The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  A postcard depicting the 1910 flood in Paris. After months of heavy rainfall, the Seine overflowed and inundated much of the city, including every city bridge except the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal.

  FOURTEEN

  The Seine Also Rises

  Paris was swimming.

  —HELEN DAVENPORT GIBBONS,

  an American writer, when the

  Seine flooded Paris in 1910

  AS LONG AS HISTORY has remembered the Seine, it has flooded. In May 2016, the rains came once again. The Seine swelled, churned, turned mud-brown, overflowed its banks, and flooded the land. Paris City Hall closed roads and turned off the lights along the river. The Louvre hauled priceless art out of its basement and into safer storage facilities on higher ground.

  Boat travel in the city came to a halt. Floating restaurants and clubs on the river were submerged; some were destroyed. Basements, parking lots, and tunnels filled with water. Underground Métro and intercity train lines near the river shut down. Thousands of people were evacuated from towns around Paris. An eighty-six-year-old woman was found dead in her flooded home in a town nearby. On Friday, June 3, the Seine reached its peak, rising more than twenty feet above sea level, the highest level in thirty-four years. That day, there was only one person to call: my old friend Mort.

  Mort Rosenblum is a book writer and former war correspondent who lives on a decommissioned British naval vessel on the Seine. It is 54 feet long, much smaller than a Freycinet, the classic 126-foot working river barge built to pass through the river’s locks that works well when renovated as a residence. His is a fast military craft designed for the high seas. I know the name of Mort’s boat, but he likes to keep it secret. He made one up when he wrote a memoir, a quarter century ago, about his river life.

  The majority of the houses on the Seine are refitted barges, but like Mort’s naval craft, there are odd and rare floating residences, including centuries-old wooden sailing ships and at least one Chinese junk. Looking down from a bridge, you cannot help but wonder what it is like to live on them.

  Mort is in his early seventies, but he still wears his jeans low on his narrow hips and his hair wild and woolly. He has written books on subjects as diverse as chocolate and olive oil. He shares his life with his wife, Jeannette, but since her job often takes her on the road, the boat is very much his world. He loves cats and the same Cohiba cigars that Fidel Castro smoked. He is allergic to mold and dust mites, and the boat is full of both, so his asthma kicks up from time to time. When he talks, you must pay close attention to what he says; sometimes his words tumble out so fast that they trip over themselves.

  In 1987, he was living in the perfect fifth-floor walk-up in an old building on the Île Saint-Louis; then his landlord found a better tenant and threw him out. He was the Paris bureau chief for the Associated Press back then, and when a British colleague and his wife decided to sell their boat and move back home, Mort bought it.

  “It took only one lunch on deck,” he wrote in his memoir. At the time he knew nothing about boats, describing himself as “a son of Arizona desert and a klutz with wrench or varnish brush.”

  Mort and I met for the first time in 1978, when he was still living on land. I had just arrived as a correspondent for Newsweek. At the Associated Press, he ran a large operation one floor below our bureau at 162 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, close to the Élysée Palace and the luxury clothing boutiques, one of the swankiest journalistic addresses in town. Those were the days when many American foreign correspondents flew first-class, enjoyed generous allowances, and had expense accounts to dine at three-star Michelin restaurants. Mort was a veteran globetrotter who had covered wars—in Vietnam, in the Congo—and headed bureaus in Kinshasa, Lagos, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Singapore, and Buenos Aires.

  In contrast, I had been writing about the drought in Kansas and pork belly futures in Chicago. Later I would return to Paris, after a stint in Rome and two decades in New York and Washington, as bureau chief for the New York Times. But during that first sojourn in the city I was green, and Mort was generous with his knowledge.

  Mort is a living encyclopedia of the Seine. All good journalists are storytellers; Mort is a great one. He gets a laugh when he talks about his life on land, when his clothes didn’t smell bad and he had a warm, dry apartment in a charming old building with fireplaces and a rose garden on the terrace. He will tell you about the summer of 1992, when the water was warm, the oxygen level low, and a thousand tons of fish died and rotted in the river. He remembers the Piscine Deligny, an outdoor floating swimming pool moored near the Musée d’Orsay, where—until it sank in 1993—women went topless and men sometimes swam in the nude.

