Виктор Мари Гюго
Les Misérables, v. 5
CHAPTER III
BRUNESEAU
The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth century Henry II. attempted soundings which failed, and not a hundred years ago, as Mercier testifies, the cloaca was abandoned to itself, and became what it could. Such was that ancient Paris, handed over to quarrels, indecisions, and groping. It was for a long time thus stupid, and a later period, '89, showed how cities acquire sense. But in the good old times the capital had but little head; it did not know how to transact its business either morally or materially, and could no more sweep away its ordure than its abuses. Everything was an obstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, was refractory to any itinerary, and people could no more get on under the city than they did in it; above, everything was unintelligible; below, inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues was the confusion of cellars, and Dædalus duplicated Babel. At times the sewer of Paris thought proper to overflow, as if this misunderstood Nile had suddenly fallen into a passion. There were, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At moments this stomach of civilization digested badly, the sewer flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris bad the after-taste of its ordure. These resemblances of the drain to remorse had some good about them, for they were warnings, very badly taken however; for the city was indignant that its mud should have so much boldness, and did not admit that the ordure should return. Discharge it better.
The inundation of 1802 is in the memory of Parisians of eighty years of age. The mud spread across the Place des Victoires, on which is the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered Rue St. Honoré by the two mouths of the sewer of the Champs Élysées, Rue St. Florentin by the St. Florentin sewer, Rue Pierre à Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie, Rue Popincourt by the Chemin-Vert sewer, and Rue de la Roquette by the Rue de Lappe sewer; it covered the level of the Rue des Champs Élysées to a height of fourteen inches, and in the south, owing to the vomitory of the Seine performing its duties contrariwise, it entered Rue Mazarine, Rue de l'Échaudé, and Rue des Marais, where it stopped after running on a hundred and twenty yards, just a few yards from the house which Racine had inhabited, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the king. It reached its maximum depth in the Rue St. Pierre, where it rose three feet above the gutter, and its maximum extent in the Rue St. Sabin, where it extended over a length of two hundred and fifty yards.
At the beginning of the present century the sewer of Paris was still a mysterious spot. Mud can never be well famed, but here the ill reputation extended almost to terror. Paris knew confusedly that it had beneath it a grewsome cave; people talked about it as of that monstrous mud-bed of Thebes, in which centipedes fifteen feet in length swarmed, and which could have served as a bathing-place for Behemoth. The great boots of the sewers-men never ventured beyond certain known points. It was still very close to the time when the scavengers' carts, from the top of which St. Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Créqui, were simply unloaded into the sewer. As for the cleansing, the duty was intrusted to the showers, which choked up rather than swept away. Rome allowed some poetry to her cloaca, and called it the Gemoniæ, but Paris insulted its own, and called it the stench-hole. Science and superstition were agreed as to the horror, and the stench-hole was quite as repugnant to hygiene as to the legend. The goblin was hatched under the fetid arches of the Mouffetard sewer: the corpses of the Marmousets were thrown into the Barillerie sewer: Fagot attributed the malignant fever of 1685 to the great opening of the Marais sewer, which remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue St. Louis, nearly opposite the sign of the Messager Galant. The mouth of the sewer in the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for the pestilences which issued from it; with its iron-pointed grating that resembled a row of teeth it yawned in this fatal street like the throat of a dragon breathing hell on mankind. The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sewer with some hideous mixture of infinitude: the sewer was bottomless, the sewer was a Barathrum, and the idea of exploring these leprous regions never even occurred to the police. Who would have dared to cast a sound into this darkness, and go on a journey of discovery in this abyss? It was frightful, and yet some one presented himself at last. The cloaca 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 attended at his master's petit lever. In the court-yard could be heard the clanging sabres of all the extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic and the great Empire; there was a swarm of heroes at Napoleon's gates; men of the Rhine, the Schelde, the Adage, and the Nile; comrades of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, Hoche, and Kléber, aeronauts of Fleurus, grenadiers of Mayence, pontooners of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had gazed at, artillerymen who had bespattered Junot's cannon-balls, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet anchored in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat to the trenches of Mantua, while others had outstripped Lannes in the hollow way of Montebello. The whole army of that day was in the court of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a company, and guarding Napoleon, then resting; and it was the splendid period when the great army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it. "Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "I have seen to-day the most intrepid man of your Empire." "Who is the man?" the Emperor asked sharply, "and what has he done?" "He wishes to do something, Sire." "What is it?" "To visit the sewers of Paris." This man existed, and his name was Bruneseau.
