The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  I DISCOVERED ANOTHER CHARACTER of Rouen’s history, and the Seine’s: Giovanni da Verrazzano, the Italian explorer from Florence who discovered New York. In the first part of the sixteenth century, King François I sought new trade routes, sources of wealth, and an expansion of his empire in the New World. Verrazzano, who had settled in France years before, was part of his team.

  In Rouen, Verrazzano Frenchified his name to Jean de Verrazane, raised money from rich Italian merchants based in Lyon, trained a crew of Norman sailors, and prepared his armadas. In 1524, he set out for the New World, sailing out to sea, via the Seine, with four ships loaded with cannons, lifeboats, scientific equipment, and provisions. Two ships were lost in a storm, and a third was forced to return to France. But the fourth, La Dauphine, carrying Verrazzano and a crew of fifty men, landed at Cape Fear, in the Carolinas, after fifty days at sea. Verrazzano became the first European to explore and chart the Atlantic coast of North America between the Carolinas and Newfoundland, discovering New York Bay and the southern tip of Manhattan along the way.

  “Verrazane was a Rouennais of Italian origin who traveled to the New World and fell in love with the place,” said Jacques Tanguy, an amateur local historian whose passion is burnishing the explorer’s reputation. “At the mouth of a river, he discovered New York.” Verrazzano called the area “New Angoulême,” Tanguy said, in honor of François I’s former title as Count of Angoulême.

  In 1609, the English explorer Henry Hudson, working for the Dutch, got credit for discovering New York, largely because he traveled the region more extensively—including the river that would bear his name. It was not until the Italian Historical Society of America mounted a successful campaign in the mid-twentieth century that Verrazzano’s achievement as the discoverer of New York was formally recognized.

  These days, just about everybody living in New York City knows the name Verrazzano. It’s the name of the double-decker suspension bridge that spans the strait between Brooklyn and Staten Island, the gateway to New York Harbor. The New York City Marathon starts at its Staten Island end. All day during every workweek, news about the flow of traffic on the bridge blares on local radio and television stations. But Verrazzano got only a bridge named after him; Henry Hudson got a 315-mile river. Adding to the humiliation for Verrazzano’s legacy, the official name of the bridge used an incorrect spelling of his name for decades. Late in 2018, the state of New York added the missing z to his name to official signs. When Rouen built a new lift bridge over the Seine in 2008, Tanguy lobbied hard to have it named after Verrazzano, just like the one in New York, but Flaubert won the contest.

  In Rouen, Verrazzano is celebrated at the Maritime, Fluvial, and Harbor Museum, on the right bank of the river. In a giant workshop stands a partially built small replica of La Dauphine, the ship Verrazzano sailed to the New World. In the sixteenth century, ship blueprints did not exist, so a team of amateur historians and master carpenters consulted archives and maritime historians to replicate the ship. They found examples of sixteenth-century graffiti on walls in the Seine Valley and referred to historical contracts to deduce the number of sailors and the quantity of food on board, which helped them define the ship’s proportions.

  Volunteer carpenters are working in oak and pine, the same woods used in Verrazzano’s time, to create a lightweight vessel. The goal is to build a full-sized replica that can sail from Rouen to New York in 2024, five hundred years after Verrazzano’s exploration.

  Other exhibits feature barge and trawler motors, the skeleton of a fin whale, and two hundred miniature models of the most famous boats of the twentieth century. The museum also has a reproduction of the interior of the submarine Nautilus, built by Robert Fulton. Robert Fulton? The American inventor? I knew that he had tested his steam engine on the Seine in Paris in 1803—“a water chariot moved by fire,” the French called it. Napoléon was not impressed, dismissing it as nothing “but a child’s toy.” It turns out, however, that Fulton had earlier experimented with the world’s first working submarine in Rouen. The French government twice rejected his request for funding, but in 1800 the Nautilus was built in a Rouen shipyard and launched on the Seine. It descended twenty-five feet for seventeen minutes.

