The suicide weighed heavily on the team. “In France, life is difficult, complicated,” said Fanny. “Some people deal with it better than others. Sometimes, when you throw yourself into the water, it is a cry for help. But sometimes people strap on a backpack to weigh themselves down, so they cannot come back to the surface.”
FROM THEIR PERCH in the heart of Paris, the members of the brigade feel their spirits lift when they come close to their river. The light that can turn its surface warm green in summer and icy gray in winter holds them in awe. “At sunrise, the water has the look of calm, like a lake,” said Berjot. “When you sail with the sun rising, you have the impression that Paris is yours. After ten a.m., the water begins to move a little. The boats take over for the rest of the day. Then it’s nightfall, with super-beautiful colors, and an effervescence, always an effervescence. The spotlights of the tourist boats light up the buildings along the quays. And then, after one in the morning, everything turns off again.”
“We are on the river and suddenly we are free, as if we are on a flying boat,” Fanny said. “The veterans of the brigade, the ones who have been here for twenty, twenty-five years, never take it for granted when they pass the Eiffel Tower. It’s much more than a job. We are guardians of the peace, and we are guardians of the river. We do not forget how lucky we are. C’est magnifique.”
Over time, I persuaded some of the police officers of the brigade to open a chest filled with official souvenirs of their profession. I bought a baseball cap with the Brigade Fluviale logo—chic in black and white—and bottles of Champagne with a Brigade Fluviale label. The souvenir I treasure most is an official River Brigade arm patch. It is round, with Velcro backing and an image of a golden sailboat with a plump sail sitting atop a river of dark blue. Commander Berjot gave it to me one day. It is the same design that she wears on her uniform. I keep it on my desk, as a reminder of the days I spent as an honored guest of the Paris River Brigade.
THE RIVER CAN NEVER BE completely trusted, even by those who know it best, as the brigade was reminded when tragedy struck one morning in January 2018. Amandine Giraud, a twenty-seven-year-old member of the brigade, disappeared in the waters near Notre-Dame during an optional training exercise. She had been on the force for sixteen months and had received her diving certificate only a month before.
Although the other members of the team were very experienced divers, they had underestimated the danger of diving that day. Because of storm flooding, the Seine’s current churned wildly below the surface; the water was a chilling forty degrees. Giraud dove into an area of the Seine between the Petit Pont and the Pont Saint-Michel so treacherous that it is referred to as the “Himalayas” of the river in Paris.
When she signaled that she was in distress, the crew struggled to pull her back on board, only to be thwarted by the strong current. One crew member dove into the water yet failed to rescue her. The boat’s supervisor ordered her life line to be cut, perhaps in the erroneous belief that she could save herself that way. But she disappeared.
Police and prosecutorial authorities opened investigations and reviews of procedures. A bargeman recovered her body at the end of April. The following month, she was promoted posthumously to the rank of captain and awarded the National Police Force Medal of Honor.
Outside the entrance to the Brigade Fluviale headquarters sits a small, decorative, blue-and-white wooden rowboat planted with flowers. Giraud’s father added a black stone plaque in her memory that included her photo and the words “A dream much too short. I love you. Your Papa.” Members of the brigade renamed the rowboat Amandine and painted her name on its side.
The stone statue of the Zouave soldier at the base of the Pont de l’ Alma. ELAINE SCIOLINO.
A nineteenth-century engraving of Javert, the police inspector in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, as he is about to throw himself off the parapet of Pont Notre-Dame.
TWENTY-ONE
The Unknown Woman of the Seine
For geographers, the Seine is a
river; for engineers, it’s a means
of nature’s communication; for the
desperate, it’s a resting place.
—SAINT-JUIRS,
La Seine à travers Paris, 1890
THE SEINE IS A TEMPTING and a terrifying place to die.
For the desperate, it can be a means to end unbearable suffering. For murderers, it can be a secret repository for their victims. For the hapless, the unlucky, the drunken, or the drugged, it can be an accidental grave.
