The River Seine, the centerpiece of the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics in July, begins with a few drops of water in a mossy grotto deep in the forests of central France.
And not a day goes by without Jacques and Marie-Jeanne Fournier checking the source just a few steps from their door.
“I go there at least three times a day. It’s a part of me,” 74-year-old Marie-Jeanne told AFP.
Her parents were once the keepers of the spring, and now that unofficial mantle has fallen to her and her husband Jacques.
Almost 60 people live in the village of Source-Seine in the wooded hills north of Dijon.
By the time the tiny stream has reached the French capital, 300 kilometers away, it has become a mighty river 200 meters wide.
But some mornings, barely a few wet tracks are visible at the spring beneath the swirling dragonflies. However, if you scratch around in the grass a little, a small stream quickly forms.
The spring – one of two places where the river officially originates – bubbles through the remains of an ancient Gallo-Roman temple built about 2,000 years ago, said Jacques Fournier, 73.
– Celtic Goddess –
But one could easily miss this small, remote valley. There are few signs directing tourists to the statue of the goddess Sequana, the Celtic deity who gave the river its name.
In the middle of the 19th century, Napoleon III. to build a grotto and a cave “where the spring was captured to honor the city of Paris and Sequana,” said Marie-Jeanne Fournier.
In the early 1950s, when she was four years old, her parents moved into a house next to the grotto and its reclining nymph.
Her father, Paul Lamarche, was later appointed property manager and received regular visitors. A small stone bridge over the Seine, while it is still a stream, is named after him.
“Like most children in the village in the 1960s,” Fournier learned to swim in a natural pool in the river just downstream from her house.
“It was part of my identity,” said Fournier, who has lived near rivers her whole life. She retired to Source-Seine to run a guest house because “the Seine is part of my parents’ heritage.”
The Olympic flame is scheduled to be carried past the site on July 12 on its way to Paris.
The couple will be there to greet it, but as members of the Sources of the Seine association, they worry about how long the river will continue to rise near their home.
Every year the grotto becomes drier and drier as climate change ravages the region that produces some of France’s best Burgundy wines.
“My fear is that the (historic) source of the Seine will disappear,” said Marie-Jeanne Fournier. “Maybe in a few years the source will be further downstream.”
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