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 Salpetriere; in 1811 under the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Peres, under the Rue du Mail, under the Rue de l‘Echarpe, under the Place Royale; in 1812, under the Rue de la Paix, and under the Chaussee 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, c?cum, 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.
CHAPTER V—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 network 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.