The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  “Ah, look at this! It’s Paris at your feet!” Savoy said. “There are many beautiful views in the world, but none, none like this one! The first time I saw it, it was like an electric shock. I said, ‘I have to be here.’”

  In Billy Wilder’s 1954 romantic comedy Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn explains to a skeptical Humphrey Bogart the magic of a four-mile walk past all the bridges of Paris: “You find one you love and go there every day with your coffee and your journal and you listen to the river.”

  THE SEINE CUTS THROUGH PARIS in a great arc from east to west, touching ten of the city’s twenty arrondissements—the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Twelfth, Thirteenth, Fifteenth, and Sixteenth. France’s two most important islands, the Île de la Cité and the smaller Île Saint-Louis, are at its heart. The arc of the Seine exaggerates the river’s size, and connecting canals extend its reach deeper into the city. It loops around the suburbs, enfolding them in a lopsided embrace. “I am the road running through Paris,” the twentieth-century author Julien Green has the Seine say.

  In Paris, the river is always present, even when you cannot see it. You are on the Left or the Right Bank, defined from the viewpoint looking downstream on the Seine. You are in an arrondissement numbered according to a system that begins on the Île de la Cité and swirls clockwise in a spiral. Street names evoke the river: the rue du Bac is named after the bac, or ferry, that transported stone blocks for the construction of the Palais des Tuileries; the rue de Seine follows the wall built by the medieval king Philippe II that led to the river on the Left Bank; the rue des Deux Ponts, on the Île Saint-Louis, connects the Ponts Marie and de la Tournelle. The rue de Bièvre recalls a small river that became a putrid canal flowing into the Seine, until it was covered over in the twentieth century.

  How exhilarating to stroll along the Seine with an open spirit and no fixed destination. Take the No. 7 Métro to the Pont Neuf. Cross to the Left Bank and head west, passing the Institut de France, the domed structure that houses the Académie Française, guardian of the French language. From there, return to the Right Bank over the Pont des Arts, the wooden-slatted, iron pedestrian bridge that leads to the Louvre. Seek a moment of contemplation in the Cour Carrée, the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century square courtyard with perfect proportions, hidden at the museum’s east end. Walk from there to the entrance on the rue de Rivoli and turn around to treat yourself to a dramatic new view of the Institut de France, framed by the Renaissance pavilions of the Louvre.

  The perfect climax is a walk west along the river toward the Eiffel Tower, the most distinctive emblem of Paris and arguably the world’s most famous monument. Without the Eiffel Tower, Paris would still exist; without the Seine, there never would have been a Paris. While the river owes the city its romantic aura, the city owes the river its birth, its life, and its identity. The love affair of Paris and the Seine defines them both.

  The harmony between Paris and its river is no accident. Parisians left nothing to chance. The Seine has served as a mirror for the city’s architectural treasures since the twelfth century, with the construction of the Louvre—first a defensive fortress, then a royal residence, then a museum—and Notre-Dame Cathedral. Paris became the first city in Europe to use its river to put its imposing architecture on display. Over time, the river was contained and landscaped to show off the structures of art and history that line its banks. The Seine allows Paris to present itself as a stage set, with the river cast as the pièce de résistance.

  In the nineteenth century, the Seine was plagued by raw sewage, the residents’ garbage, putrid smells, and thick mudflats that revealed themselves at low tide. Then, in 1853, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who was given the title “prefect of the Seine,” began to transform Paris, including its riverfront. He and his successors were determined to dominate the river, to channel the waterway into pleasant submission. They lined the Seine with new stone quays to create a single continuous route and built bridges to improve commerce and harmonize both sides of the river. They demolished thousands of decrepit houses—and uprooted thousands of poor Parisians—to create water views and tree-shaded promenades. They constructed locks and dams outside the city to make the river’s flow consistent and dependable. The architects outdid themselves. In 1991, the riverbanks earned the honor of being named a UNESCO World Heritage cultural site. That designation applies only to the picture-perfect central area between the Pont d’Iéna, at the Eiffel Tower, to the west, and the Pont de Sully, near Notre-Dame to the east. This is the Seine of romance; the commercial, industrial Seine farther east is left out.

