The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  Darius is forever filming and hard to pin down. But during one of his brief stays in Paris, I caught up with him again. We met for a stroll along the Seine at the Quai Malaquais, in the Sixth Arrondissement. We walked down a cobblestoned ramp at Port des Saints-Pères and went east, under the Pont des Arts and the Pont Neuf, which crosses the Île de la Cité. The path along the Seine there is narrow, uneven, and little used by pedestrians, except for the occasional lost tourist.

  “I love this,” he said. “It’s all poplars. The light of the sky penetrating the trees turns the water green! And look—the trees make shadows on the stones.”

  He pulled out his iPhone, locked his legs in place about two feet apart, and began shooting still photos—of the river, the bridges, the quays, the cobblestones. He explained that he always zooms in slightly to make the wide angle of an iPhone more like a 40-or 50-millimeter lens. “I want to make it like a reproduction of the human eye,” he said.

  As we walked, the sun burned hot and high above us, flattening the landscape with bright light. Darius was frustrated. “Here we are at the worst moment of the day,” he said. “We are seeing the most romantic river in the world in her worst light!”

  As if on cue, the sun hid behind a cloud. “Ah, see the blue in the distance beyond the green,” he said.

  “What blue?” I asked.

  “You don’t see the blue?”

  “No, I see green and brown and gray and silver—not blue.”

  “Are you color-blind, Elaine! The reflection of the poplars in the water is green, and the reflection of the sky is blue!”

  I stared hard into the distance. And then, I could see it. A blue that started silvery and turned darker the more I looked. It was the blue of a Corot painting.

  “The Seine, it is forever changing and showing off the reflections,” he said. “The light plays tricks and makes magic. Gray, gray brown, gray green-blue, dark blue against the blue sky. The bridges, the stones, the banks change and move with the river.”

  As we walked, Notre-Dame appeared in all its glory, perfectly framed beyond a curved arch of the Pont Saint-Michel. “You don’t have this view with the Thames, or the Hudson, or the Tiber, or the Danube, or the Guadalquivir,” he said. “You don’t have it with any other river in the world.”

  Under the Pont Saint-Michel we found a long stone bench against the wall. A cool breeze passed through. A bateau-mouche with a guide speaking in Chinese passed us, splashing waves against the stone quay. A tourist from Guadeloupe played his saxophone for us. We sat for a moment, and our voices echoed as we spoke. “We had Gil Pender walking on the other side of the river,” Darius said of an important scene in Midnight in Paris. “Why didn’t we have Gil Pender walking here? I’ve lived in Paris for most of my life, but I never walked here before. It’s a perfect set.”

  As we approached the Petit Pont, with Notre-Dame at street level above us, Darius told me to turn around and face west. The sun was moving in and out of the clouds behind us. “You see the light makes shadows of the poplars, and the people in the distance are in darkness, and the Seine is so green it zings.”

  THE SEINE IS IDEAL for many tricks of cinematography. In one classic cinematic view of the Eiffel Tower, it is filmed not straight on but at an angle from the eastern part of the Right Bank, with the river and its bridges in the foreground and the tower in the distance. This is a predictable but pleasing way to let viewers know that the setting is Paris. I have lost count of the films that contain this shot. Even the goofy 2006 remake of The Pink Panther includes it.

  The banks of the Seine at the bottom of stone staircases offer a ready-made stage for a fantasy scene. A picnic. A kiss. A breakup. A catch-up. The identification of the Seine with romance is at its most literal in Love in the Afternoon, Billy Wilder’s 1957 classic. In the opening scenes, couples kiss passionately in front of fountains and on tour boats on the Seine. “Paris, France,” Maurice Chevalier declares in his voice-over, “is just like any other big city—London, New York, Tokyo—except for two little things. In Paris, people eat better. And in Paris, people make love, well, perhaps not better, but certainly more often.”

  French filmmakers have used the Seine as more than a decorative backdrop. In La vie d’un fleuve (“The Life of a River”), a twenty-four-minute documentary made in 1932, Jean Lods traces the river from its source to the sea. Lods, who joined the French Communist Party, tells the story through the lens of laborers who worked on or near the river. The film opens with a tiny spring, and then a creek flowing amid weeds at the Seine’s source. An old farmer plows his land with a horse and hoes it by hand. Sheep and cattle graze in open fields. Two men fish from a rowboat. A husband and wife struggle to tow their barge into a lock. Then comes Paris, with the Eiffel Tower, fishermen, and hundreds of swimmers and sunbathers. From there on, the industrial Seine takes over—a factory spewing smoke from giant smokestacks, steam shovels moving rocks, forklifts transferring bales onto ships. The Seine widens dramatically at the estuary, and L’ Atlantique, an ocean liner, sails westward toward the Americas. The message is clear: that trickle of a river grows to become the France that is a global maritime power.

