Going Through Old Notebooks Part 18: The Seine at Night
One of the most beautiful things in the world to me is the stretch of river between the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal at nightfall.
From a notebook entry originally written in 2021.
One of the most beautiful things in the world to me is the stretch of river between the Pont Neuf and the Pont Royal at nightfall. The light on the Seine between these bridges slides liquid over the surface. Sometimes it is like shattered gold, and sometimes like colored silks or a school of flashing fish, and sometimes like quicksilver. It reflects the blue or gray of the evening sky, and the lamps that have just come on, and the floodlights of the monuments that line the banks on both sides. Stop lights and the lights from boats throw shivers of pinkish-red and mermaid-green over the broken surface. As boats move past, a current of water wells up from the bottom to form a fleeting smooth mirror, the color of the atmosphere. The blue, the gray, the bright spots on the water, the reddish blur of leafless trees in winter, green in summer, and the blue of the sky, the gold of the sky, the pink of the sky, and of the light on the buildings, the pale stone facades turning violet in the golden streetlights of a winter dusk.
On some nights the city is wounding. The lights on the water are sharp. Shadows pass over the cobbled quays; bicycles in motion, or the darting movements of rats. The blue of the night, so lovely at first, slips and crashes into black, almost without warning. The crescent moon lies low and orange, sickly and prone, as if poisoned.
On most nights, though, there is the eternal silvery blue of the evening river, shot with pink, or gold, or white, and the light that shatters as light through leaves, a black and coin-gold dapple. As I cross the old Pont des Arts, I see silver flashing up at me through the slats; a spangle of sequins, like Josephine Baker’s silver dress; a sliding, a shimmy, a proliferation; like the way a house appears magically through the whirring slats of a fence as you drive past.
In 1971 and 1972, I stayed at a little hotel on Rue Dauphine in the 6ème, just a block from the Pont Neuf. It's also my favorite 'pont.' I used it as a therapist of sorts. I'd stand in the middle, staring out at the tiny park at the tip of the Île de la Cité, and sort out a problem. Its serenity in the evenings, the changes of colors as you describe, would give me the answer I was seeking. Thanks for this reminder of what the Pont Neuf meant to me.
Luscious, ate this one up!