Visit a distant and little-known part of Paris.
PAUL LAMARCHE, KEEPER OF THE SEINE, SCAMPERED OVER THE last traces of a vast Gallo-Roman temple to show me the river’s source. He was into his 90s, quick, sturdy, with an elfin twinkle in his eye. Those old guys in Armenia last long on yogurt, but Lamarche thrives on the magical waters of the Seine.
“Look at this,” Lamarche said, bending over a tiny stream trickling down a groove in the rock. He dislodged a stone and seized a waterbug, like a minuscule shrimp. “Any kind of pollution kills these things,” he explained. “You won’t find any cleaner water.” He cupped his hands in the furry green moss and thrust his face into the cool liquid. I did the same. Water never tasted better.
The old man fell silent to let me ponder the past. Instead, my mind flashed ahead to the immediate future. I could imagine splashing water into guests’ whisky aboard La Vieille [the author’s boat and river home] and mentioning casually that I had scooped it from the Seine. A sadist’s dream.
We were on the Langres Plateau in the Côte d’Or, up to our ankles in red poppies and talking over the bussing hum of cicadas. Wild roses and columbines fringed the rocks, and rich, fragrant grass hid little yellow buds. Lamarche first saw this enchanted source when he was six. “We hiked down from Chanceaux to say bonjour to the goddess,” he said, nodding toward a Rubenesque statue in a fake grotto built by the city of Paris to honor Sequana.
The plaque says she was put there by Napoleon III, but Paul knows the statue was replaced in 1928. Once water spouted from her left arm, as though she were personally filling the river, but in dry years the pressure was not strong enough. Now water burbles ignobly from somewhere near her feet. In any case, her cave is not the actual source.
“The river really starts here,” Lamarche said, pointing to a rusty grate by a few chunks of marble column, all that remains of the biggest temple in ancient Gaul. “And there and there.” Water oozed from two other breaks in the rock at the base of a low cliff, in a clump of trees. “Then it goes underground and loops around to the grotto.”
He was enjoying himself, poking holes in the first few fibs the Seine’s curators sought to perpetrate on the public. The river was his life, and Sequana his beloved ancestor. After checking out the world in the military, Lamarche came home to Saint-Germain-Source-Seine, the village nearby. In 1953, he settled into the old caretaker’s farmhouse just below the grotto and opened the Café Sequana. His wife, Monique, made omelettes and strong coffee. At the source, Lamarche planted two willows, under which picnickers can dangle their toes in cool water, and shaped the small park. With money left over, he built the first bridge over the Seine, a funny little miniature of the vaulted spans farther down.
These days, mostly, he and Monique tend their fields. The grotto is left open to the public and needs only a casual eye. But when anyone stops to ask, the old man seizes a fat iron key and shows off the real thing.
Lamarche took me to the gate and worked at the rusted padlock. For several minutes, he jiggled the key and muttered darkly. Finally, he worked it loose. My friend Jeannette, meantime, simply walked past the locked gate; the fence had long since collapsed. Inside, Lamarche showed us a heavy slice of column that looters had tried to roll into a pickup. He had run them off. “They’ve taken everything,” he said, shaking his head at nonspecific sacrilege over the last two millennia.
The park belongs to Paris. After all these years, the source of the Seine, deep in the belly of Burgundy, is still a colony of the French capital. Napoleon III claimed it last century when such symbolism was pregnant with political import. Now, only a curiosity, the symbol still fits. When the river gets bigger, it is pushed around with Paris in mind. Downstream from Paris, it runs thick with urban waste.
Although Lamarche plants the flowers, trims the trees, and cleans up after slobs, what he likes best is talking to visitors. He wants people to get Sequana’s story straight. Which is not so easy to do. The Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Rivières et de Montagnes en France offers eleven lines on the name Seine. This, via a string of variants used over the centuries, evolved into Seine. Squan, apparently, was a Gallic word meaning twisting, or tranquil, or both. The Romans added a few vowels. Later, French settled on a single syllable.
An eighteen-inch-high statue of the goddess has survived in a museum at Dijon. She is in flowing Greco-Roman robes, standing in a boat with a bow shaped like the head of swan; in the swan’s mouth is a small round object, a pomegranate or a tennis ball. For myth spinners, it is a promising start.
