The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  The models wore designs that matched the setting, including tweed jackets in shades of stone and concrete and silver-sequined minidresses with spaghetti straps. “Paris is about pale gray,” said Lagerfeld.

  I WENT BACK to see Jacky a few weeks after our first meeting. He pulled Les Ponts de Paris—“The Bridges of Paris”—from a backpack. It was a heavy coffee-table book of 240 pages, published in 1999 by Paris’s City Hall. The price printed on the cover was 290 French francs (this was before the euro), or about fifty dollars. He had found it at the weekend book dealers’ open-air flea market on the edge of Paris. He had paid ten euros, and that’s what he wanted from me.

  The cover was dreadful: a photograph of three bridges at night in garish colors. The sky and river were dyed rose; the bridges, a bright turquoise. It struck me as one of those mass-produced books destined for tourists. Then I opened it. The pages were printed on heavy, shiny, fine-quality paper. The book described the history of all of Paris’s bridges and accompanied the text with reproductions of maps, paintings, engravings, and photographs.

  “So often celebrated for their charm, the bridges of Paris punctuate the Seine with their diversity,” Jean Tiberi, the mayor of Paris at the time, wrote in an introduction. “Each one, living witness to the history of the Capital, is both a technical feat and a work of art.”

  That sold me. I gave Jacky ten euros.

  Jacky said he had something else for me. He produced a large white envelope containing prints of the bouquinistes on cheap beige poster board. The colors were muddy, the details blurred.

  The painter, Tavik Frantisek Šimon, was a Czech artist living in Paris; the prints were copies of engravings he had done in the 1920s. One of them, on the Quai des Grands-Augustins, showed an elderly female bookseller, a sad look on her face as she read a newspaper.

  “That’s my stall!” said Jacky. “And that woman—she was my great-grandmother.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  “Yes, I am. But it’s a good story, no?”

  I bought the prints, of course. On the back of each print was a stanza from “Nocturne Parisien,” a poem written by Paul Verlaine in 1866, stark in its darkness:

  You, Seine, you have nothing! Two quays, no more!

  A filthy, putrid quay spreading on either shore

  With dreary, musty books and idle crowds . . .

  In other stanzas, Verlaine calls the Seine “indolent,” its waters “dismal,” its bridges “lined with a nefarious mist.” In another, the river becomes “an aged serpent . . . ever without pity.” But one stanza is filled with light:

  When sunset burns red splotches in a sky that hums,

  How blest for dreamers to emerge . . . to stare

  At Notre-Dame, dreaming in the cool peaceful air,

  Hearts and hair windswept . . .

  And that’s why Jacky enjoys his book stand on the Seine. “My job gives me freedom to dream,” he admitted. “Not like teaching, when you have strict hours. Not like a bookstore that you have to open at nine a.m. Of course, I have what I call empty days—when no one comes at all, when no one wants my books,” he said. “That’s when I feel completely useless.”

  To pass the time on those days, he likes to watch birds—kingfishers, herons, gulls, big double-crested cormorants, and numerous species of ducks. The river never bores him. “When I think of the Seine, I think of so many things. Poetry. Apollinaire. Power. And I keep myself going with the realization of being alive. I have no desire to sit in front of a television and eat peanuts.”

  A team of the Brigade Fluviale, Paris’s river police force, making its daily rounds on the Seine with the Musée d’Orsay in the background. ALEXANDER HURST.

  TWENTY

  Guardians of the Peace

  The officers of the River Brigade

  belonged to a separate kingdom, a

  floating kingdom, and when they

  went up the river at night, they

  knew they were modern explorers,

  lucky enough to cast a virgin glance

  on the city. They knew Paris like no

  one else.

