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He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a pavement under his

feet, but only mud. .

It sometimes happens, that on certain shores of Bretagne or Scotland a man, either a

traveller or a fisherman, while walking at low tide on the beach far from shore, suddenly

notices that for several minutes past, he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach

under foot is like pitch; his soles stick fast to it; it is no longer sand, it is

bird-lime. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step that he takes, as soon as the

foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The eye, however, has perceived no change;

the immense beach is smooth and tranquil, all the sand has the same aspect, nothing

distinguishes the soil that is solid from that which is not solid; the joyous little cloud

of sand-lice continues to leap tumultuously under the feet of the passer-by. .

The man pursues his way, he walks on, turns towards the land, endeavors to approach the

shore. He is not uneasy. Uneasy about what? Only he is conscious that the heaviness of his

feet seems to be increasing at every step that he takes. All at once he sinks in. He sinks

in two or three inches. Decidedly, he is not on the left road; he halts to get his

bearings. Suddenly he glances at his feet; his feet have disappeared. The sand has covered

them. He draws his feet out of the sand, he tries to retrace his steps, he turns back, he

sinks in more deeply than before. The sand is up to his ankles, he tears himself free from

it and flings himself to the left, the sand reaches to mid-leg, he flings himself to the

left, the sand comes up to his knees. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognizes the

fact that he is caught in a quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium

in which neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he have

one, he lightens himself, like a ship in distress; it is too late, the sand is above his

knees. .

He shouts, he waves his hat, or his handkerchief, the sand continually gains on him; if

the beach is deserted, if the land is too far away, if the bank of sand is too ill-famed,

there is no hero in the neighborhood, all is over, he is condemned to be engulfed. He is

condemned to that terrible interment, long, infallible, implacable, which it is impossible

to either retard or hasten, which lasts for hours, which will not come to an end, which

seizes you erect, free, in the flush of health, which drags you down by the feet, which,

at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, draws you a little lower,

which has the air of punishing you for your resistance by a redoubled grasp, which forces

a man to return slowly to earth, while leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees,

the verdant country, the smoke of the villages on the plain, the sails of the ships on the

sea, the birds which fly and sing, the sun and the sky. This engulfment is the sepulchre

which assumes a tide, and which mounts from the depths of the earth towards a living man.

Each minute is an inexorable layer-out of the dead. The wretched man tries to sit down, to

lie down, to climb; every movement that he makes buries him deeper; he straightens himself

up, he sinks; he feels that he is being swallowed up; he shrieks, implores, cries to the

clouds, wrings his hands, grows desperate. Behold him in the sand up to his belly, he sand

reaches to his breast, he is only a bust now. He uplifts his hands, utters furious groans,

clenches his nails on the beach, tries to cling fast to that ashes, supports himself on

his elbows in order to raise himself from that soft sheath, and sobs frantically; the sand

mounts higher. The sand has reached his shoulders, the sand reaches to his throat; only

his face is visible now. His mouth cries aloud, the sand fills it; silence. His eyes still

gaze forth, the sand closes them, night. Then his brow decreases, a little hair quivers

above the sand; a hand projects, pierces the surface of the beach, waves and disappears.

Sinister obliteration of a man. .

Sometimes a rider is engulfed with his horse; sometimes the carter is swallowed up with

his cart; all founders in that strand. It is shipwreck elsewhere than in the water. It is

the earth drowning a man. The earth, permeated with the ocean, becomes a pitfall. It

presents itself in the guise of a plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to

these treacheries. .

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also possible, thirty

years ago, in the sewers of Paris. .

Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the subterranean drain of Paris was

subject to these sudden slides. .

The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which were particularly friable; the

foot-way, which was of flag-stones, as in the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete, as

in the new galleries, having no longer an underpinning, gave way. A fold in a flooring of

this sort means a crack, means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a certain

length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a fontis, in the special

tongue. What is a fontis? It is the quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under

the surface of the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel in a sewer. The soaked soil

is in a state of fusion, as it were; all its molecules are in suspension in soft medium;

it is not earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very great. Nothing can be

more formidable than such an encounter. If the water predominates, death is prompt, the

man is swallowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow. .

Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being swallowed by the earth is

terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool? Instead of the open air, the broad

daylight, the clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence rains life,

instead of those barks descried in the distance, of that hope under all sorts of forms, of

probable passers-by, of succor possible up to the very last moment,--instead of all this,

deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb already prepared, death in the

mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw

in the mire and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; slime

instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place of

the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to

agonize, with that enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head! .

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems his atrocity by a

certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in shipwreck, one can be great; in the

flames as in the foam, a superb attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as

one perishes. But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme

floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is petty, ugly, infamous. To

die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger,

like Escoubleau, is horrible. To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is

going through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows enough for

hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying man knows not

whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre or a frog. .

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed. .

The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their density, according to

the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil. Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet

deep, sometimes eight or ten;sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was

almost solid, there almost liquid. In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a day

to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by the Philippeaux slough.

The mire bears up more or less, according to its density. A child can escape where a man

will perish. The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman

who felt the ground giving way beneath him began by flinging away his sack of tools, or

his back-basket, or his hod. .

The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil; some landslip at a

depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer rains; the incessant flooding of winter;

long, drizzling showers. Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or

sandy soil forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to bend

aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under this crushing thrust. In

this manner, the heaping up of the Parthenon, obliterated, a century ago, a portion of the

vaults of Saint-Genevieve hill. When a sewer was broken in under the pressure of the

houses, the mischief was sometimes betrayed in the street above by a sort of space, like

the teeth of a saw, between the paving-stones; this crevice was developed in an undulating

line throughout the entire length of the cracked vault, and then, the evil being visible,

the remedy could be promptly applied. It also frequently happened, that the interior

ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the sewermen.

When they entered without precaution into the sewer, they were liable to be lost. Ancient

registers make mention of several scavengers who were buried in fontis in this manner.

They give many names; among others, that of the sewerman who was swallowed up in a

quagmire under the man-hole of the Rue Careme-Prenant, a certain Blaise Poutrain; this

Blaise Poutrain was the brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last grave-digger of the

cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents, in 1785, the epoch when that cemetery expired.

.

There was also that young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, of whom we have just

spoken, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where they delivered the assault in silk

stockings, with violins at their head. D'Escoubleau, surprised one night at his cousin's,

the Duchess de Sourdis', was drowned in a quagmire of the Beautreillis sewer, in which he

had taken refuge in order to escape from the Duke. Madame de Sourdis, when informed of his

death, demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep, through sniffling at her salts.

In such cases, there is no love which holds fast; the sewer extinguishes it. Hero refuses

to wash the body of Leander. Thisbe stops her nose in the presence of Pyramus and says:

"Phew!" .

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