The Seine’s danger is thrilling when it is exploited for entertainment in death-defying stunts. In 1882, Arsens Blondin, a Spanish acrobat, donned a sparkly silver jersey and tightroped back and forth on a 525-foot metal cable spanning the river between the Pont de l’Alma and the Pont des Invalides. Despite a torrential downpour, a huge crowd turned out to cheer him on. At the mid-point, Blondin stopped, perched a chair on the wire, and climbed onto it; a while later, he lay down on the cable. Blondin’s real name was Antonio Federico Álvarez Calvo, but he had renamed himself after the French acrobat who was the first person to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope. That man went by “Monsieur Charles Blondin”; his real name was Jean François Gravelet.
In 1909, Harry Houdini, the American magician and stunt performer, plunged into the Seine while handcuffed. Nervous policemen jumped in after him, thinking he needed saving (he didn’t), and nearly drowned themselves.
The river is also a liquid graveyard. Although it is illegal to throw human ashes into the Seine, that does not prevent people from doing so. I have a friend who, along with her daughters and various friends and family members, deposited the ashes of her late husband into the water from the end of the Île Saint-Louis. “We knew we weren’t supposed to do it, but that was his wish,” she said. “We arrived with a jar of his ashes, and each of us threw in a handful. It was the middle of summer, and the place was covered with tourists who had no idea what we were doing. It turned out to be quite funny.”
My friend said that when she dies, she wants her ashes to be thrown from the pea-green, lattice-worked Pont Mirabeau, the subject of one of France’s most famous poems, “Le Pont Mirabeau” by Guillaume Apollinaire. She recited part of the poem aloud for me, a section about how love “goes by as water to the sea.” The poem conveys a sense of calm, ending: “Let night come on bells end the day / The days go by me still I stay.”
THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON to have died in the Seine has no identity at all. She is the Unknown Woman of the Seine—L’Inconnue de la Seine. In the late nineteenth century, the body of a young woman was fished out of the Seine in Paris. As was the custom in those days, her corpse was laid out on a block of ice and put on display in the Paris morgue, located behind Notre-Dame. Locals and tourists would come and peer through the windows to stare at the bodies, and many came to see her. L’Inconnue’s face was so innocent that she might have been a teenager; her skin bore neither marks nor bruises, so she was presumed to have committed suicide. Her look so mesmerized the pathologist on duty that he summoned a mouleur— a molder—to preserve her face in a plaster death mask.
The mask was mass-produced and sold as a decorative object in the decades that followed. L’Inconnue became a muse for artists, poets, and writers, among them Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Vladimir Nabokov. Because so little was known about her, she served as a blank slate for their fantasies. Albert Camus, who hung a mask of L’Inconnue in his studio, called her a “drowned Mona Lisa.” Filmmakers François Truffaut, Max Ophüls, and Alain Resnais evoked her image in film. In literature, L’Inconnue was imagined as an orphan who drowns herself in the Seine after her lover abandons her, a witch who destroys a young poet, and a seductress who witnesses a robbery and murder.
There is no report of L’Inconnue’s death in the police archives, no record of what happened to her body after it arrived at the morgue, and no precise notation of the date when the mold was made. But she lives on. She became famous—as the model for a life-sized, fir
st-aid mannequin used to teach cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) called “Resusci Anne” or “CPR Annie” in the United States. Millions of people have learned CPR on reproductions of her, making her the world’s most beloved and useful life-sized doll.
In the southern Paris suburb of Arcueil, L’Inconnue’s memory is kept alive in a different way. At L’Atelier Lorenzi, a family-run workshop founded in 1871, artisans create plaster copies of figurines, busts, statues—and masks of L’Inconnue. A box on the second floor holds the atelier’s most precious possession: a nineteenth-century, chestnut-brown plaster mold of a death mask that is said to be that of L’Inconnue. Copies of the mask hang in most rooms in the two-story, wood-beamed building, which was built as a relay postal station in the 1800s. The mask sells for about $150 in flat white plaster, $195 with a shiny glaze.
