A dose of bottled water from the Seine would let you live to be 150, they claimed; why not buy some? A seventeenth-century poet who went by the name Sieur Berthod poked fun at their pitch: “I have, Monsieur, a very good remedy. . . . My balm is a cure for stomach indigestion, for eye pain. My elixir is marvelous. It would bleach the devil’s skin.”
LIKE THE EIFFEL TOWER TODAY, the Pont Neuf became part of the urban iconography, featured in paintings, engravings, drawings, and prints. Some of the first daguerreotypes in the late 1830s used the Pont Neuf as a subject. One image, portraying the bridge’s statue of Henri IV on horseback, inadvertently captured a workman resting near its base, making it one of the first photographic images (perhaps the very first) of a living human being.
The Pont Neuf was restored and reconstructed several times. A bronze statue of Henri IV from 1618 (the first equestrian statue erected in Paris) was melted down to make cannons during the French Revolution, only to be reborn in 1818, when Louis XVIII built a copy of the original. The mascarons have also been reconstructed since the 1850s, bearing silent witness to Henri’s expansive vision.
The structure itself has always been a magnet for celebratory art installations. When Louis XIV married the infanta Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660, for example, they arrived at the Pont Neuf to discover a one-hundred-foot structure built in their honor on the place Dauphine just east of the bridge. Atop an obelisk was a tapestry of a chariot carrying the king and queen pulled by a rooster (a symbol of France) and a lion (a symbol of Spain), and above that a statue of Atlas carrying a globe decorated with fleurs-de-lis.
More than three centuries later, in 1963, Greek painter and sculptor Nonda built, exhibited, and lived on the Pont Neuf in a Trojan horse he created from steel, wood, and newspaper. In 1985, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude covered the bridge in 450,000 square feet of silky woven polyamide fabric the color of golden sandstone. Nine years later, the Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada decorated the bridge with thirty-two thousand pots of pink, red, and yellow begonias.
The bridge looks much as it did when Henri first rode his horse across it. Friends, lovers, families, musicians, and artists still create their own personal spaces on stone benches built into the semicircular spaces that once served as stalls selling everyday goods—books, medicines, toys—a precursor of a mini shopping mall. Merchants are still around, but these days they are selling tours.
The tour guides on the Pont Neuf compete for space as they tell their stories. One cold Saturday afternoon, two guides led separate groups in different versions of Henri IV’s assassination. They gave performances in English with enormous verve and varying doses of veracity.
Tour Guide One: “Henri IV gave a little bit of his wealth back to his people. But Henri IV was murdered. Why kill one of the good kings of this nation? Yes, he was a good king, but he was a Protestant king who became a Catholic so that he could govern over a Catholic nation. Eventually one of those fanatical Catholics decided to kill the King. François Ravaillac was his name. The king was in his carriage. Ravaillac hid behind a building with a dagger. He opened the door of the carriage and stabbed the king twice in his chest. One thrust of the knife went straight to his heart. There you go.”
Tour Guide Two: “But, guys, people loved this king. They admired him. Unfortunately, the king was murdered. Why did they murder such a great king, guys? Guys, he was a Protestant. This man turned himself into a Catholic. It was as simple as that. Everyone believed in his change of heart except one man: François Ravaillac. . . . François says, No way. Right in front of the guards, he stabs the king over and over. He is able to stab him three times. Three times—in the stomach, the chest, and the neck.”
How was Ravaillac punished?
Tour Guide One undersold the gore: “He had to receive the worst punishment possible because he had committed the worst crime. You couldn’t just cut off his head. That would have been too easy. It had to be done little by little. I’m cutting the story short. It’s called a cliffhanger.”
Tour Guide Two oversold it: “He didn’t get his head cut off. He got quartered by horses. That means they tied his four limbs to four different horses. They wanted him to suffer, so they chose the oldest and the sickest horses. It didn’t stop there. The crowd ripped his limbs off and then rushed to his body and started eating his flesh. To the bone. They chewed, and they swallowed, and they digested his flesh. Enough for disgusting stories!”
