Chapter 330 Six future progress

Digging the sewers of Paris was no easy task.The past ten centuries have labored on it as unfinished as the architecture of Paris.The sewers are indeed also affected by the Paris expansion.It is a dark, tentacled waterlocust of the subterranean world, and it grows just below as the city spreads above.Every time a road is opened in the city, the sewer grows an arm. In the past monarchy, only 23,300 meters of sewer were built, which is the situation in Paris on January 1, 1806.Since then, as we will shortly say, the work has been effectively and resolutely restored and continued; Napoleon built 4,804 meters, a curious figure; Louis XVIII, 5,709 meters; Charles X, 10,836 meters; Louis-Philippe, 89,020 meters; the Republic of 1848, 23,381 meters; The current government, 70,500 meters; the total so far is 226,610 meters. This sewer of sixty leagues has become the huge belly of Paris.The branch project in the dark has been going on, on a grand and unknown scale.

As we have seen, the underground labyrinth of Paris today is more than tenfold greater than it was at the beginning of this century.It is hard for people to imagine what kind of effort and perseverance is necessary to bring this sewer to the relatively perfect level it is now.The old monarchical government of Paris and the revolutionary city government of the last decade of the eighteenth century managed to dig the five-mile ditch that existed in 1806.Various obstacles hindered the project, some from the nature of the soil, some from the prejudices of the working people of Paris.Paris is built on a special mine bed that cannot be shoveled, hoeed, or drilled, and cannot be solved by manpower.Nothing could be more difficult to pierce and break through than this geological formation towering the marvelous formation of historic significance called Paris; After that, underground resistance emerged endlessly.There are rare earths, there are springs of running water, there are hard rocks, and there are soft and deep silts—the scientific term is called mustard.Pickaxes were laboriously drilled into this limestone layer, alternating thin layers of clay with layers of crystalline flakes inlaid with pre-Adamant sea oyster shells.Sometimes a river bursts through the vaults just opened and drowns the workmen; or suddenly a mudslide appears, which, like a violent cataract, breaks the thickest pillars like broken glass.Recently, at Fayette, it was necessary to install the steward under the Saint-Martin Canal, without sailing or draining the canal.A breach had appeared in the river bed, and water suddenly filled the subterranean site beyond the capacity of the pumps, so that a diver had to search for the breach in the narrow entrance of the large pool, and with great difficulty blocked it.Elsewhere, near the Seine, or even at a considerable distance from it, as in Belleville, on the Boulevard and the Passage de Lunier, one encounters bottomless quicksands where one sees Then it sank.Add to this the suffocating rotting gas, landslides that could bury people, sudden subsidence, and the slow typhus infection of the workers.Recently, after excavating the underground promenade of the Rue de Clichy and using masonry to install a main aqueduct for the Urk Canal (which had to be constructed in a tunnel ten meters deep); Decayed layers, reinforced with braces, from the rue du Hospitale to the Seine, after the construction of the Vault of Pièvre; in order to save Paris from the rapids in the Montmartre district, and to make this a nine-hectare There is a way out of the stagnant pond near the wicket of the Rue des Martyrs, day and night, after a trench has been built eleven meters underground from the wicket of Blanche to the Avenue Aubervilliers; Street, after building an underground trench at a depth of six meters without trenching—unheard of—Munno, director of engineering, died.

In all parts of the city, after three kilometers of sewers were built from the Rue Saint-Antoine to the Rue de Roursin; After the concrete had laid the embankment on the quicksand and made the trenches of the Rue Saint-Georges; after he had directed the lowering of the branch pipes of the dangerous Rue Notre-Dame de Nazaire, the Engineer Douro died.There is no communique for such a brave feat, which is actually far more beneficial than foolish fighting on the battlefield. In 1832, the sewers in Paris were far from what they are today. Brunesseau had actively suggested, but he waited until the cholera broke out before deciding on the huge reconstruction project that followed.Oddly enough, for example, in 1821, as in Venice, the main drain of the sewer known as the Grand Canal had a stagnant section of dirty water open to the open air in the Rue des Cuisines.Not until 1823 did the city of Paris find in its pockets the 266,080 francs ten centimes needed to cover this sewage.The Combat Porte, the Cournet, the three discharge outlets of Saint-Mandet, the mechanism, the sewage seepage well and the suction well for the purification branch, did not appear until 1836.The sewers of Paris, as we have already said, have been rebuilt and multiplied more than tenfold in twenty-five years.

