SOMETHING NASTY IN THE SEINE?

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER...

The Canal St Martin.

With temperatures soaring, the city authorities of Paris are doing their best to help us cool off. The 4^th of July will see the opening of the Paris plages; sites by the Seine where one can recline as on a real beach, eat ice cream, get a tan, flirt and ogle your fellow sunlovers, if not actually swim, the Seine being still, except in a few restricted areas, too polluted.

In the meantime, a stretch of the Canal St Martin has been opened for swimming. For almost two centuries, the canal brought drinkable water to the city, as well as providing a route for barges. It was also convenient as a place to dump stuff. Before creating the new St Martin Lido in 2016, the city dredged up hundreds of rusty bicycles, a few hand guns, quantities of edged weapons, and copious drug paraphernalia.

Even then, they hesitated. Rumours circulated of some more ominous impediment. A journalist friend covered the clean-up. I asked him if he knew why.

“Well, I have an idea,” he said. “Have you heard of Eleanor, the Pont Neuf crocodile?”

The presence of giant albino alligators and crocodiles under the cities of the west was often suggested in the ‘eighties. People bought them as pets but became alarmed when they saw them casting thoughtful glances at the family chihuahua, if not the children. They dumped them down the nearest toilet or storm drain, where, if you believed the anecdotal evidence, they thrived.

I dismissed these tales as urban myths. However, in March 1984, workers cleaning drains near Pont Neuf, Paris’s oldest bridge, alerted the fire service to the presence of a small crocodile. “She measured between two and three feet,” said one of the firemen who trapped her. “We used a shovel and brooms to hold her down, then we tied her around the nose to stop her biting.”

I remained sceptical. “What would attract a crocodile to that stretch of the Seine? You’d think it would head for somewhere more remote.”

“It is right next to the Quai de la Mégisserie,” my friend said thoughtfully.

Pet shops once lined that stretch of the Seine, some of which were suspected of consigning unsalable pets to its waters. If that’s how they disposed of puppies and kittens that had outgrown their cuteness, why not a crocodile? And where better for a predator to linger, in hopes of another tasty meal?

Meanwhile, the crocodile, now a celebrity, was in demand. An aquarium at Vanves in Brittany adopted her, christening her Eleanor. It built her an ocean-side condo that replicated les egouts where she was captured, complete with a traditional blue enamel plaque identifying her address as Pont Neuf. A sewer worker’s outfit hung on the wall, though visitors willing to put on the helmet and boots to pay her a visit were few and far between. This suited Eleanor. Like most stars, she valued her privacy.

Living in such luxury, she grew to ten feet and more than 500 pounds, and might have gone on growing for another forty years. Sadly, at the end of 2020, the Vanves facility moved her to a crocodile farm during renovations. There, she found herself among 250 other crocodiles, to whom she was completely unaccustomed. The onslaught of males during the breeding season was too much for her, and she died in May 2021, not France’s first victim of unbridled passion.

From what I’ve seen on line, people are having fun at the improvised Lido on the Canal St Martin. Nobody has yet reported any predator more dangerous than the occasional voyeur. And there couldn’t be more than one Crocodylus niloticus in the waters of Paris – could there?