BOOK SECOND. — THE INTESTINE OF THE
LEVIATHAN
3.V.2.1. THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA
PARIS casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And
this without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day
and night. With what object? With no object. With what
intention? With no intention. Why? For no reason. By
means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its
intestine? The sewer.
Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative
figure which the valuations of special science have set
upon it.
Science, after having long groped about, now knows that
the most fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers
is human manure. The Chinese, let us confess it to our
shame, knew it before us. Not a Chinese peasant — it is Eckberg
who says this, — goes to town without bringing back with
him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two full buckets
of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung,
the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham.
Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no
guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital.
A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success
would attend the experiment of employing the city to
manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the
other hand, is gold.
What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into
the abyss.
Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to
collect
the dung of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the
incalculable element of opulence which we have on hand, we
send to the sea. All the human and animal manure which the
world wastes, restored to the land instead of being cast into
the water, would suffice to nourish the world.
Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of
mud
which jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of
the street department, those fetid drippings of subterranean
mire, which the pavements hide from you, — do you know what
they are? They are the meadow in flower, the green grass,
wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle,
they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the evening,
they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins,
they are health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will
of
that mysterious creation which is transformation on earth and
transfiguration in heaven.
Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will
flow
forth from it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the
nourishment of men.
You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to
consider
me ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece
of your ignorance.
Statisticians have calculated that France alone makes a
deposit of half a milliard every year, in the Atlantic, through
the mouths of her rivers. Note this: with five hundred millions
we could pay one quarter of the expenses of our budget.
The cleverness of man is such that he prefers to get rid of
these five hundred millions in the gutter. It is the very
substance
of the people that is carried off, here drop by drop,
there wave after wave, the wretched outpour of our sewers
into the rivers, and the gigantic collection of our rivers into
the ocean. Every hiccough of our sewers costs us a thousand
francs. From this spring two results, the land impoverished,
and the water tainted. Hunger arising from the furrow, and
disease from the stream.
It is notorious, for example, that at the present hour,
the
Thames is poisoning London.
So far as Paris is concerned, it has become indispensable
of late, to transport the mouths of the sewers down stream,
below the last bridge.
A double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and
sluices, sucking up and driving back, a system of elementary
drainage, simple as the lungs of a man, and which is already
in full working order in many communities in England,
would suffice to conduct the pure water of the fields into our
cities, and to send back to the fields the rich water of the
cities, and this easy exchange, the simplest in the world, would
retain among us the five hundred millions now thrown away.
People are thinking of other things.
The process actually in use does evil, with the intention
of
doing good. The intention is good, the result is melancholy.
Thinking to purge the city, the population is blanched like
plants raised in cellars. A sewer is a mistake. When drainage,
everywhere, with its double function, restoring what it
takes, shall have replaced the sewer, which is a simple
impoverishing
washing, then, this being combined with the data
of a now social economy, the product of the earth will be
increased
tenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly
lightened. Add the suppression of parasitism, and it will be
solved.
In the meanwhile, the public wealth flows away to the
river,
and leakage takes place. Leakage is the word. Europe is
being ruined in this manner by exhaustion.
As for France, we have just cited its figures. Now, Paris
contains one twenty-fifth of the total population of France,
and Parisian guano being the richest of all, we understate the
truth when we value the loss on the part of Paris at twenty-five
millions in the half milliard which France annually rejects.
These twenty-five millions, employed in assistance and
enjoyment, would double the splendor of Paris. The city
spends them in sewers. So that we may say that Paris's great
prodigality, its wonderful festival, its Beaujon folly, its orgy,
its stream of gold from full hands, its pomp, its luxury, its
magnificence, is its sewer system.
It is in this manner that, in the blindness of a poor
political
economy, we drown and allow to float down stream and to be
lost in the gulfs the well-being of all. There should be nets
at Saint-Cloud for the public fortune.
Economically considered, the matter can be summed up
thus: Paris is a spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that
patron of well-arranged capitals, of which every nation strives
to possess a copy, that metropolis of the ideal, that august
country of the initiative, of impulse and of effort, that centre
and that dwelling of minds, that nation-city, that hive of
the future, that marvellous combination of Babylon and
Corinth, would make a peasant of the Fo-Kian shrug his
shoulders, from the point of view which we have just indicated.
Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourselves.
Moreover, and particularly in this immemorial and
senseless
waste, Paris is itself an imitator.
These surprising exhibitions of stupidity are not novel;
this is no young folly. The ancients did like the moderns.
"The sewers of Rome," says Liebig, "have absorbed all the
well-being of the Roman peasant." When the Campagna of
Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy,
and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily,
then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed
the world. This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city
and the universe. Urbi et orbi. Eternal city,
unfathomable
sewer.
