Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  The countryside is picturebook France, rolling, rich and rock walled. In its early stages, the Seine winds among fields and occasionally disappears in a brushy tangle. At any point, during the first few miles, you can hop across without getting your feet wet. Soon it widens into a respectable stream, snaking in even loops across fruited meadows. This is the deepest, greenest, richest heartland of Old Europe.

  The Seine is formalized at Billy-lès-Chanceaux, its name on the enameled plate bolted to the stone bridge. It flows past a line of tile-roofed and shuttered buildings, the town hall and bourgeois homes, set on the cobbled quai as if the place were a busy port. Jeannette and I settled down to watch life. An ancient tractor clattered across the bridge. Some kids did a Flying Wallenda act over the water. A mother herded her toddlers homeward, a duck with ducklings. We laid out a lunch on the grass. It was less elaborate than Manet’s, but we got the feeling. This was one lovely river.

  Then we meandered downstream, stopping to sniff at kitchen windows and craning our necks over tumble-down stone walls to see gardens gone wild. Whenever we found a bridge, we crossed it and watched clear water swirling slowly around the pilings. If a side road climbed a wooded rise, we followed it.

  France is particularly well endowed for this sort of sweet exploration. The Institut Géographique National (IGN) puts out a series of blue-bordered maps on a scale of one to twenty-five thousand. Two inches are devoted to each mile on the ground, enough room for street grids of hamlets and the shapes of château outbuildings. Each caprice of a stream bed is traced in and out of green-shaded splotches. A practiced eye can almost pick out the places with cozy little cafés run by accomplished grandmothers, causing the practiced palate to moisten noticeably.

  Thanks to the IGN, I could follow highways too insignificant for any color at all, doubling back to thwart dead ends and recrossing the Seine yet again whenever I liked the cut of a barn. There is a certain pleasant sameness in the river’s early stages. As in much of France beyond the cities, most people are linked to farms or are shopkeepers who earn their living one baguette at a time. In terms of nature, however, all around is heavy on luxe, calme et volupté.

  Hard times had begun to bite when I first tracked the river in 1992, and things were getting worse. The European Community, an imperfect union, bettered few lives. Farm subsidies plummeted, prices sagged, and agro-industry suffered. Other sectors stagnated, drying the national resource pool. Elsewhere, rural families were migrating to cities. The Seine’s waters hardly shielded people nearby from the world beyond. But, I suspected, only desperation could dislodge many of them from their natural paradise.

  Conflicting sensations came back, time and again, as I explored the river. Try as you might to avoid it, the Seine at its gentlest pushes you toward grandiose metaphor. It is a silver thread woven into a rich Old World tapestry, an inlay of precious metal...and so on. Then you turn another corner and find some architectural atrocity at the edge of a village gone modern. People are kind beyond belief, or porcine putzes. In microcosm, the Seine is France.

  At Bar-sur-Seine, well before the boats start, Antoine Richard fished for supper. His secret spot was just below the picturesque wreckage of a wooden wheel that had churned up electricity not long after Thomas Edison invented light bulbs. A few days earlier, he had pulled out 23 trout. A fireman in his twenties, Richard spends his down time along the river.

  The occasional French monarch dreamed of bringing boats up this high. Under orders from Napoleon, engineers once tried to dredge a channel near Bar and line it with rock walls. But the river bed is too porous in its early stages, and the emperor’s canal would not hold water. As a result, the Seine’s gently sloping grass banks are just about the way nature wants them.

  “Such tranquillity, beauty,” Richard reflected, pausing to let the scene speak for itself. Bright flowers climb mossy village walls. Up the graveled road was a regulation church with a pointy steeple. The cafés and shops had not changed for generations and likely never will. Ah, the poetry of la France éternelle. And then the other side. I asked about pollution.

  “It’s not too bad here,” Richard said. “You can still catch l’ombre, as far down as Fourchière.” That was not so far down. “Then it disappears.” Ombre, a delicate white fish like a trout, can’t handle dirty water. Farther down, fishermen have to settle for carp, chub, roach, bream, eels, and other hardy species. A few hours’ drive from the source, the Seine looked fresh and alive. But Paul Lamarche’s tiny bugs wouldn’t stand a chance.