  At the time of the 2016 flood, Mort and I hadn’t talked in a few years. I dug up an old cell phone number for him and dialed.

  “Meet me on the boat,” he said.

  “Can’t we meet on dry land?” I asked. “How about if I buy you lunch?”

  “You need to experience this moment!” he said. “Come along topside. If you want to see the Seine, you have to come out onto the Seine.”

  The boat doesn’t have a fixed address, although it has been based in and around the Port des Champs-Élysées since the 1970s. He moors it alongside other houseboats. It has a hull of double teak planking; a living room with mahogany cabinets and built-in benches and bookcases; a kitchen with a three-burner gas stove, a mini-refrigerator, hand-painted Portuguese tiles, and heavy copper pots; a portable air conditioner; a functioning toilet; a tiny bathtub; a small bedroom; and a furnished deck overflowing with potted red geraniums.

  Mort has decorated the space with trophies and trinkets from his travels: a hand-carved sailboat from Vietnam, a large crab shell from Brittany, a collection of wooden pipes. Over the years, he has learned how to install water pumps, replace oil joints, rewire cabin lights, and varnish decks. He has bought fire extinguishers, life vests, buoys, and deck furniture. He has learned the tricks of navigating the Seine: how to swing away from silt deposits that form at the bend of a curve, watch for telltale debris and ripples that could be hiding rocks, and shimmy in and out of locks.

  To get to his boat, Mort told me to take the Métro to the Solférino stop, cross the footbridge in front of the Quai d’Orsay, then turn left. “I’m four boats toward the place de la Concorde,” he said. “You’ll see a chair on one side of the wall that’s connected to a ladder on the other side. You climb onto the chair, swing over, and come down the ladder. Then there’s a gangway. Walk slowly. It’s almost sitting in the water. The river’s steady, but don’t move too much. It’s precarious.”

  Flooding has always been part of life in the Seine basin. The Marais, on the Right Bank, was once a giant swamp (marais means “swamp”). Grégoire de Tours, the sixth-century historian and bishop of Tours, described a catastrophic flood in 582 that inundated hundreds of acres. A book about the life and miracles of Sainte Geneviève described the flood of 814 as God’s punishment of the people of Paris. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, believers marched in a procession through the flood-ravaged parts of the city and appealed for the saint’s help. In 1658, shortly after flood levels began to be precisely recorded, the Seine’s waters rose to twenty-nine feet above their normal level, covering more than twenty-eight hundred acres—over half the surface of the city. The floodwaters washed away the Seine’s Pont Marie, even though the bridge was built of stone.

  In the modern era, Parisians have measured floods against the great one that came in the winter of 1910, when the Seine overflowed, and the City of Light was submerged in chaos and darkness. Torrential rains soaked the soil. The river rose twenty-eight feet above its normal level. The sewers failed. The river that had breathed life into Paris drowned its streets, houses, museums, and shops. It flooded twenty thousand buildings. All but two bridges—the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal—were totally submerged. There was no electricity, no Métro. For forty-five days, parts of the city were transformed into a lake of filth and debris, as far n
orth as the Gare Saint-Lazare. Parisians navigated the streets in rowboats and on wooden walkways. The Eiffel Tower, built on a foundation of sand, shifted three-quarters of an inch. But Gustave Eiffel was a wizard of engineering. He had also built his creation on hydraulic pumps, and the tower moved back into place when the floodwaters receded.

  After that flood, the city constructed reservoirs upstream to help manage the Seine’s water level. Now six large dams hold back excess water during winter and release it during the hot, dry summer months. The porous, permeable rock of the Seine’s basin absorbs some of the water, which reduces the risk of flooding. But when the rains came in 2016, the dams were full, the soil saturated. Nothing could stop the flow.