Thirty years ago, during the June 5th and 6th uprising, many places were basically old sewers.Most of the streets, when the center of the street was cracked, are now raised.It is not uncommon to see large square iron fences at the lowest point of a slope in a street or intersection, the bars have been rubbed bright by the soles of pedestrians, making them slippery and precarious whenever vehicles pass by, and causing horses to stumble .The formal term for bridge building gives this low point and fence the evocative name "The Trap".1832 In countless streets, Rue des Stars, Rue Saint-Louis, Rue des Temples, Rue de la Nursing, Rue Notre-Dame de Nazaire, Rue de Merriguet, Rue Embankment, Rue Petit Muscat, Rue Normandie, The Stag Bridge Street, Marais Street, Saint-Martin Street, Notre-Dame-de-Victory Street, Montmartre Street Street, Vampire Street, Place Elysée, Jacob Street, Tournon Street, old Gothic cesspit, or not Open their big mouths shyly.This is a huge stone gap in the canopy, sometimes surrounded by boundary stones, which is extremely presumptuous.

The Paris ditches in 1806 were basically the same as they were in 1663: 5,328 tuas.After Bruneseau, on January 1, 1832, it was 40,300 meters.From 1806 to 1831, an average of 750 meters was built every year; after that, 8,000 or even 10,000 meters of trench corridors were built with gravel and cement on the concrete foundation every year, and the cost was 200. The franc is one meter, and the 60-franc sewers in Paris currently cost 48 million francs. Apart from the economic progress we pointed out at the outset, serious public health problems are associated with the gigantic problem of the Paris sewers.

Paris is between two layers, one of water and one of air.This water accumulates at a considerable depth, as evidenced by two drills, provided by a layer of green sandstone between the Cretaceous and Jurassic and Limestone, which can be obtained from a disc to show that the radius is twenty-five leagues, and countless rivers and streams ooze there.In a glass of well Grenelle we can drink the waters of the Seine, Marne, Ronne, Oise, Aisne, Cher, Vienne, and Loire.This piece of water is hygienic, firstly it comes down from the sky, and secondly it comes out from the ground.That layer of air is unsanitary, and it comes out of the ditch.The rotten smell of all cesspit mingles with the breath of the city to produce this stench.The air taken from a dung-heap is scientifically proven to be purer than the air taken over Paris. After a certain time, progress takes effect, the machinery gradually perfects, and everything becomes clear. We can use this A layer of water purifies this layer of air, which means flushing the sewers.We know that cleaning the sewers means returning sludge to the land, returning manure to the land, and returning manure to the fields.Such a simple thing, for the public, will reduce poverty and improve health.At present, the disease in Paris has spread to a radius of five leagues around the Louvre Museum.

We can say that for ten centuries the cesspit has been the source of the disease of Paris, the gutter the disease of the city's blood.The instinct of the people is never wrong in this respect.In the past, the profession of sewer-making was almost as dangerous and repugnant as the profession of skinning and selling horses, considered terrible, and so long relegated to the executioner.To make a mason go down into the stinky pit, he had to pay a high wage. Well diggers hesitated and refused to put their ladders into the sewage pit. There was a saying at that time: "Going down the pit is like entering a grave." Terrible legends, which we have already spoken, fill this great trough with horrors, this dreadful, squalid and dank place bearing the marks of earthly changes and human revolutions, where we may find all relics of natural and man-made disasters, From shells from the flood to Marat's clothes.