by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER III.
BRUNESEAU.
The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenthcentury Henry II. attempted soundings which failed, and not a hundredyears ago, as Mercier testifies, the cloaca was abandoned to itself,and became what it could. Such was that ancient Paris, handed overto quarrels, indecisions, and groping. It was for a long time thusstupid, and a later period, '89, showed how cities acquire sense. Butin the good old times the capital had but little head; it did notknow how to transact its business either morally or materially, andcould no more sweep away its ordure than its abuses. Everything was anobstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, wasrefractory to any itinerary, and people could no more get on under thecity than they did in it; above, everything was unintelligible; below,inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues was the confusion ofcellars, and Dædalus duplicated Babel. At times the sewer of Paristhought proper to overflow, as if this misunderstood Nile had suddenlyfallen into a passion. There were, infamous to relate, inundations ofthe sewer. At moments this stomach of civilization digested badly,the sewer flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris bad theafter-taste of its ordure. These resemblances of the drain to remorsehad some good about them, for they were warnings, very badly takenhowever; for the city was indignant that its mud should have so muchboldness, and did not admit that the ordure should return. Discharge itbetter.
The inundation of 1802 is in the memory of Parisians of eighty yearsof age. The mud spread across the Place des Victoires, on which isthe statue of Louis XIV.; it entered Rue St. Honoré by the two mouthsof the sewer of the Champs Élysées, Rue St. Florentin by the St.Florentin sewer, Rue Pierre à Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie, RuePopincourt by the Chemin-Vert sewer, and Rue de la Roquette by the Ruede Lappe sewer; it covered the level of the Rue des Champs Élysées to aheight of fourteen inches, and in the south, owing to the vomitory ofthe Seine performing its duties contrariwise, it entered Rue Mazarine,Rue de l'Échaudé, and Rue des Marais, where it stopped after runningon a hundred and twenty yards, just a few yards from the house whichRacine had inhabited, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poetmore than the king. It reached its maximum depth in the Rue St. Pierre,where it rose three feet above the gutter, and its maximum extent inthe Rue St. Sabin, where it extended over a length of two hundred andfifty yards.
At the beginning of the present century the sewer of Paris was stilla mysterious spot. Mud can never be well famed, but here the illreputation extended almost to terror. Paris knew confusedly that ithad beneath it a grewsome cave; people talked about it as of thatmonstrous mud-bed of Thebes, in which centipedes fifteen feet in lengthswarmed, and which could have served as a bathing-place for Behemoth.The great boots of the sewers-men never ventured beyond certain knownpoints. It was still very close to the time when the scavengers' carts,from the top of which St. Foix fraternized with the Marquis de Créqui,were simply unloaded into the sewer. As for the cleansing, the dutywas intrusted to the showers, which choked up rather than swept away.Rome allowed some poetry to her cloaca, and called it the Gemoniæ, butParis insulted its own, and called it the stench-hole. Science andsuperstition were agreed as to the horror, and the stench-hole wasquite as repugnant to hygiene as to the legend. The goblin was hatchedunder the fetid arches of the Mouffetard sewer: the corpses of theMarmousets were thrown into the Barillerie sewer: Fagot attributed themalignant fever of 1685 to the great opening of the Marais sewer, whichremained yawning until 1833 in the Rue St. Louis, nearly opposite thesign of the Messager Galant. The mouth of the sewer in the Rue de laMortellerie was celebrated for the pestilences which issued from it;with its iron-pointed grating that resembled a row of teeth it yawnedin this fatal street like the throat of a dragon breathing hell onmankind. The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sewerwith some hideous mixture of infinitude: the sewer was bottomless, thesewer was a Barathrum, and the idea of exploring these leprous regionsnever even occurred to the police. Who would have dared to cast a soundinto this darkness, and go on a journey of discovery in this abyss? Itwas frightful, and yet some one presented himself at last. The cloacahad its Christopher Columbus.
One day in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperormade in Paris, the Minister of the Interior attended at his master's_petit lever._ In the court-yard could be heard the clanging sabresof all the extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic and the greatEmpire; there was a swarm of heroes at Napoleon's gates; men of theRhine, the Schelde, the Adage, and the Nile; comrades of Joubert, ofDesaix, of Marceau, Hoche, and Kléber, aeronauts of Fleurus, grenadiersof Mayence, pontooners of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had gazedat, artillerymen who had bespattered Junot's cannon-balls, cuirassierswho had taken by assault the fleet anchored in the Zuyderzee; some hadfollowed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi, others had accompaniedMurat to the trenches of Mantua, while others had outstripped Lannesin the hollow way of Montebello. The whole army of that day was in thecourt of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a company, andguarding Napoleon, then resting; and it was the splendid period whenthe great army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it. "Sire,"said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "I have seen to-day themost intrepid man of your Empire." "Who is the man?" the Emperor askedsharply, "and what has he done?" "He wishes to do something, Sire.""What is it?" "To visit the sewers of Paris." This man existed, and hisname was Bruneseau.