بخش 5 کتاب 2

BOOK TWO

LEVIATHAN’S BOWELS

LAND IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA

PARIS THROWS TWENTY-FIVE million a year into the sea. And that is not a metaphor. How, and in what way? Day and night. With what aim? With no aim. With what thought? With no thought. What for? For nothing. By means of what organ? By means of its bowels. What do you mean, its bowels? Its sewers.

Twenty-five million is the most conservative estimate of the approximate figures provided by specialized science.

Science, having groped about for a long time, now knows that the most fertilizing and the most effective of manures is human manure. The Chinese, we have to say to our shame, got on to this before we did. No Chinese peasant, so Eckeberg1 tells us, goes to town without bringing back, at the two ends of his bamboo pole, two buckets full of what we call crap. Thanks to human manure, the soil in China is as fresh as it was in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat harvests yield up to one hundred and twenty times the amount of seed. There is no guano as fertile as the excreta of a capital. A big city is the most potent of dung beetles. Put the city to work manuring the plain and you just can’t fail. If our gold is dung, our dung, on the other hand, is gold.

What do we do with this gold dung? We sweep it into the void.

We send out convoys of ships, at great cost, to harvest the droppings of petrels and penguins at the South Pole, and the supply of incalculable opulence that we have to hand we send into the sea. If all the human and animal manure that the world loses was put back in the soil instead of being tossed out to sea, it would be enough to feed the world.

These heaps of filth piled up by the curbstones on street corners, these cartloads of muck bouncing along the streets at night, these awful cans the night carters trundle along the roadways, these fetid streams of subterranean feculence that the pavement hides from you—do you know what all this is? It is meadows in flower, it is green grass, it is parsley, sage, marjoram, and thyme, it is wild game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of great bullocks at evening, it is fragrant hay, golden wheat, it is bread on your table, it is hot blood in your veins, health, joy, life. Which is how that mysterious creation that spells transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven wants it.

Stick the stuff back in the great crucible and you will have your abundance. Feed the plains and you feed mankind.

You have the power to lose this wealth and find me ridiculous into the bargain. That would be the crowning glory of your ignorance.

Statistics show that France alone pays out half a billion every year to the Atlantic through the mouths of its rivers. Take note: With this five hundred million you could cover a quarter of our budget outlays. Man is so smart that he prefers to chuck this five hundred million in the gutter. It is the people’s very substance that is being carried away, here drop by drop, there in gushing torrents, by the miserable vomiting of our sewers into the rivers and the copious vomiting of our rivers into the ocean. Every time our cesspools hiccup, it costs us a thousand francs. This has two results: The soil is impoverished and the water is contaminated. Hunger is delivered by the furrow and disease by the river.

It is well-known, for instance, that at this point in time, the Thames is poisoning London. When it comes to Paris, they have recently had to move most of the sewer outlets downstream past the last bridge.

A twin tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sweeping sluices, sucking in and driving back, an elementary drainage system as simple as a human lung, and which is already fully operational in several counties in England, would suffice to bring into our towns the pure water of our fields and to send back to our fields the rich water of the towns, and this simple two-way movement, the simplest in the world, would let us hold on to the five hundred million we throw away. And that would be that.

The current process does harm in trying to do good. The intention is good, the result is woeful. We think we are sanitizing the city, but we are depleting the population. A sewer is a misunderstanding. When drainage, with its twin function of restoring what it takes, has everywhere replaced the sewer, which is a simple impoverishing wash, then, this being combined with the givens of a new social economy, the produce of the earth will be increased tenfold and the problem of destitution will be radically reduced. Add to this the elimination of parasites, and it will be resolved.

Meanwhile public wealth is going down the drain into the river and the waste goes on. Waste is the word. Europe is ruining itself this way through exhaustion.

As for France, we have just revealed the figures. Now, as Paris contains a twenty-fifth of the total French population and as Parisian guano is the richest of the lot, we are underestimating Paris’s share in the loss of the half billion France expels annually when we put it at twenty-five million. That twenty-five million, spent on aid and on pleasure, would double the splendour of Paris. But the city squanders it in cesspools. So that we could well say that the great prodigality of Paris, its wondrous festiveness, its Folie Beaujon,2 its orgy of profusion, its gold slipping through its fingers by the bucketload, its sumptuousness, its luxury, its magnificence—is its sewers.

