Page 2148 - les-miserables

that it was not so. Under the Rue Saint-Denis there is an old
stone sewer which dates from Louis XIII. and which runs
straight to the collecting sewer, called the Grand Sewer,
with but a single elbow, on the right, on the elevation of the
ancient Cour des Miracles, and a single branch, the Saint-
Martin sewer, whose four arms describe a cross. But the gut
of the Petite-Truanderie the entrance to which was in the
vicinity of the Corinthe wine-shop has never communicat-
ed with the sewer of the Rue Saint-Denis; it ended at the
Montmartre sewer, and it was in this that Jean Valjean was
entangled. There opportunities of losing oneself abound.
The Montmartre sewer is one of the most labyrinthine of the
ancient network. Fortunately, Jean Valjean had left behind
him the sewer of the markets whose geometrical plan pres-
ents the appearance of a multitude of parrots’ roosts piled
on top of each other; but he had before him more than one
embarrassing encounter and more than one street corner—
for they are streets— presenting itself in the gloom like an
interrogation point; first, on his left, the vast sewer of the
Platriere, a sort of Chinese puzzle, thrusting out and entan-
gling its chaos of Ts and Zs under the Post-Office and under
the rotunda of the Wheat Market, as far as the Seine, where
it terminates in a Y; secondly, on his right, the curving cor-
ridor of the Rue du Cadran with its three teeth, which are
also blind courts; thirdly, on his left, the branch of the Mail,
complicated, almost at its inception, with a sort of fork, and
proceeding from zig-zag to zig-zag until it ends in the grand
crypt of the outlet of the Louvre, truncated and ramified
in every direction; and lastly, the blind alley of a passage

2148 Les Miserables