Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER I.

  THE EARTH IMPOVERISHED BY THE SEA.

  Paris casts twenty-five millions of francs annually into the sea; andwe assert this without any metaphor. How so, and in what way? By dayand night. For what object? For no object. With what thought? Withoutthinking. What to do? Nothing. By means of what organ? Its intestines.What are its intestines? Its sewers. Twenty-five millions are the mostmoderate of the approximative amounts given by the estimates of modernscience. Science, after groping for a long time, knows now that themost fertilizing and effective of manures is human manure. The Chinese,let us say it to our shame, knew this before we did; not a Chinesepeasant--it is Eckeberg who states the fact--who goes to the city, butbrings at either end of his bamboo a bucket full of what we call filth.Thanks to the human manure, the soil in China is still as youthful asin the days of Abraham, and Chinese wheat yields just one hundred andtwenty fold the sowing. There is no guano comparable in fertilityto the detritus of a capital, and a large city is the strongest ofstercoraries. To employ the town in manuring the plain would be certainsuccess; for if gold be dung, on the other hand our dung is gold.

  What is done with this golden dung? It is swept into the gulf. Wesend at a great expense fleets of ships to collect at the southernpole the guano of petrels and penguins, and cast into the sea theincalculable element of wealth which we have under our hand. All thehuman and animal manure which the world loses, if returned to the landinstead of being thrown into the sea, would suffice to nourish theworld. Do you know what those piles of ordure are, collected at thecorners of streets, those carts of mud carried off at night from thestreets, the frightful barrels of the night-man, and the fetid streamsof subterranean mud which the pavement conceals from you? All this isa flowering field, it is green grass, it is mint and thyme and sage,it is game, it is cattle, it is the satisfied lowing of heavy kine atnight, it is perfumed hay, it is gilded wheat, it is bread on yourtable, it is warm blood in your veins, it is health, it is joy, it islife. So desires that mysterious creation, which is transformationon earth and transfiguration in heaven; restore this to the greatcrucible, and your abundance will issue from it, for the nutritionof the plains produces the nourishment of men. You are at libertyto lose this wealth and consider me ridiculous into the bargain; itwould be the masterpiece of your ignorance. Statistics have calculatedthat France alone pours every year into the Atlantic a sum of half amilliard. Note this; with these five hundred millions one quarter ofthe expenses of the budget would be paid. The cleverness of man is sogreat that he prefers to get rid of these five hundred millions in thegutter. The very substance of the people is borne away, here drop bydrop, and there in streams, by the wretched vomiting of our sewers intothe rivers, and the gigantic vomiting of our rivers into the ocean.Each eructation of our cloacas costs us one thousand francs, and thishas two results,--the earth impoverished and the water poisoned; hungerissuing from the furrow and illness from the river. It is notoriousthat at this very hour the Thames poisons London; and as regards Paris,it has been found necessary to remove most of the mouths of the sewersdown the river below the last bridge.

  A double tubular apparatus supplied with valves and flood-gates, asystem of elementary drainage as simple as the human lungs, and whichis already in full work in several English parishes, would sufficeto bring into bur towns the pure water of the fields and send to thefields the rich water of the towns; and this easy ebb and flow, themost simple in the world, would retain among us the five hundredmillions thrown away. But people are thinking of other things. Thepresent process does mischief while meaning well. The intention isgood, but the result is sorrowful; they believe they are drainingthe city, while they are destroying the population. A sewer is amisunderstanding; and when drainage, with its double functions,restoring what it takes, is everywhere substituted for the sewer, thatsimple and impoverishing washing, and is also combined with the dataof a new social economy, the produce of the soil will be increasedtenfold, and the problem of misery will be singularly attenuated.Add the suppression of parasitisms, and it will be solved. In themean while the public wealth goes to the river, and a sinking takesplace,--sinking is the right word, for Europe is being ruined in thisway by exhaustion. As for France, we have mentioned the figures. Now,as Paris contains one twenty-fifth of the whole French population,and the Parisian guano is the richest of all, we are beneath thetruth when we estimate at twenty-five millions the share of Paris inthe half-milliard which France annually refuses. These twenty-fivemillions, employed in assistance and enjoyment, would double thesplendor of Paris, and the city expends them in sewers. So that we maysay, the great prodigality of Paris, its marvellous fête, its FolieBeaujon, its orgie, its lavishing of gold, its luxury, splendor, andmagnificence, is its sewerage. It is in this way that in the blindnessof a bad political economy people allow the comfort of all to bedrowned and wasted in the water; there ought to be St. Cloud nets tocatch the public fortunes.

  Economically regarded, the fact may be thus summarized: Paris isa regular spendthrift. Paris, that model city, that pattern ofwell-conducted capitals, of which every people strives to have a copy,that metropolis of the ideal, that august home of initiative, impulse,and experiment, that centre and gathering-place of minds, that nationcity, that beehive of the future, that marvellous composite of Babylonand Corinth, would make a peasant of Fo-Kian shrug his shoulders, fromour present point of view. Imitate Paris, and you will ruin yourself;moreover, Paris imitates itself particularly in this immemorial andinsensate squandering. These surprising follies are not new; it is noyouthful nonsense. The ancients acted like the moderns. "The cloacas ofRome," says Liebig, "absorbed the entire welfare of the Roman peasant."When the Campagna of Rome was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhaustedItaly; and when it had placed Italy in its cloaca, it poured into itSicily, and then Sardinia, and then Africa. The sewer of Rome swallowedup the world. This cloaca offered its tunnels to the city and to theworld. _Urbi et orbi._ Eternal city and unfathomable drain.

  For these things, as for others, Rome gives the example, and thisexample Paris follows with all the folly peculiar to witty cities. Forthe requirements of the operation which we have been explaining, Parishas beneath it another Paris, a Paris of sewers, which has its streets,squares, lanes, arteries, and circulation, which is mud, with thehuman forces at least. For nothing must be flattered, not even a greatpeople. Where there is everything, there is ignominy by the side ofsublimity; and if Paris contain Athens the city of light, Tyre the cityof power, Sparta the city of virtue, Nineveh the city of prodigies,it also contains Lutetia the city of mud. Moreover, the stamp of itspower is there too, and the Titanic sewer of Paris realizes amongmonuments the strange ideal realized in humanity by a few men likeMachiavelli, Bacon, and Mirabeau,--the grand abject. The subsoil ofParis, if the eye could pierce the surface, would offer the aspect of agigantic madrepore; a sponge has not more passages and holes than thepiece of ground, six leagues in circumference, upon which the old greatcity rests. Without alluding to the catacombs, which are a separatecellar, without speaking of the inextricable net of gas-pipes, withoutreferring to the vast tubular system for the distribution of runningwater, the drains alone form on either bank of the river a prodigiousdark ramification, a labyrinth which has its incline for its clew.In the damp mist of this labyrinth is seen the rat, which seems theproduce of the accouchement of Paris.