Travelers' Tales Paris (22 page)

The best way to approach hardware shopping at the
BHV
is to allow plenty of time; try to get the lay of the land while you're still on the stairs leading down to the basement (be prepared for aisles that extend to the vanishing point—I still get lost), then start prospecting. Help is always around if you need it, but finding things yourself is more rewarding—and you're almost guaranteed to stumble upon items you need but didn't know existed. My prize find is a set of long steel keys with handles on one end and threaded points on the other. It took me a while to puzzle out their purpose, but a dollar's investment means I'll never again have to use a hammer and nail to make starter holes for wood screws. Less constructive but more envied is the
Fermé le mardi
(Closed Tuesday) sign I bought for my kitchen.

Join the huddles around live demonstrations of the newest widgets, and for hands-on entertainment drop by the plumbing section where dozens of novel faucets and showerheads are connected to the Paris water system, ready for testing. When you find something you want to buy, ask a salesperson to write up your order and take the sales slip to a cashier, who will stamp it
paid
(the
BHV
takes all charge cards). Then go searching for the salesperson again, to claim your purchase. It's a time-consuming routine, but its charm grows on you. For a break from nuts and bolts, head upstairs to the sixth-floor
salon de thé
. Now, really—name one shopping-mall hardware outlet with a decent
salon de thé
.

Whoever goes in search of anything, must come to this, either to say that he has found it, or that it is not to be found, or that he is yet upon the quest.

—Montaigne

MORT ROSENBLUM

P
AUL
L
AMARCHE, KEEPER OF THE
S
EINE, SCAMPERED OVER THE
last traces of a vast Gallo-Roman temple to show me the river's source. He was into his 90s, quick, sturdy, with an elfin twinkle in his eye. Those old guys in Armenia last long on yogurt, but Lamarche thrives on the magical waters of the Seine.

“Look at this,” Lamarche said, bending over a tiny stream trickling down a groove in the rock. He dislodged a stone and seized a waterbug, like a minuscule shrimp. “Any kind of pollution kills these things,” he explained. “You won't find any cleaner water.” He cupped his hands in the furry green moss and thrust his face into the cool liquid. I did the same. Water never tasted better.

The old man fell silent to let me ponder the past. Instead, my mind flashed ahead to the immediate future. I could imagine splashing water into guests' whisky aboard
La Vieille
[the author's boat and river home] and mentioning casually that I had scooped it from the Seine. A sadist's dream.

We were on the Langres Plateau in the Côte d'Or, up to our ankles in red poppies and talking over the bussing hum of cicadas. Wild roses and columbines fringed the rocks, and rich, fragrant grass hid little yellow buds. Lamarche first saw this enchanted
source when he was six. “We hiked down from Chanceaux to say
bonjour
to the goddess,” he said, nodding toward a Rubenesque statue in a fake grotto built by the city of Paris to honor Sequana.

The plaque says she was put there by Napoleon III, but Paul knows the statue was replaced in 1928. Once water spouted from her left arm, as though she were personally filling the river, but in dry years the pressure was not strong enough. Now water burbles ignobly from somewhere near her feet. In any case, her cave is not the actual source.

“The river really starts here,” Lamarche said, pointing to a rusty grate by a few chunks of marble column, all that remains of the biggest temple in ancient Gaul. “And there and there.” Water oozed from two other breaks in the rock at the base of a low cliff, in a clump of trees. “Then it goes underground and loops around to the grotto.”

He was enjoying himself, poking holes in the first few fibs the Seine's curators sought to perpetrate on the public. The river was his life, and Sequana his beloved ancestor. After checking out the world in the military, Lamarche came home to Saint-Germain-Source-Seine, the village nearby. In 1953, he settled into the old caretaker's farmhouse just below the grotto and opened the Café Sequana. His wife, Monique, made omelettes and strong coffee. At the source, Lamarche planted two willows, under which picnickers can dangle their toes in cool water, and shaped the small park. With money left over, he built the first bridge over the Seine, a funny little miniature of the vaulted spans farther down.

These days, mostly, he and Monique tend their fields. The grotto is left open to the public and needs only a casual eye. But when anyone stops to ask, the old man seizes a fat iron key and shows off the real thing.

Lamarche took me to the gate and worked at the rusted padlock. For several minutes, he jiggled the key and muttered darkly. Finally, he worked it loose. My friend Jeannette, meantime, simply walked past the locked gate; the fence had long since collapsed. Inside, Lamarche showed us a heavy slice of column that looters had tried to roll into a pickup. He had run them off. “They've
taken everything,” he said, shaking his head at nonspecific sacrilege over the last two millennia.

The park belongs to Paris. After all these years, the source of the Seine, deep in the belly of Burgundy, is still a colony of the French capital. Napoleon III claimed it last century when such symbolism was pregnant with political import. Now, only a curiosity, the symbol still fits. When the river gets bigger, it is pushed around with Paris in mind. Downstream from Paris, it runs thick with urban waste.

