On the quay on the other side of the river, I could see the Louvre and the blue flags of Paris Plages, the artificial beach installation that springs up by the river every summer. The Sacré-Coeur Basilica atop the hill of Montmartre rose in the distance. Alas, the right half of the Pont Neuf was blocked by dense green foliage that hadn’t been there in Marquet’s day. And yes, this was Paris before sunset, not Paris lit up at night.
But it was still Marquet’s Seine, at the very heart of the city. And some things about the Seine do not change. A working barge moved slowly upstream. On the Pont Neuf, the bronze statue of Henri IV shone bright in the early evening sun.
A diver pushing off into the Seine from a diving board at Pont Alexandre III as part of Paris’s bid for the 2024 Summer Olympics. City officials hope to clean the river enough to hold the distance swimming, triathlon, and other water events in the Seine. IRIS SAMUELS.
TEN
Clean Enough for a Swim?
My aunt used to live in Paris. . . . She
told us that she jumped into the river
once. Barefoot. She smiled.
—MIA
in the film La La Land,
as portrayed by Emma Stone
THE DIVING BOARD on the Pont Alexandre III was twelve meters high—two meters higher than official Olympic standards. But one hot and sunny day in June, the divers plunged, one by one, twisting, jackknifing, somersaulting, and backflipping into the water. Their target was not a pristine, chlorinated diving well but the murky, mud-bottomed Seine.
Paris has prohibited swimming in the Seine since 1923, although the ban is enforced only haphazardly. A trove of black-and-white photographs proves that river swimming continued in the heart of Paris, in full public view, through the 1950s. Afterward, swimmers largely abandoned the river because of the health hazards from chemical and bacterial pollution and the physical danger of erratic currents and boat traffic.
These divers didn’t care. Their dives were acts of showmanship and defiance.
“I thought it would be very dirty, but it wasn’t bad at all,” said Alexis Jandard, a young Olympic hopeful from Lyon. “I felt the pollution of the water a little on my face, but that’s all. What scared me was the blackness. You’re diving into darkness. You have no idea if you’re going to hit bottom.”
Laura Marino, a twenty-four-year-old diver living in Paris, said the Seine was pure bliss compared to the pool she had to deal with at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. There, the water turned into an emerald green swamp after a contractor dumped eighty liters of hydrogen peroxide into the diving well. “Everyone says the Seine is dirty, but it was terrific!” she said. “What an honor to promote our sport surrounded by the great monuments of Paris.”
The Olympic-style diving event was part of a sixty-million-euro campaign organized by Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo to persuade the International Olympic Committee to choose Paris as the site for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Over two days in June 2017, Paris City Hall put on a show of thirty-three Olympic sports. Command central was the Pont Alexandre III, in the heart of touristic Paris. A floating one-hundred-meter orange running track was attached to the west side of the bridge, the Eiffel Tower strategically visible in the background for the perfect photo frame. It was a publicity stunt on a scale I had never seen in all the years I had lived in Paris.
The most colorful event was a flotilla of hundreds of kayaks and canoes paddling from the waters east of Paris. About a quarter of the kayaks were kid-sized, manned by children with life vests under their oversized white T-shirts. I was crossing the Pont de Sully when I spotted the boats like small dots in the distance. From afar the scene recalled the ninth-century invasion of Paris by the Vikings. As they got closer, the kayaks passed under the Pont Marie, turning the river into an abstract Technicolor painting in motion. Hidalgo met up with them in a kayak of her own. At one point the kids sang “La Marseillaise.”
Young paddlers in a canoe-and-kayak flotilla gather as part of Paris’s €60 million campaign for the 2024 Summer Olympics. ELAINE SCIOLINO.
Paris won the Olympics bid. Big plans for the Seine followed. A government-sponsored study identified potential sites along the river for the triathlon, swimming races, and other water events. After the Games, if the river is clean enough, a total lifting of the swimming ban could follow. “Swimming in the Seine isn’t just for the Olympics,” Hidalgo said, adding that all Parisians should be able to go for a pleasant dip in their river. Purifying the Seine is part of Hildago’s larger crusade to return the river to the people. Throughout her years as mayor, she has fought to create parks, plazas, bike paths, and walkways along the Seine’s banks. “Paris must reinvent itself every moment,” she likes to say.