This is how, in the blindness of a bad political economy, we drown and let the well-being of all stream away and disappear in swallow holes. There ought to be Saint-Cloud nets3 for the public wealth.

Economically, the situation can be summed up like this: Paris is a leaky bucket.

Paris, this model city, this blueprint of the well-made capital that every nation tries to copy, this metropolis of the ideal, this august homeland of initiative, of drive and enterprise, this centre and home of the mind, this nation city, this hive of the future, this marvellous amalgam of Babylon and Corinth, would make a peasant from Fuhkien4 shrug his shoulders, from the viewpoint we have just pointed out.

Imitate Paris and you will ruin yourself. In any case, particularly in this immemorial and insane wastefulness, Paris itself imitates.

For this surprising ineptitude is not new; it is no youthful idiocy. The ancients acted like the moderns. “The cesspools of Rome,” says Liebig,5 “soaked up the entire well-being of the Roman peasant.” When the countryside around Rome was ruined by the Roman sewers, Rome wore out Italy, and when it had dragged Italy down into its cesspool, it poured Sicily in, then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewers of Rome engulfed the world. That cesspool offered its engulfment to the city and the world. Urbi et orbi.6 Eternal City, bottomless sewer.

In this, as in other things, Rome sets the example. It is an example Paris follows, with all the stupidity peculiar to cities of genius.

For the requirements of the operation we have just described, Paris has another Paris below it; a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, its crossroads, its squares, its dead ends, its arteries, and its traffic consisting of muck, minus the human form.

For we must flatter no one and nothing, not even a great people; wherever nothing is lacking, ignominy sits next to sublimeness; and if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of power, Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of wonder, it also contains Lutetia,7 the city of slime.

Besides, the mark of its greatness also lies here, with the titanic sink of Paris achieving, among the monuments, that strange ideal achieved within humanity by men like Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau:8 awe-inspiring vileness.

The basement of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would reveal a colossal coral reef. A sponge hardly has any more pores and passages than the clump of earth six leagues around on which the great antique city rests. Not counting the catacombs, which are like a separate cellar, not counting the tangled latticework of gas mains, and forgetting the vast tubular system for distributing running water that ends in public drinking fountains, the sewers alone make up a prodigious dark network under both banks of the river; a labyrinth whose thread is its downhill slope.

It is there, in the dank mist, that the rat pops up, apparently the product of Paris in labour.

THE ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER

IF YOU IMAGINE Paris lifted up like a lid, the underground network of sewers would, from a bird’s-eye view, describe a sort of great tree, grafted onto the river and spanning both banks. On the right bank, the ring sewer would be the trunk of the tree, the secondary pipelines would be the smaller branches, and the dead ends would be the twigs.

This figure is only very sketchy and half exact, the right angle, which is the most common angle in this type of underground ramification, being very rare in the plant world.

We could get a more plausible image of this strange geometric plan by assuming that we can see, spread flat over a dark background, some kind of bizarre oriental alphabet in a great scrambled mess, whose deformed letters are welded together in an apparent jumble, apparently at random, some by their corners, others by their ends.

Sinks and sewers played a great role in the Middle Ages, in the late Roman Empire, and in the ancient Orient. The plague was born in them, despots died in them. The multitudes regarded these beds of putrefaction with an almost religious fear as monstrous cradles of death. The vermin pit of Benares is no less dizzying than the lion’s den of Babylon.1 Tiglath-Pileser, king of Assyria, swore by the sink of Nineveh, according to the rabbinical books. It was from the Münster sewer that Jan van Leiden brought out his fake moon, and it is from the cesspit of Kekhscheb that his oriental double, Mokanna, the veiled prophet from the Persian province of Khorassan, brought out his fake sun.2 The history of mankind is reflected in the history of its cesspools. The Gemoniae3 told the story of Rome. The Paris sewer has been an awesome old thing. It has been a sepulchre, it has been a refuge. Crime, intelligence, social protest, freedom of conscience, thought, theft, all that human laws pursue or have pursued, has hidden in this hole; the Maillotins4 in the fourteenth century, highwaymen in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, Morin’s visionary Illuminati5 in the seventeenth, the Chauffeurs,6 those brigands who burned their victims’ feet to make them talk, in the eighteenth. A hundred years ago, the nocturnal thrust of the dagger surfaced there, the crook in danger slipped down into it; the wood had its cave, Paris had its sewer. Gangsters, that Gallic picareria,7 accepted the sewer as a branch of the Cour des Miracles,8 and in the evening, scathing and fierce, ducked back down under the Maubuée vomitorium as into an alcove.