CHAPTER IV
CONCEALED DETAILS
The visit took place, and was a formidable campaign, – a nocturnal battle against asphyxia and plague. It was at the same time a voyage of discovery, and one of the survivors of the exploration, an intelligent workman, very young at that time, used to recount a few years ago the curious details which Bruneseau thought it right to omit in his report to the Prefect of Police, as unworthy of the administrative style. Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that day, and Bruneseau had scarce passed the first articulations of the subterranean network ere eight workmen out of twenty refused to go farther. The operation was complicated, for the visit entailed cleansing: it was, therefore, requisite to cleanse and at the same time take measurements; note the water entrances, count the traps and mouths, detail the branches, indicate the currents, recognize the respective dimensions of the different basins, sound the small sewers grafted on the main, measure the height under the key-stone of each passage, and the width both at the bottom and the top, in order to determine the ordinates for levelling at the right of each entrance of water. They advanced with difficulty, and it was not rare for the ladders to sink into three feet of mud. The lanterns would scarce burn in the mephitic atmosphere, and from time to time a sewer-man was carried away in a fainting state. At certain spots there was a precipice; the soil had given way, the stones were swallowed up, and the drain was converted into a lost well; nothing solid could be found, and they had great difficulty in dragging out a man who suddenly disappeared. By the advice of Fourcroy large cages filled with tow saturated with resin were set fire to at regular distances. The wall was covered in spots with shapeless fungi, which might have been called tumors, and the stone itself seemed diseased in this unbreathable medium.
Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down-hill. At the point where the two water-pipes of the Grand Hurleur separate he deciphered on a projecting stone the date 1550; this stone indicated the limit where Philibert Delorme, instructed by Henri II. to inspect the subways of Paris, stopped. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century in the drain, and Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth in the Ponceau conduit and that of the Rue Vieille du Temple, which were arched between 1600 and 1650, and the mark of the eighteenth in the west section of the collecting canal, enclosed and arched in 1740. These two arches, especially the younger one, that of 1740, were more decrepit and cracked than the masonry of the begirding drain, which dated from 1412, the period when the Menilmontant stream of running water was raised to the dignity of the Great Sewer of Paris, a promotion analogous to that of a peasant who became first valet to the king; something like Gros Jean transformed into Lébel.
They fancied they recognized here and there, especially under the Palais du Justice, the form of old dungeons formed in the sewer itself, hideous in pace. An iron collar hung in one of these cells, and they were all bricked up. A few of the things found were peculiar; among others the skeleton of an ourang-outang, which disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable apparition of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor animal eventually drowned itself in the sewer. Under the long vaulted passage leading to the Arche Marion a rag-picker's hotte in a perfect state of preservation caused the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere the mud, which the sewer-men had come to handle intrepidly, abounded in precious objects; gold and silver, jewelry, precious stones, and coin. A giant who had filtered this cloaca would have found in his sieve the wealth of centuries. At the point where the two branches of the Rue du Temple and the Rue Sainte Avoye divide, a singular copper Huguenot medal was picked up, bearing on one side a pig wearing a cardinals hat, and on the other a wolf with the tiara on its head.
