INUNDATION OF THE SEWERS.
“Sometimes the sewer of Paris took it into its head to overflow, as if that unappreciated Nile were suddenly seized with wrath. 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 Mouffetard sewer; 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 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.