The gist of this passage is that we should not waste our excrement by disposing it in rivers and eventually the sea; rather we should put it back into the soil (that is where the nutrients that created came from) so that we can grow more food. Hugo does not call for composting toilets. He assumes that water-borne sewers will continue to exist. He proposes that the nutrient-rich water be used to irrigate and fertilize the fields. I believe, and will have more to say about this later on this blog, that it is preferable to simply keep our water clean and collect and compost our nutrients. There will be much less likelihood of water-borne diseases if we do it this way.
Anyway, please read the blog and let's get some discussion going! My next entry will look at some of the history of LOTT and how we deal with our sewage.
When I prepared this document it used French accents. Apparently these do not translate into the blog. Sorry about that.
One word that comes up over and over in this is cloaca. Here is the definition: a cloaca is the posterior opening that serves as the only such opening for the intestinal, reproductive, and urinary tracts of certain animal species. All birds, reptiles, and amphibians possess this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces, unlike placental mammals, which possess two (or three) separate orifices for evacuation.
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Les Miserables (pp. 1061-1075, Penguin Books, 1976)
By Victoir Hugo (Hugo started this book in 1845 and finished it in 1862)
Book Two
The Entrails of the Monster
I. Land Impoverished By the Sea
Paris pours twenty-four million francs a year into the water. This is no metaphor. She does so by day and night, thoughtlessly and to no purpose. She does so through her entrails, that is to say, her sewers. Twenty-five millions is the most modest of the approximate figures arrived at by statistical science.
After many experiments science today know that the most fruitful and efficaci0us of all manures is human excrement. The Chinese, be it said to our shave, knew it before us. No Chinese peasant, according to Eckeberg, goes to the town without bringing back, at either end of his bamboo pole, two buckets filled with unmentionable matter; and it is thanks to this human manure that the Chinese earth is as fruitful as in the days of Abraham. The Chinese corn harvest amounts to 120 times the amount of seed. No guano is to e compared in fertility with the droppings of a town. A big city is the most powerful of dunging animals. To use the town to manure the country is to ensure prosperity. If our gold is so much waste, then, on the other hand, our waste is so much gold.
And what do we do with this golden dung? We throw it away. At great expense we send ships to the South Pole to collect the droppings of petrels and penguins, and the incalculable wealth we ourselves produce we throw back into the sea. The human and manure which is lost to the world because it is returned to the sea instead of the land would suffice to feed all of mankind. Do you know what all this is – the heaps of muck piled up on the streets during the night, the scavengers’ carts and the fetid flow of sludge that the pavement hides from you? It is the flowering meadow, green grass, marjoram and thyme and sage, the lowing of contented cattle in the evening, the scented hay and the golden wheat, the bread on your table and the warn blood in your veins – health and joy and life. Such is the purpose of that mystery of creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in Heaven.
Return all that to the great crucible and you will reap abundance. The feeding of the fields becomes the feeding of men. You are free to lose that richness and to find me absurd into the bargain; that will be the high point of your ignorance.
It has been calculated that France alone through her rivers every year pours into the Atlantic half a milliard francs. You must note that those five hundred millions represent a quarter of our budget expenditure. Such is man’s astuteness that he prefers to rid himself of this sum in the streams. It is the people’s substance that is being carried away, in drops or in floods, the wretched vomit of our sewers into the rivers, and the huge vomit of the rivers into the sea. Each belch of our cloaca costs us a thousand francs, and the result is that the land is impoverished and the water made foul. Hunger lurks in the furrow and disease in the stream.
It is notorious, for example, that in recent years the Thames has been poisoning London. As for Paris, the outlet of most of the sewers has had to be brought below the last of the bridges.
A two-channel arrangement of locks and sluices, sucking in and pouring out, an elementary drainage system as simple as the human lung, such as is already functioning in some parts of England, would suffice to bring our towns the pure water of the fields and to return to fields the enriched water of the towns; and this very simple exchange would save us the five hundred millions which we fling away.
The present process does harm in seeking good. The intention is good, the result lamentable. We think to cleanse the town but weaken the population. A sewer is a mistake. When drainage, with its double function of restoring what it takes away, shall have replaced the sewer, which is mere impoverishment, then this, combined with a new social economy, will increase by a hundredfold the produce of the earth and the problem of poverty will be immeasurably lessened. Add to this the elimination of parasites, and the problem is solved.
