The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  But as part of its campaign to make the Seine eco-friendly, City Hall also promotes fishing and has produced an online map showing the best spots to fish along the Seine and the Canal Saint-Martin. Anyone who wants to cast a line into the water needs a fishing permit, or carte de pêche, which can be purchased for a year or even for a day. While fishing for some species is prohibited from January until May (so the fish have a chance to reproduce), fishermen practice their sport all year round.

  On a Sunday afternoon visit to the river town of Bougival, I spotted some stone steps leading down to a wooden dock on the river. A young man named Romain Aviron was fly-fishing. He had been born and raised in a rural region of northern France filled with streams, lakes, and rivers rich in fish. He now works as a technician on the mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems of the Seine’s dams and locks west of Paris. We were only about thirty miles downstream from Paris along the curving river, but the water was almost transparent. Aviron explained the difference between fishing crudely with live bait on a big hook and the refined artistry of what he does with flies. “It’s joy to lure a fish with totally lifeless, fake bait,” he said. “I must deceive the fish, to make it believe it is chasing something alive.” He always throws his catch back into the water.

  “So the fish never dies?” I asked.

  “Never,” he said. “Why would I take away its life when it has made me happy? It’s like a game of chess. You don’t kill your partner, do you? So I don’t kill my fish.”

  Aviron didn’t catch anything that day. But the river made him happy.

  Every September, dozens of fishermen and their families and friends descend on Île de la Jatte, northwest of Paris, for a weekend Fish Festival on the Seine. The island is best known as the setting for Georges Seurat’s 1884 pointillist masterpiece A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. With its natural banks and rich concentration of underwater algae, it is also an ideal place to fish.

  Some of the fishermen who came one year were so passionate about the event that they brought tents and camped out with their children and grandchildren. Veteran fishermen offered demonstrations, including angling, street-fishing from a concrete riverbank, predator fishing by boat, and fishing for bottom-feeders. Manufacturers and designers presented their latest fishing equipment and clothing during the festival. Visitors enjoyed free entry to the tiny Musée-Aquarium de la Seine, which displays various species of freshwater fish that swim in the Seine in and around Paris.

  The Fishermen’s Association of the Hauts-de-Seine department, where the island is located, gave free lessons in a designated zone on the riverbanks. Strict rules governed the competitions, including a nokill policy that required fishermen to throw back their catch after it was weighed and photographed. “There is a strong connection between us and the fish,” said Maxime Cenni, a twenty-year-old gardener who grew up fishing with his grandfather along the Seine. “They come to us, and, of course, we must set them free again.” Maxime caught a large but lowly catfish and tossed it back into the river.

  His close friend Lionel Pelletier, forty-six, who works for a construction equipment rental company, runs a small fishing club in his spare time. “Fishing is an incredibly social sport,” he said. Like Maxime, he learned from his grandfather how to cast a line. He has caught carp, pike, catfish, and the odd plastic bag on the Seine; he was wearing a sweatshirt that read, in French, “A bad day of fishing is still better than a good week at work.”

  Other fishermen shared their stories. Twenty-year-old Nicolas Vergua said that once, when he went fishing near the Eiffel Tower, he caught a sack of potatoes. A more bizarre story was the one about the fisherman in Paris who in 2013 caught an Amazonian cousin of the piranha known as a pacu. The pacu has a powerful jaw and human-looking teeth and can grow to more than three feet long and weigh more than eighty pounds. A French wire service report said that the pacu is nicknamed “the ball cutter” because it has attacked the genitalia of fishermen; professional fishing websites dismiss the claim as nothing but a fish story.

  I CONFESS THAT I have never gone fishing. My closest encounter with the sport was sartorial. In 1979, when I was covering the Iranian Revolution for Newsweek, an American war correspondent and part-time boyfriend based in Beirut gave me a khaki-colored fishing vest as a birthday present. He excitedly showed me how it had enough pockets to hold a notebook, pen, tape recorder, small camera, passport, wallet, flashlight, sunglasses, and lipstick; he told me it would liberate me from having to carry a purse into danger zones. I had been hoping for a pair of antique gold earrings from a Middle Eastern souk, or at least a box of fine chocolates and a dozen long-stemmed roses. The relationship ended soon afterward.

