mysterious place. Mire can never be in good repute; but here ill-fame
reached even fright. Paris dimly realized that she had a terrible cave
beneath her. People talked of it as of that monstrous bog of Thebes
which swarmed with scolopendras fifteen feet long, and which might
have served as a bathing-tub for Behemoth. The big boots of the sewer
men never ventured beyond certain known points. They were still very
near the time when the scavengers’ tumbrils, from the top of which
Ste. Foix fraternized with the Marquis of Créqui, were simply emptied
into the sewer. As for cleansing, that operation was confided to
the showers, which obstructed more than they swept out. Science and
superstition were at one in regard to the horror. The sewer was not
less revolting to hygiene than to legend. The Goblin Monk had appeared
under the fetid arch of the Mouffetard sewer; the corpses of the
Marmousets had been thrown into the sewer of the Barillerie; Fagon
had attributed the fearful malignant fever of 1685 to the great gap
in the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in the
Rue St. Louis, almost in front of the sign of the Gallant Messenger.
The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was famous for the
pestilence which came from it; with its pointed iron grating, which
looked like a row of teeth, it lay in that fatal street like the jaws
of a dragon blowing hell upon men. The popular imagination seasoned
the gloomy Parisian sink with an indefinably hideous mixture of the
infinite.
[Illustration: THE MADELEINE CHURCH, PARIS.]
[Sidenote: THE BOLDEST MAN IN FRANCE.]
“One day in 1805, on one of those rare visits which the emperor made
to Paris, the minister of the interior came to the master’s private
audience. In the carousal was heard the clatter of the swords of all
those marvellous soldiers of the Grand Empire; there was a multitude
of heroes at the door of Napoleon; men of the Rhine, of the Scheldt,
of the Adige, and of the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of
Marceau, of Hoche, of Kléber. The whole army of that time was there in
the court of the Tuileries, represented by a squad or platoon guarding
Napoleon in repose; and it was the splendid epoch when the grand army
had behind it Marengo, and before it Austerlitz. ‘Sire,’ said the
minister of the interior to Napoleon, ‘I saw yesterday the boldest man
in your empire.’ ‘Who is the man?’ said the emperor, quickly; ‘and
what has he done?’ ‘He wishes to do something, sire.’ ‘What?’ ‘To
visit the sewers of Paris.’
“That man existed, and his name was Bruneseau.
[Sidenote: WORK OF THE INSPECTOR.]
“The visit was made. It was a formidable campaign; a night battle
against pestilence and asphyxia. It was at the same time a voyage of
discoveries. One of the survivors of this exploration, an intelligent
working-man, then very young, still related, a few years ago, the
curious details which Bruneseau thought it his duty to omit in his
report to the prefect of police, as unworthy the administrative style.
Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that period. Hardly
had Bruneseau passed the first branchings of the subterranean
network, when eight out of the twenty laborers refused to go farther.
The operation was completed; the visit involved the cleaning; it was
necessary, therefore, to clean, and at the same time to measure; to
note the entrance of water, to count the gratings and the mouths,
to detail the branchings, to indicate the currents at the points of
separation, to examine the respective borders of the various basins,
to fathom the little sewers ingrafted upon the principal sewer, to
measure the height of each passage under the keystone, and the width,
as well at the spring of the arch as at the level of the floor;
finally, to determine the ordinates of the levellings at a right angle
with each entrance of water, either from the floor of the sewer or
from the surface of the street. They advanced with difficulty. It was
not uncommon for the step-ladders to plunge into three feet of mire.
The lanterns flickered in the miasms. From time to time, they brought
out a sewer-man who had fainted; at certain places, a precipice. The
soil had sunken, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed
into a blind well; they found no solid ground; one man suddenly
disappeared; they had great difficulty in recovering him. By the
advice of Fourcroy, they lighted from point to point, in the places
sufficiently purified, great cages full of oakum and saturated with
resin. The wall, in places, was covered with shapeless fungi, and one
would have said with tumors; the stone itself seemed diseased in this
irrespirable medium.
