The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  MORT RARELY PULLS his boat out of its berth and onto the river these days. It would take too long and be too much trouble. He spends his winters back in his home state of Arizona, where he teaches journalism, and his summers at his olive farm in southern France. Even though he lives in Paris for only about four months a year, Mort usually keeps the boat unoccupied when he is away. He once lent it to his sister and her children for their vacation. Another boater hit Mort’s boat, and the fuel-pump switch malfunctioned. His sister didn’t know how to fix it, and a flood of oil poured into the main living area, covering the floor and soaking a precious Oriental carpet. It took three days to clean up the mess; the smell of oil lingered for weeks.

  Mort is convinced that as climate change accelerates, the river will become ever more vulnerable to flooding and a less desirable place to call home. “The boat is getting to be kind of a mess,” he confessed. “And Jeannette wants to be more settled.” He also laments the gentrification of the boat-dwelling class—many lawyers and businessmen, fewer artists and writers.

  When I asked Mort if the river had changed him, he swatted away my question.

  “Hard to say, you know? Because I don’t know what I’d be otherwise. I have to have a home in Paris,” he said.

  “But so much of your work is outside of France,” I said.

  “So much energy and knowledge pass through Paris. And I love it on the boat. I mean, look, I’m sitting there, and it is rocking back and forth, there is beautiful light, all the windows are open, there is a breeze, I’ve got this beautiful bottle of wine. . . . I’m in the middle of the city, you know, and I’m always in the elements.”

  I asked him if he needed a place to stay until the river’s waters receded.

  “Je ne quitte pas mon bateau,” he said. “I don’t leave my boat.”

  Grain in a cargo barge at the capital’s main port at Gennevilliers. © HAROPA—PORTS DE PARIS AGNÈS JANIN.

  FIFTEEN

  A Bend in the River

  Don’t worry. You will see the world.

  —JEAN, a bargeman, to his bride,

  Juliette, in the 1934 film L’Atalante

  RIVER BARGES DATE BACK to antiquity. The Seine was already a busy commercial river during the Roman invasion of Gaul. Julius Caesar reported that Labienus, one of his best lieutenants, captured fifty barges at the port of Melun and used them to advance northwest in his successful attack on Lutetia. In the Gallo-Roman era that followed, merchants used the Seine, and a network of other rivers and streams, to deliver tin, lead, and grain from the English Channel to France, and to move commodities like Spanish oil, Italian marble, and French wine and pottery up to the British Isles. In the early Middle Ages, barges transported blocks of highly polished, white building stone from Caen on a stretch of the Seine to erect churches throughout Normandy.

  Over the centuries, water continued to be the most practical way to move people and goods, as transporting overland by road was painfully slow and expensive. Grain shipments were particularly important, because bread was the anchor of most people’s diets. By the sixteenth century, barges did most of the hauling along the Seine, even moving exotic goods, like a dark reddish wood that originated in Brazil, to Rouen for dyeing cloth bright red and purple.

  By the eighteenth century in Paris, the Seine was a living organism—chaotic, dirty, crowded, and intense. Dyers tinted silks, fabrics, and hats from a quay on the Île de la Cité; families worked together, washing and cleaning animal organs for sale; washerwomen on designated laundry boats used the polluted Seine water in an often futile effort to clean clothing and linens; vendors set up stalls on the quays to peddle lottery tickets; floating grain mills clogged the river. Merchants sold fish, fruits, and vegetables from floating shops on the river and fixed stalls on its banks. Barges sometimes had difficulty passing through and docking in the city.

  Operators of river barges made a decent living carrying goods as varied as sand, coal, grain, stones, iron, metals, salt, and wine. However, when railroad lines were built in the nineteenth century, barge commerce spiraled downward. The trend accelerated after World War II, as rail and highway transport boosted economic growth. By the early 1980s, the barge industry was doomed. The Socialist government of President François Mitterrand poured massive sums of money into the state-owned railway system, expanded the network of highways, and subsidized overland freight traffic. The bargemen, fiercely independent and isolated from mainstream society, had neither a lobby in parliament nor a union to protect them. In 1950, there were fifteen thousand bateliers—bargemen who haul cargo along the Seine; today there are only about a thousand.