It was only natural that those whose place of daily work was the cul-de-sac Vide-Gousset—Empty Pocket—or the rue Coupe-Gorge—Cutthroat—had as their nocturnal abode the culvert of the Chemin-Vert or sheltered corner of Hurepoix. Whence a welter of memories. All kinds of phantoms haunt these long lonely passages; everywhere putrefaction and miasma; here and there a vent through which Villon on the inside chats with Rabelais9 on the outside.

The sewer, in the old Paris, was the meeting place of all exhaustion and all enterprise. Political economics sees refuse there, social philosophy sees residue.

The sewer is the conscience of the city. Everything converges and clashes there. In this leaden place, there is darkness but there are no more secrets. Every thing has its true form, or at least its final form. A heap of crap has this going for it: It does not lie. Naïveté has taken refuge there, Basil’s mask is found down there, but you can see the pasteboard and strings and the inside as well as the outside, and it is enhanced by honest muck. Scapin’s false nose10 is nearby. Every bit of the filth of civilization, once it is of no more use, falls into this pit of truth where the immense social slide ends; it is swallowed up in it, but on display. This jumble is a confession. Here, no more false appearances, no possible covering up; crap takes off its shirt in an absolute laying bare, a routing of illusions and mirages; nothing is more than what is, cutting the sinister figure of what comes to an end. Reality and disappearance. Down there, the bottom of a bottle avows drunkenness, the handle of a basket tells of domesticity; there, the apple core that once gave itself literary opinions goes back to being an apple core; the head on the five-franc piece frankly turns to verdigris, Caïaphas’s spit meets Falstaff’s vomit,11 the gold louis from the gambling den bumps into the nail with the suicide’s bit of rope still hanging off it, a livid foetus rolls by wrapped in the sequins that danced at the last Mardi Gras at the Opéra, a judge’s wig that has judged men grovels next to a bit of rot that was once Maggie’s skirt. This is more than fraternity, it is being on intimate terms. All that was once carefully made up is now smeared and laid on with a trowel. The last veil is ripped off. A sewer is a cynic. It tells all.

This sincerity of muck pleases us, and is restful for the soul. When you have passed your time on earth enduring the spectacle of high and mighty airs put on by reasons of state, oaths, political wisdom, human justice, professional probity, the strict requirements of position, incorruptible robes, it is a relief to step into a sewer and see the sludge that rightly belongs there.

It teaches us something at the same time. As we said a moment ago, history passes through the sewer. The Saint Bartholomews12 filter into it, drop by drop, seeping through the cobblestones. The great public assassinations, the political and religious butcheries, travel through this subterranean passage of civilization, pushing their cadavers along. To the eye of the dreamer, all the historic murderers are there, in the hideous gloom, on their knees, with a fold of their shrouds as apron, dourly mopping up their work. Louis XI is there with Tristan, François I is there with Duprat, Charles IX is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII, Louvois13 is there, Letellier is there, Hébert and Maillard14 are there, scraping stones and trying to make all traces of their actions disappear. You can hear the broom of these spectres beneath these vaults. You breathe in the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes. You can see reddish gleams in the corners. A terrible water flows there in which bloody hands have been washed.

The social observer should step into these shadows. They are part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of thought. Everything tries to run away from it but nothing escapes it. To prevaricate is useless. What side of yourself do you show by prevaricating? The shame side. Philosophy pursues evil with its probing eye and will not let it escape into nothingness. In the erasure of things that disappear, in the diminishing of things that vanish, philosophy recognizes everything. It reconstructs the purple from the bit of rag and the woman from the tatters. With the cesspool it reconstructs the city, with the muck it reconstructs the morals and customs. From the shard it completes the amphora, the pitcher. It recognizes by the imprint of a fingernail on a piece of parchment the difference that distinguishes the Jewry of the Judengasse from the Jewry of the Ghetto.15 It retrieves from what remains what has been, the good, the bad, the false, the true, the bloodstain of the law court, the inkblot in the cave, the blob of tallow in the house of ill repute, the ordeals endured, the welcome temptations, the orgies spewed out, the kink that people have acquired in abasing themselves, the trace of prostitution in souls their own coarseness made them capable of, and on the jacket of the porters of Rome, the mark of Messalina’s dig16 in the ribs.

