On the morning of June 6th, 19-year-old Arthur Germain arrived at the rural town of Source-Seine, in between two national forests in northeast France, and said goodbye to his girlfriend, his parents, the town’s mayor, some journalists, and a small group of onlookers as a guitar player strummed a classically French song in the background. Then Germain disappeared into a grove of sycamores and began looking for water. He was embarking on a journey that had, to his knowledge, never been attempted, much less completed: swimming the entire length of the Seine River, all 480 miles of it, from where it begins as little more than a trickling creek just north of Burgundy all the way to the coastal town of Le Havre, in Normandy, where it meets the Atlantic.
By Germain’s estimation, if he could maintain an average of 10 miles a day, he would need just over 50 days to complete the journey. But his lithe, 5-foot-8, 138-pound frame wouldn’t just be pulling his own weight. He wanted to be completely autonomous during the undertaking, so he planned to swim with a rope around his waist tied to an inflatable kayak full of provisions: a GoPro, a tent, a solar charging station, a hammock, three pounds of trail mix, powdered sweet potato curry, and canned sardines, to name a few. There were also keepsakes: copies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker and Kahil Gibran’s The Prophet and a mini Book of Psalms his mother had given him for protection. In total, the load added up to nearly twice his body weight.
The first few days saw him walking 18 miles over rocks and uneven dirt roads while pulling his kayak behind him. The wheels on his makeshift trailer broke almost immediately as he traipsed through wide open fields and dense forests. Then, when the river was finally deep enough for him to properly wade through, he found the waters were wild with fallen trees, strong currents, and the occasional rapid. “I had to lift the kayak above trees and sometimes had to cut them with a machete,” he told me on an afternoon in late July, when we met at a midpoint on his journey, a two-hour drive southeast of Paris. “It was like, ‘Boom!’ Imagine a rapid with a big tree in front of you and you’ve also got this kayak full of stuff.”
He lost 11 pounds that first week and a half, which he attributes to stress and the 60-degree water. But things calmed down, he quickly gained back the weight, and soon he was swiftly gliding under small stone bridges, passing idyllic scenes of rural life. He was witnessing a bucolic France a world apart from his Parisian upbringing (his mother is Anne Hidalgo, Paris’s mayor and a potential candidate for president in the next election—something Germain is not keen to discuss and wishes the French press covering his feat weren’t either). One day, in the third week of his swim, he came ashore at the village of Saint Marc sur Seine, population 150, where the mayor boasted to him about the size of his “big” city. Other sights were more startling. As he floated past the town of Nogent-sur-Seine, west of the city of Troyes, he came upon a looming surprise. “I was swimming in this dense forest,” he recalled, “and then suddenly there was this enormous smoke.” The clouds were billowing from a massive power plant. “I was shocked,” he added. “I just didn’t expect that. There were hot currents in the water, too, and it smelled like burnt toast.”
For a stretch of his journey he would be accompanied by a boat from the Protection Civile Paris Seine, a public service, to ensure he was safe from barges and other ships navigating the river. Otherwise, he’d be on his own in the water. In a time of unprecedented connectedness, when all forms of communication and material gadgets are at our fingertips, Germain was making the case for a kind of radical, endurance-based solitude. “For me, it’s important to be alone,” he said. “I don’t want a whole team behind me, giving me everything I need every time I have a problem. I can do everything myself. I don’t need help. When you live this way, you don’t use so much water or energy. You don’t need much food. You’re living without consumption.”
It’s a romantic vision of the river that harkens back to another era. The last time it was legal to swim in the Seine was nearly a century ago, when men donned full-body bathers and women wore swim caps for modesty. There were dips during heatwaves and competitive races. Even dogs were brought down to the river to be groomed. But in 1923, because of stronger currents, rising pollution, and increasingly heavy boat traffic, the practice was declared unsafe and became prohibited. Ever since, it’s often been the goal of city officials to rehabilitate the river. In 1990, Jacques Chirac, then the mayor of Paris, pledged he would swim in the Seine within five years. But he never did take that dip, and nearly three decades later, in 2018, Hidalgo, the city’s current mayor and fair Maman to our swimmer, renewed the pledge to clean the river as part of Paris’s campaign to host the 2024 Summer Olympics. The bid was successful, and she’s announced that the swimming portion of the triathlon will be held in the Seine, adding that entire stretches of the river may become open to public bathing after the games.