  At Fourchière, a gas-station owner in greasy overalls said that, in fact, the odd ombre still lurked in the river. He eyed me carefully and added, “Ici c’est une societé privée.” This was confusing. Societé can mean “association” but also “company.” Had some business cornered fishing rights? The man explained, “C’est réservé aux gens du pays.” Another two-way meaning: pays usually means “country,” and he might have been saying that only French people could fish there. He wasn’t. The other meaning is “around here.” He meant that the Seine, in that area, belonged only to Fourchière’s people. But the bakery sold me bread.

  In the Middle Ages people believed that bodies drowned in the Seine could be located by setting afloat in the river a votive candle on a wooden disc and noting where it stopped or went out. It was doubly important to find drowned bodies before the authorities did, because a huge fee of 101 écus, the equivalent of a year’s pay for a manual laborer, is said to have been charged for the delivery of a loved one from the morgue at the Châtelet. One version of a story told about a bridge and its fires has it that a poor old widow whose son had drowned had set a candle afloat in hopes of finding his body. The candle floated close to a straw-laden barge, setting it on fire. The barge touched the wooden scaffolding of a pillar of the bridge itself. In three days the raging fire destroyed the bridge and the houses on it.

  —Alison and Sonia Landes,

  Pariswalks

  Châtillon-sur-Seine is the first real town on the river. As in Paris, the water splits into two branches around an island of buildings in fitted rock that go back a half dozen centuries. But in Châtillon the channels are a coin’s toss wide, and you can see bottom. At midnight, time tunnels you backward. Cobblestone streets, laid out for horses and slop buckets, echo footsteps. Rusty hinges hold up shutters in wood petrified with age. People have snapped off their lights, leaving only a flickering glow of street lanterns that might be oil torches. A fortified hilltop church stands above the river. From some angles, it is a brooding hulk. From others, it is a graceful sweep of towers and ramparts.

  The river hairpins and eddies into a mystical pool under a rock outcropping. In fact, this is the Douix, perhaps the world’s shortest river, and the first tributary of the Seine. The Douix gushes up from the cliff at rates approaching a thousand gallons a second. It boils over a natural fall of ragged rock. From source to mouth, it is 100 yards long. In the darkness, it churns and rushes, blowing off mists. When the upper Seine was a highway, this had to be a Druid rest area.

  A number of years back, say about 50 million or so, when the Seine’s bed was on the floor of a shallow inland sea, France was as warm as the Caribbean. Off and on during those Paleocene times, waves covered a broad sweep of Western Europe, leaving islands of rich vegetation and small tropical beasts. Each dose of salt water lasted two to four million years. In between, the land dried and life forms nestled in the sediment to fossilize for the later amusement of geologists. Remains of two thousand mollusks have been found in the Paris basin, many of them dead ringers for the shells that get tossed out each night after a fruits de mer feast in Les Halles.

  As time marched on, old sands and clays hardened into new formations. The limestone deposits that characterize Paris began in a subepoch called, naturally, Lutecian. Successive layers of gypsum, clay, and sand already had taken shape by the Pleistocene epoch, a million years ago, when giant ice cubes elsewhere on the planet scraped slowly past and redecorated the scenery. T
oward the end of the Quaternary period, the banks of the Seine were somewhat as we find them. Rich alluvial soil goes down yards deep on a sandy, porous base. In the heart of Paris, where wagons could cross once wheels appeared, hard calcified rock forms a solid foundation for a city.

  A visitor today can sit on the bank under leafy trees and taste the fruits of this geological C.V. The chalky hillsides and plains produce grapes to kill for. And, above Châtillon, the northbound Seine flows into Champagne, where a monk named Dom Pérignon figured out a splendid use for them.

