reader knows, that
by "washing the sewer" we mean: the restitution of the filth to the
earth; the return to the soil of dung and of manure to the fields.
Through this simple act, the entire social community will experience a
diminution of misery and an augmentation of health. At the present hour,
the radiation of diseases from Paris extends to fifty leagues around the
Louvre, taken as the hub of this pestilential wheel.

We might say that, for ten centuries, the cess-pool has been the disease
of Paris. The sewer is the blemish which Paris has in her blood. The
popular instinct has never been deceived in it. The occupation of
sewermen was formerly almost as perilous, and almost as repugnant to the
people, as the occupation of knacker, which was so long held in horror
and handed over to the executioner. High wages were necessary to induce
a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool
cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form:
"to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of
hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with
terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions
of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found
vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of
Marat.

BOOK THIRD.--MUD BUT THE SOUL

CHAPTER I--THE SEWER AND ITS SURPRISES

It was in the sewers of Paris that Jean Valjean found himself.

Still another resemblance between Paris and the sea. As in the ocean,
the diver may disappear there.

The transition was an unheard-of one. In the very heart of the city,
Jean Valjean had escaped from the city, and, in the twinkling of an eye,
in the time required to lift the cover and to replace it, he had passed
from broad daylight to complete obscurity, from midday to midnight, from
tumult to silence, from the whirlwind of thunders to the stagnation of
the tomb, and, by a vicissitude far more tremendous even than that of
the Rue Polonceau, from the most extreme peril to the most absolute
obscurity.

An abrupt fall into a cavern; a disappearance into the secret trap-door
of Paris; to quit that street where death was on every side, for that
sort of sepulchre where there was life, was a strange instant. He
remained for several seconds as though bewildered; listening, stupefied.
The waste-trap of safety had suddenly yawned beneath him. Celestial
goodness