And in fact, this is not far from the truth, because their addiction seems to be a subconscious hangover from their ancestors’ long battle to get clean drinking water. For most of its history, the city drew its water from the Seine, which lost its purity about 1,000 years ago. Long into the nineteenth century, there were pump houses beside the river, raising water to be distributed around the city via buckets or fountains. Some of the fountains were supplied by the springs in Montmartre and Belleville, the oldest of these being the Fontaine Maubuée, built in 1392 on a street corner that has since been demolished to make way for the Centre Pompidou. Which may be just as well, because the name Maubuée apparently came from mauvaise buée or ‘bad mist’, a reference to the inferior quality of the Belleville water.
Today, there are still dozens of these old fountains dotted around the city, some of them still working (and now providing good drinking water), like the gushing spout at the corner of the rue de Charonne and the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine near Bastille, which must waste thousands of litres a day. No matter—the sight of running water is good for the Parisian soul.
The same goes for the Fontaines Wallace, the famous groups of green metal statuettes that provide a constant stream of drinking water, almost all of which goes undrunk. These were a gift to the city from a British philanthropist, Richard Wallace, the illegitimate son of a marquess who inherited his father’s money and spent most of it on art (the Wallace Collection in London) and the rest on being kind to Parisians. During the Prussian siege of 1870–71, Wallace financed ambulances, and in 1872 he paid for the design and installation of the fountains that bear his name, even consenting to have them painted dark green so that they harmonized with the rest of the city’s street furniture.
At the time the Fontaines Wallace were built, the city was still relying on systems put in place by Napoleon. In 1799, the average Parisian had access to only a litre of water a day. As a military man, Napoleon envisaged an effective but crude solution—digging canals to bring water close to the city. However, many Parisians were still reliant on water carriers who would sell drinking supplies in the street, most of it a bacterial soup pumped out of the Seine, which was also the city’s main sewer. Predictably, disease was rife, and the cholera epidemic of 1832 wiped out an estimated 18,000 Parisians.
The hundred or so Fontaines Wallace were therefore literal lifelines, allowing Parisians to drink without fear of killing themselves. And many of them survive to this day—from the ornate towers with their four caryatids representing bonté (goodness), simplicité charité and sobriété** to the humble green taps in most of Paris’s public parks, where every Parisian child gets into the habit of drinking public water as soon as they can walk.
Drinking something alcohol-free was definitely a habit that Wallace wanted to encourage. After the Prussian siege, when water supplies were even less reliable than usual, the price of drinking water went up alarmingly, so that many people began quenching their thirst with wine. And unlike the toffs, they didn’t have access to high-quality Champagne—they were quaffing vinegary gut-rot. It was no surprise that when the first Fontaine Wallace was connected up in August 1872, there was a small riot as people literally fought to get at the clean water.
Today, there are over 900 public drinking fountains in Paris, including three rather special ones that provide genuine French mineral water for free. The fountains in the place Paul Verlaine in the 13th arrondissement, the square Lamartine in the 16th and the square de la Madone in the 18th tap into a spring 500 metres below the city, and you can often see people filling up bottles to take home. The water is very soft (unlike Parisian drinking water), and is therefore said to give a purer taste to tea and coffee. These fountains also take the Parisian need for free drinking water to its logical French conclusion. They can’t be content with plain clean water—they want eau minérale.
La vie est une plage
The Parisian love affair with water comes into full fruition in summer, during Paris Plage (Paris Beach), the festival started by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë in 2002. For four weeks, from around 20 July to 20 August, a sizeable chunk of the city’s population can be seen streaming down to the river banks.
Before 2002, the city had turned its back on the river somewhat. In the 1960s, most of the Right Bank was disfigured by a highway, and along the Left Bank, the quais are busy streets that force anyone trying to get down to the river to risk their life crossing three or four lanes of traffic. Both the Louvre and the Hôtel de Ville have cut themselves off from the river, whereas they used to be on its bank—the Hôtel de Ville was originally built on a square called the place de Grève (Sandbank Square) that was literally a beach.***
In fact, until Paris Plage, pretty well the only organized activities on the river were the bateaux-mouches, the expensive and infrequent Batobus river shuttles, one or two barge bars, dancing on the quai Saint-Bernard,**** and the bouquinistes, most of whom now sell far more miniature Eiffel Towers than books. Riverside fun was almost all improvised—you would take a bottle of wine to the pedestrian parts of the embankment or picnic on the Pont des Arts. Some stretches of the voies sur berges were pedestrianized on Sundays, but it wasn’t until Paris Plage that the citizens officially reclaimed full possession of the river from the car, albeit for only a few weeks in summer.
From mid-July to mid-August, palm trees spring up along the riverbank, while sandpits and pétanque pitches temporarily turn the riverside back into a sandbank. There is usually a swimming pool with aquagym and swimming lessons—all of them free. People can sign up for dance and aerobics classes and Tai Chi sessions, and try out sports like wrestling and fencing—again, all free of charge. And for those who prefer to do nothing, there are several hundred loungers and parasols laid out on artificial beaches (along with an equal number of security men to stop them being stolen). It really is a holiday resort for people who can’t afford to, or don’t want to, leave the city in summer. And Parisians flock there like migrating flamingos.