  A view of the Pont d’Iéna and the place du Trocadéro from the Eiffel Tower. © GARY ZUERCHER, GLZ.COM, MARCORP EDITIONS, AND MARCORP-EDITIONS.COM.

  TWELVE

  Paris la Nuit

  The sun finally died in beauty,

  flinging out its crimson flames,

  which cast their reflection on the

  faces of passers-by, giving them

  a strangely feverish look. The

  darkness of the trees became deeper.

  You could hear the Seine flowing.

  —GEORGES SIMENON,

  Inquest on Bouvet

  IN THE COUNTRYSIDE, when night falls, the Seine gets lost in bushy trees and wild grasses. She hides in darkness below white cliffs that stretch high up her banks. Not so in Paris. Here the Seine is a city girl, an elegant beauty worthy of adornment. Her banks and bridges were created to be shown, not hidden.

  The secret to her success is light.

  Because of her slow-moving current, the Seine at night shimmers softly with reflections from traffic lights, streetlights, spotlights above and below the bridges. Light decorates and distorts architectural angles and the whimsical details of buildings and monuments that are lost by day.

  In the daytime, the Pont Royal, in the heart of the city, is an unremarkable, seventeenth-century stone bridge clogged with motorists making their way from the Left to the Right Bank. At night, it becomes a platform for visual pleasure. Walk north across the river on the Pont Royal, and the long façade of the Louvre stands on the other side. To the right, in the distance, the gently lit towers of Notre-Dame and the dome of the Institut de France appear through the trees. To the left is the Tuileries Garden, locked behind iron gates and shrouded in darkness. Farther on, the twin clocks of the Musée d’Orsay and the curves of the Grand Palais’s glass roofs burn bright; the tip of the Eiffel Tower peeks through. As you approach the end of the bridge, look up to be greeted by a small sculpture on the Flore Pavilion of the Louvre. It is a naked nymph by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, laughing.

  Artificial lighting is expensive, and the buildings of many other major cities go dark when night falls. Not Paris. Paris spends extravagantly on its public lighting—over $15 million a year. Lighting Paris requires meticulous planning, trial and error, creativity, and artifice. Nothing is left to chance.

  To celebrate the millennium, the city spent $5 million to decorate the Eiffel Tower, so that every night, twenty thousand white lights sparkle for five minutes of every hour, on the hour. Installing the lights involved forty mountaineers, architects, and engineers, who endured high winds, raging storms, and attacks by pigeons and bats. The lights continue to delight.

  By night, tourist boat rides on the Seine become voyages of discovery. Pleasure boats for dinner and cocktails, for music and dancing glitter in multicolored splendor. Bridges light up like necklaces strung across the river. If you arrive early enough, you can be the first in line for the boat ride and secure a spot in the front of an upper deck. When the boat passes under the bridges, you can see how the lighting from underneath reveals the curves and angles of their underbellies.

  The river’s many bridges at night are a romantic lure. Even the most absurd fantasy movie scenes seem plausible. Toward the end of the 2003 film Something’s Gotta Give, Jack Nicho
lson, thinking he has lost Diane Keaton, stumbles out of the Grand Colbert restaurant and past the Hôtel de Ville to find himself ruminating about life’s meaning midway across the Pont d’Arcole. An accordion plays “La vie en rose.” A tourist boat aglow in white lights cruises below him. Jack Nicholson—yes, Jack Nicholson—gets tears in his eyes. It starts to snow. Keaton arrives in a taxi to confess that she still loves him. He tells her, “If it’s true, my life just got made. . . . I finally get what it’s all about. I’m sixty-three years old, and I’m in love—for the first time in my life.” They throw their arms around each other and kiss.

  The magic lingers even after the city turns off the lights on most public structures at about one a.m. In a Cinderella moment, buildings suddenly seem to disappear. But the streetlamps stay on, muting the colors of the bridges and riverbanks as if they were in a dreamy painting by Matisse or Marquet.

