XXXV.
THE PARISIAN SEWERS.
THE SEWERS OF PARIS.—THEIR EXTENT.—A JOURNEY THROUGH THEM.—THE START AND THE MODE OF TRAVEL.—DESCRIPTION OF THE GREAT SEWER.—ACCIDENTS OF SEWER TRAVEL.—HISTORY OF THE SEWERS.—THEIR FIRST GREAT INSPECTION.—BRUNESEAU.—INUNDATION FROM THE SEWERS.—A MAN LOST.—HORRIBLE DEATH IN THE SEWERS.—THE OLD AND THE NEW.—THE EXCAVATIONS.—NATURE OF THE WORK.—BREAKAGE OF THE CANAL.—JEAN VALJEAN IN THE SEWERS OF PARIS.—HIS FIRST SENSATION.—CAUGHT IN A LABYRINTH.—THE SEWERS OF ST. DENIS, AND THE MARKETS.—CAUGHT IN THE WATER.—THE POLICE IN PURSUIT.—FRIGHT OF THE FUGITIVE.—THE QUICKSAND ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.—A HORRIBLE DEATH.—QUICKSAND IN THE SEWERS.—HOW IT WAS FORMED.—JEAN VALJEAN IN THE QUICKSAND.—HIS SUFFERINGS AND ESCAPE.
Paris, the gayest and brightest city in the world, has an underground life surpassing that of any other metropolis. Beneath the broad streets there are many miles of sewers constructed on a plan that furnishes a complete system of drainage. The total length of the Paris sewers is now about four hundred and thirty-four thousand yards, or three hundred miles. The length of galleries to be constructed in course of time is about two thousand yards more. To organize the network of sewers, the site of the capital has been divided into five basins, of which three are on the right and two on the left bank of the Seine.
Six great principal galleries, cutting the city nearly at right angles, and having for tributaries fifteen secondary galleries, out of which branch a multitude of galleries of less importance, constitute the principal arteries of the network. Three of the six principal galleries are on the right bank of the river: the first is that of the quays; the second descends the Boulevard de Sebastopol, and joins the first at the Place du Chatelet;and the third runs from the Place de la Bastille to the Place de la Concorde, through the streets St. Antoine and de Rivoli.
On the left bank the first gallery includes the line of the quays from the Pont d’Austerlitz to the Pont d’Iéna; the second follows the Boulevard St. Michel from the Place de l’Observatoire to the Pont St. Michel; and the third receives the Bièvre, and at the Rue St. Jacques joins the long gallery into which the sewer of the Boulevard St. Michel falls.
IN THE SEWERS OF PARIS.
The sewers, or at any rate a portion of them, are interesting places to visit, though nobody would care to live in them. Only a limited number of permissions are granted, and these only on stated days. I experienced considerable difficulty in securing a ticket, and it was only after exercising patience and perseverance to a liberal degree that my wishes were granted.
PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS.
PLACE DE LA CONCORDE, PARIS.
The ordinary route for visitors is to enter at the Place de la Concorde, or near the Madeleine Church, and come out at the Place du Chatelet. The sewer between these points is very broad and high, and is evidently the show-place of the whole system. In the centre is a canal about eight feet wide, and at its edges there are rails for the wheels of cars propelled by the workmen, who walk at the sides. The sidewalks are broad and carefully swept, so that one could walk upon them without difficulty. Visitors are generally seated in the cars and pushed along by the men to whom they are expected to give some money at the end of the journey. The car moves above the canal, and every visitor is surprised at the absence of foul odors and at the general cleanliness of the place. On each side of the larger sewers, and supported on iron posts, there are large pipes for the conveyance of water, and in some places the telegraph wires and gas tubes are visible.
LADIES IN A SEWER.
When everything is in order, there is very little to see, and a hundred yards or so are as good as the entire distance. The faint rumbling of the carriages can be heard overhead, but otherwise the silence is unbroken, save by the voices of the visitors and workmen, and the occasional sound of fallingwater. The party to which I was assigned was a serious one, and made very little noise, compared to one a little way in advance, and containing several ladies. The presence of lovely women can add a charm to a sewer, though I should hesitate to take a feminine acquaintance into such a place until I had first made the journey. We had no incident of importance greater than the loss of a hat, which was crushed beneath the car wheels, and the narrow escape of the owner from a tumble overboard as he attempted to clutch the falling article. The place was well lighted with gas; but I think everybody was glad to see the light of day as it streamed through the opening at the Place du Chatelet.
