an the
King. It attained its maximum depth in the Rue Saint-Pierre, where
it rose to the height of three feet above the flag-stones of the
water-spout, and its maximum length in the Rue Saint-Sabin, where it
spread out over a stretch two hundred and thirty-eight metres in length.

At the beginning of this century, the sewer of Paris was still a
mysterious place. Mud can never enjoy a good fame; but in this case its
evil renown reached the verge of the terrible. Paris knew, in a confused
way, that she had under her a terrible cavern. People talked of it as
of that monstrous bed of Thebes in which swarmed centipedes fifteen long
feet in length, and which might have served Behemoth for a bathtub.
The great boots of the sewermen never ventured further than certain
well-known points. We were then very near the epoch when the scavenger's
carts, from the summit of which Sainte-Foix fraternized with the Marquis
de Crequi, discharged their loads directly into the sewer. As for
cleaning out,--that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which
encumbered rather than swept away. Rome left some poetry to her sewer,
and called it the Gemoniae; Paris insulted hers, and entitled it the
Polypus-Hole. Science and superstition were in accord, in horror. The
Polypus hole was no less repugnant to hygiene than to legend. The goblin
was developed under the fetid covering of the Mouffetard sewer; the
corpses of the Marmousets had been cast into the sewer de la Barillerie;
Fagon attributed the redoubtable malignant fever of 1685 to the great
hiatus of the sewer of the Marais, which remained yawning until 1833 in
the Rue Saint-Louis, almost opposite the sign of the Gallant Messenger.
The mouth of the sewer of the Rue de la Mortellerie was celebrated for
the pestilences which had their source there; with its grating of iron,
with points simulating a row of teeth, it was like a dragon's maw
in that fatal street, breathing forth hell upon men. The popular
imagination seasoned the sombre Parisian sink with some indescribably
hideous intermixture of the infinite. The sewer had no bottom. The sewer
was the lower world. The idea of exploring these leprous regions did not
even occur to the police. To try that unknown thing, to cast the plummet
into that shadow, to set out on a voyage of discovery in that abyss--who
would have dared? It was alarming. Nevertheless, some one did present
himself. The cess-pool had its Christopher Columbus.

One day, in