  NIGHT IS SO IMPORTANT that the city of Paris spends more than a million euros every year on a one-night celebration of art and culture. Every October since 2002, Nuit Blanche—literally “White Night” and colloquially “All-Nighter”—has lured Parisians into the streets from dusk to dawn with videos, multimedia installations, sculptures, music, and dance. In 2016, the theme was romance, told through a fifteenth-century allegorical fantasy about love—love at first sight, heartbreak, and reconciliation. The setting was the Seine and its bridges, “because of the river’s romantic symbolism,” Paris City Hall announced. Publicists displayed huge posters showing a red heart on a midnight-blue background with the Seine cutting a curve through it.

  In a Nuit Blanche installation about the risk of love running out over time, a giant clock hung from a crane at one of the Seine’s ports. At a second installation nearby, intended to evoke the battle for one’s lover, zombies hovered overhead. At the Petit Palais art museum, five dancers from the Crazy Horse cabaret, dressed as water nymphs, their naked breasts visible through their sheer costumes, undulated and swayed through plumes of lavender and gray smoke.

  At the Pont des Arts, British musician Oliver Beer constructed a multimedia work called Live Stream. He mixed live music with real and imagined sounds of underwater life in the Seine. He illuminated the base of the bridge with bright green LED lights that turned the water a murky pea green, making it just transparent enough to allow viewers to see a few feet into its depths. The work was designed to evoke the “mysteries of love.” A bit farther on that night, British artist Anish Kapoor showed off Descension, an installation that created a swirling whirlpool in the middle of the river. It spanned twenty-six feet in diameter and converged into a vortex that was sucked into the black water. Then the vortex rose to the surface dressed in bright white light, vanished, and reappeared. Kapoor was on hand to explain its meaning. “Love,” he said, “is an eternal vortex.”

  Mayor Hidalgo was the evening’s ultimate cheerleader. She called Nuit Blanche on the Seine a “signal to the whole world” to “come to see us, to come to wander . . . to take inspiration, to come to be rocked by this Seine.”

  Light on the Seine has other manipulative powers. Walking along the river one night after midnight, I spotted two dozen colorful tents pitched in a neat row on the banks below. All was still, except for the silhouette of a man hanging laundry on a clothesline strung between two trees. Bathed in the yellowish glow of the streetlights, the encampment looked at first glance like a tiny village, rather than the makeshift homeless settlement it was.

  THE KING OF PARIS lighting will always be François Jousse. For more than a quarter of a century, he was the city’s chief lighting engineer, leading a team of thirty decorative lighting specialists. It was under his watch that the lighting of Paris monuments at night became an art.

  An engineer by training, Jousse turned to light in 1981, when most Paris monuments were either unlit or illuminated with crude spotlights. His job was to light more than three hundred buildings, bridges, and boulevards every night; this involved choosing the style, color, intensity, placement, and timing of the lighting. The Seine was his preferred laboratory. The structures he lit on the riverbanks were close to the water, so that the visual reverberations were part of his calculation. Jousse memorably demonstrated what light can do when he transformed the nighttime appearance of Notre-Dame. He conceived a new lighting scheme that would allow spectators to discover the cathedral’s façade slowly, through the drama of the details.

  One chilly evening shortly after the new lighting was installed, he drove me right up to the main entrance of Notre-Dame, so that he could show off the redesigned lighting of the cathedral’s south façade. Tourists had to make way for the lighting king to park on the parvis. (He had a special pass.) As we approached, he pointed out the tiny fiberoptic cables tucked into corners and crevices. We entered the cathedral, climbed a private stone staircase to the south roof, and waited for darkness. Just as the sun disappeared, the façade lit up, its pillars, gargoyles, and flying buttresses bathed in bright white. “Look—the light is stronger at the top, so you feel that you are moving closer to heaven,” he said. “This is not just a monument. It’s a virgin floating above the city.”

  Jousse is now in his seventies and retired. But his creations and his reputation live on. Standing one evening on the Pont Marie, the short bridge that joins the Right Bank to the Île Saint-Louis, he talked about his vision. His lighting scheme for the bridges that connect the banks to one of the two islands focuses on the connection with the land. This he achieved by outlining the top of the bridge structure with a horizontal line of light.

