THE SEINE

The River That Made Paris

By Elaine Sciolino

I learned so much from this book. Elaine Sciolino is a graceful, companionable writer, someone who speaks about France in the most enjoyably American way. The French pride themselves on conversing on a lofty plane; when Americans start exchanging anecdotes or matching experiences, many French people raise an eyebrow and ask, “Eh, alors?” (What’s your point?) They want to know the principle that can be drawn from all this real-life trivia. Typically, the French (for whom philosophy is a high school requirement) can brachiate from abstraction to abstraction and might become disgruntled when we Americans say, “Give me an example.” Sciolino, on the contrary, proceeds from colorful detail to revealing detail, gently informing even as she entertains.

Full disclosure: The Book Review editors asked if I knew Sciolino before assigning me this review. I assured them I did not. She has lived in Paris, working for The New York Times, only since 2002; I moved there in 1983 and returned to America in 1998. Yet she says on Page 136 that we met. Regrettably, I’m afraid I have no memory of that occasion; she sounds as if she’d be the perfect American fellow-traveler in France.

Although I’ve written books about Paris or set there, I never researched the Seine and so never knew some of the many things Sciolino tells us:

That the “team” who lit Paris bridges, monuments and boulevards with surgical knives of illumination in the 1980s was led by a single genius, François Jousse. That Paris spends more than $15 million a year on public lighting. That scores of people celebrate a fish festival every September on the island best known for Georges Seurat’s masterpiece “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (the inspiration as well for Stephen Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park With George”). That the coat of arms of Paris bears the image of a storm-tossed ship and the Latin words Fluctuat nec mergitur, “She is tossed on the waves but does not sink,” which became a slogan of resistance after 130 people were killed in 2015 during the terrorist attacks on the Bataclan concert hall and other sites. That the first Paris quay was constructed in 1312. That a monument near Rouen commemorates the transfer of Napoleon’s ashes to a boat that carried them to their final resting place in Paris at Les Invalides. That when Roman Catholics slaughtered Protestants in 1572 and dumped the bodies into the Seine, the river turned red with blood.