Dean Martin returned to the Seine in 1955 with his English version of the 1913 French song “Under the Bridges of Paris.” There was also a version by Eartha Kitt and an instrumental arrangement that featured in the 2004 film Shall We Dance? But Dino, the king of croon! How he seduced with that liquid languor. Never mind that the underbellies of the bridges could be dirty, smelly, and damp. Who wouldn’t want to follow Dean Martin (or at least his voice) down to the lower banks of the Seine, where no one could see? He clearly laid out his intentions: “How would you like to be / Down by the Seine with me . . . / Under the bridges of Paris with you . . . / I’d make your dreams come true.”
America was happy in the mid-1950s, and the English words written for “Under the Bridges of Paris” reflected the country’s mood. But take a look at the original French lyrics:
Worn down by poverty
Driven from her home
We see a poor mother
With her three small children . . .
Under the bridges of Paris
The mother and her little ones
Come to sleep there near the Seine
In their sleep they will forget their pain
If we helped
All the truly suffering people a little
No more suicides or crimes at night
Under the bridges of Paris.
The French version is a reminder that the Seine does not always carry happiness. Indeed, suffering and sadness infuse the only opera that uses the Seine as its stage set: Giacomo Puccini’s Il Tabarro (“The Cloak”), a tense, fifty-minute, one-act thriller, the first in a trio of his one-act compositions. Puccini based the opera on La Houppelande, a long-running play he saw in Paris in 1912; it concerns the murder, by a jealous barge owner of his wife and her lover, on a barge on the Seine. Puccini puts the river itself at the heart of Il Tabarro. “La Signora Senna [Lady Seine] should be the true protagonist of the drama,” he wrote in a letter to Giuseppe Adami, his librettist.
Adami’s version has one, not two murders. It tells the story of a love triangle involving Michele, the fifty-year-old barge owner; his wife, Giorgetta, a Parisian half his age; and her lover, Luigi, a handsome, twenty-year-old longshoreman who works for Michele. The scene is Michele’s barge, moored on a bend in the river near Notre-Dame. The libretto describes the barge’s cabin as pretty, with painted green window frames, pots of geraniums, and a cage of canaries. Laundry hangs on clotheslines. In the overture, strings and woodwinds swirl solemnly, ominously, to evoke the river’s murky flow. Tugboats sound their whistles loud and harsh as they roll past.
Giorgetta, bereft over the death of her infant son the year before, longs to return to life on land. “The air of my Paris is life and joy to me!” she sings. “. . . ’Tis no life for a woman, in that dark, dingy cabin. . . . We cannot live forever on the water!” Michele is miserable when he realizes that his young wife has fallen in love with Luigi and no longer cares for him. He overhears her arranging a love tryst with Luigi and pleads with the river to end his misery.
Flow, eternal river, flow!
Like your deep and mysterious waters!
Anguish pervades my soul endlessly!
Pass on, eternal river, pass on!
And drag me in and engulf me!
Your waves soothe so many sorrows!
You have marked the end of so much misery!
Forever calm, you flow, never halted by pain, fear
or anguish!
Forever flow on, forever continue your lament!
Are those the moans of icy corpses?
You carried thousands of dead in quick succession
toward their end, on your slimy arms!
Are those the sorrows you quelled by choking
their last breath in your whirlpools?
Mysterious and dark waters, flow on and pass
over my broken heart!
Wash away my sorrow and my bitter pain!
Make my destiny yours, and if you cannot give
me peace, then let me die in your waters!
Michele grabs Luigi, forces him to confess his love for Giorgetta, and strangles him. He hides the body under his black cloak. When Giorgetta returns to the barge, Michele pulls off the cloak, and Luigi’s body falls at her feet. She shrieks in horror and falls on the body of her dead lover.
Puccini wrote Il Tabarro and the two other one-act operas for the triptych’s world premiere at New York’s Metropolitan Opera house in 1918, shortly after the signing of the World War I armistice. Puccini’s La Bohème and Tosca had already made him famous, and the performance—with more than forty curtain calls that night—was a smash hit. Puccini would have attended, but there were still too many mines in the Atlantic to allow a safe crossing.
In late 2018, I attended the Met’s performance of the trilogy celebrating the centenary of its premiere. Il Tabarro was staged somber and grim and set in 1927 Paris. The curtain rose with the cast frozen in place. Michele’s deteriorating, blood-red barge was moored on a dark channel off the river, across from a row of decrepit factories; a tall crane was poised to unload cargo, and a metal footbridge spanning the stage carried pedestrians overhead. The sun set, night fell, and the red sky very slowly turned black. Baritone George Gagnidze, as Michele, sang plaintively about longing for the river to liberate him in death. Even though Michele would soon commit murder, at that moment he was a sympathetic figure. There were not forty curtain calls, but the performance, nonetheless, received a rousing standing ovation.
