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BRUNESEAU
The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary.
In the sixteenth century, Henri II.
attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years ago, the
cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself,
and fared as best it might.
Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to
indecision, and to gropings.
It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89 showed
how understanding comes to cities.
But in the good, old times, the capital had not much head.
It did not know how to manage its own affairs either morally
or materially, and could not sweep out filth any better than it
could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle, everything raised
a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to every itinerary.
One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer than one could
understand one's position in the city; above the unintelligible,
below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there
reigned the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.
Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though
this misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage.
There occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer.
At times, that stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool
flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste
of her own filth.
These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good
points; they were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the
city waxed indignant at the audacity of its mire, and did not
admit that the filth should return.
Drive it out better.
The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians
of the age of eighty.
The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des Victoires,
where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue Saint-Honore
by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees, the Rue
Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre-a-Poisson
through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt, through
the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through
the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue
des Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and,
to the South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions
in inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude,
and the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one
hundred and nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in
which Racine had lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century,
the poet more than the King. It attained its maximum depth in
the Rue Saint-Pierre, where it rose to the height of three feet
above the flag-stones of the water-spout, and its maximum length
in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it spread out over a stretch two
hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.
At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still
a mysterious place.
Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its evil
renown reached the verge of the terrible.
Paris knew, in a confused way, that she had under her a terrible
cavern. People talked of it as of that monstrous bed of Thebes
in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long feet in length, and which
might have served Behemoth for a bathtub.
The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than
certain well-known points.
We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's carts,
from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis
de Crequi, discharged their loads directly into the sewer.
As for cleaning out,-- that function was entrusted to the
pouring rains which encumbered rather than swept away.
Rome left some poetry to her sewer, and called it the Gemoniae;
Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the Polypus-Hole. Science
and superstition were in accord, in horror. The Polypus hole was
no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin was developed
under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the corpses
of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;
Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the
great hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning
until 1833 in the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of
the Gallant Messenger.
The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated
for the pestilences which had their source there; with its grating
of iron, with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a
dragon's maw in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men.
The popular imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink
with some indescribably hideous intermixture of the infinite.
The sewer had no bottom.
The sewer was the lower world.
The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not even occur
to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet
into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that
abyss--who would have dared? It was alarming.
Nevertheless, some one did present himself. The cess-pool
had its Christopher Columbus.
One day, in 1805, during one of the rare apparitions which
the Emperor made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some
Decres or Cretet or other, came to the master's intimate levee.
In the Carrousel there was audible the clanking of swords of all
those extraordinary soldiers of the great Republic, and of the
great Empire; then Napoleon's door was blocked with heroes; men
from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the Adige, and from the
Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, of Hoche,
of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of Mayence,
the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had looked
down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying
at anchor in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the
bridge of Lodi, others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of
Mantua, others had preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello.
The whole army of that day was present there, in the court-yard
of the Tuileries, represented by a squadron or a platoon, and
guarding Napoleon in repose; and that was the splendid epoch when
the grand army had Marengo behind it and Austerlitz before it.--"Sire,"
said the Minister of the Interior to Napoleon, "yesterday
I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What
man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what
has he done?"--"He wants to do something, Sire."--"What
is it?"--"To visit the sewers of Paris."
This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.
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