The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  There is something satisfying about getting up early in Paris before sunrise. Most Parisians are still asleep, and the river feels as if it’s yours. I arrived on the upper deck well before dawn in a fleece-lined rain jacket with a hood, long underwear, and sweatpants. Still, there was no escaping the cold, damp Paris night. The only people on deck were members of the crew; they smoked and drank espressos, oblivious to my presence as they gathered behind a “Staff Only” partition before their six a.m. shift began. They were listening to an all-jazz radio station playing the sentimental-sweet “Bada-bada-da-bada-bada-da” theme song from A Man and a Woman, the Claude Lelouch film that decades ago had won the Academy Award for best foreign film.

  Julie arrived, smiling. The deck chairs were wet from a hard rain. We wiped two of them dry, covered them with towels, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and waited.

  The Seine was still, as if in a deep sleep, unperturbed by the boats passing by. We stayed silent in the haunting blue darkness and watched as the streetlights’ reflections burned bright gold on the water, then faded to mists of silver as the early light crept in. Gray-pink clouds rested on the horizon as the sky turned a pale translucent blue.

  The Eiffel Tower appeared above the treetops, hazy in the morning light. Closer to us stood a row of apartment buildings, some of their windows framing warm yellow light. In front was a barge loaded with lines of brown containers. A few hundred yards away, we could see the Pont Mirabeau, and as we walked to the ship’s stern, the Pont du Garigliano. Beyond the Pont Mirabeau, the dark silhouette of the Statue of Liberty announced her presence.

  I thought of a print of the Seine at dawn that hangs in our Paris apartment. It is a blurry two-by-three-foot image that Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s creative director until his death in 2019, sent me to ring in the year 2009. I had interviewed him for Newsweek in the late 1970s, on my first assignment as a foreign correspondent: Paris Fashion Week. We met again in 2009, and I told him that his patience with a rookie had touched me. Shortly afterwards, his print arrived with a note written in silver ink on the black mat. “Happy 2009 . . . 30 years later. Very sincerely yours, Karl.” The image shows a swath of the river shimmering in silver-blue, the sky a paler hue, the dark outline of a statue on the Pont du Carrousel in the foreground, the Pont des Arts behind. It captures the mood of the river at dawn, when Paris, full of possibility, is awakening.

  Julie and I took photos of the transformation as Paris moved from night to day. We settled back into our deck chairs and talked. Julie was heading to Bordeaux for another eight-day river cruise; I was going home to my Paris apartment, where my dining room table was piled high with dozens of books and thousands of files on Paris and the Seine. She invited me to visit her in her home in Tasmania, on the other side of the world. I told her I would love to come, though I didn’t think I’d get there anytime soon. But on ne sait jamais— you never know.

  We sat only a short distance from the Pont de l’Alma, the bridge I had crossed every day, walking home from work as a young, restless, newly divorced, and very green foreign correspondent. As Julie and I said our goodbyes, I thought about how my process of self-discovery had started on that bridge over the river, and it still hadn’t ended.

  I had come to Paris to find happiness and freedom. It was in Paris—not in Tokyo or London or Hong Kong—that I had deposited my dreams. It was Paris that carried me along and stayed with me. I had healed in Paris after a failed marriage, traveled as a foreign correspondent from Paris to faraway places, and had fallen in and out of love in Paris. Years later, I shared a life with my husband and two daughters in Paris.

  The river that created Paris is not long. But it has carried me to new worlds and seduced me with its history, culture, and beauty. I have watched the seasons from its banks and bridges: the pink, cone-shaped blossoms of the horse chestnut trees in April; the long, hot July days that refuse to end before ten p.m.; the fickleness of October, when the weather changes half a dozen times in as many hours; the damp, gray, short days of December.

  Julien Green, in The Strange River, a novel of sadness and loss published in French in 1932, gives a human voice to the Seine. “I am the road running through Paris,” says the river. “I have carried off many images since you were a child and reflected many clouds. I am changeable, but as people are. . . . We have something in common, you everlasting passersby and I, the fleeing water, which is that we never go back: your time is my space.”

