Les Misérables
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 downstream, 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 downstream 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 cesspool 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 crossroads, 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 network
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.
CHAPTER II—ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER
Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
network 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 Münster that John of Leyden produced his false moon, and it
was from the cesspool 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
Germoniæ58 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 Maubuée 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 fœtus 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-Barthélemys 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