Meanwhile wastage continues and public wealth flows into the river. Wastage is the word. Europe is exhausting itself to the point of ruin. As for France, we have named the figures. But since Paris amounts to one twenty-fifth of the total French population, and the Paris manure is the richest of all, to assess at twenty-five millions Paris’s share in annual loss of half a milliard is an underestimate. Those twenty-five millions, used for relief-work and for amenities, would double the splendor of Paris. The city wastes them in its sewers; so that one may say that the abundance of Paris, her festivities, her noble buildings, her elegance, luxury and magnificence, and that money that she squanders with both hands – all this is sewage.
It is in this fashion, in the blindness of a false political economy, that the well-being of the whole community is allowed to pour away. There should be nets at Saint-Cloud to trap the public wealth. Economically one may sum it up as follows: Paris is a leaky basket. This model capital city, of which every nation seeks to have a copy, this ideal metropolis, this noble stronghold of initiative, drive, and experiment, this centre and dwelling-place of minds, this nation-town and hive of the future, a composite of Babylon and Corinth, would, seen in this aspect, cause a peasant of Fo-Kian to shrug his shoulders.
To copy Paris is to invite ruin. And Paris, in this matter of immemorial and senseless waste, copies herself. There is nothing new in her ineptitude; it is not a youthful folly. The ancients behaved like the moderns. ‘The cloaca of Rome,’ wrote Liebig, ‘absorbed all the well-being of the Roman peasant.’ When the Roman countryside was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted Italy, and when she had poured Italy through her drains she disposed of Sicily, then Sardinia, then Africa. The Roman sewer engulfed the world, sapping town and country alike. Urbi et orbi or the Eternal City, the bottomless drain.
In this, as in other matters, Rome set the example; and Paris follows it with the stupidity proper to intelligent towns. For the purpose of the operation she has beneath her another Paris, with its roads and intersections, its arteries and alleyways – the Paris of the sewers, a city of slime only lacking human kind.
We must avoid flattery, even of a great people. Where there is everything there is ignominy as well as sublimity: and if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of power, Sparta, the city of stern virtue, Nineveh, the city of prodigy, she also contains Lutetia, the city of mud. Moreover, the mark of her greatness is there also. The huge bilge of Paris achieves the strange feat that among men only a few, such as Machiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau, have achieved – an abjectness of grandeur.
The underside of Paris, if the eye could perceive it, would have the appearance of a vast sea-plant. A sponge has no more apertures and passageways than the patch of earth, six leagues around, on which the ancient city stands. Apart from the catacombs, the intricate network of gas-pipes and of piping that distributes fresh water to the street pumps, each a separate system, the sewers alone form a huge, dark labyrinth on either side of the river—a maze to which the only key is itself.
And here, in the fetid darkness, the rat is to be found, apparently the sole product of Paris’s labour.
II. Ancient history of the sewer
If one thinks of Paris lifted up like a lid, the view of the sewers from above would resemble a great tree-trunk grafted on to the river. On the right bank the main sewer would be the trunk of the tree, its lesser channels being the branches and its dead ends the twigs.
This is a condensed and inexact simile, for the right-angle, which is characteristic of this form of underground ramification, is very rare in vegetable growths. One may form a more appropriate image by supposing that one is looking down on a grotesque jumble of eastern letters attached to each other haphazard, by their sides or their extremities.
Bilges and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in the Bas-Empire and the Far East. Plague was born in them. The masses contemplated with an almost religious awe those hotbeds of putrescence, vast cradles of death. The Pit of Vermin at Benares was no less deep than the Pit of Lions at Babylon. Tiglath-Pilezar, according to the rabbinical books, swore by the vents of Nenevah. It is from the sewer of Mhnster that John of Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, raised his false sun.
The history of mankind is reflected in the history of the cloaca. The Gemoniae depicted Rome. The sewer of Paris was a formidable ancient thing, both sepulcher and refuge. Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought and theft, everything that human laws pursue or have pursued has been hidden in it – the Maillotins of the fourteenth century, the Tire-laines in the fifteenth, the Chauffeurs in the eighteenth. A century ago the night-time dagger-thrust came out of it, the footpad in danger vanished into it. The forest had its caves, and Paris had its sewer. The truanderie, that Gallic gipsy band, accepted the sewer as part of the Court of Miracles, and at night, cunning and ferocious, crouched under the Maubue vomitoria as in a bedchamber.
