When Zouave gets his feet in water
LAST week proved to be a tough challenge for Zouave (pronounced zoo-aav), one of the most recognisable symbols of the French capital, when he started getting his feet in water.
Following non-stop rains all over the country for the past three months and freezing cold weather, much to the chagrin of global-warming enthusiasts, the Loing, a tributary of the Seine, boiled over turning the streets of sidelong cities such as Montargis, Nemours and Souppe into canals.
In newspaper photographs and television camera shots showing boats rowing along buildings and houses one could easily confound these towns with Venice. When the Loing emptied its extra load into the Seine, panic also gripped Paris.
Louvre, Musée d’Orsay and other museums in the risk zones closed their doors and hurriedly shifted paintings and sculptures to upper floors. River bank parks, cafés and driveways were barred to the public.
An event largely ignored for some reason by local and international media was the submergence into water of a part of the Jatte island, north-east of Paris. Reputed for its ‘open-air studio’ where famous painters like Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Vincent Van Gogh and many others created their masterpieces, Jatte is today most frequently visited by art enthusiasts who come to see the replicas of works and the details of their creations. Last week these landmarks slid many metres deep into the rising waters of the Seine.
Jatte is also famous for its honey museum and a hundred or so beehives could be shifted to safety in time before floodwaters could reach and drown them.
But let’s get back to Zouave, avidly photographed today by tourists most of whom generally ignore his history.
The word comes from the name of a regiment of French soldiers based in Algeria in the nineteenth century. Many of these zouaves were Europeans but quite a number also had Arab origins. To face the desert conditions, their uniforms consisted of loose Bedouin style cotton shirts, high boots and fez caps. Their unusual appearance entered the French language and today someone with an eccentric behaviour is known as a zouave.
The zouave soldiers played a decisive role in 1854 when they fought at the Alma battlefront against Russian forces and won the Crimean war. Consequently, Emperor Napoleon III ordered the construction of the Alma bridge on the Seine in the seventh arrondisement of Paris. The symbolic monument was inaugurated by the emperor in 1856, its principal attraction being a zouave standing on a column in the middle and attentively watching the Seine’s waves.
But, with the passage of time, the Zouave gradually transformed himself from a historical and heroic figure into a very useful measuring instrument. Today if you see his feet drenched, it is a sign that the Seine is mounting, though it hardly indicates immediate danger. But when the water level reaches his knees, a red alert is indispensible and boats are banned from entering the river.
Though as these lines are being written the water level in the Seine has shrunk back to well below Zouave’s knees, last Friday it had gone above his waist signifying a rise of more than six metres, hence the panic.
As floods all over France are currently the topic of the day in daily television news broadcasts, many channels also projected old images of the highest rise in the Seine level in 1910. A number of black-and-white film documentaries showed Zouave drowned in water up to his shoulders.
But then there is a brighter side to everything. A fishing competition is held in Paris on the first weekend of every June. This year’s champion was not an experienced fisherman but a teenager named Thomas who pulled up in less than ten minutes a 25kg catfish. “It was heavy!” he exclaimed.
The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2016
Dear visitor, the comments section is undergoing an overhaul and will return soon.