Les égouts de Paris

Every Wednesday one can find Pariscope, the weekly magazine of entertainment options, at any newsstand for forty cents. It is not a slim magazine, as one would suspect, for a metropolitan area of ten million. While leafing through it what perhaps surprises me most is the number of theater options. For some reason I have always equated the theater more so with London than with Paris but the first fifty pages of Pariscope covers theaters, cabarets, chansonniers, and about any other sort of stage spectacle. I have yet to delve into the theater as a result of my language handicap (the circus or maybe mimes seem to be about my speed at the present for stage entertainment).

As I was skimming through Pariscope last week I came upon a section called “visites et promenades” and my eye stopped at a listing “Les égouts de Paris.” My antennae went up. I have at least mastered a few thousand French words over time and I did not immediately know what “égouts” might be. I knew the word for taste, “goût,” so I immediately extrapolated that perhaps égouts might mean “tastings.” The pseudo-gourmet in me came out at that moment. What could these tastings possibly be? Chocolate? Wine? A variety of unpasteurized country cheeses? Chocolate, wine, and a variety of unpasteurized country cheeses all at once? At that point it was Sunday, around lunchtime, and my morning gruel was but a distant memory and my rumbling stomach thought this was an excellent idea. The price was certainly a bargain, 4 euros, and the location, a few blocks from the Musée D’Orsay, was just two Métro lines away.

I readied myself to leave the apartment but just before I left I noticed my little anglais/français dictionary by the door and a nagging voice in my head said “look up égouts...”

Just like the Métro, the sewers of Paris are both a technological marvel and a response to a population crisis. The sewers, of course, have a much longer history, dating back to pre-Roman days. Then, sewers were simply trenches that led to the Seine, or to the Marais, the local swamp. The later Romans were true masters of water engineering and they built both pipe sewers and aqueducts to bring fresh water to the city for drinking and for baths. During the Middle Ages these disappeared and sewers again became v-shaped depressions in the middle of cobblestone streets that led to the Seine. Suffice it to say, as the city grew Paris became a smelly place to live. Of course, worse than smelly was the health crisis caused by filth channeling through the streets and then into the Seine that provided most of the drinking water for the city. It became common for farmers in the surrounding area to come to Paris in the early morning to collect what was known as “night soil” to bring back to their farms as fertilizer.

However, the city population was still small enough that the Seine could naturally filter out the human waste and the water was still good enough to drink--if one went to the right spot to get it: woe to those who lived downstream. By the early modern period as the city population reached two hundred thousand one saw city engineers respond to the crisis by the building of the first true, underground sewers that would take waste away to the river. Of course, these sewers were not universal through the city and the Seine became even more polluted as the population overcame the river’s ability to filter out the pollution. The city became home to thousands of water carriers whose profession was to carry water from streams and springs not polluted by humans to its wealthier inhabitants.

Under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s, at the same time as builders redid the city streets and created new parks, other engineers began to build the first, true modern sewer system. In the span of some twenty years dozens of larger sewers ran under Paris while new aqueducts brought fresh water into the city from as far as seventy miles away. For the time period it certainly was a marvel of engineering and the population benefited by a much healthier city. And, some of the very same pipes are being used to this day. Of course, the word pipe is a misnomer as some of these “pipes” are over thirty feet in diameter.

The entrance to the “Égouts de Paris” is a rather undistinguished looking turret-shaped building, about the size of a large news kiosk. The sign has an “arrow” that points underground and one goes up to the turret/entrance (hardly on the same scale as I.M. Pei’s pyramid) and pays the four euros to a rather cheerful attendant (more on that later) and descends a spiral staircase around the turret to the bowels (sorry) of the city. It is a self-guided tour of a very small cross section of the sewers, several twists and turns and cavernous openings underneath the streets, perhaps a couple of hundred yards in length. And while it is a sewer, it is actually a storm sewer that one is touring and the only smell is that of rotting leaves (hey, what happened to the chocolate, wine, and variety of unpasteurized cheeses?). Outside, above ground, it was another chilly and gray day and the sewer was warm, though certainly on the humid side.