The most surprising discovery was at the entrance of the Great Sewer. This entrance had been formerly closed by a gate, of which only the hinges now remained. From one of these hinges hung a filthy shapeless rag, which doubtless caught there as it passed, floated in the shadow, and was gradually mouldering away. Bruneseau raised his lantern and examined this fragment; it was of very fine linen, and at one of the corners less gnawed than the rest could be distinguished an heraldic crown embroidered above these seven letters, LAVBESP. The crown was a Marquis's crown, and the seven letters signified Laubespine. What they had under their eyes was no less than a piece of Marat's winding-sheet. Marat, in his youth, had had amours, at the time when he was attached to the household of the Comte d'Artois in the capacity of physician to the stables. Of these amours with a great lady, which are historically notorious, this sheet had remained to him as a waif or a souvenir; on his death, as it was the only fine linen at his lodgings, he was buried in it. Old women wrapped up the tragic friend of the people for the tomb in this sheet which had known voluptuousness. Bruneseau passed on; the strip was left where it was. Was it through contempt or respect? Marat deserved both. And then destiny was so impressed on it that a hesitation was felt about touching it. Moreover, things of the sepulchre should be left at the place which they select. Altogether the relic was a strange one: a Marquise had slept in it, Marat had rotted in it; and it had passed through the Panthéon to reach the sewer-rats. This rag from an alcove, every crease in which Watteau in former days would joyously have painted, ended by becoming worthy of the intent glance of Dante.
The visit to the subways of Paris lasted for seven years, – from 1805 to 1812. While going along, Bruneseau designed, directed, and carried out considerable operations. In 1808 he lowered the Ponceau sewer, and everywhere pushing out new lines, carried the sewer in 1809 under the Rue St. Denis to the Fountain of the Innocents; in 1810 under the Rue Froidmanteau and the Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve des Petits Pères, under the Rue du Mail, the Rue de l'Écharpe and the Place Royal; in 1812 under the Rue de la Paix and the Chaussée d'Antin. At the same time he disinfected and cleansed the entire network, and in the second year called his son-in-law Nargaud to his assistance. It is thus that at the beginning of this century the old society flushed its subway and performed the toilette of its sewer. It was so much cleaned at any rate. Winding, cracked, unpaved, full of pits, broken by strange elbows, ascending and descending illogically, fetid, savage, ferocious, submerged in darkness, with cicatrices on its stones and scars on its walls, and grewsome, – such was the old sewer of Paris, retrospectively regarded. Ramifications in all directions, crossings of trenches, branches, dials and stars as in saps, blind guts and alleys, arches covered with saltpetre, infected pits, scabby exudations on the walls, drops falling from the roof, and darkness, nothing equalled the horror of this old excremental crypt, – the digestive apparatus of Babylon, a den, a trench, a gulf pierced with streets, a Titanic mole-hill, in which the mind fancies that it sees crawling through the shadow, amid the ordure which had been splendor, that enormous blind mole, the Past.
Such, we repeat, was the sewer of the olden time.
CHAPTER V
PRESENT PROGRESS
At the present day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, and correct, and almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word "respectable." It is neat and gray, built with the plumb-line, – we might almost say coquettishly. It resembles a contractor who has become a Councillor of State. You almost see clearly in it, and the mud behaves itself decently. At the first glance you might be inclined to take it for one of those subterranean passages so common formerly, and so useful for the flights of monarchs and princes in the good old times "when the people loved its kings." The present sewer is a handsome sewer; the pure style prevails there, – the classic rectilinear Alexandrine, which, expelled from poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems blended with all the stones of this long, dark, and white vault; each vomitory is an arcade, and the Rue de Rivoli sets the fashion even in the cloaca. However, if the geometric line be anywhere in its place, it is assuredly so in the stercoraceous trench of a great city, where everything must be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer has at the present day assumed a certain official aspect, and the police reports of which it is sometimes the object are no longer deficient in respect to it. The words which characterize it in the administrative language are lofty and dignified; what used to be called a gut is now called a gallery, and what used to be a hole is now a "look." Villon would no longer recognize the ancient lodgings he used for emergencies. This network of cellars still has its population of rodents, pullulating more than ever; from time to time a rat, an old veteran, ventures his head at the window of the drain and examines the Parisians: but even these vermin are growing tame, as they are satisfied with their subterranean palace. The cloaca no longer retains its primitive ferocity, and the rain which sullied the sewer of olden times, washes that of the present day. Still, do not trust to it too entirely, for miasmas yet inhabit it, and it is rather hypocritical than irreproachable. In spite of all the préfecture of police and the Board of Health have done, it exhales a vague suspicious odor, like Tartuffe after confession. Still, we must allow that, take it all together, sweeping is an homage which the sewer pays to civilization, and as from this point of view Tartuffe's conscience is a progress upon the Augean stable, it is certain that the sewer of Paris has been improved. It is more than a progress, it is a transmutation; between the old and the present sewer there is a revolution. Who effected this revolution? The man whom every one forgets, and whom we have named, – Bruneseau.