Rome sets the example for these things as well as for
others.
Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar
to intelligent towns.
For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of
which we have just explained our views, Paris has beneath it
another Paris; a Paris of sewers; which has its streets, its
cross-roads, its squares, its blind-alleys, its arteries, and
its circulation, which is of mire and minus the human
form.
For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people;
where there is everything there is also ignominy by the side
of sublimity; and, if Paris contains Athens, the city of light,
Tyre, the city of might, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh,
the city of marvels, it also contains Lutetia, the city of mud.
However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the
Titanic sink of Paris realizes, among monuments, that
strange ideal realized in humanity by some men like Macchiavelli,
Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.
The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its
surface,
would present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge
has no more partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for
a circuit of six leagues round about, on which rests the great
and ancient city. Not to mention its catacombs, which are a
separate cellar, not to mention the inextricable trellis-work of
gas pipes, without reckoning the vast tubular system for the
distribution of fresh water which ends in the pillar fountains,
the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work under
the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding
thread.
There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the
product to which Paris has given birth.
3.V.2.2. ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER
LET the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the
subterranean
net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will
outline on the banks a species of large branch grafted on the
river. On the right bank, the belt sewer will form the trunk
of this branch, the secondary ducts will form the branches,
and those without exit the twigs.
This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right
angle, which is the customary angle of this species of
subterranean
ramifications, being very rare in vegetation.
A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can
be formed by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric
oriental alphabet, as intricate as a thicket, against a
background
of shadows, and the misshapen letters should be
welded one to another in apparent confusion, and as at haphazard,
now by their angles, again by their extremities.
Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages,
in the Lower Empire and in the Orient of old. The masses
regarded these beds of decomposition, these monstrous cradles
of death, with a fear that was almost religious. The vermin
ditch of Benares is no less conducive to giddiness than the
lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according to the
rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh. It was from
the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced his false
moon, and it was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that oriental
menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, caused
his false sun to emerge.
The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.
The Germoniae narrated Rome.
The sewer of Paris has been
an ancient and formidable thing. It has been a sepulchre, it
has served as an asylum. Crime, intelligence, social protest,
liberty of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws
persecute
or have persecuted, is hidden in that hole; the
maillotins
in the fourteenth century, the tire-laine of the
fifteenth,
the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin's illuminated in
the
seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands] in the
eighteenth. A
hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged
thence, the pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest
had its cave, Paris had its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic
picareria,
accepted the sewer as the adjunct of the Cour des
Miracles, and at evening, it returned thither, fierce and sly,
through the Maubuee outlet, as into a bed-chamber.
It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley
Vide-Gousset, [Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat],
for the scene of their daily labor, should have for
their domicile by night the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the
catch basin of Hurepoix. Hence a throng of souvenirs. All
sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors;
everywhere
is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-holes,
where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.
The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all
exhaustions
and of all attempts. Political economy therein spies a
detritus, social philosophy there beholds a residuum.
The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything there
converges and confronts everything else. In that livid spot
there are shades, but there are no longer any secrets. Each
thing bears its true form, or at least, its definitive form.
The mass of filth has this in its favor, that it is not a liar.
Ingenuousness has taken refuge there. The mask of Basil is
to be found there, but one beholds its cardboard and its
strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is
accentuated
by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its next-door
neighbor. All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past
their use, fall into this trench of truth, where the immense
social sliding ends. They are there engulfed, but they display
themselves there. This mixture is a confession. There,
no more false appearances, no plastering over is possible, filth
removes its shirt, absolute denudation puts to the rout all
illusions and mirages, there is nothing more except what
really exists, presenting the sinister form of that which is
coming to an end. There, the bottom of a bottle indicates
drunkenness, a basket-handle tells a tale of domesticity; there
the core of an apple which has entertained literary opinions
becomes an apple-core once more; the effigy on the big sou
becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas' spittle
meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from the
gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end of
the suicide. a livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the
spangles
which danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which
has pronounced judgment on men wallows beside a mass of
rottenness which was formerly Margoton's petticoat; it is
more than fraternization, it is equivalent to addressing each
other as
thou. All which was formerly rouged, is washed
free. The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic. It tells
everything.
The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.
When one has passed one's time in enduring upon earth the
spectacle of the great airs which reasons of state, the oath,
political sagacity, human justice, professional probity, the
austerities of situation, incorruptible robes all assume, it
solaces one to enter a sewer and to behold the mire which
befits it.
This is instructive at the same time. We have just said
that history passes through the sewer. The Saint-Barthelemys
filter through there, drop by drop, between the paving-stones.
