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.