





Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this
without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what
object? With no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why?
For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What
is its intestine? The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which
the valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most
fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure.
The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a
Chinese peasant—it is Eckberg who says this,—goes to town without
bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two
full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the
earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese
wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable
in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most
mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of
employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our
manure, on the other hand, is gold.

What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss.

Fleets of vessels are despatched, at great expense, to collect the dung
of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the incalculable element
of opulence which we have on hand, we send to the sea. All the human
and animal manure which the world wastes, restored to the land instead
of being cast into the water, would suffice to nourish the world.

Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which
jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street
department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the
pavements hide from you,—do you know what they are? They are the meadow
in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game,
they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the
evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the
bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are
health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that
mysterious creation which is transformation on earth and
transfiguration in heaven.

Restore this to the great crucible; your abundance will flow forth from
it. The nutrition of the plains furnishes the nourishment of men.

You have it in your power to lose this wealth, and to consider me
ridiculous to boot. This will form the master-piece of your ignorance.

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.






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
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.






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.






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
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.






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.






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
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.




