The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  There are plans to develop alternative transportation options along the river. La Seine à Vélo—The Seine by Bike—envisions the construction of a continuous 250-mile bike path along the river between Paris and the sea. On the river itself, the minister of finance already gets around Paris quickly via a speedboat docked in front of his ministry in Bercy; and the city of Paris is experimenting with taxi boat service for the general public.

  The river is reinventing itself most dramatically at night. Thanks to the work of City Hall’s lighting engineers over the years and, more recently, to evening recreational and entertainment initiatives, the riverbanks have become destinations for strolling, drinking, concertgoing, dancing, and even fine dining.

  In September 2018, Alain Ducasse, the chef with the most Michelin stars in the world, embarked on a new culinary adventure; he launched a floating gastronomic restaurant on the Seine. After five years and a $12.6 million investment, the one-hundred-seat Ducasse sur Seine began transporting diners from its berth on the Right Bank across from the Eiffel Tower in a loop upstream and downstream. The custom-made glass-and-iron structure, which runs solely on electric power, features state-of-the-art kitchens larger than those of many restaurants on land. The silverware is engraved with the emblem of the boat; the carpet and chairs in the main dining room are printed with partial maps of Paris streets and the Seine. Other Seine river boats offer meals, some elegant and expensive, but only Ducasse sur Seine prepares all the dishes from start to finish on-site. “The first time I came to Paris, when I was eighteen, one of the first things I did was to take a boat ride on the Seine,” he recalled. “Seeing Paris from the water—well, I had the most dazzling architecture of the world before me. It was like an electric shock to my system.”

  REINVENTION CAN MEAN a new way of experiencing what you already know. City dwellers have long congregated at the Tino Rossi garden along the river at the Left Bank’s Fifth Arrondissement, strolling past the modern sculptures and picnicking on the patches of green. Increasingly, they fill the open-air space with dance.

  Every night from late spring to early fall, the three small stone and concrete amphitheaters that touch the river host impromptu dance-athons that go on until midnight. One is reserved for tango, another for the traditional musette, performed to accordion and violin. In between is salsa.

  Is there anything more romantic than dancing along the banks of the Seine on the solstice, June 21, when the day never seems to end and light is at its peak? On one recent summer solstice night, it was ninety-nine degrees even as the sun was setting. Most Parisians do not have air-conditioning, and it seemed as if the entire city had descended onto the riverbanks for some relief. Indeed, when the river is embraced in light from its banks and the passing boats, it shimmers in points of silver and fools you into thinking it is cooler outside. I arrived with Bérengère, intrepid journalist by day, salsa queen by night. She’s nearly six feet tall; when she walks onto the dance floor, heads turn.

  A dozen dancers were showing off their moves. The women were reinas—queens. One, middle-aged and full-figured, was dressed in capris and a sheer white blouse; she made her entrance onto the dance floor alone. Her face announced her confidence. Another, younger, was dressed in a flashy green-and-blue Hawaiian shirt, tight jeans, and black Nike sneakers; she knew precisely how to follow her more experienced partner, when to strut and twirl and dip. Then, she spun from partner to partner, as a stream of salseros—men who dance salsa—waited their turn.

  As the night went on, the dance floor became so crowded that couples could not avoid touching each other as they moved. It is common politesse in Paris to avoid making physical contact on the street, or in the Métro. If you accidentally bump into someone, you are expected to say pardon. Here, personal space melted away. Barriers fell. Whether young or old, black or white, ingenue or expert, French or foreigner, French speaker or Spanish speaker—everyone enjoyed equal status. Cuban salsa, with its syncopated rhythm and constant twirling, shared time with bachata, with its three back-and-forth steps and a tap. Tourists passing on the big bateaux-mouches stood on the deck and cheered the dancers.

  The master of salsa on the Seine is Serge Heller. He is the ultimate DJ, choosing music according to the vibes he feels from the floor. If you arrive before the amphitheater opens to the public at seven, he will teach you the basic moves. Both enthusiastic and patient, he grabs reluctant beginners by the hand and guides their bodies into the steps.