The truth is more complicated. Henri IV had been the ultimate pragmatist. He converted to Catholicism to unify France after the Wars of Religion, granted religious freedom and certain civil rights to Protestants, achieved peace at home and abroad, eliminated the national debt, and brought a degree of economic prosperity to his people. Henri had survived two dozen known plots against his life, but this time, as he was traveling from the Louvre to the Arsenal, his royal carriage was caught in a traffic jam on the rue de la Ferronnerie, near the city’s main market, and his luck ran out. François Ravaillac, a thirty-two-year-old fanatical Catholic and failed monk suffering from hallucinations, was waiting for him. Ravaillac jumped onto the running board of the king’s carriage and stabbed him three times with a kitchen knife he’d stolen from an inn nearby. After a ten-day trial, Ravaillac was condemned to death and taken, almost naked, to the place de Grève, now the square in front of Paris City Hall. His executioners plunged the arm he had used to stab the king into burning sulfur; ripped flesh from his chest with iron pincers; and seared his arms with molten lead and boiling oil and resin before he was drawn and quartered (a punishment reserved for regicides). A frenzied mob tore and chopped his flesh into pieces. One eyewitness said that a woman ate his flesh. The mob carried his body parts through the streets and burned them, throwing his ashes to the wind.
Visitors may not know the history of Henri IV or the Pont Neuf, but many are likely to know about the grillwork around the statue of Henri as a place where couples proclaimed their everlasting love by attaching metal padlocks. They began putting locks on the Pont Neuf after they were banned from doing so on the Pont des Arts, a spindly, fragile footbridge that soon became unable to bear the weight of all this love. Lock vendors would pop up on the Pont Neuf when you least expected them, moving easily among the gaggles of tourists, and flashing their bits of metal with cunning and caution. Eventually, the locks burdened the sturdier Pont Neuf as well, weighing nearly enough to send pieces of the mesh panels crashing onto passing boats below. In 2018, the city fought back by removing the locks and covering the grillwork of the bridge with heavy corrugated plastic barriers. Though the vendors have now moved a few bridges away, some couples still hang their locks on the spaces between the barriers, on the lampposts, and on the heavy iron rings for mooring boats at the bridge’s base.
Lovers’ locks on the Pont des Arts. Several years ago, Paris removed the locks and banned people from adding new ones. GABRIELA SCIOLINO PLUMP.
STUDY PARIS THROUGH THE PONT NEUF and the river’s other bridges, and you have a mosaic of the city’s history and architecture. The Parisii built crude wooden bridges from the Île de la Cité to the riverbanks. Gates and towers closed the bridges and helped defend the island. The ancient imperial Romans built solid bridges of timber and stone in expanding their city, first to the Left Bank, an area that was less likely to flood because of its elevation. In contrast, the Right Bank was a broad swamp. In the ninth century, the Vikings attacked Paris several times. Unlike other invaders, Vikings waged war not on land but on water. Their great military advantage lay in their boats, which could move men and arms quickly over long distances. During the final attack in 885, fortified bridges linking the Île de la Cité to both banks stopped the Viking fleet of seven hundred ships from moving farther upriver. In 886, when the Seine, filled with debris, overflowed and washed away the city’s Petit Pont, the Vikings were able to invade Paris. (After a year of fighting, they agreed to withdraw in exchange for seven hundred pounds of silver.)
Long before Henri IV,
Parisians thought of their city as three parts: “the island” (the city itself), “the area beyond the big bridge” (the Right Bank), and “the area beyond the small bridge” (the Left Bank). It was only in the Middle Ages, as the wetlands were filled in, that the city expanded more rapidly and extensively on the Right Bank.
The bridges stretch themselves over the river as if they are posing for passersby. Every one of them has its own story, structure, composition, and character. The Pont de la Concorde, in front of the National Assembly, was built during the French Revolution using stones of the demolished Bastille, “so that the people could forever trample on the old fortress,” according to Rodolphe Perronet, the bridge’s engineer.
