Si la Seine M'était Contée; L'homme et la Rivière, la Seine et la France

Paris: Éditions du Tigre, 1969. 253 pages illustrations, maps, color plate 28 cm. Il a été tiré de cet ouvrage cent exemplaires numérotés de 1 à 100 qui constituent l'edition originale./ Includes bibliographical references (page 253). 4 lbs Fine in Near finer gently rubbed jacket now in archival mylar. Hardcover.

In French. Uncommon in US. A popular cultural history of the Seine by a prolific author of the small Paris house Éditions du Tigre, which issued nearly all of Prat's work — among it Fourrures et pelletiers à travers les âges (1952), Un gosse et son clocher (1966), Paysages, vie et visages des Yvelines à l'orée du XXe siècle, and Remeubler Versailles: d'accord, mais comment? — an output that places him among the independent men of letters and regional antiquarians who sustained French local and terroir history outside the university. The title's borrowing from Guitry's Si Versailles m'était conté (1954) signals the register: an evocative, anecdotal, broadly chronological narration addressed to the cultivated general reader rather than a documented monograph, and the paired subtitle announces its organizing conceit — the river first as the setting of human settlement, navigation, and labor, then as an agent in the making of the nation. The book belongs to the durable French genre of the fleuve-biography, in which a watercourse serves as the thread for a history of France seen from its banks, and it appeared at a telling moment: two years after the Georges-Pompidou expressway sealed the Right Bank against the water, and at the nadir of the Seine's postwar pollution, on the eve of the environmental and industrial-heritage turn that would reframe such subjects entirely. Its value now is accordingly less evidentiary than documentary — as a witness to how the Seine was narrated to a French public in the last years before that shift, and as a compilation of local lore, riverine trades, and topographic detail that a cataloguer should expect to find undocumented and unfootnoted. Scarce and largely absent from the major union catalogs; verify pagination, plates, and any series statement against the volume itself before finalizing the record.Seine River Valley (France) Seine, Vallée de la (France) France -- Seine River Valley.