The sewers of Paris were begun several hundred years ago. The exact date is not known; in fact, their history is not exactly known, and some of it is mixed up with a great deal of fiction. InLes Misérables, Victor Hugo has given a graphic account of them, though, like much that he has written, the account is not always strictly true. (I quote his language.) He says, “The sewer of Paris, in the middle ages, was legendary. In the sixteenth century, Henry II. attempted an examination, which failed. Less than a hundred years ago, the cloaca, Mercier bears witness, was abandoned to itself, and became what it might.
“Such was that ancient Paris, given up to quarrels, to indecisions, and to gropings. It was for a long time stupid enough. Afterwards, ‘89 showed how cities come to their wits. But, in the good old times, the capital had little head; she could not manage her affairs either morally or materially, nor better sweep away her filth than her abuses. Everything was an obstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, was refractory to all itineracy. Men could no more succeed in guiding themselves through its channels than in understanding themselves in the city; above, the unintelligible, below, the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues there was the confusion of caves; labyrinth-lined Babel.
INUNDATION OF THE SEWERS.
“Sometimes the sewer of Paris took it into its head to overflow, as if that unappreciated Nile were suddenly seized withwrath. There were, infamous to relate, inundations from the sewer. The inundation of 1802 is a present reminiscence with old Parisians. The mire spread out in a cross in the Place des Victoires, where the statue of Louis XIV. is; it entered the Rue St. Honoré by the two mouths of the sewer of the Champs Elysées, the Rue St. Florentin by the St. Florentin sewer, the Rue Pierre à Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt by the sewer of the Chemin Vert, the Rue de la Roquette by the sewer of the Rue de Sappe; it covered the curbstones of the Rue des Champs Elysées to the depth of some fourteen inches; and on the south, by the vomitoria of the Seine performing its function in the inverse way, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l’Echaudé, and the Rue des Marais, where it stopped, having reached the length of a hundred and twenty yards, just a few steps from the house which Racine had lived in, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the king. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue St. Pierre, where it rose three feet, above the flagging of the water-spouts, and its maximum extent in the Rue St. Sabin, where it spread out over a length of two hundred and sixty-one yards.
“At the commencement of this century the sewer of Paris was still a mysterious place. Mire can never be in good repute; but here ill-fame reached even fright. Paris dimly realized that she had a terrible cave beneath her. People talked of it as of that monstrous bog of Thebes which swarmed with scolopendras fifteen feet long, and which might have served as a bathing-tub for Behemoth. The big boots of the sewer men never ventured beyond certain known points. They were still very near the time when the scavengers’ tumbrils, from the top of which Ste. Foix fraternized with the Marquis of Créqui, were simply emptied into the sewer. As for cleansing, that operation was confided to the showers, which obstructed more than they swept out. Science and superstition were at one in regard to the horror. The sewer was not less revolting to hygiene than to legend. The Goblin Monk had appeared under the fetid arch of the Mouffetardsewer; the corpses of the Marmousets had been thrown into the sewer of the Barillerie; Fagon had attributed the fearful malignant fever of 1685 to the great gap in the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in the Rue St. Louis, almost in front of the sign of the Gallant Messenger. The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was famous for the pestilence which came from it; with its pointed iron grating, which looked like a row of teeth, it lay in that fatal street like the jaws of a dragon blowing hell upon men. The popular imagination seasoned the gloomy Parisian sink with an indefinably hideous mixture of the infinite.
THE MADELEINE CHURCH, PARIS.
THE MADELEINE CHURCH, PARIS.
THE BOLDEST MAN IN FRANCE.
“One day in 1805, on one of those rare visits which the emperor made to Paris, the minister of the interior came to the master’s private audience. In the carousal was heard the clatter of the swords of all those marvellous soldiers of the Grand Empire; there was a multitude of heroes at the door of Napoleon; men of the Rhine, of the Scheldt, of the Adige, and of the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau, of Hoche, of Kléber. The whole army of that time was there in the court of the Tuileries, represented by a squad or platoon guarding Napoleon in repose; and it was the splendid epoch when the grand army had behind it Marengo, and before it Austerlitz. ‘Sire,’ said the minister of the interior to Napoleon, ‘I saw yesterday the boldest man in your empire.’ ‘Who is the man?’ said the emperor, quickly; ‘and what has he done?’ ‘He wishes to do something, sire.’ ‘What?’ ‘To visit the sewers of Paris.’
“That man existed, and his name was Bruneseau.
WORK OF THE INSPECTOR.
