The Seine: The River that Made Paris

The Seine, of course, is a woman. She is called la Seine, not le Seine. Poets and songwriters refer to her as female. She takes her name and her identity from the ancient goddess Sequana, who healed ailing pilgrims at her temple at the river’s source.

The Seine’s romantic power is rooted in her human scale. Compared with the Nile, the Amazon, or even the Hudson, she feels accessible, narrow enough to track the comings and goings on either side. Her banks are flat, her bridges densely packed and so low to the ground that you can almost touch the water.

THE SEINE EMERGES young and fresh in a field of springs on a remote plateau in Burgundy and grows strong and majestic by the time she reaches the sea, 777 kilometers—483 miles—away.

The Seine runs through or along the borders of dozens of towns and villages. Three great cities—Paris, Rouen, and Le Havre—serve as the anchors Napoléon evoked.

The light bouncing off her banks and bridges at night can carry even the least imaginative of us into flights of fancy.

The women agreed that they would never walk along the Seine after a late-night party.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway described the Seine as a salve against solitude: “With the fishermen and the life on the river, the beautiful barges with their own life on board, the tugs with their smokestacks that folded back to pass under the bridges, pulling a tow of barges, the great elms on the stone banks of the river, the plane trees and in some places the poplars, I could never be lonely along the river.”

It’s a place to fall in love, rekindle love, or bear witness to love.

Fluctuat nec mergitur—“She is tossed on the waves but does not sink.”

Within the city limits of Paris, thirty-five main bridges cross the Seine.