Some people laugh outright. Others raise their eyebrows or grimace. On the stone quays of the Seine, even the most passionate odes to the river’s charms tend to arrive at the same conclusion: Nope.
“Swim in it? Me?” said retiree Patrice Desrousses, 64, recoiling ever so slightly as he paused in his promenade beside the storied waterway. “Oh, I think not.” Less than two weeks before Paris inaugurates its first Olympic Games in a century , the Seine — watery muse to poets and painters, backdrop to the city’s most majestic monuments, sighed over by generations of lovers — remains the designated open-air venue for marathon and triathlon swimming events during the global sports festival.
Whether that will actually happen, though, is anyone’s guess. Recent water-quality tests have shown steady improvement, and if current trends hold, the river may be deemed safe for swimming. But readings earlier this summer turned up high levels of E.
coli bacteria, which indicates the presence of fecal matter. Despite an expensive and ambitious antipollution initiative, officials acknowledge that a single drenching downpour at an inopportune moment could send a surge of sewage into the waterway. For visitors and locals alike, ongoing drama over whether the Seine will be swimmable has become its own spectator sport.
“Our dream was to bathe in the river like Parisians used to do 100 years ago,” the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said in May at the opening of a huge stormwater c.