Hidalgo’s campaign revives the dream of former president Jacques Chirac. During his unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1988, his official platform included a pledge to make the Seine swimmable. In 1990, as mayor of Paris, he repeated the promise on a television talk show. “I have stated that in three years, I will swim in the Seine in front of witnesses to prove that the Seine is a clean river,” he said. A few years later, he admitted failure. “I’m not sure the Seine has been getting on too well since I left City Hall,” he told a group of schoolchildren. “I shouldn’t have made a promise I couldn’t keep.” Chirac is still mocked for his over-the-top boasting.
THE SEINE WAS ONCE very swimmable. In the seventeenth century, Henri IV went skinny-dipping in its cold waters, and his son Louis XIII and grandson Louis XIV were fans of the bathing it offered—even though they were sometimes dunking themselves in filthy waters. In the eighteenth century, people regularly plunged into the Seine—to wash, to exercise, and to have fun. Parisians swam in floating pools filled with Seine water along the quays and could easily go to the nearby villages of Bercy, Auteuil, and Passy (all now part of Paris) to canoe, fish, and swim; many bathers jumped in nude. Few people, however, knew how to swim properly, so the river was more a place to paddle around in or cool off. After the French Revolution, Paris passed an ordinance banning nude river bathing. La baignade sauvage—“wild bathing,” as it was called—was still the norm in isolated areas, although bathing suits ruled in places where swimmers might be seen by the public.
The nineteenth-century caricaturist Honoré Daumier poked fun at swimmers (and boaters and fishermen, too). From the window of his studio in an attic on the Île Saint-Louis, he witnessed everyday recreational activities on the river. I found a treasure trove of Daumier’s engravings in an unexpected place: the house turned museum where novelist Honoré de Balzac once lived in Paris. The museum director, Yves Gagneux, discovered Daumier’s prints at an auction and bought them at a great price. Some of the male swimmers had big bellies and spindly legs, others rail-thin frames, their bodies twisted in grotesque and awkward positions. Daumier had captured the range of their emotions: jubilation, disappointment, foolishness, ridicule, fear, vanity, cowardice. “The swimmers were naked, even if you don’t explicitly see that,” said Gagneux. “And people in that era were just beginning to learn how to swim. So swimming was a dangerous sport; it was about how people face a cold, hostile place where they can drown.” Daumier made light of the challenge of swimming in the river. “For Daumier, the Seine is a place of amusement and little misfortunes,” said Gagneux, “We drink there, we get tired, we burn in the sun. He never missed an opportunity to make fun of Parisians.”
Many writers and painters celebrated swimming in the Seine. One of Georges Seurat’s best-known works is his 1884 oil Bathers at Asnières. The canvas shows working-class suburbanites lounging on the riverbank on a hazy, hot summer day while two bathers frolic in the Seine. Bridges and factories in the background evoke the noisy, dirty, and foul-smelling world of progress. The nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert lived and worked in a grand house overlooking the Seine near Rouen. Swimming in the river helped relieve his hallucinations, convulsions, migraines, blackouts, and blurry vision. His disorder was most likely epilepsy, although it
was never conclusively diagnosed. In a letter to a niece in 1876, he wrote, “In a little while, I will go and fight like a triton in the waves of the Sequana. . . . Swimming on my stomach, on my back, in the narrows, along the banks of the islands bordered with foliage, I will look like the sea gods depicted in fine tapestries.”
FROM ANTIQUITY, Parisians living near the Seine felt blessed. Its constantly moving, unpolluted waters, richly stocked with fish, demonstrated the force and goodness of nature and were considered sacred and pure. The water was plentiful and drinkable.
