The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  The Niagara is fierce and angry, the Seine slow and easygoing. But at night they evoke similar emotions: the wonder and joy that well up from watching their transformation in light.

  Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir with the Parc de Bercy on the Right Bank in the background. A pedestrian bridge, it opened in 2006. © Gary Zuercher, glz.com, MARCORP EDITIONS, AND MARCORP-EDITIONS.COM.

  A fireworks display by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang during Paris’s annual October event, Nuit Blanche. Guo-Qiang’s show, One Night Stand, was a pyrotechnic celebration of the sexual fantasy of having a one-night stand in Paris on the Seine. THIERRY NAVA—COURTESY CAI STUDIO.

  THIRTEEN

  What’s Sex Got to Do with It?

  Photographing couples on the banks

  of the Seine in spring—what a

  cliché! But why deprive yourself of

  the pleasure? Every time I encounter

  lovers, my camera smiles; let it do

  its job.

  —WILLY RONIS, photographer

  ONE OCTOBER NIGHT a few years ago, the city of Paris celebrated sex. It happened in the most public of places: the middle of the Seine between the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre.

  One Night Stand was a “conceptual pyrotechnic explosive event” by the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Cai doesn’t create with acrylics or pastel; he paints with explosives. He once ignited a six-mile-long fuse to lengthen the Great Wall of China, so that “extraterrestrial intelligence on faraway planets will be able to see it.” For the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, he choreographed fireworks that more than a billion people watched on television.

  This time, he used fireworks displays to evoke the ultimate Paris sex fantasy: a one-night stand on the Seine. The river, he said, was the “eternal witness of the romantic history of France” and a setting to “present an adventure into the night.”

  Writers and filmmakers have long coupled fireworks and sexuality. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom masturbates while fireworks fill the sky and a young woman named Gerty MacDowell exposes her underwear. (The scene helped ban the book’s publication in the United States and England.) For the 1955 film To Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock beat the censors by cutting to fireworks when Grace Kelly and Cary Grant were about to make love. (It remains one of the steamiest no-sex sex scenes in movie history.) Times change, and in the twenty-first century, fireworks suggesting sex certainly don’t shock the French. Paris City Hall commissioned Cai’s work of art for an official Nuit Blanche festival.

  One Night Stand opened at midnight with the sounds of sex—heavy breathing, gasping, and moaning—woven into a contemporary musical composition and broadcast across the river by loudspeaker. Rhythmic drumming and what sounded like a monkey’s mating call added auditory texture. Next, a pyrotechnic display sent fireworks into the air. The act lasted twelve minutes, estimated to be the length of time the average French couple needs to climax, Cai Studios claimed in a press release. Purple fireworks spelled out in English, “One Night Stand” and “Let’s Play.”

  As if the symbolic evocation of intercourse were not enough, Cai transformed a bateau-mouche into a “love boat” where fifty couples from around the world had sex inside translucent red tents. The couples were given the option of either turning off the lights in their tents to copulate privately or turning them on to reveal their silhouettes in motion. To share the bliss with the crowd, the lovers could press a button signaling operators in small boats nearby to send a fifteen-second spurt of bright white fireworks into the air.

  A minute of blazing silver fireworks acted as a “good-bye kiss.” Another message in purple fireworks followed: “Sorry Gotta Go.” The Seine swirled in purple, pink, and midnight blue. Then the sky lit up with a finale of white, green, red, and purple bursts that shot up to 164 feet. Spectators crowded the banks and cheered. Even Bertrand Delanoë, then mayor of Paris, came out to watch the show.

  Such an overtly sexual fireworks display (paid for with taxpayers’ money) would never happen over the Potomac or the Hudson, or any river in the United States. But here in Paris, it was considered sheer pleasure. And, bien sûr, art.

  PEOPLE SEEKING PHYSICAL SATISFACTION and personal liberation have often come to Paris. The Seine is part of the seduction. One of the most famous songs about the river, “La Seine,” portrays the river as the city’s paramour: “The Seine is a lover / And Paris sleeps in her bed.”

