The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  According to the VNF, a barge of one thousand tons or more can move upstream from Le Havre through Rouen, Paris, and beyond to Nogent-sur-Seine, where the river gets too narrow to accommodate such large craft. The barge would travel precisely 323.83 miles for two days, one hour, and one minute and would transit through twenty-one locks. (There are traffic jams, of course, and boats sometimes line up for hours waiting to pass through the locks.)

  Many people who live near the Seine claim that it is an impostor, traveling under a false name. A global geographic convention dictates that when two rivers meet and form one channel—a “confluence”—the river with the stronger annual flow trumps the weaker one and snatches the name. When the Seine gets to the town of Marcilly-sur-Seine, one hundred miles west of the source, it joins the Aube. The Aube is stronger, so it should have trumped the Seine.

  Even if the Aube had won the name contest, it would have lost it a bit farther downstream at Montereau-Fault-Yonne, 140 miles northwest of the source and sixty miles southeast of Paris. There the Seine is joined by the Yonne, which is more powerful and nearly twice as wide. So the Seine should have ended in obscurity there, and the Yonne should have been the river that moved on through Paris to the sea.

  The French love to argue about their history, and the debate over the name of the Seine continues today. In 2018, the local newspaper L’Yonne républicaine stated unequivocally that “according to the rules of hydrography, it is the Yonne that flows in Paris.” The article cited scholarly geography tomes as proof of this “injustice.”

  French geographers point out that the “confluence” rule is often ignored. According to the geographer Yves Boquet, the Rhine River should have been called the Aare, the Mississippi the Ohio, and the Ganges the Yamuna. Maps that accurately measured the flow and size of rivers were drawn only in the mid-eighteenth century, and who would have dared change the Seine’s name then?

  The consensus among geographers and historians is that the Seine stayed the Seine because of its aura of holiness. Its source was the site of a temple and a place of pilgrimage dedicated to a healing goddess, even before the Romans came and conquered Gaul. Under Roman rule, both the goddess and her river were called Sequana, a Latin name that may have originated from the Celtic (or Gallic) word siquana, mentioned in the writings of Julius Caesar.

  According to one interpretation, Sequana’s name means “sacred river,” from the Celtic (or Gallic) words sawk (holy) and onna (water). But according to another, it could mean “winding” or “tortuous,” evoking the path of a snake, from the Celtic word squan. Or sin-ane (slow river), or maybe sôgh-ane (peaceful river). In any case, the Romans Latinized the name and made it Sequana.

  Over time—although geographers do not know exactly when or how—the name Sequana morphed into the word Seine. And the Seine reigned triumphant. “Why weren’t one or the other [rivers] considered the mother branch of the river, capable of transmitting the name?” asked Michel Grandin in his 1993 book Rivières de France. He answered his own question: “Because the Seine is a sacred river, whose source is of divine origin.”

  PART TWO

  Westward from Burgundy

  Signs mark the source of the Seine at the Plateau of Langres in Burgundy. The center sign indicates that the source belongs to the city of Paris. ANDREW PLUMP.

  FOUR

  The Ancient Source

  The Seine is a silent river. She has no

  torrents or waterfalls. She sinks and

  meanders and has great difficulty

  getting to the sea. She takes her time.

  I have lived Sequana from the inside.

  She has touched me and talked to me

  even in her silence.

  —ANTOINE HOAREAU

  on the origins of the Seine

  THE FRENCH LEARN AS CHILDREN where the Seine begins. They memorize the fact in geography class: “The Seine takes its source at the Plateau of Langres.” But the source itself is hard to find. GPS and cell phone service go dead in that forgotten corner of Burgundy. Except for warnings of deer crossings, few signposts dot the back roads that wind through farm fields and tree-covered valleys. No train passes through, and Dijon, the closest metropolis, is about an hour’s drive southeast.