  At the same time, to create a connection between the bridges and the river, he installed lights on the arches below that would illuminate them and make mirror images in the water. “Symbolically, it is to show travel on the river in two ways: a waterway with boats, and a land route with pedestrians and cars,” he said. “There is a conflict between them, and light is a way to resolve it, to share space in time.”

  The structures along the river show off two schools of lighting: the Paris school, which bathes its subjects in warm, even light, and the Lyon school, which uses small spotlights to highlight details for dramatic effect. The Conciergerie, the onetime medieval prison on the Île de la Cité, is covered in the uniform, even glow of the Paris school, as is the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, in Montmartre. The Pont Alexandre III, with its candelabras, cupids, sea monsters, and other decorations, is lit up with the pointillistic precision of the Lyon school. So are the arches and hanging lamps of the Pont de Bercy, the high-relief sculptures on the Pont d’Austerlitz, and the medallions on the N monograms, in honor of Napoléon III, on the Pont au Change.

  The resulting lighting is complex and elaborate. For bridges with arches, the light shoots out from the pillars (the Pont d’Iéna, the Pont de la Concorde) or the abutments (as in the case of the Pont Alexandre III); for a truss bridge, like the Pont des Arts, the light is diffused; on a steel girder bridge, like the Pont de l’Alma or the Pont du Garigliano, the highlights are linear.

  One of the ornate Belle Époque lampposts on the Pont Alexandre III. © GARY ZUERCHER, GLZ.COM, MARCORP EDITIONS, AND MARCORP-EDITIONS.COM.

  There are practical considerations. The floor of the Pont des Arts is made of wooden cladding; when pedestrians cross, they can see through the cracks to the river below. If the lights were pointed upward, you could lose your sense of balance, so they point downward. Through the cracks in the cladding, strollers glimpse the Seine glimmering as it moves slowly to the sea.

  One of Jousse’s proudest illuminations is that of the Pont de Bir-Hakeim, which carries the No. 6 Métro line across the river. He took over a project conceived by the Italian architect Italo Rota, who envisioned the installation of sensory lights that would follow the Métro as it passed. But Jousse faced a shortage of funds, as well as scheduling problems: he and his team could work only between three and five in the morning, when the Métro wasn’t running. “I thought about his idea long and hard,” Jousse said. “Then it hit me! I decided to in
stall lights underneath the Métro tracks.” The resulting line of light illuminates the carriages of the Métro as they cross the bridge but is invisible the rest of the time. These days, the city of Paris is more aware than ever of the potential of the bridges to dazzle at night. It has asked architects designing new bridges to integrate lighting into their plans.

  The artificial light draws us in, but what can be more romantic than the moon over a river? Gustave Flaubert felt such power when, in 1867, he wrote a letter to his dear friend and fellow writer George Sand: “Sunday night, at eleven o’clock, there was such lovely moonlight along the river and on the snow that I was taken with an itch for movement, and I walked for two hours and a half, imagining all sorts of things, pretending that I was travelling in Russia or in Norway. . . . I thought of you and I missed you.”

  THE POWER AND MAGIC of light on the Seine at night reminded me of the faster-flowing river of my childhood, the Niagara, and its powerful falls. Years ago, when I was living in Washington, D.C., and my daughter Alessandra was twelve, I took her to Niagara Falls. After dark, the falls were dressed up in a changing wardrobe of iridescent colors. We called on the technician responsible for the display. He led us onto a lookout that held his instrument panel and, like the Wizard behind the curtain in Oz, showed Alessandra how to do it.

  She turned knobs and rushed out to the balcony to view her work, then rushed back in to change the colors. She colored the falls in rainbow hues; patriotic red, white, and blue; and what the technician called “bridal white.” When the lights went off, he gave her a signed document that read, “This will certify that Alessandra on February 9 lit up both the American and Canadian Horseshoe Falls in the colors of the rainbow. The above recorded person now becomes an official ‘Illuminator of Niagara.’” A kid’s magic moment.