  The Seine can evoke images of exotic places. Toward the end of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the unnamed narrator feels transported to a faraway place by the river: “It was a transparent and breathless night; I imagined that the Seine, flowing between the twin semicircles of the span and the reflection of its bridges, must look like the Bosporus. . . . The moon, narrow and curved like a sequin, seemed to have placed the sky of Paris beneath the oriental sign of the crescent.”

  Even when personal disaster strikes, the romance of the river endures. In her diaries, Anaïs Nin tells of receiving an official police order to move her rented houseboat out of Paris. It was late summer 1938, before the outbreak of World War II. Nin sailed away alone, staying on deck in the rain to watch Paris pass by. “I remembered my dream, of sailing for twenty years and all my friends standing on the shore asking me where I was going and when I would be back,” she wrote. “Here I was in reality, sailing past the sections of Paris so familiar to me, past apartment houses where I had lived, and streets I had so often explored. But I was not allowed to meditate on how dreams materialize, for the houseboat was taking in water, and I had to man the pump.”

  WHEN YOU MOVE TO PARIS from far away, it isn’t long before visitors start arriving—friends and family who want you to show them the city. Because my first apartment was near the Eiffel Tower, my usual tour started with an ascent to its top, which gave an aerial view of the Seine curving through Paris. When visitors wanted to take the perfect photo of the Eiffel Tower itself, I took them to the place du Trocadéro for a straight-on view of the tower with the river in the foreground. At the place de la Concorde, we circled Paris’s oldest monument, a pink granite obelisk sculpted more than three thousand years ago for the Temple of Luxor in Egypt. It arrived in Paris after a two-year journey on the waters of the Nile, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the English Channel, and, finally, the Seine. It was erected in 1836 at the spot where Louis XVI was beheaded during the French Revolution.

  At night, there was the requisite river tour on a bateau-mouche. It’s not a bargain, but a ride on the Seine after sunset is a no-fail crowdpleaser, and no visitor wants it to end. Movie buffs—and visitors of a certain age—remember that magic moment in Charade, Stanley Donen’s 1963 romantic thriller, when the murders are not yet solved but Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn find themselves falling in love on a tourist boat on the Seine. The boat trains its bright spotlight first on a couple kissing as their bodies lean against a tree, then on a second couple sitting on a park bench locked in a tight embrace. Audrey moves closer to Cary, lowers her voice, and says, “Hey, you don’t look so bad in this light.”

  “Why do you think I brought you here?” he replies, then leans in for a perfect ten-second movie kiss. Every time I took a bateau-mouche in my early, lonely days in Paris, I thought of Audrey Hepburn and hoped there would be a Cary Grant on the upper deck.

  Even Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was entranced by the romance of a nighttime boat ride on the river. When the queen and her husband made a royal state visit to France in 1957, President René Coty invited them on his presidential yacht for a “night promenade,” with fireworks over the river in her honor. Dressed in a gown of silver lamé and lace embroidered with diamonds and crystals, a matching stole trimmed in white fox, and a diamond tiara and necklace, the queen waved to the crowd of one million people who lined the riverbanks to see her and
pointed out the monuments of Paris to her husband as they passed. A wire service report captured her mood: “She gazed with wonder . . . delighted by the spectacle . . . her eyes sparkling like the diamonds in her tiara.”

  A map drawn by Mattéo Fiorini in 1550 depicting Paris when it was protected by a wall. Île de la Cité is at the center.

  THREE

  The Main Street of France

  Here is the entrance to paradise.

  —A VIKING LEADER

  discussing a plan to invade France via the Seine, Vikings, season three

  LATE ONE AFTERNOON in October 1784, a fifteen-year-old military student named Napoléon Bonaparte arrived in Paris for the first time. He came with fellow cadets from a regiment in Burgundy on a cheap passenger barge. They docked at the Quai des Célestins, on the Right Bank, and crossed the Seine at the Pont Marie to reach the Île Saint-Louis, where they dined at a small inn. Later that evening, Napoléon was drawn to a book he spotted at a bookseller’s stall along the river. It was the picaresque novel Gil Blas by Alain-René Lesage, which recounts the adventures of a naïve but clever young valet who becomes a landowning nobleman and learns wisdom and compassion along the way. As Napoléon had no money, a friend from school paid for it.