I DISCOVERED SONGS connected to the Seine hidden away in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. Some books and documents were so obscure that the library’s digital catalog did not list them. A librarian brought out printed and handwritten treasures one by one, among them a large twentieth-century scrapbook compiled by a collector of centuries-old papers. The collector had copied out many of the poems and songs in longhand. One was an extract from a 1661 songbook apparently performed by a blind street singer known as Le Savoyard, who boasted of his own talents: “A singer blessed with such a powerful organ and such a deafening and loud voice that even if I had drunk only two fingers of eau de vie, if I sang on the Quai des Augustins, the king would hear me all the way from the windows of his Louvre palace.”
Another document was a 1939 arrangement of Francis Poulenc’s “La Grenouillère,” a nostalgic ode set to a poem of Apollinaire’s about the restaurant and place of leisure on the Seine. Poulenc drew inspiration from his childhood memories of time spent in boats on the Marne. “I of course thought of those lunches in straw hats painted by Renoir,” he wrote, evoking the most famous of Renoir’s paintings on the Seine, Luncheon of the Boating Party. “It is the bumping together of the boats that provides the rhythm from start to finish of this tenderly haunting melody.”
The piece of music was so meaningful for Poulenc that he commanded its would-be singers, “Do not sing it if you do not believe it.”
Nineteenth-century novelist Émile Zola with his camera on the Seine. Zola became a passionate photographer late in life. © ASSOCIATION DU MUSÉE ÉMILE ZOLA.
EIGHTEEN
Capturing the Moment
I was on a river boat at night when
Paris looks so beautiful and we’re
passing the Eiffel Tower. How did I
make a really original, great picture
of the Eiffel Tower? It was thanks
to the river. I consider it my Seine
masterpiece.
—National Geographic photographer
WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD
LATE IN LIFE, the novelist Émile Zola became a passionate amateur photographer. He took more than six thousand photographs from 1894 until his death in 1902. He owned at least ten cameras, including some of the earliest Kodaks, and experimented with wide angles and panoramas, glass plates and film, small and large formats, paper of different textures. Zola perfected a shutter-release system so that he could take photographs of himself. He made his own contact sheets an
d developed and printed photos in darkrooms installed in the basements of his homes.
Zola took photographs for his personal pleasure; they were not intended for public display. It was only in 1953, more than half a century after his death, that Life magazine published a small selection of them, revealing to the world that the literary realist had also been a realistic photographer.
Zola discovered photography years after he moved into what would become his main home. In 1878 he took the money he earned from his novel L’ Assommoir and bought a small two-story house facing the Seine in the village of Médan, west of Paris. Over the next few years he expanded it into a comfortable villa on a large plot of land where he developed wooded parks, stables, chicken coops, a garden, and a greenhouse. He also bought part of the Île du Platais, an island in the river, and built a chalet there.
Every morning at seven-thirty, Zola walked his dog, Pinpin, along the river valley. At nine sharp, he entered the high-ceilinged room where he did his writing, its twelve oversized windows imbuing it with the stark light and airy openness of an artist’s studio. Zola sat at a long desk in a high, straight-backed, upholstered armchair and fastidiously wrote four pages in four hours. When tempted to put down his pen, he found resolve in the Latin of Pliny the Elder painted in large script above the fireplace: Nulla dies sine linea (“No day without a line”). Just about every afternoon after writing, Zola left the house he shared with his wife, Alexandrine, to spend time with Jeanne Rozerot, the other woman in his life and the mother of their two children. He and Jeanne took long walks together along the Seine. Alexandrine was deeply wounded when she learned of the relationship, but the two households continued an uneasy coexistence.
On the day I visited Zola’s house, I sat, in a similar armchair, in the spot where Zola wrote. The tall stained-glass windows before me opened to the garden and, just beyond it, the railroad tracks that carried trains west from Paris, a thick row of trees, and the Seine.
In much of his fiction, Zola painted the Seine darkly. His photographs, by contrast, are clear and bright. They explore the power of light, which he called “life itself.” After a visit to Rome in 1894, he wrote, “My visual memory has a power, an extraordinary vividness. When I evoke the objects I have seen, I see them again the way they really are, with their lines, forms, colors, odors, and sounds. It is the ultimate materialization: the sun that illuminated them almost dazzles me.” A few years later, he stated that visual memory is best preserved in photography: “You cannot claim to have truly seen something if you have not taken a photograph revealing an array of details that could not otherwise have been noticed.”
Zola photographed family life with his wife; his double life with Rozerot and their two children; his friends; his dogs; his travels abroad; scenes of Paris in the 1890s; and the Seine. He took black-and-white panoramic views of the river. In one, the Seine stretches across the horizon, beyond the trees and broad lawns of his estate. A view of the quiet river shows the Île du Platais and two rowboats on the shore, apparently waiting to take him, and perhaps his friends, to the island. In 2017, the estate of Zola’s grandson auctioned off thousands of his prints and glass plates, five of his cameras, photo albums, and even white linen laboratory coats embroidered with his initials in red. The museum in Médan houses most of Zola’s photographs, and a small number can be found at the Musée d’Orsay.
