River Seine : Love labour's lost and won!

'Sous le pont Mirabeau coule la Seine
Et nos amours
Faut-il qu’il m’en souvienne
La joie venait toujours après la peine'*

                                                 'Pont Mirabeu' recital by Patricia Guedas

The Seine (/seɪn, sɛn/ SAYN, SEN, French: [sɛn] is a 777-kilometre-long (483 mi) river in northern France. Its drainage basin is in the Paris Basin (a geological relative lowland) covering most of northern France.

The Seine rises at Source-Seine, 30 kilometres (19 mi) northwest of Dijon in northeastern France in the Langres plateau, flowing through Paris and into the English Channel at Le Havre (and Honfleur on the left bank).

The Seine and Eiffel Tower, By Savani, 1987

Seine is navigable by ocean-going vessels as far as Rouen, 120 kilometres (75 mi) from the sea. Over 60 percent of its length, as far as Burgundy, is negotiable by large barges and most tour boats, and nearly its whole length is available for recreational boating; excursion boats offer sightseeing tours of the river banks in the capital city, Paris.

There are 37 bridges in Paris across the Seine (the most famous of which are the Pont Alexandre III and the Pont Neuf) and dozens more outside the city. A notable bridge, which is also the last along the course of the river, is the Pont de rNormandie, the ninth longest cable-stayed bridges in the world, which links Le Havre and Honfleur.

In Fiction, Arts And Poetry 

Georges Seurat's 
Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte 
(1884–1886)
is set on an island in the Seine.

Poet Guillaume Apollinaire wrote the great poem Pont Mirabeau just bedore his death at the age of 38 in 1918.The first stanza of the poem is inscribed on one side of the Mirabeau bridge.

The Seine was the river that Javert, the primary antagonist of Victor Hugo's 1862 novel Les Misérables, drowned himself in. It was also the river that an angry mob pushed Erik, the Phantom, main antagonist of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1910) into, and he, too, drowns.

In Ludwig Bemelmans' 1953 children's book Madeline's Rescue and the 1998 live-action adaptation of Madeline, Madeline accidentally falls into the Seine after standing on the ledge of a bridge. The notable difference between the two is that in the book, Madeline fell over after playing on the ledge, whereas in the film, she fell over trying to justify her actions towards Pepito that got all the girls in trouble.

In the 2016 film La La Land, Mia, the female protagonist, sang about her aunt who jumped into the Seine without looking and how it is similar to all the dreamers in the world who keeps on dreaming, in her final audition "Audition (The Fools Who Dream)”. The song was nominated for Best Original Song in the 89th Academy Awards.

Text : Choyon Khairul Habib, Wikipedia

*Poetry, Guillaume Apollinaire     

Video : Choyon Khairul Habib