City of Light on water
A river cruise in Paris allows visitors to see historic city from a new perspective
PARIS, FRANCE— It’s a slow go, as we roll up the river, slicing through the calm, flat waters of the Seine, right through the heart of Paris, some of its best known sites hovering above us — places so postcard-pretty, and so utterly familiar all over the world, that their presence almost seems surreal. On the near and far shores, couples stroll hand-in-hand, making the City of Light into their City of Love, while touristy tour boats, the Bateaux Mouches, some of them stuffed to the gills with snap-happy visitors, motor on past us. Looking up, I take in a view honoured by time, a scene seen by thousands, for hundreds of years. And yet, sitting at the floor-to-ceiling window in my state room, it all seems suddenly new.
Most of Europe’s great cities — Paris included — were built from the river, up. During the generations before the invention of motorized transportation, these rivers were the roads of the continent, taking people to work, or market, or wherever they needed to go. I’m here on the Seine, sailing aboard Uniworld’s brand-new uber-luxurious ship, the SS Joie de Vivre, launched just this year, to get a taste of those times, and along the way, a new perspective on Paris (and its surrounds).
While France’s famous capital has experienced some difficult times in the last couple years, it still welcomes millions of travellers, most of whom jam the city’s labyrinthine web of roadways on tour buses and taxis. Built with a length of 125 metres (about 10 metres shorter than the standard), the Joie de Vivre, which was built to feel like a floating five-star hotel, is able to dock deep in the heart of Paris, at the Quai de Grenelle in the 15th Arrondissement, the steel girders of the Eiffel Tower easily visible from the top deck (called the sun deck), just around a bend in the river.
As we sail down the Seine, I wander up onto the sun deck to take a few photos and stumble into a conversation with the ship’s captain, Sebastien Humbert. As it’s a warm day, he’s standing in the open door frame of the wheelhouse in his shirt sleeves, chatting with a small cluster of his navigational crew just inside. I introduce myself and, after some chit-chat in French about life in this country, I ask him the difference it makes seeing things from river level. Originally from Rouen, the capital of Normandy and also a city on the Seine, Humbert says that it’s special to sail on his home river.
“My father, grandfather, aunts, uncles, they’re all captains — and I grew up sailing with them,” he notes, in a distinctly French accent. “Every morning,” he continues, as we move inside the wheelhouse, “it’s a new city or town, it’s a new view.” And his first mate, Wattiau Xavier, adds that seeing Paris from the ship lets you have an almost secret, backstage access. “On the road side, all the chateaus and castles, they’re closed up, behind walls,” he says. “But here, they open onto the river. They’re wide open.”
I see what he’s saying as we sail just a small portion of the 777-kilometre Seine, from the Paris 15th to Caudebec-en-Caux and back. Lounging on my bed (much has been made of the beds on this ship, custom-made with horsehair mattresses by Savoir of England), I watch the city ebb away, centuries-old architecture giving way to the suburbs, me a fly on the wall, watching couples push strollers along riverside paths and old men feeding birds from benches, finally leaving the city behind and entering the French countryside.
Still a working river, we pass through a series of locks and steam by dozens of smallish cargo ships carrying all sorts of products, weighed down and close to the water. Ancient villages climb away on the riverbanks; crumbling turrets crown hilltops; very old churches with their still-soaring spires rise above bustling river towns.
At each stop, I take the opportunity to walk riverside pathways, wandering through parks and even discovering islands in the middle of the Seine that, it seems, few know exist, quiet green spaces surrounded by water, with no other tourists or cruisers in sight.
The cruise line also spent a considerable amount of time and attention trying to bring Paris inside the ship. This new “Super Ship” was launched this past March with Dynasty star Dame Joan Collins as godmother. It feels like an almost fantastical, kaleidoscopic vision of Paris in the first half of the 20th century, from the gilded and wrought iron finishes and Art Deco furniture to the Sotheby’s-sourced artwork on the walls. Head to the bow and you’ll find sunny Le Bistrot, which pairs a Paris brasserie feel with big, retractable windows, and, to the stern, after dark, to hang out at Claude’s supper club — crew use hydraulics to cover a small, indoor resistance-training pool that occupies this space during the day with a retractable dance floor, transforming the Club L’Esprit spa into a sort of speakeasy.
And while ocean liners are usually defined by the facilities on board, river ships set themselves apart, in part, by their itinerary. While many different lines ply the waters of the Seine, the Joie de Vivre’s tours almost completely coincide with my stated purpose here — to find new perspectives on this beautiful, familiar city. In their case, it’s behind, below, and above.
At the rambling Palace of Versailles, we go behind the scenes, escaping the long lines and the crush of the masses touring the main public galleries and instead enjoy a private tour led by an eccentric guide with a weird, pencil-thin moustache and a ring of giant, old-school keys, taking us through what he called the “secret rooms” sealed from public view even in the heyday of the palace, bedrooms and bathrooms used by a series of kings named Louis, as well as Marie Antoinette, which he opens, one-by-one, with those clanging keys.
At the Eiffel Tower, we take a small staircase down below the concrete base before later taking the elevator up, learning about the guts of the operation, seeing the spinning wheels and pulleys and three massive 200,000-kilo canisters that control the lifts. And we see brand-new angles from above, too. With the rooftops of Paris in line to gain UNESCO recognition and preservation, we make our way from the top of the Arc de Triomphe and then to the rooftop bar atop the Galleries Lafayette, where we sip Champagne, the city at our feet.
We finish on a little-known terrace, which opens from the rear of the ninth floor of a glassy think tank called the Arab World Institute to a sweeping cyclorama of central Paris, the Seine below us, the ancient Île de la Cité to our left, the sun bouncing off Notre Dame’s famous flying buttresses. Remove the cars and the mobile phones and other modern touches, and, I realize, it’s a view that hasn’t changed for centuries. The church sitting there in the middle of the Seine, parting its waters; that river rolling past it, powerful and yet placid; the flow of the Seine rolling inexorably west, all the way to the sea. Tim Johnson was a guest of Uniworld which didn’t review or approve this story.