Paris. More than a decade ago. The Seine.
The Seine is the river that runs through the heart of Paris. It is wide, unhurried, and has been flowing through this city for longer than the city has existed. Poets have written about it. Painters have stood on its banks. Napoleon built bridges across it. And on one of those bridges, more than a decade ago, I stopped walking and simply stared. I had not expected the locks.
Across the river sits the Pont des Arts, a pedestrian bridge connecting two of Paris’s most celebrated institutions — the Louvre museum on one bank, and the Institut de France on the other. No traffic. No noise. Just people walking, and the river moving quietly below. Wooden slats underfoot, iron railings on either side, and on a clear day, the whole of Paris seems to arrange itself around you — domes, rooftops, water, light.
I slowed down. Then I stopped.
Because of the locks. Hundreds of thousands of locks, covering every inch of railing. Every size. Every colour. Brass ones, painted ones, heart-shaped ones, cheap ones from the hardware shop around the corner. Each carrying two names and one enormous hope.
That this would last. That nothing would change.
Look closely and you could read them. “Chantal et Charmaine.” “Tom + Ellie.” “2015, Qian, Jinlin — Forever.” Names in marker, names scratched in metal, names engraved by people who had planned ahead and brought the right tools. All of them saying the same thing, in every language, in every handwriting. Please. Not yet. Stay.
A Wish As Old As Worry
The story behind the locks begins, as the best stories do, with heartbreak. Mani Ratnam would have approved.
In a small Serbian town called Vrnjačka Banja, just before the First World War, a schoolmistress named Nada fell in love with an officer named Relja. He went to war in Greece. He fell in love with someone else. And did not come back to Nada. She never recovered, and eventually died of it. Which is the kind of ending that leaves a town looking for something to do with its grief.
The women of Vrnjačka Banja found an answer. They began writing their names, and the names of their loves, on locks, and fixing them to the bridge where Nada and Relja used to meet. Not a grand gesture. Not a ceremony. Just a small, stubborn wish dressed up as ironmongery. Protection, they hoped, against the same fate.
The gesture wandered. Across Europe, across decades, picking up believers everywhere it went. It found a 2006 Italian novel, in which two lovers attach a lock to a bridge in Rome and throw the key into the river. Young Europeans read it, recognised something in it, and began to act on it. Within two years, it had reached Paris.
Paris was not the end of it. The tradition has since spread to over 500 locations across 65 countries. Cologne, Moscow, Seoul, New York, Melbourne. Wherever there is a bridge and a railing, someone has arrived with a lock and a feeling.
Here is what you actually did. You brought a lock — or bought one from a vendor who had appeared on the bridge with the particular efficiency of someone who had read the situation correctly — wrote your names on it, snapped it onto the railing, and threw the key into the Seine. The lock said this is permanent. The key going into the river said I accept I cannot undo this.
It was, depending on how you look at it, either the most romantic gesture in the world or a considerable administrative problem in the making.
As it turned out, it was both.
By 2014 there were nearly a million locks on the Pont des Arts, weighing 45 tonnes. The equivalent of twenty elephants, standing very still on a wire fence, all of them believing in forever. A section of the railing collapsed under the weight. The city launched a campaign called Love Without Locks, which nobody paid the slightest attention to. Eventually the city stepped in, removed every single lock, and began the work of replacing the railings entirely.
We have always done this. Fear of losing a good thing at one end. A deep desire for more at the other. These are not weaknesses. They are the most human feelings there can be. The lock just happens to be what we had in our hands at the time.
A thread tied around the wrist. A ring slipped onto a finger. A coin tossed into a fountain. A name carved into a tree that will keep growing long after the feeling has moved on. And then a lock on a bridge and a key in a river — and the small, magnificent delusion that this time, finally, something might actually stay.
It never does. But the trying is very human, and it is very hard to argue with.
So What Did Paris Do?
It did what Paris does. It made a practical decision and somehow made it look elegant.
The old railings were pulled down and replaced with glass panels. Clean, clear, completely smooth. Nothing to attach to. No hook, no bar, no gap. A lock pressed against it would simply slide off, which is not the effect anyone was going for.
But here is what you can do now, standing on the Pont des Arts. You can look straight through. Through the glass, past the railing, all the way down to the Seine moving steadily below. The same river that was flowing when Napoleon built the bridge in 1804. Still going. Still not stopping for anyone.
There is something in that worth sitting with. We spend so much energy trying to fix things in place. Lock them down. Make them stay. And the river just keeps moving, completely unbothered, as if it knows something we have spent centuries refusing to accept.
Maybe the glass is the better lesson. Not a lock. Not a wish thrown into the water. Just clarity. See through it. Stay open. Keep moving.
The Seine keeps moving. And somehow, despite everything, so do we.
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If Paris and what tourism does to cities interests you, this one is worth your time. Tourist, Go Home.
