenty-eight years old and free to be my own person in Paris.
Like so many Americans, I felt as if I already knew the city, as if I owned it. I had studied French history. I had read about Paris in novels and seen it in paintings. I had heard songs about April in Paris and loving Paris in the springtime and the fall. I had watched movies—oh, the movies—set in Paris.
But I was ill-prepared to dive into the culture of France. My French was so weak that when I did interviews, I had to write out my questions in advance, word for word, and record every conversation to guarantee accuracy. I rigged up a recording device on the rotary dial telephone in my office, a practice that probably violated French privacy laws.
No one told me about French manners and mannerisms. I didn’t know that you never discuss personal wealth, religious beliefs, or real estate transactions at proper dinner parties. Or that you should eat hamburgers and pizza with a knife and fork and never take seconds on the cheese course.
I didn’t know that wearing a lot of makeup or laughing too loud is considered vulgar. Or that floral prints would identify me as a foreigner or that the uniform for a late Sunday afternoon book party is a pair of well-cut black trousers and a tailored shirt in fine white cotton. Or that it is essential to say bonjour to shopkeepers, bus drivers, and people in elevators but impolite to smile at strangers. Or that “pas mal” (“not bad”) can mean “great!” and “I wouldn’t say no” can mean “I’d love to!”
The dollar was at an all-time low against the franc, so there was little money for distractions to relieve my loneliness. I hadn’t known to bring a portable typewriter for my new job. Newsweek’s Chicago bureau, where I had been working, was a convivial place with a stash of eggshell-blue Olivetti Lettera 22 portables; the Paris bureau was an every-man-for-himself world (the four other correspondents were older men) where self-sufficiency and seniority reigned.
I found two sources of support. The first was “Madame,” an elderly French tutor, who gave me conversation lessons every Saturday morning. Her dark apartment oozed Parisian charm, with its crystal chandeliers and fine art. Madame was thin and elegant, smoked filtered Gauloises, and wore Art Nouveau rings set with giant stones. She wrote my homework assignments in turquoise ink with a Montblanc pen.
And then there was the Seine.
People everywhere feel visceral connections with the rivers they love. Mark Twain had his Mississippi; Johann Strauss celebrated the Danube. Russians venerate the Volga, and Indianans sing about the Wabash. Many lovers of Broadway musicals know the words to “Ol’ Man River,” a tune from Show Boat. In Buffalo, where I grew up, my river had been the Niagara, a short, fast-rolling strait between two lakes that does not look, move, or sound anything like the Seine. When I was thirteen, I took ballet lessons in Fort Erie, just across the river in Canada, and I often walked home on the pedestrian lane of the international Peace Bridge. No matter how cold the day, how fierce the snowstorm, I would stop midway across the span to gaze at the river below, abandoning myself to a force of nature beyond my control. Although the bridge was eighteen miles away from the powerful Niagara Falls, the current already ran swift here. The Niagara taught me that a river can dissolve loneliness and catch the heart. And then, in Paris, I moved into an apartment close to the Seine. Most evenings I crossed the river during my walk from the Newsweek office, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in the Eighth Arrondissement, to the avenue de la Bourdonnais, in the Seventh.
My half-hour walk took me across the Pont de l’Alma, which links two neighborhoods in the west of Paris: the designer boutiques on the Right Bank and the bourgeois residences on the Left. Napoléon III ordered the city planner, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, to build a stone bridge as a celebration of France’s 1854 victory over the Russians in Crimea. But the bridge was too narrow to support the ever-increasing flow of cars and foot traffic. In the early 1970s, it was rebuilt in steel, simple and unadorned. It looks like an overpass on a U.S. highway.
Four stone soldiers stood sentry on the original bridge. Now only one remains, the statue of a bearded Zouave, a colonial soldier from a regiment created in Algeria in 1831 from the Zouaoua, a Kabyle tribe. Dressed in a tasseled fez, blousy pants, and a long cape, he stands with his left hand on his hip, his right holding the end of a rifle barrel. He is the city’s unofficial flood monitor. If his pointed shoes are submerged, the river is running high.
ON THE WAY HOME, returning to the habit of my teen years, I would stop midway on the Pont de l’Alma. Confronted with a city so familiar and yet still new and strange, I found comfort in the river’s calm and steady flow to its certain destination. Whatever the water level, the Zouave gazed with equanimity over the shimmering stream. At sunset, I watched the light fade from gold to pale yellow to silver and recede into darkness. The streetlights danced in the river’s reflection.