It was natural that those whose daily work was in the alley Vide-Gousset or the Rue Coupe-Gorge should have this night-time dwelling in the culvert of the Chemin-vert bridge or the Hurepoix kennel. From these come a host of memories. All sorts of ghosts haunt those long, lonely corridors; foulness and miasma are everywhere, with here and there a vent-hole through which Villon from within converses with Rabelais without.
The sewer, in ancient Paris, is the resting-place of all failure and all effort. To political economy it is a detritus, and to social philosophy a residue. It is the conscience of the town where all things converge and clash. There is darkness here, but no secrets. Everything has its true or at least its definitive form. There is this to be said for the much-heap, that it does not lie. Innocence dwells in it. The mask of Basil is there, the cardboard and the strings, accented with honest filth; and beside it, the false nose of Scapin. Every foulness of civilization, fallen into disuse, sinks into that ditch of truth wherein ends the huge social down-slide, to be swallowed, but to spread. It is a vast confusion. No false appearance, no white-washing, is possible; filth strips off its shirt in utter starkness, all illusions and mirages scattered, nothing left except what is, showing the ugly face of what ends. Reality and disappearances: here, a bottleneck proclaims drunkenness, a basket-handle tells of home life; and there the apple-core that had literary opinions again becomes an apple-core. The face on the coin turns frankly green, the spittle of Caiaphas encounters the vomit of Falstaff, the gold piece from the gaming house rattles against the nail from which the suicide hung, a livid fetus is wrapped in the spangles which last Shrove Tuesday danced at the OpJra, a wig which passed judgment on men wallows near the decay which was the skirt of Margoton. It is more than fraternity, it is close intimacy. That which was painted is besmeared. The last veil is stripped away. A sewer is a cynic. It says everything.
This sincerity of filth pleases us and soothes the spirit. When one has spent one’s time on earth suffering the windy outpourings which call themselves statesmanship, political wisdom, human justice, professional probity, the robes of incorruptibility, it is soothing to go into the sewer and see the mire which is appropriate to all this. And at the same time it teaches us. As we have said, history flows through the sewer. Saint Bartholomew weeps drop by drop through the paving stones. The great assassinations, the political and religious butcheries, pass through that underworld of civilization with their bodies. To the thoughtful eye, all the murderers of history are there on their knees in that hideous penumbra, with a fragment of shroud for their apron, sadly washing out their offence. Louis XI is there with Tristan, Francois I with Duprat, Charles IX with his mother, Richelieu with Louis XIII; Louvois, Letellier, Hebert, and Maillard seek to efface the traces of their lives. One may hear the swish of spectral brooms and breathe the huge miasma of social catastrophe and see red reflections in the corners. A terrible water flows that has washed bloodstained hands.
The social observer should enter that darkness; it is a part of his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of thought, from which everything seeks to fly but nothing escapes. To compromise is useless: what side of oneself does one show by compromise; except what is shameful: Philosophy pursues evil with its unflinching gaze and does not allow it to escape into nothingness. Amid the vanishing and the shrinking it detects all things, reconstructing the purple from the shred of rag and the woman from the wisp. Through the cloaca it reconstructs the town, from the mire it recreates its customs; from the shard it deduces the amphora or the jug. From the impress of a fingernail on parchment it distinguishes between Jewry of Judengasse and that of the Ghetto. From what remains it rediscovers what has been, good, bad, false, true – the spot of blood in the palace, the ink spot in the cavern, the drop of grease in the brothel, the torments suffered, temptations encountered, orgies vomited up, the wrinkles of self-abasement, the traces of prostitutions in souls rendered capable of it by their vileness, and on the smock of the Roman porter the elbow-mark of Messalina.
III. Bruneseau
The Paris sewer of the Middle Ages was a legend. In the sixteenth century Henri II attempted a sounding which failed. Less than a hundred years ago, as Mercier attests, the cloaca was left to itself, to make of itself what it could.
