Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (3 page)

Of course everyone knows the unappetizing alternative, which Victor Hugo pointed out in the mid-1800s: in Latin
lutum
means mud, therefore Lutetia was the “City of Mud.” As to the etymology of “Paris,” the canoes came in very handy. The ancient Celtic word appears to be composed of
par
(a kind of canoe) +
gw-ys
(boatmen or expert navigators). Therefore the Parisii tribespeople were expert navigators with canoes. The Romans dubbed the muddy settlement
Lutetia Parisiorum
, a mouthful that later inhabitants shortened to Lutetia then Frenchified to the euphonic Lutèce. Paris’s neolithic canoes are evoked by the dozens of paddle-shaped information panels, designed by Philippe Starck, found in many places around town.

If you believe what the conqueror Julius Caesar wrote in
Gallic Wars
, France’s expert canoe navigators (and other warlike inhabitants) savored not only Seine trout, but also human flesh. The fearsome Gauls called their river Sequana, meaning “snakelike,” presumably because the Seine meanders on its 482-mile course from its source on the 1,500-foot Langres Plateau in Burgundy to the Atlantic, a torpid yard’s tilt per mile. The Romans lost no time humanizing snaky Sequana into a curvaceous water nymph of the same name. In case your mind’s eye fails to envision her, a mid-nineteenth-century rendition of Sequana stands in a faux grotto at the Source de la Seine. This watery enclave is near the village of Chanceaux. But the property belongs to Paris: Sequana’s fountainhead was claimed for the city not by Caesar but by another emperor, Napoléon III.

By continuing downstream from the National Library on the landscaped left bank, under rows of poplars, past barges, houseboats, and homeless people’s encampments, you’ll eventually catch sight of Notre-Dame’s spire. It marks the center-point from which distances in France are measured. Fittingly, not far from where Notre-Dame stands the Romans built their walled citadel or
civitas
(later bastardized as
la Cité
), ringed by the Seine’s natural moat. Then as now the river ran at its narrowest around the Île de la Cité and could be forded when low, which is why Roman engineers first bridged it here.

There was nothing new under the sun in Caesar’s day. The Seine’s ford lay at the crossroads of older, Bronze Age trade routes, routes that led south to the Mediterranean and west to the English Channel. In time, Lutetia became the crucible where the south’s copper and the west’s tin met and melded into bronze weaponry. In the fourth century AD, when Julian the Apostate was proclaimed
Augustus
in Paris, the rebellious young emperor elevated Lutetia to the rank of “summer capital” of the Roman Empire, and the Seine became the new Rome’s Tiber. In due course, once the Romans had vacated, upriver paddled medieval missionaries and Norsemen of an equally bloody-minded nature, bent on trading, raiding, and proselytizing. And the rest, as they say, is history, a murky tale splayed over centuries and far too slippery to grasp here, with Lutetia becoming “Paris,” Sequana morphing into “Seine,” and my feet already sore after a mere mile’s march downstream.

Since the early twenty-first century even the short seedy stretch of quay fronting the Austerlitz train station has been pedestrianized. You can now walk unmolested by cars along the river’s left bank for several miles, almost as far as the Musée d’Orsay. I paused on the Pont d’Austerlitz to reconnoiter and rest my bunions. With several specific episodes of city lore in mind, it struck me that, probably ever since the first Gallic fisherman-cannibal fell afoul of his neighbor hereabouts, the Seine has been the favorite accomplice of murderers, and a convenient channel for the lifeblood of adulterers, warriors, revolutionaries, royalists, and massacre victims.

Take, for instance, Isabeau of Bavaria, luckless bride of mad King Charles VI. Around 1400, in a fit of jealousy, he had one of her admirers sewn into a cloth sack and tossed into the river (from where the Pont Louis-Philippe now stands, on the Right Bank). And what about the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre of 1572, when the Seine famously ran red? It did so again during the Revolution, as illustrated by eighteenth-century chronicler Jean-Louis Mercier’s account of Louis XVI’s execution at Place de la Concorde. Mercier tells of an onlooker who dipped his finger into the sovereign’s blood as it ran toward the river, pronouncing it particularly salty. Victor Hugo, no stranger to prose in full flood, preferred the sewers to the Seine for many uplifting scenes in
Les Misérables
, though he did finish off his misguided police inspector, Javert, in the river’s maelstrom.