The migration is spreading out from the city centre, too. I live near Napoleon’s Canal de l’Ourcq, which was once one of France’s main trade routes, and is now slowly emerging from decades of industrial and urban decline. In summer, people rent canoes and pedalos, there are one-euro boat trips up the canal to the suburb of Pantin, and a small marina has been installed. Part of the canal, along the Bassin de la Villette, has even been incorporated into the Paris Plage scheme, forcing the city to rename it Paris Plages, plural. Now, as on the banks of the Seine, for a month or so in summer, you can listen to concerts, battle for loungers, learn to line-dance and tango, refresh yourself in a cool mist spray, or dive in the canal and then get yourself vaccinated against Weil’s disease, the potentially fatal illness caused by ingesting rat’s urine.
The improvements made to this 800-metre stretch of canal have put a whole neighbourhood back in touch with its wateriness. Even the local firemen have been getting in on the act. I regularly see them testing their hoses, spraying an arc of water across the canal, and wetting anyone who strays too close to the opposite bank—especially if she happens to be good-looking.
In fact, the Paris Plage(s) scheme is not the first time since Baron Haussmann that city leaders have shown their attachment to water. During Jacques Chirac’s time as Mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995, and then as President of France from 1995 to 2007, Parisians jokingly called their tapwater ‘Château Chirac’. In 1988, during his spell as Mayor, he promised to clean up the River Seine so completely that he himself would swim across it ‘before the end of 1995’. This would not have been a good idea because of the strong current and the number of barges and bateaux-mouches constantly surging up and down the river, but it was an idealistic promise from a native Parisian that the city has never forgotten.
In 2004, during a presidential visit to a school, a pupil asked Monsieur Chirac whether he had done it yet. ‘No,’ he answered, ‘because I’m not sure the Seine has been getting on too well since I left City Hall.’
Joking aside, he admitted to the schoolkids that he shouldn’t have made a promise he couldn’t keep (thereby undermining the whole institution of electioneering, and setting alarm bells ringing across France’s entire political landscape).
The Seine is getting cleaner, though, and apparently there are now twenty-nine species of fish swimming past the Louvre and under the Pont Neuf, none of which has legs and three heads. Even so, bathing in the river has been forbidden since 1923, and anyone jumping in these days will be fined for wasting river-police time, if they don’t drown or poison themselves, that is.
Walking on water
At the end of January 1910, Paris’s motto about not sinking was contradicted by the Seine itself, as the river rose 8.62 metres and burst its banks, partially submerging the city for thirty-five days.
An estimated 2.4 billion cubic metres of water (I say ‘estimated’ because I have no idea how much that really is) poured into the streets creating a filthy lake that engulfed not only the quartiers by the riverbanks, but also low-lying areas way ‘inland’, including much of the 8th and 9th arrondissements, almost up to the Gare Saint-Lazare.
The sewers and the métro were flooded, countless cellars were turned into swimming pools, and many ground-floor apartments had to be evacuated. The Eiffel Tower, built on a bed of sand, shifted 2 centimetres off the vertical, but with German efficiency, the canny engineer Gustave Eiffel (real name Bönickhausen) had erected his tower on hydraulic pumps and it was easily righted.
During the great flood of 1910, the phrase ‘Do you need a lift?’ took on a new, more hands-on meaning.
As floods are meant to come around every century (according to the French, Nature works to a metric calendar), Paris has long been haunted by the fear of a repeat disaster in 2010. Engineers have built huge run-off reservoirs upriver, but these can only hold about 830 million cubic metres of water, leaving about 1.6 billion to gush onward to the capital if the river levels are the same as in 1910.
Paris has therefore resigned itself to getting its feet wet sometime soon, and has put in place a minutely detailed scheme to limit flood damage, aptly named the Plan Neptune.***** Scientists say that it wouldn’t be a flash flood—just as in 1910, the waters would take several days to rise to dangerous levels, so there would be time to mobilize all the city’s workers, as well as 10,000 soldiers.
To ensure that radio programmes won’t be interrupted (Paris wouldn’t want to be without endless debates on the philosophical meaning of the deluge, or talk shows with politicians blaming each other’s parties for the catastrophe), a 330-metre-long flood barrier has been prepared. It would be erected around the Maison de la Radio, which is by the river, near the Eiffel Tower. Meanwhile, the Maison’s toilets, sinks and taps have been fitted with valves so that the studios won’t be filled with river water and sewage (after all, journalists’ voices would sound strange if they had to wear pegs on their noses).
Over at the Louvre, as the waters rose, 700 volunteers would start carrying works of art out of the basement storage areas and up to higher floors—the heaviest sculptures have already been moved.
And just to prove that the city does think about its people as well as its media and culture, it should be pointed out that the very first measure in le Plan Neptune is to evacuate all the homeless people who sleep on the riverbanks. Although that might only be to avoid having them float in through the windows of the Louvre.