  Saint-Germain-Source-Seine, the tiny village closest to the springs that give birth to the Seine, is a victim of the erosion of small-town France. Its church is closed, its cemetery crumbling, its shops shuttered. On paper, Saint-Germain-Source-Seine no longer exists; it has merged administratively with another village down the road. But the people who live in and around it are proud ambassadors of the source of the Seine, especially on holidays. One year, Antoine Hoareau, a self-taught historian of the river’s origins who lives nearby, invited me to celebrate Bastille Day with the local community and then see the source with him as a guide. I drove there from Paris with Andy, my husband of more than thirty years and my partner in exploring France.

  We sat outdoors near Saint-Germain-Source-Seine’s town square, at long tables under a tent, for a three-hour lunch served with a sparkling pink crémant to start, followed by a local red. I sidestepped the 60-proof absinthe, but when an older man with a charming smile poured me a double shot of eau de vie de poire that he’d made at home with local pears and grain alcohol, how could I say no? The crowd belted out renditions of “La Marseillaise” and the chanson ban bourguignon, a regional tune for festive occasions involving hand-waving and clapping. When lunch ended and games of boules began, Hoareau was ready for our adventure.

  Hoareau, who is in his thirties, works full-time as a city official in Dijon, but the origins of the Seine are his lifelong passion. Since 2003, he has been a leader of the seventy-member Friends of the Sources of the Seine, a group founded in 1992. He has written a short book and participated in television documentaries on the subject.

  We drove along a narrow tree-lined road, stopping when we came to a sign that read, “City of Paris, Domaine of the Sources of the Seine.” Ignoring the intermittent rain, the three of us followed a flight of concrete steps down a short hill. A ten-acre park with picnic tables, benches, garbage bins, and a gravel walking path awaited us.

  “You are now back in Paris,” said Hoareau.

  Paris? The central point of Paris—located at Notre-Dame—is 178 miles away by car and 157 on foot, so why is a piece of it here? Launching into a history lesson, Hoareau explained that Napoléon III was inspired by the history of the Roman Empire after its conquest of Gaul. Incorporating the source of the Seine into the city of Paris was his way of enlarging the symbolic power of his reign. He ordered Baron Haussmann to define the source of the river and mark the place with a grotto and fountain. In 1864, the Municipal Council of Paris bought the springs and the surrounding land, built a park, planted fir trees, and declared it part of Paris, sort of a disconnected arrondissement. With a budget of about €25,000 a year, Paris pays to mow the lawns, clear the trash, repair the paths, and cut down dead trees at a site that few Parisians visit; only about twenty thousand people in total come each year.

  Hoareau led us to the grotto at the far southern end of the site. It was pieced together with stones taken from the surrounding fields and shelters a graceless stone sculpture of a nymph. A local artist, François Jouffroy, chiseled the first statue of her in 1868. A plaque credited Napoléon III with constructing the grotto for the city of Paris, because “Paris owes its prosperity to the Seine.”

  Stone sculpture of a nymph in a grotto created during the reign of Napoléon III at the “official” spot where the Seine River begins. ANDREW PLUMP.

  The 1868 nymph did not fare well. During World War I, according to the Association des Sources de la Seine archives, American soldiers used her for target practice. In 1934, a Dijon sculptor named Paul Auban redesigned and rebuilt her, without noticeable improvement.

  The nymph is naked except for a cloth draped over her right leg, her pubic area covered by a bunch of grapes. (We were in Burgundy wine country, after all.) She recl
ines on a rock in the middle of the grotto. Her breasts defy gravity. She holds a cornucopia in her right hand and gazes over her shoulder.

  “Her feet are too big,” said Hoareau. “And her hands—they are not even trucker’s hands. They’re worse! And her expression! She stares at the Seine with a silent, masculine glare.”

  “You don’t like her?” I asked.

  “It is not that I do not like her,” he said. “But she is a pure invention. We are in the typical style of the nineteenth century. So there has to be a statue of a female creature, with a voluptuous body, posed in a languorous way, with a cornucopia in her hand to symbolize the wealth that the Seine will bring to all the people who live on its banks. Worse, she is confused with Sequana, and she is not Sequana.”