CHAPTER VI
FUTURE PROGRESS
Digging the sewerage of Paris was no small task. The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to finish, any more than they could finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the counterstrokes of the growth of Paris. It is in the ground a species of dark polypus with a thousand antennæ, which grows below, equally with the city above. Each time that the city forms a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The old monarchy only constructed twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers, and Paris had reached that point on Jan. 1, 1806. From this period, to which we shall presently revert, the work has been usefully and energetically taken up and continued. Napoleon built – and the figures are curious – four thousand eight hundred and four metres; 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: all together two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred metres, or sixty leagues, of sewer, – the enormous entrails of Paris, – an obscure ramification constantly at work, an unknown and immense construction. As we see, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is, at the present day, more than tenfold what it was at the beginning of the century. It would be difficult to imagine all the perseverance and efforts required to raise this cloaca to the point of relative perfection at which it now is. It was with great trouble that the old monarchical Provostry, and in the last ten years of the eighteenth century the revolutionary Mayoralty, succeeded in boring the five leagues of sewers which existed prior to 1806. All sorts of obstacles impeded this operation; some peculiar to the nature of the soil, others inherent in the prejudices of the working population of Paris. Paris is built on a stratum strangely rebellious to the pick, the spade, the borer, and human manipulation. Nothing is more difficult to pierce and penetrate than this geological formation on which the marvellous historical formation called Paris is superposed. So soon as labor in any shape ventures into this layer of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. They are liquid clay, running springs, hard rocks, and that soft and deep mud which the special science calls "mustard." The pick advances laboriously in the calcareous layers alternating with very thin veins of clay and schistose strata incrusted with oyster-shells, which are contemporaries of the Pre-Adamite oceans. At times a stream suddenly bursts into a tunnel just commenced, and inundates the workmen, or a slip of chalk takes place and rushes forward with the fury of a cataract, breaking like glass the largest supporting shores. Very recently at La Villette, when it was found necessary to carry the collecting sewer under the St. Martin canal without stopping the navigation or letting off the water, a fissure formed in the bed of the canal, and the water poured into the tunnel deriding the efforts of the draining-pumps. It was found necessary to employ a diver to seek for the fissure which was in the mouth of the great basin, and it was only stopped up with great difficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from the river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and Passage Lunière, bottomless sands are found, in which men have been swallowed up. Add asphyxia by miasmas, interment by slips and sudden breaking in of the soil; add typhus, too, with which the workmen are slowly impregnated. In our days, after having hollowed the gallery of Clichy with a banquette to convey the mainwater conduit of the Ourque, a work performed by trenches ten metres in depth; after having arched the Bièvre from the Boulevard de l'Hôpital to the Seine, in the midst of earth-slips and by the help of trenching often through putrid matter, and of shores; after having, in order to deliver Paris from the torrent-like waters of the Montmartre, and give an outlet to the fluviatic pond of twenty-three acres which stagnated near the Barrière des Martyrs; after having, we say, constructed the line of sewers from the Barrière Blanche to the Aubervilliers road, in four months, by working day and night at a depth of eleven metres; after having – a thing unknown before – executed subterraneously a sewer in the Rue Barre du Bec, without trench, at a depth of six metres, the surveyor Monnot died. After arching three thousand metres of sewer in all parts of the city, from the Rue Traversière St. Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine; after having, by the Arbalète branch, freed the Censier-Mouffetard square from pluvial inundations; after having constructed the St. George sewer through liquid sand upon rubble and béton, and after having lowered the formidable pitch of the Nôtre Dame de Nazareth branch, the engineer Duleau died. There are no bulletins for such acts of bravery, which are more useful, however, than the brutal butchery of battle-fields.
