3.V.3.5. IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS
A FINENESS WHICH IS TREACHEROUS
HE felt that he was entering the water, and that he no
longer had a pavement under his feet, but only mud.
It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne
or Scotland a man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while
walking at low tide on the beach far from shore, suddenly notices
that for several minutes past, he has been walking with
some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch; his
soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is birdlime.
The
strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes, as soon
as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The eye,
however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is
smooth and tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing
distinguishes the soil that is solid from that which is not
solid;
the joyous little cloud of sand-lice continues to leap
tumultuously
under the feet of the passer-by.
The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the
land, endeavors to approach the shore. He is not uneasy.
Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness
of his feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes.
All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches.
Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get his
bearings.
Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared.
The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out
of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he
sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his
ankles, he tears himself free from it and flings himself to the
left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the
right,
the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable
terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a quicksand,
and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in
which neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings
away his burden, if he have one, he lightens himself, like a
ship in distress; it is too late, the sand is above his knees.
He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand
continually gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land
is too far away, if the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is
no hero in the neighborhood, all is over, he is condemned to be
engulfed. He is condemned to that terrible interment, long,
infallible, implacable, which it is impossible to either retard
or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an
end, which seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which
drags you down by the feet, which, at every effort that you
attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little
lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance
by a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to
earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees,
the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain,
the sails of the ships on the sea, the birds which fly and sing,
the sun and the sky. This engulfment is the sepulchre which
assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the
earth towards a living man. Each minute is an inexorable
layer-out of the dead. The wretched man tries to sit down,
to lie down, to climb; every movement that he makes buries
him deeper; he straightens himself up, he sinks; he feels that
he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the
clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in the
sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to his breast, he is only
a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans,
clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that
ashes,
supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from
that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher.
The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his
throat; only his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud,
the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand
closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair
quivers above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of
the beach, waves and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a
man.
Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes
the carter is swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that
strand. It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is
the earth drowning a man. The earth, permeated with the
ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the guise of a
plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to these
treacheries.
This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea
beaches, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of
Paris.
Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the
subterranean
drain of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.
The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which
were particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones,
as in the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in
the new galleries, having no longer an underpinning, gave
way. A fold in a flooring of this sort means a crack, means
crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a certain
length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called
a
fontis, in the special tongue. What is a
fontis? It is the
quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the
surface of the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in
a sewer. The soaked soil is in a state of fusion, as it were;
all its molecules are in suspension in soft medium; it is not
earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very great.
Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If
the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swallowed
up; if earth predominates, death is slow.
Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being
swallowed by the earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it
in a cess-pool? Instead of the open air, the broad daylight,
the clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence
rains life, instead of those barks descried in the distance, of
that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable passersby, of
succor possible up to the very last moment, — instead of all
this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow
suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw
in the mire and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled
with the death-rattle; slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted
hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place of the
ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's teeth, and to writhe,
and to struggle, and to agonize, with that enormous city which
knows nothing of it all, over one's head!
Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes
redeems his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On
the funeral pile, in shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames
as in the foam, a superb attitude is possible; one there becomes
transfigured as one perishes. But not here. Death is
filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme floating
visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is
petty, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like
Clarence, is permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like
Escoubleau, is horrible. To struggle therein is hideous; at
the same time that one is going through the death agony, one
is floundering about. There are shadows enough for hell, and
mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying
man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a
spectre or a frog.
Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is
deformed.
The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their
length and
their density, according to the more or less bad quality of the
sub-soil. Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet
deep,
sometimes eight or ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable.
Here the mire was almost solid, there almost liquid.
In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a day to
disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes
by the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less,
according to its density. A child can escape where a man will
perish. The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of
load. Every sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath
him began by flinging away his sack of tools, or his
back-basket, or his hod.
The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of
the soil; some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man;
the violent summer rains; the incessant flooding of winter;
long, drizzling showers. Sometimes the weight of the surrounding
houses on a marly or sandy soil forced out the vaults
of the subterranean galleries and caused them to bend aside,
or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under this
crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the
Parthenon,
obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of
Saint-Genevieve hill. When a sewer was broken in under
the pressure of the houses, the mischief was sometimes betrayed
in the street above by a sort of space, like the teeth of
a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was developed
in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the
cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy
could be promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that
the interior ravages were not revealed by any external scar,
and in that case, woe to the sewermen. When they entered
without precaution into the sewer, they were liable to be lost.
Ancient registers make mention of several scavengers who
were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many
names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed
up in a quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue
Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain
was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last
grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents,
in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.
There was also that young and charming Vicomte
d'Escoubleau,
of whom we have just spoken, one of the heroes of the
siege of Lerida, where they delivered the assault in silk
stockings,
with violins at their head. D'Escoubleau, surprised one
night at his cousin's, the Duchess de Sourdis', was drowned
in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which he had taken
refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis,
when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle,
and forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. In
such cases, there is no love which holds fast; the sewer
extinguishes
it. Hero refuses to wash the body of Leander.
Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and says:
"Phew!"