Such was ancient Paris, the victim of quarrels, indecisiveness, and false starts. For a long time it was stupid. Then the year ’89 showed how sense comes to cities. But in the good old days the capital had little discernment; she did not know how to order her affairs either morally or materially, and could no more dispose of ordure than of abuses. Everything was difficult, everything raised questions. The sewerage itself was opposed to any discipline. A course could no more be laid down for it than could agreement be reached in the town; above was the unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusions of tongues lay the confusion of cellars, the labyrinth below Babel.
Sometimes the Paris sewer chose to overflow, as though that hidden Nile was suddenly angry. Tere were infamous sewer floods. That stomach of civilization digested badly; the cloaca at times flowed back into the town, giving Paris a taste of bile. These parallels of sewage and remorse had their virtue. They were warnings, very badly received it must be said. The town was angered by the audacity of its filth, and could not accept that its ordure should return; it must be better disposed of.
The flood of 1802 is within the memory of eighty-year-old Parisians. The mire formed a cross in the Place des Victoires, with its statue of Louis XIV. It entered the Rue Saint-HonorJ by the two sewer mouths of the Champs-Ilysees, the Rue Popincourt by the Chemin-Vert mouth, the Rue de la Roquette by the Rue de Sappe sewer. It covered the Rue des Champs-Ilysees to the depth of thirty-five centimeters; and at midday, when the vomitorium of the Seine performed its function in reverse, it reached the Rue des Marais among other streets, covering a distance of a hundred and nine meters, only a few paces from the house where Racine had lived, respecting the poet more than it had the king. It attained its greatest depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it rose three feet above the roof-gutters, and its greatest extent in the Rue Saint-Sabin, when it stretched over a distance of two hundred and thirty-eight meters.
At the beginning of this century the Paris sewer was still a place of mystery. Much has never had a good name, but here it was a subject for alarm. Paris was confusedly aware that beneath her lay a dreadful hollow, resembling the monstrous bog of Thebes inhabited by worms fifteen feet long, and which might have served as a bathtub for Behemoth. The great boots of the sewage workers never ventured beyond certain known points. It was still very near the time when the carts of the street-scavengers, from one of which Sainte-Foix had fraternized the Marquis de Crequi, were simply emptied into the sewer. As for cleansing, this was left to the rain-storms, which obstructed more than they carried away. Rome invested her cloaca with a touch of poetry, calling it Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, calling it the stench-hole. Science and superstition were agreed to the horror. The stench-hole was as repellent to hygiene as to legend. Spectral figures emerged from the Mouffetard sewer, corpses had been flung into that of the Barillerie. Fagon attributed the terrible malignant fever of 1865 to the break in the Marais sewer, which until 1833 lay open in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the inn-sign of the Messager-Galant. The sewer-mouth in the Rue de la Mortellerie was famous for the plagues which spread from it: with the pointed bars of its grilled resembling a row of teeth, it was like a dragon’s mouth breathing hell upon men. Popular imagination credited that dark Parisian sink with a hideous endlessness. The idea of exploring it did not occur to the police. Who would have dared to sound those depths, to venture into the unknown? It was terrible. Nevertheless someone did venture. The cloaca found its Christopher Columbus.
One day in 1805, during one of the Emperor’s rare visits to Paris, the Minister of the Interior attended his petit lever. The rattle of sabers of those extraordinary soldiers of the Republic and the Empire could be heard in the Carrousel. There was an over-abundance of heroes at Napoleon’s door – men from the Rhine, the Adige, and the Nile, comrades of Joubert, Desaix, Marceau, Hoche, and Kleber, men who had followed Bonaparte on the bridge at Lodi, who had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, who had preceded Lannes in the sunken road of Montebello. All the army, represented by a squad or a platoon, was there in that courtyard of the Tuileries, guarding Napoleon’s rest. It was the splendid time when the Grande ArmJe had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz ahead of it… ‘Sire,’ said the Minister of Napoleon, ‘yesterday I saw the bravest man in your Empire’ …’Who is he?’ the Emperor asked. ‘And what has he done?’ … ‘It is what he wants to do, Sire.’ … ‘What is that?’ … ‘To explore the sewers of Paris.’
The man’s name was Bruneseau.
