The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last
ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a
termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris. The
sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.
Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a
thousand antennæ, which expands below as the city expands above. Every
time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm. The
old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred
metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the
first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall
shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and
prosecuted; Napoleon built—the figures are curious—four thousand eight
hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred and
nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six;
Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of 1848,
twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present
government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time,
two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres; sixty
leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris. An obscure
ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored.
As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day more
than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is
difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts
which have been required to bring this cesspool to the point of
relative perfection in which it now is. It was with great difficulty
that the ancient monarchical provostship and, during the last ten years
of the eighteenth century, the revolutionary mayoralty, had succeeded
in perforating the five leagues of sewer which existed previous to