Paris, From the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 2

by William Walton

"The next morning, all this deposit is relegated to a distance of nine kilomètres, as far as Bondy, by elevating machines: the cisterns are washed out and cleansed by floods of water; the heavy matter which the pumps do not take up is put in casks and taken away to be employed directly in the manufacture of manure, by mixing it with other fertilizing materials. The transportal of the liquid matter to Bondy is effected by means of a machine of twenty-five horse-power, through a conduit thirty centimètres in diameter, which follows the right bank of the canal de l'Ourcq."

The great collecteur d'Asnières, a sectional view of which under the Rue Royale, is shown on page 299, is five mètres, sixty centimètres, in width, and three mètres, forty, in height; the channel for the water in the centre is three mètres, fifty, in width, and one mètre, thirty-five, in depth. On each side is a banquette, or sidewalk, ninety centimètres wide. The collecteurs, as well as the smaller sewers of the streets and houses, are constructed of masonry laid in mortar, and they are lined with cement which insures their cleanliness and their sonorousness. The former quality is maintained by an incessant surveillance, an organized force of nine hundred and thirty-one men being constantly employed, and an arrangement of fans or wings, mounted either upon the fronts of the boats or attached to the bottoms of the little trucks which run on rails along the edges of the canal of the larger sewers. These fans descend into the canal and sweep all obstructions before them,—the sand from the street pavements overhead constituting a large portion of this obstructive material. The siphons are cleansed by an ingenious process invented by Belgrand and applied by him to that of the Alma,—a large wooden ball, eighty-five centimètres in diameter, traversing twice a week each of the two conduits, a mètre in diameter. So thorough is this policing of the sewers, that it is recorded that the number of heavy leathern thigh boots furnished the égoutiers is some twelve hundred or two thousand annually, representing a value of nearly a hundred thousand francs. One pair of these boots lasts about six months.

An analysis of the air of these sewers gives surprising results. The proportion of carbonic acid is somewhat greater than in the air of the streets overhead, that of ammoniacal azote is much more considerable, and that of bacteria only half as great. Consequently, not only does the personnel of this underground labyrinth traverse it constantly without danger, but visitors from the upper world find amusement in exploring it. Every fortnight, on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month, the Préfet of the Seine, or the Chief Engineer of the Service de l'Assainissement de Paris, grants permits for these visits to a certain number of applicants,—the visitors are transported through the collecteurs of the Châtelet to the Place de la Concorde, under the Boulevard Sebastopol and the Rue de Rivoli, in little vehicles forming two trains, drawn each by an electric engine; then from the Concorde to the Madeleine, under the Rue Royale, in boats drawn by an electric tug. The trip takes about an hour, and can be made in either direction; the sewers are open to this invasion from Easter to the end of October, excepting in case of storms, when the water in the canals is apt to rise rapidly over the banquettes and drive the workmen to the regards or places of ascent provided every fifty or a hundred mètres apart. The danger of asphyxia, which was formerly very serious, is now practically abolished, the ventilation being assured by numerous openings in the street gutters under the curb-stones, which are kept free from floating materials and obstructions by a special corps of égoutiers.

For the wagonnets de service in the larger sewers, an ingenious arrangement is used,—on the little four-wheeled truck which runs on rails along the edge of the central canal are laid two more sections of railroad at right angles, and on these are mounted two more four-wheeled trucks carrying each a rectangular little tank or receptacle, with a rounded bottom. The outside rail, at each end, is blocked, so as to keep these tanks in position while in transit,—when arrived at their destination, the blocks are removed and the two run off on other rails to be emptied. The Parisian sewers carry not only the drainage of the streets and houses, but also all those various underground means of communication which in other, and less well-ordered, municipalities have each their own burrowing to do,—at the cost of infinite expense and confusion. The water-pipes, the telegraphic cables, the telephone wires, the pneumatic tubes for the postal service, and the piping for the conveyance of motive power, are all sheltered in these underground thoroughfares. So complete and well organized, indeed, are these égouts, that that constant habitant of sewers, the rat, is being driven out of them,—neither the black rat nor his enemy, the great Norway animal, can find lodging and refuge in these cement-lined walls, as hard as steel. The task of the hunter of rodents is greatly facilitated by all these improved methods.