  But the spirit of the barge world lives on, celebrated at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, the Seine port and traditional French capital of the bateliers, located at the confluence of the Seine and Oise Rivers, twenty-five miles northwest of Paris by car, thirty-four by boat. Hundreds of bateliers, most of them retired, live there, and they revel in celebrating the lives they once led on the river.

  Every year, Conflans recalls the joys and sorrows of barge life with a two-day festival of boat excursions, tours, exhibitions, music, dancing, and speeches by local officials. The French navy and the port authority of the cities of Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre send recruiters.

  The most poignant event the year I attended was a performance by the choir of the Clos de Rome, an assisted-living residence that caters to bateliers and their families.

  THE CHOIR CONSISTED of seven women ranging in age from seventy-three to ninety-three. Their hair was neat and cropped short; they wore what they called “Sunday dress,” sober black pants or skirts and white tops fancy enough for churchgoing. They mounted a tented stage at the end of a day so hot and humid that the river seemed ready to boil over and the pink cotton candy puffs turned liquid in their paper cones. But the choir is the living memory of the songs sung on the river for more than a century, and the crowd had been waiting for them.

  I had always understood barge life as a man’s world. It hadn’t occurred to me that there were bargewomen, as strong, tough, and resilient as their husbands (even though this group looked like the gentlest of grandmothers).

  Miguel Biard, the forty-seven-year-old maestro, told the crowd he had grown up as a fourth-generation batelier and wanted to celebrate the men and women who lived and worked on barges. He had pieced together lyrics from his grandfather’s notebook and from navigation diaries found in the Conflans museum. The songs, set to well-known melodies, told stories of hard labor, protests, and injustice.

  “These songs are about real events that happened during everyday life on the barges,” Miguel said. “They are part of our river heritage. I have nothing against people on land, but today we are in the world of the water.” He used the word terriens when he referred to “people on land”; the word translates to “terrestrials” and also to “landlubbers.”

  A rotating disco ball sent beads of white light falling onto the stage. An accordionist behind a curtain began to play. The singers gripped their sheet music, smiled wide, and sang loud. The first song, “Dans nos péniches,” a singsongy tune that made you want to dance, dated from 1904. I heard the words “rich” and “happy” and assumed it extolled the pleasure of barge life. Only later did I learn the full lyrics: “On our barges, mesdames and messieurs, we are neither rich nor happy. . . . The only thing we eat is work.”

  “The Tribulations of the Canal Saint-Denis,” the song that followed, told the story of bargemen who lived on the canal and rented horses to haul barges that weighed as much as 250 tons. When there were no horses, humans had to pull those barges into the docks. Miguel said that some of his singers had pulled barges as an everyday chore and praised their hard work; the crowd burst into applause.

  The third song “Le Batelier,” from the 1950s, celebrated the freedom that came with barge life. The batelier “is happy to live this way. He is the only master aboard his boat. . . . He loves his kind bargewoman as much as his beautiful river.”

 
Spectators clapped to the beat. When the singers finished, the crowd cheered, and the choir started up again. Miguel treated the women like rock stars. “I want to introduce these elderly barge ladies!” Miguel said. “Liliane, who remembered these songs, from the boat Notsa! Reymonde, from the same boat, because she is Liliane’s sister. Monique, a lady of the land, but who sings well and has her place in this choir. Ginette, of the boat Gima. Olga of the boat Pirée. Nicole of the boat Épinoche. And Simone. Which boat, Simone?”

  I waited until the stage cleared, then introduced myself to Miguel. He said he had abandoned the barge to become an archaeologist. His mother, Arlette Renau, had spent her childhood and much of her adult life as a batelière—a female barge worker—and was at his side. I asked if we could meet again. Arlette said she would welcome me into her home even though I was “a lady of the land.”