  French writers have found romantic inspiration in the river, illustrating their characters’ intimacy and sensuality by setting their stories on its banks. In his 1869 novel Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert’s characters find themselves sharing a meal along the river. “That evening they dined at an inn on the banks of the Seine. . . . They were served a chicken with its legs and arms spread, an eel stew . . . rough wine, hard bread, and blunt knives. . . . They felt almost as if they were in the middle of a journey, in Italy, on their honeymoon.”

  In Émile Zola’s 1886 novel The Masterpiece, lovers Claude and Christine share an enchantment with the river that fuels their desire. They walk arm in arm along the quays, dazzled by the wharves and vessels and massive river barges. “The soul of the great city, rising from the waters, wrapped them in all the tenderness that had ever pulsed through its age-old stones,” Zola wrote. Later, Claude, half-mad, drags Christine back to the same place on the Seine with the hope of rediscovering its magic: “There he stopped again, his gaze fixed upon the island riding forever at anchor in the Seine, cradling the heart of Paris through which its blood has pulsed for centuries.”

  In French literature, some writers portray the Seine as a curvaceous woman; some even see a woman in the architecture. “Now it seems difficult for me to believe that others, venturing into the place Dauphine from the Pont Neuf, should not have been overwhelmed at the sight of its triangular formation, with slightly curved lines, and of the slit which bisects it into two wooded spaces,” the surrealist—and sexist—André Breton wrote. “It is, without any doubt, the sex of Paris that is outlined in this shade.”

  THE SEINE ONCE MEANT sexual liberation. But you had to leave Paris to find it. After the construction of a railroad line to the western suburbs in 1837, city dwellers began to flock to riverside pleasure pavilions known as guinguettes. The strict social mores governing city life were left behind. In the countryside, Parisians ate simple fare, drank cheap wine, and danced to live music. Millionaires mingled with artists’ models; seduction was expected. One diversion was a promenade sur l’eau (a river excursion) in a canoe; it could include swimming naked among the reeds and under the hanging branches of willow trees.

  In 1869, Monet and Renoir painted side by side at La Grenouillère (“The Froggery”), one of the most famous guinguettes. It was named after the young and free-spirited female swimmers who frolicked in the water like frogs. Optimistically promoted as “Trouville-sur-Seine” after the seaside resort in Normandy, it featured a spa, a boating establishment, and a floating café. It was so fashionable that Napoléon III, along with his wife, Eugénie, and their son, once visited.

  In his short story “Femme Fatale,” Guy de Maupassant painted a dark portrait of La Grenouillère. “The place reeked of vice, corruption, and the dregs of Parisian society . . . ,” he wrote. “Cheats, con men, and cheap hacks rubbed shoulders with under-age dandies, old roués and rogues, sleazy underworld types once notorious for things best forgotten mingled with other small-time crooks and speculators, dabblers in dubious ventures, frauds, pimps, and racketeers. Cheap sex, both male and female, was on offer in this tawdry meat-market of a place.”

  Renoir’s much brighter view of guinguette life, in his painting Luncheon of the Boating Party, captured the free-spirited mingling of the social classes at La Maison Fournaise, overlooking the Seine, and the joy of a glorious sunny afternoon meal on the terrace among friends. At the guinguette, Renoir felt liberated. “I was perpetually at Fournaise’s,” he wrote about his time spent there in 1869. “There I
found as many splendid girls to paint as I wanted. One wasn’t reduced as today to follow a little model in the street for an hour, only to be called a dirty old man in the end.”

  La Grenouillère closed long ago. A tiny museum struggles to preserve its memory. La Maison Fournaise, by contrast, is still a working restaurant, in what is now a prosperous suburb. At lunch on the balcony immortalized by Renoir, you will find yourself surrounded by business executives and families celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.

  These days, the Seine in Paris is not really an inviting place for lovemaking (unless perhaps you live on a houseboat or check into the ultra-cool floating hotel named Off). Sex on the Seine sounds better in theory than in practice. The bridges are too public for copulation, and the romantic nooks under the bridges sometimes provide shelter to rats as large as cats. Even prostitution is not widespread along the Seine, as it is in more deserted areas such as the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of the city.