As Paris grew into a major city on both sides of the river, the Seine became a dumping ground for household, industrial, and human waste. Even royals could not escape its odors. In the late twelfth century, Philippe II—a fanatic about cleanliness—was reportedly disgusted by the stench when he opened the windows of his palace on the Île de la Cité to view the Seine. From the Middle Ages on, tanners’ dyes, animal carcasses, and detritus from skinners, furriers, and glovemakers all went into the river. Passing bargemen and traders added their garbage. Putrid water thrown onto unpaved streets or into farm fields inevitably made its way into the river.
In the eighteenth century, the river in and around Paris was known both at home and abroad as a smelly open sewer, so contaminated that parts of it took on the color of what was thrown into it: blood-red from animal carcasses, brown from garbage and excrement, black from tanners’ dyes and rot. In a letter in 1771, the English politician and art historian Horace Walpole complained that he had to leave the “groves and lawns and rivers” of his estate outside London for a trip to Paris, “a dirty town with a dirtier ditch, calling itself the Seine.”
Wealthy Parisians began to have their drinking water delivered from filtration fountains. But most people had no choice except to drink from the river. “The water of the Seine loosens the stomach, for those who are not accustomed to it,” wrote Louis-Sébastien Mercier, the eighteenth-century chronicler of Paris. “Foreigners are scarcely ever spared the inconvenience of a little diarrhea; but they would avoid it if they took the precaution of putting a tablespoonful of white wine vinegar into each pint of water.” The reality, however, was much worse.
The practice of dumping waste into the Seine continued without restraint. The river, dirty, disease-ridden, and dangerous, was a place to avoid. In 1808, Napoléon opened a sixty-mile canal to bring fresh drinking water to Paris from the Ourcq River, a tributary of the Marne, northeast of Paris. When the great cholera epidemic of 1832 hit the city, Parisians using water from the Seine were more susceptible to the disease.
Later in the nineteenth century, Napoléon III, his city planner Baron Haussmann, and Eugène Belgrand, their engineer, designed the Parisian water-supply and sewer networks still used now. To provide more Parisians with clean drinking water, they created a system with two sets of underground pipes to separate drinkable from untreated water. However, waste from factories still went straight into the river. “The Seine, black sewer of the streets, / Loathsome river, fed by gutters, / Dirties my feet,” the nineteenth-century writer Théophile Gautier lamented in a poem.
In the twentieth century, with even greater industrial and household pollution, the river became more contaminated. Factory owners cared more about production and profits than protecting the environment. In the 1990s, a scientific study classified the stretch of the Seine that ran through Paris as having one of the highest heavy metal levels in the world—from metals like cadmium, copper, mercury, nickel, and lead. In addition to the scourge of industrial waste, advanced farming methods using nitrates and phosphorous starved the river of oxygen; as more people could afford washing machines, their increased use of laundry detergents further poisoned the water. The river looked and smelled bad.
Cleanup campaigns had started in the 1970s, but it was only in the mid-1990s that France launched a sweeping Seine River basin initiative to restore the river to health. Within a decade, the country spent $13.5 billion on this effort, including the construction of waste-treatment and water-purification plants designed to remove undesirable chemicals. The river slowly began to rise from the dead.
THE SEINE IS a difficult river to clean; Paris is a case in point. The city does not have a sophisticated system of storm drains to channel excess groundwater from streets, sidewalks, and roofs away from the river. Paris’s rudimentary drainage system can manage a moderate level of runoff, but it would be technically impossible and financially prohibitive to overhaul the city’s network of drains.
Dams help to control the water level when the Seine overflows; reservoirs serve as giant storage bins for excess water. But the system is not fool-proof. When it rains too hard, sewers back up, gutters overflow, and the water pours, unfiltered and contaminated, into the Seine. Environmental scientists predict that climate change will cause more frequent flooding. The river’s current is not powerful enough to flush sediments and sewage to the sea. Waste dumped from boats and industry, high levels of heavy metals, and toxic pollutants from surface runoff, including pesticides, also poison the river. The water purification process begun in the 1990s did not eliminate harmful bacteria like E. coli. According to the French Ministry of Health, even today, a swimmer risks gastroenteritis, urinary tract and skin infections, septicemia, and meningitis. The divers in the 2017 Olympics demos were ordered to take antibacterial showers immediately after their short swims.