BRUNESEAU

THE PARIS SEWER was legendary in the Middle Ages. In the sixteenth century Henri II1 tried some exploratory soundings but they were aborted. Not even a hundred years ago, as Mercier2 can attest, the cesspit was left to its own devices and went its own way.

That was the old Paris for you, given up to carping, dithering, and groping around in the dark. It was not terribly bright for quite some time. Later, 1789 showed how towns can get some sense into them. But in the good old days, the capital did not have much of a head; it did not know how to do business, either morally or materially, and had no more idea how to get rid of its rubbish than its abuses. Everything was too hard, everything was called into question. The sewer, for instance, rebelled against any itinerary. People could not get their bearings in the waste dump network any more than they could make themselves understood in the city; up above, the unintelligible babble, down below, an inextricable tangle; beneath the confusion of tongues lay the confusion of cellars; Daedalus replicated Babel.3 Sometimes the sewer of Paris took it upon itself to overflow, as though this undervalued Nile was suddenly rocked by anger. It is pretty revolting, but sometimes the sewer flooded. This stomach of civilization occasionally had trouble digesting, the cesspit gurgled back up into the city’s gullet, and Paris had an aftertaste of its gutter. These instances of resemblance between the sewer and remorse had a good side; they were warnings; very badly received warnings, though, with the city fuming over its sludge having such gall and not accepting that what you dump can come back to haunt you. Get rid of it better.

The flood of 1802 is still a living memory for Parisians of eighty. The muck spread out in a cross at the place des Victoires where the statue of Louis XIV stands; it entered the rue Saint-Honoré through the two sewer mouths in the Champs-Élysées, the rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the rue Pierre-à-Poisson through the sewer of the Sonnerie, the rue Popincourt through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, and the rue de la Roquette through the sewer of the rue de Lappe; it filled the gutters of the rue des Champs-Élysées to a depth of thirty-five centimeters; and, at midday, through the vomitorium of the Seine performing its function in reverse, it penetrated the rue Mazarine, the rue de l’Échaudé, and the rue des Marais, where it stopped after going 109 meters, just a few feet short of the house Racine once lived in, respecting, of the seventeenth century, the poet more than the king. It attained its maximum depth in the rue Saint-Pierre, where it rose to a level of three feet above the flagstones of the waterspout, and its maximum reach in the rue Saint-Sabin, where it spread out for 238 meters.

At the beginning of this century, the Paris sewer was still a mysterious place. Sludge can never smell sweet; but here its reputation was so bad as to strike fear. Paris was vaguely aware that it had a terrible cellar under it. People talked about it as though it were the monstrous bog of Thebes, which teemed with scolopendra, gargantuan sea monsters fifteen feet long, and which could easily have served as a bathtub for Behemoth.4 The great boots of the sewer workers never ventured beyond certain known points. This was still not long after the days when the rubbish collectors’ carts, on which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the marquis de Créqui,5 were simply emptied straight into the sewer. As for any cleaning operation, this was left to storm water, which gummed up the works more than flushed them out. Rome let a little poetry stick, still, to its cloaca, and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted its and called it the Stink Hole. Science and superstition were in agreement as to its horror. The Stink Hole was no less averse to hygiene than to legend. The Goblin Monk6 had hatched under the fetid arch of the Mouffetard sewer; the cadavers of the Marmousets7 had been thrown into the sewer of the Barillerie; Fagon8 had attributed the fearful malignant fever of 1685 to the big open hole in the Marais sewer, which remained gaping until 1833 in the rue Saint-Louis practically in front of the inn sign for the Messager Galant. The manhole in the rue de la Mortellerie was famous for the plagues that came out of it; with its grate of pointy iron bars simulating a row of teeth, it was as deadly in that street as a dragon’s maw blowing hell over mankind. The popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with an unspeakably hideous dose of the boundless. The sewer was a bottomless pit. The sewer was the Barathrum,9 the gorge outside Athens into which criminals were cast. The idea of exploring these pestilential regions did not occur even to the police. To tempt that unknown, to throw a plumb line into that shadowland, to go on a voyage of discovery into that abyss, who would have dared? It was terrifying. Someone did turn up, though. The cesspit had its Christopher Columbus.