IV. Unknown details
The inspection took place. It was a formidable undertaking, a battle in darkness against pestilence and asphyxia. And also a voyage of discovery. One of the survivors, and intelligent workman who was then very young, later recalled certain details which Bruneseau had seen fit to omit from his report to the Prefect of Police as being unworthy of an official document. Methods of disinfection were at that time very rudimentary. Bruneseau had hardly entered the underground network with eight of his twenty workers refused to go further. The operation was complicated; it entailed cleaning and also measuring, noting the entry-points, counting the grilles and mouths, recording the branches with some indication of the current at various points, examining the different basins, determining width and height of each corridor both from the floor of the sewer and in relation to the street surface. Progress was slow. It happened not infrequently that the ladders sank into three feet of slime. Lanterns flickered and died in the poisonous air, and from time to time a fainting man had to be carried out. There were pitfalls at certain places where the floor had collapsed and the sewer became a bottomless well; one man suddenly disappeared and they had great difficulty in rescuing him. On the advice of Fourcroy, the noted chemist, they lighted reasonably clear places with cages filled with oakum steeped in resin. The walls were here and there covered with shapeless fungi resembling tumors; the very stonework seemed diseased.
Bruneseau proceeded downstream in his survey. At the junction of two channels at the Grand Hurleur he detected on a jutting stone the date 1550, which indicated the limit reached by Philibert Delorme, charged by Henri II with inspecting the underground labyrinth of Paris. This stone was the token of the sixteenth century. Bruneseau found the handicraft of the 17th century in the Ponceau conduit and that of the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, vaulted over between 1600 and 1650, and of the eighteenth in the western section of the main canal, lined and vaulted over in 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the ring sewer, dating from 1412, when the open stream of MJnilmontant was invested with the dignity of the main sewer of Paris – a promotion resembling that of a peasant who becomes the king’s valet.
Here and there, notably under the Palais de Justice, dungeon cells were found built into the sewer. An iron collar hung in one of them. All were walled up. There were strange discoveries, among others the skeleton of a orangutan that had vanished from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous appearance of the Devil in the Rue des Bernardins. The poor devil had drowned in the sewer.
Under the long, vaulted corridor that ends at the Arche-Marion a rag-picker’s hod was found in a state of perfect preservation. The slime everywhere, being bravely ransacked by sewage workers, abounded in precious objects of jewelry and gold and silver, and coins. A giant filtering of the cloaca might have scraped up the wealth of centuries. At the junction of the Rue du Temple and the Rue Sainte-Avoye a strange copper medal was found, of Huguenot origin, having on one side a pig wearing a cardinal’s hat and on the other a wolf in a tiara.
But the most surprising discovery was made at the entrance to the main sewer. This entrance had formerly been closed by a barred gate of which only the hinges remained. A dingy shred of material was attached to one of the hinges, having no doubt been caught on it as it floated by. Bruneseau examined it by the light of his lantern. It was of very fine cambric, and on its least worn part he discovered a heraldic coronet embroidered above the seven letters LAVESP. The coronet was that of a marquis, and the seven letters signified Laubespine. He realized that he was looking at a fragment of Marat’s shroud. Marat in his youth, at the time when he was veterinary surgeon to the household of the Comte d’Artois, had had a love-affair, historically attested, with a great lady, of which a sheet was his only souvenir. On his death, since it was the only scrap of decent linen he possessed, he had been wrapped in it. Old women had dressed him for the grave, the tragic Ami du Peuple, in that relic of sensual delight.
Bruneseau left the rag there without destroying it, whether from contempt or respect who can say? Marat merited both. It was so imprinted with destiny that one might hesitate to touch it. Besides, the things of the tomb should be left where they choose to be. In short, it was a strange relic: a marquise had slept in it, Marat had rotted in it and it had crossed the Pantheon to end up with the sewer rats. The bed-chamber rag, of which Watteau might have exquisitely drawn the folds, had in the end been worthy of the dark gaze of Dante.
The total inspection of that unspeakable underside of Paris took seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While exploring, Bruneseau originated, planned, and carried out considerable construction work. In 1808 he lowered the Ponceau level, and, creating new channels everywhere, he drove the sewer in 1809 under the Rue Saint-Denis to the Fontaine des Innocents; in 1810 under the Rue Froidmanteau and the Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, the Rue du Mail, the Rue de l’Icharpe, and the Place Royale; in 1812 under the Rue de la Paix and the Chaussee d’Antin. At the same time he had the whole network disinfected. He was assisted from the second year by his son-in-law Nargaud.
