'However good a walker one may be/ moaned one of them, 'one hesitates to wade through streets full of refuse and covered with thick, glutinous mud.... Yesterday, going on foot to the national Jardin des Plantes, I went through some lanes where the poverty, filth and indecency of the passers-by were such that it makes me feel sick merely to think of them. ... This is the first time, in my peregrinations through Europe, that I have discovered I have a stomach, and understood the sensation described as mal de cceur!
A few improvements were tried out, however. In certain streets the middle of the roadway was cambered, and the central kennel replaced by gutters on the right and left. This method was said to have given good results in England; but whereas London had pavements, Paris still had none, which meant that every shower produced floods, and the water poured down into the cellars and found its way into the shops.
'Let's make pavements at once!' thought the engineers; but the first they laid were paved with great flagstones that made walking difficult, dotted with unsightly mark-posts and suddenly interrupted at every entrance gateway, forcing pedestrians to step up and down continually.
Taking everything into consideration, the innovation did not seem particularly useful. The famous Dillon pavements, as they were called, were therefore only very slowly adopted under the Empire. A few made their appearance here and there, in streets e as great and wide as the Rue du Mont-Blanc' - the Chaussee d'Antin of today. Elsewhere there was no change: walkers continued to hug the walls to avoid being run over, and the little Savoyards went on throwing planks across the gutter with their traditional cry of Passez, payez! A piquant subject for the painters, but a most unpleasant necessity for the fashionables of both sexes, for ever threatened with a glissade and an evil-smelling footbath.
Stendhal went through this ordeal one evening, trying to cross the gutter in the Rue de Poitiers. He came out of it so covered with mud that he had to spend the night with his friend Crozet to get his breeches dry. And the adventure was still fresh in his mind, no doubt, when seven or eight years later he wrote in his diary: 'We ought to shout at these Parisians, who think themselves so advanced in the matter of their police and their cleanliness, 'You are barbarians; your streets stink aloud; you can't take a step in them without being covered with black mud, which gives a disgusting appearance to the populace, forced to travel on foot. This comes of the absurd idea of turning your streets into a^main sewer. It's under the streets that sewers should be laid/
An idea that appears somewhat commonplace today, but was much less so under the First Empire, since throughout a reign in which architects and engineers played such an important part, only five kilometres of new sewers were laid down. Five kilometres - hardly a three-hundredth part of our underground system of today!
4 Armed robbers on the roads of France
CHAPTER VII. PUBLIC SERVICES
Antediluvian public services — Lack of water and lack of light - The markets - The police - The post office - The -fire service — Scarcity of carnages - His Excellency's coach
THE dirtiness of the city was also due to the lack of water. In face of this, the Prefect of Police was merely wasting his breath when he enjoined the owners to have the streets cleaned in front of their houses, and the campaigns started in the newspapers were equally useless. It was with a certain irony that their readers took note of articles like this in the Observateur Frangais of the 1st Ther-midor, year IX —a pleasing sample of the literature of the dog-days:
'Citizens of Paris! clean your city! It is hot, very hot, the street surface is burning, the gutters are stagnant and stink of putridness. Water them, therefore! Your own interest calls for it, and the police has ordered it. We have no water, say some of you. We have no arms, say others. But you all have two sous with which to save yourselves from the heat of reflected sunlight, from falls, illnesses, doctors' visits and so on/
Two sous — this was, in fact, the price of a water supply consisting of two pails containing about three gallons. But for the family kitchen, for housework, for personal cleanliness — no question of baths — this provision was slender. Besides which, many people reckoned that two sous a day made one ecu a month, that is thirty-six francs a year.
In the courtyards of many houses there still existed a few wells, while the various quarters possessed between them about sixty public drinking-fountains; but most of these were charged for, functioned only in the daytime and often ran dry. So that i£ they were not to die of thirst, the Parisians were obliged to have recourse to the good offices of the Auvergnats perambulating the town., dragging their little water-butts mounted on wheels, or carrying a pair of buckets hooked on to a wooden ring.
In theory these buckets had to be filled at so-called 'purifying 3 fountains, but many of the carriers found it simpler and more economical to go and draw water f om the river, and it is easy to imagine the swarm of microbes to which they treated their customers every morning.
By some miracle of grace our grandparents did not seem to be the worse for it. Although it was already terribly polluted, 1 they still looked on the Seine as a 'beautiful, limpid river*, and they were grateful to the pumping stations of Notre-Dame, the Gros-Caillou and the Perier Brothers for feeding their fountains.
But among foreigners visiting the capital, the water of Paris had a bad name. Sir John Dean Paul blamed it for the violent attacks of colic from which he suffered in the course of his travels in 1802; and a year earlier, the King and Queen of Etruria suffered the same sort of disaster. As for their young heir the Contino, he invented a picturesque way of expressing his woes: whenever people inquired how he was he turned a pirouette, lifted the skirts of his little coat and pointed politely to his behind. They had no need to know Spanish to see where the shoe pinched, in a manner of speaking.
Various kinds of filters were suggested from time to time in the hope of purifying the drinking-water after a fashion, foremost among them that of a certain M. Cuchet, of which the papers told wonders. But for really drinkable water the people of Paris had to wait for the completion of the important public works ordered by Napoleon, such as the building of the reservoir at La Villette, of the canal of the Ourcq and the water supply of the Beuvrone, which finally ensured the abundant, regular output of our drinking-fountains.
A city does not only need water, it also needs light. Unfortunately no serious progress was made in this direction during the Empire. With its 4,000 lanterns swinging at the end of a rope — miserable argand lamps only too often extinguished by rain and wind, or even left unlighted because the licence-holder wanted to bum as little oil as he could — Paris was to remain, up to 1815, what it was in 1800: not the City of Light but the city of candle-ends.
1 There were, of course, no such things as sewage farms, and the most horrible refuse - spoilt goods from the market halls, garbage from the Hotel-Dieu, and so forth, fell straight into the river.
There were times when Napoleon lost his temper. 'The non-lighting of Paris', he wrote one day to Fouche, 'amounts to an embezzlement. We must make an end of an abuse of which the public Is beginning to complain.* But these fits of anger had no effect. A few new devices were tried out for form's sake, such as the mirrored lamps of Saver and Fraiture, and the 'parabolic reflectors' of Bordier the engineer. The thermo-lamps of Philippe Lebon, the earliest form of gas lighting, were looked upon as mere curiosities, and people remained faithful to the old lanterns, which continued to afford the Parisians intermittent illumination.