On a day in 1805, on one of the rare appearances the emperor put in in Paris, the minister of the interior, a Decrès or a Crétet10 or someone, came to the master’s morning levee. You could hear the clatter of the swords in the Carrousel of all those amazing soldiers of the mighty republic and the mighty empire; there was a glut of heroes tripping over themselves at Napoléon’s door—men from the Rhine, from the Scheldt, the Adige, and the Nile; companions of Joubert, Desaix, Marceau, Hoche, Kléber; balloonists from Fleurus, grenadiers from Mayence, pontoniers from Genoa, hussars that the pyramids had gazed upon, artillerymen Junot’s cannonballs had spattered, cuirassiers who had stormed the battle fleet at anchor in the Zuyder Zee; some had followed Bonaparte over the bridge at Lodi, others had been with Murat in the trenches of Mantua, still others had gone before Lannes in the sunken road of Montebello. The whole army of those days was there, in the courtyard of the Tuileries, represented by a squad or a platoon, and was guarding Napoléon while he rested. It was the splendid time when the Grande Armée had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz ahead of it. “Sire,” said the minister of the interior to Napoléon, “yesterday I saw the boldest man in your empire.” “Who is this man?” the emperor promptly asked, “and what has he done?” “It’s what he wants to do, sire.” “Which is what?” “To visit the sewers of Paris.” This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.

DETAILS NOBODY KNOWS

THE VISIT TOOK place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against plague and asphyxiation. It was, at the same time, a voyage of discovery. One of the survivors of the expedition, a smart sewer worker, very young at the time, was still a few years ago telling anyone who’d listen the curious details that Bruneseau thought it best to leave out of his report to the prefect of police as unworthy of the administrative style. Disinfecting procedures were very rudimentary in those days. Bruneseau had only just got past the first sections of the underground network when eight out of the twenty workers with him refused to go any farther. The operation was complicated; the visit involved cleaning, so clean they must, but at the same time, they had to survey: to note the water inlets, to count the grates and the grids, to detail the connecting pipes, to jot down the currents at drainage divides, to identify the respective capacities of the various basins, to probe the small sewers grafted onto the main sewer, to measure the height under the keystone of each tunnel along with the width both at the spring of the vault and level with the floor, and last, to determine the different levels at the right of each water inlet, both from the sewer floor and from the street surface. They made painful headway. It was not uncommon for the stepladders to sink into three feet of mud. The lanterns kept flickering and going out in the noxious vapours. From time to time they would have to carry out a sewer worker who had fainted. At certain places there would be a sheer drop. The ground would have given way, the flagstones would have crumbled, the sewer would have turned into a sinkhole; there was nothing solid left; one man promptly disappeared and they had great difficulty pulling him out. On Fourcroy’s1 advice, they lit at intervals, in spots sufficiently cleaned, great cages full of tow soaked in resin. In some places the wall was covered with gnarled funguses that looked for all the world like tumors; the stone itself seemed sick in that unbreathable environment.

Bruneseau proceeded downstream on his exploratory expedition. At the parting of the two water mains from the Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered the date 1550 on a jutting stone, indicating the point reached by Philibert Delorme,2 who was given the job by Henri II of visiting the underground waste dumps of Paris. This stone was the sixteenth century’s mark on the sewer. Bruneseau also found the seventeenth century’s handiwork in the Ponceau conduit and in the conduit from the rue Vieille-du-Temple, both vaulted between 1600 and 1650, as well as the eighteenth century’s handiwork in the west section of the collector canal, laid down and vaulted in 1740. These two vaults, especially the more recent one, the one from 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the ring sewer, which dated from 1412, a time when the bubbling brook of Ménilmontant was elevated to the rank of main sewer of Paris, a promotion analogous to a peasant’s becoming premier valet de chambre to the king; something like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.

Here and there, notably under the Palais de Justice, they thought they recognized the cavities of old dungeons cut into the sewer itself. Ghastly in pace.3 An iron collar hung in one of these cells. They walled them all up. Some finds were bizarre; among others, the skeleton of an orangutan that had disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a vanishing act probably connected to the famous and incontestable appearance of the devil in the rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil had ended up drowning in the sewer.

Under the long vaulted corridor that ends in the Arche-Marion, a rag-and-bone man’s sack, perfectly preserved, was the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere the mud, which the sewer workers had come to handle fearlessly, abounded in precious objects, gold and silver jewelry, precious stones, coins. If a giant had sifted through this cloaca, he would have collected the riches of centuries in his sieve. At the parting of the two branches of the rue du Temple and the rue Sainte-Avoye, they picked up a singular Huguenot medallion in copper, bearing on one side a pig capped with a cardinal’s hat and on the other, a wolf wearing a tiara on its head.

