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PRESENT PROGRESS
To-day the sewer is clean, cold, straight, correct.
It almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England
by the word "respectable."
It is proper and grayish; laid out by rule and line; one might
almost say as though it came out of a bandbox. It resembles a
tradesman who has become a councillor of state. One can almost
see distinctly there.
The mire there comports itself with decency.
At first, one might readily mistake it for one of those subterranean
corridors, which were so common in former days, and so useful
in flights of monarchs and princes, in those good old times, "when
the people loved their kings." The present sewer is a beautiful
sewer; the pure style reigns there; the classical rectilinear
alexandrine which, driven out of poetry, appears to have taken
refuge in architecture, seems mingled with all the stones of that
long, dark and whitish vault; each outlet is an arcade; the Rue
de Rivoli serves as pattern even in the sewer.
However, if the geometrical line is in place anywhere, it
is certainly in the drainage trench of a great city. There, everything
should be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer has, nowadays,
assumed a certain official aspect. The very police reports, of
which it sometimes forms the subject, no longer are wanting in
respect towards it.
The words which characterize it in administrative language
are sonorous and dignified. What used to be called a gut is now
called a gallery; what used to be called a hole is now called
a surveying orifice.
Villon would no longer meet with his ancient temporary provisional
lodging. This net-work of cellars has its immemorial population
of prowlers, rodents, swarming in greater numbers than ever; from
time to time, an aged and veteran rat risks his head at the window
of the sewer and surveys the Parisians; but even these vermin
grow tame, so satisfied are they with their subterranean palace.
The cesspool no longer retains anything of its primitive ferocity.
The rain, which in former days soiled the sewer, now washes
it.
Nevertheless, do not trust yourself too much to it.
Miasmas still inhabit it. It is more hypocritical than irreproachable.
The prefecture of police and the commission of health have
done their best. But, in spite of all the processes of disinfection,
it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after confession.
Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping
is a homage which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from
this point of view, Tartuffe's conscience is a progress over the
Augean stables, it is certain that the sewers of Paris have been
improved.
It is more than progress; it is transmutation.
Between the ancient and the present sewer there is a revolution.
What has effected this revolution?
The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned,
Bruneseau.
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