  With its open riverbanks, the Seine also invites predators. Bérengère and Joanna, two young women who worked with me, said that even in daylight, men harass women on the riverbanks. “You sit along the banks with your friends looking at the water, and men passing by feel they have the right to sit down next to you and start a conversation even when you don’t want anything to do with them,” Bérengère said. “It happens everywhere in Paris, but by the Seine it’s scary.” The women agreed that they would never walk along the Seine after a late-night party.

  For gay men, the banks of the Seine have long been a place for cruising and a sexual refuge. In Blake Edwards’s 1982 film Victor Victoria, Robert Preston plays Toddy, a struggling middle-aged gay impresario who waxes lyrical about Paris. “Along the banks of the Seine,” he sings, “just take a walk now and then, you’ll meet some interesting men: Gay Paree!”

  Edmund White’s 2001 book The Flâneur recounts his wanderings in Paris. He describes the best stretches of the Seine for cruising, as well as his own experiences, in passages that struck me as raw and vulgar the first time I read them. It was only when I came to know the power of the river—and after I got to know him—that I appreciated the sheer pleasure he took from these brief and random encounters.

  When White arrived in Paris, forty-three and “fairly young-looking,” he’d “cruise along the Seine near the Austerlitz train station under a building that was cantilevered out over the shore on pylons. Or,” he continues, “I’d hop over the fence and cruise the pocket park at the end of the Île Saint-Louis, where I lived. There I’d either clatter through the bushes or descend the steps to the quay that wrapped around the prow of the island like the lower deck of a sinking ship. . . . I had to step over the giant rusting rings on the quayside to which boats could be roped—though I never saw a boat moored there. When the bateaux-mouches would swing around the island, their klieg lights were so stage-set bright that we’d all break apart and try to rearrange our clothing.”

  White evokes the memory of an “ardent, muscular lad” who went home with him several times but never told him his name or gave him his phone number. The young man said only that he was kept “in great style” in a townhouse in the Marais by a German businessman who looked a lot like Edmund. White admits that this behavior was not mainstream. “Of course, most people, straight and gay, think that cruising is pathetic or sordid,” he writes. “But for me, at least, some of my happiest moments have been spent making love to a stranger beside dark, swiftly moving water below a glowing city.”

  FILMMAKERS HAVE EXPROPRIATED scenes of dark embraces interrupted by bright lights on the Seine. In that special moment in Charade when Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are falling in love on a bateau-mouche, the lights are illuminating other lovers. Nothing is left to chance. The script itself spells out what happens next: “A searchlight near the boat’s bridge has gone on and now begins sweeping the river banks. On benches by the water’s edge, lovers are surprised by the bright light which suddenly and without warning discovers them in various attitudes of mutual affection. Some are embarrassed, some amused, and some (the most intimate) damn annoyed. One even shakes his fist at the light.”

  The lights are indiscriminate; a bateau-mouche spotlight can reveal secrets. An acquaintance told me how a friend of hers, a Parisian woman in her sixties, learned of her husband’s infidelity that way. One night, the husband, also in his sixties, happened to be passionately kissing a much younger woman on the banks of the Seine when they were caught by the piercing spotlight of a passing bateau-mouche. Shortly afterward, a television channel that had been filming from the boat aired a frothy feature on how tourists love to kiss on the banks of the Seine. The wife was watching the program and recognized her husband. She confronted him. They divorced.

  FOR A MONTH every summer since 2001, sensuality and sexiness—if not sex—is officially sanctioned at a makeshift beach along the Seine. For a city dweller with no access to a house in the country, Paris Plages (Paris Beaches) serves as an egalitarian alternative. Until recent years, the city trucked in two thousand tons of sand to this urban riviera on the Right Bank, which attracts millions of people and has spawned copies around the world. (The city still brings in dozens of palm trees.) Paris beachgoers line up for free massages, dance lessons, games of boules and volleyball, trampoline jumping, and wall climbing. Deck chairs, outdoor showers, hammocks, and beach umbrellas are free. Cafés, restaurants, and ice cream stands offer refreshments. Corporate sponsors pick up much of the bill.

