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 cesspool?
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.