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 Vieille-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 Ménilmontant 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
Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Pères, under the
Rue du Mail, under the Rue de l’Écharpe, under the Place Royale; in
1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussée d’Antin. At the
same time, he had the whole network 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, cœcum,
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.