Archeologists, in fact, have put together a detailed account of the daily goings-on at the temple to Sequana. Reading it, I half-suspected that some clumsy printer had substituted pages from a modern guide to Lourdes. The Gauls’ first temple was made of wood and clay earth, but Romans later hauled in enough slabs of marble and hewn stone for a vast religious complex. The waters trickled among high columns and past inner recesses reserved for holy business. Downstream, they widened into a pool where the masses took the cure.
Gauls, Romans, and foreign tourists covered great distances, hobbling on foot or in fancy carriages. Priests received offerings in temple alcoves. Pilgrims sealed vows by pitching coins or jewelry into the water. Artisans fashioned replicas of limbs in need of curing, and they charged an arm and a leg. In bronze, wood, or soft rock, they depicted familiar-looking maladies—tumors, poxes, and deformities—which the Seine was enlisted to heal. Souvenir stands sold kitschy statuettes; had transport been better, they might have come from Taiwan.
The temple thrived as a sacred health spa and also as a vacation getaway from a bustling Gallo-Roman settlement downstream started by a tribe of Gauls, fishermen, and water traders known as the Parisii. Par, in Celtic, means boat. By then, the Parisii’s capital on an island in the Seine, now the Ile de la Cité, was rolling in resource. The settlement, as well as the region near Sequana’s temple and the river that linked them, were at the crux of a new world taking shape.
About six centuries before Christ, and the Romans, the Greeks had found a more direct route to Britain than sailing by Gibraltar and up rough open seas. They needed English tin and copper to make bronze, buying it with Mediterranean wine. Greek traders followed the Rhône to the Saône until they ran out of river. Crews humped their cargo overland to the headwaters of the Seine. From there, it was only water to the Thames. The Greeks enriched not only the entrepôt region of Vix, not far from the source, but also Gallic villages clustered along the river.
Germans, meantime, carted their heavy metals from Spain, in exchange for honey, amber, and furs. That required crossing the Seine. Wagoners settled on the Parisii’s village, where flat rocks on either bank flanked an island made of silt. For much of the year, horses could ford the river; it was twice as wide then as it is now and a whole lot shallower. When the water was high, Gauls ferried the wagons across, for a price.
Paris was born on what is now Ile de la Cité, a small island in the Seine. On its coat of arms, the city’s symbol is a boat shaped like an island.
—JO’R, LH, and SO’R
The island was perfectly placed. Forests hemmed in the river basin, and bandits cruised the few rutted roads. Anyone with a choice preferred the Seine—peaceful, dependable, and free of muggers. And road convoys had to get over the river. Seven thousand strong, behind a stockade, the Parisii ran a bustling market and a mint that stamped gold coins. Politics were shaped by the watermen, the nautes, who ruled the wavelets until A.D. 52.
But after Rome conquered the British isles, Caesar realized he had to fuel his legionnaires there with home-grown olive oil. Like all other roads, he decided, the Seine would lead to Rome. His armies seized everything along the old Greek route. On their island redoubt, the Gauls fought back.
Caesar reported humbly: “Labienus exhorted his soldiers to remember their past bravery, their happiest combats, and to conduct themselves as if Caesar, who so often had led them to victory, were there in person.” Romans routed the right flank, but the Parisii’s general, Camulogenus, held the center. “All were encircled and massacred,” Caesar wrote, adding that horsemen cut down those who fled. We have no Gallic version, but the battle was likely the origin of Parisian driving habits.
Having burned their town rather than leave it to Caesar, the Gauls started fresh on the island. On the river’s left bank, a gleaming Roman city offered the usual colonial amenities: temples, baths, a theater, aqueducts, and stone streets, along with a port. Stone pillars and wooden planks made up the first Petit Pont. Gauls ran their own port on the island. The whole place was called Lutetia, a name that lingers today on a fancy hotel façade and a hundred other places.
The Romans built a temple to Jupiter atop a shrine to a Gallic god; Notre-Dame, on the same spot, now blots out both deities. By then, the Gauls had joined the invaders they could not beat. The nautes offered a statue to honor the Roman god and continued their lucrative river traffic.