  The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who lived in the sixth and fifth centuries b.c., put it slightly differently: “You can never step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and you are not same person.”

  That is the secret of the Seine. It is forever changing—widening, deepening, reflecting, twisting, shriveling from too little rain, overflowing its banks. But it always moves forward.

  As, I hope, do I.

  Container ship moving past Caudebec-en-Caux on the Seine. ELAINE SCIOLINO.

  Paris firefighters on the Île de France, a floating fire station that filtered and pumped water from the Seine to help extinguish the fire at Notre-Dame Cathedral on April 15, 2019. BRIGADE DE SAPEURS-POMPIERS DE PARIS–BUREAU COMMUNICATION.

  Afterword

  The water of the Seine saved

  Notre-Dame.

  —GENERAL JEAN-CLAUDE GALLET,

  commandant of the firefighting

  brigade of Paris

  ON APRIL 15, 2019, the day of the great Notre-Dame fire, crowds lined the bridges and the banks across the Seine, watching in sorrow and disbelief as flames devoured the cathedral’s roof and columns of thick, dark smoke shot into the sky. Some people prayed. Some wept. Some were close enough to be assaulted by embers and ash. Except for the crackling of the flames, the area around Notre-Dame and along the river was cloaked in eerie silence.

  Little noticed was a firefighting boat docked along the riverbank beneath the cathedral. Its powerful motors furiously pumped water from the depths of the river into hoses connected to mobile fire stations on land. After the fire was extinguished, hours later, the Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris, the city’s firefighting force, estimated that half the water used in the operation had come from the Seine.

  “We had before us two elements of nature, fire and water,” said three-star general Jean-Claude Gallet, commander of the firefighters brigade of Paris, the first rescue service in Europe. “The fire had the face of a demon with a mind of its own. Every time we went after it, it found another attack route on its path of destruction, as if it understood our desperation.

  “Then, right in front of us, we had the Seine. It was as if the Seine were human. The Seine was an ally, but more than an ally. She was a serene, tranquil force supporting us against the chaos of the flames. It all sounds a bit mystical, but the Seine came to our rescue.”

  And so it was that the Seine, the life-giver of Paris, saved the monument that sits at the city’s historic and geographic heart: Notre-Dame.

  Earlier that day, Paris had been enjoying one of those rare bright April afternoons made famous in song. Sunlight streamed from a cloud-flecked blue sky, transforming the Seine’s waters into glittering shards. Bateaux-mouches cruised past the city’s architectural treasures with insouciance. As the afternoon was ending, bouquinistes along the quays began to pack up their old books and souvenirs and close their stalls for the day. Tourists competed with commuters for space on the sidewalks and in cafés, as rush hour merged with happy hour.

  It was the Monday of Holy Week, and inside Notre-Dame, clerics and lay workers prepared for days of services that would culminate in Easter Sunday. Many more sightseers and worshippers than usual were gathered in the cathedral’s cool, cavernous interior, after having waited an hour or more to enter.

  Out of sight, the fire was smoldering in the high reaches of the cathedral’s attic, a frame of medieval oak tree trunks nicknamed “the forest” that supported the lead-covered roof. The fire was so silent and cunning that when the internal fire a
larm sounded, at six-eighteen p.m., a guard found nothing. As a precaution, however, church officials cut short the evening Mass, ordered the visitors to leave, and locked the doors. Within half an hour, flames roared from the rafters for all to see, transforming the 850-year-old stone structure into a blazing inferno.

  By eight p.m., most of the roof and the attic had collapsed. The delicate nineteenth-century spire, built with 500 tons of oak and covered in 250 tons of lead, was too weak to stand. It had proudly soared 305 feet high over the transept; now it snapped in two and crashed to the ground.

  With thirteen million visitors a year, Notre-Dame was the most visited monument in Paris; it attracted more people than even Saint Peter’s Basilica. The world watched in disbelief and mourned as this unique symbol of Paris, a masterpiece of medieval architecture, faced destruction. “Like all of my fellow citizens, I am sad to see this part of us burn tonight,” President Emmanuel Macron wrote on Twitter, as if the tragedy were universal. Later, Monsignor Patrick Chauvet, the rector of the cathedral, said, “Notre-Dame is a home, and I feel in my heart that everyone feels at home here.”

