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

by William Walton

When the canal de l'Ourcq was first opened, the work was carried out by a company to which was granted the right of navigation on the new channel, connected with the Seine by the canals Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, but in 1876 the city of Paris repurchased this concession from the canal company. A supply is also drawn from several important artesian wells in different localities,—that of Grenelle, in the Place de Breteuil, driven between 1833 and 1852, draws the water from a depth of five hundred and forty-nine mètres and elevates it to a height of seventy-five. This supply is turned into that of the Ourcq. The artesian well of the Butte aux Cailles, begun in 1863, was resumed in 1892 and is just being terminated; the depth attained is some six hundred mètres. That of Passy, 1855-1860, somewhat less deep, supplies the lakes of the Bois de Boulogne; that of the Place Hébert, 1863-1893, seven hundred and eighteen mètres in depth, furnishes some large ponds in the neighborhood.

Among the great reservoirs, the most noticeable is that of Montmartre, rising high by the side of the church of the Sacré-Cœur, and containing within its gray walls no less than three lakes, one above another. The largest of all these storage basins in the city is that of the Vanne, at the side of the principal entrance to the Parc Montsouris; in its vast, vaulted enclosure, covered with turf, may be stored two hundred and fifty thousand cubic mètres of water. Visitors are admitted to the under vault, where, by the light of torches, the enormous walls and the innumerable columns that sustain this weight are dimly visible. The water of the Avre, drawn from the two sources of the Vigne and Verneuil, is to be stored in the still larger reservoir on the heights of Saint-Cloud, similar in construction and now nearly completed. Each of the three sections in which it is built will contain a hundred thousand cubic mètres.

The ancient mediæval methods have all been put away, the inevitable little open gutter running down the middle of the street—celebrated by Boileau and Mme. de Staël, and many others—has long since disappeared, but the water-supply is not yet entirely adequate, and the citizens may still suffer for the lack of a pure liquid to drink,—as they did through so many centuries. It not infrequently happens, as it did in the early autumn of 1898, that several quarters of the city are simultaneously deprived of eau de source, and compelled to use the river-water alone. Every effort is made to avert this—as it is rightly considered—calamity, the streets are placarded with official notices warning the inhabitants of the approaching curtailment of their supply, and they are notified in a similar manner when the scarcity is over. Two solutions have been proposed for this insufficiency, both of them involving such heavy expense that the municipality shrinks from adopting either;—the first, to supply every dwelling with a double set of pipes, one carrying the pure water of the aqueducts, and the other the river-water, forced up into the upper stories; the second is to go as far as the lakes Neuchâtel, or Geneva, for an uncontaminated supply. The complete application of the tout à l'égout system has been delayed by the want of the greatly-increased volume of water necessary for its application, and strong petitions have been presented demanding the postponement of the application of the law of 1894. The present supply is about a hundred and twenty-four litres of eau de source and ninety-six of eau de rivière daily for each inhabitant, but in summer this amount may become greatly diminished. Paris thus stands second in the amount of daily water-supply in the European capitals,—the figures ranging from Rome with four hundred and fourteen litres per capita, daily, to Constantinople with fifteen. London has only a hundred and seventy-three for each inhabitant daily; and Berlin, seventy-three, next to the Turkish capital. The figures for American cities are very much higher,—New York, three hundred and fifty-nine; Boston, three hundred and sixty-three; Philadelphia, six hundred; Chicago, six hundred and thirty-six, and Buffalo, eight hundred and forty-five (September, 1898).

ANOTHER grave evil produced by an insufficient water-supply is the lack of pressure in the pipes in case of fire, and the possible lack of water itself. The number of bouches d'incendie, or fire-plugs, which it is proposed to raise to eight thousand, placed a hundred mètres apart, in all the streets of the city, is as yet far from attaining that figure. The infrequency of serious fires in the capital is, however, very noticeable when compared with the losses of American cities. Various causes contribute to this result: the solid character of the dwelling-houses generally, especially in the older quarters of the city—the handsome, new apartment-houses that have been put up in such numbers of recent years in the neighborhood of the Arc de l'Étoile are, very many of them, much less well built; the general absence of furnaces and of those overwrought fires to which the severity of his climate incites the American citizen; the total absence of buildings of an inordinate height, and, in modern times, the much more restricted use of electricity and the consequent diminution of that too frequent danger of the present day, "defective insulation." The fire service is, also, very efficient; the brass helmets of the pompiers are as inseparable from any public performance, theatrical or musical, as the uniforms of the Garde Républicaine; these faithful sentinels are on duty behind the scenes as well as before them, and even up in the "flies," where, before the introduction of electricity, they were obliged to pass several hours in a temperature of, frequently, thirty-five degrees Centigrade, ninety-six Fahrenheit. At present, the fire department of Paris has adopted most of the modern improvements common to other civilized capitals, and the details of its service differ from those with which we are familiar principally in the military character given it.