  — Quai des enfers, a 2010

  police thriller by INGRID ASTIER

  EVERY MORNING, a River Brigade team of four police officers covers a beat that is long, narrow, and wet. The Brigade Fluviale’s mission is to patrol about 370 miles of waterways in and around Paris, including the Seine, its connecting canals and tributaries, and several small lakes. Paris owns the most important tourist river in the world, with eight million passengers boarding thousands of tour boats of varied sizes and shapes each year. The River Brigade is the first line of defense in a chain of law enforcement and lifesaving personnel. Its tasks range from the urgent to the ordinary: by night the river police might rescue somebody attempting suicide; by day they can find themselves disengaging a tree trunk from the hull of a houseboat. They enforce rules governing river life, handing out fines for swimming, speeding, and waterskiing. They are summoned when boats collide, suspicious packages are found, dead bodies surface. After their first response, firefighters, doctors, land police, and even electricians and plumbers pitch in.

  “I am a boat pilot, a diver, a sonar operator and trainer, a judicial police officer, a team leader,” said Brigadier Serge Denis, who was in his mid-forties and had been on the force for more than a decade. “The Brigade Fluviale is the Swiss Army knife of the river. We have a central blade but a lot of other tools, too.” Denis was pleased with the image and laughed out loud. “Swiss Army knife,” he said again. “That’s the best way to describe us.”

  At seven o’clock one sunny morning in late June, I accompanied four “guardians of the peace,” as the officers call themselves—Laurent, Fred, Tristan, and Fanny, one of the few female police divers—on a training and surveillance mission. They wore tight, custom-made wet-suit uniforms and had assigned roles: the captain gave the orders; the pilot drove the boat; the diver jumped into the water; and the rescuer administered first aid. At the start of the morning shift, the team members went through the daily ritual of news updates and maintenance checks.

  We set out on the river in a sleek, black inflatable motorboat. First, the officers took turns swimming freestyle as part of their daily training. Then they strapped on diving gear and plunged deep into the river’s darkness. Even though summer had officially started, the water was so cold that it numbed their heads and hands; twenty minutes was the longest any of them could bear to stay in. At one point, Tristan emerged clutching an object in his right hand like a trophy, a broad smile on his face. It was a twelve-inch metal statue of a man holding a dog.

  Our moment of joyful discovery was shattered by an emergency announcement on the two-way radio. “Two men have taken a priest hostage . . . in a church . . . in Rouen!” said Fred. “With a knife!” Rouen was far from the team’s area of operations in Paris—more than seventy miles away—but they needed to stand by in case they were called to respond.

  In the next few minutes, more information came in. Two men wielding knives had taken several people hostage in Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray Church, near Rouen. They had forced the eighty-five-year-old parish priest, Father Jacques Hamel, to his knees as he was saying Mass and had slit his throat. The horrified congregation had watched him die. Police officers then shot the killers dead.

  At least one of the officers in our patrol had to be armed and ready. “We can’t all be in our wet suits!” said Fanny. She stripped out of her wet suit, donned her police uniform, and strapped her handgun around her waist. “Above all, we are police officers,” she said. “Our most important training in the service is shooting, not swimming.”

  One morning, when I went along on an emergency call for help from a tugboat owner near the Porte d’Ivry, in eastern Paris, we chopped through the waters of the Seine at fifty miles an hour. I had been warned not to wear a hat, but I had anyway, and it flew off. I gripped the steel back of the captain’s perch as the wind whipped us. “Just like Miami V
ice, no?” one of the brigadiers said.

  Just about every member of the River Brigade has watched the reruns and is familiar with the ins and outs of Miami Vice, the 1980s American television series that celebrated police work from a perch on the water. Sonny (Don Johnson) and Rico (Philip Michael Thomas) played two cool alpha-male police detectives working undercover in Miami. Sonny lived on a sailboat with his pet alligator, Elvis, drove a Ferrari, and piloted a racing boat. He and Rico raced around Miami Beach in never-ending gun battles with drug traffickers, pimps, mafiosi, and serial home burglars. They changed clothes several times per episode. Sonny wore a three-day stubble, T-shirts under unstructured pastel Armani blazers, Ray-Ban sunglasses, white linen slacks, and slip-on, soft leather loafers without socks.