I took in the life of the narrow river:
the bateaux-mouches filled with carefree tourists, the houseboats, the quiet grandeur of the structures on the upper level of the riverbanks, lined with horse chestnut and plane trees, and the proximity of the lower banks to the water. Downstream, the Eiffel Tower peeked out from behind the greenery. Across the river, apartment buildings on the avenue de New York came into view, as did the roof of the Art Deco Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Directly in front, the Passerelle Debilly, a green metallic footbridge built for the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle, carried people heading home from work. A half mile away from where I stood was the Pont des Invalides, and beyond that, the gold-colored statues and ornaments of the Pont Alexandre III.
If I listened hard enough, I could hear the voice of the river. In the 1920s and 1930s, when James Joyce lived in Paris, he walked miles up and down the Seine. He was almost always with a companion, as he was nearly blind by then. He would stop at times on the Pont de l’Alma to hear the water move so he could capture its rhythm in his writing. “There’s music along the river / For Love wanders there,” he wrote in the opening poem of Chamber Music.
Even when the Seine was still and silent, I stood on the bridge and reveled in the sounds of life surrounding me: the revving motorcycles, the honking cars, the bells of Notre-Dame announcing the time, the multilingual commentaries rising from the tourist boats, the loud chatter of American visitors who didn’t know that in Paris, one’s voice should be soft and low.
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway described the Seine as a salve against solitude: “With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river.”
Neither could I. I overcame anxiety and loneliness and moved forward in my life, like the Seine in its course. The river allowed me to begin a journey of discovery—of Paris, of the French people, of myself. Its energy pumped deep into my veins; its light gave me strength.
“Everything is going to be okay,” I said to myself.
And over time, it was.
A Chinese bride and groom pose for a photograph near the Seine as part of their nuptial preparations. Before their marriage celebrations, some Chinese couples fly to Paris to be photographed in their wedding finery. DAVID BROAD.
TWO
The Most Romantic River in the World
She goes to the sea
Passing through Paris. . . .
And . . . walks between the quays
In her beautiful green dress
And her golden lights.
—JACQUES PRÉVERT,
“Chanson de la Seine”
THE SEINE IS the most romantic river in the world. She encourages us to dream, to linger, to flirt, to fall in love, or to at least fantasize that falling in love is possible. The light bouncing off her banks and bridges at night can carry even the least imaginative of us into flights of fancy. No other river comes close. The Ganges, the Mississippi, and the Yangtze? They are muscular workhorses. The Thames? Who can name one famous couple who fell in love on its banks? The Danube? It may be immortalized as the world’s most recognizable waltz, but its history is one of warring nations.
The Seine’s romantic power is rooted in her human scale. Compared with the Nile, the Amazon, or even the Hudson, she feels accessible, narrow enough to track the comings and goings on either side. Her banks are flat, her bridges densely packed and so low to the ground that you can almost touch the water.
Then there is her grandeur. The architectural treasures that line her banks allow her to project power beyond her physical dimensions. The interplay between intimacy and power casts a spell. Painters, poets, filmmakers, photographers, historians, novelists, composers, lovers, and, these days, virtual-reality designers have fallen hopelessly in love with her. Monet painted from a studio boat on the Seine, Matisse and Marquet while gazing down at the river from their Paris apartments. Zola, Flaubert, and Bizet lived in houses along the Seine. Jazz great Django Reinhardt rented a place nearby. Dumas could see the river from his Château de Monte-Cristo.
The Seine, of course, is a woman. She is called la Seine, not le Seine. Poets and songwriters refer to her as female. She takes her name and her identity from the ancient goddess Sequana, who healed ailing pilgrims at her temple at the river’s source.
According to the French rules of geography and grammar, a river that flows into the sea, as the Seine does, should be given the masculine appellation le fleuve; many people who live and work on the Seine insist that it is feminine: la rivière, which is supposed to refer only to inland waterways. “The old word rivière is always used by the people of the water, from bargemen to bureaucrats,” wrote Francois Beaudouin, the founder of a museum on barge life in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, in his book Paris/Seine. “Fleuve,” he continued, is a word that “geographers imposed on the general public in the nineteenth century and that goes against the femininity of Sequana.”
