Suddenly we realized that someone had been talking to us for quite a while. Our grandmother was talking to us!
"At that time I must have been almost your age; it was the winter of 1910. The Seine had turned into a real sea. The people of Paris traveled round by boat. The streets were like rivers; the squares, like great lakes. And what astonished me most was the silence…"
On our balcony we heard the sleepy silence of flooded Paris. The lapping of a few waves when a boat went by, a muffled voice at the end of a drowned avenue.
The France of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves.
2
Even the president was reduced to cold meals by it."
This was the very first remark to ring out through the capital of our France-Atlantis… We imagined a venerable old man – combining in his appearance the noble bearing of our great-grandfather Norbert and the pharaonic solemnity of a Stalin – an old man with a silvery beard, sitting at a table gloomily lit by a candle.
This news report came from a man of about forty with a lively eye and a resolute expression, who appeared in photos in our grandmother's oldest albums. Coming alongside the wall of an apartment block in a boat and putting up a ladder, he was climbing toward one of the first-floor windows. This was Vincent, Charlotte 's uncle and a reporter for the Excelsior. Since the start of the flood he had been working his way up and down the streets of the capital in this fashion, seeking out the key news item of the day. The president's cold meals was one such. And it was from Vincent's boat that the mind-boggling photo was taken that we were contemplating. It was on a vellowed press cutting: three men in a precarious little craft crossing a vast expanse of water flanked by apartment blocks. A caption explained: "Messieurs the deputies, on their way to a session of the Assemblée Nationale."…