“They thought they recognized here and there, chiefly under the Palais
de Justice, some cells of ancient dungeons built in the sewer itself.
Hideous _in pace_. An iron collar hung in one of these cells. They
walled them all up. Some odd things were found; among other things,
the skeleton of an orang-outang which disappeared from the Jardin des
Plantes in 1800—a disappearance probably connected with the famous and
incontestable appearance of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the
last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil finally drowned
himself in the sewer.
“Under the long, arched passage which terminates at the Arche Marion,
a rag-picker’s basket, in perfect preservation, was the admiration
of connoisseurs. Everywhere the mud, which the workmen had come to
handle boldly, abounded in precious objects, gold and silver trinkets,
precious stones, coins. A giant who should have filtered this cloaca
would have had the riches of centuries in his sieve. At the point of
separation of the two branches of the Rue du Temple and the Rue Ste.
Avoye, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on
one side a hog wearing a cardinal’s hat, and on the other a wolf with
the tiara on his head.
[Sidenote: EXTENT OF THE WORK.]
“The complete visitation of the subterranean sewer system of Paris
occupied seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While yet he was performing
it, Bruneseau laid out, directed, and brought to an end some
considerable works. At the same time, he disinfected and purified the
whole network. After the second year, Bruneseau was assisted by his
son-in-law Nargaud.
“Tortuous, fissured, unpaved, crackling, interrupted by quagmires,
broken by fantastic elbows, rising and falling out of all rule, fetid,
savage, wild, submerged, in obscurity, with scars on its pavements and
gashes on its walls, appalling,—such was, seen retrospectively, the
ancient sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings
of trenches, branchings, goose-tracks, stars as if in mines, cœcums,
cul-de-sacs, arches covered with saltpetre, infectious cesspools,
an herpetic ooze upon the walls, drops falling from the ceiling,
darkness,—nothing equalled the horror of this old voiding crypt, the
digestive apparatus of Babylon, cavern, grave, gulf pierced with
streets, Titanic molehill, in which the mind seems to see prowling
through the shadow, that enormous blind mole, the past.
“At present the sewer is neat, cold, straight, correct. It almost
realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word
‘respectable.’ It is comely and sober; drawn by the line; we might
almost say, fresh from the bandbox. At the first glance, we should
readily take it for one of those underground passages formerly so
common and so useful for the flight of monarchs and princes, in
that good old time ‘when the people loved their kings.’ The present
sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns in it; the classic
rectilinear alexandrine, which, driven from poetry, appears to have
taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with every stone of that
long, darkling, and whitish arch; each discharging mouth is an arcade.
If the geometric line is in place anywhere, it surely is in the
stercorary trenches of a great city. There all should be subordinated
to the shortest road. The sewer has now assumed a certain official
aspect. The very police reports, of which it is sometimes the object,
are no longer wanting in respect for it. The words which characterize
it in the administrative language are elevated and dignified. Villon
would no longer recognize his old dwelling in case of need.
[Sidenote: HOW THE SEWERS ARE BUILT.]
“The excavation of the sewers of Paris has been a difficult work.
Paris is built upon a deposit singularly rebellious to human control.
There are liquid clays, living springs, hard rocks, those soft and
deep mires which technical science calls Moutardes. The pick advances
laboriously into these calcareous strata alternating with seams of
very fine clay and laminar schistose beds, incrusted with oyster
shells contemporary with the pre-adamite oceans. Sometimes a brook
suddenly throws down an arch which has been commenced, and inundates
the laborers; or a slide of marl loosens, and rushes down with the
fury of a cataract, crushing the largest of the sustaining timbers
like glass. Quite recently at Villette, when it was necessary, without
interrupting navigation and without emptying the canal, to lead the
collecting sewer under the St. Martin Canal, a fissure opened in
the bed of the canal; the water suddenly rose in the works under
ground beyond all the power of the pumps: they were obliged to seek
the fissure, which was in the neck of the great basin, by means of
a diver, and it was not without difficulty that it was stopped.
Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from the river,
as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and the Lunière arcade,
we find quicksands in which we sink, and a man may be buried out of
sight. Add asphyxia from the miasma, burial by the earth falling in,
sudden settlings of the bottom, and the work of constructing sewers
can well be understood to be dangerous.”
[Illustration: THE GREAT SEWER.]
[Illustration: SUBTERRANEAN PARIS.]
[Sidenote: JEAN VALJEAN’S ESCAPE.]
In all that he has written, Victor Hugo has produced nothing more
graphic than his description of Jean Valjean in the sewers of Paris,
when endeavoring to escape from the police, after the fight at the
barricades. We quote his description, omitting a few paragraphs.
“It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
“A resemblance of Paris with the sea. As in the ocean, the diver can
disappear.
“The transition was marvellous. From the very centre of the city, Jean
Valjean had gone out of the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye,
the time of lifting a cover and closing it again, he had passed from
broad day to complete obscurity, from noon to midnight, from uproar to
silence, from the whirl of the thunder to the stagnation of the tomb,
and, by a mutation much more prodigious still than that of the Rue
Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute security.
“Sudden fall into a cave; disappearance in the dungeon of Paris; to
leave that street in which death was everywhere for this kind of
sepulchre, in which there was life, was an astounding crisis. He
remained for some seconds as if stunned; listening, stupefied. The
spring trap of safety had suddenly opened beneath him. Celestial
goodness had in some sort taken him by treachery. Adorable ambuscades
of Providence!
“Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know
whether what he was carrying away in this grave were alive or dead.
“His first sensation was blindness. Suddenly he saw nothing more. It
seemed to him also that in one minute he became deaf. He heard nothing
more. The frenzied storm of murder which was raging a few feet above
him only reached him, as we have said, thanks to the thickness of
the earth which separated him from it, stifled and indistinct, and
like a rumbling at a great depth. He felt that it was solid under his
feet; that was all; but that was enough. He reached out one hand, then
the other, and touched the wall on both sides, and realized that the
passage was narrow; he slipped, and realized that the pavement was
wet. He advanced one foot with precaution, fearing a hole, a pit, some
gulf; he made sure that the flagging continued. A whiff of fetidness
informed him where he was.
[Sidenote: LIGHT AND DARKNESS.]
“After a few moments he ceased to be blind. A little light fell from
the air-hole through which he had slipped in, and his eye became
accustomed to this cave. He began to distinguish something. The
passage in which he was earthed—no other word better expresses the
condition—was walled up behind him. It was one of those cul-de-sacs
technically called branchments. Before him there was another wall,
a wall of night. The light from the air-hole died out ten or twelve
paces from the point at which Jean Valjean stood, and scarcely
produced a pallid whiteness over a few yards of the damp wall of the
sewer. Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate it appeared
horrible, and to enter it seemed like being ingulfed. He could,
however, force his way into that wall of mist, and he must do it. He
must even hasten. Jean Valjean thought that that grating, noticed by
him under the paving-stones, might also be noticed by the soldiers,
and that all depended upon that chance. They also could descend into
the well and explore it. There was not a minute to be lost. He had
laid Marius upon the ground; he gathered him up,—this is again the
right word,—replaced him upon his shoulders, and began his journey. He
resolutely entered that obscurity.
“The truth is, that they were not so safe as Jean Valjean supposed.
Perils of another kind, and not less great, awaited them perhaps.
After the flashing whirl of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and
pitfalls; after chaos, the cloaca. Jean Valjean had fallen from one
circle of hell to another.
[Sidenote: A PERPLEXING SITUATION.]
“At the end of fifty paces he was obliged to stop. A question
presented itself. The passage terminated in another, which it met
transversely. These two roads were offered. Which should he take?
Should he turn to the left or to the right? How guide himself in this
black labyrinth? This labyrinth, as we have remarked, has a clew—its
descent. To follow the descent is to go to the river.
“Jean Valjean understood this at once.
