You're on the Pont Neuf — the New Bridge, which is the oldest bridge in Paris. Four hundred years old and still called new. Paris has decided this is fine, and honestly, so have I.
Rest a hand on the stone parapet and look at the water for a second, because the water is where this story lives. For centuries this bridge was the city's front porch. Everyone crossed it, and everyone lingered on it. When Peter the Great, the Tsar of Russia, toured Paris, he declared he'd found nothing in the city more curious than this bridge. Not the palaces. The bridge.
I'm going to skip ahead about three hundred years, to March seventh, nineteen eighty-four.
That morning, two sewer workers were doing their rounds in the tunnels under the street at the end of this bridge. Paris sewers are enormous — every tunnel matches the street above it and carries the same name. So these two men were, officially, underneath the Rue du Pont-Neuf when their flashlight found a pair of eyes looking back.
A crocodile.
A live Nile crocodile, over two feet long, living in the sewers of Paris.
They called the fire department, which is what you do in France when the situation exceeds your job description. The firefighters caught her, and the zoologists at the botanical garden worked out the story. She'd almost certainly been somebody's illegal pet, released into the drains when she stopped being a fun size.
They
