Renoir would have loved it.
The Île de Chatou, ten miles west of Paris, is so pleasant that after the Vikings invaded it in 856, they stayed for ten years. These days, it also goes by a second name, Île des Impressionistes; in 1880 and 1881, Renoir painted Luncheon of the Boating Party, his best-known work on the Seine, from the balcony of La Maison Fournaise on the island.
I had come to spend time with members of the Sequana Association, an organization of rowing fanatics. For three decades, its members have bought, restored, rebuilt, exhibited, and rowed some of the most important boats to have plied the waters of the Seine between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I arrived with Laura, my researcher from Northern Ireland; Heather, a student and varsity rower at Princeton; and her boyfriend, Chris, who had also rowed competitively as a Princeton undergrad. The Sequana members had invited us to row out on the river, though first we would have a French-style “picnic.”
We entered a rustic wooden building on the banks of the river, built to replicate a nineteenth-century gare d’eau or boat storage and repair facility. We opened the door to the smell of wood, glue, and varnish. A cavernous hall stored old boats in various stages of restoration. Thick ropes, carefully rolled, hung from the rafters. Dozens of tools, some with obscure purposes, lined the walls. In the back of the atelier, at a long dining table covered in blue-and-white checked plastic, our hosts served a three-course lunch of quiches, salads, sandwiches, fruit pastries, and madeleines. Like the Impressionists at the Maison Fournaise, we drank chilled white wine heavily sweetened with crème de cassis. I joked to our hosts that ours was a real-life luncheon of the boating party.
My Italian last name prompted Annie Lesgards, a longtime rower, to tell me that she, too, was of Italian origin, on her mother’s side. “My family was from a place called Caltanissetta,” she said, referring to a poor agricultural and sulfur-mining city in central Sicily.
“Caltanissetta!” I said. “My paternal grandparents were from Caltanissetta. I’ve never met a French person whose family came from Caltanissetta. You and I are paesane! We are probably related.”
Later, I asked how the organization came to be named after Sequana. The word sequana is well known here, though not exactly as the name of a river goddess. We were in the region known as Hauts-de-Seine—Alta Sequanae in Latin—a crescent-shaped cluster of wealthy residential suburbs that curves around Paris at its western city limits.
“Anyone who lives here knows Sequana,” said Bernard Romain, a retired manager. “From the time you’re eight or nine years old and people ask you what you are, you say, ‘I’m an Alto-Sequanais.’ And when the river floods, we say ‘Sequana is angry.’ Everyone associates the Seine with Sequana.”
THE SEINE HAS ALWAYS been a boater’s paradise. The river’s jousting tournaments of today date back to the Middle Ages, when they were staged for royalty. A jouster armed with a wooden shield and a twelve-foot pole, stands on a boat and tries to knock his opponent into the river.
By the nineteenth century, the river was an experimental laboratory for unusual recreational boats and watercraft. Boaters mounted bicycles on floating wooden structures to make aquatic cycles and developed innovative paddleboats. A podoscaphe, for example, was a floating device that resembled a modern-day paddleboard, except that it had two floating pontoons attached like oversized water skis to a base.
From the 1830s on, rowing became a fashionable weekend pastime for both the working class and the bourgeoisie escaping the sweltering city. You could rent boats in places like Chatou, and boating life quickly became so popular that new personality stereotypes sprung up around canotier, or canoe-rower, culture. In his caricatures, Daumier often portrayed weekend boaters as unfortunate amateurs struggling with their oars, or hapless rowers who just wanted to get drunk with their friends.
Napoléon III so appreciated the art of rowing that in 1861 he built a 114-foot-long deep red rowing boat modeled after an ancient trireme—a vessel named for its three banks of oars. When launched on the Seine near Paris, it took seventy men to row.
These days, the Seine welcomes sailboats, motorboats, kayaks, rowboats, canoes, water skis, Jet Skis, and paddleboards. The Port de l’Arsenal, located off the Seine near the site of the Bastille, is one of many marinas for pleasure boats, some of them inhabited and permanently moored to create a tiny village.