A major source of water pollution in the Paris metropolitan region comes from lead. Deteriorating lead pipes, metal roofs made with lead, and soil filled with decades of leaded gasoline leak that heavy metal into the river. We once had a major leak in a bathroom in our apartment and discovered that the burst pipe, probably more than a hundred years old, was made of lead.
I HAD LONG WANTED to swim in the Seine. I was convinced I could do it after I watched the divers plunging from the Pont Alexandre III into the river’s dark waters with the fearlessness and ferocity of soldiers going into battle. Renegade swimmers in Paris have broken the noswim rules. In 2015 a group of them organized an unauthorized dive off the pedestrian bridges on the Canal de l’Ourcq, which flows into the Seine. One swimmer reported back that there was “seaweed, but nothing gross.” The police broke up the party.
I had my own plan to become a guerrilla swimmer. Even if the river is dark with poisons in and around Paris, it is gloriously clear closer to its source in deep Burgundy. I had glimpsed an opportunity when I’d visited the Fleury family’s vineyards in Champagne country, some forty miles from the Seine’s origin.
So one July morning, Bérengère Sim, a young French journalist, and I headed to Courteron to learn more about the Fleury vineyards and to take a dip in the Seine. We walked to the family’s holiday cottage and into the garden, which stretched about a hundred feet. Fleury’s wife, Colette, pushed open the gate in a rickety wooden fence and led us to the water. She showed us the tree with the “Tarzan rope” that her grandson used to swing from land into the river below during the hot summer months.
The water was clear. Looking down from the edge of the grass on the shore, I noticed that the bottom of the river was sandy, not thick and mucky like the floor of the Seine in Paris. Water ran clean and smooth over the stones along the bank. Schools of small black fish swam among speckled underwater weeds.
“It’s only about fifteen!” said Colette Fleury, meaning that the water was fifteen degrees Celsius—less than sixty degrees Fahrenheit. That’s not much different from the Atlantic coast of Maine in late August, I thought, not too bad.
I hadn’t brought a bathing suit—I wasn’t sure there would be a place to change. But I stripped down to my T-shirt and panties. Only then did she realize that I was serious. She rushed into her house and came back with a pair of plastic red Crocs that fastened with secure straps behind the ankles, for protection against sharp stones. Just my size. I tested the water temperature with my hand and thought, this could be worse. The Lake Erie of my childhood was a lot colder when we started swimming every summer. I put one foot
in the water, then the other.
Then I plunged in. The water was shockingly cold and fresh. Bérengère took a photo with her iPhone. I sent it to my daughters as proof that their mother was not a wimp.
Bérengère was next.
She took a deep breath and jumped in.
What a thrill for us to say later, “I swam in the Seine today!”
A woman fishing on the Seine in Paris. Cleanup efforts have brought many species of fish back to the river. IRIS SAMUELS.
ELEVEN
The Zen of Rowing and Fishing
One by one the boats cast off from
the landing stage. The oarsmen
leaned forward and with a regular
swing pulled back. At each stroke
of the long, slightly curved blades,
the fast skiffs sped through the
water making for La Grenouillère
and growing progressively smaller
till they disappeared beyond the
railway bridge and into the distance.
—GUY DE MAUPASSANT,
“Femme Fatale”
THE TWO FRENCH COUPLES put on striped jerseys and flat-topped boater hats banded in grosgrain ribbon. They tied red kerchiefs around their throats and gave me and my three companions matching boater hats. We were ready to set out from the Île de Chatou for a Sunday afternoon of rowing. Stray clouds relieved the heat of the unforgiving July sun. Along the banks, a wall of trees, including elm, ash, linden, and willow, turned the water the same Veronese green that mesmerized the Impressionists. Our boats were romantic wooden skiffs more than a hundred years old.
The Seine Page 9