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ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER
Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the
subterranean net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will
outline on the banks a species of large branch grafted on the
river.
On the right bank, the belt sewer will form the trunk of this
branch, the secondary ducts will form the branches, and those
without exit the twigs.
This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right
angle, which is the customary angle of this species of subterranean
ramifications, being very rare in vegetation.
A more accurate image of this strange geometrical plan can
be formed by supposing that one is viewing some eccentric oriental
alphabet, as intricate as a thicket, against a background of shadows,
and the misshapen letters should be welded one to another in apparent
confusion, and as at haphazard, now by their angles, again by
their extremities.
Sinks and sewers played a great part in the Middle Ages, in
the Lower Empire and in the Orient of old.
The masses regarded these beds of decomposition, these monstrous
cradles of death, with a fear that was almost religious.
The vermin ditch of Benares is no less conducive to giddiness
than the lions' ditch of Babylon. Teglath-Phalasar, according
to the rabbinical books, swore by the sink of Nineveh.
It was from the sewer of Munster that John of Leyden produced
his false moon, and it was from the cess-pool of Kekscheb that
oriental menalchme, Mokanna, the veiled prophet of Khorassan,
caused his false sun to emerge.
The history of men is reflected in the history of sewers.
The Germoniae[58] narrated Rome.
The sewer of Paris has been an ancient and formidable thing.
It has been a sepulchre, it has served as an asylum.
Crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience,
thought, theft, all that human laws persecute or have persecuted,
is hidden in that hole; the maillotins in the fourteenth century,
the tire-laine of the fifteenth, the Huguenots in the sixteenth,
Morin's illuminated in the seventeenth, the chauffeurs [brigands]
in the eighteenth.
A hundred years ago, the nocturnal blow of the dagger emerged
thence, the pickpocket in danger slipped thither; the forest had
its cave, Paris had its sewer. Vagrancy, that Gallic picareria,
accepted the sewer as the adjunct of the Cour des Miracles, and
at evening, it returned thither, fierce and sly, through the Maubuee
outlet, as into a bed-chamber.
[58] Steps on the Aventine Hill, leading to the Tiber, to
which the bodies of executed criminals were dragged by hooks to
be thrown into the Tiber.
It was quite natural, that those who had the blind-alley
Vide-Gousset, [Empty-Pocket] or the Rue Coupe-Gorge [Cut-Throat],
for the scene of their daily labor, should have for their domicile
by night the culvert of the Chemin-Vert, or the catch basin of
Hurepoix. Hence a throng of souvenirs.
All sorts of phantoms haunt these long, solitary corridors;
everywhere is putrescence and miasma; here and there are breathing-holes,
where Villon within converses with Rabelais without.
The sewer in ancient Paris is the rendezvous of all exhaustions
and of all attempts.
Political economy therein spies a detritus, social philosophy
there beholds a residuum.
The sewer is the conscience of the city.
Everything there converges and confronts everything else.
In that livid spot there are shades, but there are no longer
any secrets. Each thing bears its true form, or at least, its
definitive form. The mass of filth has this in its favor, that
it is not a liar. Ingenuousness has taken refuge there.
The mask of Basil is to be found there, but one beholds its
cardboard and its strings and the inside as well as the outside,
and it is accentuated by honest mud. Scapin's false nose is its
next-door neighbor.
All the uncleannesses of civilization, once past their use,
fall into this trench of truth, where the immense social sliding
ends.
They are there engulfed, but they display themselves there.
This mixture is a confession. There, no more false appearances,
no plastering over is possible, filth removes its shirt, absolute
denudation puts to the rout all illusions and mirages, there is
nothing more except what really exists, presenting the sinister
form of that which is coming to an end. There, the bottom of a
bottle indicates drunkenness, a basket-handle tells a tale of
domesticity; there the core of an apple which has entertained
literary opinions becomes an apple-core once more; the effigy
on the big sou becomes frankly covered with verdigris, Caiphas'
spittle meets Falstaff's puking, the louis-d'or which comes from
the gaming-house jostles the nail whence hangs the rope's end
of the suicide.
a livid foetus rolls along, enveloped in the spangles which
danced at the Opera last Shrove-Tuesday, a cap which has pronounced
judgment on men wallows beside a mass of rottenness which was
formerly Margoton's petticoat; it is more than fraternization,
it is equivalent to addressing each other as thou.
All which was formerly rouged, is washed free.
The last veil is torn away. A sewer is a cynic.
It tells everything.
The sincerity of foulness pleases us, and rests the soul.
When one has passed one's time in enduring upon earth the
spectacle of the great airs which reasons of state, the oath,
political sagacity, human justice, professional probity, the austerities
of situation, incorruptible robes all assume, it solaces one to
enter a sewer and to behold the mire which befits it.
This is instructive at the same time.
We have just said that history passes through the sewer.
The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there, drop by drop,
between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations, political
and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage of
civilization, and thrust their corpses there.
For the eye of the thinker, all historic murderers are to
be found there, in that hideous penumbra, on their knees, with
a scrap of their winding-sheet for an apron, dismally sponging
out their work. Louis XI.
is there with Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX.
is there with his mother, Richelieu is there with Louis XIII.,
Louvois is there, Letellier is there, Hebert and Maillard are
there, scratching the stones, and trying to make the traces of
their actions disappear.
Beneath these vaults one hears the brooms of spectres. One
there breathes the enormous fetidness of social catastrophes.
One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.
There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have
been washed.
The social observer should enter these shadows.
They form a part of his laboratory.
Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything desires
to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is useless.
What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful
side.
Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does
not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration
of things which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish,
it recognizes all.
It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from
the scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes
the city; from mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd
it infers the amphora or the jug.
By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it
recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
from the Jewry of the Ghetto.
It re-discovers in what remains that which has been, good,
evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace, the ink-blot of
the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials undergone,
temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which characters
have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution in
souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the
vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.
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