utches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle;
slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the
hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's
teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that
enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head!

Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus! Death sometimes redeems
his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in
shipwreck, one can be great; in the flames as in the foam, a superb
attitude is possible; one there becomes transfigured as one perishes.
But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. The supreme
floating visions are abject. Mud is synonymous with shame. It is
petty, ugly, infamous. To die in a butt of Malvoisie, like Clarence, is
permissible; in the ditch of a scavenger, like Escoubleau, is horrible.
To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going
through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows
enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and
the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre
or a frog.

Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister; here it is deformed.

The depth of the fontis varied, as well as their length and their
density, according to the more or less bad quality of the sub-soil.
Sometimes a fontis was three or four feet deep, sometimes eight or ten;
sometimes the bottom was unfathomable. Here the mire was almost solid,
there almost liquid. In the Luniere fontis, it would have taken a man a
day to disappear, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by
the Philippeaux slough. The mire bears up more or less, according to its
density. A child can escape where a man will perish. The first law of
safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman who felt the
ground giving way beneath him began by flinging away his sack of tools,
or his back-basket, or his hod.

The fontis were due to different causes: the friability of the soil;
some landslip at a depth beyond the reach of man; the violent summer
rains; the incessant flooding of winter; long, drizzling showers.
Sometimes the weight of the surrounding houses on a marly or sandy soil
forced out the vaults of the subterranean galleries and caused them to
bend aside, or it chanced that a flooring vault burst and split under
this crushing thrust. In this manner, the heaping up of the Pa