e time. We have just said that history
passes through the sewer. The Saint-Barthelemys filter through there,
drop by drop, between the paving-stones. Great public assassinations,
political and religious butcheries, traverse this underground passage
of civilization, and thrust their corpses there. For the eye of the
thinker, all historic murderers are to be found there, in that hideous
penumbra, on their knees, with a scrap of their winding-sheet for
an apron, dismally sponging out their work. Louis XI. is there with
Tristan, Francois I. with Duprat, Charles IX. is there with his mother,
Richelieu is there with Louis XIII., Louvois is there, Letellier is
there, Hebert and Maillard are there, scratching the stones, and trying
to make the traces of their actions disappear. Beneath these vaults one
hears the brooms of spectres. One there breathes the enormous fetidness
of social catastrophes. One beholds reddish reflections in the corners.
There flows a terrible stream, in which bloody hands have been washed.

The social observer should enter these shadows. They form a part of
his laboratory. Philosophy is the microscope of the thought. Everything
desires to flee from it, but nothing escapes it. Tergiversation is
useless. What side of oneself does one display in evasions? the shameful
side. Philosophy pursues with its glance, probes the evil, and does
not permit it to escape into nothingness. In the obliteration of things
which disappear, in the watching of things which vanish, it recognizes
all. It reconstructs the purple from the rag, and the woman from the
scrap of her dress. From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from
mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora
or the jug. By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it
recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse
from the Jewry of the Ghetto. It re-discovers in what remains that
which has been, good, evil, the true, the blood-stain of the palace,
the ink-blot of the cavern, the drop of sweat from the brothel, trials
undergone, temptations welcomed, orgies cast forth, the turn which
characters have taken as they became abased, the trace of prostitution
in souls of which their grossness rendered them capable, and on the
vesture of the porters of Rome the mark of Messalina's elbowing.

CHAPTER III--BRUNESEAU

The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth
century, Henri