The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  As a young priest, Seigne was attacked by seven bandits in a forest that belonged to his father, a wealthy landowner. As the bandits were about to kill him, Seigne got on his knees and begged God to convert them to Christianity. His prayers were answered. They converted and devoted their lives to serving God; some became saints. To give thanks, Seigne built an abbey and church and began a campaign of conversion. He received a large gift of land from his father and invited people living in the area to use it. They cut trees for firewood and cleared forests to plant crops. Seigne became a patron saint of the harvest.

  In the town to be called Saint-Seine-l’Abbaye, six miles from the source and the temple, a thirteenth-century abbey of the same name tells the saint’s life story through a long fresco, finished in 1504. The paint is peeling, the walls damaged by water. But there he is, pale-faced and serious, with wispy light hair, in his black monk’s robes. These days the church is mostly empty; the adjoining abbey is a center for troubled teenagers. An annual local harvest festival in his honor ended long ago. Saint Seigne is a forgotten saint, but the goddess Sequana lives on.

  Hoareau is determined to make the source of the Seine known to all. He comes often, hoping to unlock more of its secrets and expand the site to attract more visitors. He envisions a picnic area, a network of walls and passages, an esplanade, and boutiques. The temple site has never been properly excavated for all to see. There is no money from benefactors to restore it, no political will to develop it, no American Friends of the Sources of the Seine the way there are “American Friends” of French national treasures like Versailles and the Louvre. Even if a massive excavation were undertaken, there might be little left to see. In the centuries that followed the destruction of the temple, its stones, even the blocks that made up its pillars, were hauled away and used for local construction.

  Hoareau takes the long view. “The original source is hidden somewhere underground, protected and safe,” he said. “Nobody will steal it from us. We have only begun to tell its story.”

  The Seine in the countryside near its source. ANDREW PLUMP.

  A Gallo-Roman bronze statue of the healing goddess Sequana standing proudly in a duck-billed boat. This relic can be found at the archeological museum in Dijon. GABRIELA SCIOLINO PLUMP.

  FIVE

  The Legend of the River

  When Neptune stretched out his

  arms to seize her, her body melted

  into water; her veil and green

  garments, which the winds blew

  before her, became emerald-colored

  waves; she was transformed into a river

  of that color, which still delights in

  wandering the places she loved as a

  nymph.

  —JACQUES-HENRI BERNARDIN

  DE SAINT-PIERRE, L’Arcadie

  I CAME FACE-TO-FACE with Sequana in an obscure museum in Dijon. During my visit to the source of the Seine, I had been told her story. Now here she was: a nineteen-inch, sixteen-and-a-half-pound, two-thousand-year-old Gallo-Roman bronze statue encased in protective glass. She stands elegant in a boat, her head inclined, her left leg slightly bent. The prow of her boat is the head of a duck that holds a round object—a pomegranate perhaps—in its long bill; the stern is the duck’s upswept tail.

  The Musée Archéologique de Dijon is a hidden jewel, housed in a former Benedictine abbey with high stone ceilings and grand halls. It is the receptacle for the region’s ancient artifacts, a beneficiary of the French state’s policy of leaving some of the treasures of history where they are found, instead of relocating them to Paris. Sequana is displayed prominently in a long, vaulted room and is the star of the museum’s collection. “I find her superb,” said Frédérique Bouvard, the museum’s curator. “She is our Mona Lisa.”

  The goddess is the most important symbol of the river. Were she to receive the recognition she deserves, she could become the most important female icon in France. But the museum operates with modest ambitions and a small budget: it offers no multilingual audio guides, no museum catalog, and no video telling Sequana’s story. Not enough people know about her, although she has given her name to a multinational company that makes paper, a bistro on the Île de la Cité, a wine label, a houseboat moored in Rouen, an association that restores hundred-year-old boats, an office building in a Paris suburb, a folk-metal song, and even to an interior design business run by an Irishwoman married to a Frenchman.