  From then on, the Seine meandered in and out of Napoléon’s life. Although the Seine is not France’s longest river—the Loire is some 30 percent longer—it has always had an outsized role in France, as well as in the global imagination. It is a thread running through every significant chapter of French history, and a symbol of the country’s identity as crucial as the tri-color flag or “La Marseillaise.”

  Napoléon intuitively felt the Seine’s force, and once he was in power, he altered the river’s life, defining it as the national river of France and launching ambitious public works projects to tame and reshape it. He saw it as a romantic inspiration as well as a practical asset and unifier of the nation. In a speech in Le Havre in 1802, he proclaimed its commercial importance as the connector of its three great port cities: “Le Havre, Rouen, and Paris are a single town, and the Seine is Main Street.”

  During Napoléon’s decade and a half in power, he oversaw the construction of three bridges and nearly ten thousand feet of stone quays in Paris. He eliminated about two hundred islands that had clogged the river between Rouen and Le Havre. He started, then abandoned, a scheme to make the Seine navigable westward from Châtillon-sur-Seine, the first substantial town from the river’s source, to Marcillysur-Seine, where vessels could already travel through Paris and all the way to the sea.

  In 1805, Napoléon used the Seine as the basis for street addresses, a system that is still in place today. Numbers start at the point closest to the river and increase as they move away—even numbers on the right, odd numbers on the left. For streets parallel to the river, the numbers get higher as they follow the river’s westward course. Whether they are conscious of it or not, Parisians still use the river as their guide. In my long, lazy walks as a newcomer, the Seine was my compass. I loved that I knew where I was going, or not going, thanks to the Seine. If I followed the river, I would never be lost.

  After his humiliating retreat from Russia, Napoléon won one of his last battles in 1814 at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, where the Yonne River flows into the Seine. A bronze statue of Napoléon on horseback stands at their meeting point, inscribed with a bold pronouncement: “Do not worry, my friends. The bullet that will kill me has not yet been cast.” His enemies captured Paris several weeks later, and Napoléon was forced to sign the Treaty of Fontainebleau, ending his rule as emperor of France.

  With his defeat at Waterloo in 1815 after a brief return to power, Napoléon retired to Château de Malmaison, his last residence in France, near the Seine, before his final exile to the island of Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic. Six years later, as he lay dying, he dictated a codicil to his will stating that he wanted his ashes to be buried near the river. His British captors denied the request, and he was interred more than four thousand miles away, on Saint Helena. The political winds changed, and in 1840, Napoléon’s remains were carried to Paris along the Seine in a brightly painted frigate. His body was placed in five successive coffins nested and sealed in a red quartzite sarcophagus in the Hôtel des Invalides. His words about wanting to rest along the Seine are inscribed at the entrance to his crypt: “I wish my ashes to rest on the banks of the Seine among the people of France, whom I loved so much.”

  ON A MAP, France is veined by 5,000 miles of waterways, 416 inland rivières, and 74 fleuves that flow into the sea. The fast-flowing Rhône cuts through the vineyards and olive groves of Provence; the sandy Loire is home to France’s grand châteaus; the Marne harbors the ghosts of World War I. The French so revere their rivers that they have named dozens of their administrative départements after them. In the gardens of Versailles, eight bronze sculptures personify the greatest of the country’s rivers and tributaries—the Seine and Marne, the Loire and Loiret, the Rhône and Saône, the Garonne and Dordogne. But it is the Seine, the river of Paris, that rules France.

