Les Misérables
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 Bièvre from
the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, 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 Barrière des Martyrs, after having, let us state,
constructed the line of sewers from the Barrière 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 Traversière-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 Arbalète, 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-Mandé,
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 crossroads 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_.60
In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l’Étoile, the Rue
Saint-Louis, the Rue du Temple, the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, the Rue
Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue Folie-Méricourt, the Quai aux Fleurs,
the Rue du Petit-Musc, 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-Batelière, in
the Champs-Élysées, 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 cesspool 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 cesspool 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
cesspool 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.
BOOK THIRD—MUD BUT THE SOUL
CHAPTER I—THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES
It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,
the diver may disappear there.
The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,
Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an
eye, in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had
passed from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to
midnight, from tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the
stagnation of the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even
than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most
absolute obscurity.
An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door
of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that
sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He
remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening,
stupefied. The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him.
Celestial goodness had, in a manner, captured him by treachery.
Adorable ambuscades of providence!
Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether that which he was carrying in that grave was a living being or
a dead corpse.
His first sensation was one of blindness. All of a sudden, he could see
nothing. It seemed to him too, that, in one instant, he had become
deaf. He no longer heard anything. The frantic storm of murder which
had been let loose a few feet above his head did not reach him, thanks
to the thickness of the earth which separated him from it, as we have
said, otherwise than faintly and indistinctly, and like a rumbling, in
the depths. He felt that the ground was solid under his feet; that was
all; but that was enough. He extended one arm and then the other,
touched the walls on both sides, and perceived that the passage was
narrow; he slipped, and thus perceived that the pavement was wet. He
cautiously put forward one foot, fearing a hole, a sink, some gulf; he
discovered that the paving continued. A gust of fetidness informed him
of the place in which he stood.
After the lapse of a few minutes, he was no longer blind. A little
light fell through the man-hole through which he had descended, and his
eyes became accustomed to this cavern. He began to distinguish
something. The passage in which he had burrowed—no other word can
better express the situation—was walled in behind him. It was one of
those blind alleys, which the special jargon terms branches. In front
of him there was another wall, a wall like night. The light of the
air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point where Jean Valjean
stood, and barely cast a wan pallor on a few metres of the damp walls
of the sewer. Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate thither
seemed horrible, an entrance into it appeared like an engulfment. A man
could, however, plunge into that wall of fog and it was necessary so to
do. Haste was even requisite. It occurred to Jean Valjean that the
grating which he had caught sight of under the flag-stones might also
catch the eye of the soldiery, and that everything hung upon this
chance. They also might descend into that well and search it. There was
not a minute to be lost. He had deposited Marius on the ground, he
picked him up again,—that is the real word for it,—placed him on his
shoulders once more, and set out. He plunged resolutely into the gloom.
The truth is, that they were less safe than Jean Valjean fancied.
Perils of another sort and no less serious were awaiting them,
perchance. After the lightning-charged whirlwind of the combat, the
cavern of miasmas and traps; after chaos, the sewer. Jean Valjean had
fallen from one circle of hell into another.
When he had advanced fifty paces, he was obliged to halt. A problem
presented itself. The passage terminated in another gut which he
encountered across his path. There two ways presented themselves. Which
should he take? Ought he to turn to the left or to the right? How was
he to find his bearings in that black labyrinth? This labyrinth, to
which we have already called the reader’s attention, has a clue, which
is its slope. To follow to the slope is to arrive at the river.
This Jean Valjean instantly comprehended.
He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer des Halles; that
if he were to choose the path to the left and follow the slope, he
would arrive, in less than a quarter of an hour, at some mouth on the
Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont-Neuf, that is to say, he
would make his appearance in broad daylight on the most densely peopled
spot in Paris. Perhaps he would come out on some man-hole at the