  We reached our destination and tied the boat to a large iron ring cemented to the stone quay. Two police divers plunged in. They discovered that a piece of metal had jammed the tugboat’s motor, and they pulled it free. An easy recovery.

  TO BECOME A GUARDIAN of the peace on the river, candidates must be under the age of forty, have one year of service in the regular police force, be licensed boaters and excellent swimmers, know how to shoot a handgun, and have security clearances from the Ministry of the Interior. They must pass a series of verbal, written, physical, and psychological exams, and then undergo several months of specialized training, followed by tests in swimming, breath holding, rescue, diving, and first aid.

  “We carefully examine their motives,” said Sandrine Berjot, a career police officer who became commander of the Brigade Fluviale in 2012. “This is absolutely not a vacation club where you say, ‘Isn’t it nice that today we’re in T-shirts sunning ourselves, and when it gets hot we’ll jump into the river.’ The psychologist will ask questions about death, because it is never easy to dive into a completely hostile environment in the middle of the night to search for a dead body.”

  Every graduating class is named after one of the bridges over the Seine; Serge’s class was called Simone de Beauvoir. The ritual on graduation day is to jump from your bridge into the river.

  THE SEINE IS a tranquil river, but its currents are unpredictable. The supporting pillars of bridges create invisible whirlpools that can send boats spinning and drag victims deep under the surface. The water temperature can rise to seventy-five degrees in summer and fall to freezing in winter. Fog can blind even the most experienced police diver. Pollution turns the water a murky brown. Algae blooms in the spring and summer, when the river can be tinted a sickly green.

  Louis Lépine, the head of the Paris Police Prefecture at the turn of the last century, created the brigade in June 1900. Paris was hosting the Exposition Universelle, and most of the temporary structures built as national pavilions lined the banks of the river. The brigade did such an excellent job during the exposition (it saved twelve people from drowning and helped two hundred others to safety) that it became a permanent force. Within a few years, the brigade was trawling the bottom of the river in search of debris—and bodies.

  The gateway to the River Brigade headquarters is hidden behind trees on the far side of the suburban commuter train tracks next to the Pont d’Austerlitz in the Fifth Arrondissement. To access it, you take a fork at the corner where the roadway meets the Quai Saint-Bernard and walk about a hundred feet down an access road until you reach a parking lot. Inside a metal gate is a narrow walkway leading to a floating police station.

  These days, the brigade consists of several rotating teams with about a hundred personnel. Eighty of these employees are active-duty swimmers and divers, but even the maintenance and administrative workers are members of the police. Every year, they conduct some five thousand patrols and two hundred rescue missions. They also retrieve several dozen dead bodies.

  A large two-story pontoon boat connected to three smaller pontoon boats was custom-designed to serve as the brigade’s central command. The large boat has air-conditioning, a surveillance desk, a combined conference and dining room with long tables, a warren of offices, toilets, showers, lockers, and unobstructed views of the river. Food is important (this is France, after all), and the full-service kitchen is equipped to cook hot meals. A shelf holds mismatched cups, glasses, plates, and cutlery.

  One of the smaller pontoon boats is a logistical base for surveillance cameras that monitor the river; another houses a repair shop and an underground storage facility; the third stores fuel. The brigade has sixteen boats, some of them moored outside Paris. The biggest is a seventy-two-foot-long towboat that carries a tall white crane capable of pulling up a car. The officers of the brigade know the rhythms and secrets of the river. There is a hidden spot between the Pont de l’Alma and the Passerelle Debilly, near the gold-painted Flame of Liberty, where, just as you turn the corner of the river going east, the Sacré-Coeur Basilica appears out of nowhere, high on its hill in Montmartre. The officers told me about a squatter who lives behind a door that opens into a small space in one of the stone quays near their headquarters and greets them every morning with a single “Bonjour.”

  One of the biggest threats comes not from criminals but from infection. Although the Seine’s waters are getting cleaner, they are not yet clean enough for swimming. E. coli, an infection from fecal matter, is a risk; more serious is leptospirosis, a bacterial disease transmitted through rat urine. And the Seine is full of rats.