“The visit was made. It was a formidable campaign; a night battle against pestilence and asphyxia. It was at the same time a voyage of discoveries. One of the survivors of this exploration, an intelligent working-man, then very young, still related, a few years ago, the curious details which Bruneseau thought it his duty to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy the administrative style. Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that period. Hardly had Bruneseau passed the first branchings of the subterraneannetwork, when eight out of the twenty laborers refused to go farther. The operation was completed; the visit involved the cleaning; it was necessary, therefore, to clean, and at the same time to measure; to note the entrance of water, to count the gratings and the mouths, to detail the branchings, to indicate the currents at the points of separation, to examine the respective borders of the various basins, to fathom the little sewers ingrafted upon the principal sewer, to measure the height of each passage under the keystone, and the width, as well at the spring of the arch as at the level of the floor; finally, to determine the ordinates of the levellings at a right angle with each entrance of water, either from the floor of the sewer or from the surface of the street. They advanced with difficulty. It was not uncommon for the step-ladders to plunge into three feet of mire. The lanterns flickered in the miasms. From time to time, they brought out a sewer-man who had fainted; at certain places, a precipice. The soil had sunken, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a blind well; they found no solid ground; one man suddenly disappeared; they had great difficulty in recovering him. By the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted from point to point, in the places sufficiently purified, great cages full of oakum and saturated with resin. The wall, in places, was covered with shapeless fungi, and one would have said with tumors; the stone itself seemed diseased in this irrespirable medium.
“They thought they recognized here and there, chiefly under the Palais de Justice, some cells of ancient dungeons built in the sewer itself. Hideousin pace. An iron collar hung in one of these cells. They walled them all up. Some odd things were found; among other things, the skeleton of an orang-outang which disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800—a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable appearance of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil finally drowned himself in the sewer.
“Under the long, arched passage which terminates at theArche Marion, a rag-picker’s basket, in perfect preservation, was the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere the mud, which the workmen had come to handle boldly, abounded in precious objects, gold and silver trinkets, precious stones, coins. A giant who should have filtered this cloaca would have had the riches of centuries in his sieve. At the point of separation of the two branches of the Rue du Temple and the Rue Ste. Avoye, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on one side a hog wearing a cardinal’s hat, and on the other a wolf with the tiara on his head.
EXTENT OF THE WORK.
“The complete visitation of the subterranean sewer system of Paris occupied seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While yet he was performing it, Bruneseau laid out, directed, and brought to an end some considerable works. At the same time, he disinfected and purified the whole network. After the second year, Bruneseau was assisted by his son-in-law Nargaud.
“Tortuous, fissured, unpaved, crackling, interrupted by quagmires, broken by fantastic elbows, rising and falling out of all rule, fetid, savage, wild, submerged, in obscurity, with scars on its pavements and gashes on its walls, appalling,—such was, seen retrospectively, the ancient sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings of trenches, branchings, goose-tracks, stars as if in mines, cœcums, cul-de-sacs, arches covered with saltpetre, infectious cesspools, an herpetic ooze upon the walls, drops falling from the ceiling, darkness,—nothing equalled the horror of this old voiding crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon, cavern, grave, gulf pierced with streets, Titanic molehill, in which the mind seems to see prowling through the shadow, that enormous blind mole, the past.
“At present the sewer is neat, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word ‘respectable.’ It is comely and sober; drawn by the line; we might almost say, fresh from the bandbox. At the first glance, we should readily take it for one of those underground passages formerly so common and so useful forthe flight of monarchs and princes, in that good old time ‘when the people loved their kings.’ The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns in it; the classic rectilinear alexandrine, which, driven from poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with every stone of that long, darkling, and whitish arch; each discharging mouth is an arcade. If the geometric line is in place anywhere, it surely is in the stercorary trenches of a great city. There all should be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer has now assumed a certain official aspect. The very police reports, of which it is sometimes the object, are no longer wanting in respect for it. The words which characterize it in the administrative language are elevated and dignified. Villon would no longer recognize his old dwelling in case of need.
HOW THE SEWERS ARE BUILT.