Late in the 3rd century, France was rearranged by the muscular Teutonic tourism that got to be a habit. Franks swept southwest from the Rhine estuary. They eventually settled most of the country, hence the name France. But Burgundians from the central Rhine, tall Wagnerian blondes with a power problem, made straight for the Seine. In A.D. 276, they trashed Lutetia, burning the Roman sector. Failing to dislodge the Gauls from their island, they moved up-stream and razed Sequana’s temple.
A Seine biographer, Anthony Glyn, reckons the Germanic invaders smashed the temple because they did not like female deities. In fact, centuries later, a monk named Seigne (pronounced “Seine”) was sainted and recruited as patron of the river, which explains those impressive church towers at Saint-Seine-L’Abbaye, a few miles toward Dijon on the other side of the hill from the source. But he didn’t take; Sequana has eclipsed Saint Seigne, whatever his role.
The Roman Empire was crumbling fast. In Lutetia, Gallo-Romans had shaped a new culture. Freed of Mediterranean keepers, they took the old name, Paris. And they looked mostly down-stream, toward England and northern Europe, where trade was brisk. Wine from Burgundy and Champagne floated down the Seine. But not much came from beyond, overland from the Saône. Gradually, Sequana’s shrine lost its pre-Michelin stars and slipped into the mists.
I started my river journey on foot. This line might have carried some power in a Richard Burton diary, with chilling detail of treacherous porters and mosquitos the size of turkey buzzards, but walking down the Seine is not what you’d call hardship. In fact, I didn’t go very far before I hopped back into an open car and followed the farmer’s roads and narrow strips of blacktop to the first proper bridge across the river. A very short bridge.
My original idea had been a single journey, from first trickle to final rollers, in some form of conveyance. Paul Theroux suggested a kayak, the way he’d do it. Another old pro urged something more French, like a rubber Zodiac. Had I talked to Mark Spitz, I probably would have considered the butterfly stroke. But the Seine, often submissive, needs a minimum of conquering. To live her secret life, you’ve got to take it slowly, in various ways at different times. My exploring would take me among old books, into rusting engine compartments, and, as far as I could go, into the thoughts of river people. More than a journey, this was a quest. I was after the soul of the Seine. Scrapping all plans, I simply set out.
The countryside is picturebook France, rolling, rich and rock walled. In its early stages, the Seine winds among fields and occasionally disappears in a brushy tangle. At any point, during the first few miles, you can hop across without getting your feet wet. Soon it widens into a respectable stream, snaking in even loops across fruited meadows. This is the deepest, greenest, richest heartland of Old Europe.
The Seine is formalized at Billy-lès-Chanceaux, its name on the enameled plate bolted to the stone bridge. It flows past a line of tile-roofed and shuttered buildings, the town hall and bourgeois homes, set on the cobbled quai as if the place were a busy port. Jeannette and I settled down to watch life. An ancient tractor clattered across the bridge. Some kids did a Flying Wallenda act over the water. A mother herded her toddlers homeward, a duck with ducklings. We laid out a lunch on the grass. It was less elaborate than Manet’s, but we got the feeling. This was one lovely river.
Then we meandered downstream, stopping to sniff at kitchen windows and craning our necks over tumble-down stone walls to see gardens gone wild. Whenever we found a bridge, we crossed it and watched clear water swirling slowly around the pilings. If a side road climbed a wooded rise, we followed it.
France is particularly well endowed for this sort of sweet exploration. The Institut Géographique National (IGN) puts out a series of blue-bordered maps on a scale of one to twenty-five thousand. Two inches are devoted to each mile on the ground, enough room for street grids of hamlets and the shapes of château outbuildings. Each caprice of a stream bed is traced in and out of green-shaded splotches. A practiced eye can almost pick out the places with cozy little cafés run by accomplished grandmothers, causing the practiced palate to moisten noticeably.
Thanks to the IGN, I could follow highways too insignificant for any color at all, doubling back to thwart dead ends and recrossing the Seine yet again whenever I liked the cut of a barn. There is a certain pleasant sameness in the river’s early stages. As in much of France beyond the cities, most people are linked to farms or are shopkeepers who earn their living one baguette at a time. In terms of nature, however, all around is heavy on luxe, calme et volupté.
