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The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last ten centuries

have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a termination, any more than they have

been able to finish Paris. The sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the

growth of Paris. Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a

thousand antennae, which expands below as the city expands above. Every time that the city

cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The old monarchy had constructed only

twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this

respect on the first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall

shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and prosecuted; Napoleon

built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII.,

five thousand seven hundred and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and

thirty-six; Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of 1848,

twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present government, seventy

thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time, two hundred and twenty-six thousand

six hundred and ten metres; sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An

obscure ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored. .

As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day more than ten times

what it was at the beginning of the century. It is difficult to form any idea of all the

perseverance and the efforts which have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point

of relative perfection in which it now is. It was with great difficulty .

that the ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years of the

eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded in perforating the five

leagues of sewer which existed previous to 1806. All sorts of obstacles hindered this

operation, some peculiar to the soil, others inherent in the very prejudices of the

laborious population of Paris. Paris is built upon a soil which is singularly rebellious

to the pick, the hoe, the bore, and to human manipulation. There is nothing more difficult

to pierce and to penetrate than the geological formation upon which is superposed the

marvellous historical formation called Paris; as soon as work in any form whatsoever is

begun and adventures upon this stretch of alluvium, subterranean resistances abound. There

are liquid clays, springs, hard rocks, and those soft and deep quagmires which special

science calls moutardes.[59] The pick advances laboriously through the calcareous layers

alternating with very slender threads of clay, and schistose beds in plates incrusted with

oyster-shells, the contemporaries of the pre-Adamite oceans. Sometimes a rivulet suddenly

bursts through a vault that has been begun, and inundates the laborers; or a layer of marl

is laid bare, and rolls down with the fury of a cataract, breaking the stoutest supporting

beams like glass. Quite recently, at Villette, when it became necessary to pass the

collecting sewer under the Saint-Martin canal without interrupting navigation or emptying

the canal, a fissure appeared in the basin of the canal, water suddenly became abundant in

the subterranean tunnel, which was beyond the power of the pumping engines; it was

necessary to send a diver to explore the fissure which had been made in the narrow

entrance of the grand basin, and it was not without great difficulty that it was stopped

up. Elsewhere near the Seine, and even at a considerable distance from the river, as for

instance, at Belleville, Grand-Rue and Lumiere Passage, quicksands are encountered in

which one sticks fast, and in which a man sinks visibly. Add suffocation by miasmas,

burial by slides, and sudden crumbling of the earth. Add the typhus, with which the

workmen become slowly impregnated. In our own day, after having excavated the gallery of

Clichy, with a banquette to receive the principal water-conduit of Ourcq, a piece of work

which was executed in a trench ten metres deep; after having, in the midst of land-slides,

and with the aid of excavations often putrid, and of shoring up, vaulted the Bievre from

the Boulevard de l'Hopital, as far as the Seine; after having, in order to deliver Paris

from the floods of Montmartre and in order to provide an outlet for that river-like pool

nine hectares in extent, which crouched near the Barriere des Martyrs, after having, let

us state, constructed the line of sewers from the Barriere Blanche to the road of

Aubervilliers, in four months, working day and night, at a depth of eleven metres; after

having--a thing heretofore unseen-- made a subterranean sewer in the Rue Barre-du-Bec,

without a trench, six metres below the surface, the superintendent, Monnot, died. After

having vaulted three thousand metres of sewer in all quarters of the city, from the Rue

Traversiere-Saint-Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine, after having freed the Carrefour

Censier-Mouffetard from inundations of rain by means of the branch of the Arbalete, after

having built the Saint-Georges sewer, on rock and concrete in the fluid sands, after

having directed the formidable lowering of the flooring of the vault timber in the

Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth branch, Duleau the engineer died. There are no bulletins for such

acts of bravery as these, which are more useful, nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter

of the field of battle. .

[59] Mustards. .

