In the summer of 1985 I rode my Vespa 150 east from Paris along the Seine until reaching a strand of strand past Melun. The temperature was warm and I waded into the river. It smelled of algae, but I plunged into the waters. Not pleasant, but not unpleasant, then again as a child in the early 1960s we swam off the sewer ducts off Wollaston Beach. Warm. We didn’t know any better as hadn’t an Amerlot swimming in the Seine.
Of course our prime swimming hole in Paris was the Piscine Deligny. The floating pool was moored on the Rive Gauche. Paris’ only outdoor piscine or at least the only one I knew. A favorite of the young and old alike.
According to parisisinvisible.blogspot.com/ at the beginning of the 1970s, one French politician, Emmanuel Hamel, wrote a letter to the Minister of the Interior complaining about topless sunbathing at the pool. His particular concern about that? The French parliament, the Assemblée nationale overlooked the pool, and it was ‘offputting’!
Tant pis.
Foto Helmut Newton 1976