“He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer of the markets;
that, if he should choose the left and follow the descent, he would
come in less than a quarter of an hour to some mouth upon the Seine
between the Pont au Change and the Pont Neuf; that is to say, he
would reappear in broad day in the most populous portion of Paris.
He might come out in some gathering of corner idlers. Amazement of
the passers-by at seeing two bloody men come out of the ground under
their feet. Arrival of sergent-de-ville, call to arms in the next
guard-house. He would be seized before getting out. It was better to
plunge into the labyrinth, to trust to this darkness, and rely on
Providence for the issue.
“He chose the right, and went up the ascent.
“When he had turned the corner of the gallery, the distant gleam of
the air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell back over
him, and he again became blind. He went forward, none the less, as
rapidly as he could. Marius’s arms were passed about his neck, and
his feet hung behind him. He held both arms with one hand, and groped
for the wall with the other. Marius’s cheek touched his, and stuck
to it, being bloody. He felt a warm stream, which came from Marius,
flow over him and penetrate his clothing. Still, a moist warmth at his
ear, which touched the wounded man’s mouth, indicated respiration,
and consequently life. The passage through which Jean Valjean was now
moving was not so small as the first. Jean Valjean walked in it with
difficulty. The rains of the previous day had not yet run off, and
made a little stream in the centre of the floor, and he was compelled
to hug the wall to keep his feet out of the water. Thus he went on
in midnight. He resembled the creatures of night groping in the
invisible, and lost under ground in the veins of the darkness.
“However, little by little, whether that some distant air-holes sent a
little floating light into this opaque mist, or that his eyes became
accustomed to the obscurity, some dim vision came back to him, and he
again began to receive a confused perception, now of the wall which
he was touching, and now of the arch under which he was passing. The
pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the
soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it.
“To find his way was difficult.
[Sidenote: THE TRACK OF THE SEWERS.]
“The track of the sewers echoes, so to speak, the track of the streets
which overlie them. There were in the Paris of that day two thousand
two hundred streets. Picture to yourselves below them that forest
of dark branches which is called the sewer. The sewers existing at
that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of thirty
miles. We have already said that the present network, thanks to the
extraordinary activity of the last thirty years, is not less than a
hundred and forty miles.
“Jean Valjean began with a mistake. He thought that he was under
the Rue St. Denis, and it was unfortunate that he was not there.
There is beneath the Rue St. Denis an old stone sewer, which goes
straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer, with a
single elbow, on the right, at the height of the ancient Cour des
Miracles, and a single branch, the St. Martin sewer, the four arms
of which cut each other in a cross. But the gallery of the Petite
Truanderie, the entrance to which was near the wine-shop of Corinth,
never communicated with the underground passage in the Rue St. Denis;
it runs into the Montmartre sewer, and it was in that that Jean
Valjean was entangled. There, opportunities of losing one’s self
abound. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthian of the
ancient network. Luckily Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer
of the markets, the geometrical plan of which represents a multitude
of interlocked top-gallant-masts; but he had before him more than
one embarrassing encounter, and more than one street corner—for
these are streets—presenting itself in the obscurity like a point of
interrogation; first, at his left, the vast Plâtrière sewer, a kind
of Chinese puzzle, pushing and jumbling its chaos of T’s and Z’s
beneath the Hôtel des Postes and the rotunda of the grain-market to
the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, at his right, the
crooked corridor of the Rue du Cadran, with its three teeth, which
are so many blind ditches; thirdly, at his left, the branch of the
Mail, complicated, almost at its entrance, by a kind of fork, and,
after zigzag upon zigzag, terminating in the great voiding crypt of
the Louvre, truncated and ramified in all directions; finally, at the
right, the cul-de-sac passage of the Rue des Jeûneurs, with countless
little reducts here and there, before arriving at the central sewer,
which alone could lead him to some outlet distant enough to be secure.