Voies Navigables de France (or VNF) offers print and online guides with the rules of the river: speed limits, traffic lights, tolls, turning, mooring, and safely passing under bridges, for example. Paris bans boats without motors within its city limits unless there is special authorization; motorboats and yachts may transit through the city if they do not disturb commercial and passenger navigation. Even the Rowing-Club—Société de Régates Parisiennes (Rowing-Club—Paris Rowing Society), is located two Métro stops north of the Paris city limits.
The Sequana Association has a specific mission: preserving the patrimoine—or heritage—of historic boats and honoring the memory of Alphonse Fournaise, a master boat maker who founded La Maison Fournaise. Its members study old documents, photographs, and miniature models to make exact replicas of boats that once were and are no more. More than 140 people have paid a forty-euro fee to join (I am one of them), and its collection numbers more than fifty boats.
I first met members of the Sequana Association at a lakeside festival near Léry-Poses, seventy miles northwest of Paris. It was a Belle Époque dress-up affair: more than fifty women wore long dresses with pinafores and wide-brimmed hats with matching gloves, and carried parasols; they paraded before a jury, which awarded prizes to the most authentically appareled. The men wore striped jerseys and straw boater hats.
Sequana launched fourteen boats on the lake that day, the first time it had exhibited so many. Among them was Madame, a reproduction of the rowboat that had belonged to the writer Guy de Maupassant, who owned several vessels during his lifetime. The Sequana Association had no original plan or blueprint for the boat, so designers used photographs of him rowing on the Seine in 1889 to build a three-dimensional simulation. A naval architect helped them construct the boat with oak planks and copper nails.
Roastbeef, a reconstruction of a twenty-nine-foot-long sailboat Gustave Caillebotte owned for a short time in the early 1890s, was a reminder that he was almost as serious a sailor and boat designer as he was a painter of river life. One of his last designs, Roastbeef was a fast boat but, with its 323-square-foot sail, difficult to navigate.
I was invited for a ride in Suzanne, a reconstructed steamboat dating from 1882 that is the Sequana Association’s jewel. Years before, one of the organization’s members had found calcified, crumbling designs for the hull of a steamboat in his family home in Paris. Shortly afterward, he dug up a battered brass steam engine on the family farm in the Gers region, in southwest France. The designs and the engine belonged with each other. Since 2006, when the boat was rebuilt as Suzanne, she has traveled more than fifteen hundred miles.
I strapped myself into a bright blue-and-yellow life vest and jumped onto the steamboat. My skipper was Jean Jack Gardais, a retired mechanical engineer and Sequana’s president. He was dressed in jeans and a blue-and-white striped sailor’s shirt stained with grease. We stood together next to the steam engine, which was housed in a highly polished brass cylinder. The boiling water inside gave off so much heat that sweat poured in rivulets down his face. I asked him how he could stand being so hot. “Hot?” he asked. “Not hot at all.”
Several months later, Jean Jack gave me a tour of the Sequana Association’s headquarters in Chatou. Its treasures are on display next to the atelier in a boat garage that serves as a small museum. One is a rare yole, a type of rowing boat sometimes equipped with a sail, with a hull made from a single twenty-three-foot-long piece of mahogany. The French state has designated it a national historical monument.
On the day my three companions and I came to row, our hosts chose four boats dating from the first two decade
s of the twentieth century, pulling them out from their storage racks in the garage. The wooden boats were slightly heavier than today’s fiberglass shells, and it took four rowers to lift each one. Then they slid the wooden backs and arm rests of the coxswains’ seats into place and rubbed pig fat on the oars to help them rotate more smoothly in the oarlocks. Then they carried the boats down a concrete ramp to the Seine for a “wet launch.” That required the rowers to stand knee-deep in the water, two holding each boat in place while another climbed aboard and rowed it to a floating dock to pick up the guests. The ramp down to the dock was broken, so we had to step gingerly down a shaky board six inches wide.
Members of the Sequana Association, a group of rowers dedicated to restoring and exhibiting century-old boats, launch onto the Seine from their headquarters on the Île de Chatou. BERNARD ROMAIN / ASSOCIATION SEQUANA.