  Serge is elusive about his age, but I’d guess that he is in his sixties. When he dances, he becomes a young man again. He heads to the dance floor and salsas through the crowd alone. His jeans are tight on his slim hips, his shirt unbuttoned at the top. A woman approaches. He takes her into his arms, and they move together. “I have never said no when a woman asks me to dance,” he told me. “We are here to please women.” At the end of the evening, a hat is passed to take up a collection for him.

  I had never danced salsa in my life, and tonight was not the time to start. Who would want to dance with me, anyway? Swept away by the romance of the music, I longed to glide through space in the arms of the perfect partner. As if on cue, my husband arrived. Andy is an enthusiast on the dance floor, even if he is self-taught and undisciplined. I fell in love with him the first time we danced.

  I suggested an alternative to salsa. A DJ was playing American swing and old-fashioned rock and roll on an open terrace nearby. That I could dance to. And there, on the banks of the Seine, we danced.

  Fluctuart, a floating art museum, which opened in 2019, on the Right Bank of the Seine. © FLUCTUART.

  A quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty on Île aux Cygnes, with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Paris’s Lady Liberty was a gift from American expatriates in France to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. ELAINE SCIOLINO.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Joy of Life

  The river will have flowed through

  my life as an instinctive force

  informs a man’s destiny.

  —JULIEN GREEN, Paris

  THE BRAND-NEW luxury cruise liner had just set off on its Seine River journey from Paris toward the sea when we were summoned to the upper deck. The setting sun was painting the sky pink and orange. With no notice, the ship—which had been built 33 feet shorter than the standard 443 feet just so that it could be compact enough to turn around in the river—swung into a sharp 180-degree turn and stopped short. Before us on our right was the Eiffel Tower. Straight ahead, at the westernmost tip of the narrow artificial island known as the Île aux Cygnes, stood a much smaller structure: a quarter-scale replica of the Statue of Liberty.

  The Eiffel Tower defines Paris, and the Statue of Liberty is America’s best-known icon. Even though Paris’s Statue of Liberty is so much smaller than New York’s, before us was a celebration of Americanness in Paris.

  My fellow passengers were a well-traveled, cruise-loving crowd of seventy Americans, twenty-three Australians, six Canadians, two South Africans, and one Japanese. Some of them had been visiting Paris for decades. Some had been reluctant to come to Paris this time, perceiving the city as a target for terrorists.

  None of them seemed to know the story of how a Liberty replica came to rest in the middle of the river.

  In the 1880s, a French sculptor, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, designed the original Statue of Liberty as a gift to the United States with funding from a group of French individuals. One of Bartholdi’s chief engineers was none other than Gustave Eiffel, who tested on Lady Liberty some of the techniques he later used on the tower that bears his name. In 1885, the statue was transported in pieces by train from Paris to Rouen and from there by boat along the Seine to Le Havre, then across the ocean to its perch in New York Harbor.

  Four years later, Paris inaugurated both the Eiffel Tower and the miniature replica of the Statue. The tower, Eiffel’s wrought-iron masterpiece, was built as a temporary structure for the Exposition Universelle of 1889
; the replica of the Statue of Liberty was a gift from the American community of Paris to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. Initially, she faced east, toward the Eiffel Tower and the Élysée Palace, but in 1937, in a gesture of Franco-American friendship, she was turned to face west, toward the United States.

  Many of us had never seen Paris from this glorious perspective. And the two mismatched structures fit elegantly into an iPhone photo frame, which empowered even the most photographically challenged in our group. We crowded at the front of the deck and snapped the postcard-perfect image. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” said Joanna, a retired schoolteacher from South Carolina.

  The cruise of the SS Joie de Vivre—“Joy of Life”—was off to a great start.

  I have never been a cruise lover. But I’d wanted to see the Seine from this vantage point. To travel along a river as the light changes the perspective is to savor slowness, to absorb and reflect as you move toward your destination.

