YONNE OR SEINE?

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1938, Page 9

YONNE OR SEINE?

RIVER FLOWING THROUGH PARIS.

Parisians have been informed that Paris is not on the Seine, but they have received the news with equanimity. It is M. Allard, eminent French essayist and geographer, who has put the Parisians right and told them that the river which -flows beneath the thirty-two bridges of the capital, past the cathedral of Notre-Dame, with its graceful flying buttresses, past the grim Conciergerie, prison of the Revolution, past the magnificent facade of the Louvre and the green trees of the Tuileries and on through the city where the thousand feet high Eiffel Tower is reflected in its waters, is not the Seine but the Yonne. The Yonne, M. Allard maintains, is not the tributary of the Seine but the principal river. He puts forward the following proofs in favour of his contention. Where the Yonne and the Seine meet, at Montereau, some fifty miles upstream from Paris, the Yonne is wider, deeper and swifter than the Seine. The Yonne is longer than the Seine. The source of the Yonne is higher, being at nearly 3,000 feet altitude, whereas that of the Seine is less than 1,600 feet. It has moreover been observed that when salmon go up the so-called Seine to spawn on arriving at Montereau they turn to the right and go up the Yonne. They never go up the Seine, and the instinct of fish is more likely to be accurate than mapmakers.