Paris measures its floods by the height of the water flowing over the statue of the Zouave (French colonial soldier) on the Pont de l’Alma. Normally, he manages to keep his boots dry, but in the great flood of 1910, the Seine came up to his elbows. This picture shows a lesser flood in 1930 (being French, Parisian floods follow a metric timetable).
To Parisians, the most worrying things about the exhibition were the obvious signs that the flood had lasted a very long time. A whole new way of life had sprung up in the city. The photos showed people being calmly ferried about in rowing boats with their shopping. There were also long, precarious walkways consisting of planks, doors and tabletops aligned on trestles. These had become the new pavements, running the whole length of streets and across squares. Improvised scaffolding was erected in front of buildings so that residents could climb through the first-floor windows and carry on with daily life—only the ground floor and basements were totally flooded.
The waste-disposal system had evolved, too—the exhibition showed some bizarre photos of men shovelling cartloads of rubbish into the river. The dumps were flooded, so domestic refuse was tipped into the Seine at the Pont de Tolbiac, a pretty stupid idea considering that this is upriver of the city, meaning that the waste flowed right through Paris and presumably straight back into the streets where it had been collected.
It wasn’t all doom and gloom, however. One of the photographers of a century ago had found his ‘you’ve got to laugh’ picture. In a street at least a metre deep in water, someone had hung a sign outside a bar—fermé pour cause d’inondation (closed due to flooding). The name of the bar? Le Café de l’Aquarium.
And the exhibition’s visitors’ book showed that nothing can traumatize a French person so much that they will stop making bad puns. Someone had written qui leut crue?—who would have believed it?—a play on cru, the past participle of croire (to believe) and crue, meaning high water. And I’m sure that there are Parisian journalists out there just praying for another flood so that they can use the joke in a headline.
Did I just do that?
As well as riverboat trips, Parisians organize two very different sorts of water-themed tours of their city.
One of these takes visitors to admire some of the engineering work done by Baron Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be understandable if we were talking about an aesthetically pleasing technological achievement like the Eiffel Tower, but less so (in my view, anyway) when the object of the guided tour is the sewers.
For an hour or so, starting from the Pont de l’Alma, visitors can wander through the tunnels, enjoying a truly multi-sensory experience. They can see, hear, smell, and if they’re very clumsy, feel and even taste a generous sample of Paris’s dirty water (and other waste matter, of course). The tour programme promises a visit to delightful-sounding places of interest such as the avenue Bosquet collector, the place de la Résistance storm drain, and a tunnel that carries the Left Bank’s intellectual waste to the purification works.
The sewer walls all have road signs telling you where you are in the city, so an underground tour is rather like strolling through Paris, accompanied not by traffic and pedestrians but by merde.
The second type of visit is much more fragrant. Eau de Paris, the public water-supply service, organizes themed walking tours in different parts of the city. One of them takes visitors on a 2.5 kilometre stroll around the Left Bank, to see a seventeenth-century aqueduct and some of the old fountains. Another takes in the springs in the old village of Montmartre. There’s also a guided tour of the best surviving Fontaines Wallace. (For more details about the tours, see the address list at the end of the book.)
Eau de Paris, by the way, is a relatively new organization created in 2009, when the city decided to take back control of its water supply, which had been in private hands since 1985. Other public services are being privatized, but Parisians couldn’t bear to think of anyone else possessing their water.
Eau, what a beautiful morning!
All of the above would seem to explain the watery goings-on every time I walk out of my front door in the north of Paris before eight in the morning.
For a start, I am very likely to get a water cannon sprayed at me. This, I always feel, is a bit over the top. After all, my only misdemeanour is wanting to get a cup of coffee. But it is never the riot police who are trying to hose me back home again. It is a green-overalled city worker, gripping the long nozzle of a hose as if it was a small guitar, sluicing the previous day’s cigarette ends, litter and dog muck into the gutter.
You would think that the residents of the neighbourhood would be grateful, but they often huff and moan at the cleaners, who have a habit of ricocheting a fine mist of watered-down detergent and assorted dirt particles on to the shoes and lower legs of anyone who gets in their way. Only when there are enough impatient pedestrians growling to get past will the cleaner turn away and squirt somewhere else, opening up a ten-second window during which people can scurry through to the wet-but-safe zone that has already been hosed.
After this trial by water, there is a second barrier at the corner of the street, which gets flooded every morning by a minor tsunami of floating jetsam gushing along the gutter on its way to the drain. The speed and depth of the torrent is often increased by a green-uniformed man sweeping it along, making sure that no paper, plastic bottles
