Unable to understand Valjean’s act of generosity, Javert goes mad. In Paris, he approaches the edge of the Pont Notre-Dame and gazes down at the most treacherous part of the Seine. It is a suffocating, hemmed-in square of water bordered by two bridges and two quays, a stretch of the river that is “dreaded by mariners,” Hugo writes. The water rolls in vast and terrible waves. Whirlpools loosen and tighten their grip like screws that never stop turning.
Javert is swallowed by the blackness of the night. When he reappears, he is ready for death: “Suddenly, he took off his hat and laid it on the edge of the quay,” Hugo wrote. “A moment later a tall black form, which from the distance some belated pedestrian might have taken for a phantom, appeared standing on the parapet, bent toward the Seine, then sprang up and fell straight into the darkness; there was a dull splash; and the night alone was admitted to the secret convulsions of that obscure form which had disappeared under the water.”
ALL IS NOT DARK. The Seine also has the power to keep people alive. Either its glittering beauty relieves them of their misery or its cold and sinister darkness is too terrifying to enter.
In 1900, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was racked with stomach pain. A cancerous tumor was discovered in his lower intestine, and he fell into a deep depression. One day, he fled his Paris studio to kill himself. “I had definitely made up my mind to jump into the Seine,” he told James Earle Fraser, his student and apprentice.
I practically ran down the rue de Rennes toward the Seine, and when I looked up at the buildings they all seemed to have written across the top a huge word in black letters—“Death—Death—Death.”
I reached the river and went up on the bridge and as I looked over the water, I saw the Louvre in the bright sunlight and suddenly everything was beautiful to me. . . . Whether the running and the hurrying had changed my mental attitude, I can’t say—possibly it might have been the beauty of the Louvre’s architecture or the sparkling water of the Seine—whatever it was, suddenly the weight and blackness lifted from my mind and I was happy and found myself whistling.
Saint-Gaudens lived another seven years.
Novelists have captured the magnificent contradiction of the Seine as a place that lures you to death but then redeems itself and saves you from its darkness. In Balzac’s The Wild Ass’s Skin, the despairing Raphaël de Valentin, after gambling and losing the last of his money, prepares to take the fatal plunge from the Pont Royal one morning. “Bad time to drown,” says an old woman dressed in rags, laughing at him. “The Seine—it’s dirty and cold.” He notices a rescue boat on duty and decides to wait until nightfall. But then he discovers a magical wish-granting parchment in a strange antiques shop on the Quai Voltaire. The urge to end his life vanishes.
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Mathieu Delarue, a professor of philosophy, is about to plunge from the Pont Neuf but at the last moment changes his mind. “That,” he said, “will be for the next time.”
Perhaps the fairy-tale architecture lining the quays works to counterbalance the sinister darkness of the water and the slime that can form on its surface. Is the river so beautiful that it cools the impulse to jump in? Or perhaps the Seine is a holder of the secrets and mysteries of life, as well as death, and many find salvation along its banks.
Le petit-pont, an 1850 engraving by Charles Meryon with the towers of Notre-Dame in the background.
A map from 1611 depicting the city of Paris, centered around Île de la Cité. To the right, three islands that will later become Île Saint-Louis.
TWENTY-TWO
Island-Hopping
The islands are like a pearl necklace
of nature decorating the river.
Each pearl has its own life, its
own identity. There are islands of
imagination that never existed and
islands that are no more.
—MILENA CHARBIT, architect
LA SEINE MUSICALE, a modern performance center made of wood and glass, rises from the Seine like a sailboat with an egg-shaped hull. Its sail, an arc covered in solar panels, rotates around it on steel rails to follow the course of the sun.
Since it opened in 2017, this shining structure has begun to transform the Île Seguin, a twenty-eight-acre island west of the Paris city limits. It is the go-to place to experience some of the best global music and dance, to dine, shop, have a drink, walk through gardens, and take in the view from the roof. It is a crossroads for serious audiences and visitors passing through. “A boat on an island on a voyage of adventure” is how Olivier Haber, its chief executive officer, described it.