  In these sorts of settings, one is well advised to husband the adjectives and go easy on superlatives. That said, there may be no place better than Vix, anywhere, to uncork a bottle and contemplate peace on earth. Two millennia after thriving as a crossroads of world trade, Vix has dropped from the map. Its ancient treasures—some gold and jewelry, but especially a stunning cast-bronze five-foot-six-inch-high Grecian urn from the tomb of a princess—are five miles away in Châtillon. The highway misses it by a mile. No one mentioned it to me; flashing by in the car, I saw a sign and hung a right.

  Unvisited, Vix remains in a mossy-tile, pre-neon state, its falling-down walls half hidden in bursts of bright flowers. The Seine makes a gentle bend into the village and flows under three arches of a stone bridge. It is wide and clear as glass, with whorls of weeds under its rippled surface. In the falling light of dusk, fishermen in waders tie flies to their lines and snake them over the water.

  For a while, I fussed with my cameras. By placing my car near the bridge, I could get high enough to picture the chipped “La Seine” sign, with a spray of red flowers in the foreground and the rich green far bank as a backdrop. After half a roll, I gave up. The power was not visual but spiritual, and every sense went into the picture: perfumes, ripplings and rustlings, balmy air you could feel.

  A few couples, some young, some ancient, watched the bushy-haired man with Paris plates crawl over his car and twist into odd positions. Most quickly lost interest. They had come to see the river at sundown, a specialty of Vix that is now into its third millennium and shows no sign of losing its glory.

  Approaching a man with a fly rod, I fished for quotes. Yes, outsiders were welcome to try their luck in the Seine, he said, and I was happy to hear it. Like picture-taking, words fell short. What could he tell me that I could not feel by sitting there quietly? Here in Vix, it all fell together: the cycles of geology, the waves of history, the link to modern times. Light was dwindling fast, and people were expecting me a long way down the road. I sat, and sat, and sat.

  Mort Rosenblum is the former editor-in-chief of the International Herald Tribune and the author of many books, including Mission to Civilize, A Goose in Toulouse and other Culinary Adventures in France, and Who Stole the News? This story was excerpted from his book The Secret Life of the Seine.

  L’aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte

  S’avançait lentement sur la Seine déserte

  The glittering dawn, in robe of red and green,

  Moving slowly, on the Seine was seen.

  —Baudelaire

  DONALD W. GEORGE

  In Notre Dame

  The author is moved by the Unseen.

  NOTRE DAME FROM THE OUTSIDE IS MAGNIFICENT, MONUMENTAL, solidly of the Earth and yet soaringly not. But for all its monumental permanence, its context is clearly the present: visitors pose, focus, click; portable stalls sell sandwiches and postcards; tourist groups shuffle by in ragtag formation.

  Walk through those massive, humbling doors, though, and suddenly you breathe the air of antiquity. Let your mind and eyes adjust to the inner light, and you begin to realize that there is much more to Paris than the life of its streets, and a small sense of its magnificent and moving past comes back to you.

  When I entered Notre Dame on my most recent trip, I was overwhelmed by the solid, soaring arches and columns I had forgotten, by the depth and texture of the stained-glass windows with their luminous blues and reds and greens. I thought of how many people had worked to build this magnificence, and of how many people since then had stood, perhaps on the very same stones as I, and marveled at it. I thought of all the faith and hope and sacrifice it manifests. I walked through the fervent space, awed by the art and the hush that seemed to resonate with the whispers of centuries, and just when I was beginning to feel too small and insignificant and was getting ready to leave, I saw a simple sign over a tiny stone basin of water, on a column near the doors.

  The sign said, “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” in seven languages, with pictures that showed a hand dipping into the water, then touching a forehead.

  I touched my hand to the cool, still water, then brought it to my head, and as I did so, chills ran through my body and tears streamed into my eyes.

  Somehow that simple act had forged a palpable contact with ages past, had put everything into startling focus: the ceaseless flow of pilgrims to this special place, the ceaseless procession of hands to water and fingers to forehead, all sharing this basin, this gesture.

  I felt a new sense of the history that flows with us and around us and beyond us all—of the plodding, tireless path of humankind and of the sluggish, often violent spread of Christianity through Europe and the rest of the world—and a new sense of the flow of my own history, too: my Protestant upbringing, a pastor whose notions of Christian love have had a deep and abiding influence on my life, the old and still inconceivable idea of God.