  The views of the banks from the river are gentle and peaceful but not fairy-tale wondrous like those from the Rhine, where castles with turrets seem to pop out from every hill. That may explain why the trip planners emphasized the destinations rather than the journey. We traveled much of the time at night, so that I watched the lights of the boat reflecting on the water from my posh top-deck cabin with floor-to-ceiling windows. The river flowed beneath us, as black as a Soulages painting. We spent many daylight hours on excursions ashore. Uniworld knew its clientele. The majority of the passengers had been on at least one of its other river cruises—the Rhine, the Danube, the Rhône—and they were satisfied with the approach.

  We embarked from the Quai de Grenelle, on the western edge of Paris, entering the ship via a red-carpeted gangplank that led us into a two-story, white marble atrium. A Murano chandelier in green and gold glass worthy of Versailles hung from the ceiling. Uniworld had decorated the ship’s interior with Dutch paneling and cabinets of polished walnut, French and English fabrics, marble-lined bathrooms, period advertising posters, nineteenth-century aquatints, and solid bronze Italian fixtures custom-made to look old. Our cruise featured all we could eat of the farm-to-table cuisine, an open bar, a French captain, and a Dutch chef. The general manager, sommelier, yoga instructor–masseuse, and crew were Romanian.

  Uniworld wanted us to feel that we were having a French experience, and so the decks had been named after novelists Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Honoré de Balzac. We enjoyed sit-down multicourse dinners in the formal Le Pigalle restaurant and casual fare in Le Bistrot, where red-and-white checked cloths covered the tables and loudspeakers played recorded accordion music. The guests expected old-fashioned fare like onion soup, escargots in parsley-garlic butter, frogs’ legs, country pâté, fish soup, cheese platters, and pear sorbet, and they got it. A fizzy white French wine was served in Champagne flutes. French cabaret singers serenaded us. One of the Romanian hostesses taught the guests—in her musical accent—to say “Bonjour,” “Voilà, voilà,” “Ooh, la, la,” and “Oui, oui, oui.”

  OVER SEVEN DAYS and nights on the river, we covered 186 miles, traveled through six locks, passed seventy-six islands, went under more than seventy bridges, and were joined by fifteen rivers. In Caudebecen-Caux we left the ship and rode thirty-six miles by bus to meet the sea at Honfleur; the port docking facilities there were not large enough to accommodate our craft.

  We did not travel through the heart of Paris. A ship of this design is too high to pass safely under many of its bridges; there would have to be a separate trip on a bateau-mouche to admire Paris from the river. We journeyed under the Pont Mirabeau as we left the city limits, and residential areas gradually morphed into industrial Paris. On our left, the giant Lafarge cement factory loomed through rows of trees on the Quai André Citroën. We reached the highway bridge over the Boulevard Périphérique and left Paris behind. There the river sharply swung south, made a hairpin turn north, and began looping its way westward.

  The countryside provided a respite from the overstimulation of Paris. Jean-Baptiste-Balthazar Sauvan captured that lazy feeling in his 1821 travel book Picturesque Tour of the Seine, from Paris to the Sea. The tourist, he wrote, is “fatigued with admiration” for the structures lining the river in Paris and finds the countryside visually restful. “The eye,” he explained, “needs the repose afforded by the scenery of nature.”

  For most of our route, the Seine remained narrow, its banks flat. Even though I was on the water, I felt a connection with both sides, as if I were traveling along a narrow highway, witnessing the everyday life of towns and countryside by day and the twinkling of lights at night. We passed the wealthy suburbs lining the Seine west of Paris, like Saint-Cloud, where my two daughters attended the American School of Paris; Neuilly, where the New York Times’ Paris bureau was briefly located; Argenteuil, where my younger daughter’s French soccer team sometimes played; Chatou, where I had gone rowing in a century-old boat with the Sequana Association; and Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where I often took guests to visit France’s national archaeological museum in a centuries-old château.