  I DONNED AN ANORAK, jeans, a small backpack, and rubber-bottomed work shoes. I headed out, following Mort’s directions, and found the upper quay at the designated spot. The quay held rows of densely packed houseboats. Three boats can be parallel-parked on the river at one mooring. They can share water and electrical power lines. If you happen to live on the third boat out, you must climb over the decks of your two neighbors to get to dry land. Mort lived on the third boat. He waved from his deck, clambered across his neighbors’ decks, crossed a flimsy metal walkway connected to the land, climbed up a vertical metal ladder bolted into the quay, and stepped over a stone barrier onto an old chair that filled in for a stepstool; with another stride he reached the sidewalk. We took the same route in reverse to get to the boat. The flood had knocked out Mort’s water and electricity. Jeannette was away. It was cold and dreary. The boat smelled of diesel, damp, and cat.

  Usually, the river in Paris enjoys a steady stream of traffic: bateaux-mouches, the sightseeing giants; smaller, more agile tourist boats like those run by the Vedettes de Paris; low-slung working barges; tugboats; motorboats. The traffic is so dense that if you live on a houseboat, you feel it moving. The wakes from the larger vessels can cause your boat to shudder and sway and can topple your balance. But these were not normal times. The water had risen too high for boats to pass beneath the arches of the bridges. Now the only boats on the river were those of the Brigade Fluviale, the river police.

  Life on land appears different when you look at it from a river, even more so when the river is swollen. Usually the stone walls along the quay block the street-level view of the Right Bank. But the water had lifted Mort’s boat so high that the obelisk on the place de la Concorde was entirely visible.

  The Seine is a slow river, only now the water was moving fast. It swirled in spirals, flowed backward, and kicked up waves. Paris’s detritus went by: tree trunks, wooden planks, car tires, tin cans, air conditioners, fans, plastic bags, bicycles, and bottles, so many bottles—wine, beer, water, and baby bottles.

  Tourists had been gathering on the banks and bridges to record the swollen waters with their cameras and smartphones, clustering around the city’s unofficial water gauge, the statue of the Zouave on the Pont de l’Alma. Water reaching the statue’s toes shows that the river is running high; water reaching his thighs shows that the river is unnavigable. The year 2016 was truly remarkable: the water rose to his hips. During the great flood of 1910, when Paris nearly drowned, it reached his shoulders.

  Despite all his years covering disasters, Mort said he had never seen the river this high. “One night I’m sitting on my deck drinking a glass of wine, and the ducks are swimming by, and everything is perfectly normal,” he said. “And the next morning I wake up and it’s like Noah’s ark! It’s a sign. This is not supposed to happen. Anyone who doesn’t think global warming exists has to have his head examined.”

  A scene of a lamppost in Paris during the 2016 flood. ANDREW PLUMP.

  Mort almost lost his car to the river. As the water rose, he moved it to higher ground and thought it was safe. Then he received an urgent call from Jeannette, who had seen the car featured in an online warning notice from the small port association representing houseboat owners. The water was drawing nearer to the vehicle. Mort put on waders and walked through waist-high water to get to it. Exhausted, he managed to move the car to still higher ground.

  “It was already going underwater,” he said. “Half an hour more and it would have been too late.”

  “But how did you get it to start?”

  “It’s a Volkswagen.”

  Houseboats are not unique to Paris, of course. But no other houseboat community has views of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and so many long strands of bridges connecting the riverbanks. When I’d first moved to Paris, I’d gazed down at them from the Pont de l’Alma and wondered who were those people perched on chaises longues on their decks, sipping white wine and watching the sun as it settled into the river. I’ve never fantasized about living on a houseboat, but a few glorious nights? Living on a houseboat, you belong to the romance of the river. You belong to Paris at its heart.

  The French live on boats along many of the country’s rivers, but the densest community is in the Paris area on the Seine, where more than thirteen hundred residential boats are officially registered. They fit into two categories: working boats that have been transformed into homes, and motorless houses floating on pontoons.

  The same social and cultural divide between city and suburban life translates to life on the water. In lower-end areas, like the Canal de l’Ourcq, which feeds into the Seine in Paris, some houseboats are little more than shabby dinghies for two. Some of the poshest floating houses in France are docked in the upscale suburbs west of Paris. They have their own street addresses, mailboxes, and independent electrical, gas, and water lines. There’s little water traffic in their neighborhoods.