Thus at the beginning of the century society cleansed its underside and performed the toilet of its sewer. So much at least was made clean.
Tortuous, fissured and unpaved, interspersed with quagmires, rising and falling, twisting and turning without reason, fetid and bathed in obscurity, with scars on its floor and gashes in its walls, altogether horrible – such, in retrospect, was the ancient sewer of Paris. Ramifications all ways, intersections, branches, crow’s feet, blind alleys, salt-rimed vaults, reeking cesspits, poisonous ooze on the walls, drops falling from the roof, darkness: nothing could equal in horror that excremental crypt, Babylon’s digestive system, a cavern pierced with roads, a vast molehill in which the mind seems to perceive, straying through the darkness amid the rot of what was once magnificence, that huge blind mole, the Past.
This, we repeat, was the sewer of former days.
V. Present progress
Today the sewer is clean, cold, straight, and correct, almost achieving that ideal which the English convey by the word ‘respectable.’ It is orthodox and sober, sedately in line, one might almost say, neat as a new pin – like a tradesman become Counselor of State. One can see almost clearly in it. The filth is well-behaved. At first sight one might mistake it for one of those subterranean passages that aided the flight of princes in those good old days when ‘the people loved their kings.’ The present sewer is a good sewer, pure in style. The classic rectilinear alexandrine, having been driven out of poetry, seems to have taken refuge in architecture and to be part of the stonework of the long, shady, whitish vault. Every outlet is an arcade; the Rue de Rivoli has its counterpart in the cloaca. Moreover, if a geometrical line is to have a place anywhere, it is surely in the stercorary trench of a great city. The sewer today has a certain official aspect. Even the police reports of which it is sometimes the object treat it with some respect. Words referring to it in administrative language are lofty and dignified. What was once called a sluice is now a gallery, and a hole has become a clearing. Villon would no longer recognize his emergency lodgings. But the network still has its immemorial rodent population, more numerous than ever. Now and then a veteran rat will risk his neck at a sewer-window to survey the Parisians; but even these vermin are tame, being well content with their subterranean palace. Nothing is left of the cloaca’s primitive ferocity. The rain, which once sullied it, now washes it. But we should not trust it too much on this account. Miasmas still infest it. It is more hypocritical than irreproachable. Despite the efforts of the police and the Health Commission, despite all attempts to purify it, it still exhales a vaguely suspect odor, like Tartuffe after confession.
We may agree then, when all is said, that cleaning is a tribute which the sewer pays to civilization; and since, in this respect, the conscience of Tartuffe is an advance on the Augean stable, so the Paris sewer is a step forward.
It is more than an advance, it is a transformation. Between the old and the present sewer a revolution has taken place. And who was responsible? The man whom everyone forgets, and whom we have named – Bruneseau.
VI. Future progress
The digging of the Paris sewer was no small matter. Ten centuries had worked at it without completing it, any more than they had completed Paris. It was a sort of dark, multi-armed polyp which grew witgh the city above it. When the city put out a street, the sewer stretched out an arm. The old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand meters of sewer: that was the point reached in Paris on 1 January 1806. From that time, to which we shall refer later, the work was effectively and energetically carried forward. Napoleon – the figures are curious – built 4,804 meters, Louis XVIII built 5,709, Charles X 10,836, Louis-Phillipe 89,020, the Republic of 1848 23,381 and the present regime has built 70,500; in all, at this date, 226,610 meters, or 60 leagues of sewers, constitute the vast entrails of Paris. A dark network always in growth, unknown and enormous.