The sewers of Paris in 1832 were far from being what they are to-day. Bruneseau had

given the impulse, but the cholera was required to bring about the vast reconstruction

which took place later on. It is surprising to say, for example, that in 1821, a part of

the belt sewer, called the Grand Canal, as in Venice, still stood stagnating uncovered to

the sky, in the Rue des Gourdes. It was only in 1821 that the city of Paris found in its

pocket the two hundred and sixty-thousand eighty francs and six centimes required for

covering this mass of filth. The three absorbing wells, of the Combat, the Cunette, and

Saint-Mande, with their discharging mouths, their apparatus, their cesspools, and their

depuratory branches, only date from 1836. The intestinal sewer of Paris has been made over

anew, and, as we have said, it has been extended more than tenfold within the last quarter

of a century. .

Thirty years ago, at the epoch of the insurrection of the 5th and 6th of June, it was

still, in many localities, nearly the same ancient sewer. A very great number of streets

which are now convex were then sunken causeways. At the end of a slope, where the

tributaries of a street or cross-roads ended, there were often to be seen large, square

gratings with heavy bars, whose iron, polished by the footsteps of the throng, gleamed

dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and caused horses to fall. The official language of

the Roads and Bridges gave to these gratings the expressive name of Cassis.[60] .

[60] From casser, to break: break-necks. .

In 1832, in a number of streets, in the Rue de l'Etoile, the Rue Saint-Louis, the Rue

du Temple, the Rue Vielle-duTemple, the Rue Notre-Dame de Nazareth, the Rue

Folie-Mericourt, the Quai aux Fleurs, the Rue du Petit-Muse, the Rue du Normandie, the Rue

Pont-Aux-Biches, the Rue des Marais, the Faubourg Saint-Martin, the Rue Notre Dame

des-Victoires, the Faubourg Montmartre, the Rue Grange-Bateliere, in the Champs-Elysees,

the Rue Jacob, the Rue de Tournon, the ancient gothic sewer still cynically displayed its

maw. It consisted of enormous voids of stone catch-basins sometimes surrounded by stone

posts, with monumental effrontery. .

Paris in 1806 still had nearly the same sewers numerically as stated in 1663; five

thousand three hundred fathoms. After Bruneseau, on the 1st of January, 1832, it had forty

thousand three hundred metres. Between 1806 and 1831, there had been built, on an average,

seven hundred and fifty metres annually, afterwards eight and even ten thousand metres of

galleries were constructed every year, in masonry, of small stones, with hydraulic mortar

which hardens under water, on a cement foundation. At two hundred francs the metre, the

sixty leagues of Paris' sewers of the present day represent forty-eight millions. .

In addition to the economic progress which we have indicated at the beginning, grave

problems of public hygiene are connected with that immense question: the sewers of Paris. .

Paris is the centre of two sheets, a sheet of water and a sheet of air. The sheet of

water, lying at a tolerably great depth underground, but already sounded by two bores, is

furnished by the layer of green clay situated between the chalk and the Jurassic

lime-stone; this layer may be represented by a disk five and twenty leagues in

circumference; a multitude of rivers and brooks ooze there; one drinks the Seine,the

Marne, the Yonne, the Oise, the Aisne, the Cher, the Vienne and the Loire in a glass of

water from the well of Grenelle. The sheet of water is healthy, it comes from heaven in

the first place and next from the earth; the sheet of air is unhealthy, it comes from the

sewer. All the miasms of the cess-pool are mingled with the breath of the city; hence this

bad breath. The air taken from above a dung-heap, as has been scientifically proved, is

purer than the air taken from above Paris. In a given time, with the aid of progress,

mechanisms become perfected, and as light increases, the sheet of water will be employed

to purify the sheet of air; that is to say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that by

"washing the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the earth; the

return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields. Through this simple act, the

entire social community will experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of

health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues

around the Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel. .

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease of Paris. The

sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The popular instinct has never been

deceived in it. The occupation of sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as

repugnant to the people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror

and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce a mason to

disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into

it; it was said, in proverbial form: "to descend into the sewer is to enter the

grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink

with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as

of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from the

shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat. .

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