Great public assassinations, political and religious
butcheries, traverse this underground passage of civilization,
and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the thinker,
all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous
penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet
for an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI.
is there with Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is
there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII.,
Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hebert and Maillard are
there, scratching the stones, and trying to make the traces of
their actions disappear. Beneath these vaults one hears the
brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness
of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections
in the corners. There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody
hands have been washed.
The social observer should enter these shadows. They
form a part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope
of the thought. Everything desires to flee from it, but
nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless. What side
of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful side.
Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does
not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration
of things which disappear, in the watching of things which
vanish, it recognizes all. It reconstructs the purple from the
rag, and the woman from the scrap of her dress. From the
cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from mud, it reconstructs
manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora or the jug.
By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it
recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the
Judengasse from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It re-discovers in
what remains that which has been, good, evil, the true, the
blood-stain of the palace, the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop
of sweat from the brothel, trials undergone, temptations
welcomed,
orgies cast forth, the turn which characters have taken
as they became abased, the trace of prostitution in souls of
which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the
vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's
elbowing.
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.
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.
3.V.2.5. PRESENT PROGRESS
TO-DAY the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct. It almost
realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the
word "respectable." It is proper and grayish; laid out by
rule and line; one might almost say as though it came out
of a bandbox. It resembles a tradesman who has become a
councillor of state. One can almost see distinctly there. The
mire there comports itself with decency. At first, one might
readily mistake it for one of those subterranean corridors,
which were so common in former days, and so useful in flights
of monarchs and princes, in those good old times, "when
the people loved their kings." The present sewer is a beautiful
sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical rectilinear
alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have taken
refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of
that long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade;
the Rue de Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer. However,
if the geometrical line is in place anywhere, it is certainly
in the drainage trench of a great city. There, everything
should be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer
has, nowadays, assumed a certain official aspect. The
very police reports, of which it sometimes forms the subject,
no longer are wanting in respect towards it. The words which
characterize it in administrative language are sonorous and
dignified. What used to be called a gut is now called a gallery;
what used to be called a hole is now called a surveying
orifice. Villon would no longer meet with his ancient temporary
provisional lodging. This net-work of cellars has its
immemorial population of prowlers, rodents, swarming in
greater numbers than ever; from time to time, an aged and
veteran rat risks his head at the window of the sewer and
surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin grow tame, so
satisfied are they with their subterranean palace. The cesspool
no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity. The
rain, which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes it.
Nevertheless, do not trust yourself too much to it. Miasmas
still inhabit it. It is more hypocritical than irreproachable.
The prefecture of police and the commission of health have
done their best. But, in spite of all the processes of
disinfection,
it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after
confession.
Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping
is a
homage which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this
point of view, Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the
Augean stables, it is certain that the sewers of Paris have been
improved.
It is more than progress; it is transmutation. Between
the
ancient and the present sewer there is a revolution. What has
effected this revolution?
The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have
mentioned, Bruneseau.
3.V.2.6. FUTURE PROGRESS
THE excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight
task. The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being
able to bring it to a termination, any more than they have
been able to finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the
counter-shocks of the growth of Paris. Within the bosom of
the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a thousand
antennae, which expands below as the city expands above.
Every time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out
an arm. The old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three
thousand three hundred metres of sewers; that was
where Paris stood in this respect on the first of January, 1806.
Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall shortly speak,
the work was usefully and energetically resumed and prosecuted;
Napoleon built — the figures are curious — four thousand
eight hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand
seven hundred and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred
and thirty-six; Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand
and twenty; the Republic of 1848, twenty-three thousand
three hundred and eighty-one; the present government, seventy
thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time, two
hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres;
sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An
obscure ramification ever at work; a construction which is
immense and ignored.
As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is
to-day more than ten times what it was at the beginning of
the century. It is difficult to form any idea of all the
perseverance
and the efforts which have been required to bring
this cess-pool to the point of relative perfection in which it
now is. It was with great difficulty that the ancient
monarchical
provostship and, during the last ten years of the
eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded
in perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed
previous to 1806. All sorts of obstacles hindered this
operation,
some peculiar to the soil, others inherent in the very
prejudices of the laborious population of Paris. Paris is
built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious to the pick,
the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation. There is
nothing more difficult to pierce and to penetrate than the
geological formation upon which is superposed the marvellous
historical formation called Paris; as soon as work in any form
whatsoever is begun and adventures upon this stretch of alluvium,
subterranean resistances abound. There are liquid
clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires
which special science calls
moutardes.