The most surprising encounter was at the entrance to what was called the Grand Sewer. This inlet had previously been closed by a grate of which only the hinges remained. From one of these hinges hung a sort of grimy shapeless rag, a remnant of something no doubt caught there as it was going by, floating in the dark, that had wound up being torn to shreds. Bruneseau held up his lantern and examined this shred. It was of very fine cambric and they made out at one of the least worn corners a heraldic crown embroidered above these seven letters: LAVBESP. The crown was a marquis’s coronet and the seven letters stood for “Laubespine.”4 They realized that what they were looking at was a piece of Marat’s shroud. Marat, in his youth, had had his share of love affairs. This was when he was part of the household of the comte d’Artois in his capacity as a physician to the stables. From his love affair with a great lady, which is a matter of historical record, he had kept this bedsheet. At his death, as it was the only remotely fine linen he had at his place, they had buried him in it. Old women had bundled up the tragic friend of the people for the grave in these swaddling clothes that had known the pleasures of the flesh.

Bruneseau moved on. They left the flap of cloth where it was, without finishing it off. Out of scorn or respect? Marat deserved both. And then again, destiny was imprinted clearly enough on it for anyone to hesitate to touch it. Besides, what is entombed should be left where it chooses to be. In a word, the relic was strange. A marquise had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it; it had passed through the Panthéon only to wind up down with the sewer rats. This intimate boudoir rag, whose every crease Watteau5 would once have drawn with delight, had wound up worthy of Dante’s penetrating glare.

The complete visit of the foul underground waste dump of Paris took seven years, from 1805 to 1812. As he wended his way, Bruneseau designed, directed, and brought to completion substantial public works; in 1808, he lowered the canal floor of the Ponceau drain and, creating new lines everywhere, drove the sewer under the rue Saint-Denis as far as the fontaine des Innocents in 1809; under the rue Froidmanteau and La Salpêtrière in 1810; under the rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, the rue du Mail, the rue de l’Écharpe, and the place Royale in 1811; and under the rue de la Paix and the chaussée d’Antin in 1812. At the same time, he had the entire network disinfected and cleaned. From the second year on, Bruneseau took on his son-in-law, Nargaud, as his assistant.

That is how, at the beginning of this century, the old society cleaned up its double backside and performed its sewer’s toilette. That was one act cleaned up, at least.

Tortuous, fissured, unpaved, cracked, sliced up by quagmires, jolted by sharp bends, rising and falling without rhyme or reason, fetid, feral, savage, submerged in darkness, with scars on its flagstones and gashes on its walls, appalling—such was, in retrospect, the antique sewer of Paris.

Ramifications in all directions, crisscrossing trenches, connecting drainpipes, junctions like crow’s-feet, stars as in saps, ceca, culs-de-sac, vaults covered with saltpetre, putrid sinkholes, scurfy scabs oozing over the walls, drips dripping from the ceiling, darkness; nothing equalled the horror of this old crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon, lair, pit, chasm bored through by streets, titanic molehill where the mind seems to see prowling through the shadows, in filth that once was splendour, that enormous blind mole, the past. This, we repeat, was the sewer of days gone by.

CURRENT PROGRESS

TODAY THE SEWER is clean, cold, upright, correct. It practically achieves the ideal of what is understood in England by the word respectable. It is decent and dull; straight as a die; we might almost say immaculate. It is like a supplier who has become a councillor of state. You can almost see clearly in it. The muck behaves itself there. At first glance, you could mistake it for one of those underground tunnels once so common and so handy for the flight of monarchs and princes, in the good old days, “when the people loved their kings.” The current sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classic rectilinear alexandrine, driven out of poetry, seems to have taken refuge in architecture, apparently fusing with each and every stone in this long, gloomy, whitish vault; every overflow pipeline is an arcade; the rue de Rivoli has its imitators even in the cloaca. In any case, if the geometric line has a place anywhere, it is surely in the stercorary trenches of a great city. There, everything must be subordinate to the shortest path. The sewer has today taken on a certain official aspect. Even the police reports of which it is sometimes the object now show respect for it. The terms used to describe it in administrative language are elevated and dignified. What was once known as a gut is now a gallery; what was once known as a hole is now a light shaft. Villon would no longer recognize his antiquated bolt-hole. This network of cellars, of course, still has its time-honoured population of rodents, more teeming than ever; from time to time, a rat, old whiskers, risks popping his head out of the sewer window to examine the Parisians; but these very vermin are becoming tame, satisfied as they are with their subterranean palace. The cloaca has nothing left now of its primitive ferocity. The rain, which befouled the sewer of bygone days, washes today’s sewer clean. But don’t rely on it too much. Miasmas still inhabit it. It is more hypocritical than irreproachable. The prefecture of police and the health department have toiled in vain. Despite all the cleansing processes, it gives off a faintly suspect odour, like Tartuffe after confession.1 Let’s agree, though, since cleaning is, all things considered, a tribute that the sewer pays to civilization, and since, from this point of view, Tartuffe’s conscience is an advance on Augeas’s stable,2 the sewer of Paris has most certainly improved.

