Under Water

Souvenir of the Paris Flood of 1910 is a special newspaper edition commemorating the rescue efforts of Breton sailors in the great inundation that lasted almost a month. During that time the main rail station was flooded, as was the basement of the Louvre Museum and, on some boulevards, wooden walkways of the kind usually seen in pictures of Venice were the only safe way of travel on foot.
Come forward in time nearly four decades (to 1948) as the couple in Ralph Bartholomew's publicity photo for General Electric appliances encounter "The Mystery of the Flooded Basement."

A genuine mystery is how Edouard Denis Baldus took this panormaic photograph of the Rhone River inundation of Avignon in 1856. My guess is that he went up in a balloon.
I had been looking at flood pictures recently, after reading Helen Constantine's vivid translation of Emile Zola's The Flood (from the book French Tales, Oxford University Press: 2008). In The Flood, Zola imagined the Garonne River as an animal attacking a tiny village. He based his story on accounts of a flood near Toulouse on 22 June 1875, that he read about in L'Illustration. Told through the voice of Louis Roubeau, a seventy year-old farmer just retired, whose younger daughter Veronique is engaged to Gaspard, a nice young man who adores her, Roubeau expects to end his days in contentment.
“In the preceding days it had in fact rained for sixty hours without stopping. The Garonne ne had been very had high since the previous day; but we trusted it and as long as it didn’t rise above the banks we did not consider it a bad neighbor. It served us well!”
Then tragedy strikes.

“Behind the people who were running between the trunks of the poplars, in the middle of great tufts of grass, we had just seen something that looked like a pack of wild beasts, grey with yellow spots, advancing toward us.”

“Now the waves came in one unbroken line, rearing up and collapsing again, with the thunderous noise of a battalion charging. In the first onslaught they had broken down three poplar trees; their tall branches crashed down and disappeared. A wooden hut was overwhelmed; a wall collapsed; unharnessed carts were swept away like straws. Bur mostly the water seemed to be pursuing those who were fleeing.”
“Of the collapse all we could see was the water in turmoil, and waves splashing up again under the debris of the roof. Then it was calm once more; the vast lake found its level once again around the black cavity of the drowned house with its carcase of broken planks sticking up out of the water.”
These pictures seem too aesthetically pleasing somehow, no match for Zola's words in portraying the reality of inundation, although both Marcel Bovis (Paris, 1935) and Rene Jacques (the Marne, 1949) are fine photographers. And when flood waters recede, what they leave behind seems unbelievable. Perhaps so did the fabled City of Ys as it vanished beneath the waves near Finistere.