me was ruined by the Roman sewer, Rome exhausted
Italy, and when she had put Italy in her sewer, she poured in Sicily,
then Sardinia, then Africa. The sewer of Rome has engulfed the world.
This cess-pool offered its engulfment to the city and the universe. Urbi
et orbi. Eternal city, unfathomable sewer.

Rome sets the example for these things as well as for others.

Paris follows this example with all the stupidity peculiar to
intelligent towns.

For the requirements of the operation upon the subject of which we have
just explained our views, Paris has beneath it another Paris; a Paris
of sewers; which has its streets, its cross-roads, its squares, its
blind-alleys, its arteries, and its circulation, which is of mire and
minus the human form.

For nothing must be flattered, not even a great people; where there
is everything there is also ignominy by the side of sublimity; and,
if Paris contains Athens, the city of light, Tyre, the city of might,
Sparta, the city of virtue, Nineveh, the city of marvels, it also
contains Lutetia, the city of mud.

However, the stamp of its power is there also, and the Titanic sink of
Paris realizes, among monuments, that strange ideal realized in humanity
by some men like Macchiavelli, Bacon and Mirabeau, grandiose vileness.

The sub-soil of Paris, if the eye could penetrate its surface, would
present the aspect of a colossal madrepore. A sponge has no more
partitions and ducts than the mound of earth for a circuit of six
leagues round about, on which rests the great and ancient city. Not to
mention its catacombs, which are a separate cellar, not to mention
the inextricable trellis-work of gas pipes, without reckoning the vast
tubular system for the distribution of fresh water which ends in the
pillar fountains, the sewers alone form a tremendous, shadowy net-work
under the two banks; a labyrinth which has its slope for its guiding
thread.

There appears, in the humid mist, the rat which seems the product to
which Paris has given birth.

CHAPTER II--ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE SEWER

Let the reader imagine Paris lifted off like a cover, the subterranean
net-work of sewers, from a bird's eye view, will outline on the banks
a species of large branch grafted on the river. On the right bank, the
belt sewer will form the trunk of this branch, the secondary ducts will
form the branches, and those without exit the twigs.

This figure is but a summary one and half exact, the right an