It is more than an advance; it is a transmutation. Between the old sewer and the current sewer, there has been a revolution. Who brought about this revolution? The man everyone forgets, but whom we have named, Bruneseau.

FUTURE PROGRESS

THE EXCAVATION OF the Paris sewer was no mean feat. They worked on it for the last ten centuries without being able to finish the job any more than they were able to finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, reaps all the aftereffects of the growth of Paris. It is a sort of dark polyp with a thousand antennae sitting in the earth and growing down below at the same time as the city above. Every time the city carves out a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The old monarchy only built 23,300 metres of sewers; that’s as far as Paris had got by January 1, 1806. From that period, which we will talk about again shortly, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and continued. Napoléon built—the figures are curious—4,804 metres; Louis XVIII, 5,709; Charles X, 10,836; Louis-Philippe, 89,020; the Republic of 1848, 23,381; the current regime, 70,500; in all, at the present time, 226,610 metres, or sixty leagues of sewers, form Paris’s enormous entrails. Obscure ramification, always in labour; an immense construction project that goes unnoticed.

As you can see, the underground maze of Paris is today ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is hard to imagine all the perseverance and effort required to bring this cloaca to the point of relative perfection it has now attained. It was with great difficulty that the old monarchical provostship and, in the last ten years of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, managed to tunnel out the five leagues of sewers that existed before 1806. All kinds of obstacles got in the way of this operation, some to do with the nature of the soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the working population of Paris. Paris is built on a deposit strangely resistant to the pick, to mud, to the plumb bob, to manhandling. There is nothing harder to drill through and penetrate than the geological formation that the marvellous historical formation known as Paris sits on top of; as soon as work, in any shape or form, begins and ventures into that nappe of alluvial sediment, subterranean resistance abounds in the form of liquid clays, springs, hard rock, the soft deep silt that the special science calls “mustard.” The pick makes slow headway in those calcareous plates alternating with very thin veins of potter’s clay and layers of schist containing sheets encrusted with oyster shells contemporary with the preadamite oceans. Sometimes a stream abruptly causes a vault under construction to cave in and floods the workers; or a marl slide occurs, moving with the fury of a waterfall and shattering the great wooden support beams like glass. Only very recently, at Villette, when they needed to take the main sewer under the canal Saint-Martin without interrupting navigation and without emptying the canal, a fissure opened in the canal basin, water suddenly rose in the subterranean work site at a rate faster than the pumps could pump it out; they had to get a diver to look for the fissure, which turned out to be in the neck of the main basin, and they had a hell of a job blocking it up. Elsewhere, close to the Seine, and even some distance from the river, at Belleville, Grande-Rue, and the Lunière Arcade, for instance, you come across quicksand where a man can drop out of sight in a trice. Add suffocation from miasmas, entombment from landslides, the earth suddenly caving in. Add typhus slowly permeating the workers. In our day, after having dug out the Clichy gallery and provided it with a track for holding a water main to take water from the Ourcq, works executed in a cutting ten metres deep; after having survived all the landslides and often putrid excavations to vault over the Bièvre River1 from the boulevard de l’Hôpital as far as the Seine; after having endeavoured to rescue Paris from the torrential waters of Montmartre and to provide a runoff for the fluvial pond, nine hectares across, which used to stagnate near the barrière des Martyrs; after having built the sewer line from the barrière Blanche to the Aubervilliers road in four months flat, working day and night, at a depth of eleven metres; after having built an underground sewer in the rue Barre-du-Bec, without a cutting, six metres below ground—something never before seen—the foreman Monnot dropped dead. After having vaulted three thousand meters of sewers over every bit of the city, from the rue Traversière-Saint-Antoine to the rue de Lourcine; after having drained off, through the Arbalète drain, the storm water that used to flood the Censier-Mouffetard junction; after having built the Saint-Georges sewer on dry stone revetment and concrete in shifting sands; after having directed the awe-inspiring lowering of the floor of the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth drain, the engineer, Duleau, dropped dead. There are no bulletins for these particular acts of bravery, even though they are rather more useful than the mindless bloodbaths of the battlefield.

