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The visit took place.
It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle against pestilence
and suffocation.
It was, at the same time, a voyage of discovery.
One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent workingman,
who was very young at the time, related curious details with regard
to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged
to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of
official style.
The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely
rudimentary.
Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of that
subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused
to go any further.
The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the necessity
of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same
time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the
gratings and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to
indicate the currents at the point where they parted, to define
the respective bounds of the divers basins, to sound the small
sewers grafted on the principal sewer, to measure the height under
the key-stone of each drain, and the width, at the spring of the
vaults as well as at the bottom, in order to determine the arrangements
with regard to the level of each water-entrance, either of the
bottom of the arch, or on the soil of the street.
They advanced with toil.
The lanterns pined away in the foul atmosphere.
From time to time, a fainting sewerman was carried out.
At certain points, there were precipices. The soil had given
away, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a
bottomless well; they found nothing solid; a man disappeared suddenly;
they had great difficulty in getting him out again.
On the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted large cages filled
with tow steeped in resin, from time to time, in spots which had
been sufficiently disinfected.
In some places, the wall was covered with misshapen fungi,--one
would have said tumors; the very stone seemed diseased within
this unbreathable atmosphere.
Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down hill.
At the point of separation of the two water-conduits of the
Grand-Hurleur, he deciphered upon a projecting stone the date
of 1550; this stone indicated the limits where Philibert Delorme,
charged by Henri II. with visiting the subterranean drains of
Paris, had halted. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century
on the sewer; Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth
century once more in the Ponceau drain of the old Rue Vielle-du-Temple,
vaulted between 1600 and 1650; and the handiwork of the eighteenth
in the western section of the collecting canal, walled and vaulted
in 1740. These two vaults, especially the less ancient, that of
1740, were more cracked and decrepit than the masonry of the belt
sewer, which dated from 1412, an epoch when the brook of fresh
water of Menilmontant was elevated to the dignity of the Grand
Sewer of Paris, an advancement analogous to that of a peasant
who should become first valet de chambre to the King; something
like Gros-Jean transformed into Lebel.
Here and there, particularly beneath the Court-House, they
thought they recognized the hollows of ancient dungeons, excavated
in the very sewer itself.
Hideous in-pace. An iron neck-collar was hanging in one of
these cells.
They walled them all up.
Some of their finds were singular; among others, the skeleton
of an ourang-outan, who had disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes
in 1800, a disappearance probably connected with the famous and
indisputable apparition of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins,
in the last year of the eighteenth century.
The poor devil had ended by drowning himself in the sewer.
Beneath this long, arched drain which terminated at the Arche-Marion,
a perfectly preserved rag-picker's basket excited the admiration
of all connoisseurs.
Everywhere, the mire, which the sewermen came to handle with
intrepidity, abounded in precious objects, jewels of gold and
silver, precious stones, coins.
If a giant had filtered this cesspool, he would have had the
riches of centuries in his lair. At the point where the two branches
of the Rue du Temple and of the Rue Sainte-Avoye separate, they
picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on one
side the pig hooded with a cardinal's hat, and on the other, a
wolf with a tiara on his head.
The most surprising rencounter was at the entrance to the
Grand Sewer. This entrance had formerly been closed by a grating
of which nothing but the hinges remained.
From one of these hinges hung a dirty and shapeless rag which,
arrested there in its passage, no doubt, had floated there in
the darkness and finished its process of being torn apart.
Bruneseau held his lantern close to this rag and examined
it.
It was of very fine batiste, and in one of the corners, less
frayed than the rest, they made out a heraldic coronet and embroidered
above these seven letters:
LAVBESP.
The crown was the coronet of a Marquis, and the seven letters
signified Laubespine. They recognized the fact, that what they
had before their eyes was a morsel of the shroud of Marat.
Marat in his youth had had amorous intrigues.
This was when he was a member of the household of the Comte
d'Artois, in the capacity of physician to the Stables. From these
love affairs, historically proved, with a great lady, he had retained
this sheet.
As a waif or a souvenir.
At his death, as this was the only linen of any fineness which
he had in his house, they buried him in it.
Some old women had shrouded him for the tomb in that swaddling-band
in which the tragic Friend of the people had enjoyed voluptuousness.
Bruneseau passed on.
They left that rag where it hung; they did not put the finishing
touch to it. Did this arise from scorn or from respect?
Marat deserved both. And then, destiny was there sufficiently
stamped to make them hesitate to touch it.
Besides, the things of the sepulchre must be left in the spot
which they select.
In short, the relic was a strange one.
A Marquise had slept in it; Marat had rotted in it; it had
traversed the Pantheon to end with the rats of the sewer. This
chamber rag, of which Watteau would formerly have joyfully sketched
every fold, had ended in becoming worthy of the fixed gaze of
Dante.
The whole visit to the subterranean stream of filth of Paris
lasted seven years, from 1805 to 1812.
As he proceeded, Bruneseau drew, directed, and completed considerable
works; in 1808 he lowered the arch of the Ponceau, and, everywhere
creating new lines, he pushed the sewer, in 1809, under the Rue
Saint-Denis as far as the fountain of the Innocents; in 1810,
under the Rue Froidmanteau and under the Salpetriere; in 1811
under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue du Mail, under
the Rue de l'Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812, under the
Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee d'Antin. At the same time,
he had the whole net-work disinfected and rendered healthful.
In the second year of his work, Bruneseau engaged the assistance
of his son-in-law Nargaud.
It was thus that, at the beginning of the century, ancient
society cleansed its double bottom, and performed the toilet of
its sewer. There was that much clean, at all events.
Tortuous, cracked, unpaved, full of fissures, intersected
by gullies, jolted by eccentric elbows, mounting and descending
illogically, fetid, wild, fierce, submerged in obscurity, with
cicatrices on its pavements and scars on its walls, terrible,--such
was, retrospectively viewed, the antique sewer of Paris.
Ramifications in every direction, crossings, of trenches,
branches, goose-feet, stars, as in military mines, coecum, blind
alleys, vaults lined with saltpetre, pestiferous pools, scabby
sweats, on the walls, drops dripping from the ceilings, darkness;
nothing could equal the horror of this old, waste crypt, the digestive
apparatus of Babylon, a cavern, ditch, gulf pierced with streets,
a titanic mole-burrow, where the mind seems to behold that enormous
blind mole, the past, prowling through the shadows, in the filth
which has been splendor.
This, we repeat, was the sewer of the past.
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