  Like so much of French history, the story of Verrazzano is a subject of lively debate. Guy Pessiot, a writer, editor, and publisher who has devoted much of his life to Rouen’s history, questions whether Verrazzano really set sail from Rouen. “There could be chicanery here,” he says, even though he promotes the museum’s work and Tanguy is one of his closest friends. “We know for sure where Verrazzano got his money, but some historians disagree that Rouen was his place of departure.”

  As an American whose four grandparents emigrated from Sicily to the United States, I’m on the side of Rouen’s believers in Verrazzano.

  ROUEN COMMEMORATES another famous explorer born there in the seventeenth century, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The first time I went to Rouen long ago, I told my hosts I had never heard of him. On a later trip, I connected the dots and figured out that René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was the explorer Americans know as Robert de La Salle. La Salle was the Frenchman who explored the Gulf of Mexico and traveled down the Mississippi, claiming the entire river basin for France.

  This was the same La Salle who, with his crew and the Italian soldier of fortune Henri de Tonti, built a fort in 1679 at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario. Today it is the site of Fort Niagara. La Salle struck up a friendship with the Seneca Indians above Niagara Falls. They gave him permission to construct the first commercial sailing vessel on Lake Erie and taught him how to make long overland trips on foot and in snowy weather.

  Growing up in Buffalo, I often went to LaSalle Park, a few blocks from where I lived. I jogged from LaSalle Park to city hall and back on the one-mile track built along my first river, the Niagara, at the point where it begins at Lake Erie. Years and another continent later, during a cruise of the Seine, I found myself once again in Rouen, in front of the La Salle plaque. The French guide called him by his full name, and given the blank look on the Americans’ faces, I assumed that none of them recognized it.

  “May I intervene?” I asked and informed the group that this was “our” La Salle.

  “I’ve been a teacher and a principal altogether for thirty-six years, and I never heard of Cavelier,” said Joanna from Charleston. “But I know La Salle!”

  GUY PESSIOT OWNS the world’s most comprehensive private collection of old photos of Rouen. His home in the historical center overflows with books, engravings, maps, and prints of the city. Officially retired, he serves as the city’s adviser in charge of tourism and heritage and is its biggest cheerleader. On one visit, Guy said I had to see a view of the river from a hill above the city—much different from any perspective in Paris. I risked missing my train back to Paris, but he insisted. We drove up a winding road to Saint Catherine’s Hill and looked out over the chalky cliffs. Below us were the spires and belfries of churches on the right bank of the river. The Seine snaked on its course, and tiny ripples lit up in silver in the late afternoon light.

  I thought of Flaubert and how he experienced the sensuality of the Seine when he swam in it, like “a thousand liquid nipples traveling over the body.”

  “It’s a three-star panoramic view, no?” Pessiot said. “I’ve done the Danube and the Rhine. But the Seine is much more beautiful.”

  And so it was.

  An early twentieth-century postcard of le mascaret, the tidal wave that appeared at Caudebec-en-Caux four times a year. The wave was a popular tourist attraction until the early 1960s, when the Seine was dredged and the river tamed.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Tsunami on the Seine

  One immense wave rolled on

  majestically foaming from bank to

  bank, leaving everything in uproar

  in its train, while all before was

  perfectly calm.

  —JEAN-BAPTISTE-BALTHAZ
AR SAUVAN,

  Picturesque Tour of the Seine,

  from Paris to the Sea, 1821

  THE WAVE ROSE AND ROARED, then disappeared. Le mascaret, as the wave was called, began at the Seine estuary when the tides of spring rose high. Salt water rushed upstream at up to fifteen miles per hour, funneling into the narrow channel of the freshwater river. Four times a year, for centuries, the mascaret appeared from nowhere at Caudebec-en-Caux, in northern Normandy. After rushing at its greatest height—up to thirteen feet tall—it slowed, diminishing to ripples by the time it reached Rouen, to the east.

