Page 2173 - les-miserables

ocean, becomes a pitfall. It presents itself in the guise of a
plain, and it yawns like a wave. The abyss is subject to these
treacheries.
This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea
beaches, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers
of Paris.
Before the important works, undertaken in 1833, the sub-
terranean drain of Paris was subject to these sudden slides.
The water filtered into certain subjacent strata, which
were particularly friable; the foot-way, which was of flag-
stones, as in the ancient sewers, or of cement on concrete,
as in the new galleries, having no longer an underpinning,
gave way. A fold in a flooring of this sort means a crack,
means crumbling. The framework crumbled away for a cer-
tain length. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was
called a fontis, in the special tongue. What is a fontis? It is
the quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under
the surface of the earth; it is the beach of Mont Saint-Michel
in a sewer. The soaked soil is in a state of fusion, as it were;
all its molecules are in suspension in soft medium; it is not
earth and it is not water. The depth is sometimes very great.
Nothing can be more formidable than such an encounter. If
the water predominates, death is prompt, the man is swal-
lowed up; if earth predominates, death is slow.
Can any one picture to himself such a death? If being
swallowed by the earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it
in a cess-pool? Instead of the open air, the broad daylight, the
clear horizon, those vast sounds, those free clouds whence
rains life, instead of those barks descried in the distance,

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