Hard times had begun to bite when I first tracked the river in 1992, and things were getting worse. The European Community, an imperfect union, bettered few lives. Farm subsidies plummeted, prices sagged, and agro-industry suffered. Other sectors stagnated, drying the national resource pool. Elsewhere, rural families were migrating to cities. The Seine’s waters hardly shielded people nearby from the world beyond. But, I suspected, only desperation could dislodge many of them from their natural paradise.
Conflicting sensations came back, time and again, as I explored the river. Try as you might to avoid it, the Seine at its gentlest pushes you toward grandiose metaphor. It is a silver thread woven into a rich Old World tapestry, an inlay of precious metal...and so on. Then you turn another corner and find some architectural atrocity at the edge of a village gone modern. People are kind beyond belief, or porcine putzes. In microcosm, the Seine is France.
At Bar-sur-Seine, well before the boats start, Antoine Richard fished for supper. His secret spot was just below the picturesque wreckage of a wooden wheel that had churned up electricity not long after Thomas Edison invented light bulbs. A few days earlier, he had pulled out 23 trout. A fireman in his twenties, Richard spends his down time along the river.
The occasional French monarch dreamed of bringing boats up this high. Under orders from Napoleon, engineers once tried to dredge a channel near Bar and line it with rock walls. But the river bed is too porous in its early stages, and the emperor’s canal would not hold water. As a result, the Seine’s gently sloping grass banks are just about the way nature wants them.
“Such tranquillity, beauty,” Richard reflected, pausing to let the scene speak for itself. Bright flowers climb mossy village walls. Up the graveled road was a regulation church with a pointy steeple. The cafés and shops had not changed for generations and likely never will. Ah, the poetry of la France éternelle. And then the other side. I asked about pollution.
“It’s not too bad here,” Richard said. “You can still catch l’ombre, as far down as Fourchière.” That was not so far down. “Then it disappears.” Ombre, a delicate white fish like a trout, can’t handle dirty water. Farther down, fishermen have to settle for carp, chub, roach, bream, eels, and other hardy species. A few hours’ drive from the source, the Seine looked fresh and alive. But Paul Lamarche’s tiny bugs wouldn’t stand a chance.
At Fourchière, a gas-station owner in greasy overalls said that, in fact, the odd ombre still lurked in the river. He eyed me carefully and added, “Ici c’est une societé privée.” This was confusing. Societé can mean “association” but also “company.” Had some business cornered fishing rights? The man explained, “C’est réservé aux gens du pays.” Another two-way meaning: pays usually means “country,” and he might have been saying that only French people could fish there. He wasn’t. The other meaning is “around here.” He meant that the Seine, in that area, belonged only to Fourchière’s people. But the bakery sold me bread.
In the Middle Ages people believed that bodies drowned in the Seine could be located by setting afloat in the river a votive candle on a wooden disc and noting where it stopped or went out. It was doubly important to find drowned bodies before the authorities did, because a huge fee of 101 écus, the equivalent of a year’s pay for a manual laborer, is said to have been charged for the delivery of a loved one from the morgue at the Châtelet. One version of a story told about a bridge and its fires has it that a poor old widow whose son had drowned had set a candle afloat in hopes of finding his body. The candle floated close to a straw-laden barge, setting it on fire. The barge touched the wooden scaffolding of a pillar of the bridge itself. In three days the raging fire destroyed the bridge and the houses on it.
—Alison and Sonia Landes,
Pariswalks
Châtillon-sur-Seine is the first real town on the river. As in Paris, the water splits into two branches around an island of buildings in fitted rock that go back a half dozen centuries. But in Châtillon the channels are a coin’s toss wide, and you can see bottom. At midnight, time tunnels you backward. Cobblestone streets, laid out for horses and slop buckets, echo footsteps. Rusty hinges hold up shutters in wood petrified with age. People have snapped off their lights, leaving only a flickering glow of street lanterns that might be oil torches. A fortified hilltop church stands above the river. From some angles, it is a brooding hulk. From others, it is a graceful sweep of towers and ramparts.
