บทที่ บทที่ 328 · FUTURE PROGRESS

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.

BOOK THIRD—MUD BUT THE SOUL