The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  All large ships that travel between Rouen and Le Havre must hire registered Seine pilotes to do the steering. The film showed Vintrin at the port of Rouen at six-fifteen a.m. meeting a cargo ship that had been loaded with two thousand tons of grain for delivery to Lisbon; he would get it safely to Le Havre.

  Afterward, I contacted Vintrin, and we rendezvoused in Rouen. He and his first mate, David Robert, invited me for a ride on Lady Mary, a three-hundred-foot freighter registered in Antigua, which was carrying fertilizer to Germany. They strapped me into a red life jacket and helped me climb up a long metal gangplank with rope bannisters to the vessel’s high bridge. A slim man dressed in tight jeans and wrap-around sunglasses introduced himself as Alex, the captain. He was Russian and oversaw a Russian and Ukrainian crew.

  The wind blew the strong smell of gasoline into the cabin as we set off toward Caudebec-en-Caux. The water was still and safe enough for us to move the conversation “du coq à l’âne”—“from the cock to the donkey,” or from one subject to another. The common language was grammatically broken but navigationally correct English. Alex, who had spent much of his professional life in rough English ports, asked me to join him for a cup of tea.

  We talked about the threat of terrorism, the troubled euro, the frequency of strikes in France, and the doping scandal in the Tour de France. And, of course, about the river, which was the color not of dark khaki, the way it often is Paris, but of translucent sea glass. This was a well-traveled, predictable course, not a high-seas adventure of discovery. But Vintrin reveled in its routine. “It’s not like being a sea captain, where you’re on the water for months,” he said. “We can have a nap in the afternoon. We can see our kids growing up.”

  Then he launched into a running commentary of the sites we passed, starting with Val-de-la-Haye, a village a few miles west of Rouen. A monument there commemorates the transfer of Napoléon’s ashes to the boat that carried them to their final resting place in Paris. He pointed out châteaus, eighteenth-century manor houses, and wooden church steeples with twisted bell towers. We passed the ruins of a feudal château perched high on a hill; it was named after Robert the Devil, a legendary figure who may or may not have been the father of William the Conqueror. We moved along a narrow stretch of the Seine, with high chalk cliffs used by paragliders and a landscape as dense and green as the tropics. Suddenly Vintrin snapped to attention. He eased the ship into a slow, sharp curve. “A sand bar,” he said. “You can’t see it, but I know it’s there.”

  GPS has taken much of the guesswork out of steering. Paradoxically, climate change has eliminated the blocks and “pancakes” of ice that made the river impassable in winter. Nevertheless, a pilote’s familiarity with every bend and mood of the river is essential. The work is more stressful when the weather is bad. The fog blinds and suffocates, and the wind whips the rain against the bridge.

  We passed the twelfth-century Saint-Georges de Boscherville abbey, now open to visitors, and small farms, where cows and sheep grazed in green meadows. High on a hill to our right was a white rocky outcrop that indeed looked like a giant armchair. “Do you know the story of Gargantua’s chair?” Vintrin asked. He explainted that Gargantua was a creation of sixteenth-century writer François Rabelais and, of course, the origin of the word “gargantuan.” According to legend, the giant stopped at this place and made a stone armchair for himself. These days, the cliffs are ideal perches for paragliding.

  As we moved on, we spotted a small beach with kayaks bobbing in the waves. “It’s gravel, only a gravel beach,” said Vintrin, in a tone that sounded like an apology. Even though it was not a beach of fine sand like those on the Atlantic, a small sailing club made its home there.

  Captain Alex reveled in the scenery and the good weather. “In Norway, you’re in the middle of nowhere, no neighbors around you for miles, and no sunshine,” he said. “In western Scotland, it’s like a moonscape! A few castles on the rocks, stones, and the sea. Nothing else. Here, it’s different. People pay a fortune to travel like this. I like to say, ‘I travel on a cruise ship, just a different kind of cruise ship.’”

