Chương Chương 324 · THE LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA

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.