The Pont de la Tournelle, which links the Île Saint-Louis to the Quai de la Tournelle, on the Left Bank, is anchored by a 1928 statue of Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. Sitting atop a tall, stark pylon on the southeastern bank of the bridge, she is portrayed as a young woman, her hands on the shoulders of a child who represents the city. Geneviève is one of the most intriguing Parisian saints. Combining ruthless negotiating skills with mystical piety and fasting (she was probably anorexic), she claimed that God told her that Attila and his Mongol hordes advancing from the east would spare Paris from massacre and destruction. The people of Paris considered her either a lunatic or a fake, until Attila moved south. Then, and forever more, she was heralded as the savior of Paris.
The double-decker Pont de Bir-Hakeim carries the No. 6 Métro high above the Seine, making it the most visually rewarding Métro trip in Paris. For French director, screenwriter, and producer Cédric Klapisch, who celebrates Paris in his films, the experience has a mystical feel. “When I’m crossing the Bir-Hakeim bridge on the Métro, I can’t stop myself from having a vision of ecstasy,” he said. “There is the Eiffel Tower and the Seine, . . . the Haussmannian buildings, the insane high-rises. It’s a mixture of time and space. I’m moving forward in beauty.”
Then there is the most elegant of Paris bridges: the Pont Alexandre III, a Belle Époque confection linking the Invalides to the Champs-Élysées. Built for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900, it was named in honor of the father of the visiting Russian czar, Nicholas II, as a symbol of the emerging diplomatic alliance between France and Russia. An aesthetic requirement produced an engineering breakthrough. The Pont Alexandre III had to be low enough to preserve the view of the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais from the Invalides on the other side of the river. Large chunks of the bridge, including sections of its single spanning arch, were prefabricated off-site in strong molded metal. Two monumental stone pillars topped by shiny gold-winged horses support each end of the bridge. Sculptures of full-figured, bare-breasted nymphs look out at the river from their perches at the center of the bridge: two nymphs of the Seine flanking the Parisian coat of arms face downstream, and two nymphs of the Russian river Neva flanking the Imperial Russian coat of arms face upstream. Gilded candelabras, trumpet-blowing angels, lion-taming cherubs, dolphins, starfish, sea monsters, and birds proclaim joy.
Within the city limits of Paris, thirty-five main bridges cross the Seine. There are thirty-seven in all if one counts the ring road around Paris that crosses the river upstream at Charenton/Bercy and downstream at Saint-Cloud/Issy. GLZ.COM.
Some bridges are named for French military victories. Bir-Hakeim memorializes the Libyan oasis where Free French forces repulsed two German enemy divisions in 1942; Iéna and Austerlitz were sites of Napoléon’s triumphs; and Alma, a Crimean War victory. Others are named after famous people: a king (Louis-Philippe), an engineer (Christophe Marie), a president of France (Charles de Gaulle), and a president of Senegal (Léopold-Sédar-Senghor).
The newest bridge, a pedestrian span named after the twentieth-century feminist, novelist, and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, has no pillars or visible sign of support, although it spans one of the widest stretches of the Seine. Asymmetrical and eclectic, it is an arched bridge and a suspension bridge in one.
One summer, on the pedestrian route where the Pont d’Arcole joins the Île de la Cité to the Right Bank, a virtual-reality viewing station gave the spectator a free, 360-degree panorama of the scene as it looked in 1628. Focus on the Seine, and it is crowded with fishing boats and cargo barges. Swing the viewing station around, and you can see cobblestoned streets and hear a cacophony of street sounds—cawing gulls and merchants promoting their wares.
Bridges are magnets for different sectors of the public. The Pont des Arts links the Louvre and the Institut de France, home of the Académie Française and the Académie des Beaux-Arts; it’s a place for people to picnic. Not far away, the Pont Saint-Louis, connecting the Île de la Cité and the Île Saint-Louis, is an open-air stage for musicians, especially Americans playing jazz. The pea-green late-nineteenth-century Pont Mirabeau, at the western end of Paris, honors Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, the Count of Mirabeau, a leader of the French Revolution’s early years. But the bridge is widely known because of one of France’s most famous poems, “Le Pont Mirabeau” by Guillaume Apollinaire; it is a place of pilgrimage for writers and lovers of poetry.