  Even before Rome ruled Gaul, pilgrims came to the river’s source to worship at Sequana’s temple, traveling with their offerings from as far as the English Channel. They believed the temple was a sacred place, capable of delivering miracles. According to a pagan legend, the pure water rose up from an invisible spring, imbuing the site with supernatural powers.

  But that is history, and nothing about the current grotto is authentic. Hoareau pointed to its base, where water bubbled up from a small hole covered with a round metal grate. “That’s the ‘official’ source,” he said, his voice dripping with derision. That little hole in a man-made limestone grotto in the middle of nowhere is where the Seine begins? It felt improbable. But it was the most remote location to which the Seine could be traced.

  Tourists throw coins into the grotto’s pool and make a wish. Hoareau recalled a story from his youth. He and his cousin Anne-Charlotte were fourteen when the euro was about to replace the French franc on New Year’s Day 1999. The two teenagers received euro coins already in circulation as presents on Christmas and rushed to the source. “We had a small pouch with the first euros ever made,” Hoareau said. “I think we were the first people to throw euros into the source of the Seine!”

  I threw a two-euro coin into the pool and wished hard.

  From the grotto, a pipe carries the Seine’s water underground through a field of grass and moss, until it emerges a few hundred feet away, under a stone footbridge. A caretaker who once lived there built the bridge, the first one encountered by the Seine on its westward journey, and the smallest.

  As we made our way from the grotto into the field, we passed a modern sculpture of Sequana, created by a local sculptor named Eric de Laclos. Bits of straw and small plants lay at her feet, offerings, perhaps, from modern-day Druids, descendants of the religious, political, and medical authorities who conducted purification rituals at the source of the Seine in pre-Roman times.

  The ground was wet and spongy beneath our feet. Hoareau said that other underground springs moved in a network, flowing not from the mountains but from reservoirs deep below the surface. “Look around,” he told us. “The great paradox at the sources of the Seine is that we do not see one gush of water. There’s water all around our feet. There is the one we see here, but turn around, and look—there’s another spring, at the foot of the little hill there. Then there are two others in the grass.” The number of underground springs erupting above ground varies, depending on the season and the rainfall. There are seven permanent sources, but as many as fifteen sources in early springtime.

  The site sits in a narrow recess in the limestone Plateau of Langres, which connects the Vosges and Morvan Mountains and dates to the Jurassic period, roughly 200 million years ago. Fresh water flows from higher ground into deep underground reservoirs. Below the soil is a layer of clay and below that a layer of limestone. The limestone filters the water, the clay tightens, and the water forces its way through the surface. When the Seine overflowed during the flood of 2016, an excess of water turned the field into a giant pool.

  So the Seine has not one source but many that spring from this concentrated area in Source-Seine. “There is a proverb that says it’s the little streams that make the big rivers, and so the Seine starts like that,” Hoareau explained. “It is pure, it is beautiful, and it is a little bit magical.”

  As we walked, the landscape changed from a marshy open meadow into a tangle of reeds, weeds, and trees. Hoareau led us on a narrow path under a canopy of green. Here, the Seine was a collection of clear, shallow pools in an emerald-green swamp flowing into a narrow creek. Hoareau stopped at one of the pools and dared me to drink.

  “Is the water clean?” I asked.

  “Ah, yes,” he replied.

  I tried to stall. I knew that half the drinking water of Paris comes from the Seine and Marne rivers, but that water is carefully filtered and purified. “Is this considered the water of the Seine?” I asked.

  “It is the water of the Seine, of course! You can drink the water of the Seine here! Ah, yes!”

  “Pesticides?”

  “There are no pesticides.”

  Hoareau explained that visitors have drunk from this spring since antiquity. “It is very good and fresh,” he said. “We are raised on the water of the Seine. Many Parisians envy us!”

  Indeed, this was not Paris, where the river is murky brown much of the time. To prove his point, Hoareau bent over, cupped his hands over a pool of water bubbling up from the ground, scooped, and slurped.