  Joris Ivens’s 1957 black-and-white film La Seine a rencontré Paris (“The Seine Meets Paris”) uses a poem written by Jacques Prévert as a voice-over. Here, the Seine becomes a unifier, a key to understanding Paris. Wine, wheat, wood, and bricks are piled high in barges along the Seine. When a line of workers move bricks onshore, one pile after another, you can feel their burden and almost smell their sweat. “The Seine is a factory,” the narrator states, reading from Prévert’s poem. “The Seine is work.”

  The film observes boys playing on a stack of logs, a dog jumping into the river, girls in a circle singing, the sights and sounds of traffic, people sleeping, eating, walking, fishing, and splashing on the riverbanks. “There once was the Seine,” the narrator continues. “There once was life. . . . A river with eddies, sewers, and, every once in a while, a drowned person, when it isn’t a dead dog, with fishermen who never catch anything.”

  At the end, a lock opens wide to reveal the river flowing downstream to the open sea.

  With its bridges and banks, the Seine has become a favorite backdrop in adventure films. The 2011 film The Intouchables opens with a car chase along the Seine at night. In The Bourne Identity (2002), Matt Damon takes to the roof of the building that was once La Samaritaine department store to track Chris Cooper as he stops on the Pont Neuf. In Inception (2010), director Christopher Nolan creates a dream sequence where the characters play with reality. Mirror images give the impression that the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, near the Eiffel Tower, goes on forever.

  The chase scene is key to the 2007 animated film Ratatouille, when Skinner, the greedy, paranoid head chef of the restaurant Gusteau’s, chases Remy, the rat and aspiring chef, through the streets of Paris. Skinner jumps on a red scooter, races along a quay of the Seine, tumbles down a set of stairs, then chases Remy on foot across the decks of two barges. The scene ends with Skinner falling into the river as Remy escapes.

  In my view, the most daring, real-life moment in Seine film history comes in the heart-stopping 1976 documentary, C’était un rendezvous, an eight-minute film shot in one take by director Claude Lelouch. Lelouch hops into his Mercedes early one morning at Porte Dauphine, on the western edge of Paris, with a camera attached to the car’s front bumper, and races around Paris at breakneck speed. He plows through red lights, goes the wrong way on one-way streets, ignores cars, buses, and pedestrians, and ends up in a romantic encounter at the top of Montmartre. For twenty-five seconds along the way, he speeds along the Seine. He starts with a skid across place de la Concorde. Just as he is about to cross the river at the Pont de la Concorde toward the Assemblée Nationale, he swerves left and accelerates along the Quai François Mitterrand. Lelouch passes two cars at the Pont Royal, and heads straight for the side of a bus as he approaches the Pont du Carrousel. Two statues at the northern end of the bridge come i
nto focus just before he makes another screeching left turn through an archway and onto the place du Carrousel, in front of the Louvre. (Lelouch was arrested for failure to stop at red lights after the first screening of the film, which was banned and for years shown only surreptitiously.)

  Other directors film the Seine for slapstick comedy. In the remake of The Pink Panther, Steve Martin, playing the clueless Inspector Clouseau, inadvertently sends Kevin Kline, lying on a gurney, his body swathed in bandages, crashing through the window of a hospital and into the Seine. In Irma la Douce (1963), Jack Lemmon emerges from the river as an unfazed English gentleman, umbrella first. The Seine was so polluted that Lemmon was given several immunization shots, including one for tetanus, before shooting the scene. He later called it the most disgusting thing he ever had to do in a movie, according to IMDb, the online film and television database.

  Sometimes the fantasy world of film can invade real life. Camille Claudel (1988), about the sculptress who had been Rodin’s lover, was filmed in an apartment on the Île Saint-Louis made to look like Rodin’s atelier. In one scene, Isabelle Adjani, who plays Camille, becomes so angry and despondent that she takes a sculpture she has made of Rodin’s foot and throws it from a bridge into the Seine. A few years later, a team of frogmen from the river police found it at the bottom of the river. It had some sort of signature on it. They thought it was a real treasure. Then they got the bad news: it was only a movie prop.

