Les Misérables
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, François I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,
Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is
there, Hébert 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 cesspool, it reconstitutes 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.
CHAPTER III—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 cesspool, 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; Dædalus 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 cesspool 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-Honoré by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Élysées, the
Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue
Pierre-à-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-Élysées 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’Échaudé,
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
bathtub. 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 Créqui, 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 Gemoniæ; 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 cesspool 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 Decrès or Crétet 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 Kléber; the aérostiers 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.
CHAPTER IV
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 Vieille-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 Ménilmontant 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