Rowing shells are delicate. In both modern and old wooden boats, you must be careful where you step; otherwise your foot might break through the hull. It is easy to dent or crack a modern fiberglass shell, and hundred-year-old crafts made of thin wood are even more fragile.
Sequana’s rowers warned Heather and Chris not to treat their antique three-seater like a Princeton racing shell. But once the experienced scullers got going, their enthusiasm took over. “Lightly light!” urged Annie, their coxswain. Heather and Chris shortened their stroke. “See how light and easily it moves?” said Annie. “You don’t really need to muscle it.”
I was paired with Kareen Sontag, a fifty-five-year-old lifelong rower who holds down a day job as an IT manager. She was rowing our two-seater, Jako; I was in the coxswain seat. The construction of the oak-and-mahogany boat was not much different from that of a modern-day scull. Both have sliding seats, oarlocks, adjustable foot stretchers with straps, and rudders with rope steering systems for the coxswain.
I could hear the grinding of Kareen’s seat as she plied each stroke, the plop of her oars when she dipped them sharply in the water, and the gurgle of water against the hull as the boat moved forward. Later, Chris said, “When you hear that gurgle, you know that you and the water are in perfect harmony.”
We rowed under three bridges—including the same iron railway bridge that Renoir and Vincent van Gogh painted and Maupassant wrote about—and passed old barges docked on the banks. There were boats that served as houses and houses that happened to float. One houseboat was a crumbling wreck, with plastic tarps covering its windowless frames and much of its roof. Annie said its nickname was “the wreck of the Medusa,” after the tragic nineteenth-century shipwreck immortalized in Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa.
We passed what had once been the site of La Grenouillère, a popular boating, swimming, and dining establishment in the nineteenth century. It had an adjacent floating rest area with a single tree that was nicknamed “the camembert” because of its round shape, Kareen said. Then we came to a house partially hidden behind trees where composer Georges Bizet lived for a short time before his death. When we reached the town of Bougival, the sounds of motorcycle engines and honking horns shattered the quiet. In the 1950s, the construction of Route Nationale 13 near the river had destroyed the tranquillity of the neighborhood. “All the people who owned beautiful houses along the river suddenly found themselves trapped with the permanent sound of traffic,” said Kareen.
According to river rules, Kareen explained, barges and working boats have precedence over a pleasure boat like ours. And when a larger boat passes, you turn your boat parallel to the wake; if you try to face it head-on, your vessel might break in two. Pousseurs—tugboats that push engineless barges along the Seine—make the biggest wakes. “We are tolerated,” said Kareen. “We are the ones who have to maneuver and get out of the way.”
Swarms of small dragonflies hovered over the river’s surface near the banks; Kareen pointed out the males with bright blue abdomens. “This is a true sign that the river is getting cleaner,” she said. “Twenty years ago, they had gone.” A large fish jumped out of the water—another sign of the Seine’s health. She dipped an oar into the river and scooped up some water to show me how clear it was.
When we reached a lock at Bougival, Kareen stopped. We could make out the remnants of the seventeenth-century Marly Machine on the tiny Île aux Bernaches, in the distance. The Marly Machine was a gravity-defying hydraulic construction with a giant pumping station that Louis XIV built so that the Seine’s water could flow five hundred feet up a steep slope to feed his fountains at Versailles.
As we headed back to Chatou, she told me to turn around for one last look. “You are not in the suburbs of Paris; you are in a green forest,” she said. “Look at the river and the green trees rising above in the distance, and you are in the world of a hundred years ago.”
A group of boys was sunbathing on a concrete dock, partially shaded under a curved plastic roof about ten feet above the water. It looked a little like a bus shelter. Some of them climbed on top of the roof and jumped, one after the other, over and over, into the Seine. Leaning against the dock were their fishing poles, perhaps awaiting the boys’ next activity on a Sunday afternoon of sheer joy.
OH, THE PLEASURE that comes with casting a line into the Seine—certainly Ernest Hemingway understood it. He described the lure of the riverbanks in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris life in the 1920s. He walked there when he had finished work for the day or needed to “think something out.” He liked to take the stairs under the Pont Neuf to the Vert-Galant. There, the Seine’s currents and backwaters created excellent places to fish, he wrote. And there, he discovered the fishermen.