It is difficult nowadays to conceive the condition of the streets of a mediæval city, and Paris was no exception. Not only were they very crooked—each householder building where he chose, with very little consideration for the general alignment, badly paved or not at all, unsewered and dark, but they were the receptacles for absolutely all the refuse of the dwellings. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker threw everything out of the windows, and nobody carried it away. The first vaulted sewer was constructed in the reign of Charles VI, in the Rue Montmartre, by Hugues Aubriot, prévôt of the merchants; but the state of the public thoroughfares remained much as it had been in the preceding century. The houses were built on the level of the streets, and inundated at every violent shower, the choked-up gutters refusing to carry off the sudden flood. Even the kings of France struggled in vain against the universal infection,—"incommoded in their Hôtels Saint-Pol and des Tourelles, they were constantly protesting to the municipality of Paris; Louis XII, François I, and Henri II vainly attempted to secure the removal of the égout Sainte-Catherine; this unwholesome neighborhood even caused François I to change his property of Chanteloup for the locality of the Tuileries." In 1473, the Parlement ordered the Lieutenant Criminel to clear away the filth which obstructed the entrance to Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet and along the course formerly traversed by the Bièvre, and three years later a more general effort at reformation was made. The main streets, the surroundings of the Palais, were submitted to a sort of system of cleaning, the cost of which was defrayed by a tax laid upon the inhabitants thus favored. The aqueduct of Belleville had been constructed in 1244, to supply the fountain of the monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs, and afterward furnished water to most of the fountains of Paris; in 1457, it had been repaired by the prévôt of the merchants, and thus supplied a means of cleansing the streets. In 1265, there was existing a fountain in the upper part of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, known as the Fontaine Saint-Lazare, and fed by the aqueduct of Saint-Gervais—from Romainville, near Vincennes—constructed in the last years of the reign of Philippe-Auguste. The fountain of the Innocents, that of Maubuée, and that of the Halles were also watered by this aqueduct of the Pré-Saint-Gervais. The Cité and the quartier Saint-Jacques were for centuries the most pestilential quarters of the capital, and, despite the various measures taken to ameliorate them, it was not till the reign of Henri IV that the evil was effectively attacked by the widening of the streets so as to permit the noblesse and the bourgeoisie to traverse them in carriages.

To such a height had the deposits of refuse outside the city walls attained, that, in 1525, during the panic that prevailed in Paris at the news of the captivity of François I, Jean Briçonnet, President of the Chambre des Comptes, secured the passage of an ordinance directing their razing, as from their summits an enemy could command the city walls! During this reign, however, considerable progress was made in cleansing and embellishing the capital; the king particularly enjoined upon the municipality the importance of paving and sweeping the streets, and a royal edict of November, 1539, prescribed minute regulations for the conduct of the inhabitants and the measures to be taken that would be considered very satisfactory, if enforced, at the present day. The paving of the streets, which had been commenced under Philippe-Auguste, had proceeded so slowly that in 1545 the greater portion of the Faubourg Saint-Germain was not yet paved, and the Cardinal de Tournon, Abbé of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, undertook the task. A decree of the court, March 30, 1545, ordered the commencement in the Rue de Seine; but when the cardinal desired to straighten the street lines also, he encountered a vigorous opposition on the part of the inhabitants. The Parlement was obliged to come to his assistance, and a decree of the 21st of the following October directed that all those who had valid reasons for opposing this measure should appear by means of a procureur, within the space of three days, to state them.

Five years later, another public-spirited citizen, Gilles de Froissez, an iron-master, proposed to bring the water of the Seine to aid in the great task of cleaning the city, and was instrumental in beginning this good work. In 1605, still another, François Miron, paid out of his own pocket for the facing with masonry of the égout de Ponceau from the Rue Saint-Denis to the Rue Saint-Martin. Various other open sewers were gradually transformed into covered ones, but under Louis XIV, while the total length of the first was only two thousand three hundred and fifty-three mètres, that of the latter, including the long égout de ceinture, or stream of Ménilmontant, was eight thousand and thirty-six.

Marie de Médicis, having begun, in 1613, to plant the trees for the park of her proposed palace on the site of the old Hôtel du Luxembourg, was desirous of securing a supply of water for her fountains, and arrangements were made to divide that which was to be brought from the source at Rungis by the Aqueduct of Arcueil. The old one built by the Romans in this locality—whence its name, Arculi—had fallen to ruins; one Hugues Cosnier had engaged, the preceding year, to construct a new one in three years, which should bring thirty inches of water to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, eighteen for the palace and twelve for the inhabitants. The work was carried out by Jacques Debrosse, between 1613 and 1624; and on his handsome, dressed-stone construction there was erected another in rough stone, less high but twice as long, between 1868 and 1872.