The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are today. Bruneseau had set things in motion, but it needed cholera2 to spur the vast reconstruction that has taken place since. It may come as a shock to know, for example, that in 1821, part of the ring sewer known as the Grand Canal, as in Venice, was still stagnating out in the open, in the rue des Gourdes. It was not until 1823 that the city of Paris found in its purse the 266,080 francs and 6 centimes needed to cover over this vile abcess. The three absorbing dead wells of the Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mandé, with their overflow pipes, their machinery, their sumps, and their purifying connecting drains, date only from 1836. The intestinal waste dump of Paris has been completely revamped, becoming, as we said, ten times what it was a quarter of a century ago.

Thirty years ago, at the time of the insurrection of June 5 and 6, it was still, in many places, practically the old sewer. A very large number of streets, today cambered, were then very uneven tracks. You very often saw, at the dip where the sides of a street or an intersection ended, wide square grates with big bars whose iron shone, burnished by the feet of the crowd. These were dangerous and slippery for carriages and caused horses to take a tumble. The official language of the department of civil engineering gave these dips and grates the expressive term cassis—black currants. In 1832, in a whole host of streets—rue de l’Étoile, Saint-Louis, du Temple, Vieille-du-Temple, Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, Folie-Méricourt, quai aux Fleurs, rue du Petit-Musc, de Normandie, Pont-aux-Biches, des Marais, faubourg Saint-Martin, rue Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, faubourg Montmartre, rue Grange-Batelière, in the Champs-Élysées, rue Jacob, rue de Tournon—the old gothic cloaca still cynically flashed its gaping chops. These were enormous gaps in stone building blocks, occasionally surrounded by curbstones, in a show of monumental effrontery.

Paris, in 1806, was practically still at the same sewer figures as that recorded in May 1663: 10,384 metres. After Bruneseau, on January 1, 1832, it had 40,300 metres. From 1806 to 1831, they had built 750 metres on average a year; since then they have built eight and even ten thousand metres of galleries of masonry every year using small materials with a bath of hydraulic cement poured over a concrete base. At two hundred francs a metre, the sixty leagues of sewers of today’s Paris represent forty-eight million francs.

Apart from the economic progress that we indicated at the beginning, serious public hygiene issues are linked to this immense problem, the Paris sewer.

Paris lies between two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of water, which lies fairly deep underground but is already being explored by two bores, is provided by a layer of green sandstone lying between chalk and Jurassic limestone; this layer may be represented by a disc with a radius of twenty-five leagues; a whole host of rivers and streams trickle into it; when you drink a glass of the water from the Grenelle well, you are drinking the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire. The sheet of water is healthy; it comes from the sky first of all, then from the ground; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas of the cloaca blend into the air the city breathes—hence its bad breath. Air taken from above a pile of manure—this has been scientifically observed—is purer than air taken from above Paris. Eventually, with the help of progress, mechanisms currently being developed, together with our growing enlightenment, will allow us to use the sheet of water to purify the sheet of air—meaning, we will wash the sewer. By washing the sewer, of course, we mean restoring the muck to the earth; sending the dung back to the soil to fertilize the fields. This simple act will mean a decrease in misery and an increase in health for the whole social community. At the present time, diseases from Paris spread out over a radius of fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.

You could say that, for ten centuries, the cloaca has been the disease of Paris. The sewer is the vice the city has in its blood. The people’s instinct has never been wrong. The job of sewer worker was once almost as perilous, and almost as repulsive for the people, as the job of slaughterer in an abattoir, a job tainted with horror and long abandoned to the executioner. It needed high pay to persuade a mason to disappear into that fetid sap; the well-sinker’s ladder thought twice before it plunged in; a proverb had it that “to go down into the sewer is to step into the grave”; and all sorts of hair-raising legends, as we said, once covered with horror that colossal sink; dreaded putrescent swamp that bears the trace of the revolutions of the terrestrial globe just as it does the revolutions of men, and in which vestiges of all the cataclysms are to be found, from shells dating back to the Flood right down to Marat’s flap of rag.