by Victor Hugo
CHAPTER VI.
FUTURE PROGRESS.
Digging the sewerage of Paris was no small task. The last ten centurieshave toiled at it without being able to finish, any more than theycould finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the counterstrokesof the growth of Paris. It is in the ground a species of dark polypuswith a thousand antennæ, which grows below, equally with the cityabove. Each time that the city forms a street, the sewer stretchesout an arm. The old monarchy only constructed twenty-three thousandthree hundred metres of sewers, and Paris had reached that point onJan. 1, 1806. From this period, to which we shall presently revert,the work has been usefully and energetically taken up and continued.Napoleon built--and the figures are curious--four thousand eighthundred and four metres; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred andthirty-six; Louis Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; theRepublic of 1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one;the present government, seventy thousand five hundred: all together twohundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred metres, or sixty leagues,of sewer,--the enormous entrails of Paris,--an obscure ramificationconstantly at work, an unknown and immense construction. As we see,the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is, at the present day, more thantenfold what it was at the beginning of the century. It would bedifficult to imagine all the perseverance and efforts required to raisethis cloaca to the point of relative perfection at which it now is. Itwas with great trouble that the old monarchical Provostry, and in thelast ten years of the eighteenth century the revolutionary Mayoralty,succeeded in boring the five leagues of sewers which existed prior to1806. All sorts of obstacles impeded this operation; some peculiarto the nature of the soil, others inherent in the prejudices of theworking population of Paris. Paris is built on a stratum strangelyrebellious to the pick, the spade, the borer, and human manipulation.Nothing is more difficult to pierce and penetrate than this geologicalformation on which the marvellous historical formation called Parisis superposed. So soon as labor in any shape ventures into this layerof alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. They are liquid clay,running springs, hard rocks, and that soft and deep mud which thespecial science calls "mustard." The pick advances laboriously inthe calcareous layers alternating with very thin veins of clay andschistose strata incrusted with oyster-shells, which are contemporariesof the Pre-Adamite oceans. At times a stream suddenly bursts into atunnel just commenced, and inundates the workmen, or a slip of chalktakes place and rushes forward with the fury of a cataract, breakinglike glass the largest supporting shores. Very recently at La Villette,when it was found necessary to carry the collecting sewer under theSt. Martin canal without stopping the navigation or letting off thewater, a fissure formed in the bed of the canal, and the water pouredinto the tunnel deriding the efforts of the draining-pumps. It wasfound necessary to employ a diver to seek for the fissure which was inthe mouth of the great basin, and it was only stopped up with greatdifficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance fromthe river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and PassageLunière, bottomless sands are found, in which men have been swallowedup. Add asphyxia by miasmas, interment by slips and sudden breakingin of the soil; add typhus, too, with which the workmen are slowlyimpregnated. In our days, after having hollowed the gallery of Clichywith a _banquette_ to convey the mainwater conduit of the Ourque, awork performed by trenches ten metres in depth; after having archedthe Bièvre from the Boulevard de l'Hôpital to the Seine, in the midstof earth-slips and by the help of trenching often through putridmatter, and of shores; after having, in order to deliver Paris fromthe torrent-like waters of the Montmartre, and give an outlet to thefluviatic pond of twenty-three acres which stagnated near the Barrièredes Martyrs; after having, we say, constructed the line of sewersfrom the Barrière Blanche to the Aubervilliers road, in four months,by working day and night at a depth of eleven metres; after having--athing unknown before--executed subterraneously a sewer in the Rue Barredu Bec, without trench, at a depth of six metres, the surveyor Monnotdied. After arching three thousand metres of sewer in all parts of thecity, from the Rue Traversière St. Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine;after having, by the Arbalète branch, freed the Censier-Mouffetardsquare from pluvial inundations; after having constructed the St.George sewer through liquid sand upon rubble and béton, and afterhaving lowered the formidable pitch of the Nôtre Dame de Nazarethbranch, the engineer Duleau died. There are no bulletins for such actsof bravery, which are more useful, however, than the brutal butchery ofbattle-fields.