Yet public health officials warn that levels of e coli and other bacteria in the waters remain high. And last summer, a cement plant in eastern Paris allowed hundreds of liters of toxic wastewater to flow into the river. A recent poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion showed that only 12 percent of the respondents considered the water safe for swimming. And a €15 fine remains in place for anyone who violates the ban.
Trying to reverse the public’s perception lent an admirably civic dimension to Germain’s project. Once he obtained all the necessary permits to swim in the river—an ordeal in itself as he’d be swimming through 360 communes, each of which required its own approval process—he planned to measure its pollution levels every three miles, hoping to demonstrate that it was far cleaner than the Senegal River, where he had swum in the visibly dirty waters without any health issues. But what thrilled Germain most was the bracing novelty of the experiment itself. The trip had never been made before and would take an enormous amount of strength and self-discipline. When we met that first time, it struck me that Germain’s quest was more than an environmental marketing campaign or a survivalist stunt. He was swimming toward a kind of independence.
On an unseasonably damp evening in late July, the blond-haired swimmer began arranging his camp on a grassy riverbank. He was still in his wetsuit from the waist down, revealing a muscular teenage frame, and had a goggles-tan on his forehead. Around him, stuff was everywhere: a swim cap on the front of the kayak; a half-erected green tent on the grass; an SLR camera, which he uses to shoot a video about his day, on a tripod. A neighborhood Beagle sniffed through it all.
Our meeting had been arranged by Denise Daries, Germain’s girlfriend, who is also his publicist and social media handler. Initially we were supposed to meet in the town of Melun, a bit further south, but Germain was ahead of schedule, and here we were on the lawn of a sailing club about 30 miles outside of Paris, in the town of Seine-Port. He exchanged pleasantries with a handful of locals who came to welcome him, and politely declined a homemade meal, having already decided to fix his own pasta with vegetables—dried, astronaut-style—that he’d reheat with his mini gas burner.
Once the crowd dispersed, he changed into dry clothes and put on a lightweight down jacket held together by duct tape. His face was lightly stubbled, his fingertips were pruned, and he was still barefoot, bits of dirt between his toes. “My goal is to connect with nature and prove that I can live with barely nothing and be happy,” he said, now sitting on the ground and breaking a twig into pieces and creating a small pile on the earth in front of him. He explained that his hero is South African survivalist Mike Horn, who’s traversed the Arctic and circled the Equator. But his own approach was different. Germain wanted to push himself, yes. It’s just not solely about endurance. “I want to take some time to, you know, read and write and just chill. To think,” he said, his hazel eyes opening wide, the tips of his golden eyelashes shimmering in the late-day sun. “When you swim, you’re in a bubble. You hear the sound of the water and nothing else. I like learning, but from what is in front of my eyes.”
Germain, who has big eyes, a wavy crew cut, and the lean but muscular physique of a young Adonis, has been swimming since the age of two, just after he learned to walk, and has always been more comfortable moving barefoot and bare-chested through nature than in the stuffy confines of a classroom. “The system wasn’t made for me,” he said, explaining his decision not to continue college—much to his parent’s chagrin. Rather than immersing himself in textbooks, he prefers to learn through experience. He needs something visceral to motivate him, like when, in 2018, he spent months training to swim the English Channel. Completing the 21-mile journey in nine hours and 47 minutes—three hours of which he had tendonitis in his left arm—he became the youngest French person to accomplish the iconic endeavor. Before the crossing, his nutritionist had recommended a meat-heavy diet that sustained him for the journey. But afterward, he felt drained of energy and purpose. “My body was, like, dead,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t wake up. I was so tired. I couldn’t endure that type of eating anymore.”
