Les Misérables, v. 5/5: Jean Valjean

by Victor Hugo

  CHAPTER IV.

  CONCEALED DETAILS.

  The visit took place, and was a formidable campaign,--a nocturnalbattle against asphyxia and plague. It was at the same time a voyage ofdiscovery, and one of the survivors of the exploration, an intelligentworkman, very young at that time, used to recount a few years ago thecurious details which Bruneseau thought it right to omit in his reportto the Prefect of Police, as unworthy of the administrative style.Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that day, and Bruneseauhad scarce passed the first articulations of the subterranean networkere eight workmen out of twenty refused to go farther. The operationwas complicated, for the visit entailed cleansing: it was, therefore,requisite to cleanse and at the same time take measurements; note thewater entrances, count the traps and mouths, detail the branches,indicate the currents, recognize the respective dimensions of thedifferent basins, sound the small sewers grafted on the main, measurethe height under the key-stone of each passage, and the width bothat the bottom and the top, in order to determine the ordinates forlevelling at the right of each entrance of water. They advanced withdifficulty, and it was not rare for the ladders to sink into threefeet of mud. The lanterns would scarce burn in the mephitic atmosphere,and from time to time a sewer-man was carried away in a fainting state.At certain spots there was a precipice; the soil had given way, thestones were swallowed up, and the drain was converted into a lost well;nothing solid could be found, and they had great difficulty in draggingout a man who suddenly disappeared. By the advice of Fourcroy largecages filled with tow saturated with resin were set fire to at regulardistances. The wall was covered in spots with shapeless fungi, whichmight have been called tumors, and the stone itself seemed diseased inthis unbreathable medium.

  Bruneseau, in his exploration, proceeded down-hill. At the point wherethe two water-pipes of the Grand Hurleur separate he deciphered on aprojecting stone the date 1550; this stone indicated the limit wherePhilibert Delorme, instructed by Henri II. to inspect the subways ofParis, stopped. This stone was the mark of the sixteenth century inthe drain, and Bruneseau found the handiwork of the seventeenth inthe Ponceau conduit and that of the Rue Vieille du Temple, which werearched between 1600 and 1650, and the mark of the eighteenth in thewest section of the collecting canal, enclosed and arched in 1740.These two arches, especially the younger one, that of 1740, were moredecrepit and cracked than the masonry of the begirding drain, whichdated from 1412, the period when the Menilmontant stream of runningwater was raised to the dignity of the Great Sewer of Paris, apromotion analogous to that of a peasant who became first valet to theking; something like Gros Jean transformed into Lébel.

  They fancied they recognized here and there, especially under thePalais du Justice, the form of old dungeons formed in the sewer itself,hideous _in pace._ An iron collar hung in one of these cells, and theywere all bricked up. A few of the things found were peculiar; amongothers the skeleton of an ourang-outang, which disappeared from theJardin des Plantes in 1800, a disappearance probably connected withthe famous and incontestable apparition of the devil in the Rue desBernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor animaleventually drowned itself in the sewer. Under the long vaulted passageleading to the Arche Marion a rag-picker's _hotte_ in a perfect stateof preservation caused the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere themud, which the sewer-men had come to handle intrepidly, abounded inprecious objects; gold and silver, jewelry, precious stones, and coin.A giant who had filtered this cloaca would have found in his sieve thewealth of centuries. At the point where the two branches of the Ruedu Temple and the Rue Sainte Avoye divide, a singular copper Huguenotmedal was picked up, bearing on one side a pig wearing a cardinals hat,and on the other a wolf with the tiara on its head.

  The most surprising discovery was at the entrance of the Great Sewer.This entrance had been formerly closed by a gate, of which only thehinges now remained. From one of these hinges hung a filthy shapelessrag, which doubtless caught there as it passed, floated in the shadow,and was gradually mouldering away. Bruneseau raised his lantern andexamined this fragment; it was of very fine linen, and at one of thecorners less gnawed than the rest could be distinguished an heraldiccrown embroidered above these seven letters, LAVBESP. The crown wasa Marquis's crown, and the seven letters signified _Laubespine._What they had under their eyes was no less than a piece of Marat'swinding-sheet. Marat, in his youth, had had amours, at the time when hewas attached to the household of the Comte d'Artois in the capacity ofphysician to the stables. Of these amours with a great lady, which arehistorically notorious, this sheet had remained to him as a waif or asouvenir; on his death, as it was the only fine linen at his lodgings,he was buried in it. Old women wrapped up the tragic friend of thepeople for the tomb in this sheet which had known voluptuousness.Bruneseau passed on; the strip was left where it was. Was it throughcontempt or respect? Marat deserved both. And then destiny was soimpressed on it that a hesitation was felt about touching it. Moreover,things of the sepulchre should be left at the place which they select.Altogether the relic was a strange one: a Marquise had slept in it,Marat had rotted in it; and it had passed through the Panthéon to reachthe sewer-rats. This rag from an alcove, every crease in which Watteauin former days would joyously have painted, ended by becoming worthyof the intent glance of Dante.

  The visit to the subways of Paris lasted for seven years,--from 1805to 1812. While going along, Bruneseau designed, directed, and carriedout considerable operations. In 1808 he lowered the Ponceau sewer,and everywhere pushing out new lines, carried the sewer in 1809 underthe Rue St. Denis to the Fountain of the Innocents; in 1810 under theRue Froidmanteau and the Salpêtrière; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve desPetits Pères, under the Rue du Mail, the Rue de l'Écharpe and the PlaceRoyal; in 1812 under the Rue de la Paix and the Chaussée d'Antin. Atthe same time he disinfected and cleansed the entire network, and inthe second year called his son-in-law Nargaud to his assistance. It isthus that at the beginning of this century the old society flushed itssubway and performed the toilette of its sewer. It was so much cleanedat any rate. Winding, cracked, unpaved, full of pits, broken by strangeelbows, ascending and descending illogically, fetid, savage, ferocious,submerged in darkness, with cicatrices on its stones and scars on itswalls, and grewsome,--such was the old sewer of Paris, retrospectivelyregarded. Ramifications in all directions, crossings of trenches,branches, dials and stars as in saps, blind guts and alleys, archescovered with saltpetre, infected pits, scabby exudations on the walls,drops falling from the roof, and darkness, nothing equalled the horrorof this old excremental crypt,--the digestive apparatus of Babylon, aden, a trench, a gulf pierced with streets, a Titanic mole-hill, inwhich the mind fancies that it sees crawling through the shadow, amidthe ordure which had been splendor, that enormous blind mole, the Past.

  Such, we repeat, was the sewer of the olden time.