Les Misérables
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
Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, under the
Rue du Mail, under the Rue de l’Écharpe, under the Place Royale; in
1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussée d’Antin. At the
same time, he had the whole network 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, cœcum,
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.
CHAPTER V—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 network 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.
CHAPTER VI—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 antennæ, 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 cesspool 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_.59 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 Lumière 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