THE visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a
nocturnal battle against pestilence and suffocation. It was,
at the same time, a voyage of discovery. One of the survivors
of this expedition, an intelligent workingman, who
was very young at the time, related curious details with regard
to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself
obliged to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as
unworthy
of official style. The processes of disinfection were,
at that epoch, extremely rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau
crossed the first articulations of that subterranean network,
when eight laborers out of the twenty refused to go any further.
The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the
necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at
the same time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to
count the gratings and the vents, to lay out in detail the
branches, to indicate the currents at the point where they
parted, to define the respective bounds of the divers basins,
to sound the small sewers grafted on the principal sewer, to
measure the height under the key-stone of each drain, and
the width, at the spring of the vaults as well as at the bottom,
in order to determine the arrangements with regard to the
level of each water-entrance, either of the bottom of the arch,
or on the soil of the street. They advanced with toil. The
lanterns pined away in the foul atmosphere. From time to
time, a fainting sewerman was carried out. At certain points,
there were precipices. The soil had given away, the pavement
had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a bottomless
well; they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly;
they had great difficulty in getting him out again. On
the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted large cages filled with tow
steeped in resin, from time to time, in spots which had been
sufficiently disinfected. In some places, the wall was covered
with misshapen fungi, — one would have said tumors; the very
stone seemed diseased within this unbreathable atmosphere.
Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill. At
the
point of separation of the two water-conduits of the Grand-Hurleur,
he deciphered upon a projecting stone the date of
1550; this stone indicated the limits where Philibert Delorme,
charged by Henri II. with visiting the subterranean drains of
Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth
century on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of the
seventeenth century once more in the Ponceau drain of the
old Rue Vielle-du-Temple, vaulted between 1600 and 1650;
and the handiwork of the eighteenth in the western section
of the collecting canal, walled and vaulted in 1740. These
two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of 1740, were
more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt sewer,
which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh
water of Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the
Grand Sewer of Paris, an advancement analogous to that
of a peasant who should become first
valet de chambre
to the King; something like Gros-Jean transformed into
Lebel.
Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House,
they thought they recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons,
excavated in the very sewer itself. Hideous in-pace.
An iron
neck-collar was hanging in one of these cells. They walled
them all up. Some of their finds were singular; among others,
the skeleton of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from
the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably
connected with the famous and indisputable apparition of
the devil in the Rue des Bernardins, in the last year of the
eighteenth century. The poor devil had ended by drowning
himself in the sewer.
Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the
Arche-Marion, a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited
the admiration of all connoisseurs. Everywhere, the
mire, which the sewermen came to handle with intrepidity,
abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and silver,
precious stones, coins. If a giant had filtered this cesspool,
he would have had the riches of centuries in his lair.
At the point where the two branches of the Rue du Temple
and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye separate, they picked up a singular
Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on one side the pig
hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a wolf with a
tiara on his head.
The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the
Grand Sewer. This entrance had formerly been closed by a
grating of which nothing but the hinges remained. From
one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless rag which,
arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there in
the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart.
Bruneseau held his lantern close to this rag and examined it.
It was of very fine batiste, and in one of the corners, less
frayed than the rest, they made out a heraldic coronet and
embroidered above these seven letters: LAVBESP. The
crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters
signified
Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they
had before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat.
Marat in his youth had had amorous intrigues. This was
when he was a member of the household of the Comte d'Artois,
in the capacity of physician to the Stables. From these love
affairs, historically proved, with a great lady, he had retained
this sheet. As a waif or a souvenir. At his death, as this
was the only linen of any fineness which he had in his
house, they buried him in it. Some old women had shrouded
him for the tomb in that swaddling-band in which the tragic
Friend of the people had enjoyed voluptuousness. Bruneseau
passed on. They left that rag where it hung; they did not put
the finishing touch to it. Did this arise from scorn or from
respect? Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there
sufficiently stamped to make them hesitate to touch it. Besides,
the things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot which
they select. In short, the relic was a strange one. A Marquise
had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it; it had traversed
the Pantheon to end with the rats of the sewer. This chamber
rag, of which Watteau would formerly have joyfully
sketched every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the
fixed gaze of Dante.
The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of
Paris
lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he proceeded,
Bruneseau drew, directed, and completed considerable works;
in 1808 he lowered the arch of the Ponceau, and, everywhere
creating new lines, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the
Rue Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in
1810, under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the Salpetriere;
in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue
du Mail, under the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale;
in 1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee
d'Antin. At the same time, he had the whole net-work disinfected
and rendered healthful. In the second year of his
work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance of his son-in-law
Nargaud.
It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient
society cleansed its double bottom, and performed the
toilet of its sewer. There was that much clean, at all
events.
Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected
by
gullies, jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending
illogically, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with
cicatrices on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible, —
such was, retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.
Ramifications in every direction, crossings, of trenches,
branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum, blind
alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby
sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;
nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt,
the digestive apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf
pierced with streets, a titanic mole-burrow, where the mind
seems to behold that enormous blind mole, the past, prowling
through the shadows, in the filth which has been splendor.
This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.