  Andy and I followed suit. The water was neither chalky, like Evian, nor metallic, like Aquafina. It was sweet and pure with no trace of calcium or sodium, and certainly no chlorine taste or smell of Parisian tap water.

  “You can now say that you drank the water of the Seine at its source!” Hoareau proclaimed.

  The water bubbling up from the ground converged into a narrow stream a few feet away, the first evidence of the Seine as a river. “What you’re about to do—you’re going to physically straddle the river,” Hoareau said. “Put one foot on the right bank and the other on the left at the same time.” I did so, my feet sinking into the muddy marsh.

  The story of the Gallo-Roman temple begins with the Celts—or, since we’re in France, the Celtic Gauls, the people who inhabited Gaul before the Romans came and conquered. The Gauls believed that the spring had healing powers. Hoareau led us to a channel made of flagstones that carried water into a catchment basin hollowed out from a stone slab. “You see that bubbling water there, on the stones? Do you realize where you are?” he asked.

  I did not. He said we were at an important site of what could have been a small, square temple sacred to the Gauls before the Romans came and built their own. He pointed out a stone at our feet that would have been one corner of the temple, then walked on and pointed out the three others. “It is almost certain—almost—that if we dug here, we could maybe find holes for the foundations of pillars and entrances that would allow us to verify that the Gauls already worshipped at the sources of the Seine.” he said. “We could really discover so many things!”

  WHEN THE ROMANS CONQUERED the Gauls, they integrated earlier Gallic cultural practices into their own and built a new temple complex on the original site. They enlarged the spring where the goddess Sequana was worshipped into a grand, three-hundred-foot-long healing complex and built terraces, buildings, and courtyards on the marshland. One of the buildings contained small alcoves where pagan priests may have lived and received pilgrims in need of spiritual guidance and medical care.

  A narrow, man-made stone trench channeled rivulets of Seine water from its source through the temple complex and into its heart: an oval cement healing basin of water. Pilgrims came to drink and bathe in the water, deposit offerings, say prayers, seek help, and give thanks. There was a dormitory where they could stay and rest for several days. Perhaps they believed that Sequana would appear to them in a dream; perhaps she would deliver them from pain or disease. The temple integrated the ebbs and flows of the river so that it literally wound its way through the architecture. Then it turned and moved toward Paris.

  The remnants of the Gallo-Roman temple should be the star attraction of the site. But the sanctuary sits forlorn and
forgotten at the bottom of the park, off-limits to visitors and buried under marshy land choked with brambles and reeds. It has been closed to the public since the last archaeological dig, in 1967. Informational panels attached to a low, nondescript metal fence announce a “protected archaeological site” with “access forbidden.”

  But no one else was around. Hoareau climbed over the fence and told us to follow. “Even if we do not see very much, we have to go and look,” he said.

  We climbed over into forbidden territory.

  As we walked on, Hoareau showed us two steps carved from one block of stone. It was there that a large stone statue of Sequana is thought to have stood. The temple was big business in Roman times, not unlike the shrine of Lourdes in southwest France today. A great esplanade, surrounded with workshops and boutiques, most likely served as a welcome center. Artisans crafted and sold ex-votos—votive offerings—to the traveling pilgrims. These included objects carved from stone and oak, modeled in clay, or hammered in bronze or base metal. They were made to represent parts of the body that needed healing. The pilgrim would explain the location of the ailment, the artisan would fabricate a votive of the affected body part, and then the pilgrim would throw the totem into the sacred pool.

  By the fourth or fifth century, the temple had been desecrated and destroyed. The priests and artisans had fled. A century later, Christian church councils campaigned to eliminate pagan practices like the worship of Sequana, wrote Simone-Antoinette Deyts, the archaeologist who studied the site for years, in Scientific American in 1971. She quoted a sixth-century directive that stated, “Destroy the springs and the groves they dare call sacred. . . . Be certain you will be cured by no other means than by invoking the cross of Christ.”

  The church decided that the Seine needed a Christian saint, not a pagan goddess, as inspiration. It identified a local nobleman turned monk named Sigo and called him Seigne, after the river.