  The officers of the brigade are armed with vaccinations—against typhus, tetanus, hepatitis, and yellow fever. They stay out of the water when they have open cuts or wounds and must shower off the river’s dreck as soon as they return to headquarters.

  The main pontoon boat shelters numerous species of fish, which live and spawn underneath it: perch, eels, carp, a variety of small shrimp. One morning when I visited, I leaned over the deck and looked deep into the water. A strong smell of seaweed and dead fish overpowered me. The visibility that day was good, and I could see down as far as five feet, where hundreds of tiny, fast-moving black fish swam.

  In the same waters lives a well-fed, four-foot-long silure, a beast of the catfish family with a broad, flat head, beady eyes, and slimy skin that looks like dung and feels like rubber. The silure has poor eyesight, good hearing, and an ugly, ravenous mouth that opens round and wide to suck in fish, ducks, pigeons, water rats, and other prey. It can live to be fifty years old. The specimen under the police pontoon loves swimming back and forth in the muck at the bottom of the river. It makes an appearance near the surface about once a week.

  “Does it have a name?” I asked Sébastien Bonneau, one of the senior officers. I thought it might be the brigade’s mascot. He and his colleagues looked at me as if I were nuts.

  “No—he eats all the ducks!” Bonneau said.

  “So why don’t you just get rid of him?”

  “He’s more at home here than we are.”

  The floor of the Seine is a massive garbage dump for objects big and small, a final resting place for rusty car chassis, busted air conditioners, old furniture, tree trunks, electrical wiring, slabs of drywall, beer bottle caps, cigarette butts. Once the brigade pulled up an entire zinc-topped bar from a café. When the crew discovers explosives or suspicious objects, it calls in a special team of bomb-dismantling experts. The black water and the unpredictable currents make it hard to find small but important objects for a criminal investigation—like a gun that may have been used in a robbery. Since 2009, the brigade has used American-made sonar devices to seek out submerged cars and bodies hidden from view.

  Two heavy World War II–era German machine guns with the brand name “Rheinmetall” hang like trophies high on a wall of the brigade’s main meeting room. A glass cabinet holds some of the best finds from the river’s depths: other World War II relics, including grenades, shell casings, dog tags, and handcuffs; pistols in assorted sizes and shapes; a collection of sunglasses; a hunting knife in its leather case. The memorabilia also run to religious objects, such as crucifixes, a bronze statue of Saint Anthony of Padua, and a framed por
trait of Jesus, as well as other ephemera: miniature Eiffel Towers, cigarette lighters, a metal hammer and sickle, a bust of Napoléon, an old sword, coins, a silver cup, a leather glove, a sculpture of a bird and a dog, a terra-cotta cherub, and keys that couples throw into the river after they lock their “love” padlocks to bridges.

  In 2015, an officer diving near the Pont Neuf spotted a strange object. He dug around it and retrieved a mascaron, one of the carved stone masks with heads as big as two feet tall that decorate the bridge. This one, missing half of its nose and one ear, had fallen off. The brigade turned it over to the city of Paris and was rewarded with three replicas—which are now shown off to visitors as treasured possessions.

  People release unwanted water pets into the river, even though it is illegal to do so. The brigade once pulled up a six-foot-long royal python. Royal pythons are native to sub-Saharan Africa, and their natural habitat is land—forest floors and grassy savannahs. But they can easily survive in water, and this one must have liked the Seine.

  During one of my visits, two emergencies unfolded. A brigade team raced out to the Pont Marie to save a young man struggling in the river. A friend—either drunk or horsing around or both—had pushed him in. The man was saved, the friend arrested and charged with attempted murder. A second team rushed to the Pont de Tolbiac to rescue a fully clothed man in his forties who had jumped into the water in a suicide attempt. The call for help came too late. The man had been in the water for fifty minutes, his brain deprived of oxygen. The doctor on duty declared him dead.