II. attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years
ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself,
and fared as best it might.

Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision,
and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a long time. Later on, '89
showed how understanding comes to cities. But in the good, old times,
the capital had not much head. It did not know how to manage its own
affairs either morally or materially, and could not sweep out filth
any better than it could abuses. Everything presented an obstacle,
everything raised a question. The sewer, for example, was refractory to
every itinerary. One could no more find one's bearings in the sewer
than one could understand one's position in the city; above the
unintelligible, below the inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues
there reigned the confusion of caverns; Daedalus backed up Babel.

Sometimes the Paris sewer took a notion to overflow, as though this
misunderstood Nile were suddenly seized with a fit of rage. There
occurred, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At times, that
stomach of civilization digested badly, the cess-pool flowed back into
the throat of the city, and Paris got an after-taste of her own filth.
These resemblances of the sewer to remorse had their good points; they
were warnings; very badly accepted, however; the city waxed indignant
at the audacity of its mire, and did not admit that the filth should
return. Drive it out better.

The inundation of 1802 is one of the actual memories of Parisians of
the age of eighty. The mud spread in cross-form over the Place des
Victoires, where stands the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered the Rue
Saint-Honore by the two mouths to the sewer in the Champs-Elysees,
the Rue Saint-Florentin through the Saint-Florentin sewer, the Rue
Pierre-a-Poisson through the sewer de la Sonnerie, the Rue Popincourt,
through the sewer of the Chemin-Vert, the Rue de la Roquette, through
the sewer of the Rue de Lappe; it covered the drain of the Rue des
Champs-Elysees to the height of thirty-five centimetres; and, to the
South, through the vent of the Seine, performing its functions in
inverse sense, it penetrated the Rue Mazarine, the Rue de l'Echaude, and
the Rue des Marais, where it stopped at a distance of one hundred and
nine metres, a few paces distant from the house in which Racine had
lived, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more th