COME ON IN, THE WATER'S FINE

PARIS REDISCOVERS THE PISCINE

The Piscine Deligny in its glory days.

Starting in July, Parisians will once more be allowed to swim in the Seine. Chalk up another victory to our courageous mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who led the clean-up campaign before the Olympics and even took a dip herself – prudently, however, in a wetsuit.

Not that it will be possible for Parisians to fling themselves joyously into the cooling waters willy-nilly. Only three sites are approved for la natation, and they are widely scattered, in the 4^th, 12^th and 15^th arrondissements.

This is a sad come-down from the great days of the big Paris piscines, in particular the Deligny, when taking a refreshing dip was one of the capital’s great pleasures.

In 1785, Barthélemy Turquin, also credited with inventing the life jacket, opened the city’s first école de natation or swimming school. Between 1801 and 1803, the school, housed on a floating jetty, was towed to a spot next to Place de la Concorde and the Assemblee Nationale where, as Piscine Deligny, it served generations of Parisians as a public swimming pool.

Asian-style terraces and cafés created the atmosphere of a Turkish café. Timber for their construction came from the Dorade, the steamer which, when Napoléon’s body was brought from Saint Helena to Paris in 1840, carried it up the Seine for reburial.

During the belle époque, boulevardiers strolled to the Deligny in the afternoon to smoke, drink coffee, and admire the women in their clinging wool maillots de bain. Marcel Proust’s mother was among the swimmers. He remembered her “splashing and laughing there, blowing him kisses and climbing again ashore, looking so lovely in her dripping rubber helmet, he would not have felt surprised had he been told that he was the son of a goddess.”

The Deligny in 1845.

Private cabins were provided for changing clothes, but, as one habitué reminisced, “American girls learning French at the Alliance Française, just three Metro stops away, would come down to the pool. They seemed to enjoy perfecting their French with me. Sometimes I would take the girls into my cabin to continue their French lessons. It was charming, if not altogether comfortable.”

Things, however, soon began to go downhill – downstream? So much sewage was dumped into the Seine that, in 1844, the water had become “sale, trouble, souvent fétide et malsaine” (dirty, cloudy, often foul-smelling and unhealthy.) People continued to swim in it until 1923, when young novelist Raymond Radiguet, lover of Jean Cocteau, succumbed to typhoid fever after doing so.

The 1900 Olympic Games used the Deligny, and better filtering was installed in 1919 but it took the German Occupation to achieve a real upgrade. The Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers who had exclusive use of the facility demanded it.

In the 1960s, the Deligny became a popular gay hangout. A member of the National Assembly complained that, crossing the bridge on his way to a sitting, he was distracted by the sight of near-nude boys sunbathing below. Rather than suggesting he avert his eyes, the owners screened off the terrace, but these indignities were too much for the timbers that had borne the bones of Napoléon, and, in the early hours of July 8, 1993, the Deligny, possibly from shame, sank ingloriously into the mud.