The Île Seguin is still unexplored terrain. A ten-minute walk from the end of a Métro line, it is not found on tourist maps. The Seine’s two most famous islands, the Île Saint-Louis (about the same size as the Île Seguin) and the Île de la Cité (nearly twice as big) have always reigned over central Paris. The Seine is a river of islands, some reachable by bridges and many more only by boat. Centuries ago, there were more than three hundred, scattered from the source to the sea. Napoléon’s grand public works projects to make the river more navigable swept away well over half of them, dredging some, joining some either to other islands or to the riverbanks. Today 117 Seine islands survive, forming an elongated archipelago of industry, culture, habitation, recreation, and refuge, full of sand and stone and stories.
The Île Seguin comes with a rich history, even if little known to Americans. Seven miles southwest of central Paris and five miles northeast of Versailles, the island was farmland until the eighteenth century, when Louis XV bought it for his daughters. From the early nineteenth century on, it housed leather tanneries, laundries, and riverside cabarets. In 1929, Louis Renault opened his first automobile factory on the island, and over time, Renault’s operation became the largest factory in France. Renault raised the level of the island and erected two bridges to link the Right and Left Banks, facilitating access. The company also experimented in innovation—building its own electric power plant, testing sites (including an underground racetrack), and a docking operation big enough to ship finished cars.
During World War II, Renault produced trucks for the occupying Germans. The Allied forces bombed the site to force it to stop. After the Liberation, Louis Renault was accused of collaborating with the enemy; he died in prison in 1944, shortly before his trial was to start. After the war, the factory went back to making vehicles for the French; it was hit by serious labor strikes during the civil unrest in May 1968. Renault later moved manufacturing to sites outside Paris, and the factory closed in 1992. For years afterward it stood abandoned, a forlorn reminder of the Île Seguin’s prosperous industrial past. Eventually it was demolished, and the site cleared of polluted soil and industrial residue that included ten thousand tons of iron.
In 2000, François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and chief executive of Kering, which owns luxury fashion brands including Gucci and Saint Laurent, announced a plan to build a museum for his modern art collection on the island. After five years of administrative delays, he put it in Venice instead. “Île Seguin: I give up,” he wrote in exasperation in Le Monde. A plan for a university campus went nowhere. Then, in 2010, the regional government of Hauts-de-Seine bought a third of the island for La Seine Musicale.
Now, from La Seine Musicale’s rooftop, visitors can see panoramic views: downstream, the Pont de Sèvres; upstream, Paris; to the side, on the Right Bank, a clumsy office building designed by Jean Nouvel, a General Electric plant, and a swath of the sleepy upper-middle-class suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt. The Seine flows on both sides of the site, creating unity between the indoor and outdoor spaces.
“The presence of water is inspiring, always,” said Laurence Equilbey, the founder and artistic director of Insula, the orchestra in residence. “The water passes by, the river changes, and it is fantastic to watch the movement and the reflection of light. You see the low hills on the banks, the barges and the rowers on the river. You feel you are in a less viol
ent and more peaceful universe. It’s beautiful to be on an island, no?”
THE ARCHIPELAGO OF THE SEINE is nearly nonexistent at its start, with only seven islands on the 230-mile route from the river’s source to Paris. They become denser on the west side of Paris, and densest as the river approaches Rouen. The islands eliminated in Napoléon’s projects included all of those on the route from Rouen to the sea. Today sandbars still come and go with the tide, creating pop-up islands.
Over centuries, the Seine’s currents claimed some now-vanished islands and moved others, changing their shapes. The Île de Belcinac, across from the town of Caudebec-en-Caux, for example, disappeared and reappeared three times between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. The tiny Île des Ravageurs and the Île Robinson were added onto the town of Asnières-sur-Seine, west of Paris, in 1970. But Île des Ravageurs retains its identity as a destination for dog lovers: since 1899 it has been home to what locals proclaim is the first animal cemetery in the world. It holds the graves of more than forty thousand pets—dogs, of course, as well as other “domestic animals,” including cats, horses, birds, rabbits, hamsters, and monkeys. One of the most famous graves is that of the French-born German shepherd Rin Tin Tin, who became known as the “Wonder Dog.” Rescued in 1918 from a World War I battlefield by an American soldier from California, Rinty, as he was called, starred in more than two dozen Warner Bros. films. When he died in 1932, just shy of the age of fourteen, his body was sent back to his native France for burial.