“The excavation of the sewers of Paris has been a difficult work. Paris is built upon a deposit singularly rebellious to human control. There are liquid clays, living springs, hard rocks, those soft and deep mires which technical science calls Moutardes. The pick advances laboriously into these calcareous strata alternating with seams of very fine clay and laminar schistose beds, incrusted with oyster shells contemporary with the pre-adamite oceans. Sometimes a brook suddenly throws down an arch which has been commenced, and inundates the laborers; or a slide of marl loosens, and rushes down with the fury of a cataract, crushing the largest of the sustaining timbers like glass. Quite recently at Villette, when it was necessary, without interrupting navigation and without emptying the canal, to lead the collecting sewer under the St. Martin Canal, a fissure opened in the bed of the canal; the water suddenly rose in the works under ground beyond all the power of the pumps: they were obliged to seek the fissure, which was in the neck of the great basin, by means of a diver, and it was not without difficulty that it was stopped. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from the river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and the Lunière arcade, we find quicksands in which wesink, and a man may be buried out of sight. Add asphyxia from the miasma, burial by the earth falling in, sudden settlings of the bottom, and the work of constructing sewers can well be understood to be dangerous.”
THE GREAT SEWER.
THE GREAT SEWER.
SUBTERRANEAN PARIS.
SUBTERRANEAN PARIS.
JEAN VALJEAN’S ESCAPE.
In all that he has written, Victor Hugo has produced nothing more graphic than his description of Jean Valjean in the sewers of Paris, when endeavoring to escape from the police, after the fight at the barricades. We quote his description, omitting a few paragraphs.
“It was in the sewer of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.
“A resemblance of Paris with the sea. As in the ocean, the diver can disappear.
“The transition was marvellous. From the very centre of the city, Jean Valjean had gone out of the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye, the time of lifting a cover and closing it again, he had passed from broad day to complete obscurity, from noon to midnight, from uproar to silence, from the whirl of the thunder to the stagnation of the tomb, and, by a mutation much more prodigious still than that of the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute security.
“Sudden fall into a cave; disappearance in the dungeon of Paris; to leave that street in which death was everywhere for this kind of sepulchre, in which there was life, was an astounding crisis. He remained for some seconds as if stunned; listening, stupefied. The spring trap of safety had suddenly opened beneath him. Celestial goodness had in some sort taken him by treachery. Adorable ambuscades of Providence!
“Only, the wounded man did not stir, and Jean Valjean did not know whether what he was carrying away in this grave were alive or dead.
“His first sensation was blindness. Suddenly he saw nothing more. It seemed to him also that in one minute he became deaf. He heard nothing more. The frenzied storm of murder which was raging a few feet above him only reached him, as we have said, thanks to the thickness of theearth which separated him from it, stifled and indistinct, and like a rumbling at a great depth. He felt that it was solid under his feet; that was all; but that was enough. He reached out one hand, then the other, and touched the wall on both sides, and realized that the passage was narrow; he slipped, and realized that the pavement was wet. He advanced one foot with precaution, fearing a hole, a pit, some gulf; he made sure that the flagging continued. A whiff of fetidness informed him where he was.
LIGHT AND DARKNESS.
“After a few moments he ceased to be blind. A little light fell from the air-hole through which he had slipped in, and his eye became accustomed to this cave. He began to distinguish something. The passage in which he was earthed—no other word better expresses the condition—was walled up behind him. It was one of those cul-de-sacs technically called branchments. Before him there was another wall, a wall of night. The light from the air-hole died out ten or twelve paces from the point at which Jean Valjean stood, and scarcely produced a pallid whiteness over a few yards of the damp wall of the sewer. Beyond, the opaqueness was massive; to penetrate it appeared horrible, and to enter it seemed like being ingulfed. He could, however, force his way into that wall of mist, and he must do it. He must even hasten. Jean Valjean thought that that grating, noticed by him under the paving-stones, might also be noticed by the soldiers, and that all depended upon that chance. They also could descend into the well and explore it. There was not a minute to be lost. He had laid Marius upon the ground; he gathered him up,—this is again the right word,—replaced him upon his shoulders, and began his journey. He resolutely entered that obscurity.
“The truth is, that they were not so safe as Jean Valjean supposed. Perils of another kind, and not less great, awaited them perhaps. After the flashing whirl of the combat, the cavern of miasmas and pitfalls; after chaos, the cloaca. Jean Valjean had fallen from one circle of hell to another.
A PERPLEXING SITUATION.
“At the end of fifty paces he was obliged to stop. A questionpresented itself. The passage terminated in another, which it met transversely. These two roads were offered. Which should he take? Should he turn to the left or to the right? How guide himself in this black labyrinth? This labyrinth, as we have remarked, has a clew—its descent. To follow the descent is to go to the river.
“Jean Valjean understood this at once.