THE SEINE LENDS ITSELF to photography. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris was the cradle of photography and the first city in the world to create a photographic record of itself. Two Frenchmen, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Daguerre, gave birth to this new art, inventing printing techniques and experimenting with primitive cameras. Niépce and Daguerre became partners, and in 1839, Daguerre unveiled the results of a new process, the daguerreotype. Among the first daguerreotypes to be publicly displayed were images of the Seine—starring the Pont Neuf and the Île de la Cité. One of the first panoramic views of Paris was a view of the Seine and several of its bridges taken in 1842 by the photographer-painter Charles Nègre from the top of the Church of Saint-Gervais. Three years later, photographer Frédéric Martens used a panoramic daguerreotype camera to capture a 150-degree shot of the Seine and its banks from the Salon Carré, in the Louvre.
By the time Zola was shooting pictures, early Kodak cameras were in vogue. The new technology dovetailed with Impressionism in painting, aiming to catch fleeting moments in time. Zola’s camerawork was done in the countryside, but even he was lured to Paris. There, the river of the goddess Sequana reveals herself to the camera in all her sophisticated glory. The city’s landmarks and monuments revel in their intimate visual relationship with the water, while the bridges and stone banks give the river a unified structure. Light plays with the water and reflects off the stones in infinite shades of gray.
Twentieth-century photographers used the medium to capture daily life along the river. At the turn of the century, Louis Vert photographed dockworkers unloading a barge and women grating cheese; Eugène Atget photographed dog shearers, lampshade sellers, street musicians, and mattress makers. (The filler for the mattresses—wool, hair, and feathers—arrived by barge.) The photographers also experimented with landscapes in black and white. Among the most well-known photographs are Atget’s 1923 albumen image of two houseboats on the glasslike surface of the Seine in Paris, with the Conciergerie in the shadow and light of a winter day struggling to pierce the thick fog, and Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 view of the triangular tip of the Île de la Cité, dreamy and sensual, riding the river between the two halves of the Pont Neuf.
The Seine never becomes a cliché in photographs. In 2014, Sun Honglei, one of China’s most famous actors, and Wang Jundi, a Chinese musician and opera singer, decided to get married in Paris. A professional film crew from China recorded the event, including the couple’s poses on the riverbanks. They started a trend; the Seine has now become a backdrop for wealthy young Chinese couples who travel to Paris for pre-wedding photographs before the real celebration back home.
THE SEINE OFTEN PRESENTS greater challenges for the photographer than for the painter. The painter may aim to capture the moment but always has the luxury of whimsical approximation. The photographer starts with concrete techniques, struggling to capture and frame the rhythm of the flowing river through the lens at a precise moment.
The twentieth-century French photographer Willy Ronis explained the process. He told an interviewer from the newspaper Libération of standing on the Pont d’Arcole on a January day as a convoy of gigantic barges went by. As the last barge was passing, he spotted two children playing on the empty deck, aimed his camera, and hoped for the best.
“The most overwhelming emotion of my life was what I felt in 1959 when I took this photograph . . . without being sure if I had managed to pull it off,” he said. “It was a shot that I could not repeat. If I had pressed the shutter a tenth of a second later, it would have been all over. We are often late in our perceptions, because we’re not birds of prey. We’ve lost those instincts. Between the time I took the shot and when I plunged the film into the developing tank bath and took it out in the darkness to put it in the fixing agent, and then a minute and a half afterward, seeing it shimmering in the bright light, I came close to having a heart attack.” An instinct had compelled him to wait for exactly the right moment, and he’d turned it into art.
Ronis died in 2009, at the age of ninety-nine. I once met his friend Jean Claude Gautrand, an expert on photography and a photographer himself. I was then writing a monthly online column called Lumière for the New York Times’ T Magazine and met Gautrand for a story about a ten-pound, 624-page photographic opus on Paris he had edited. His modest apartment on the city’s eastern edge was decorated with dozens of antique cameras and hundreds of photography books, some of which he had written or edited.
His book Paris: Portrait of a City examined more than 160 years of the city’s history. He spent three and a half years deep in archives, libraries, and p
rivate collections, sifting through hundreds of thousands of files, finally settling on just over five hundred photographs. They documented demolitions and building projects that had transformed the cityscape, key events in Paris’ history, and quotidian scenes of pleasure and of suffering: on the streets, in cafés, parks, and the river. “I was born here,” he said. “Paris is my universe.”
Among the book’s photographs were some taken by Zola of the Exposition Universelle of 1900 from two flights up the new Eiffel Tower. One shows the Pont d’Iéna, over the Seine, thronged with pedestrians. You can see the Romanesque-Moorish Palais du Trocadéro, razed in 1935, blurry and dreamlike in the distance.
WHAT VISITOR TO PARIS doesn’t like to memorialize the trip with a photograph taken from one of its bridges? A classic shot captures Parisians on the bridge, seen from behind, gazing at the Seine. You don’t always see the river, but you know it is there. And you wonder what the people are thinking. The bridges themselves are powerful photographic images, as the painter Richard Overstreet discovered some years ago. Richard, an American married to a Frenchwoman, has lived in Paris for decades. His passion is painting. “It’s my second breath,” he likes to say. But at one point in his life, he put down his paintbrush and picked up a camera. “I needed to go from a turpentine-framed studio to plein air,” he explained.
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