As I ambled downstream, I tried to remember how many times in Georges Simenon’s novels Inspector Maigret fished bodies or their parts from the Seine, into whose depths Maigret stared daily from his office on the Quai des Orfèvres. The silver screen has certainly upheld the ghoulish-river tradition. People are pushed or fling themselves into Sequana’s arms with alarming frequency, as in the otherwise forgettable
Paris by Night
. Relatively recent history has also seen the river run
rouge:
in October 1961, during the Algerian War, the infamous Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon, then prefect of the Paris police, ordered hundreds of Algerian demonstrators to be beaten or bound and dumped into the Seine. The crime was denied for decades, and Papon, protected by everyone from De Gaulle to Mitterrand, remained free until 1999. A plaque on the Pont Saint-Michel records the event. It was placed there in 2001 by mayor Bertrand Delanoë.

But I suspect most contemporary visitors to Paris couldn’t give a flying buttress about the morbidity of moviemakers, literati, historians, and statisticians, who note that in an average year about fifty people fling themselves into the river hoping to end their lives. Like me, when I’m in a good mood, they imagine the Seine as a romantic setting, with pairs of lovers twining. That was precisely what I saw ahead, midstream, in the shade of a spreading sycamore, on the upstream tip of the Île Saint-Louis. The sight reassured me that, on the river’s edge, there’s something for everyone. There’s the Tino Rossi sculpture garden, for instance, with built-in sand pits and convenient statuary for insouciant dog-walkers. There are concrete-lined heat sinks for sun-seeking optimists, amphitheaters for tango enthusiasts, footpaths for red-faced joggers, and many an isolated stretch where anglers wet a line or clochards a wall.

Day and night, the river buzzes with
bateaux-mouches
, speakers blaring and floodlights glaring, gaily conveying millions of merrymakers each year on a magical Paris mystery tour.

But how much of the Seine’s glamour is carefully staged illusion? When in a sardonic frame of mind, induced, as was now the case, by the press of bodies around Notre-Dame, I often think of the river’s curving sweep as seen from a satellite: an eyebrow raised at all romantic notions of Paris, starting with my own. Romance? Two hundred years ago Napoléon I, ever the poet, dubbed the river “The highway linking Paris and Rouen.” Thanks to inspired twentieth-century planners, the Seine is still a highway, paved with asphalt on both sides, and girded by commuter train rails underneath the left embankment. Industrial barges and tour boats churn up the dark waters between.

Twenty-five million tons of freight, much of it toxic, transits on the river yearly. The effluent and garbage of the capital and upstream Seine Basin have flowed across Sequana’s bosom since the days of Lutetia. That paragon of romantic bridges, the Pont des Arts, linking the Louvre to the Institut de France, was long where street sweepers dumped their loads. So foul was the Seine by 1970, the statistical baseline for reclamation efforts, that it was pronounced “nearly dead.” Of the dozens of fish species pre-industrial fishermen once snared in their nets, scientists could find only three remaining. The situation has slowly improved, with bottom-feeders such as torpedo fish making a comeback, though in the early 1990s then-mayor Jacques Chirac was a trifle premature when he tossed trout and salmon into what was still a sump. The fish promptly went belly up. Granted, a few escapees from the Canal Saint-Martin do cross Paris now and again, swimming as fast as their fins will take them to Le Havre and the sea. In 2010 one lucky angler famously fished out a plump, healthy hatchery salmon—and practically made front-page news.

Today, with the river’s quays and bridges a UNESCO World Heritage Site, few Parisians suspect that Sequana is on a respirator: six oxygen-pumping plants hidden along the banks keep floundering fish species alive. Still fewer people notice the submerged garbage-catching barriers discreetly emptied by trucks or barges. And hardly anyone thinks of the hundreds of employees working around the clock to keep the river tidy, police it, control its flow, and purify its water. This is not done merely to please environmentalists or the tourism board. The fact is eighty percent of Paris’s drinking water comes from the Seine. The turgid flow is treated in four plants at the rate of three million cubic meters daily then piped into the homes of unsuspecting residents. I recall the day I heard rumors that, on average, by the time the Seine reaches my kitchen sink it has been through five human bodies. Try telling that to an enraptured visitor at a riverside café.

