BROWSE Columns
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The river Seine splits Paris into its Left to Right banks, with all its social and cultural signifiers. A working river with barges filled with stone and sand, sparkling Bateaux Mouches and flashing police boats. Café au lait in daytime, jet black and golden at night.
As a student of psychogeography in Paris in the autumn of 2024, my interpretation of Guy Debord’s dérive (drift) would be to follow the river, visiting the islands of the Seine from west to east, observing, exploring, writing in response. My journey would start on Île de la Grande Jatte and finish on Île de La Cité as Notre-Dame re-opened after its resurrection.
It’s a milky-tea Sunday afternoon in November and Île de la Grande Jatte is tucked away on the edges of Neuilly, hidden behind trees. Yellow leaves in droves on the roofs of the houseboats. Someone’s lit a fire, autumn on the nose.
Sisley, Monet, Seurat, Van Gogh painted here, capturing genteel escapes to the paysage away from the dusty city. Information panels about impressionists dot the path. I see no parasol-shaded, big-skirted women like those Seurat painted, but then it’s the wrong season, the wrong century.
The island is movement with tennis, football and jogging. Brisk walks. On the southern end the persistent sound is the thwack of tennis balls and the football ref’s whistle. North the dogs bark, boots crunch paths. The fabrics of choice are Lycra and cashmere. Everyone looks chic, even the runners.
At the northernmost end of the island, I get closer to the river. A boy is holding a fishing rod, more as a distraction than a sport. Nothing is biting today.
I make my way south again, past the sport centre. When I went up the island the football score was 2-0. On my return the score is nil-nil. I’d like to think of it as time travel, but I suspect it’s just a new game.
Pass by the Salvation Army hostel boat, and down the steps from the bridge that double as hill training for a runner with neon shoes. You can glimpse the northern tip of the island, locked away and accessible only by another staircase on the other side of metro line 1.
Carry on to tidy paths, past exercise machines and a dormant rose garden. A smell of mulching leaves. This island seems to host every sport: boxing, rugby, fencing, football, swimming, padel, golf. A lot of tennis. Two brave people play ping pong on this breezy day.
At the southern end of the island a massive barrage puts its arms across the Seine, holding and guiding the gushing beige water. A tiny white bus trundles past a patch of dirty snow in a field, to a turning circle, starting another slow lap of the island.
This was a place for manufacturing. A production line, an assembly. Perched in the river between Meudon and Boulogne-Billancourt it was a stopping off point between Paris and Versailles. It housed tanneries and laundries. From 1929 it churned out Renault cars, shipped away on large barges. The site was the largest factory in France, closed in 1992. Over the years the layers of industry and factory have been peeled away, decontaminated, concrete piles staked into the river.
The island still feels industrial - a grey monolith and very much a work in progress to deliver a new urban design vision. Right now, in late November, it’s mostly populated by workmen in luminous vests. The information boards advertise a cultural quarter and public space. There are statements on climate and biodiversity. A mirrored wall reflects the blue sky; plastic foliage hides metal ducting. The ashtrays are full.
La Seine Musicale glints like giant beetle at one end. The posters advertising La Haine – the musical based on Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1990s film – read ‘Jusqu’ici rien n’a changé’ (So far nothing has changed), but outside the physical change continues uninterrupted. Hammering down new foundations, for an island in development, for an assembly of ideas and money.
Enter through a canyon, between the only high-rise buildings on the island. Decide: left, or right? You might want to say north or south, but it’s actually east or west. The position of the island and your approach to it can challenge your internal compass.
Start by going west into what used to be fields for the Saint-Germain-des-Prés monastery in the Middle Ages. Later basic housing for workers from Renault. Bombed in the war, then remade into chic real estate. Designer street – Philippe Starck lived here; architect Jean Nouvel designed the curved office block in bronze.
The houses live cheek by jowl, and come in gentle pastel colours, grey, mauve, cream. One sharp geometric oddity, a black diamond on its edge.
The stunted trees have lost the leaves on the top but not the bottom. A monkish tonsure.
Heading back north, which isn’t north, you cross the canyon again and enter the park. A pair of bright green parakeets sit in a tree eating red berries.
This park is wilder than most French parks – deliberately so for biodiversity and leisure. Pass by the stables, move past one of the four wooden sculptures commemorating the great storm of December 1999 that felled 60,000 trees in Paris alone. A tree made into its own coffin.
La Tour aux Figures by Jean Dubuffet stands tall on a small hill at the end of the island. It was designed to be explored from the inside, but it’s closed today. Its shape reminds you of a large wad of chewing gum with Mondrian lines and primary colours. Turn your back on this tower and look instead at a flaming red tree at the edge of the island, before you take the steps back onto Pont d’Issy-les-Molineaux, where the Eiffel tower peeks out of the clouds, giving you some direction.
This island is narrow, constrained. A man-made island where women stand, inspiring. To beam out a wish for freedom, liberty for France.