  Along a narrow river path near the Club Nautique, in the suburb of Sèvres, are dozens of elaborate floating houses. Rosebushes, palm trees, and evergreens embellish some of their decks. Inside are Persian carpets, leather furniture, and pale wood paneling. An inspection of one home revealed a Weber grill and a tall Christmas tree heavy with ornaments; another boasted enough neatly stacked firewood to last the winter; still another had a modern eat-in kitchen, with picture windows looking out at the river. Sinbad was a floating house with a brass anchor door knocker; Bel Ami was a mansion of a barge, with a small, inflatable Zodiac boat and a motorboat tied to its side (perhaps recalling Maupassant, who gave the name Bel Ami to a boat he owned and a novel he wrote); Light II was a modernistic construction of white and gray angles, with an abstract painting hanging in the front hallway.

  Years ago, I heard a dramatic house-on-the-river tale of woe from Pierre Bergé, the longtime partner of the designer Yves Saint Laurent. One summer in the 1960s, Bergé rented a shabby-chic houseboat on the Seine. He was seeking a weekend refuge with Saint Laurent, who had suffered a severe nervous breakdown. The designer had just returned from hospitalization in a military facility, where he had endured powerful drugs and electroshock therapy.

  The houseboat they rented wasn’t a boat at all—it was a real house that happened to float in a classy and quiet neighborhood: off boulevard du Général Koenig in the rich western Paris suburb of Neuilly. “The Seine boat was my version of a house in the country,” Bergé said. “Our lives are cluttered with too many things. On a boat, you’re stripped to the essentials. It was marvelous.”

  The friend who had rented Bergé the floating house was oblivious to its seaworthiness. “I would tell him, ‘The boat is not in a good state,’” Bergé recalled. “I would say, ‘The boat takes in water.’ His answer was always the same: ‘Ah, bon?’” One Sunday night that summer, a three-deck canasta game heated up. Saint Laurent, Bergé, and two of their friends were so deep into meld making and point scoring that they didn’t bother to eat or drink. Nor did they notice what was happening around them.

  That night the boat was taking in water. A lot of it. A team of river police patrolling the Seine noticed. The police ordered the men to stop their game and evacuate. They watched from shore as the houseboat sank.

  Houseboats in the Port de l’Arsenal, in Paris off the Seine. ANDREW PLUMP.<
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  BUYING A HOUSEBOAT in Paris requires a huge investment of time and money. A luxury houseboat can cost as much per square foot as an apartment on land. France is notorious for—and perversely proud of—the complex and contradictory, mysterious and mind-bending bureaucratic hurdles and red tape that confound even the most patient supplicant. Houseboat ownership takes this centuries-old tradition to a new level. The process of buying a houseboat starts with a twenty-eight-page guidebook from the governmental authority Voies Navigables de France. The guidebook asserts that houseboats along the Seine are pretty and make Paris “most attractive.” But buying one is not an endeavor for the faint-hearted: “Occupying a site on the public domain of the river is precarious, revocable, and non-transferable,” it warns.

  Complicated procedures involve six different agencies for document registrations, certification of navigation, inspections, insurance, and obtaining a sailing license. A houseboat cannot be sold with a parking place—that is public property. The wait for a berth in Île-de-France, which includes the area in and around Paris, can last years. There was a time when living on a houseboat was a comparatively cost-effective way to set yourself up in Paris. That would change in 1994, when the VNF and the Paris port authority imposed a housing tax, a mooring fee, and a contract of occupation. With those added costs, the fantasy of renting a berth in a prime location in central Paris with an unobstructed view of the Eiffel Tower turns out to be expensive.

  In recent years, though, Airbnb has made it easy to rent a houseboat in Paris for a temporary stay. A large, floating house that sleeps eight might cost three hundred euros a night. The promise of romance is one of the selling points. As one rental website explains in its promotional material, “What can be more romantic than dining on the deck of an authentic ship, while feeling the energetic city around you?”