  For a few moments I lost all sense of place and time—then a door opened and a tourist group entered, looking up and around in wonder, and I walked into the world of sunlight and spire again.

  I stopped, blinked at the sandwich stalls and postcard vendors, then turned back toward that stony symmetry and thought: sometimes you feel so small and insignificant in the crush of history that you lose all sense of purpose and self. Then something will happen to make you realize that every act and every encounter has its own precious meaning and lesson, and that history is simply the sum of all these.

  Sometimes it comes together, as it did for me that moment in Notre Dame; sometimes the world is reduced to a simple sign, a stone basin, the touch of water to head—and the vast pageant of the past and the living parade of the present take on a new, and renewing, symmetry and sense.

  Donald W. George was the award-winning travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner for nine years before jumping into the World Wide Web, where he was travel editor of Salon.com. Currently he is global travel editor for Lonely Planet Publications. His career as a peripatetic scribbler started in Paris, where he lived and worked and fell in love (several times) the summer between his junior and senior years at Princeton. He is the editor of Salon.com’s Wanderlust: Real Life Tales of Adventure and Romance, and coeditor of Travelers’ Tales Japan.

  A bench at the entrance to the Métro, Champs-Elysée:

  As I sit in Paris in the rain I try to imagine each passerby in 16th- or 15th-century dress. The images are quite vivid, as I’ve soaked up enough Tintorettos, Titians, and Lottos to last till the next millennium.

  Ever bright in my mind are the twisted, tortured torsos of slaves, the brilliant detail of saintly robe, the cool, smooth feel of carved stone limbs, and the myriad of churches and museums. Such passion, such epiphany, such intensive labor and detail in every craftsman-trade, from glass and mosaic to stone work, wood carving, and masonry.

  Paris now feels like a weathered and paved-over metropolis of modernity and bustling tourists. Looking deeper and deeper though I can see vividly Paris as it once was: a glorious daunting fountain of song.

  Paris’s soul is still here, as solid as the faded marble façades and cobblestone walkways. I’m awed that we’ve regressed so far. What men 600 years ago erected, carved, created without use of modern amenities puts us to shame. In each detail, archway, window I see a masterpiece taking a man’s entire lifetime to create. Perhaps that’s why the city has such soul—from every artisan and slave buried, celebr
ated within it.

  No wonder modern man is lost, living in a wasteland of convenience—only 200 souls per building, only 2 days of ethereal spontaneity per painting. Sainte-Chapelle must be at least 50,000 souls—200 mosaic artists, 10 architects over 200 years, 100 masons, 2,000 slaves—the Assumption at least 2 years. And imagine, making paint for each pigment, etching each chip of stone. No wonder they did it right—such effort, such time required—every stroke counts.

  —Gina Granados, “Dear Patrick”

  TARAS GRESCOE

  Real Life House of Horrors

  What resides in Paris’s least-known museum?

  Come and see.

  THERE ARE PARTS OF PARIS THAT NEVER MAKE IT INTO THE guidebooks, and the Fragonard Museum is one of them. Its home, the little bedroom community of Maisons-Alfort, at the confluence of the Seine and the Marne just south of the Bois de Vincennes, is only twenty minutes upstream from the Louvre by even the slowest péniche, but a skein of TGV tracks, elevated Métro lines, and Périphérique off-ramps has lately transformed this nondescript suburb into a commuter belt no man’s land.

  Since the 18th century, in fact, Maisons-Alfort has been noted for only two things. The first is its proximity to a grim enclave in Charenton, the mental hospital whose walls are visible across the water. The second is the presence of one of the world’s oldest veterinary schools. The sprawling École Vétérinaire d’Alfort, with its spike-topped stone walls and slit-windowed turrets, looks as intimidating and inescapable as the most Zolaesque lunatic asylum. On this overcast afternoon, however, the knowledge that it also houses a museum filled with the grotesque work of an anatomist—one declared mad by his contemporaries—makes it downright terrifying.