“If Jean Valjean had had any notion of what we have here pointed out,
he would have quickly perceived, merely from feeling the wall, that he
was not in the underground gallery of the Rue St. Denis. Instead of
the old hewn stone, instead of the ancient architecture, haughty and
royal even in the sewer, with floor and running courses of granite,
and mortar of thick lime, which cost seventy-five dollars a yard,
he would have felt beneath his hand the contemporary cheapness, the
economical expedient, the millstone grit laid in hydraulic cement
upon a bed of concrete, which cost thirty-five dollars a yard, the
bourgeois masonry known as _small materials_; but he knew nothing of
all this.
“He went forward with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing,
knowing nothing, plunged into chance, that is to say, swallowed up in
Providence.
[Sidenote: MOVING IN THE DARKNESS.]
“By degrees, we must say, some horror penetrated him. The shadow which
enveloped him entered his mind. He was walking in an enigma. This
aqueduct of the cloaca is formidable; it is dizzily intertangled. It
is a dreary thing to be caught in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean
was obliged to find, and almost to invent, his route without seeing
it. In that unknown region, each step which he ventured might be the
last. How should he get out? Should he find an outlet? Should he find
it in time? Would this colossal subterranean sponge, with cells of
stone, admit of being penetrated and pierced? Would he meet with some
unlooked for knot of obscurity? Would he encounter the inextricable
and the insurmountable? Would Marius die of hemorrhage, and he of
hunger? Would they both perish there at last, and make two skeletons
in some niche of that night? He did not know. He asked himself all
this, and he could not answer. The intestine of Paris is an abyss.
Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
[Sidenote: APPROACHING THE SEINE.]
“Suddenly he was surprised. At the most unexpected moment, and without
having diverged from a straight line, he discovered that he was no
longer rising; the water of the brook struck, coming against his heels
instead of upon the top of his feet. The sewer now descended. What?
would he then soon reach the Seine? This danger was great, but the
peril of retreat was still greater. He continued to advance. It was
not towards the Seine that he was going. The saddle-back which the
topography of Paris forms upon the right bank, empties one of its
slopes into the Seine, and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest
of this saddle-back, which determines the division of the waters,
follows a very capricious line. The culminating point, which is the
point of separation of the flow, is in the St. Avoye sewer, beyond the
Rue Michel de Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the Boulevards,
and in the Montmartre sewer, near the markets. It was at this
culminating point that Jean Valjean had arrived. He was making his way
towards the belt sewer; he was on the right road. But he knew nothing
of it.
“Whenever he came to a branch, he felt its angles, and if he found
the opening not as wide as the corridor in which he was, he did not
enter, and continued his route, deeming rightly that every narrower
way must terminate in a cul-de-sac, and could only lead him away from
his object, the outlet. He thus evaded the quadruple snare which was
spread for him in the obscurity, by the four labyrinths which we have
just enumerated.
“At a certain moment he felt that he was getting away from under the
Paris which was petrified by the _émeute_, in which the barricades had
suppressed the circulation, and that he was coming beneath the Paris
which was alive and normal. He heard suddenly above his head a sound
like thunder, distant, but continuous. It was the rumbling of the
vehicles.
“He had been walking for about half an hour, at least by his own
calculation, and had not yet thought of resting; only he had changed
the hand which supported Marius. The darkness was deeper than ever,
but this depth reassured him.
“All at once he saw his shadow before him. It was marked out on a
feeble ruddiness almost indistinct, which vaguely empurpled the floor
at his feet and the arch over his head, and which glided along at
his right, and his left, on the two slimy walls of the corridor. In
amazement he turned round.
“Behind him, in the portion of the passage through which he had
passed, at a distance which appeared to him immense, flamed, throwing
its rays into the dense obscurity, a sort of horrible star, which
appeared to be looking at him.
“It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer.
Behind this star were moving, without order, eight or ten black forms,
straight, indistinct, terrible.
[Sidenote: FOLLOWED BY THE POLICE.]
“During the day a _battue_ of the sewers had been ordered. Three
platoons of officers and sewer-men explored the subterranean streets
of Paris; the first, the right bank, the second, the left bank, the
third, in the city.
“The officers were armed with carbines, clubs, swords, and daggers.
“That which was at this moment directed upon Jean Valjean was the
lantern of the patrol of the right bank.