3.V.2.3. BRUNESEAU
THE sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary.
In the sixteenth century, Henri II. attempted a bore, which
failed. Not a hundred years ago, the cess-pool, Mercier
attests the fact, was abandoned to itself, and fared as best it
might.
Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels,
to
indecision, and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a
long time. Later on, '89 showed how understanding comes to
cities. But in the good, old times, the capital had not much
head. It did not know how to manage its own affairs either
morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth any better
than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle,
everything
raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory
to every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings
in the sewer than one could understand one's position in the
city; above the unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath
the confusion of tongues there reigned the confusion of caverns;
Daedalus backed up Babel.
Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as
though this misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a
fit of rage. There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations
of the sewer. At times, that stomach of civilization digested
badly, the cess-pool flowed back into the throat of the city,
and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth. These
resemblances
of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they
were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed
indignant at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that
the filth should return. Drive it out better.
The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of
Parisians of the age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form
over the Place des Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis
XIV.; it entered the Rue Saint-Honore by the two mouths to
the sewer in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Saint-Florentin
through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre-a-Poisson
through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt, through
the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through
the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue
des Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres;
and, to the South, through the vent of the Seine, performing
its functions in inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine,
the Rue de l'Echaude, and the Rue des Marais, where it
stopped at a distance of one hundred and nine metres, a few
paces distant from the house in which Racine had lived,
respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than
the King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre,
where it rose to the height of three feet above the
flag-stones of the water-spout, and its maximum length in the
Rue Saint-Sabin, where it spread out over a stretch two hundred
and thirty-eight metres in length.
At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was
still a mysterious place. Mud can never enjoy a good fame;
but in this case its evil renown reached the verge of the
terrible. Paris knew, in a confused way, that she had under
her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as of that monstrous
bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long feet
in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bath-tub.
The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further
than certain well-known points. We were then very near the
epoch when the scavenger's carts, from the summit of which
Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Crequi, discharged
their loads directly into the sewer. As for cleaning
out, — that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which
encumbered rather than swept away. Rome left some poetry
to her sewer, and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers,
and entitled it the Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition
were in accord, in horror. The Polypus hole was no less
repugnant
to hygiene than to legend. The goblin was developed
under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the corpses
of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;
Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of
1685 to the great hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which
remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost
opposite the sign of the
Gallant Messenger. The mouth
of the
sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for the
pestilences
which had their source there; with its grating of iron,
with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a dragon's
maw in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men. The
popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with
some indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite. The
sewer had no bottom. The sewer was the lower world. The
idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur to
the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet
into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that
abyss — who would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless,
some one did present himself. The cess-pool had its
Christopher Columbus.
One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which
the Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior,
some Decres or Cretet or other, came to the master's intimate
levee. In the Carrousel there was audible the clanking
of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of the great
Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was
blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut,
from the Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert,
of Desaix, of Marceau, of Hoche, of Kleber; the aerostiers of
Fleurus, the grenadiers of Mayence, the pontoon-builders of
Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had looked down upon,
artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered with mud,
cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor
in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the
bridge of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat in the trenches
of Mantua, others had preceded Lannes in the hollow road of
Montebello. The whole army of that day was present there,
in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron
or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that was
the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind
it and Austerlitz before it. — "Sire," said the Minister of the
Interior to Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man
in your Empire." — "What man is that?" said the Emperor
brusquely, "and what has he done?" — "He wants to do something,
Sire." — "What is it?" — "To visit the sewers of Paris."
This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.