The regiment of Sapeurs-Pompiers is, in fact, a regiment of infantry, lent to the city of Paris by the Minister of War. It is paid out of the municipal budget, with the exception of the pensions of the Legion of Honor, the military medal, and the retired list, which are the charge of the State. The regiment is composed of two battalions, of six companies each, with a total strength of seventeen hundred men. The pay of the men and their indemnities are the same as for the regiments of infantry in garrison in Paris, there are special privileges for the officers, and the quality of the recruits, especially with regard to their physique, is maintained at a very high standard. Their bravery, their efficiency, and their devotion are equal to those which are displayed so frequently by this well-organized service in other large cities, and are equally appreciated by the public; when, at the annual review at Longchamps on the day of the national fête, the regiment of sapeurs-pompiers defiles before the reviewing-stand, the great wave of applause and recognition which envelops it, drowning the other cheers in its roar, betokens the intimate appreciation of the Parisian, of high and low degree, of these unpretentious heroes.

By the new organization of this service, now in process of completion, the city is divided into twenty-four "zones," in the centre of each of which is a post of men and material, known as a centre de secours. The smaller posts, scattered through the city, in case of fire, notify by telephone these central stations and the état-major of the regiment, adjoining the Préfecture de Police; if the fire is of sufficient importance, the centre de secours sends a reinforcement and the steam fire-engine, the pompe à vapeur, but in very many cases the service of the latter is not needed. Its appearance in the streets is comparatively rare, and it is seldom driven at the mad gallop of the American machines. Moreover, its whistle is the curious thin treble so common in European motor engines, railroad and other. The old-fashioned hand-pumps have almost completely disappeared, with the exception of some localities like the Butte Montmartre, too steep to be approached by horses. In the central stations, the arrangements are those generally adopted nowadays to secure the quickest possible service,—even to the harness suspended from hooks in the ceilings to be dropped on the horses' backs, and the metal pole down which the men slide from their sleeping-rooms above.

For particular service, details for the theatres, balls, private clubs, etc., the number of men is fixed by the Préfet de Police, and there is extra pay in all these cases. The department is also called upon in case of street accidents, falling buildings, asphyxia in sewers, etc. The service material includes special apparatus for respiration in cellars, basements, etc., where the presence of gas or smoke is to be apprehended; and the great ladder, carried on a special truck, has a length of twenty mètres, greater than the average height of the Parisian houses. It is stated that the time allowed to elapse between the receipt of an alarm in the stations and the departure for the fire is often under a minute, and never exceeds two; in 1896, the time between the alarm and the attack of the fire was less than five minutes in ten hundred and seventy-nine fires out of a total of twelve hundred and four. In seven hundred and eighty-four cases, in the same year, the conflagration was completely extinguished in five minutes, and the very longest fire lasted six hours and a half.

At the entrance of each of the twelve casernes, or barracks, of the regiment, the names of the officers and soldiers who have been killed in the discharge of their duty are engraved on a slab of black marble, the Golden Book of the regiment. In the court of the état-major the names of the forty sapeurs-pompiers who have thus died since 1821, are engraved on a marble panel. In his order of the day, March 11, 1888, "the colonel informs the regiment, with profound grief, of the deaths of Corporal Toulon and former sergeant Sixdenier, who perished yesterday, at noon, victims of their devotion, in endeavoring to save an imprudent workman who had descended, without taking precautions, into an excavation of the Rue des Deux-Ponts." Three citizens were also asphyxiated in trying to save him, two of whom died; "and the deaths of Sixdenier and Toulon will be for all another and a grand example to add to the history of the regiment."

A Parisian merchant or manufacturer, Dumourrier-Duperrier, in 1699, furnished the first effective, organized system of combating fires in the city, and in 1717 he received, by letters-patent, the direction of the Compagnie de Garde-Pompes, the origin of the present organization. In 1792, the total effective of this force was two hundred and sixty-three men, officers included, with forty-four force-pumps, twelve suction-pumps, and forty-two casks. The men were provided with uniforms and, later, armed with sabres; in the year IX of the Republic, the corps, then four hundred strong, was placed under the direction of the Préfet de police, under the general administration of the Préfet de la Seine. The frightful conflagration which ended the fête given by the Austrian ambassador, Prince von Schwartzenberg, to the Emperor, in honor of his marriage with Marie-Louise, in 1810, awoke public attention to the insufficiency of the arrangements for extinguishing fires, and in the following year measures were taken to secure a larger authority and more energetic action. Napoleon decided that the gardes-pompes should be put on a strictly military footing; an imperial decree of September 18, 1811, created a battalion of sapeurs-pompiers consisting of four companies with thirteen officers and five hundred and sixty-three men. For the first time, they were armed with muskets, and as a military force were held as an auxiliary in the police service and in the maintenance of public order. One of the articles of this decree provided for the payment of this force by the city until the establishment of a company to insure against fire,—which was held to foreshadow an intention to place this expense, at least in part, upon these companies, and thereby relieve the municipal budget.