I LOVE THE PONT NEUF because it holds a secret. Behind the statue of Henri IV are staircases that descend two flights. They open out onto a spit of land at the westernmost tip of the Île de la Cité, the Square du Vert-Galant. “Vert-Galant” (which can translate to “Old Charmer” or “Gay Blade”) was France’s nickname for Henri IV. He was twice married, had four important mistresses known as “favorites,” countless one-night stands, and more than a dozen—and perhaps as many as twenty-two—children. He is still so deeply appreciated in France that in 2010, to mark the four hundredth anniversary of his death, Le Figaro published a special supplement on his life and legacy. The cover declared, “The adventurer, the seducer, the king. Long Live Henri IV!”
Paris insiders use the Vert-Galant as a place to picnic, talk and even sleep. Unlike many other Paris parks, which close from dusk to dawn, this one is open all night long. When the river is high, the branches of the weeping willow planted in cobblestones at the tip of the square caress the surface of the Seine. You can come close enough to reach out and touch the water.
The Pont Neuf is also the subject of my favorite painting of a bridge over the Seine. Unlike so many paintings of the river that depict its water glistening in morning light, Le Pont-Neuf, la nuit captures its night magic. Albert Marquet painted it between 1935 and 1939 from his apartment on a quay facing the Pont Neuf and the Île de la Cité. The sky and water are black; the bridge and the cars crossing it shimmer in the glow of yellow and red electric lights. To the north, the ten-story, turn-of-the-twentieth-century department store La Samaritaine reigns over the scene.
During his lifetime, Marquet traveled far to paint—to Italy, England, Sweden, Germany, Morocco, and Algeria—but he kept coming back to the Seine, studying it obsessively for decades through the windows of the different apartments where he lived. One of his constant subjects was the Pont Neuf; he was working on a painting of the bridge covered in snow shortly before his death in 1947. “His balcony was his atelier,” Sophie Krebs, curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, told me when the museum mounted a massive retrospective of his work. The movement, colors, and shadows of the water mesmerized Marquet. Many of his Seine paintings were done in muted grays and browns, in dense fog and under clouds. But in his large canvas of the Pont Neuf, painted as he looked from a window of his sixth-floor apartment on the Left Bank, his final home in Paris, the bright nocturnal lights of the bridge pop. “Look carefully, and you can see that it’s raining,” Krebs said. “The sidewalk and the roadway are wet. And look at the lights reverberating on the bridge. It’s astonishing. There is no equivalent anywhere.”
I asked Krebs if she knew the location of the apartment where Marquet painted this view. “On the Quai des Grands-Augustins where it meets rue Dauphine,” she told me.
“Do you know who lives there now?” I asked.
“Som
eone very important.”
“Could you find out for me?”
“I don’t think so.”
I let the matter rest for a few weeks, then asked her again. This time she promised to search the files in case the owner had loaned any personal works or documents to the exhibition, though she thought it was hopeless. But lo and behold, one day Krebs called with the name of the important man living in the apartment. I recognized it. Not only that, I had met the man and his wife at a dinner party years before. The hostess was a close mutual friend. I asked her if she would intercede on my behalf, so I could see the view. Bien sûr.
Monsieur and Madame Y invited me over for a drink, under one condition: I had to promise to keep their identities and address secret. I asked if I could bring along the curator of the exhibition. Bien sûr once again.
When we arrived, we found ourselves in a long living room decorated in designer modern furniture in shades of beige. Large and important contemporary paintings hung on the walls, framed under a high ceiling. Three tall, wide doors opened to balconies facing the Seine.
The couple invited us into a bedroom and showed us the balcony Marquet loved. “You can see Notre-Dame from here,” said Monsieur Y. “There was a photograph in the exhibition of Marquet taken from this balcony!”
I recognized the balcony, with its wrought-iron railing, from the black-and-white photograph of Marquet that had hung in the museum. Standing in the foreground of the photo on a gray day shrouded in fog, he gazes out at the river, holding what looks like a notebook or small sketchbook in his left hand.
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