  Every summer, the city of Paris turns parts of the Seine’s riverbanks into “Paris Plages”—urban beaches. ANDREW PLUMP.

  A night-time image of La Seine Musicale, the ultramodern concert hall on Île Seguin just west of Paris. NICOLAS GROSMOND.

  SEVENTEEN

  River of Song

  The Seine sings, sings, sings, sings,

  Sings all day and all night,

  Because she is in love

  And her lover—it’s Paris.

  —“LA SEINE,” a popular song from 1948

  SINGING IS NOT an everyday habit in Paris. It’s unusual for a Parisian to spontaneously burst into song in the middle of a conversation at work. So I was surprised when Juliette Jestaz, the curator of manuscripts and engravings at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, a repository for more than two million books, manuscripts, documents, and maps about Paris history, began singing to me. Jestaz is a quiet beauty. On the day we met she was wearing a long, loose, gray flannel skirt, a burgundy-colored turtleneck, and matching flats. Her brown hair, streaked with fine strands of gray, was pulled into a low bun, her face untouched by makeup. The office where we met was piled high with books and papers crammed into heavy cardboard file boxes. A large, dark tapestry hung on one of the walls. The crystal chandelier was unlit.

  The singing began during a conversation about the library’s resources. I told her I was looking for unusual facts and stories about life on the Seine.

  “Have you found any songs?” she asked.

  “Not many,” I said.

  She asked if I knew “Les Ricochets,” written and sung by Georges Brassens, the twentieth-century singer-songwriter and poet. I told her I didn’t. Without another word, she began humming the 1976 tune. Then she sang: “I was only eighteen, just leaving my hometown one fine day . . .”

  Her voice was pure, sweet, and practiced. The song recounted the story of a young man who arrived in Paris for the first time and headed straight to the bridges of the Seine, where he fell in love with the first Parisian woman he met. She broke his heart, but he was not sad.

  I had come with Joanna Beaufoy, a young British scholar with a passion for songs, and we asked if Juliette knew any others.

  “Of course,” she said.

  Jestaz singled out “La Seine,” a 1948 love song and probably the best-known song about the river. This time, Joanna joined in as Jestaz sang. Jestaz explained that the library owned a large collection of songs about Paris, some of them in the form of small printed scores that were sold on the street so that people could sing along with a street singer.

  Rivers and songs. Songs and rivers. Rivers belong to all of us, and to none of us. They nourish and betray. They remind us of misery and of bliss. It is no wonder that composers have put words about rivers to music, probably for as long as songs have been sung. The Danube inspired Johann Strauss’s waltz; the Mississippi, “Ol’ Man River.” In 1941, folksinger Woody Guthrie wrote twenty-six ballads for a movie about the Columbia and the benefits of hydroelectric dams. The Seine is rich in material for song: a river on a human scale, it provides a perfect setting for sunrise and sunset, a means of livelihood, an association with romance, love, life, and death.

  A 2004 scholarly essay by Martin Pénet analyzed 123 twentieth-century songs inspired by the Seine in Paris. He classified them according to subject: sites and monuments (21), bridges (20), upstream and downstream from Paris (19), the river in general (18), quays (18), water traffic (13), floods (10), and bathing (4). But songs about the Seine originated centuries before. In the Middle Ages, poems were sung, not read, and these became the earliest documented songs about the river. The medieval French poet Eustache Deschamps, for example, composed a ballad extolling the clear waters of the Seine in Paris as a source of fertility:

  She is the city crowned above all others . . .

  Situated on the river Seine,

  Vines, woods, field and meadow.

  All the wealth of this mortal life.

  In 1635, a general proclamation banned singing in public. Songs could be subversive, filled with rumors, gossip, political protest, and criticism of the ruling classes. The intrepid ignored the ban, many of them singing in code to avoid arrest. The most sensitive meeting place was the Pont Neuf. All the social classes mingled there, making the bridge a dangerous place to sing a song and the best place for spreading it.

