The secret life of the Seine

When Mort Rosenblum, world-weary foreign correspondent, moved aboard a 54-foot boat moored in the center of Paris, he knew that life would be sweet. Damp perhaps. And sometimes ripe with the smell of diesel fuel. But sunning himself on deck for the first time, in sight of characters out of Hugo or Flaubert, enjoying his view of the Eiffel Tower as the wake from a bateau-mouche sloshed the Burgundy in his wine glass, he realized that he had entered a separate "arrondissement" of the spirit, a Paris that even most Parisians would have sworn vanished decades ago. In The Secret Life of the Seine, Rosenblum is our guide to life along the river, and to the many pleasures unique to this main artery of the heart of France. We get to know his own floating village between the Pont de l'Alma and the Pont de la Concorde, but then setting out from Paris, he takes us to the river's source near Dijon, through the provinces of Burgundy and Champagne, past castles and abbeys and cherry orchards, through a thousand years of French history and culture, on to Normandy, where the Seine empties at last into the sea at Le Havre. Along the way the narrative shifts from the art of navigation and commerce t