  The museum arranged for a private viewing, so that I could see Sequana in all her glory. I was allowed to bring along a photographer. (The last time Sequana had been photographed professionally was about half a century ago.) We arrived one morning for a most unusual unveiling. Two technicians wearing protective gloves unlocked and removed Sequana’s heavy glass case. One of them lifted her up and cradled her in his arms as gently as if she were a newborn. He carried her up several flights of stairs and set her on a table covered in heavy white protective paper. “We rarely move her and never lend her to other museums, because she is too fragile,” said Sophie Casadebaig, the museum’s director. “She hasn’t been seen like this for decades.”

  Slim and small-breasted, Sequana wears a flowing dress that exposes her forearms and part of her chest and falls in pleats to the floor, revealing the tips of her pointed slippers. A sash with an elaborate knot holds the garment in place. A robe trimmed with pearls is fixed to her right arm by five Roman brooches. A large, broad crown partially covers her wavy hair, which is parted in the middle and tied at the back of her neck. Long tresses frame her face.

  She is young, with large eyes and refined features, and wears a look of anticipation. Her forearms are outstretched as if in a gesture of welcome. Her right hand once held an object that was lost long ago, said Casadebaig—perhaps a plate, a bowl, or a cornucopia of fruit. “There are so many unknowns about her,” she added.

  One of the technicians took a fine-haired brush and wiped away loose dust that had settled in Sequana’s crevices and folds, revealing her many colors—flat brown, gray, and green; shiny bronze; and tiny specks of white powder where oxidation had taken hold. I moved as close as I could without touching her.

  THE FIRST EVIDENCE of the name Sequana comes in eleven ancient inscriptions found on the site of the temple at the source. The cult of Sequana flourished under Roman rule. Her temple complex is believed to have been destroyed in the fourth or fifth century a.d., and over time, Sequana was forgotten. In the middle of the nineteenth century, archaeologists began to comb through the site where the temple complex once stood. It yielded odd treasures, including a large fourth-century terra-cotta vase. Its neck bore an inscription: Deae Sequana Rufus donavit—“Rufus gave this to the goddess Sequana.” Inside were 120 small bronze votive offerings and more than eight hundred third-and fourth-century Roman bronze coins.

  In 1933, Henry Corot, a landowner and self-taught archaeologist from Dijon, and his team were responsible for the discovery of the bronze statue of Sequana that now captivated me. Corot often turned up at the temple site at four in the morning. On the day Sequana was found, some six years after he began excavations, he had become so discouraged that he had instructed his team to clean up the site, and then packed his things up and left.

  Antoine Hoareau, my guide to the source waters, told the story: “His men were removing all the gravel and dirt when they hit a large stone slab. Underneath they found two ancient bronze statues. One was a young fawn; the other was Sequana. They ran to the train station and saw Corot as he was ready to get on the train. They yelled, ‘Monsieur Corot! Monsieur Corot! We found bronzes. Hurry back!’”

  He rushed back. He deduced that the bronzes had evaded him because they had been removed from the temple and hidden nearby to elude robbers. He called the discovery of the bronzes “the treasure of the springs of the Seine!” and described Sequana as “majestic,” with “an air of goodness and compassion.”

  Corot concluded that Sequana had been built in three parts: a base, which had probably
been attached with metal nails to a wooden plate; a bronze boat in the shape of a duck, soldered to the base; and the statue of Sequana, soldered to the boat. Corot speculated that the object in the duck’s bill might have been what he called “an Alpine gooseberry.”

  Corot had a grand vision for what the temple site could become. In his formal report on the discovery, he wrote, “There remains much to be done to comb the ancient ground of the Temple, find what is left of its walls, clean the immense pool that stretched from its western façade, so that we can return this Gallo-Roman site, unique in the world, to something of the sumptuous appearance it had in the first centuries of our era.”

  That never happened.

  Instead, the treasures yielded over the years were sent to the Dijon archaeological museum. One is what’s left of a large stone statue of Sequana that used to stand in her temple. It was vandalized sometime after Christianity took root in France, and now sits headless and armless in the museum. A modern sculpture, an imagining of what she might have looked like, has been erected at the temple complex at the source of the Seine.