“He said to himself that he was probably in the sewer of the markets; that, if he should choose the left and follow the descent, he would come in less than a quarter of an hour to some mouth upon the Seine between the Pont au Change and the Pont Neuf; that is to say, he would reappear in broad day in the most populous portion of Paris. He might come out in some gathering of corner idlers. Amazement of the passers-by at seeing two bloody men come out of the ground under their feet. Arrival of sergent-de-ville, call to arms in the next guard-house. He would be seized before getting out. It was better to plunge into the labyrinth, to trust to this darkness, and rely on Providence for the issue.
“He chose the right, and went up the ascent.
“When he had turned the corner of the gallery, the distant gleam of the air-hole disappeared, the curtain of obscurity fell back over him, and he again became blind. He went forward, none the less, as rapidly as he could. Marius’s arms were passed about his neck, and his feet hung behind him. He held both arms with one hand, and groped for the wall with the other. Marius’s cheek touched his, and stuck to it, being bloody. He felt a warm stream, which came from Marius, flow over him and penetrate his clothing. Still, a moist warmth at his ear, which touched the wounded man’s mouth, indicated respiration, and consequently life. The passage through which Jean Valjean was now moving was not so small as the first. Jean Valjean walked in it with difficulty. The rains of the previous day had not yet run off, and made a little stream in the centre of the floor, and he was compelled to hug the wall to keep his feet out of the water. Thus he went on in midnight. He resembled the creatures of nightgroping in the invisible, and lost under ground in the veins of the darkness.
“However, little by little, whether that some distant air-holes sent a little floating light into this opaque mist, or that his eyes became accustomed to the obscurity, some dim vision came back to him, and he again began to receive a confused perception, now of the wall which he was touching, and now of the arch under which he was passing. The pupil dilates in the night, and at last finds day in it, even as the soul dilates in misfortune, and at last finds God in it.
“To find his way was difficult.
THE TRACK OF THE SEWERS.
“The track of the sewers echoes, so to speak, the track of the streets which overlie them. There were in the Paris of that day two thousand two hundred streets. Picture to yourselves below them that forest of dark branches which is called the sewer. The sewers existing at that epoch, placed end to end, would have given a length of thirty miles. We have already said that the present network, thanks to the extraordinary activity of the last thirty years, is not less than a hundred and forty miles.
“Jean Valjean began with a mistake. He thought that he was under the Rue St. Denis, and it was unfortunate that he was not there. There is beneath the Rue St. Denis an old stone sewer, which goes straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer, with a single elbow, on the right, at the height of the ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the St. Martin sewer, the four arms of which cut each other in a cross. But the gallery of the Petite Truanderie, the entrance to which was near the wine-shop of Corinth, never communicated with the underground passage in the Rue St. Denis; it runs into the Montmartre sewer, and it was in that that Jean Valjean was entangled. There, opportunities of losing one’s self abound. The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthian of the ancient network. Luckily Jean Valjean had left behind him the sewer of the markets, the geometrical plan of which represents a multitude of interlocked top-gallant-masts; but he had before him more than one embarrassingencounter, and more than one street corner—for these are streets—presenting itself in the obscurity like a point of interrogation; first, at his left, the vast Plâtrière sewer, a kind of Chinese puzzle, pushing and jumbling its chaos of T’s and Z’s beneath the Hôtel des Postes and the rotunda of the grain-market to the Seine, where it terminates in a Y; secondly, at his right, the crooked corridor of the Rue du Cadran, with its three teeth, which are so many blind ditches; thirdly, at his left, the branch of the Mail, complicated, almost at its entrance, by a kind of fork, and, after zigzag upon zigzag, terminating in the great voiding crypt of the Louvre, truncated and ramified in all directions; finally, at the right, the cul-de-sac passage of the Rue des Jeûneurs, with countless little reducts here and there, before arriving at the central sewer, which alone could lead him to some outlet distant enough to be secure.
“If Jean Valjean had had any notion of what we have here pointed out, he would have quickly perceived, merely from feeling the wall, that he was not in the underground gallery of the Rue St. Denis. Instead of the old hewn stone, instead of the ancient architecture, haughty and royal even in the sewer, with floor and running courses of granite, and mortar of thick lime, which cost seventy-five dollars a yard, he would have felt beneath his hand the contemporary cheapness, the economical expedient, the millstone grit laid in hydraulic cement upon a bed of concrete, which cost thirty-five dollars a yard, the bourgeois masonry known assmall materials; but he knew nothing of all this.
“He went forward with anxiety, but with calmness, seeing nothing, knowing nothing, plunged into chance, that is to say, swallowed up in Providence.
