The prefecture of police and the commission of health have done their best. But, in spite of all the processes of disinfection, it exhales, a vague, suspicious odor like Tartuffe after confession.
Let us confess, that, taking it all in all, this sweeping is a homage which the sewer pays to civilization, and as, from this point of view, Tartuffe''s conscience is a progress over the Augean stables, it is certain that the sewers of Paris have been improved.
It is more than progress; it is transmutation.
Between the ancient and the present sewer there is a revolution.
What has effected this revolution?
The man whom all the world forgets, and whom we have mentioned, Bruneseau.
BOOK SECOND.--THE INTESTINE OF THE LEVIATHAN
CHAPTER VI
FUTURE PROGRESS
The excavation of the sewer of Paris has been no slight task. The last ten centuries have toiled at it without being able to bring it to a termination, any more than they have been able to finish Paris.⑨⑨
The sewer, in fact, receives all the counter-shocks of the growth of Paris.
Within the bosom of the earth, it is a sort of mysterious polyp with a thousand antennae, which expands below as the city expands above.
Every time that the city cuts a street, the sewer stretches out an arm.
The old monarchy had constructed only twenty-three thousand three hundred metres of sewers; that was where Paris stood in this respect on the first of January, 1806. Beginning with this epoch, of which we shall shortly speak, the work was usefully and energetically resumed and prosecuted; Napoleon built--the figures are curious--four thousand eight hundred and four metres; Louis XVIII., five thousand seven hundred and nine; Charles X., ten thousand eight hundred and thirty-six; Louis-Philippe, eighty-nine thousand and twenty; the Republic of 1848, twenty-three thousand three hundred and eighty-one; the present government, seventy thousand five hundred; in all, at the present time, two hundred and twenty-six thousand six hundred and ten metres; sixty leagues of sewers; the enormous entrails of Paris.