Verdigris statues. One on each end. At the top La France Renaissante – deemed too warlike even for Jeanne D’Arc. At the bottom Statue of Liberty once faced one way, then pivoted.
The willow trees reach for the ground alongside turquoise benches and lampposts. A flash of white and minty green: the number 6 metro trundles across Pont Bir-Hakeim, up there.
Cracked steps, spongey tarmac and exercise machines. Breaths clouding, diesel fumes drift from the quays. There’s a stillness. The city is just awake.
The river is beige, flowing fast. At the Pont Saint-Louis there is a trio of Christmas trees decked out with an abundance of baubles, mirroring the plane trees above with their sea urchin-like pod decorations.
Across the water by Notre-Dame and the courts there are constant sirens, but this island is quieter. I mostly hear French spoken, and it’s hushed. Respectful of the neighbours.
Taking the narrow, elevated pavement towards the western tip of the island gives me a perfect insight into apartments, let’s me imagine the creaking richness of lives here. When I turn, everything leans towards me. There are no straight lines, and I like it.
Charles Baudelaire’s traces are all over this island, and I try to sneak a view inside Hôtel de Lauzun, imagine him as a detached flâneur, observing the rapidly changing Paris of the 1800s.
Someone’s windscreen wipers are metronoming across dry glass. I put my hand out to check for rain. It’s not raining.
Yet.
When the rain starts to splutter, I take shelter in Saint-Louis en l’Île. The nativity is set up at the back, but the proportions of this crib seem off: the wise men tower over a camel.
Back in the street, a man cycles past on a Vélib singing along with the hollow rattle of the cans someone’s left in the basket. It’s jolly, cheerful, then drowned out by clanging scaffolding poles.
And it’s properly raining now so I seek shelter again, order a café crème to warm my hands. It arrives, the colour of the river at the end of the street.
End at the start. Go back to the beginning. The birthplace of Paris, the symbol of the city.
And the centre of so much: revolution, condemnation and faith.
Approaching from the Left Bank, I’m met by the line of blue police vans along Quai des Orfèvres and the court. Someone is being taken away in a van with sirens on, followed by a neon-bright tuktuk playing Christmas music.
I’m moving towards Pont Neuf, cutting through Place Dauphine, I soon take the narrow steps down to the Square du Vert-Gallant. I walk in the park for a bit as the seagulls are taking turns to sit on the lamppost at the end. I double back on myself and go lower – down to the lumpy quayside with weathered stone faces jutting out of the wall.
At the end the weeping willows dip their long fingers into the turbulent river. The trees’ roots are moving the paving stones, breaking free.‘Sous les pavés, la plage’ as the students of May 1968 chanted, hurling paving stones.
Another gull lands for its stint on the lamppost.
I amble towards the middle of the island, adding locations to my must-visit list: Sainte Chapelle, la Conciergerie. I ask a CRS officer at a barrier if I can just walk past.
‘Why, Madame?’
I shrug in true flâneur-style ‘I’m just walking’.
‘That will not be possible.’
I peek through a hole in the gate at the Hôtel du Dieu hospital. A side of a building has been demolished – only ghost outlines of the floors and wards still visible, layers of its history exposed. The other side of the street is glittering with expensive cheap souvenirs and queues for ice cream on a freezing day.
Another fence halts me outside Notre-Dame, my path blocked again. I take a backstreet instead, get to the other end of the island where I walk down another set of coffin-like steps to the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. Rough stone, a low opening to the Seine with sharp black iron teeth.
Inside a light in a tunnel and names of places and people. Copies of secret letters, artworks and official administration, ashes and soil from the camps. Auschwitz, Drancy, Bergen-Belsen, Vel D’Hiv. The words on the wall are carved in a jagged Runic-like font. Words that tell us to forgive but never forget.
When I resurface, blinking at the cold, I see a black cormorant on the quay surrounded by white gulls. I run my hand along the wall. Is it too late to start again? To go back to the beginning.
A month later I am up early on a soft Paris morning to enter the brightly restored Notre-Dame de Paris. Blue stained glass and vibrant colours, a bronze bowl altar and heart-stopping beauty.
I don’t believe, but I feel something. A window on our multitude, beautiful together despite our differences, where we build and preserve. Restore and rebuild. I say a little prayer, light a candle, hope for more light.
After the terrorist attacks of 2015 the city’s Latin motto became a rallying cry; Fluctuat nec mergitur – ‘she is tossed by the waves but does not sink’.
This journey might be at an end, but I will keep drifting along the river.
Anja Ekelof is a writer based in Edinburgh. Born in Sweden she has lived and worked in Dublin and Paris, where she recently completed a master’s degree in creative writing. Her poetry and flash fiction has been published in the Menteur, Paris Lit Up Magazine, NEUN magazine and La Piccioletta Barca. She is currently editing a novel exploring migration and identity set in 1990s Ireland.