Although Lamarche plants the flowers, trims the trees, and cleans up after slobs, what he likes best is talking to visitors. He wants people to get Sequana's story straight. Which is not so easy to do. The
Dictionnaire Etymologique des Noms de Rivières et de Montagnes en France
offers eleven lines on the name
Seine
. This, via a string of variants used over the centuries, evolved into
Seine. Squan
, apparently, was a Gallic word meaning twisting, or tranquil, or both. The Romans added a few vowels. Later, French settled on a single syllable.

An eighteen-inch-high statue of the goddess has survived in a museum at Dijon. She is in flowing Greco-Roman robes, standing in a boat with a bow shaped like the head of swan; in the swan's mouth is a small round object, a pomegranate or a tennis ball. For myth spinners, it is a promising start.

Archeologists, in fact, have put together a detailed account of the daily goings-on at the temple to Sequana. Reading it, I half-suspected that some clumsy printer had substituted pages from a modern guide to Lourdes. The Gauls' first temple was made of wood and clay earth, but Romans later hauled in enough slabs of marble and hewn stone for a vast religious complex. The waters trickled among high columns and past inner recesses reserved for holy business. Downstream, they widened into a pool where the masses took the cure.

Gauls, Romans, and foreign tourists covered great distances, hobbling on foot or in fancy carriages. Priests received offerings in temple alcoves. Pilgrims sealed vows by pitching coins or jewelry
into the water. Artisans fashioned replicas of limbs in need of curing, and they charged an arm and a leg. In bronze, wood, or soft rock, they depicted familiar-looking maladies—tumors, poxes, and deformities—which the Seine was enlisted to heal. Souvenir stands sold kitschy statuettes; had transport been better, they might have come from Taiwan.

The temple thrived as a sacred health spa and also as a vacation getaway from a bustling Gallo-Roman settlement downstream started by a tribe of Gauls, fishermen, and water traders known as the Parisii.
Par
, in Celtic, means boat. By then, the Parisii's capital on an island in the Seine, now the Ile de la Cité, was rolling in resource. The settlement, as well as the region near Sequana's temple and the river that linked them, were at the crux of a new world taking shape.

About six centuries before Christ, and the Romans, the Greeks had found a more direct route to Britain than sailing by Gibraltar and up rough open seas. They needed English tin and copper to make bronze, buying it with Mediterranean wine. Greek traders followed the Rhône to the Saône until they ran out of river. Crews humped their cargo overland to the headwaters of the Seine. From there, it was only water to the Thames. The Greeks enriched not only the
entrepôt
region of Vix, not far from the source, but also Gallic villages clustered along the river.

Germans, meantime, carted their heavy metals from Spain, in exchange for honey, amber, and furs. That required crossing the Seine. Wagoners settled on the Parisii's village, where flat rocks on either bank flanked an island made of silt. For much of the year, horses could ford the river; it was twice as wide then as it is now and a whole lot shallower. When the water was high, Gauls ferried the wagons across, for a price.

The island was perfectly placed. Forests hemmed in the river basin, and bandits cruised the few rutted roads. Anyone
with a choice preferred the Seine—peaceful, dependable, and free of muggers. And road convoys had to get over the river. Seven thousand strong, behind a stockade, the Parisii ran a bustling market and a mint that stamped gold coins. Politics were shaped by the watermen, the
nautes
, who ruled the wavelets until A.D. 52.

But after Rome conquered the British isles, Caesar realized he had to fuel his legionnaires there with home-grown olive oil. Like all other roads, he decided, the Seine would lead to Rome. His armies seized everything along the old Greek route. On their island redoubt, the Gauls fought back.

Caesar reported humbly: “Labienus exhorted his soldiers to remember their past bravery, their happiest combats, and to conduct themselves as if Caesar, who so often had led them to victory, were there in person.” Romans routed the right flank, but the Parisii's general, Camulogenus, held the center. “All were encircled and massacred,” Caesar wrote, adding that horsemen cut down those who fled. We have no Gallic version, but the battle was likely the origin of Parisian driving habits.

Having burned their town rather than leave it to Caesar, the Gauls started fresh on the island. On the river's left bank, a gleaming Roman city offered the usual colonial amenities: temples, baths, a theater, aqueducts, and stone streets, along with a port. Stone pillars and wooden planks made up the first Petit Pont. Gauls ran their own port on the island. The whole place was called Lutetia, a name that lingers today on a fancy hotel façade and a hundred other places.

The Romans built a temple to Jupiter atop a shrine to a Gallic god; Notre-Dame, on the same spot, now blots out both deities. By then, the Gauls had joined the invaders they could not beat. The
nautes
offered a statue to honor the Roman god and continued their lucrative river traffic.

Late in the 3rd century, France was rearranged by the muscular Teutonic tourism that got to be a habit. Franks swept southwest from the Rhine estuary. They eventually settled most of the country, hence the name France. But Burgundians from the central Rhine, tall Wagnerian blondes with a power problem, made
straight for the Seine. In A.D. 276, they trashed Lutetia, burning the Roman sector. Failing to dislodge the Gauls from their island, they moved up-stream and razed Sequana's temple.