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.