The sewers of Paris were in 1832 far from being what they are now.
Bruneseau gave the impulse, but it required the cholera to determine
the vast reconstruction which has taken place since. It is surprising
to say, for instance, that in 1821 a portion of the begirding sewer,
called the Grand Canal, as at Venice, still stagnated in the open air,
in the Rue des Gourdes. It was not till 1823 that the city of Paris
found in its pocket the twenty-six thousand six hundred and eighty
francs, six centimes, needed for covering this turpitude. The three
absorbing wells of the Combat, la Cunette, and St. Mandé, with their
disgorging apparatus, draining-wells, and deodorizing branches, merely
date from 1836. The intestine canal of Paris has been re-made, and,
as we said, augmented more than tenfold during the last quarter of a
century. Thirty years ago, at the period of the insurrection of June 5
and 6, it was still in many parts almost the old sewer. A great number
of streets, now convex, were at that time broken causeways. There
could be frequently seen at the bottom of the water-sheds of streets
and squares, large square gratings, whose iron glistened from the
constant passage of the crowd, dangerous and slippery for vehicles, and
throwing horses down. The official language of the department of the
roads and bridges gave these gratings the expressive name of _Cassis._
In 1832 in a number of streets,--Rue de l'Étoile, Rue St. Louis, Rue
du Temple, Rue Vieille du Temple, Rue Nôtre Dame de Nazareth, Rue
Folie Méricourt, Quai aux Fleurs, Rue du Petit Muse, Rue de Normandie,
Rue Pont aux Biches, Rue des Marais, Faubourg St. Martin, Rue Nôtre
Dame des Victoires, Faubourg Montmartre, Rue Grange Batelière, at the
Champs Élysées, the Rue Jacob, and the Rue de Tournon, the old Gothic
cloaca still cynically displayed its throats. They were enormous
stone orifices, sometimes surrounded with posts, with a monumental
effrontery. Paris in 1806 was much in the same state as regards
sewers as in May, 1663,--five thousand three hundred and twenty-eight
toises. After Bruneseau, on Jan. 1, 1832, there were forty thousand
three hundred metres. From 1806 to 1831 seven hundred and fifty metres
were on the average constructed annually; since then eight and even
ten thousand metres have been made every year in brick-work, with a
coating of concrete on a foundation of b£ton. At two hundred francs the
metre, the sixty leagues of drainage in the Paris of to-day represent
forty-eight million francs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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