The Seine

The place, briefly

The Seine is the reason Paris exists. The city began on an island in it, and every arrondissement number in Paris still spirals out from that island. It runs 777 kilometres from Burgundy to the Channel and about thirteen of them through the city, under thirty-seven bridges, between stone quais that were built to stop it flooding and are now mostly used for walking.

In Giovanni's Room it is the book's most persistent piece of geography. Baldwin uses the name Seine only three times. He writes river thirty-two. David crosses it, walks along it, looks down into it, and thinks about going into it, and the river is doing something different each time.

The first crossing is the good one. David and Giovanni are in a cab at dawn, going to Les Halles for oysters, and Giovanni looks out at the water and says that this old whore, Paris, as she turns in bed, is very moving. What David sees is exact and unhurried: the river swollen and yellow, nothing moving on it, barges tied up along the banks, the island widening away from them under the weight of the cathedral. It is the last completely happy passage in the novel.

In the same paragraph the mist over the river is hiding the alleys and hanging like a curse on the men who slept beneath the bridges, and one of them goes past below, black and alone. Giovanni asks David whether he has ever slept under a bridge, or whether perhaps they have soft beds with warm blankets under the bridges in his country. It reads as a joke about being poor. It is not. When Giovanni loses his job and then his room and the police are looking for him, the bridges are where David imagines him, frightened and cold and not knowing where to go.

Through the spring the river is where the two of them walk home. Baldwin gives that stretch to an older David, remembering: walking up and down this house tonight, I see again the river, the cobblestoned quais, the bridges, and the low boats going under them with washing hung out to dry. The fishermen come back as the water drops. The bookstalls on the quais open up. Then the season turns, the fishermen disappear, the banks go clear, the colours on the river fade and the river begins to rise.

The turn is where the river stops being scenery. Walking home alone one evening, David thinks for the first time about death as something real, and what he thinks about is specific: the people before him who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. He wonders how they had done it, the physical act. Below him, along the bank and under the bridges, he can almost hear the lovers and the ruins.

By then he has already frightened someone. When David vanishes for days, Jacques finds Giovanni convinced he is dead — he thought we should drag the river for you, Jacques says, but I assured him that you had not drowned yourself.

The river closes the book. Giovanni, wanted for Guillaume's murder, is caught early one morning in a barge tied up along the river. The newspapers had put him in Argentina. It was a great shock, David says, to discover that he had got no farther than the Seine, and that this lack of dash did nothing to endear him to the public. He is executed for it.

So the water that carried the novel's happiest morning is also the width Giovanni could not get across. Baldwin does not explain the pattern and does not need to. He simply keeps putting the river there.