The depth of the fontis varied, as did the length and density, according to the nature of the subsoil. At times a fontis was three or four feet deep, at times eight or ten, and sometimes it was bottomless. In one the mud was almost solid, in another nearly liquid. In the Lunière fontis, a man would have taken a day in disappearing, while he would have been devoured in five minutes by the Phélippeaux slough. The mud bears more or less well according to its degree of density, and a lad escapes where a man is lost. The first law of safety is to throw away every sort of loading, and every sewer-man who felt the ground giving way under him began by getting rid of his basket of tools. The fontis had various causes,--friability of soil, some convulsion at a depth beyond a man's reach, violent summer showers, the incessant winter rain, and long drizzling rains. At times the weight of the surrounding houses upon a marshy or sandy soil broke the roofs of the subterranean galleries and made them shrink, or else it happened that the roadway broke and slit up under the terrific pressure. The pile of the Panthéon destroyed in this way about a century ago a portion of the cellars in Mont Sainte Geneviève. When a sewer gave way under the weight of the houses, the disorder was expressed above in the street by a sort of saw-toothed parting between the paving-stones. This rent was developed in a serpentine line, along the whole length of the cracked vault, and in such a case, the evil being visible, the remedy might be prompt. It often happened also that the internal ravage was not revealed by any scar outside, and in that case, woe to the sewer-men. Entering the injured drain incautiously, they might be lost in it The old registers mention several night-men buried in this manner in the fontis. They mention several names, among others that of the sewer-man swallowed up in a slough under the opening on the Rue Carême Prenant, of the name of Blaise Poutrain; this Blaise was brother of Nicholas Poutrain, who was the last sexton of the cemetery called the Charnier des Innocents in 1785, when that cemetery expired. There was also the young and charming Vicomte d'Escoubleau, to whom we have alluded, one of the heroes of the siege of Lerida, where the assault was made in silk stockings and with violins at their head. D'Escoubleau, surprised one night with his cousin, the Duchesse de Sourdis, drowned himself in a cesspool of the Beautreillis sewer, where he had taken refuge to escape the Duc. Madame de Sourdis, when told the story of this death, asked for her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep through inhaling her salts. In such a case there is no love that holds out; the cloaca extinguishes it. Hero refuses to wash the corpse of Leander. Thisbe holds her nose in the presence of Pyramus, and says, Pah! CHAPTER VI. THE FONTIS.