  With transplanted beach culture come beach rules. Several years ago, the exposure of skin and the presence of “perverts and voyeurs” pushed Paris City Hall to enforce a ban on full nudity, bare breasts, and even thongs. “The behavior of the public must be in accordance with good morals, tranquillity, security, and public order,” the ruling stated.

  The police threatened to issue thirty-eight-euro fines to bathers who refused to cover up. “Heat wave or not, appropriate dress is required,” proclaimed a front-page article in the newspaper Le Parisien. “This is a space of freedom, but if people want to see breasts, they should go to the Lido or the Moulin Rouge,” said Yvan Hinnemann, a manager of Paris Plages.

  Police officers and guards patrol the beach, although the rules are often stretched. Just as many men as women wear thongs that reveal their buttocks; the consensus seems to be that only bare-breasted women are at risk of a citation.

  The truth is that the Seine—like many other settings in Paris—is ideal for seduction. You might have no intention of kissing the person you’re with, or no hope of getting kissed back. But on the Seine, in the thrall of the bridges, dark water, and shimmering lights, it might happen. It’s a place to fall in love, rekindle love, or bear witness to love.

  An American friend of mine, Elizabeth Stribling, looks down at the Seine through the tall casement windows in the bedroom of the pied-à-terre she shares with her husband on the Île de la Cité. She opens the heavy drapes to revel in the romantic riverside stage set before her. “I see young lovers,” she says. “I see old lovers, too. In Paris, there are a lot of old people just as amorous as the young ones. It’s one of the things I love most about this river.”

  Her words echo those of the American novelist Sherwood Anderson nearly a century before: “On a bridge over the Seine—a young working man with his sweetheart. . . . They stood with arms about each other looking up the river. Occasionally they kissed, oblivious to the thousands of people passing, seemingly equally oblivious of them.”

  Tour guides on the bateaux-mouches say the Pont Marie is the lovers’ bridge. The story goes that if you make a wish as the boat slips under the bridge and keep the wish secret, it will be granted. There are different versions of the story. One summer night, I took Laura and Heather, two students who were working with me in Paris, for a boat ride. As we approached the bridge, the recorded voice of a tour guide announced: “If you’re with the person you love, kiss him or her under the bridge, make a wish, and your wish will come true.”

  A
lthough her boyfriend was an ocean away, Heather closed her eyes and made a wish. A feeling of harmony filled the night. The Paris air was still hot, but it felt cooler by the Seine, and even though it was late, hundreds of people sat along the stone riverbanks and at the Vert-Galant park, at the tip of the Île de la Cité. We could see a party on the roof of a houseboat moored on the Right Bank, and dancing in the stone amphitheaters of the Tino Rossi Garden on the Left. The sun had set, turning the sky the palest of blue and the water a deep gray-blue with dark, rippling waves. Then the sky became a shade of rose and the Seine the color of gooseberry syrup, as Flaubert had described it to George Sand in a letter in 1866. The moon, yellow and full, hung low in the sky.

  SHORTLY AFTERWARD, the luxury brand Chanel gave the river a starring role in an elusive game of seduction. In a black-and-white ad for Chanel’s J12 ceramic unisex watch, French comic actress Camille Cottin and television and film actor Syrus Shahidi flirt and gaze into each other’s eyes on the Pont Louis-Philippe in Paris. It is dusk, and the river shimmers silver in the reflection of the streetlights.

  “Let’s go,” says Cottin.

  “Yes, let’s,” Shahidi replies.

  Cottin shouts “Taxi!” to the driver of a motorboat passing below, but Shahidi hesitates. Cottin decides to go alone. Clothed in a tight-fitting dark sweater, mini-shorts, and high heels, with the black Chanel watch on her wrist, she steadies herself on the bridge’s stone guardrail, raises her arms above her head, and dives into the water with a crisp somersault. She swims to the boat, climbs in, and speeds off with the driver, who wears sunglasses and a boater’s cap, leaving Shahidi behind.

  “Diving into water,” says Chanel in its online promotion, “has never been so alluring.”