  The oldest account of the mascaret, known by geographers as a tidal bore, is in the ninth-century Latin chronicles of the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille. The wave slowed the longboats of the Vikings and helped Caudebec defend itself against their raids. Even as late as the nineteenth century, the mascaret could wreak havoc with river commerce, one study revealing that between 1789 and 1850, more than two hundred ships disappeared in its fury. With the advent of the railroad, the mascaret also became a huge tourist attraction. Its timing was predictable, occurring when tides were at their highest near the equinoxes, allowing sightseers all the way from Paris to schedule trips to see it. Then, in the early 1960s, the river was dredged; dams, locks, and a canal tamed the wave forever.

  I learned about the mascaret the first time I visited Caudebec-en-Caux, in 2016, for the inauguration of MuséoSeine, a museum devoted to the history, commerce, culture, geography, and personalities of the river from Paris to the sea. I was writing an article on the museum for the New York Times, and for Caudebec, a town of two thousand inhabitants, the combination of the opening and the international press coverage made the whole affair big news. Andy and I got the celebrity treatment; the local newspaper took our photograph, and luminaries turned out to welcome us.

  The MuséoSeine sits so close to the river that you almost expect it to flood its basement when it rains too hard. “We want to be in direct conversation with the Seine, to have both visual and human connections with the river,” said Jean-Claude Weiss, a regional official. “So we are putting our feet in the water.”

  A short footbridge connects the museum to the only surviving gribane, a late nineteenth-century sailboat, floating on the water and anchored to the shore. Its flat bottom helped it glide over sandbars; its wide deck was efficient for transporting blocks of stone used to dike the river. The gribane had been turned into a houseboat, and after much negotiation was finally sold to the museum. From its deck, we could see stark differences between the Seine’s two banks. The right bank, where we stood, was lined with high cliffs and unusual vegetation, including the region’s signature “tadpole trees”—with big heads and narrow trunks. On the flat terrain across the river were corn and wheat fields and the forest of Brotonne, which often flooded before the river was diked.

  As if on cue to greet us, a red-and-white 480-foot oil tanker named Songa Breeze lumbered by. We waved and the captain, perched high on the tanker’s bridge, waved back.

  The name Caudebec originated with the Vikings. In their language, bec meant stream and caud came from cald, or cold. The town grew up around two streams flowing from the hills into the Seine. In the Middle Ages, the plentiful fresh water fueled the development of a prosperous tannery industry. The river also facilitated the export of local merchandise, especially the wide-brimmed chapeau de Caudebec—the Caudebec hat, which came into fashion in the sixteenth-century. Made from lamb’s wool, camel hair, and ostrich feathers, it was felted and waterproofed, and may even have been worn by Louis XIV at Versailles.

  BEFORE WORLD WAR II, Caudebec’s medieval town center had wood-timbered houses and dark, narrow streets. In 1940, the advancing German army used incendiary bombs to prevent residents from fleeing across the Seine. The bombs hit cars clustered at the docks, and the town was set on fire. The town burned for three days; 80 percent of its buildings were destroyed.

  After the war there was little money to rebuild, and residents had to settle for structures lacking so much charm and originality they were called “the barracks.” But the city is proud of what survived and is now a routine stop for tens of thousands of passengers on Seine river cruises. “We have to take care of these visitors,” said Mayor Bastien Coriton. “We can’t just sell them Calvados and camembert. We have to show them our city, to put our treasures on display.” He insisted on giving us a tour.

  City hall was the first stop. Built from sturdy brick along the river, it survived the bombing. We continued along a half-mile-long riverside promenade. In the town center, Coriton took us to the most spectacular survivor of the 1940 fire, the Notre-Dame de Caudebec-en-Caux Church, built in the Flamboyant Gothic style in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We stood outside and admired the hundreds of sculpted human figures decorating its western portal. “When Henri IV came here, he said this was the most beautiful chapel in his realm,” Coriton told us. He tried to push open the heavy doors, but they were locked. He smiled; as mayor, he had the keys to the church in his pocket. “It’s one of the perks of the job,” he said. Inside, he pointed out the massive pillars on each side of the nave, the stained-glass windows that had been taken from an abbey, and the Renaissance organ with a magical trumpet sound, restored to its full glory in 2007. He spoke with pride about raising €400,000 to replace the bell tower.

