Pont du Carrousel

The place, briefly

The Pont du Carrousel runs from the Louvre's Flore wing to the foot of the rue des Saints-Pères, which is the walk between the museums of the right bank and the bookshops and galleries of the left. It is one of the plainer bridges in central Paris and one of the most used.

The first bridge here opened in 1834 and was interesting. Antoine-Rémy Polonceau built it with hollow tubes of cast iron rather than solid ribs, which made it lighter and cheaper than anything comparable, and he faced the ironwork in wood to keep it from looking industrial. It was called the Pont des Saints-Pères by nearly everyone, after the street it landed on, whatever the official name said.

By the 1930s it was too narrow and too low for river traffic, and it was replaced. The present bridge, finished in 1939, is reinforced concrete faced in stone, with three shallow arches set deliberately flat so that barges can pass beneath. The four allegorical statues at its corners — Abundance, Industry, the Seine, the City of Paris — were carved by Louis Petitot for the 1834 bridge and moved onto the new one, which is why they are a century older than the thing they stand on.

The detail worth knowing is the lighting. The lamp columns at the four corners telescope: they stand about twelve metres by day and extend to around twenty at night, which was Lucien Lambert's solution to lighting a bridge without cluttering the view of the Louvre in daylight. They still work.

Camille Pissarro painted it in the last months of his life. From November 1902 to May 1903 he worked from room 32 on the third floor of the Hôtel du Quai Voltaire, a few hundred metres downstream, painting the quai Malaquais and the bridge in changing light — his only series made from the Left Bank. He left in May, meant to start another Paris series in the autumn, and died in November instead. The Pont du Carrousel, Afternoon comes out of that window.

What he painted was Polonceau's iron bridge, not this one. The stone crossing here now went up thirty-six years after his death, which makes the picture a record of something that no longer exists at an address that still does.

None of the Atlas's Paris books is set on the bridge. It is here because it is one of the two or three crossings the writers on both banks used constantly without bothering to name it — the shortest walk from the Louvre to Saint-Germain.