  We arrived at the port of Caudebec and said good-bye to Alex, who would spend the night on board with his crew and continue his journey with another pilote. Vintrin climbed down a ladder attached to the outside of the barge. As a pilot cutter passed at high speed, he leapt in at just the right moment. Then it was my turn. I climbed down the ladder and got ready to jump. What if I fell into the river? I knew I had to aim just right. The cutter sped by, but I was too scared to move. When it circled around a second time, I threw myself forward and fell into Vintrin’s arms.

  We had a good day on the river, a day that belonged to the sun and turned the river’s surface into shards of shimmering light. “Compared to other rivers I have worked on—the Elbe, the Amazon, the Loire, the Gironde—the Seine is narrow and shallow,” Vintrin said as we walked along the deck. He never had to contend with the mascaret, tamed long before his career began. But the river, with its powerful tides and hidden obstacles, has set many more subtle traps. “The biggest risk is routine,” Vintrin said. “I might say to myself, ‘Oh, today there is nothing to see, nothing to do.’ But that’s not true. There is always something to watch out for.”

  Inside the MuséoSeine, I had noticed a virtual-reality Timescope with a rotating viewfinder outfitted with a 3-D lens. You point it at the river and move back in time. You see the great tidal wave as it appears from nowhere to suddenly overwhelm the banks. You hear the roar of the wave and the shouts and cries of the spectators as they run from the rising, foaming rush of water.

  In that moment, the mascaret lives.

  An image of Moulin de Pierre, a thirteenth-century windmill in Normandy constructed by the monks at the abbey of Jumièges. ANDREW PLUMP.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Windmills and War

  Dusk sifted over the Seine valley . . .

  and the day’s last light faded from

  the chalk cliffs . . . where antiaircraft

  gunners strained for the drone of

  approaching bombers.”

  —RICK ATKINSON,

  The Guns at Last Light

  THE ROMANESQUE ARCHES and fragmented stone walls stood naked and gray in a drizzly fog early on a January morning. High on a hill at a bend in the Seine near Rouen is the Abbey of Jumièges, what Victor Hugo described as “the most beautiful ruins in France.”

  Philippe Jean, an amateur historian and volunteer guide, sat in the heated staff kitchen to escape the cold. “The weather is sad today, the soul a little melancholy,” he said.

  He made strong coffee and told the story of Jumièges and the other Norman monasteries. The Seine Valley from Rouen to the sea was once the domain of monks. They organized and financed the construction of their own harbors and ports, collected taxes from the local farmers, sold the right to fish, and managed commerce through a centralized string of abbeys built along the river. Jumièges, a grand Benedictine abbey founded in the seventh century by Saint Philibert, was the most powerful of them all.

  With control of the river valley, a place of fertile land and forests filled with wild game, the monks were rich—until the Vikings raided, plundered, torched, and destroyed abbeys and towns. Afterward, Jumièges was rebuilt on a grander scale, and William the Conqueror consecrated it in 1067. It became a great center of religion and learning, and a haven where the local poor could find food and shelter. But there was more trouble ahead. During the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, Huguenots looted the abbey. Two hundred years later, the French Revolution doomed it forever. The contents of its library were sent to Rouen, and much of the stone of its buildings was sold and carted away. Later, the ruins bore silent witness, first to German and later to Allied armies sweeping through this part of France during World War II.

  Outside, Jean stopped at a round bronze marker that said “3D” and opened a program on his iPad. He pointed its camera at what once was the long nave of the Notre-Dame Ch
urch, the best-preserved part of the abbey complex. Suddenly we were back centuries in time, looking at a three-dimensional, 360-degree panoramic projection of Jumièges at the height of its power and glory. The iPad projection transformed the gray stones of the nave into a grand, sunlit hall of soaring 150-foot towers, eighty-foot walls, Gothic and Romanesque arches, a wood-beamed ceiling, even a roof. The choir appeared as it had looked in the Gothic period. More sites and eras came alive on the screen: Saint Peter’s Church in the ninth century, the sixteenth-century cloister with fine carvings and frescoes, the gardens, and the large eighteenth-century dormitory where the monks slept.

  “The ruins invite the viewer to imagine,” Jean said. “We are in a place halfway between dream and reality. We are not just spectators. We are also actors, because each of us sees it, each of us feels it in a personal way. Here we are in a total work of art.”