The sewers of Paris were in 1832 far from being what they are now.Bruneseau gave the impulse, but it required the cholera to determinethe vast reconstruction which has taken place since. It is surprisingto say, for instance, that in 1821 a portion of the begirding sewer,called the Grand Canal, as at Venice, still stagnated in the open air,in the Rue des Gourdes. It was not till 1823 that the city of Parisfound in its pocket the twenty-six thousand six hundred and eightyfrancs, six centimes, needed for covering this turpitude. The threeabsorbing wells of the Combat, la Cunette, and St. Mandé, with theirdisgorging apparatus, draining-wells, and deodorizing branches, merelydate from 1836. The intestine canal of Paris has been re-made, and,as we said, augmented more than tenfold during the last quarter of acentury. Thirty years ago, at the period of the insurrection of June 5and 6, it was still in many parts almost the old sewer. A great numberof streets, now convex, were at that time broken causeways. Therecould be frequently seen at the bottom of the water-sheds of streetsand squares, large square gratings, whose iron glistened from theconstant passage of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for vehicles, andthrowing horses down. The official language of the department of theroads and bridges gave these gratings the expressive name of _Cassis._In 1832 in a number of streets,--Rue de l'Étoile, Rue St. Louis, Ruedu Temple, Rue Vieille du Temple, Rue Nôtre Dame de Nazareth, RueFolie Méricourt, Quai aux Fleurs, Rue du Petit Muse, Rue de Normandie,Rue Pont aux Biches, Rue des Marais, Faubourg St. Martin, Rue NôtreDame des Victoires, Faubourg Montmartre, Rue Grange Batelière, at theChamps Élysées, the Rue Jacob, and the Rue de Tournon, the old Gothiccloaca still cynically displayed its throats. They were enormousstone orifices, sometimes surrounded with posts, with a monumentaleffrontery. Paris in 1806 was much in the same state as regardssewers as in May, 1663,--five thousand three hundred and twenty-eighttoises. After Bruneseau, on Jan. 1, 1832, there were forty thousandthree hundred metres. From 1806 to 1831 seven hundred and fifty metreswere on the average constructed annually; since then eight and eventen thousand metres have been made every year in brick-work, with acoating of concrete on a foundation of b£ton. At two hundred francs themetre, the sixty leagues of drainage in the Paris of to-day representforty-eight million francs.
In addition to the economic progress to which we alluded at the outset,serious considerations as to the public health are attached to thisimmense question,--the drainage of Paris. Paris is situated betweentwo sheets,--a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of water,lying at a very great depth, but already tapped by two borings, issupplied by the stratum of green sandstone situated between the chalkand the Jurassic limestone; this stratum may be represented by adisc with a radius of twenty-five leagues; a multitude of rivers andstreams drip into it, and the Seine, the Marne, the Yonne, the Oisin,the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne, and the Loire are drunk in a glass ofwater from the Grenelle well. The sheet of water is salubrious, forit comes from the sky first, and then from the earth; but the sheetof air is unhealthy, for it comes from the sewer. All the miasmas ofthe cloaca are mingled with the breathing of the city; hence this badbreath. The atmosphere taken from above a dungheap, it has been provedscientifically, is purer than the atmosphere taken from over Paris.Within a given time, by the aid of progress, improvements in machinery,and enlightenment, the sheet of water will be employed to purify thesheet of air, that is to say, to wash the sewer. It is known that bywashing the sewer we mean restoring the ordure to the earth by sendingdung to the arable lands and manure to the grass lands. Throug
h thissimple fact there will be for the whole social community a diminutionof wretchedness and an augmentation of health. At the present hour theradiation of the diseases of Paris extends for fifty leagues round theLouvre, taken as the axle of this pestilential wheel.
We might say that for the last ten centuries the cloaca has been themisery of Paris, and the sewer is the viciousness which the city hasin its blood. The popular instinct has never been deceived, and thetrade of the sewer-man was formerly almost as dangerous and almost asrepulsive to the people as that of the horse-slaughterer, which solong was regarded with horror and left to the hangman. Great wageswere required to induce a bricklayer to disappear in this fetidsap; the ladder of the well-digger hesitated to plunge into it. Itwas said proverbially, "Going into the sewer is entering the tomb;"and all sorts of hideous legends, as we said, covered this colossalcesspool with terrors. It is a formidable fosse which bears traces ofthe revolutions of the globe as well as the revolutions of men; andvestiges may be found there of every cataclysm from the shells of theDeluge to the ragged sheet of Marat.
BOOK III.
MUD, BUT SOUL.