The tour leads through various cross sections of the sewer and is full of informative signs, a diorama or two, and just a few other tourists. A group of schoolchildren were behind me as I guided myself along the tour and they certainly seemed to be excited about the sewer. Perhaps I was missing something? Jean Valjean? The ghost of Baron Haussmann? Anton and his rooster, on the run? I paused and saw the children being led by a special guide, a sewer worker proudly wearing his powder-blue jumpsuit. I decided to draft behind the “tour” as it was not offered to the average tourist, even the specialist on French advertising history. The guide certainly knew his sewer stuff as he animatedly described parts of the sewer, its pipes, its cleaning and maintenance, and certainly everything else that one would want to know about the sewers. The children certainly seemed to be fascinated with his sewer lore. Of course, I recall my own interest in water at that age, of building dams and canals and channels in our family’s side yard and then turning on the water from a spigot to test the soundness of my construction. Perhaps that was my true calling? My vocabulary took a real boost that day as I learned all types of hydrographic words that I never otherwise would have come upon. Part of the tour took us on an iron grating, a sort of catwalk, that was above the rushing water below us and I felt myself being permeated by the essence of dead, moist leaves. I am sure there is some spa in the Western U.S. that offers the same treatment but here I was in Paris getting the same treatment plus a tour of the sewers for a measly four euros.

He took great delight in explaining one of the major problems of the storm sewers: the buildup of silt over time, that, if left untreated, would see the sewers arteriosclerotically blocked. The Parisian solution during the late 1800s was ingenious. Engineers constructed a large, hollow, floating metal ball that was eighty percent the diameter of the silted sewer. The ball would be lowered into the sewer in pushed into the opening. The ball in the sewer (think of a pea in a straw, perhaps) would let water flow around its sides. However, just like a plane wing creates lift because of the lessening of air pressure above the wing, the ball changes the water pressure in the pipe and causes the water to flow much more quickly around the ball creating turbulence. This turbulence put the silt back into solution and would see the problem solved.

The best part of the tour was the historical alleyway that consisted of a forty or so hanging placards, in both French and English, that gave a history of the sewer through text, maps, drawings, and pictures (most of which I cribbed for the introduction). With the water and debris rushing below I had a good half hour of learning everything and more about the sewers. At one point one could even take a tour of the sewers in a Venetian style gondola but those days have long ended? And, like all museums now, this “museum” had a gift shop that one had to enter before the final exit. While much of the exhibit was excellent one could say the gift shop needed some work, especially in their stock: a few pins, a postcard or two, a Paris sewer hat, and some t-shirts (“I visited the Paris sewer and all I got was this lousy t-shirt,” perhaps?).

A few television monitors were in the shop and one could chose to watch one of seven different three-minute programs about “Paris and its sewers today.” One included vignettes of Parisians losing their keys and other possessions down the sewers. The Parisians then called a special sewer hotline that appeared on the screen and the scene switched next to a special powder-blue van, a sewer response team of experts dressed in you-know-what that with the precision of a CSI team delved back into the depths and rescued those items to the grateful response of their owners. There certainly appears to be a sense of pride in the sewers that one does not see in the U.S.

One lonely attendant, in his powder-blue jumpsuit sat on a little stool by a cash register that got little use. The smell of rotting leaves was even stronger here as the gift shop was in a cul-de-sac of sorts that had little ventilation. The attendant did not look very happy (I am sure he knew the words to all of the incessantly-playing videos by heart) and I imagine his chief aim in life was to perhaps rise to the much happier ticket-taker above him if tuberculosis or consumption did not get to him first.

While not quite what I originally expected I found the diversion to be worthwhile. I have now witnessed the city’s two largest underground infrastructural achievements. All I now have left of this troika of the troglodyte world are the catacombs. But that awaits for another day and another blog.