water, a fissure formed in the bed of the canal, and the water poured
into the tunnel deriding the efforts of the draining-pumps. It was
found necessary to employ a diver to seek for the fissure which was in
the mouth of the great basin, and it was only stopped up with great
difficulty. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from
the river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and Passage
Lunière, bottomless sands are found, in which men have been swallowed
up. Add asphyxia by miasmas, interment by slips and sudden breaking
in of the soil; add typhus, too, with which the workmen are slowly
impregnated. In our days, after having hollowed the gallery of Clichy
with a _banquette_ to convey the mainwater conduit of the Ourque, a
work performed by trenches ten metres in depth; after having arched
the Bièvre from the Boulevard de l'Hôpital to the Seine, in the midst
of earth-slips and by the help of trenching often through putrid
matter, and of shores; after having, in order to deliver Paris from
the torrent-like waters of the Montmartre, and give an outlet to the
fluviatic pond of twenty-three acres which stagnated near the Barrière
des Martyrs; after having, we say, constructed the line of sewers
from the Barrière Blanche to the Aubervilliers road, in four months,
by working day and night at a depth of eleven metres; after having--a
thing unknown before--executed subterraneously a sewer in the Rue Barre
du Bec, without trench, at a depth of six metres, the surveyor Monnot
died. After arching three thousand metres of sewer in all parts of the
city, from the Rue Traversière St. Antoine to the Rue de l'Ourcine;
after having, by the Arbalète branch, freed the Censier-Mouffetard
square from pluvial inundations; after having constructed the St.
George sewer through liquid sand upon rubble and béton, and after
having lowered the formidable pitch of the Nôtre Dame de Nazareth
branch, the engineer Duleau died. There are no bulletins for such acts
of bravery, which are more useful, however, than the brutal butchery of
battle-fields.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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