  The museum also houses some fifteen hundred ex-votos, votive offerings in wood, stone, and bronze that pilgrims gave to Sequana, hoping her healing energies would cure their illnesses and alleviate their suffering. Some were masterfully sculpted from wood, others mass-produced. One group of offerings consists of four hundred larger-than-life representations of pilgrims hewn from chunks of oak, unearthed in the 1960s—the largest collection of wooden Gallic sculptures ever found. The collection also includes effigies of body parts carved from local limestone or wood: heads, eyes, breasts, arms, legs, and sexual and internal organs that were thought to need healing. Statuettes of women with big bellies and of couples locked in embrace suggest a desire for a child. One figure, with breasts and a penis, represents a hermaphrodite. Statuettes of children holding puppies or rabbits may have been tokens from parents giving thanks. A head without a mouth or ears suggests deafness, and a head wrapped in a towel, migraines. Other statuettes were abstract or decorative, their purpose unknown. There were also small bronze plaques, thin pieces of crudely worked metal, depicting sexual organs, breasts, and stylized eyes.

  IN 2016, the cities of Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre sponsored Réinventer la Seine (Reinvent the Seine), a competition to develop twenty-three sites along the length of the river. The goal was to create a new way of living with the water. “Entrepreneurs, investors, artists, associations, and others are invited to submit their ideas,” the organizers stated. I knew I could never help fulfill Corot’s dream of restoring the ancient temple site to its original grandeur. But what if a grand replica of Sequana could be erected? She would be a fitting match to the one-quarter-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty that sits on an island in the Seine in Paris. I decided to enter the idea in the competition.

  A pre-Christian healing goddess with no ties to any living religion, Sequana would fit nicely into the official French policy that reveres the republican ideal. She could be the secular version of Joan of Arc, the warrior-martyr, and of Our Lady of Lourdes, the miracle worker. She could be the idealized embodiment of freedom, without the republican weight of Marianne leading citizens to liberty. As Sequana was a healing goddess, we could create an NGO to help women in need of spiritual or physical healing.

  I created, printed, and bound a dossier with historical texts, color photographs, and a pitch. I submitted formal applications—one each to the cities of Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre. Paris had the most sites where a statue could be situated, but Le Havre, at the river’s end, seemed an especially good fit for a proposal celebrating its source. Over the next few months, I told just about anyone who might help about the Sequana project. Casadebaig, from the archaeological museum of Dijon, was excited about it. She told me that if I wanted to produce any replica of her Sequana—from key chains to a monumental statue—the exclusive reproduction rights belonged to the museum. Bien sûr.

  THERE IS ANOTHER Sequana story, the fictional tale of “the nymph of the Seine.” In the seventeenth century, the playwright Jean Racine composed “The Nymph of the Seine to the Queen,” a lyrical poem marking the marriage of Louis XIV to the infanta Maria Theresa of Spain. In the poem, the river nymph, who is not named, both welcomes the queen to France and serves as the voice of the country.

  The eighteenth-century writer and traveler Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre embellished the story. Born in Le Havre and best known for Paul et Virginie, a novel of innocent love, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre imagined the origins of the Seine in his 1781 political utopia, L’ Arcadie. In it he tells the story of a beautiful and high-spirited nymph, Sequana, born to the wine god Bacchus and an unidentified mother. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre injects Sequana into the ancient Greek myth of Persephone (whom the Romans called Proserpine), the daughter of Demeter (or Ceres in Roman mythology), the goddess of the harvest.

  There are variations in the story in both Greek and Roman mythology. In one classic Greek version, Persephone is picking flowers in a meadow when Hades, the god of the underworld, rises through a chasm in the ground, kidnaps her, and pulls her down into his kingdom. A nymph who was with Persephone weeps so much that she turns into a pool of salt water. Demeter searches ceaselessly for her daughter, and eventually Zeus intervenes on Demeter’s behalf and returns Persephone to her. But Persephone has eaten food in the underground world—a small number of pomegranate seeds—and is doomed to spend her winter months there, returning to the earth’s surface only in the spring.

