Les Misérables
his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious
groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that
ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from
that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The
sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only
his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it;
silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them, night. Then
his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand
projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and disappears.
Sinister obliteration of a man.
Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is
swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is
shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man.
The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents
itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is
subject to these treacheries.
This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also
possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.
Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain
of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.
The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were
particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the
ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,
having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of
this sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away
for a certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was
called a _fontis_, in the special tongue. What is a _fontis?_ It is the
quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of
the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked
soil is in a state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in
suspension in soft medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The
depth is sometimes very great. Nothing can be more formidable than such
an encounter. If the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is
swallowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow.
Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the
earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cesspool? Instead of
the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,
those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried in
the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable
passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,—instead of
all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb
already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation
by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and
clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;
slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the
hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one’s
teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that
enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one’s head!
Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems his
atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in
shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.
But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme
floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is petty,
ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is
permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.
To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going
through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows
enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and
the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a
spectre or a frog.
Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.
The depth of the _fontis_ varied, as well as their length and their
density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.
Sometimes a _fontis_ was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or
ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost
solid, there almost liquid. In the Lunière fontis, it would have taken
a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five
minutes by the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less,
according to its density. A child can escape where a man will perish.
The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every
sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath him began by flinging
away his sack of tools, or his back-basket, or his hod.
The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;
some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer
rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.
Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil
forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to
bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under
this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthénon,
obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Geneviève
hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the
mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,
like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was
developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the
cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be
promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior
ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe
to the sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer,
they were liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several
scavengers who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many
names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a
quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue Carême-Prenant, a certain Blaise
Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain,
who was the last grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des
Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.
There was also that young and charming Vicomte d’Escoubleau, of whom we
have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida, where they
delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.
D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the Duchesse de
Sourdis’, was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which
he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de
Sourdis, when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and
forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is
no love which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to
wash the body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of
Pyramus and says: “Phew!”
CHAPTER VI—THE FONTIS
Jean Valjean found himself in the presence of a fontis.
This sort of quagmire was common at that period in the subsoil of the
Champs-Élysées, difficult to handle in the hydraulic works and a bad
preservative of the subterranean constructions, on account of its
excessive fluidity. This fluidity exceeds even the inconsistency of the
sands of the Quartier Saint-Georges, which could only be conquered by a
stone construction on a concrete foundation, and the clayey strata,
infected with gas, of the Quartier des Martyrs, which are so liquid
that the only way in which a passage was effected under the gallery des
Martyrs was by means of a cast-iron pipe. When, in 1836, the old stone
sewer beneath the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, in which we now see Jean
Valjean, was demolished for the purpose of reconstructing it, the
quicksand, which forms the subsoil of the Champs-Élysées as far as the
Seine, presented such an obstacle, that the operation lasted nearly six
months, to the great clamor of the dwellers on the riverside,
particularly those who had hotels and carriages. The work was more than
unhealthy; it was dangerous. It is true that they had four months and a
half of rain, and three floods of the Seine.
The fontis which Jean Valjean had encountered was caused by the
downpour of the preceding day. The pavement, badly sustained by the
subjacent sand, had given way and had produced a stoppage of the water.
Infiltration had taken place, a slip had followed. The dislocated
bottom had sunk into the ooze. To what extent? Impossible to say. The
obscurity was more dense there than elsewhere. It was a pit of mire in
a cavern of night.
Jean Valjean felt the pavement vanishing beneath his feet. He entered
this slime. There was water on the surface, slime at the bottom. He
must pass it. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was dying,
and Jean Valjean exhausted. Besides, where was he to go? Jean Valjean
advanced. Moreover, the pit seemed, for the first few steps, not to be
very deep. But in proportion as he advanced, his feet plunged deeper.
Soon he had the slime up to his calves and water above his knees. He
walked on, raising Marius in his arms, as far above the water as he
could. The mire now reached to his knees, and the water to his waist.
He could no longer retreat. This mud, dense enough for one man, could
not, obviously, uphold two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have stood a
chance of extricating themselves singly. Jean Valjean continued to
advance, supporting the dying man, who was, perhaps, a corpse.
The water came up to his arm-pits; he felt that he was sinking; it was
only with difficulty that he could move in the depth of ooze which he
had now reached. The density, which was his support, was also an
obstacle. He still held Marius on high, and with an unheard-of
expenditure of force, he advanced still; but he was sinking. He had
only his head above the water now and his two arms holding up Marius.
In the old paintings of the deluge there is a mother holding her child
thus.
He sank still deeper, he turned his face to the rear, to escape the
water, and in order that he might be able to breathe; anyone who had
seen him in that gloom would have thought that what he beheld was a
mask floating on the shadows; he caught a faint glimpse above him of
the drooping head and livid face of Marius; he made a desperate effort
and launched his foot forward; his foot struck something solid; a point
of support. It was high time.
He straightened himself up, and rooted himself upon that point of
support with a sort of fury. This produced upon him the effect of the
first step in a staircase leading back to life.
The point of support, thus encountered in the mire at the supreme
moment, was the beginning of the other watershed of the pavement, which
had bent but had not given way, and which had curved under the water
like a plank and in a single piece. Well built pavements form a vault
and possess this sort of firmness. This fragment of the vaulting,
partly submerged, but solid, was a veritable inclined plane, and, once
on this plane, he was safe. Jean Valjean mounted this inclined plane
and reached the other side of the quagmire.
As he emerged from the water, he came in contact with a stone and fell
upon his knees. He reflected that this was but just, and he remained
there for some time, with his soul absorbed in words addressed to God.
He rose to his feet, shivering, chilled, foul-smelling, bowed beneath
the dying man whom he was dragging after him, all dripping with slime,
and his soul filled with a strange light.