  THE SAPEURS-POMPIERS DE PARIS is not a civilian force but part of the French armed forces and, therefore, trained to respond to crises with military discipline and precision. At one dramatic moment, even after a steady water supply on land and from the river was secure, General Gallet feared a chain reaction. After the spire fell, it crashed into the nave. High winds and pockets of hot gases caused the fire to spread quickly inside the cathedral, weakening the stone vaulting above the nave and reaching the northern bell tower. If the tower collapsed, the weight of the eight bronze bells within it would pull down the southern bell tower as well. In a closed-door meeting with Macron and his closest ministers, Gallet announced that the cathedral was on the verge of destruction. “I told them that it was a question of minutes,” he said. “I told them we had half an hour—no longer—before the cathedral would fall into ruin.”

  The motto of the Sapeurs-Pompiers is “Save or perish.” Gallet had served in several war zones, including a two-year stint in Afghanistan. He immediately thought of the collapse of the twin towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and the bold decision by the New York City Fire Department to send its firefighters into the towering inferno to rescue people trapped inside. Gallet and his operational commander, General Jean-Marie Gontier, ordered twenty-five firefighters into the bowels of the burning cathedral. They would either save the northern tower from within or face certain death. “Mr. President, if you want to see the towers of Notre-Dame standing tomorrow, there is no other solution,” Gallet said.

  The firefighters mounted the north tower with handheld hoses. They sprayed water into the air and onto the stone walls to cool them down from the inside. Through the openings in the tower’s walls, the operational command on the ground could see the lamps mounted on the sides of the firefighters’ helmets. “Fireflies,” Gallet called them. “It was surreal,” he said. “In the background, there were flames sixty-five feet high, and then you saw the line of firefighters progressing, very calmly, and the fireflies of their helmet lamps.” The firefighters managed to ascend the stairs, steadily cooling the internal temperatures degree by degree. It was enough to prevent the collapse of the north tower.

  SINCE ITS CREATION, Notre-Dame has been more than just a structure of chiseled limestone. With the Seine as its mirror and protector, the cathedral serves as the geographical, spiritual, and cultural heart of France. The site is officially recognized as the center of France, the starting point for any voyage of discovery. In 1769, Louis XV issued a royal decree ordering all distances in France to be calculated from a designated point in the parvis, the open forecourt in front of the cathedral. (The word “parvis” takes its name from the Latin word for paradise.) The triangular square marking the spot came to be known as point zéro. In 1924, it became the point of reference to calculate the mileage of highways in France, and an octagonal brass compass was set into the cobblestones, a visible reminder of the centrality of the cathedral in the country’s life.

  The site of Notre-Dame has been a holy place since antiquity. A Druid shrine and then a pagan temple dedicated to Jupiter, the chief of the Roman gods, are believed to have stood on this very spot. Further, a Frankish church dedicated to the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen; a Merovingian basilica; and Carolingian and Romanesque cathedrals. Perhaps that explains why Notre-Dame holds within its walls a profound spirituality, even for nonbelievers.

  The parvis—although six times smaller in the Middle Ages than it is today—was for centuries the maison commune (the meeting place) of the French people: “Serfs were set free there, mysteries played, and banquets given,” wrote Jacques Hillairet, the twentieth-century historian of Paris. “The poor and the hunted could always find asylum. Night and day, anyone who went on a long journey could put his valuables in Notre-Dame. Contracts were drawn up there, and oddities put on exhibition.”

  The cathedral has served as the setting for momentous events in French history. In 1431, during the Hundred Years’ War, Henry VI of England was crowned king of France to assert English claims to the French throne. In 1804, Napoléon Bonaparte crowned himself emperor. In 1909, Pope Pius X beatified Joan of Arc in her first step toward sainthood.

  Louis XIII and Anne of Austria, his queen, built a new altar for the chapel of the Virgin to mark three miraculous cures that occurred in the cathedral in 1626; Marie-Antoinette came to Notre-Dame to give thanks for the birth of a son in 1781, after eleven years of marriage to Louis XVI.