  In retelling the story, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre used the Roman mythological names and portrayed Sequana as one of the handmaidens of Ceres (Demeter). Ceres travels the world searching for her daughter, and Sequana helps her when she comes to Gaul. When Ceres eventually succumbs to defeat, Sequana asks for the farm fields that surround them as compensation. Ceres agrees and, in an added gesture, grants Sequana the gift of making wheat grow wherever she walks. Worried that Sequana could suffer the same fate as her own daughter, Ceres assigns the nymph Heva and her team to watch over her.

  One day when Sequana is collecting shells and playing in the waves at the seaside, Heva spots Neptune, the god of the sea, swimming deep under the waves. She recognizes him by his flowing white hair, purplish face, and blue robes. Neptune has just come from the North Sea, where he witnessed an earthquake, and is now roaming the seas, checking that his shores are secure.

  “Upon seeing him, Heva uttered a piercing cry and warned the Seine [Sequana], who quickly fled to the fields,” Bernandin de Saint-Pierre writes. But Neptune has already spotted Sequana, and, “struck by her grace and her nimble movements, he drove his seahorses onto the shore in pursuit. He had nearly overtaken her, when she called out to her father Bacchus, and her mistress Ceres. Both answered her pleas: when Neptune reached out his arms to seize her, her body melted into water; her veil and green garments, which the winds blew before her, became emerald-colored waves; she was transformed into a river of that color, which still delights in wandering the places she loved as a nymph.”

  Heva dies of grief from losing Sequana. Her nymphs build a steep cliff of black-and-white stones in her honor. The cliff, two miles north of Le Havre, goes by the name Le Cap de la Hève. It marks the northernmost point of the Bay of the Seine, the place where the Seine meets the sea. Like Heva watching over Sequana, her namesake cliff protects sailors from shipwreck, its forbidding rock face warning them of danger. The other nymphs who fled inland with Sequana were transformed into the Seine’s largest tributaries, the Aube, Yonne, Marne, and Oise, and “all the other rivers that come to the Seine to give their waters to their former mistress,” writes Bernardin de Saint-Pierre.

  Charles Nodier retold the Sequana myth in an 1836 work, La Seine et ses bords. The book includes an engraving of Neptune, bearded and fierce-looking, his feet planted firmly on the ground, his muscular arms wrapped around Sequana’s waist. Apparently carried away by lust, he has dropped his trident, which lies on the ground behind h
im. A terrified Sequana raises her arms high in the air as she struggles to break free. The sky is dark. The sea rushes forward, foaming at their feet.

  Neptune’s obsession with Sequana continues after she becomes the Seine. Twice a day, he thunders loudly and forces seawater into the river. Sequana so hates her pursuer that whenever he tries to overtake her, she keeps her green river waters separate from Neptune’s salty azure sea, “fleeing inland to the fields, retreating to her source, against her natural course,” Bernardin de Saint-Pierre writes. Unlike Persephone, who fell victim to her abductor, Sequana escapes.

  I find it comforting to imagine that her iron will explains the tides that come twice a day along the Seine—the odd ebbs and flows, the currents, waves, and churning water fighting the powerful sea.

  Jean-Pierre Fleury grows grapes and produces Champagne on his family’s thirty-seven acre vineyard near the village of Courteron. BÉRENGÈRE SIM.

  SIX

  Champagne on the Seine

  I live in the Champagne cork.

  —OLD SAYING of the residents

  of the historic center of Troyes

  I USED TO THINK that “Champagne country” meant the vast vineyards around the cities of Reims and Épernay. The grandest among them have rich histories and lofty labels like Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart, Dom Pérignon, Bollinger. They are situated in the Marne Valley, where most Champagne is produced. But one day my friend Jean-Claude Ribaut told me about a smaller, less prosperous Champagne region two hours’ drive south of Paris. “There is a valley and four rivers run through it,” he said. “The rivers look like the fingers of a hand. One of them is the Seine.”