  The glow of Jean’s words lingered as I headed ten miles north to the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille. Much of its history mirrors that of Jumièges, but it is a remarkably alive place that still functions as an abbey and is home to thirty Benedictine monks. The rule of the Benedictines is prayer, work, and silence. Monks at Saint-Wandrille restore oil paintings, old books, and gold-leaf frames; make beer, honey, and furniture wax. They sing and record Gregorian chants and write books. A gift shop sells an array of the abbey’s own publications and products as well as those of other abbeys, including herbal remedies, jams, spiced cakes, and bonbons.

  Some of the monks are designated talkers, authorized to deal with the public. And so it happened one Saturday that I met Brother Magnier, a stout, sixty-something monk with a brush cut; he was dressed in a long black robe and black sandals and socks. His responsibilities include giving tours of the abbey’s public spaces: the chapel, cloisters, refectory, and gardens.

  Brother Magnier gathered several dozen mostly French visitors into a great hall with folding chairs and regaled them with stories. One was about a seventh-century hermit and holy man named Milon who, for twenty-five years, lived in a huge cave nearby, along the Seine. “The Seine was still wild and snaked between the wetlands and the rocky coastline,” said Brother Magnier. “Milon blew his horn whenever there was a heavy fog to alert the boats and help them avoid accidents.” Brother Magnier had a wry sense of humor. When a visitor asked about the abbey’s beer production, he replied, “Ah, if people asked as many questions about God as they did about beer, religion would be growing in full effervescence!”

  THE SEINE VALLEY is crowded with ancient ruins, Romanesque churches, villages that inspired the Impressionists, nature parks, local museums, and reminders of its last great cataclysm, World War II. The valley has a rural feel. It is home to rare species of water plants as well as farm cattle and fields of sugar beets, corn, wheat, flax, and rapeseed. You can find white limestone cliffs speckled with black flint and quaint houses. This rustic quality can be sneakily chic; if, at sophisticated dinner parties in Paris, you mention that you have a thatched-roof cottage in Normandy, many people are impressed.

  Several dozen châteaus of various sizes and degrees of grandeur rise from the valley, many of them visible from the river, including the ruins of Château Gaillard, the military fortress of genius and hubris built by Richard the Lionheart on a limestone cliff above the town of Les Andelys. Normandy is also filled with bocages normands, areas of farmland and fields characterized by high, dense hedges that date back centuries and make it difficult to cross the countryside. After D-Day, as advancing American troops moved inland, these hedgerows created dangerous, costly obstacles. The Americans were unable to see, shoot, or move through them, and the ousting of the Germans from Normandy turned into what has gone down in history as “hedge warfare.”

  The Seine Valley is not on the must-visit list of many American tourists; most of them see it as merely a highway from Paris to the World War II beaches of Normandy. Even in the high season, you can have the back roads here to yourself. On one drive, I happened by chance on the Moulin de Pierre at Hauville, a restored windmill built in the thirteenth century by the monks at Jumièges. Except for the young caretaker at the entrance, I was alone. Birds, dozens of birds of many species, cackled and swept low around us, like Hitchcock’s menacing flocks.

  “Have you ever seen The Birds?” I asked the caretaker.

  The reference didn’t register.

  “The movie? Alfred Hitchcock?”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, and laughed. “Okay, if you don’t return in twenty minutes, I’ll come and get you.”

  Inside, the windmill smelled of damp wood and dust. As I climbed a steep, curving staircase to the top, my mind flashed on an earlier Hitchcock movie, the 1940 spy thriller Foreign Correspondent, with its most famous scene: the blades of an abandoned windmill reversing direction as a signal for the enemy plane to land. Joel McCrea played the dashing American foreign correspondent, whose trench coat got caught in the mechanism of the windmill, nearly pulling him in.

  I made my way down, unscathed.

  From there, Jean-Pierre Girod, a regional councilor who knows all the back roads, took over. We drove through forests, marshes, peat bogs, and meadows, stopping at a farm dating back to the sixteenth century that raises white-bibbed Duclair ducks. He sprinkled his running dialogue with odd bits of information: how the region has eighty species of bees and more than 270 species of birds, including area rarities like the Eurasian bittern, the white spoonbill, and the black-tailed godwit. “People come from all over the world to watch them,” he said.