The islands of the Seine have been used to house a maximum-security prison (Île Saint-Étienne), a theater (Île Louviers), a casino (Île aux Dames), a grand sports complex (Île de Puteaux), a model farm (Île de la Loge), and the station for a major dam and lock west of Paris invaded every year by Canada geese (Île de Chatou).
The flowing river makes its islands elongated and narrow. The smallest Seine island, the Île Paradis, on a bend in the river seven miles upstream of Rouen, is about the size of four tennis courts. The biggest, several miles farther on, is an amalgam of seven islands that were joined together—the Îles d’Harcourt, Bonport, Surgès, Launy, de Quatre Ages, du Courant, and aux Moines. About eight times bigger than Île de la Cité, this island lacks a new identity; instead, each of its component parts keeps its old name, like states in a union.
For many visitors to Paris, and even many Parisians, the most visited islands are the Île de la Cité and the smaller Île Saint-Louis. They are joined by a short bridge but are different from each other in nearly every way—history, function, architecture, and inhabitants.
The Île de la Cité is almond-shaped, three-quarters of a mile long, and just over a tenth of a mile wide, covering about fifty-four acres. Inhabited since pre-Roman times, it is still an important archaeological site. Its jewel is Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was built stone by stone from 1163 to 1345, triggering the construction of houses and churches, which attracted new inhabitants.
Under the square in front of Notre-Dame, a crypt open to the public holds vestiges of the city’s ancient history, including large blocks of stone from the fortified fourth-century b.c. wall that once encircled the island, ancient gold and bronze coins, and the remains of fourth-century a.d. Gallo-Roman thermal baths. A piece of a quay from the first-century b.c. Gallo-Roman port on the island, along with amphoras and traces of a storage depot, bear witness to the robust trade on the river in that era.
In the eighteenth century, Paris city planners razed some of the medieval buildings to improve sanitation and ease congestion on the Île de la Cité. Then came Baron Haussmann and his radical transformation of the island in the nineteenth century. He destroyed a quaint but densely packed, dirty, and dangerous medieval legacy—a hundred houses, thirty streets and alleys, and several churches—on the Île de la Cité. The island’s population shrank from fifteen thousand to five thousand.
On part of the cleared land, Haussmann built the new Hôtel-Dieu—a hospital and barracks that became the headquarters for the Prefecture of Police. Only about nine hundred people live on the island now, but thirteen million come every year to visit Notre-Dame. Partially hidden at the far edge of the garden behind Notre-Dame sits a memorial that honors the two hundred thousand “Martyrs of the Deportation,” those who were sent to Nazi concentration camps during the Occupation and never returned. A staircase leads to a confined space with bars on the window. You can look through the bars and see the Seine; people along the Left Bank can see you, the prisoner, looking out at them.
The Île Saint-Louis was created in 1614, when the ditch between the Île aux Vaches and the Île Notre-Dame was filled in. A sandy, wet no-man’s-land, it became one of the first laboratories for urban planning in France, thanks to the vision of Henri IV as implemented by his son Louis XIII. Over three decades, its circumference was diked, and elegant townhouses and mansions were built from pale local stone, not for the nobility but for the rich bourgeoisie. In a nod to modernity, some of the houses looked outward toward the Seine, rather than inward toward courtyards and interior streets. The streets were straight, wider than elsewhere in Paris, and, for the first time, plotted on a grid with a central straight road that spanned the island.
The Île Saint-Louis became arguably the most elegant address in central Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. The painter Paul Cézanne lived there, on the Quai d’Anjou facing the Right Bank. As a young dandy, Baudelaire lived at No. 22 Quai de Béthune facing the Left Bank. The Nobel-prize-winning physicist and chemist Marie Curie lived at No. 36 for twenty-two years. Years later, President Georges Pompidou and his wife, Claude, rented an apartment at No. 24; he died there in 1974. More recently, Jamel Debbouze, one of France’s most popular humorists, and his wife moved to the only street that cuts through the length of the island.