They fell into two categories: retirees on small pensions that could become worthless with inflation and enthusiasts who fished in their spare time. The fishermen “used long jointed cane poles,” he wrote, with fine lines, light gear, and quill floats. Sure, there was better fishing outside of Paris, but they always caught something.
The Seine was polluted in Hemingway’s time, but the fishermen considered the fish healthy enough to eat. The river brought forth a plentiful supply of fingerling fish they called goujon. “They were delicious fried whole, and I could eat a plateful,” Hemingway wrote. “They were plump and sweet-fleshed with a finer flavor than fresh sardines even, and were not at all oily, and we ate them bones and all.”
Hemingway made excuses for why he stayed on the sidelines: he didn’t have the tackle; he preferred to fish in Spain; he never knew when he would finish work. In Paris, his fishing pleasure came vicariously. “It always made me happy that there were men fishing in the city itself, having sound, serious fishing and taking a few fritures home to their families,” he wrote.
The Seine has been fished as long as humans have settled on its banks. Archaeologists have found fishhooks at prehistoric sites along the river. In Gallo-Roman times, carp were introduced into the Seine; this hardy, common species had most probably been imported from Asia by the Roman legions. Over the centuries, fish became an important source of food. In the days when harvesting fish was a reliable way to make a living, men did the fishing, using boats, nets, and traps, while women sold the catch on the riverbanks or in open-air markets in town. John Frederick Smith, in his 1840 book A Hand Book up the Seine, describes the glorious bounty that came forth from the Seine in those days: “They fish there the sperling, a delicate little fish, the color of mother-of-pearl, which when taken out of the water smells like violets; also some herrings, shrimps, oeillet, a few capelau, the sea-dog or russet, the lamprey, the pimperneau, very small eels, crabs, flounders, sole, plaice, the green boned orphie, the mullet, the shad, the sturgeon, and the salmon.”
Later, observers would write about how drastically pollution had killed off the fish. By 1900, salmon, a marker of the river’s health, had disappeared from the Seine; twenty years later, many other species had vanished as well. The twentieth-century writer Julien Green recalled the time he was crossing the Solférino footbridge and saw an ugly sight below: “Hundreds of fish fl
oating on the black water, white bellies turned skywards, poisoned by the filth that pollutes our lovely river.” By the 1970s, the river around Paris became so dirty and starved of oxygen that only the hardiest species—bottom-feeders like carp, for example—could survive.
The 1994 book La Seine: Mémoire d’un fleuve, a nostalgic overview of what the Seine once was and still is, shows a warning sign from the 1970s that announced, “HERE, River Seine DANGER. Water polluted—poisoned.” It adds, “The health of you and your children depends on your common action.”
Then the cleanup began, and many species of fish returned. Now local fishing clubs regularly restock the river with fish. The systematic oxygenation of the river helps keep fish alive. “We’re improving the quality of water by aerating it for whatever creature passes by,” said Laurent Niquet, the director of the Chatou dam and lock, west of Paris. “We let it breathe, like wine in a carafe.”
In the late 2010s, Paris City Hall counted more than thirty species swimming within the city limits, among them survivors like carp, as well as perch, pike, sea trout, shad, rudd, European eel, and even a few Atlantic salmon.
THE CITY OF PARIS mounted an outdoor exhibition on a pontoon boat moored near the Musée d’Orsay to educate passersby about the fish of the Seine. They learned about the history, habitats, reproduction cycles, longevity, and food habits of nearly a dozen species. The northern pike, for example, is a lazy predator with hundreds of sharp teeth. The European eel lives in the Seine but migrates every year across the Atlantic to breed. Small ablettes (common bleak) were fished and eaten in the Middle Ages and fried up in riverside restaurants in the early twentieth century. The city bans the human consumption of all fish caught in the Seine, because of dangerous levels of toxins like metals (especially lead), arsenic, and PCBs stored in their bodies, but the fishermen are out there just for fun.
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