Parisians shrug off such reports. They seem to acquire a taste for chlorine and kidney-filtered water. With that pleasant thought in mind I gulped an espresso and a glass of Seine then descended a stairway to the riverbank, just downstream of Place Saint-Michel. I was in time to see the Brigade Fluvial, stationed near the Pont des Arts, struggle into wetsuits and brave the waters. I prayed to Sequana that these fluvial firemen were inoculated against every known water-borne disease and heavily insured. Ditto the Seine police, who fly by on speedboats, their sunglasses flashing, apparently having the time of their life. If only their dream duties did not include dealing with the successful suicide victims, and the many, many others who try but fail.

Despite the widely reported death of Jacques Chirac’s trout and salmon, many Parisians continue to dream of fishing and swimming in the Seine, so much so that Paris’s port authority and long-serving mayor Delanoë are studying the feasibility of creating inner-city bathing beaches. Delanoë got his toes in the water in summer 2002 with an initiative called
Paris Plage
, as in “beach.” He ordered that the Right Bank expressway be closed temporarily, and had outdoor cafés, sun umbrellas, and portable swimming pools planted on the tarmac. The initiative is now a regular summertime event, and the expressway is also closed from mid-morning to early afternoon on Sundays, transforming the pitted asphalt into an enchanted Yellow Brick Road. But no one so far has been foolhardy enough to scatter sand on the riverbanks and dive in.

As I shuffled now over the handsome, modern Solferino footbridge to the Right Bank quays flanking the Tuileries, I paused to take in the seductive views, and had to admit that a sandy strand somewhere hereabouts wouldn’t be bad. Once the water was clean enough for a swim, however, there would remain the minor detail of the Seine’s yearly floods, which tend to wreak havoc and would possibly sweep away the mayor’s beaches.

Earthquake-prone California lives in fear of “the big one.” But Paris dreads a repeat of the 1910 flood, whose height and extent are remembered around town by small plaques. Were it not for the reservoirs, dams, locks, and embankments perfected following the 1910 deluge, in the dry season the Seine would be a muddy trickle, while in rainy months it would slosh as far as the Bastille, Odéon, and Opéra neighborhoods. A replay of 1910, termed a “Parisian Chernobyl” by police and municipal authorities, would cost billions of euros and shut down the city for months.

Floods would be nightmarish indeed, but occasional high water can be a boon, providing walkers with a blissful respite between marks on the meter stick. Moderately high water means cars can no longer use the expressways, while pedestrians can still pick a path between the puddles. Traditionally, Parisians gauged the river’s height by Le Zouave (it rhymes with suave), a giant statue of a soldier. Le Zouave juts from the Pont de l’Alma and when Sequana caresses his neck, the city is in trouble. Happily, the river was barely licking the statue’s boots as I crept by on the Pont de l’Alma. I switched back to the Left Bank and sauntered along the stretch of quay in the Eiffel Tower’s shadow.

Feet throbbing, I limped onto the Allée des Cygnes, a narrow, half-mile-long island anchored midstream. It joins the tiered bridge of Bir-Hakeim to that of Grenelle, thereby uniting the bridges’ respective monuments to hope, pride, or self-deception, depending on your interpretation of history and your worldview. At Bir-Hakeim a 1949 plaque reminds readers that “France never stopped fighting” in World War II. Downstream at Grenelle a thirty-foot Statue of Liberty faces west, turning its buttocks to Notre-Dame. On the Allée des Cygnes itself I saw no swans, but spotted many peacocks in designer sportswear. They lazed on benches, and appeared to be enjoying the unusual views of 1950s to 1970s highrise architecture.

Another quarter-mile downstream at Javel (as in
eau de Javel
, or bleach, produced here starting in the 1770s) the Seine flowed melodiously beneath the ironwork Pont Mirabeau. In the rushing mainstream I could hear Guillaume Apollinaire’s wistful refrain of time and love slipping by, the one every French high schooler memorizes:
Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine et nos amours faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne la joie venait toujours après la peine …

But I hadn’t walked three hours to weep tears of nostalgia. The goal I had been advancing toward was near: a giant bronze nymph, symbol of the river, affixed to the Pont Mirabeau. On the railing above her head is a crown in the shape of a turreted citadel, and the device
Fluctuat nec mergitur
. The sculpture’s décolleté suggests that the sculptor was more interested in his model’s bounteous
seins
than in the Seine. I gazed down into her corroded but smiling eyes and recognized Sequana.