In Seine? Pas de putain de moyen!

By BRUCE LOWITT

The glorious and romantic Seine River that flows through Paris turns out to be so polluted and deadly that the 2024 Summer Olympics’ marathon swimming and triathlon events will be moved to the Loire, the Rhone, the Rhine or possibly the Mississippi River.

“We’re not ruling that last one out,” Bruno Le Maire, France’s Minister of Economy and Finance,” said Sunday. “We spent €1.4-billion ($1.73-billion) trying to clean up the Seine and, to put it plainly, it didn’t do merde to make it safe.

“If les Americains are willing to come up with, say, €1-billion ($1.08-billion) of that to help us balance the books, we’d be delighted to move the open-water events to one of their most famous rivers and, have them, um, take this merde off our hands,” Le Maire said.

On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo met at the Port de l’Arsenal along the Seine and, as they had promised many weeks ago, told a gathering of reporters, photographers and spectators that they were ready to swim in the river to prove its cleanliness and safety.

But after four and a half hours of “Apres vous, Madame Hidalgo.” “Apres vous, Monsieur Macron.” “Oh, non, non, toi en premier, Madame Hidalgo.” “Mais j’insiste, Monsieur Macron,” by which time it was just the two of them at the water’s edge, they packed up their arm floaties and goggles and left.

Hidalgo said she was hesitant to jump in because of the occasional body parts drifting by. “One of them,” she said with the aid of a translator, “looked very much like the tattooed leg of one of my neighbors who disappeared a few weeks ago. He loves, uh, loved, to sit and dangle his feet in the river at Île de la Cité.”

Tony Estanguet, chief organizer of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, downplayed recent reports of the hulls of Bateaux Mouches dissolving in the Seine, and the dissolving and drowning of tourists.

“That’s a rumor started by London Mayor Sadiq Khan,” Estanguet said Sunday. “He’s trying to lure the Olympic open-water events to the River Thames. Well, if you’ll, heh-heh, pardon my French, “Baise cette merde et baise-le!”