MOVING IN THE DARKNESS.
“By degrees, we must say, some horror penetrated him. The shadow which enveloped him entered his mind. He was walking in an enigma. This aqueduct of the cloaca is formidable; it is dizzily intertangled. It is a dreary thing to be caught in this Paris of darkness. Jean Valjean was obliged to find, and almost to invent, his route without seeing it. Inthat unknown region, each step which he ventured might be the last. How should he get out? Should he find an outlet? Should he find it in time? Would this colossal subterranean sponge, with cells of stone, admit of being penetrated and pierced? Would he meet with some unlooked for knot of obscurity? Would he encounter the inextricable and the insurmountable? Would Marius die of hemorrhage, and he of hunger? Would they both perish there at last, and make two skeletons in some niche of that night? He did not know. He asked himself all this, and he could not answer. The intestine of Paris is an abyss. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.
APPROACHING THE SEINE.
“Suddenly he was surprised. At the most unexpected moment, and without having diverged from a straight line, he discovered that he was no longer rising; the water of the brook struck, coming against his heels instead of upon the top of his feet. The sewer now descended. What? would he then soon reach the Seine? This danger was great, but the peril of retreat was still greater. He continued to advance. It was not towards the Seine that he was going. The saddle-back which the topography of Paris forms upon the right bank, empties one of its slopes into the Seine, and the other into the Grand Sewer. The crest of this saddle-back, which determines the division of the waters, follows a very capricious line. The culminating point, which is the point of separation of the flow, is in the St. Avoye sewer, beyond the Rue Michel de Comte, in the sewer of the Louvre, near the Boulevards, and in the Montmartre sewer, near the markets. It was at this culminating point that Jean Valjean had arrived. He was making his way towards the belt sewer; he was on the right road. But he knew nothing of it.
“Whenever he came to a branch, he felt its angles, and if he found the opening not as wide as the corridor in which he was, he did not enter, and continued his route, deeming rightly that every narrower way must terminate in a cul-de-sac, and could only lead him away from his object, the outlet. He thus evaded the quadruple snare which was spread for him inthe obscurity, by the four labyrinths which we have just enumerated.
“At a certain moment he felt that he was getting away from under the Paris which was petrified by theémeute, in which the barricades had suppressed the circulation, and that he was coming beneath the Paris which was alive and normal. He heard suddenly above his head a sound like thunder, distant, but continuous. It was the rumbling of the vehicles.
“He had been walking for about half an hour, at least by his own calculation, and had not yet thought of resting; only he had changed the hand which supported Marius. The darkness was deeper than ever, but this depth reassured him.
“All at once he saw his shadow before him. It was marked out on a feeble ruddiness almost indistinct, which vaguely empurpled the floor at his feet and the arch over his head, and which glided along at his right, and his left, on the two slimy walls of the corridor. In amazement he turned round.
“Behind him, in the portion of the passage through which he had passed, at a distance which appeared to him immense, flamed, throwing its rays into the dense obscurity, a sort of horrible star, which appeared to be looking at him.
“It was the gloomy star of the police which was rising in the sewer. Behind this star were moving, without order, eight or ten black forms, straight, indistinct, terrible.
FOLLOWED BY THE POLICE.
“During the day abattueof the sewers had been ordered. Three platoons of officers and sewer-men explored the subterranean streets of Paris; the first, the right bank, the second, the left bank, the third, in the city.
“The officers were armed with carbines, clubs, swords, and daggers.
“That which was at this moment directed upon Jean Valjean was the lantern of the patrol of the right bank.
“This patrol had just visited the crooked gallery and the three blind alleys which are beneath the Rue du Cadran. While they were taking their candle to the bottom of these blind alleys, Jean Valjean had come to the entrance of the gallery upon his way, had found it narrower than the principalpassage, and had not entered it. He had passed beyond. The policemen, on coming out from the Cadran gallery, had thought they heard the sound of steps in the direction of the belt sewer. It was, in fact, Jean Valjean’s steps. The sergeant in command of the patrol lifted his lantern, and the squad began to look into the mist in the direction whence the sound came.
“Jean Valjean saw these goblins form a kind of circle. These mastiffs’ heads drew near each other and whispered.
“The result of this council held by the watch-dogs was, that they had been mistaken, that there had been no noise, that there was nobody there, that it was needless to trouble themselves with the belt sewer.
NARROW ESCAPE FROM CAPTURE.
