The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth century Henry II. attempted soundings which failed, and not a hundred years ago, as Mercier testifies, the cloaca was abandoned to itself, and became what it could. Such was that ancient Paris, handed over to quarrels, indecisions, and groping. It was for a long time thus stupid, and a later period, '89, showed how cities acquire sense. But in the good old times the capital had but little head; it did not know how to transact its business either morally or materially, and could no more sweep away its ordure than its abuses. Everything was an obstacle, everything raised a question. The sewer, for instance, was refractory to any itinerary, and people could no more get on under the city than they did in it; above, everything was unintelligible; below, inextricable; beneath the confusion of tongues was the confusion of cellars, and Dædalus duplicated Babel. At times the sewer of Paris thought proper to overflow, as if this misunderstood Nile had suddenly fallen into a passion. There were, infamous to relate, inundations of the sewer. At moments this stomach of civilization digested badly, the sewer flowed back into the throat of the city, and Paris bad the after-taste of its ordure. These resemblances of the drain to remorse had some good about them, for they were warnings, very badly taken however; for the city was indignant that its mud should have so much boldness, and did not admit that the ordure should return. Discharge it better. The inundation of 1802 is in the memory of Parisians of eighty years of age. The mud spread across the Place des Victoires, on which is the statue of Louis XIV.; it entered Rue St. Honoré by the two mouths of the sewer of the Champs Élysées, Rue St. Florentin by the St. Florentin sewer, Rue Pierre à Poisson by the sewer of the Sonnerie, Rue Popincourt by the Chemin-Vert sewer, and Rue de la Roquette by the Rue de Lappe sewer; it covered the level of the Rue des Champs Élysées to a height of fourteen inches, and in the south, owing to the vomitory of the Seine performing its duties contrariwise, it entered Rue Mazarine, Rue de l'Échaudé, and Rue des Marais, where it stopped after running on a hundred and twenty yards, just a few yards from the house which Racine had inhabited, respecting, in the seventeenth century, the poet more than the king. It reached its maximum depth in the Rue St. Pierre, where it rose three feet above the gutter, and its maximum extent in the Rue St. Sabin, where it extended over a length of two hundred and fifty yards.