Page 2141 - les-miserables

above Paris. In a given time, with the aid of progress, mech-
anisms become perfected, and as light increases, the sheet
of water will be employed to purify the sheet of air; that is to
say, to wash the sewer. The reader knows, that by ‘washing
the sewer’ we mean: the restitution of the filth to the earth;
the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.
Through this simple act, the entire social community will
experience a diminution of misery and an augmentation of
health. At the present hour, the radiation of diseases from
Paris extends to fifty leagues around the Louvre, taken as
the hub of this pestilential wheel.
We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has
been the disease of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which
Paris has in her blood. The popular instinct has never been
deceived in it. The occupation of sewermen was formerly al-
most as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the people, as
the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror
and handed over to the executioner. High wages were nec-
essary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the
ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it
was said, in proverbial form: ‘to descend into the sewer is to
enter the grave;’ and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have
said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-
hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe
as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found ves-
tiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the
rag of Marat.

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