Perhaps the most dramatic measure of all in Plan Neptune is that Paris’s transport company, the RATP, plans to deliberately flood métro lines running alongside the river, presumably on the grounds that it’s better to drain off clean water than dirty. Though of course the water would no longer be clean when the flood receded—someone would have to collect up all the dead rats, mice and accumulated rubbish. It is to be hoped that Plan Neptune includes a few pairs of rubber gloves.
Throughout 2010, the city expressed this obsession with flooding in a series of exhibitions about the events of 1910, and at each one Parisians could be seen studying maps of the flooded area to see if their current address was in there. I naturally did the same, and was relieved to see that I am currently out of danger. Until 2006, however, I was living near the Bastille, well inside the evacuation zone, and even back then, my next-door neighbour had started stockpiling sacks of plaster to block up his toilet, shower and all of his sinks. As soon as the sewers flooded, he said, the drains would overflow and our houses would be turned into fountains of merde. Fortunately, he didn’t give his speech to potential buyers when I was trying to sell my place.
One of the flood-related exhibitions featured a collection of photos from a now-defunct newspaper called the Journal des Débats. The pictures showed that the streets of Paris, especially those around the river, have hardly changed since 1910. Apart from all the hats, long dresses and moustaches, the black-and-white photos could almost have been taken yesterday.
The traditional way of measuring the height of the Seine certainly hasn’t changed at all in a century. Parisians still look to the statue of the Zouave (a French-African colonial soldier) on the Pont de l’Alma. Usually he stands well above the river on a plinth, gazing with blithe detachment into the oncoming current. If he has his toes in the water, the Seine is running very high and Parisians start to feel empathetic rheumatism. But in the stark photos of 1910, the rushing tide was over his elbows, and with his right arm crooked up towards his face, he seemed to be contemplating the imminent prospect of drowning.
Paris measures its floods by the height of the water flowing over the statue of the Zouave (French colonial soldier) on the Pont de l’Alma. Normally, he manages to keep his boots dry, but in the great flood of 1910, the Seine came up to his elbows. This picture shows a lesser flood in 1930 (being French, Parisian floods follow a metric timetable).
To Parisians, the most worrying things about the exhibition were the obvious signs that the flood had lasted a very long time. A whole new way of life had sprung up in the city. The photos showed people being calmly ferried about in rowing boats with their shopping. There were also long, precarious walkways consisting of planks, doors and tabletops aligned on trestles. These had become the new pavements, running the whole length of streets and across squares. Improvised scaffolding was erected in front of buildings so that residents could climb through the first-floor windows and carry on with daily life—only the ground floor and basements were totally flooded.
The waste-disposal system had evolved, too—the exhibition showed some bizarre photos of men shovelling cartloads of rubbish into the river. The dumps were flooded, so domestic refuse was tipped into the Seine at the Pont de Tolbiac, a pretty stupid idea considering that this is upriver of the city, meaning that the waste flowed right through Paris and presumably straight back into the streets where it had been collected.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. One of the photographers of a century ago had found his ‘you’ve got to laugh’ picture. In a street at least a metre deep in water, someone had hung a sign outside a bar—fermé pour cause d’inondation (closed due to flooding). The name of the bar? Le Café de l’Aquarium.
And the exhibition’s visitors’ book showed that nothing can traumatize a French person so much that they will stop making bad puns. Someone had written qui leut crue?—who would have believed it?—a play on cru, the past participle of croire (to believe) and crue, meaning high water. And I’m sure that there are Parisian journalists out there just praying for another flood so that they can use the joke in a headline.
Did I just do that?
As well as riverboat trips, Parisians organize two very different sorts of water-themed tours of their city.
One of these takes visitors to admire some of the engineering work done by Baron Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be understandable if we were talking about an aesthetically pleasing technological achievement like the Eiffel Tower, but less so (in my view, anyway) when the object of the guided tour is the sewers.
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nbsp; For an hour or so, starting from the Pont de l’Alma, visitors can wander through the tunnels, enjoying a truly multi-sensory experience. They can see, hear, smell, and if they’re very clumsy, feel and even taste a generous sample of Paris’s dirty water (and other waste matter, of course). The tour programme promises a visit to delightful-sounding places of interest such as the avenue Bosquet collector, the place de la Résistance storm drain, and a tunnel that carries the Left Bank’s intellectual waste to the purification works.
The sewer walls all have road signs telling you where you are in the city, so an underground tour is rather like strolling through Paris, accompanied not by traffic and pedestrians but by merde.
The second type of visit is much more fragrant. Eau de Paris, the public water-supply service, organizes themed walking tours in different parts of the city. One of them takes visitors on a 2.5 kilometre stroll around the Left Bank, to see a seventeenth-century aqueduct and some of the old fountains. Another takes in the springs in the old village of Montmartre. There’s also a guided tour of the best surviving Fontaines Wallace. (For more details about the tours, see the address list at the end of the book.)
Eau de Paris, by the way, is a relatively new organization created in 2009, when the city decided to take back control of its water supply, which had been in private hands since 1985. Other public services are being privatized, but Parisians couldn’t bear to think of anyone else possessing their water.
Eau, what a beautiful morning!
All of the above would seem to explain the watery goings-on every time I walk out of my front door in the north of Paris before eight in the morning.
Paris Revealed Page 6