RAIN COMING

The weather office is predicting rain and, by the time you read this article, it will probably fall. The rivers that will be slack will not stay slack for very long and I can still hear the words of a peasant who, under the cataracts of All Saints' Day, lamented "Where on earth is the Oise going to put all that water?"

And the one they promise it?

I know rivers whose floods are periodic and I have seen the precautions they take in a town like Dax to avoid trouble. Everywhere where water can reach houses and infiltrate, they build, as soon as the flood is reported, small cement walls that are raised as the water rises. Obviously for Paris, with all the underground pipes, they are still only blocking the sewer manholes; it would be difficult to do more for the moment.
But, in the countryside, nothing is done at all. The local residents are used to seeing water invade their gardens, their plantations, their cellars and finally their ground floors; they go up to the first floor or leave depending on whether they like water sports or dread boating on a background of cabbages or between poplars.
But what enchants me is a large housing estate whose immense sign dominates the flooded plain and of which, from a distance, one can only read these words: "Protected from flooding."