THE SEINE EMERGES young and fresh in a field of springs on a remote plateau in Burgundy and grows strong and majestic by the time she reaches the sea, 777 kilometers—483 miles—away. She flows through history: past prehistoric encampments, ancient Roman towns, Viking strongholds, medieval châteaus, monastic abbeys, and World War II battlegrounds. Along her route, she opens herself without hesitation, allowing any riverside town to lay claim to her mystique. Yet her one true love is and always has been Paris, the source of power in France since antiquity. The city arrives slightly more than midway through her journey, giving the Seine her geographic, historic, and symbolic importance.
Long before the invention of GPS—or even accurate maps—the geography of the Seine served as both a practical and an inspirational guide for travelers seeking the heart of France, and so it continued even after the mastery of flight changed humanity’s perspective. Look at the Seine from the sky and you find a highway to Paris. Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator who first flew solo across the Atlantic, in 1927, saw the Seine from his cockpit near the end of his transatlantic flight. The river helped guide him safely to Le Bourget airfield near Paris, where a crowd of thousands cheered him. In his memoir The Spirit of St. Louis, he wrote, “Down under my left wing, angling in from the north, winding through fields submerged in night, comes the Seine, shimmering back to the sky the faint remaining light of evening. With my position known and my compass set, with the air clear and a river and an airway to lead me in, nothing but engine failure can keep me now from reaching Paris.”
Despite her confinement between banks of stone, the Seine becomes one with the buildings and monuments that adorn them. Here she becomes the Seine all of us know, or think we know. “Wherever we are in the world, when we close our eyes and think about the Seine, it’s Paris that we see,” wrote the poet André Velter.
Life is lived on the river—on barges, pleasure craft, pontoon platforms, decommissioned naval vessels. Afloat on the Seine, you can live, eat and drink, make love, get married, practice yoga, run a business, shop for books, watch fireworks, do a wine tasting, go fishing, dance the tango. You can attend a fashion show, a concert, a play. You can find a hotel, a psychiatric hospital ward, a film studio, a homeless shelter, an art museum, an architect’s showroom—all floating on the river.
Bathers sunning themselves on the Right Bank of the Seine near the Pont de Sully and the Île Saint-Louis. ANDREW PLUMP.
The world’s most visited cathedral, Notre-Dame, sits on an island in the Seine; the world’s most visited art museum, the Louvre, faces the Seine from Paris’s Right Bank. Despite a crackdown by Paris City Hall, couples from around the world continue to clamp padlocks to the Seine’s bridges as evidence that they long to be locked in love forever. Before they are married, some Chinese couples fly to Paris to be photographed in wedding attire along the Seine. Even worldly-wise Parisians are seduced by the Seine�
�its geography, history, politics, economics, culture, and, bien sûr, its romance.
Philippe Labro—novelist, filmmaker, essayist, columnist, television host—is an urbane Parisian, but he turns downright exuberant when he talks about the Seine. “What’s my favorite word in French—rivière! River! Riv-ee-air!” he said. “It rhymes with lumière—light. It moves. It flows like music. It’s a sign of life.”
Labro was so intrigued by the cultural differences between the Left and Right Banks that in 1984 he made the river the focal point of his seventh and last film: Rive droite, rive gauche, starring Gérard Depardieu and Nathalie Baye. “Rive gauche meant freedom and liberty and free speech and free sex,” he said. “Rive droite meant money, politics, scandal, and the power of the media. The Seine became an obsession—it flows through the movie just as it flows through the city. There is movement of place, going from one space to another, and movement of life, from intrigue to love to death. I loved it. I wasn’t aware that making the movie was work.”
Chef Guy Savoy, whose restaurant has three Michelin stars, became so fixated on the Seine that he invested over €2 million and more than five years of his life to move his restaurant to its banks. Restaurant Guy Savoy now sits at the top of a red-carpeted stone staircase carved with medallions and wreaths in the Monnaie de Paris, the French Mint, which once produced all the coins of the realm.
One morning, Savoy threw open a ten-foot-high window in the main dining room to show me his view. The Louvre was to the left across the river, the Pont Neuf to the right, the tip of the Île de la Cité straight ahead. We were so close to the booksellers on the riverbank below that we could wave to them and say bonjour.