Edmund White, the American writer, appreciated the Île Saint-Louis as a quiet refuge. In his novel The Married Man, one of the main characters, Austin, likes to come from a noisy bar or a talkative dinner party “on the mainland and cross the black, rapidly flowing Seine” to the Île Saint-Louis, “his poetic island, always five degrees cooler than the rest of Paris.”
Crowds from all over the world descend on the Île Saint-Louis less for its peaceful vibe or elegant architecture than for its ice cream. They might wait in line for an hour at Berthillon for what some believe is the best ice cream in Paris. One of Berthillon’s other great offerings is its tarte tatin, an upside-down caramelized apple tart served with crème fraiche; this dish was once—but is no longer—a staple of every respectable French bistro. It is a temptation too delicious to resist.
WEST OF THE CITY LIMITS is the Île de la Jatte, the setting for Georges Seurat’s 1884 pointillist masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The painting depicts a crowded park on the Seine, full of activity. In the foreground a man and woman stand in profile, looking out at the river. She wears a long skirt with a large bustle and carries a black umbrella; he wears a top hat and a formal suit and holds a cigar. In the center, another woman takes the hand of a girl dressed in white. People lounge on the grass; a child scampers; a dog sniffs the ground. Sailboats, steamboats, and a fisherman’s small boat line the river. A coxswain with a white parasol over her head travels with four rowers in a long, narrow shell.
The painting hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago; even if you’ve never seen it, you might still recognize it. Stephen Sondheim used it as inspiration for his musical Sunday in the Park with George; NBC’s online store sold a poster where the characters from The Office pose in the same positions; Babar illustrator Laurent de Brunhoff mimicked it by turning its characters into elephants. In a Sesame Street version, Big Bird posed as the woman with the black umbrella; he replaced her bustle with his feathery ducklike tail. Visitors to the Île de la Jatte can take a two-and-a-half-mile tour around the island to see exactly where Sunday Afternoon and other important Impressionist works were painted, including two other Seurats, two Monets, and works by Van Gogh, Sisley, Albert Gle
izes, and Alexandre Nozal.
The Île du Platais, where Émile Zola bought land and built a pavilion, is visible from his estate in Médan. Zola rowed his friends over to sunbathe, swim, and fish there. His boat, named Nana after the protagonist of one of his most successful novels, was a gift from Guy de Maupassant. “It was a very convivial life,” his great-granddaughter Martine Le Blond-Zola told me when I visited one day. In the 1920s, the Île du Platais became a “naturist” recreation club, with bungalows and a large concrete swimming pool. Nudity was banned, but members wore minimal clothing—bathing trunks for men, outfits that resembled two-piece bathing suits for women, and this long before Louis Réard, a Frenchman, invented the bikini in 1946. Closed in 2002, the club remains abandoned.
The tiny Île aux Bernaches, fifteen miles west of Paris, was once the site of a giant water-pumping station that Louis XIV built for the Marly Machine. The station, formally inaugurated by the king in 1684, contained fourteen wheels, thirty feet in diameter, and more than 250 pumps. It ran night and day, made a frightful racket, and emitted a horrible odor. Newer constructions replaced it, and the machines stopped turning in 1968. The Île aux Bernaches is not accessible today, but a brick administrative building is still there, choked with weeds and stringy plants. On the northern bank of the mainland, you can climb stairs up a hill alongside the chutes where the water ascended to the château.
The remnants of the Marly Machine on an island at Bougival. Louis XIV created the device to pump water five hundred feet uphill to supply the fountains of Versailles. GABRIELA SCIOLINO PLUMP.
MILENA CHARBIT, a young architect, is the preeminent expert on the Seine islands. She wrote her master’s thesis on the subject and developed it into a book and a museum exhibition that was shown at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, a cultural space perched over the Seine across from the eastern end of the Île Saint-Louis. “No one was paying any attention to the islands of the Seine,” she told me when I toured the exhibition and interviewed her there. “It was a little world that was unknown, unexplored, and foreign.”
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