Travelers' Tales Paris (23 page)

A Seine biographer, Anthony Glyn, reckons the Germanic invaders smashed the temple because they did not like female deities. In fact, centuries later, a monk named Seigne (pronounced “Seine”) was sainted and recruited as patron of the river, which explains those impressive church towers at Saint-Seine-L'Abbaye, a few miles toward Dijon on the other side of the hill from the source. But he didn't take; Sequana has eclipsed Saint Seigne, whatever his role.

The Roman Empire was crumbling fast. In Lutetia, Gallo-Romans had shaped a new culture. Freed of Mediterranean keepers, they took the old name, Paris. And they looked mostly down-stream, toward England and northern Europe, where trade was brisk. Wine from Burgundy and Champagne floated down the Seine. But not much came from beyond, overland from the Saône. Gradually, Sequana's shrine lost its pre-Michelin stars and slipped into the mists.

I started my river journey on foot. This line might have carried some power in a Richard Burton diary, with chilling detail of treacherous porters and mosquitos the size of turkey buzzards, but walking down the Seine is not what you'd call hardship. In fact, I didn't go very far before I hopped back into an open car and followed the farmer's roads and narrow strips of blacktop to the first proper bridge across the river. A very short bridge.

My original idea had been a single journey, from first trickle to final rollers, in some form of conveyance. Paul Theroux suggested a kayak, the way he'd do it. Another old pro urged something more French, like a rubber Zodiac. Had I talked to Mark Spitz, I probably would have considered the butterfly stroke. But the Seine, often submissive, needs a minimum of conquering. To live her secret life, you've got to take it slowly, in various ways at different times. My exploring would take me among old books, into rusting engine compartments, and, as far as I could go, into the thoughts of river people. More than a journey, this was a
quest. I was after the soul of the Seine. Scrapping all plans, I simply set out.

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.

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. Toward 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.