  We reveled in rural riverbanks lined with limestone and flint cliffs, green marshes, gardens, and fields of grain. In some places, the landscapes recall what the Impressionists captured when they painted outdoors near the river—Monet from a studio boat, Cézanne and Caillebotte from an island where Zola owned land near the house where he wrote. We saw the house on the Seine where Bizet wrote Carmen and, farther on, past Rouen, the place where Flaubert swam. Châteaus peeked out from behind the trees, more like austere eighteenth-century manor houses, not fantasy palaces with towers and turrets like those on the Rhine.

  In other places, the working river greeted us with factories, storage facilities, oil refineries, and grain silos. The banks have been rebuilt so many times that often they resemble the walls of manmade canals, defined by concrete and stone.

  Our daytime excursions took us away from the river, to the château at Versailles, Monet’s house and gardens at Giverny, the Bayeux tapestries, the Normandy beaches of the D-Day landings. In Rouen, I walked again across the bridge from which Joan of Arc’s ashes were thrown into the Seine and revisited the maritime museum to see the miniature skeleton of Verrazzano’s boat. We hiked on a gravel road up a hill and toured the ruins of the once impregnable fortress of Château Gaillard.

  Along the way, a French guide named Dominique compressed centuries of history into short lectures, livening them up with tales of leaders and warriors: Charles the Simple, Geoffrey the Handsome, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lionheart.

  I had chosen to go solo on this trip, and I found myself surprisingly lonely. One evening at dinner, I spoke about my service at the New York Times and suddenly, I was an outsider. My fellow passengers included many Trump supporters convinced that journalists were enemies of the people who wrote fake news. One man left the table when he learned of my professional affiliation. I sometimes joined the Canadians or the Australians, but they tended to cluster among themselves. For the first time in my life, I understood what it’s like to be a woman of a certain age traveling alone.

  Then I met Julie. Julie was Australian, in her early fifties; she wore glasses, loose clothing, and no makeup. During mealtimes, she preferred listening to her fellow passengers’ anecdotes to telling her own stories. She had little in common with the big-city Australians, who were older and worldlier. She had never gone abroad as an adult, taken a cruise, ridden a subway, or vacationed on her own. She had never tasted frogs’ legs or escargots.

  During long conversations, we shared our life stories. Julie grew up in the suburbs of Hobart in the small island state of Tasmania. She became a single mother at seventeen; married a man who turned violent and abused alcohol and drugs; divorced him, then married a man fourteen years her senior. They raised their blended family of five children together, and they now have two grandchildren. She went back to school for advanced degrees, ran a homeless shelter for men, learned how
to ride a motorcycle, began to paint. These days, she rides a bike several miles to her job as a school administrator. Her most recent project was taking up beekeeping in her urban food garden.

  The SS Joie de Vivre luxury cruise liner navigating one of the many curves in the Seine. UNIWORLD BOUTIQUE RIVER CRUISE COLLECTION.

  Julie had saved money for her dream trip: a seven-week tour of Europe that included a cruise along the Seine, a trip she’d had to keep on hold for decades. “I went straight from being a teenager to managing a growing family,” she said. “I couldn’t travel abroad while my parents needed me in their twilight years. I never got to be me. It was a huge thing to finally be doing something for myself.”

  Julie suffered from both a crippling fear of flying and motion sickness; the flight from Australia to Europe came via Abu Dhabi and required twenty-two hours in the air. To ease her terror, she plunked down $12,000 for a round-trip, first-class plane ticket. Her anxiety about getting sick on the hour-long bus ride to Honfleur was so intense that she planned to stay behind on the boat—until I negotiated a front-row seat for her on the bus.

  Julie and I decided that on the last morning we would watch the sun as it rose over the Seine. As the cruise was coming to an end, the ship docked at the same quay on the far western end of the Left Bank where we had begun seven days before. It was an unromantic industrial part of Paris, with graffiti-scarred factories and nondescript modern apartment blocks.