Chapter Chapter 326 · BRUNESEAU

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.

CHAPTER IV

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.