Then, through friends, he met Denise, and the pair soon became inseparable—his first serious relationship, her second. “We share the same soul,” Germain said, his whole face smiling. “My life started when I met her.” She was a vegetarian, and following her lead, he traded beef for beets. But while Daries, also 19, remained in school, he dropped out once classes went online due to the pandemic. When the citywide quarantine was lifted, he went to work for an environmental nonprofit, but soon he decided to make his own statement about man’s connection to nature and came up with an idea: “La Seine a la Nage,” “The Seine by Swimming.” He would paddle his way along France’s most storied river, the one he’d grown up alongside but had never been able to swim himself. Working with Daries, his father, a swimming coach, a naturopath, and a mental coach, Germain spent a year mapping out his route and planning the expedition.
A few months prior to his departure, he’d been approached by a team of filmmakers, and was now recording what he sees with his GoPro for a documentary that Apple is producing. He was also taking his own photos, which he hoped to display in galleries, and drawing. “At first, I was very bad,” he said of his sketches, “but I’ve gotten better.” He has just one pencil and a notebook that he stows in a dry bag along with handwritten letters from Daries and his friends.
As he made his way along the river, Germain found that he didn’t have a daily routine, per se. Waking without an alarm when the sun rises, he let the weather and river conditions dictate the course of his day. But he always tried to swim the requisite 10 miles to stay on track, taking breaks along the way to refuel, defuel, and admire the scenery. As he swims, his thoughts meandered: the fresh vegetables he wants to eat when he’s home, his ambition to swim the Amazon.
He’d brought his phone with him, but had rarely been using it for anything more than taking a daily selfie to send to Daries, which she’d post to Instagram along with a caption about how he was feeling. (On June 14, for example, he attributed his physical score of 3/5 to having drunk a spinach and spirulina soup, and on July 6 the overall difficulty score was a 3.5 because of 43-mile-an-hour winds and waves.) Once he reaches his stopping point, the location of which he never knew until the moment he decided he was done for the day, he passed the time by writing, reading, and connecting with the people who live nearby. “The landscapes evolve almost as much as the people,” he said. “I talk for hours with people I just met. We discuss everything and nothing.”
Or those talks started out as nothing and became everything. Just before reaching the city of Rouen, about 93 miles from the coast, Germain wasn’t aware of when the tides would be up or down—in this part of the river they rose and fell rapidly—so finding a safe place to settle was paramount. One side of the river was wild; the other was lined with huge, beautiful houses. “This one had apple trees and a lawn with lounge chairs,” Germain recalled. “The shutters were all closed, and after I walked through town where I learned the owners were away, I decided to set up on the property. I spent the whole afternoon there. They even had a barbeque so I used it to heat up my water so I didn’t have to waste my gas. As I’m doing that, I call Denise and then I turn my back and there’s the owner! I almost had a heart attack. The guy definitely thought I was a homeless person.”
Germain said he explained his mission, and the owner let him stay and even use his shower—one of seven times he washed himself in waters other than the Seine itself. Then, he woke up at 7 a.m. the next morning to leave without disturbing the man or his family, only to discover his host had beaten him to it and left a fresh croissant and coffee outside his guest’s tent. “This croissant was so much more than just a croissant,” Germain said.
Drinking water was also a premium, though he never had trouble hydrating since people offered him refills wherever he stopped. “It was never really a problem—except the day I lost my water bottle,” he said, his eyebrows lifting. “The night prior, I couldn’t pull my kayak out of the river because the tide was too low, so I tied it up and took what I needed to set up nearby. The next morning, I went to my kayak and everything had disappeared. My Go-Pro, my camera, my water bottle, the main portions of my food, and the box for measuring the water levels. It was all gone. I looked inside to see the kayak was full of water. This is when I realized a boat must’ve come by and a wave sent the stuff everywhere.”
With a bit of luck, and help from the Protection Civile, they found half of what had floated away including the cameras and the measuring box: “I was expecting them to be wet and ruined, but they were dry. I was like, ‘God exists!’”
