2024-07-28 14:11:21
The old song of the Seine
Deadline: 29.07.2024
Citizens are also bathing: Paris is bathing
Credits: Photo Alliance / Sipa USA
The river Seine has been strictly prohibited in the city for 101 years. It is very dirty. The mayor of Paris has already broken the law. Now long-distance athletes and tricycles should also be allowed in the river. What did he say to that?
DSeine doesn’t care about Paris. It simply flows and leaves the city on the right, left or, like Notre Dame, on an island in the middle. Jacques Prévert wrote: “La Seine a de la chance/ Elle n’a pas de soucis/ Elle se la coule douce/ Le jour comme la nuit”. She was good, she didn’t worry, she let herself go, day and night.
When Prévert got his in 1951 “Song of the Seine” published in a volume of poetry, Parisians were not even allowed to bathe in the river. Officially, the bathing ban from the prefectural decree of 1923 still applies today – even if Mayor Anne Hidalgo breaks it one morning in July. Near the city hall, he jumped into the Seine, swam a long way, and said: “The water is gentle.” Words like Prévert.
Before Hidalgo, the French sports minister has waded into the green waters of the Seine to prove that long distance swimmers and athletes at the Olympic Games in Paris are not threatened by bacteria such as E.coli and enterococci as well as other wastes of an organic and inorganic nature that have been for centuries for us to say zero.
Prévert said he didn’t care. But not to the people in Paris and other cities that depend on it. People don’t just offend him, and this is what they get from him: guilt and anxiety. “Et elle too de sa source/ Tout doucement lai bruit/ Et sans se faire de mousse/ Sans sorti de son lit/ Elle s’en va vers la mer/ En passant par Paris”. It came out of its source, gently and without noise, without foam, without getting out of bed, it went through Paris to the sea.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo at the Seine on July 17, 2024
Quelle: image alliance / abaca
Even before Paris, above, there are industrial cities like Troyes and the spring cloud of the nymph Sequana, who overlooks the pure, untouched Seine in Burgundy. Swimming in Paris became a problem as the boats got bigger. Modernity brings about pollution. Prévert grew up in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a region when swimming in the Seine was not yet banned. As a poet, he changed from a believer to a lyrical believer.
In his “chanson”, which is always new set to music by others in the wave-like instruments of Smetana’s “Vltava”, the Seine flows in the green fabric of the quays, decorated in the golden beauty of the city. Notre-Dame looked down on left and right with envy. So he went there, all the way to Le Havre. “En passant comme un rêve/ Au milieu des mystères/ Des misères de Paris”. Gone like a dream, amid the secrets, sadness of Paris.
The new Seine, clean, said Anne Hidalgo, the leader of the float, will be the heritage of these Games, the proud Olympic champion.
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