  The Seine has been a source of food and water, an irrigator of crops, and a healer. It has been a killer, a crime scene, and a burial ground. It has been a sewer and waste dump for towns and cities, farmers and factory owners, tanners and butchers, washerwomen and bargemen. It has been an attack route in war, a promenade in peace, and a starting point for global exploration. It has been a practical powerhouse for industry and a path of transit, ferrying foods across its currents. Finally, it has been the keeper of the secrets of French history.

  For two millennia, before the railroads and highways transformed the movement of cargo, grain moved downriver toward the sea, while wine moved upriver to Paris on barges. An 1809 gastronomic map of France—the earliest of its kind—shows images of the bounty of the river and the land along its shores: trout, catfish, gudgeon, crayfish, eels, squash, pears, eggs, cheese, grapes, partridge, veal, ducks, chickens, pigs, and hares.

  The Seine runs through or along the borders of dozens of towns and villages. Three great cities—Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre—serve as the anchors Napoléon evoked. Like blood pumping through the arteries of the landscape, the river’s basin feeds a quarter of the country’s landmass and population. According to France’s National Geographic Institute, the Seine flows under more than two hundred bridges and is fed by forty-five tributaries.

  It no longer makes the trip it once did, roaming wildly and freely. Its role as a conduit of navigation, trade, industry, leisure, and beauty physically transformed it. Over the centuries—extravagantly under Napoléon but starting long before him—it has been narrowed, enlarged, tamed, deepened, embanked, dammed, canalized, landscaped, dredged. Its lakes have been filled in, its islands dug out, its swamps drained, its banks lined with concrete. The construction of its quays in Paris began in 1312, and they have been renovated again and again ever since. Some French historians say that when they look at the Seine, they see a botched makeover, like a woman’s face that’s been lifted too many times. For me, however, it is an organic form that changes color, from molasses to pewter, from emerald to celadon, and turns a hundred shades in between as it works its way to the sea.

  Geography has made the Seine an elusive companion. As a body of water, it resists easy categorization. It is hard to measure its length with precision. If the Seine ran in a straight line, its distance from the source to the sea would be 250 miles; because of its capricious twists and turns, it is almost double that length.

  A woman by the Seine, reading a book. ANDREW PLUMP.

  THE RIVER STARTS as pure spring water, bubbling up from fissures in an obscure plain in northeast Burgundy. From there, it flows west, cutting a deep trench through the dry chalk plateau of Champagne country and the medieval city of Troyes. It swells as it absorbs other waterways, showing off and then abandoning different landscapes on its banks: cultivated fields, dark green thickets, dense woods, spongy marshes, grassy meadows, white limestone cliffs speckled with bl
ack flint. A children’s geography book from 1926 describes the Seine as the “most regular and most navigable” river in France, with a gentle drop along its route—only 1,465 feet until it heads triumphantly into Paris almost midway on its journey. At the city’s far western edge, it becomes lazy and winding, looping and twisting and losing its sense of direction as it continues a northwesterly course across the flat country of Normandy. At Rouen, about seventy-five miles northwest of Paris, it becomes a maritime river, deep and wide enough for oceangoing ships. Fifty-six miles farther along, it opens to a large estuary, a huge expanse of water that acts as a transition zone between the river and the sea. At the end of the estuary, the Seine empties into the English Channel at Le Havre.

  The official verdict on the Seine’s navigability comes from Voies Navigables de France (VNF), the public institution that manages France’s eighty-two navigable cours d’eau, or water routes, forty-seven of them canals. It publishes trilingual boaters’ bibles in French, English, and German, with colored maps showing every curve, island, town, park, bridge, silt deposit, dam, lock, tributary, and rest stop, as well as photos and descriptions of tourist sites. No serious boater would be without them.

  Most of the Seine is navigable for small recreational craft. But commercial navigation officially begins at Marcilly-sur-Seine, about a hundred miles from the source and seventy miles from Châtillon. There the Seine takes on a succession of identities: Petite Seine (Small Seine) from Marcilly-sur-Seine to its junction with the Yonne River, Haute Seine (High Seine) to Paris, Basse Seine (Low Seine) to Rouen, and Seine Maritime (Maritime Seine) to the sea.