“You ask me if my great-grandfather made the mold himself, and I don’t know,” said Laurent Lorenzi Forestier, who runs the family business. “You ask me how the morgue organized the casting of the mold, and I don’t know. What I do know is that we have a mold from that era.”
L’Inconnue’s face is serene. Her cheeks are round and full, her skin smooth, her hair parted in the middle and pulled back behind her neck. Her eyelashes give the impression that they are still wet. She is pleasant-looking, not classically beautiful. The mystery of her half-smile haunts. She seems happy in death or maybe only asleep; her eyes look as if they might open at any time. Skeptics claim that the woman depicted in the mask was not a drowning victim but a live model, because her features are too perfect.
L’Inconnue continues to inspire. At a Bastille Day picnic near the source of the Seine in deep Burgundy, I met a poet named Céline Walter. She had published a book of poetry entitled L’Inconnue de la Seine. She was convinced that L’Inconnue had drowned herself after her heart was broken. “To think that she didn’t get the kiss she wanted and is now the most kissed face in the world,” Céline said. “It’s so much more beautiful, more romantic. She took beautiful revenge. Over time, she gave me her voice, and I gave her mine. There was a sort of dialogue. I grew fond of her. I got to know her.”
THE SEINE CAN SERVE as a communal burial ground. One of the most disturbing images in French history comes from the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when Charles IX and his mother, Catherine de’ Medici, ordered the assassinations of leading Protestants, and Catholic mobs attacked. Over three days and three nights of violence, thousands of bodies were thrown into the Seine. The river turned red with blood.
In more recent history, during the final stages of Algeria’s eight-year war of independence, the Seine figured in the Paris Massacre of 1961. Maurice Papon, the chief of the Paris Police Prefecture, ordered his officers to attack a mass protest of about twenty-five thousand Algerians who were violating a curfew. The police were unforgiving. Some protesters were beaten to death in police stations. Others were tortured and killed in the nearby woods. Some were thrown into the Seine from the Pont Saint-Michel and left to drown. Graffiti painted on the bridge afterward read, “Ici on noie les Algériens” (Here we drown Algerians). The official death toll was three; in truth, perhaps as many as five hundred Algerians died. In 1998, Papon was convicted of crimes against humanity for his role—as an official in Bordeaux—in France’s collaboration with the Nazis in World War II.
In 2001, on the fortieth anniversary of the massacre, Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë hung a commemorative plaque on the Pont Saint-Michel. As the number of victims is in dispute, it reads, “In memory of the many Algerians killed during the bloody repression of the peaceful demonstration of 17 October 1961.” The story of the tragedy is seldom taught in French schools.
Every year, dozens of corpses are pulled from the Seine, most of them suicides. In 1791, two years after the beginning of the French Revolution, suicide was decriminalized and lost some of its stigma. However torturous the decision to commit suicide may be, British historian Richard Cobb wrote in his 1978 book Death in Paris that the act itself became as simple as running an errand or making an everyday purchase. Using a mortuary archive from 1795–1801, he concluded that 75 percent of the people who committed suicide by drowning lived within a few minutes’ walking distance of the Seine. Young women were most likely to choose suicide by drowning; men favored hanging.
In literature and film, the Seine has served as the default site when a character needs to disappear or be killed off. Émile Zola portrayed the river as an easy and discreet way to kill in Thérèse Raquin, a tawdry tale of adultery and murder. Thérèse cheats on her husband, Camille, taking his friend Laurent as her lover. The adulterous pair plot the husband’s death. Laurent throws Camille overboard from a boat on the Seine. Laurent and Thérèse get married, but visions of the dead man push them into madness and suicide.
In Martin Scorsese’s 2011 film Hugo, twelve-year-old Hugo Cabret is orphaned and must live with his alcoholic uncle Claude, who forces the boy to help him do his job winding the clocks at the Gare Montparnasse train station. In one scene, Claude disappears into the depths of the Seine. When, after many months, his body is found, it is unclear whether he was the victim of suicide, murder, or an accident, although the presence of his flask indicates that he was probably drunk. Hugo has continued to wind the clocks, so Claude had not been missed at work. But with Claude dead, the stationmaster wants to know who has been doing his job.
