“I am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.”
– Dziga Vertov

No bateaux-mouches, blaring megaphones bombarding tourists with figures and dates and facts – 780 kilometres, 845 A.D., 37 bridges, named for a Gallo-Roman goddess… No champagne dinner cruises. No film crews shooting Notre Dame, Louvre, sunset, Tour Eiffel, to a tacky soundtrack, through a pink filter.

Not this Valentine’s Day. Life flows quietly through Paris, as it is, for once, on the river.

La Seine c’est comme une personne,

La Seine is like a person. Sometimes, it runs, “it runs very fast,” says a boy, running along with it.

It hastens its pace at dusk,
But sometimes, in spring, it stops
And looks back at you, like a mirror.

It cries when you cry
or smiles to comfort you,

“and always laughs in the summer sun,” someone wrote once.

La Seine, says a cat, is a mouse to tease, a riverbank along which to stretch and purr. A girl, says an old man, as light and bright as he is tired, dancing past. The gentleman, ever gallant, tips his hat at her; in his mind, he too dances.

In the real world, he hobbles to a stone bench, alone, watches labourers unload crates from riverboats.

The Seine is a factory,
The Seine is work,

Fishermen see it glisten. They joke loudly. They sing. A little further: guitars, accordions, violins, notebooks of sketches in graphite, poems in encre de chine. Easels, oils and watercolours, aspiring Monets, Renoirs, Caillebottes, Seurats, and Manets.

La Seine,

c’est une chanson qui coule de source,

A couple of lovers, huddled against the cold, arms interlaced, defiant. Une chanson. The song is young, in love in a little garden concealed on an island. In the heart of Paris, on Valentine’s Day, under the Pont Neuf. Chestnut, walnut trees, weeping willows. Swans, tufted ducks, wagtails, black-headed gulls, river on either side, baguettes, red wine from the bottle.

La Seine is romantic, young and naïve,

“scabrous, tumultuous, capricious,” says a disenchanted lover. “A river like any other,” says a disillusioned other.

I know her as if I made her,

 for as a man is, so he sees:

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, […] and some scarce see nature at all,”

And some go through whole lives in which the Seine is just water. Valentine’s Day is just another day. It flows on the river, either way, out of Paris.

The gates open westward. The river makes its way to the English Channel, leaving behind the boy, the cat, the old man, Louvre, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, the labourers, the crates, the shivering lovers, writers, artists, bakers, musicians, accountants, pigeons and crumbs of bread some child scattered, like stars.

Il était une fois la Seine.

Il était une fois l’amour,
il était une fois le malheur,
et une autre fois l’oubli,

Il était une fois la Seine
Il était une fois la vie.

Jacques Prévert