“The sergeant gave the order to file left towards the descent to the Seine. If they had conceived the idea of dividing into two squads and going in both directions, Jean Valjean would have been caught. That hung by this thread. It is probable that the instructions from the prefecture, foreseeing the possibility of a combat and that the insurgents might be numerous, forbade the patrol to separate. The patrol resumed its march, leaving Jean Valjean behind. Of all these movements Jean Valjean perceived nothing except the eclipse of the lantern, which suddenly turned back.
“Slow and measured steps resounded upon the floor for some time, more and more deadened by the progressive increase of the distance; the group of black forms sank away; a glimmer oscillated and floated, making a ruddy circle in the vault, which decreased, then disappeared; the silence became deep again; the obscurity became again complete; blindness and deafness resumed possession of the darkness; and Jean Valjean, not yet daring to stir, stood for a long time with his back to the wall, his ear intent and eye dilated, watching the vanishing of that phantom patrol.
“He resumed his march, and after a time felt that he was entering water, and that he had under his feet pavement no longer, but mud.
CAUGHT IN A QUICKSAND.
“It sometimes happens, on certain coasts of Brittany or Scotland,that a man, traveller or fisherman, walking on the beach at low tide far from the bank, suddenly notices that for several minutes he has been walking with some difficulty. The strand beneath his feet is like pitch; his soles stick to it; it is sand no longer, it is glue. The beach is perfectly dry, but at every step he takes, as soon as he lifts his foot, the print which it leaves fills with water. The eye, however, has noticed no change; the immense strand is smooth and tranquil, all the sand has the same appearance, nothing distinguishes the surface which is solid from the surface which is no longer so; the joyous little cloud of sand-fleas continues to leap tumultuously over the wayfarer’s feet. The man pursues his way, goes forward, inclines towards the land, endeavors to get nearer the upland. He is not anxious. Anxious about what? Only he feels somehow as if the weight of his feet increased with every step which he takes. Suddenly he sinks in. He sinks in two or three inches. Decidedly he is not on the right road; he stops to take his bearings. All at once he looks at his feet. His feet have disappeared. The sand covers them. He draws his feet out of the sand; he will retrace his steps, he turns back, he sinks in deeper. The sand comes up to his ankles; he pulls himself out, and throws himself to the left; the sand is half leg deep ; he throws himself to the right; the sand comes up to his shins. Then he recognizes with unspeakable terror that he is caught in the quicksand, and that he has beneath him the fearful medium in which man can no more walk than the fish can swim. He throws off his load if he has one, he lightens himself like a ship in distress; it is already too late; the sand is above his knees.
QUICKSANDS ON THE COAST OF BRITTANY.
“He calls, he waves his hat or his handkerchief; the sand gains on him more and more; if the beach is deserted, if the land is too far off, if the sand-bank is of too ill repute, if there is no hero in sight, it is all over; he is condemned to enlizement. He is condemned to that appalling interment, long, infallible, implacable, impossible to slacken or to hasten, which endures for hours, which will not end, which seizes you erect,free and in full health, which draws you by the feet, which, at every effort that you attempt, at every shout that you utter, drags you a little deeper, which appears to punish you for your resistance by a redoubling of its grasp, which sinks the man slowly into the earth while it leaves him all the time to look at the horizon, the trees, the green fields, the smoke of the villages in the plain, the sails of the ships upon the sea, the birds flying and singing, the sunshine, the sky. Enlizement is the grave become a tide and rising from the depths of the earth towards a living man. Each minute is an inexorable enshroudress. The victim attempts to sit down, to lie down, to creep; every movement he makes inters him; he straightens up, he sinks in; he feels that he is being swallowed up; he howls, implores, cries to the clouds, wrings his hands, despairs. Behold him waist deep in the sand; the sand reaches his breast; he is now only a bust. He raises his arms, utters furious groans, clutches the beach with his nails, would hold by that straw, leans upon his elbows to pull himself out of this soft sheath, sobs frenziedly; the sand rises. The sand reaches his shoulders, the sand reaches his neck; the face alone is visible now. The mouth cries, the sand fills it; silence. The eyes still gaze, the sand shuts them; night. Then the forehead decreases, a little hair flutters above the sand; a hand protrudes, comes through the surface of the beach, moves and shakes, and disappears. Sinister effacement of a man.
“This fatal mishap, always possible upon one or another coast of the sea, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewer of Paris.
QUICKSAND IN THE SEWER.
