1805, during one of the rare apparitions which the Emperor
made in Paris, the Minister of the Interior, some Decres or Cretet or
other, came to the master's intimate levee. In the Carrousel there was
audible the clanking of swords of all those extraordinary soldiers of
the great Republic, and of the great Empire; then Napoleon's door was
blocked with heroes; men from the Rhine, from the Escaut, from the
Adige, and from the Nile; companions of Joubert, of Desaix, of Marceau,
of Hoche, of Kleber; the aerostiers of Fleurus, the grenadiers of
Mayence, the pontoon-builders of Genoa, hussars whom the Pyramids had
looked down upon, artillerists whom Junot's cannon-ball had spattered
with mud, cuirassiers who had taken by assault the fleet lying at anchor
in the Zuyderzee; some had followed Bonaparte upon the bridge of Lodi,
others had accompanied Murat in the trenches of Mantua, others had
preceded Lannes in the hollow road of Montebello. The whole army of that
day was present there, in the court-yard of the Tuileries, represented
by a squadron or a platoon, and guarding Napoleon in repose; and that
was the splendid epoch when the grand army had Marengo behind it and
Austerlitz before it.--"Sire," said the Minister of the Interior to
Napoleon, "yesterday I saw the most intrepid man in your Empire."--"What
man is that?" said the Emperor brusquely, "and what has he done?"--"He
wants to do something, Sire."--"What is it?"--"To visit the sewers of
Paris."

This man existed and his name was Bruneseau.

CHAPTER IV--BRUNESEAU.

The visit took place. It was a formidable campaign; a nocturnal battle
against pestilence and suffocation. It was, at the same time, a voyage
of discovery. One of the survivors of this expedition, an intelligent
workingman, who was very young at the time, related curious details with
regard to it, several years ago, which Bruneseau thought himself obliged
to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy of official
style. The processes of disinfection were, at that epoch, extremely
rudimentary. Hardly had Bruneseau crossed the first articulations of
that subterranean network, when eight laborers out of the twenty refused
to go any further. The operation was complicated; the visit entailed the
necessity of cleaning; hence it was necessary to cleanse and at the same
time, to proceed; to note the entrances of water, to count the gratings
and the vents, to lay out in detail the branches, to ind