One of the darkest films involving the Seine is Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962), a tale of two friends who fall in love with the same woman. Catherine, played by Jeanne Moreau, is exciting but narcissistic. On a whim at one crucial moment, she jumps from the riverbank into the Seine then swims back to the quay. (Her body double was drunk at the time of filming, so Moreau played the scene herself.) The film ends tragically when Catherine, married to Jules, asks Jim to join her for a ride in her car. She tells Jules to “watch us carefully.” She smiles sweetly at Jim, who is seated beside her, accelerates, and drives the car off a damaged bridge into the Seine, killing them both.
Perhaps no French writer has felt death on the Seine more acutely than Victor Hugo. Hugo loved the river. In the years after his 1831 opus The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made him rich and famous, he traveled around Normandy, sketching. But the Seine claimed his spirit.
The story of how the river came to torture Hugo is preserved in a three-story brick house—now a museum dedicated to Hugo—that faces the Seine in the town of Villequier, twenty-three miles west of Rouen. Roses fill the garden, and red and white wrought-iron chairs offer visitors a place to sit and read. Lazy cows graze on the hills, and apples grow in small orchards nearby, but there is neither a café nor a bakery in town. The house had belonged to Charles-Isidore Vacquerie, who appreciated the writings and beliefs of the much younger Hugo. The two men became close friends, and the Hugo family came to visit in the summer. Vacquerie’s son Charles and Hugo’s daughter Léopoldine fell in love and married in February 1843; seven months later, the newlyweds were dead.
The Seine had not been tamed in Hugo’s day. It was deeper, its currents more powerful. Silt formations moved silently, ominously, changing shape and forming mini-islands. The only way to travel along the river was by ferry or private boat. Sophie Schmidt, a guide at the museum, explained when I visited that Léopoldine and Charles went to consult their notary at nearby Caudebec-en-Caux on an exceptionally windy day.
“They went out on a small boat, and it was too light,” she said. “It was a time when the Seine was much busier with more barges, and wider than it is today. The boat capsized. Charles came from a family of seamen. He was a good swimmer and knew the river well. But in those days, not many people knew how to swim, especially women. Léopoldine could not swim. She panicked. She was wearing a heavy dress. She sank deep into the river’s depths. Charles dove in to try to save her. They both perished.”
She was nineteen; he was twenty-six.
The furnishings in one of the bedrooms evoke their memory: their narrow bed, a piece of t
he veil worn by Léopoldine on her wedding day, a nightshirt that belonged to Charles. Her unadorned wedding dress hangs in an adjoining bedroom. The windows in both rooms look out onto the point in the river where they drowned.
“Hugo was on a walking tour in southwest France with his mistress when the accident happened,” said Schmidt. “He learned about it only ten days later. He was in a café and he read about it in a newspaper. Léopoldine had already been buried. The Seine for Hugo meant death, a river that killed.” A photocopy of the page about her death in the newspaper Le Siècle hangs on one wall.
Hugo poured his grief into poetry. In Villequier, he railed against the injustice of their deaths, and struggled to make peace with destiny:
Anything good he owns, Fate takes away.
No gift was his, these days that disappear. . . .
The world is dark, O God! The set refrain
Is made of bitter tears as much as song.
A wide riverfront path for strollers and bike riders extends five miles along the road outside the museum. It opens to a grassy park with weathered picnic tables. Its focal point is a stone statue of Hugo looking out to the river. His features are crudely chiseled; his face is grim. He is said to be searching for his daughter. Mercifully, large shady trees block his view of the water.
PERHAPS THE MOST IMPORTANT suicide in all modern French literature comes in Hugo’s 1862 novel Les Misérables. It is the suicide of Javert, the troubled police inspector who doesn’t even have a first name. Throughout the novel, Javert is gripped by an obsession: to punish and destroy the escaped convict Jean Valjean, who had been imprisoned for nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread. But when Valjean saves Javert’s life, Javert is faced with a moral dilemma: How can he arrest the man who saved him?
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