“The water filtered into certain underlying, particularly friable soils; the floor, which was of paving-stones, as in the old sewers, or of hydraulic cement upon concrete, as in the new galleries, having lost its support, bent. A bend in a floor of that kind is a crack, is a crumbling. The floor gave way over a certain space. This crevasse, a hiatus in a gulf of mud, was called technicallyfontis. What is a fontis? It is the quicksand of the sea-shore suddenly encountered under ground; it is the beach of Mont St. Michel in a sewer. Thediluted soil is, as it were, in fusion; all its molecules are in suspension in a soft medium; it is not land, and it is not water. Depth sometimes very great. Nothing more fearful than such a mischance. If the water predominates, death is prompt, there is swallowing up; if the earth predominates, death is slow, there is enlizement.
“Can you picture to yourself such a death? If enlizement is terrible on the shore of the sea, what is it in the cloaca? Instead of the open air, the full light, the broad day, that clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence rains life, those barks seen in the distance, that hope under every form, probable passers, succor possible until the last moment; instead of all that, deafness, blindness, a black arch, an interior of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire under a cover! the slow stifling by the filth, a stone box in which asphyxia opens its claw in the slime and takes you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death rattle; mire instead of sand, sulphuretted hydrogen instead of the hurricane, ordure instead of the ocean; and to call, and to gnash your teeth, and writhe, and struggle, and agonize, with that huge city above your head knowing nothing of it all!
“The depth of the fontis varied, as well as its length, and its density by reason of the more or less yielding character of the subsoil. Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten; sometimes no bottom could be found. The mire was here almost solid, there almost liquid. In the Lunière fontis, it would have taken a man a day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by the Phélippeaux slough. The mire bears more or less according to its greater or less density. A child escapes where a man is lost. The first law of safety is to divest yourself of every kind of burden. To throw away his bag of tools, or his basket, or his hod, is the first thing that every sewer-man does when he feels the soil giving way beneath him.
PERIL OF JEAN VALJEAN.
“Jean Valjean found himself in presence of a fontis. A yielding of the pavement, imperfectly upheld by the underlying sand, had occasioned a damming of the rain-water. Infiltrationhaving taken place, sinking had followed. The floor, broken up, had disappeared in the mire. For what distance? Impossible to say. The obscurity was deeper than anywhere else. It was a mud-hole in the cavern of night.
“Jean Valjean felt the pavement slipping away under him. He entered into this slime. It was water on the surface, mire at the bottom. He must surely pass through. To retrace his steps was impossible. Marius was expiring, and Jean Valjean exhausted. Where else could he go? Jean Valjean advanced. Moreover, the quagmire appeared not very deep for a few steps. But in proportion as he advanced, his feet sank in. He very soon had the mire half-knee deep, and water above his knees. He walked on, holding Marius with both arms as high above the water as he could. The mud now came up to his knees, and the water to his waist. He could no longer turn back. He sank in deeper and deeper. This mire, dense enough for one man’s weight, evidently could not bear two. Marius and Jean Valjean would have had a chance of escape separately. Jean Valjean continued to advance, supporting this dying man, who was perhaps a corpse.
“The water came up to his armpits; he felt that he was foundering; it was with difficulty that he could move in the depth of mire in which he was. The density, which was the support, was also the obstacle. He still held Marius up, and with an unparalleled outlay of strength he advanced; but he sank deeper. He now had only his head out of the water, and his arms supporting Marius. There is in the old pictures of the deluge a mother doing thus with her child.
“He sank still deeper, he threw his face back to escape the water, and to be able to breathe; he who should have seen him in this obscurity would have thought he saw a mask floating upon the darkness; he dimly perceived Marius’s drooping head and livid face above him; he made a desperate effort, and thrust his foot forward; his foot struck something solid: a support. It was time.
SAVED AT LAST.
“He rose, and writhed, and rooted himself upon this supportwith a sort of fury. It produced the effect upon him of the first step of a staircase reascending towards life.
“This support, discovered in the mire at the last moment, was the beginning of the other slope of the floor, which had bent without breaking, and had curved beneath the water like a board, and in a single piece. A well-constructed paving forms an arch, and has this firmness. This fragment of the floor, partly submerged, but solid, was a real slope, and, once upon this slope, they were saved. Jean Valjean ascended this inclined plane, and reached the other side of the quagmire.
“On coming out of the water, he struck against a stone, and fell upon his knees. This seemed to him fitting, and he remained thus for some time, his soul lost in unspoken prayer to God.
“He rose, shivering, chilled, infected, bending beneath this dying man, whom he was dragging on, all dripping with slime, his soul filled with a strange light.”