  As we resumed our tour of the town, we saw other vestiges of the city’s history as a thriving regional capital: the House of the Knights Templar, a medieval prison, and pieces of fortification walls. One of the only timbered houses still standing is a royal administrative dwelling built in 1516; during the German attack, the church shielded the house from the fire. The French couple who had bought the house a few years earlier invited us in. They were restoring it, painstakingly, because the house was classée—landmarked—so there were strict rules about what they could do. They showed us the uneven glass panes, the intricate seventeenth-century woodwork, and crude graffiti of fish and ships that seamen had etched into the stone wall of a cobblestoned entryway, sometimes as thanks to the Virgin Mary for a safe return, sometimes as a wish for the next voyage to go well. “We wanted the house for its history, despite all its problems,” Yann Rousselet, the husband, said. “We live with the constraints—like the wind that whips through in the winter, because we can’t put in double-glazed windows. Can you imagine taking care of this place?”

  “You’d have to be crazy to do it,” his wife, Johanna, added. “And we are crazy.”

  For Mayor Coriton, the house represents a piece of the town’s lost history. “When you come here, you really have the feel of what Caudebec was like before the war,” he said.

  We returned to the MuséoSeine to tour the museum, with artifacts dating from the paleolithic era to modern times. A giant ancient iron anchor discovered in nearby Aizier was proof of the first-century maritime trade that had brought goods from as far as the Mediterranean; a third-century copper statuette of Mercury, the god of commerce and travel, most likely belonged to a merchant who’d carried it to sea as a good-luck charm. Three-dimensional hologram videos showed professional actors playing historical figures: a ninth-century monk described the horrible scenes of fire and pillaging by the Vikings; a sixteenth-century hatmaker talked about the famous Caudebec hat. A detailed aerial photo of the river from Paris to Le Havre, with all of its loops and curves, stretched across one long wall. It showed where the river had been dramatically wider before it was diked, and where land masses replaced what was once underwater.

  Downstairs, a boat like the one that Victor Hugo’s daughter and son-in-law had been traveling in before they drowned hung from the ceiling. An old-fashioned blue-striped beach tent and a display of old swimsuits got us talking about swimming in the Seine. “In the 1920s and 1930s in Caudebec, there was a beach club with changing rooms and a diving board,” said Mayor Coriton. “Right up until the war. My grandmother learned to swim in the Seine.”

  “I knew a monk who swam in the Seine every week,”
Nathalie Demunck, another official, chimed in. “And he never got sick.”

  We approached a digital apparatus with a multiple-choice Seine quiz, where players could compete to be the first to choose the right answers. I nagged Andy to play, just as our kids would have done. We faced off on either side of a flat screen and selected a game of eighteen questions in French.

  What is a tidal bore? (A funneling of sea water back into a river at high tide.)

  What causes shipwrecks? (Before levees were built, sandbanks and shoals did.)

  How old is the Seine? (Three million years old.)

  What is the length of the Seine? (777 kilometers.)

  Why does the estuary from Honfleur extend a hundred miles east to the commune of Poses? (The tide is felt until the Poses dam; the dam stops the tide from going any farther.)

  How many rivers longer than fifty kilometers flow into the Seine? (Fourteen.)

  What fish can be found in the estuary? (Eel, stickleback, flounder, bass.)

  Has the Seine ever frozen over? (Often.)

  BACK ON THE MAIN LEVEL of the MuséoSeine, we watched a short film about Jean-Marc Vintrin, a pilote, or river pilot. In the film, the Seine looks calm, but danger lurks beneath its surface and along its banks. Sandbars shift without notice; silt builds up; chains of islands create barriers; sharp curves present visual delights and navigational nightmares.