  The day was hot, the air still, when I called on Arlette in the working-class village of Veneux–Les Sablons. She lived with six cats in a small, functional house at the confluence of the Seine and Loing Rivers, near Fontainebleau. She welcomed me into a space that served as both dining and living room. She had hot and cold running water, a modern shower and toilet, and brand-new kitchen appliances. There was no central heating; a wood stove warmed her home. Several small, framed oil paintings of boats hung on the walls, bearing witness to the years she and her family lived and worked on the river. She received no pension for her barge years.

  Arlette grew up knowing that she would continue the barge life of her parents and grandparents. She would have been born on the river had the Germans not invaded France in 1940 and seized the family’s barge for use as a tank transporter. To give his wife and children a place to stay during the Occupation, her father bought the house where she was now living. He spent two years as a prisoner of war. When he came home, he bought another barge. The family returned to its itinerant life, hauling heavy cargo, like sand and coal, along the river. Arlette should have gone to one of the special state-run boarding schools for children of barge people, institutions run with military efficiency and without love. Arlette’s parents rejected that option and decided instead to keep their children on board.

  Arlette spent her childhood on the boat, going barefoot and wearing whatever she liked. She taught herself how to read and write. “My father thought school was a waste of time,” she said. “His world was work. But he was curious and cultivated. My father always told me, ‘If you want to learn, observe nature. Everything is there, you’ll understand.’”

  “Yeah, but when you had to go to the bank and deal with a banker, nature didn’t help,” Miguel interjected.

  “Did you suffer?” I asked.

  “I never saw it as a sacrifice,” she said. “It was freedom. The happiest time of my life was when I was a child being with my parents. How awful, school! I never could’ve gone to boarding school. I would’ve run away. Or killed myself.”

  Arlette’s mother took her as matelot—first deckhand—on a barge when she was only twelve; Arlette’s father navigated a second barge with her brother. When Arlette went out among those she called “people on land,” she was mocked for not speaking or writing proper French. “I was wild,” she said.

  She became pregnant at twenty by a bargeman and married him even though she did not love him. She almost lost Miguel, her youngest, to kidney cancer when he was two years old. A young niece drowned in the Seine after she slipped off the wet deck of Arlette’s boat. The insular culture created its own complications. “It was a family operation,” she said. “It was forbidden to take a barge out alone, so you had to have a partner with you. That meant a bargeman couldn’t survive if his wife didn’t work with him. Women did everything a man did.”

  “Women had to do all the household chores, too—shopping, cooking, cleaning the cabin, taking care of the kids,” Miguel said. “The man never did any of that. My father never changed or washed a diaper.” Addressing his mother, he added, “When you were very pregnant, you had to carry buckets of water down to the hold.”

  “Yes, but that was in my day,” Arlette said. As a bargewoman for twenty-two years of her adult life, Arlette drove the boat, emptied the oil tank, chopped wood, maintained the engine, scraped and painted the hull, and bailed out water—sometimes by hand. “I once had to spend all night taking an engine apart!” she said.

  Arlette swept the cargo hold clean after every delivery, sometimes encountering dangerous substances like lead, sulfur, and soot. She breathed in fine cereal dust and poisonous asbestos. She became ill when lead ore was loaded onto the barge. But in those days, health issues were not the bargeman’s priority, and she loved the freedom of barge life. The deck became a playground for her children. When it was loaded high with sand, they would dig holes and build castles. “I adored every minute of it,” said Arlette. “It kept me positive in life no matter what.”

  Then life became unbearable. Arlette’s husband suffered from depression and physically abused her. She broke one of the unwritten rules of barge culture when she divorced him. As they owned two barges, she tried to go it alone on the other one. But without a helpmate, and struggling to support her children, she fell deep into debt. She was forced to live on land, in a small apartment subsidized by the state. She earned what she could cleaning factories and houses. “I felt like a bird in a cage,” she said.

  For Miguel, her son, nothing about this life was ever romantic. He was born on the barge and sent away to state boarding school between the ages of six and fifteen. At twenty-three, he abandoned barge life to pursue a more conventional path. “When you stand on the banks of the Seine in Paris, the work of a bargeman looks like a picturesque profession,” said Miguel. “You cannot imagine how hard the life is.”