Typically Germain credits his achievements to a guru of a different kind: “I have learned how to master my emotions by following the Wim Hof method,” he says of Dutch adventurer Wim Hof’s three-pillar technique using the breath, exposure to cold temperatures, and a mix of commitment, will power, and self-control to survive in tough situations. “When things are hard,” he continues, “I can take pleasure in suffering. Not just in swimming, but in life. I was having so much fun that I wasn’t even counting the time.”
The beach town of Le Havre, where the Seine meets the Atlantic, is normally bustling in mid-summer. But it’s being whipped with wind on this third Saturday in July, 49 days after Germain began his swim—by increasing his daily swim by an additional three miles, he’s four days ahead of his originally scheduled arrival. Ominous clouds threaten those on the Ferris Wheel and a crowd on the promenade, some of whom take cover under the awning of a churros vendor. But the skies clear up a bit, and I find Daries among the group awaiting Germain’s arrival over by the empty volleyball courts. She’s checking her phone every few seconds for an update from his parents, who are riding on one of the handful of small motor boats alongside him.
Slowly, we all make our way over the dunes. In total, there are about 50 spectators spread out along the wide beach made even wider by the outgoing tide. The sound of the waves clash with the 5 p.m. ringing of the bells from a nearby church until they’re suddenly interrupted by foghorns. Then a chant begins: “Ar-tur! Ar-tur! Ar-tur!”
I have to squint to see him, but flares are lit and suddenly there he is, gracefully coming into view, his arms dancing in slow motion up and over the surface of the water as he turns from his front onto his back like a happy seal. Once under the barrier and in shallow enough water, he stands up and lifts both arms in the air like Rocky, but with a bit more disbelief on his face. Those in the water around him offer hugs, but it’s Daries he’s after. She wades into the water in her Nikes and the pair embrace.
Just a few days earlier, over lemonades in Paris, Daries echoed his sentiment about their cosmic union. “The connection we have,” she says, “is so real. I know it’s weird to say that when you’re only 19 years old, but I can feel it. He’s like my other half. Like the same person as me.”
That said, while she’s not much of a swimmer herself, she believes in his passions—especially his enthusiasm for environmental issues. While it’ll take some time for him to calculate and release a comprehensive review of his discoveries regarding the Seine’s cleanliness, as he suspected, it measured far cleaner than anyone may have anticipated.
“The water quality surveys were very interesting,” says Germain, about a week after he finished. We are sitting outside of a café in Paris’s 15th arrondissement, near where he lives in a small studio apartment attached to his parents’ home. “We saw that the Seine is not so polluted and does not deserve this status. I haven’t had any health problems. This is not Chernobyl! So, in fact, we are not very far from having a river that is passable. And in cities like Rouen, like Paris, where there is sometimes a lack of space, we need a place to cool in summer. Everyone dreams of diving into the Seine.”
Indeed, Germain says swimming through Paris was unbelievable. “When you swim,” he says, while eating a bowl of quinoa with fresh vegetables, “it’s a totally different experience. It’s sensorial. You feel it. And then to see this big, big tower above you. It’s so impressive and something I won’t ever forget.”
But it appears the more philosophical realizations of his undertaking will be what stays with him most; the uncomfortable feeling of existing with very little—and, by the same token, being viewed like you are very little. He experienced this, he says, when meeting people, like the man whose yard he camped in, who had no idea about his project. All they saw was a scruffy-faced guy with a torn jacket setting up camp on a riverbank, or in the case of his night in Paris, under the metro tracks.
“You’re never alone, and that’s a very hard way to live,” he tells me, now wearing a green army jacket with rips that appear to have been there when he purchased it. “You almost feel like an animal sometimes.”
These days, he’s taking a break with Daries in the countryside while waiting to review all the documentary footage. He’s eating lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, jumping back in pools and rivers for fun, and getting where he needs to go either by foot or on bike. He seems to feel pride about having achieved autonomy—from society, his parents, higher-level institutions, and the pressures to conform. And yet he’s still relishing in his primal, self-sustaining instincts. A few weeks after our lunch, there he is on Instagram, shirtless in shorts straddling the branches of a tree: “I’m training to climb,” he writes, inserting a “thinking” and gorilla emoji. “Maybe a future expedition in mind?”