  In 1944, on the day after Paris was liberated from the Nazis, General Charles de Gaulle marched with his troops down the Champs-Élysées and across the Seine to celebrate with a Mass in Notre-Dame, just as a Mass at the cathedral had marked the end of World War I. As he entered the cathedral, snipers began shooting, first onto the parvis, then into the cathedral itself; de Gaulle ignored the commotion and took his seat.

  When Socialist president Francois Mitterrand, an agnostic, died in 1996, more than sixty world leaders and thirteen hundred other dignitaries gathered in Notre-Dame to mourn him. Cuba’s Fidel Castro came in civilian dress, while Palestinian chief Yasser Arafat wore a uniform and his signature keffiyeh.

  NOTRE-DAME, with the Seine protecting, showcasing, and coursing around it, has lived many lives and undergone many transformations. It took almost two hundred years—from 1163 to 1345—to build the cathedral, the result an amalgam of Gothic architectural styles. Over the centuries that followed, it survived desecrations and renovations. In the sixteenth century, Huguenot Protestants vandalized statues they regarded as sacrilegious. A century later, Louis XIV raised the altar so that it looked like a stage, covered its columns in marble and gilded bronze, ripped out some stained-glass windows, and added statues, including one of himself and another of his father, Louis XIII. In the eighteenth century, when the spire went wobbly, church authorities pulled it down.

  The most violent destruction occurred during the anticlerical frenzy following France’s 1789 revolution, which transformed Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason in the service of the new secular republic. Revolutionaries pulled the stone heads of Old Testament figures off the façade, having mistakenly assumed that they were French kings; even depictions of the Three Magi were destroyed. The cathedral was so badly damaged that by the end of the eighteenth century, extremists were calling for it to be demolished and its stone to be sold as construction material.

  Victor Hugo’s 1831 epic novel, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ignited a national awakening. For Hugo, the cathedral was “a vast symphony in stone, the colossal handwork of a man and a people” that had suffered “innumerable degradations and mutilations . . . both by the ravages of time and the hand of man.” In 1845, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, a young architect in his early thirties, in partner-ship with his friend and fellow architect Jean-Baptiste Lassus, was put in charge of the restoration of Notre-Dame, a project that would take more than twen
ty years. He re-created stained-glass windows, restored the western façade, replaced sculptures destroyed during the revolution, rebuilt the sacristy, designed the gargoyles on the rooftops, and, most memorably, created the delicate lead-covered wooden spire, the one that collapsed in the great fire of 2019.

  On the day of the blaze, the cathedral was a structure in varying stages of decay, encased in a web of scaffolding. Decorative balustrades and gargoyles that evacuated rainwater had fallen. Flying buttresses, blackened from car emissions, were crumbling. Some limestone sculptures were so fragile that they turned to dust when touched. The ambitious renovation project was underfunded and moving slowly.

  As planning for the current restoration of the cathedral begins, Viollet-le-Duc’s vision for Notre-Dame rings true today. “In a project of this sort, one cannot proceed with enough prudence and discretion,” he wrote in the early stage of his work. “A restoration can do more harm to a monument than the ravages of the centuries and the fury of rioters.”

  Even now, after the great fire, the best way to view the cathedral is to embrace its historic complexity—by navigating around it from the Seine. The cathedral’s medieval symmetrical façade, with its twin bell towers and hundreds of figures sculpted in stone, enjoys an unobstructed view from the parvis. The cathedral’s southern flank stretches along the river and can be seen in all its magnificence from the Quai de Montebello, on the Left Bank.

  The back side of Notre-Dame, the nineteenth-century creation of Viollet-le-Duc, is less celebrated by the populace but shows its splendor at night, the flat, dark silhouette of the cathedral’s flying buttresses visible through the trees. I found, like many others, a special place and time in which to make this view my own: the middle of the Pont de la Tournelle, just before dawn. Facing west, I watch as the sky moves from blue-black to deep blue velvet to soft gray, then light blue. The delicate architectural details of the back of Notre-Dame gradually reveal themselves, until finally, the early morning sun adorns them in warm orange hues.