As we see, the underground labyrinth of Paris is today ten times what it was at the start of the century. It is hard to conceive of the perseverance and effort needed to bring it to its present state of relative perfection. It was with great difficulty that the monarchical authority, and the revolutionary in the last decade of the eighteenth century, succeeded in digging the five leagues of sewer which existed before 1806. Every kind of obstacle hindered the operation, some due to the nature of the ground, others to the prejudice of the working population of Paris. Paris is built on a site strangely opposed to pick and shovel, to all human management. Nothing is more difficult to penetrate than the geological formation on which is set the marvelous historical formation which is Paris; underground resistance is manifest whenever, and by whatever means, the attempt is made. There are liquid clays, live springs, rocks, and the deep sludgy pits known to science as moutardes. The pick advances laboriously through chalky strata alternating with seams of very fine clay, and layers of schist encrusted with oyster-shells, relics of the prehistoric ocean. Sometimes a stream destroys the beginning of a tunnel, drenching the workers; or a fall of rubble sweeps down like a cataract, shattering the stoutest roof-props. Only recently, when it became necessary to run a sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without emptying the canal or interfering with its use, a fissure developed in the canal bottom so that more water poured into the lower gallery than pumps could handle; a diver had to find the fissure, which was in the neck of the great basin, and it was blocked only with difficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine and even some distance from the river, there are shifting sands in which a man may sink. There is also the danger of asphyxiation in the foul air and burial beneath falls of earth. There is a typhus, with which the workers become slowly infected. In our time, after four months of day and night labor principally designed to rid Paris of the pouring waters of Montmartre, and after constructing the Rue Barre-du-Bec sewer some six meters underground, the foreman, Monnot, died. The engineer, Duleau, died after constructing 3,000 meters of sewer which included the formidable task of lowering the floor of the Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth cutting. No bulletins signaled these acts of bravery, more useful than any battlefield slaughter.
The Paris sewers in 1832 were very different from what they are today. Bruneseau had made a start, but it needed cholera to supply the impetus for the huge reconstruction which took place later. It is surprising to know, for example, that in 1821 a part of the ring sewer, known, as in Venice, as the Grand Canal, still lay open to the sky in the Rue des Gourdes. Not until 1823 did Paris find the 266,080 francs 6 centimes necessary to cover this disgrace. The three absorbent wells of Combat, the Cunette, and Saint-Mande, with their ancillary outlets, date from only 1836. The intestinal canal of Paris has been rebuilt and, as we have said, increased more than tenfold in the last twenty-five years.
Thirty years ago, at the time of the insurrection of 5 and 6 of June, it was still in many places almost the ancient sewer. A great many streets, now cambered, were then sunken. One often saw, at a point where the gutters of two streets met, large square grilles whose thick iron bars, burnished by the feet of pedestrians, were slippery for carts and dangerous for horses. And in 1832, in countless streets, the old gothic cloaca was still shamelessly manifest in great gaping blocks of stone.
In Paris in 1806 the figure was not much more than that for May 1663 – 5,328 fathoms. After Bruneseau, on 1 January 1832, it amounted to 40,300 meters. From 1806 to 1831 an annual average of 750 meters had been built; after which the figure rose to eight and even ten thousand a year, galleries built of cemented rubble on a foundation of concrete.
Apart from economic progress, the Paris sewer is part of an immense problem of public hygiene. Paris exists between two layers, of water and air. The water layer, some distance underground but fed by two sources, is borne on stratum of sandstone situated between chalk and Jurassic limestone, and may be represented by a disc of some twenty-five leagues radius into which a host of rivers and streams seep. One may drink the mingled waters of Seine, Marne, Yonne, Oise, Aisne, Cher, Vienne, and Loire in a glass of water drawn from a well in Grenelle. The layer of water is healthy, coming first from the sky and then from the earth; the layer of air is unhealthy, for it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas of the cloaca are mingled with the breath of the town, hence its poor quality. It has been scientifically demonstrated that air taken from immediately above a dung-heap is purer than the air of Paris. In time, with the aid of progress, perfected mechanisms and fuller knowledge, the layer of water will be used to purify the layer of air – that is to say, to cleanse the sewer. By cleansing the sewer we mean the return of mire to the earth, of manure to the soil, and fertilizer to the fields. This simple fact will bring about a decrease in misery and increase in health for the whole community. As things are, the maladies of Paris spread some fifty leagues form the Louvre, taking this as the hub of the pestilential wheel.
It may be said that for ten centuries the sewer has been the disease of Paris, the evil in the city’s blood. Popular instinct has never doubted it. The trade of sewage worker was more perilous and nearly as repugnant to the people as the trade of executioner, and held in abhorrence. High wages were needed to induce a mason tro vanish into that fetid ooze. ‘To go into the sewer is to go into the grave,’ men said. All sorts of legends covered that colossal sink with horror, that dreadful place which bears the impress of the revolution of the earth and of men, in which remains of every cataclysm is to be found, from the Flood to the death of Marat.
