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, despots died 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 Nineveh. It is from the sewer of Münster that John of Leyden raised his false moon, and from the pit of Kekhscheb that Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan, raised his false sun.
The history of mankind is reflected in the history of cloaca. The Gemoniae depicted Rome. The sewer of Paris was a formidable ancient thing, both sepulchre 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 in the fourteenth century, the Tire-laines in the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth, the Illuminati in the seventeenth, 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 a part of the Court of Miracles, and at night, cunning and ferocious, crouched under the Maubué 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 muck-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 whitewashing, 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 disappearance: 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 foetus is wrapped in the spangles which last Shrove Tuesday danced at the Opéra, a wig which passed judgement 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 seeps 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, François I with Duprat, Charles IX with his mother, Richelieu with Louis XIII; Louvois, Letellier, Hébert, 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 the Jewry of the 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 inkspot 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 prostitution 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 in 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 were suddenly angry. There 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-Honoré by the two sewer mouths of the Champs-Élysées, 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-Élysées to a depth of thirty-five centimetres; 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 metres, 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 metres.
At the beginning of this century the Paris sewer was still a place of mystery. Muck has never had a good name, but here it was a subject for alarm. Paris was confusedl
y 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 with the Marquis de Créqui, 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 as 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 1685 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 grille 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 that unknown? It was terrible. Nevertheless someone did venture. The cloaca found its Christopher Columbus.
On a 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 sabres 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 Kléber, 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 Armée had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz ahead of it … ‘Sire,’ said the Minister to 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, an 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 when 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 the 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 tumours; 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 seventeenth 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. The two vaults, especially the more recent, that of 1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the ring sewer, dating from 1412, when the open stream of Ménilmontant 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 orang-utan 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 been 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 the sewage workers, abounded in precious objects of jewellery 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 LAVBESP. 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 Panthéon 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 Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, the Rue du Mail, the Rue de l’Écharpe, and the Place Royale; in 1812 under the Rue de la Paix and the Chaussée 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 this 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, foetid 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 Counsellor 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 odour, like Tartuffe after confession.
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