The sewers of Paris were in 1832 far from being what they are now. Bruneseau gave the impulse, but it required the cholera to determine the vast reconstruction which has taken place since. It is surprising to say, for instance, that in 1821 a portion of the begirding sewer, called the Grand Canal, as at Venice, still stagnated in the open air, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was not till 1823 that the city of Paris found in its pocket the twenty-six thousand six hundred and eighty francs, six centimes, needed for covering this turpitude. The three absorbing wells of the Combat, la Cunette, and St. Mandé, with their disgorging apparatus, draining-wells, and deodorizing branches, merely date from 1836. The intestine canal of Paris has been re-made, and, as we said, augmented more than tenfold during the last quarter of a century. Thirty years ago, at the period of the insurrection of June 5 and 6, it was still in many parts almost the old sewer. A great number of streets, now convex, were at that time broken causeways. There could be frequently seen at the bottom of the water-sheds of streets and squares, large square gratings, whose iron glistened from the constant passage of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and throwing horses down. The official language of the department of the roads and bridges gave these gratings the expressive name of Cassis. In 1832 in a number of streets, – Rue de l'Étoile, Rue St. Louis, Rue du Temple, Rue Vieille du Temple, Rue Nôtre Dame de Nazareth, Rue Folie Méricourt, Quai aux Fleurs, Rue du Petit Muse, Rue de Normandie, Rue Pont aux Biches, Rue des Marais, Faubourg St. Martin, Rue Nôtre Dame des Victoires, Faubourg Montmartre, Rue Grange Batelière, at the Champs Élysées, the Rue Jacob, and the Rue de Tournon, the old Gothic cloaca still cynically displayed its throats. They were enormous stone orifices, sometimes surrounded with posts, with a monumental effrontery. Paris in 1806 was much in the same state as regards sewers as in May, 1663, – five thousand three hundred and twenty-eight toises. After Bruneseau, on Jan. 1, 1832, there were forty thousand three hundred metres. From 1806 to 1831 seven hundred and fifty metres were on the average constructed annually; since then eight and even ten thousand metres have been made every year in brick-work, with a coating of concrete on a foundation of b£ton. At two hundred francs the metre, the sixty leagues of drainage in the Paris of to-day represent forty-eight million francs.
In addition to the economic progress to which we alluded at the outset, serious considerations as to the public health are attached to this immense question, – the drainage of Paris. Paris is situated between two sheets, – a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of water, lying at a very great depth, but already tapped by two borings, is supplied by the stratum of green sandstone situated between the chalk and the Jurassic limestone; this stratum may be represented by a disc with a radius of twenty-five leagues; a multitude of rivers and streams drip into it, and the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oisin, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire are drunk in a glass of water from the Grenelle well. The sheet of water is salubrious, for it comes from the sky first, and then from the earth; but the sheet of air is unhealthy, for it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas of the cloaca are mingled with the breathing of the city; hence this bad breath. The atmosphere taken from above a dungheap, it has been proved scientifically, is purer than the atmosphere taken from over Paris. Within a given time, by the aid of progress, improvements in machinery, and enlightenment, the sheet of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air, that is to say, to wash the sewer. It is known that by washing the sewer we mean restoring the ordure to the earth by sending dung to the arable lands and manure to the grass lands. Through this simple fact there will be for the whole social community a diminution of wretchedness and an augmentation of health. At the present hour the radiation of the diseases of Paris extends for fifty leagues round the Louvre, taken as the axle of this pestilential wheel.
We might say that for the last ten centuries the cloaca has been the misery of Paris, and the sewer is the viciousness which the city has in its blood. The popular instinct has never been deceived, and the trade of the sewer-man was formerly almost as dangerous and almost as repulsive to the people as that of the horse-slaughterer, which so long was regarded with horror and left to the hangman. Great wages were required to induce a bricklayer to disappear in this fetid sap; the ladder of the well-digger hesitated to plunge into it. It was said proverbially, "Going into the sewer is entering the tomb;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we said, covered this colossal cesspool with terrors. It is a formidable fosse which bears traces of the revolutions of the globe as well as the revolutions of men; and vestiges may be found there of every cataclysm from the shells of the Deluge to the ragged sheet of Marat.