The river hairpins and eddies into a mystical pool under a rock outcropping. In fact, this is the Douix, perhaps the world’s shortest river, and the first tributary of the Seine. The Douix gushes up from the cliff at rates approaching a thousand gallons a second. It boils over a natural fall of ragged rock. From source to mouth, it is 100 yards long. In the darkness, it churns and rushes, blowing off mists. When the upper Seine was a highway, this had to be a Druid rest area.
A number of years back, say about 50 million or so, when the Seine’s bed was on the floor of a shallow inland sea, France was as warm as the Caribbean. Off and on during those Paleocene times, waves covered a broad sweep of Western Europe, leaving islands of rich vegetation and small tropical beasts. Each dose of salt water lasted two to four million years. In between, the land dried and life forms nestled in the sediment to fossilize for the later amusement of geologists. Remains of two thousand mollusks have been found in the Paris basin, many of them dead ringers for the shells that get tossed out each night after a fruits de mer feast in Les Halles.
As time marched on, old sands and clays hardened into new formations. The limestone deposits that characterize Paris began in a subepoch called, naturally, Lutecian. Successive layers of gypsum, clay, and sand already had taken shape by the Pleistocene epoch, a million years ago, when giant ice cubes elsewhere on the planet scraped slowly past and redecorated the scenery. Toward the end of the Quaternary period, the banks of the Seine were somewhat as we find them. Rich alluvial soil goes down yards deep on a sandy, porous base. In the heart of Paris, where wagons could cross once wheels appeared, hard calcified rock forms a solid foundation for a city.
A visitor today can sit on the bank under leafy trees and taste the fruits of this geological C.V. The chalky hillsides and plains produce grapes to kill for. And, above Châtillon, the northbound Seine flows into Champagne, where a monk named Dom Pérignon figured out a splendid use for them.
In these sorts of settings, one is well advised to husband the adjectives and go easy on superlatives. That said, there may be no place better than Vix, anywhere, to uncork a bottle and contemplate peace on earth. Two millennia after thriving as a crossroads of world trade, Vix has dropped from the map. Its ancient treasures—some gold and jewelry, but especially a stunning cast-bronze five-foot-six-inch-high Grecian urn from the tomb of a princess—are five miles away in Châtillon. The highway misses it by a mile. No one mentioned it to me; flashing by in the car, I saw a sign and hung a right.
Unvisited, Vix remains in a mossy-tile, pre-neon state, its falling-down walls half hidden in bursts of bright flowers. The Seine makes a gentle bend into the village and flows under three arches of a stone bridge. It is wide and clear as glass, with whorls of weeds under its rippled surface. In the falling light of dusk, fishermen in waders tie flies to their lines and snake them over the water.
For a while, I fussed with my cameras. By placing my car near the bridge, I could get high enough to picture the chipped “La Seine” sign, with a spray of red flowers in the foreground and the rich green far bank as a backdrop. After half a roll, I gave up. The power was not visual but spiritual, and every sense went into the picture: perfumes, ripplings and rustlings, balmy air you could feel.
A few couples, some young, some ancient, watched the bushy-haired man with Paris plates crawl over his car and twist into odd positions. Most quickly lost interest. They had come to see the river at sundown, a specialty of Vix that is now into its third millennium and shows no sign of losing its glory.
Approaching a man with a fly rod, I fished for quotes. Yes, outsiders were welcome to try their luck in the Seine, he said, and I was happy to hear it. Like picture-taking, words fell short. What could he tell me that I could not feel by sitting there quietly? Here in Vix, it all fell together: the cycles of geology, the waves of history, the link to modern times. Light was dwindling fast, and people were expecting me a long way down the road. I sat, and sat, and sat.
Mort Rosenblum is the former editor-in-chief of the International Herald Tribune and the author of many books, including Mission to Civilize, A Goose in Toulouse and other Culinary Adventures in France, and Who Stole the News? This story was excerpted from his book The Secret Life of the Seine.
L’aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte
S’avançait lentement sur la Seine déserte
The glittering dawn, in robe of red and green,
Moving slowly, on the Seine was seen.
—Baudelaire