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IN THE CASE OF SAND AS IN THAT OF WOMAN, THERE IS A FINENESS
WHICH IS TREACHEROUS
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 right 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 right, 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, the 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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