The pick advances
laboriously through the calcareous layers alternating with
very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds in plates
incrusted
with oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the pre-Adamite
oceans. Sometimes a rivulet suddenly bursts
through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the
laborers; or a layer of marl is laid bare, and rolls down with
the fury of a cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting beams
like glass. Quite recently, at Villette, when it became
necessary
to pass the collecting sewer under the Saint-Martin canal
without interrupting navigation or emptying the canal, a fissure
appeared in the basin of the canal, water suddenly became
abundant in the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond
the power of the pumping engines; it was necessary to send a
diver to explore the fissure which had been made in the
narrow entrance of the grand basin, and it was not without
great difficulty that it was stopped up. Elsewhere near the
Seine, and even at a considerable distance from the river, as
for instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumiere Passage,
quicksands are encountered in which one sticks fast, and in
which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas,
burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the
typhus, with which the workmen become slowly impregnated.
In our own day, after having excavated the gallery of Clichy,
with a banquette to receive the principal water-conduit of
Ourcq, a piece of work which was executed in a trench ten
metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides, and
with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up,
vaulted the Bievre from the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as
the Seine; after having, in order to deliver Paris from the
floods of Montmartre and in order to provide an outlet for
that river-like pool nine hectares in extent, which crouched
near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, let us state,
constructed
the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to the
road of Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night,
at a depth of eleven metres; after having — a thing heretofore
unseen — made a subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec,
without a trench, six metres below the surface, the
superintendent,
Monnot, died. After having vaulted three thousand
metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from the Rue
Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having
freed the Carrefour Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of
rain by means of the branch of the Arbalete, after having
built the Saint-Georges sewer, on rock and concrete in the
fluid sands, after having directed the formidable lowering of
the flooring of the vault timber in the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth
branch, Duleau the engineer died. There are no bulletins
for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful,
nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.
The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they
are to-day. Bruneseau had given the impulse, but the cholera
was required to bring about the vast reconstruction which
took place later on. It is surprising to say, for example, that
in 1821, a part of the belt sewer, called the Grand Canal, as in
Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered to the sky, in the Rue
des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city of Paris found
in its pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty
francs and six centimes required for covering this mass of
filth. The three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette,
and Saint-Mande, with their discharging mouths, their apparatus,
their cesspools, and their depuratory branches, only
date from 1836. The intestinal sewer of Paris has been made
over anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more
than tenfold within the last quarter of a century.
Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the
5th
and 6th of June, it was still, in many localities, nearly the
same ancient sewer. A very great number of streets which
are now convex were then sunken causeways. At the end of
a slope, where the tributaries of a street or cross-roads ended,
there were often to be seen large, square gratings with heavy
bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng,
gleamed dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused
horses to fall. The official language of the Roads and Bridges
gave to these gratings the expressive name of Cassis.
In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the
Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vielle-du-Temple,
the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Mericourt,
the Quai aux Fleurs, the Rue du Petit-Muse, the
Rue du Normandie, the Rue Pont-Aux-Biches, the Rue des
Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame des-Victoires,
the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere,
in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon,
the ancient gothic sewer still cynically displayed its maw.
It consisted of enormous voids of stone catch-basins sometimes
surrounded by stone posts, with monumental effrontery.
Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically
as stated in 1663; five thousand three hundred fathoms. After
Bruneseau, on the 1st of January, 1832, it had forty thousand
three hundred metres. Between 1806 and 1831, there had
been built, on an average, seven hundred and fifty metres
annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of
galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small
stones, with hydraulic mortar which hardens under water, on
a cement foundation. At two hundred francs the metre, the
sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the present day represent
forty-eight millions.
In addition to the economic progress which we have
indicated
at the beginning, grave problems of public hygiene are
connected with that immense question: the sewers of Paris.
Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a
sheet of air. The sheet of water, lying at a tolerably great
depth underground, but already sounded by two bores, is furnished
by the layer of green clay situated between the chalk
and the Jurassic lime-stone; this layer may be represented by
a disk five and twenty leagues in circumference; a multitude
of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine, the
Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne
and the Loire in a glass of water from the well of Grenelle.
The sheet of water is healthy, it comes from heaven in the
first place and next from the earth; the sheet of air is
unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the miasms of the
cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence this
bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has
been scientifically proved, is purer than the air taken from
above Paris. In a given time, with the aid of progress,
mechanisms
become perfected, and as light increases, the sheet of
water will be employed to purify the sheet of air; that is to
say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that by "washing
the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the earth;
the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.
Through this simple act, the entire social community will
experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of
health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from
Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the
hub of this pestilential wheel.
We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has
been
the disease of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris
has in her blood. The popular instinct has never been
deceived in it. The occupation of sewermen was formerly
almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the people, as
the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror
and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary
to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the
ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it
was said, in proverbial form: "to descend into the sewer is to
enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have
said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole
which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the
revolutions of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all
cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.