  As in poetry, rhyming is important in song, and “Seine” is a great word for lyrics. In French it is pronounced “sen” and rhymes with reine (queen), sereine (serene), peine (trouble), sirène (mermaid), souveraine (sovereign), veine (vein), and almost with aime (from the verb aimer, to love). It is a homonym with scène, to mean “scene,” as on a theater stage. In French, the two words are sometimes used interchangeably. In 2017, La Seine Musicale, a modernistic concert hall, opened on the Île Seguin, on the Seine. When spoken, the hall’s name can mean both “Musical Seine” and “Musical Scene.” In English, Seine is sometimes mispronounced “sane” and is coupled with the long a sound, as in ABBA’s song “Our Last Summer” (“Walks along the Seine / Laughing in the rain”).

  Joanna gave me one of the most thoughtful Christmas presents I’ve ever received: a CD containing a score of famous songs about the Seine, tunes that she had found and digitized. The CD included peppy songs like “La Seine” from the 2011 animated film Un monstre à Paris, set during the great flood of 1910. In the film, an inventor transforms a flea into a giant monster, Francoeur, a gifted singer who performs in a cabaret alongside a feisty female star, whose voice is that of actress Vanessa Paradis.

  Oldies like Léo Ferré’s 1952 interpretation of “Le Pont Mirabeau,” Apollinaire’s classic 1912 poem about the loss of his muse and lover, Marie Laurencin, are inspired by the Seine. The bridge represented freedom and peace for the couple, and when Laurencin ended the relationship after five years, Apollinaire wrote of a heart broken by love’s fickleness. Ferré turned the poem into a waltz of melancholy: “All love goes by as water to the sea / All love goes by / How slow life seems to me / How violent the hope of love can be.” It is a masterpiece of the French chanson.

  There are songs of love, friendship, nostalgia, danger, loss, longing, political protest, work, and death. The Seine in song is often represented as a woman courted by various lovers (France, Parisians, visitors). In the song “Paris a rencontré la Seine” (“Paris Met the Seine”) by Serge Reggiani, the Seine is Paris’s fiancée, and her bridges are her rings (“For the Seine is a lover / and Paris sleeps in her bed”). In the poem turned song
“Quai de Béthune,” Louis Aragon, a founder of France’s Surrealist movement, sees the Seine as a blonde who makes love to the Île de la Cité. (True to the Surrealist tradition of nonsense and mystery, he doesn’t explain why she is blond.)

  In “Les Feux de Paris,” a Louis Aragon poem sung by Jean Ferrat, the Seine becomes carnal on “obscene mornings,” opening at the Île Saint-Louis’s place Dauphine “like a woman with crazy eyes” and her legs spread apart. (Why are there so many comparisons of the Seine to a woman with spread legs?) Ferrat also sings songs about the Seine belonging to all of France—from Burgundy to the sea. “Don’t act so cocky, Paris,” he croons in the 1961 song “Regarde-toi Paname,” which uses a slang name for the city. “I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings / But you can see the Seine flow / From elsewhere than the foot of Notre-Dame.”

  The Seine’s seductive power cuts across nationalities. In 1959, the Kingston Trio, an American folk group, sang a song called “The Seine” written by Brooklyn-born Irving Burgie (a.k.a. Lord Burgess). It came out as a ballad of singsongy syrup. A song with a similar title, “La Seine,” tells the story of a love affair that ended at the river; it was a hit in France and the United States. When the great French vocalist Maurice Chevalier sang it, he enunciated every delicious syllable—the river was eur-euseh and ad-ven-toor-eu-seh (happy and adventurous). The best line comes when the Seine reveals herself as a woman who can’t stop singing about the city she loves: “The Seine sings, sings, sings, sings, / Sings all day and all night, / Because she is in love / And her lover—it’s Paris.”

  Doris Day offered a perky, English-language version, replacing the words “Elle roucoule, coule, coule” with “She’s cooing, cooing, cooing.” Dean Martin sang it slow and sexy. (“Someday I know / She’ll come to Paris again, / And I’ll find her again where I lost her, / By the lovely river Seine.”) Only one false note: both Doris and Dean pronounced “Seine” as “sane” instead of “sen.” Josephine Baker and Bing Crosby insisted on authenticity, singing “La Seine” in French. Bing did it in 1953 with strong violins and horns for the album Le Bing: Song Hits of Paris, in which he gamely sang every single song in French. An actress playing a South Vietnamese cabaret singer sang a half-English, half-French version in the 1968 war film The Green Berets, starring John Wayne. There are versions in German and Swedish.