第 三百三十三 章 · IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS

WHICH IS TREACHEROUS

He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a

pavement under his feet, but only mud.

It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a

man, either a traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on

the beach far from shore, suddenly notices that for several minutes

past, he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is

like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is

bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he

takes, as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water.

The eye, however, has perceived no change; the immense beach is smooth

and tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing distinguishes

the soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little

cloud of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the

passer-by.

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors

to approach the shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is

conscious that the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing at

every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks in two or

three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the right road; he halts to get

his bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have

disappeared. The sand has covered them. He draws his feet out of the

sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in more

deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free

from it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he

flings himself to the right, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with

indescribable terror, he recognizes the fact that he is caught in a

quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which

neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if

he have one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too

late, the sand is above his knees.

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually

gains on him; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if

the bank of sand is too ill-famed, there is no hero in the

neighborhood, all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is

condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable,

which it is impossible to either retard or hasten, which lasts for

hours, which will not come to an end, which seizes you erect, free, in

the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which, at every

effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a

little lower, which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by

a redoubled grasp, which forces a man to return slowly to earth, while

leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the verdant country,

the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the

sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment

is the sepulchre which assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths

of the earth towards a living man. Each minute is an inexorable

layer-out of the dead. The wretched man tries to sit down, to lie down,

to climb; every movement that he makes buries him deeper; he

straightens himself up, he sinks; he feels that he is being swallowed

up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, grows

desperate. Behold him in the sand up to his belly, the sand reaches to

his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious

groans, clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that

ashes, supports himself on his elbows in order to raise himself from

that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand mounts higher. The

sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only

his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it;

silence. His eyes still gaze forth, the sand closes them, night. Then

his brow decreases, a little hair quivers above the sand; a hand

projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and disappears.

Sinister obliteration of a man.

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is

swallowed up with his cart; all founders in that strand. It is

shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is the earth drowning a man.

The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents

itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is

subject to these treacheries.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also

possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris.

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain

of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were

particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the

ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as in the new galleries,

having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of

this sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away

for a certain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was

called a _fontis_, in the special tongue. What is a _fontis?_ It is the

quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of

the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked

soil is in a state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in

suspension in soft medium; it is not earth and it is not water. The

depth is sometimes very great. Nothing can be more formidable than such

an encounter. If the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is

swallowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow.

Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the

earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cesspool? Instead of

the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds,

those free clouds whence rains life, instead of those barks descried in

the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of probable

passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,—instead of

all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb

already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation

by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and

clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;

slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the

hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one’s

teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that

enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one’s head!

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems his

atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in

shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb

attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.

But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme

floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is petty,

ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is

permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.

To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going

through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows

enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and

the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a

spectre or a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the _fontis_ varied, as well as their length and their

density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.

Sometimes a _fontis_ was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or

ten; sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost

solid, there almost liquid. In the Lunière fontis, it would have taken

a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five

minutes by the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less,

according to its density. A child can escape where a man will perish.

The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every

sewerman who felt the ground giving way beneath him began by flinging

away his sack of tools, or his back-basket, or his hod.

The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;

some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer

rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.

Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil

forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to

bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under

this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Parthénon,

obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the vaults of Saint-Geneviève

hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the houses, the

mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space,

like the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was

developed in an undulating line throughout the entire length of the

cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible, the remedy could be

promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior

ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe

to the sewermen. When they entered without precaution into the sewer,

they were liable to be lost. Ancient registers make mention of several

scavengers who were buried in fontis in this manner. They give many

names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a

quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue Carême-Prenant, a certain Blaise

Poutrain; this Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain,

who was the last grave-digger of the cemetery called the Charnier des

Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d’Escoubleau, of whom we

have just spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lérida, where they

delivered the assault in silk stockings, with violins at their head.

D’Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin’s, the Duchesse de

Sourdis’, was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which

he had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de

Sourdis, when informed of his death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and

forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts. In such cases, there is

no love which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses to

wash the body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of

Pyramus and says: “Phew!”