  We cut through a park with the unwieldy name of Regional Natural Park of the Meanders of the Norman Seine. It blankets part of the river valley between Rouen and Le Havre, and its trails include the route des fruits—a thirty-nine-mile trail of fruit-producing trees. (Normandy has been planted with ten million apple trees.) We passed overgrown fields scarred with enormous craters, which Girod explained were made by World War II bombs. The craters had never been cleared out, he said, and might still contain live bombs.

  THE AUGUST ’44 MUSEUM, near Rouen, a warren of connected rooms in a stone-walled stable, is a repository for World War II artifacts. It offers glimpses into the daily lives of soldiers who fought and died in the Allies’ bloody march to Paris from the Normandy beaches.

  Nicolas Navarro, a self-taught historian in his thirties, has poured his soul into the modest museum. It sits to the side of the centuries-old Château du Taillis, which Nicolas’s parents bought in 1998, and which he is renovating, stone by stone. In 2016 he received a prize as France’s Young Restorer of a Historic Monument.

  His primary passion, however, is the museum, the goal of which is to present the last stage of the war in France in all its complexity. The familiar story line skips from D-Day, the Allied landing on Normandy beaches on June 6, 1944, to the liberation of Paris. What often gets lost is the account of the fierce battles in Normandy and the Seine Valley after the Allies landed.

  The Seine, much wider as it approaches the sea than it is in Paris, was a strategic barrier that bedeviled both sides. After D-Day, it took nearly three more months of warfare and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives for the Allies to push east and triumphantly enter Paris on August 25, 1944. “I tell visitors the fight only began on the beaches,” said Nicolas. “I explain that afterward, there was terrible combat, terrible suffering.”

  Four years earlier, in 1940, the Germans had been the invaders. They destroyed bridges as they attacked and occupied Rouen. The area around the city’s cathedral burned for forty-eight hours, because the Germans stopped local firemen from getting near the fiery site. Monique Rannaud, who lived in Rouen during the war and was ninety when I met her, shared her story of life during these years.

  Monique was thirteen when the war started. She and her mother watched warplanes flying overhead. Since each plane had a cross painted underneath it, her mother thought they were Canadian planes. She was wrong. The Germans were coming. “The first bomb fell on the house next door to ours,” Monique
told me. “The Germans blew up the bridges. Many people were killed. We went to the banks of the Seine afterward, my mother and I, and we saw dead bodies in the river. My mother wept.”

  At the time, Monique did not cry. “I was only thirteen,” she said. “I didn’t understand.”

  Daily life during the war years was hard, she recalled, with little to eat. But more traumatic was the memory of those bodies floating on the Seine. “I was scarred by it,” she said, her voice low and flat.

  It would take several years before the Seine stopped reminding her of the war. She was eighteen when the fighting ended; peacetime meant joy and relaxation, activities like canoeing on the Seine. She became a star rower and signed up to compete in the national championship of France, on a route that would take her along the Seine past the Eiffel Tower. The competition paid off unexpectedly. Before the war, Monique had met a boy named Pierre. He had lived in Rouen, though they’d lost contact after he moved away. Somehow, Pierre learned that she would be rowing in the canoeing competition and traveled to the river to find her.

  “We got married five years later,” she said. “I really love the Seine.”

  BEFORE D-DAY, the Allies bombed the Seine’s bridges and ferries to make it difficult for German tanks and big guns to get to the Normandy beaches before the Allied landing. After D-Day, the Allies took turns bombing parts of Rouen, aiming to dislodge the German occupiers. Allied bombers knocked out the city’s bridges. Most of the left bank, including the Saint-André tower and the rue des Charrettes, a street that Flaubert wrote about in Madame Bovary, was destroyed. Much of the old city caught fire. The soaring cathedral, the Palais de Justice, and the Gothic Church of Saint-Maclou were damaged but saved from destruction. In 1944 alone, twenty-seven hundred civilians in Rouen were killed.