  Over time, the roughness wore him down. “You didn’t keep garbage on the boat—it smelled bad,” Miguel said. “You used the river as a garbage dump. You did your business in a chamber pot and threw it into the water.”

  When the bargemen docked, “You weren’t super-clean because you were still working, and your hair wasn’t cut and combed nicely like landlubbers’,” Miguel said. “Frankly, sometimes we were disgusting. We made campfires, we yelled, we played music, we made noise. We ate, drank, and fought a lot. We went to nightclubs at the age of twelve and to streets where prostitutes worked.”

  Petty theft was part of batelier culture. The dockworkers were complicit. They trafficked in cigarettes and whiskey. They would slit open a fifty-pound bag of sugar and fill up a jar for the family of a favorite bargeman.

  “My father did not do that,” said Arlette. “The only thing we did was salvage what we could from scrap piles—bolts, brackets, screws, stuff like that. When I was a kid, I walked around looking for things to take. Since I was a kid, no one did anything to stop me.”

  “Terriens were afraid of you,” said Miguel.

  They also called the bargemen names: manouche, slang for “gypsy,” and caoutchoucs, meaning “rubbers,” because of the heavy rubber boots they wore on board. The bargemen themselves had cliques. Loire bargemen looked down on Seine bargemen. “They called us ‘the black jaws,’ because we carried so much coal,” he said.

  IN 1934, screenwriter and director Jean Vigo made L’ Atalante, a landmark film on the world of the batelier, released just after he died of tuberculosis at age twenty-nine. The Gaumont studio cut the film to make it more marketable, but film historians preserved Vigo’s original footage. When I saw it at the Cinémathèque film center in Paris, it had been restored and remastered to its original glory, with the enthusiastic sponsorship of Gaumont.

  The standing-room-only crowd was transported into a world of fantasy and hardship, of love and broken dreams on the Seine barge named L’ Atalante. The viewer can feel the cold dampness of the river at night, the claustrophobia of the living quarters, the powerful allure of life on land in Paris. François Truffaut once said that Vigo achieved poetry with this film. Martin Scorsese called Vigo a “visionary.”

 
; The film tells the story of Jean, the captain of a traditional 126-foot-long river barge, who marries Juliette, a peasant’s daughter. There is no wedding party or honeymoon. Juliette is still in her wedding dress when Jean takes her to the barge where they will live with a first mate, a cabin boy, and a passel of cats.

  Vigo’s camera lingers over scenes of daily life in the cramped, indoor spaces of the barge, even as the vessel plies its way through bucolic settings. Juliette soon finds barge life suffocating. One night when the barge is docked in Paris, Jean takes his wife to a bistro and dance hall. A peddler-magician sings to Juliette about his chic Parisian wares, and they dance. Furious, Jean drags her back to the barge. But Juliette longs to see Paris at night. She slips away, planning to be back on board before Jean awakes. Discovering that she is not there, Jean falls into a rage, unmoors the barge, and leaves Paris. Juliette is left alone in the city.

  Juliette loses her money to a purse snatcher and has to take a menial job. In her absence, Jean falls into a deep depression. But the Seine is pure and clear, a means of entering an imaginary world of peace and wisdom. Juliette once told Jean that by opening your eyes underwater, you could see the face of the one you love. He jumps in and, swimming with his eyes open, deep below the surface, sees a vision of her, smiling, in her wedding dress.

  The first mate eventually finds Juliette, and she returns to start her life with Jean anew. In the film’s final shot, the barge, seen from above, looks sleek and triumphant as it moves with confidence along the river.

  THESE DAYS, Conflans-Sainte-Honorine preserves two pillars of traditional barge culture: a floating Catholic church for the bateliers and a museum dedicated to their history. Since 1932, the church, Saint Nicolas of the Batellerie Chapel, has inhabited a converted barge named Je Sers—“I Serve.” Moored along the quay among the barges of bateliers who have made Conflans their floating retirement community, the chapel has a small library, a multipurpose recreation and meeting room, a kitchen and dining area, and cabins that function like a small dormitory. Alcohol and drugs are banned on the premises.