Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [198]
—MORT ROSENBLUM, The Secret Life of the Seine
I could spend my whole life
Watching the Seine flow by …
It is a poem of Paris.
—BLAISE CENDRARS
Bridging the Seine
VIVIAN THOMAS
OF COURSE EVERY visitor to Paris notices the Seine, but not every visitor pays the river’s bridges the attention they deserve. Each Seine bridge is unique, and collectively the bridges are one of Paris’s greatest monuments. Not every bridge in Paris is “worth eulogizing,” as Eric Maisel aptly puts it in A Writer’s Paris—many are simply ordinary, no different from bridges back home, nothing more than a way to go. “But a few of Paris’s bridges are exceptional. They are worth the airfare and the languid hours I pray you devote to them. They are why you came.” I am partial to the Pont des Arts and the Pont Alexandre III, but you will undoubtedly have favorites of your own.
VIVIAN THOMAS, introduced previously, has been an editor at Where Paris and is now assistant editor of France Today. She contributed numerous articles to the former Paris Notes, where this piece originally appeared.
MY HIGH SCHOOL French teacher changed my life one day by drawing a bird’s-eye view of a boat on the blackboard. Two more sweeping lines, and the boat was in a river. “Here,” she said, tapping her chalk on the boat, “is where Paris began. On the Île de la Cité.” As she explained, the top half of the blackboard became the Right Bank, the bottom half the Left. “And this,” she said, slicing a diagonal line straight through the boat’s sharp prow, from bank to bank, “is the Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris.” Her little drawing and the light that shone in her face as she talked about her favorite city planted the seeds of what would blossom into my lifelong passion for Paris.
Three years later I stood on that bridge, looking out over the island’s pointed prow. I had stepped right into her picture, and ever since, I’ve had a special attachment to the island and its bridges.
No one knows exactly when a Gallic tribe called the Parisii first settled on the wooded island that would become Paris. But by 52 BC, they had already built between the island and the left bank of the Seine a five-arched wooden bridge that Julius Caesar found as he traveled south, seeking the shortest route from today’s Amiens to Sens.
His decision to establish a camp in the village he called Lutetia Parisiorum reflected its strategic location, at the crossroads of the north-south trail he was traveling and the east-west water route of the Seine. The Parisii later fought the Romans but lost, and on fleeing the island burned the bridge behind them.
That first bridge, destroyed and rebuilt many times, became known as the Petit Pont when a second one, the Grand Pont, was built to the Right Bank, across the river’s larger channel. Paris would have two bridges for over thirteen hundred years.
During the Gallo-Roman period, the city spilled over onto the Left Bank, only to retreat to the island again during the barbarian invasions. But by the end of the Middle Ages, Paris was booming. The swampy Right Bank was drained and cultivated, monasteries and abbeys were flourishing, and the city boasted ten bridges by the mid-1600s.
Parisians were not only crossing those bridges, but they were living and working on them. Houses and shops lined most of them, while beneath several bridges the Seine turned both huge waterwheels that supplied the city’s water and noisy millstones that ground grain for its bread. Businesses flourished on bridges; first fishermen, tanners, and millers, later luxury merchants like jewelers, booksellers, and parfumeurs. A bridge address became the pinnacle of chic.
The ponts were also lucrative sources of revenue for their builders. Before Colbert created the Ponts et Chaussées in 1716,