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If being swallowed by the earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cess-pool?
It is but a reeking cess-pool, not a fountain of cleansing, to which she has come. Such are the uses of St Peter's, a temple where the Church is glorified at the expense of religion. Its high altar stops the way to the throne of grace, and its priest bars your access to a Redeemer's blood. And how was this temple built? Romanists speak of it as a monument of the piety of the faithful.
From the cess-pool, it re-constitutes the city; from mud, it reconstructs manners; from the potsherd it infers the amphora or the jug. By the imprint of a finger-nail on a piece of parchment, it recognizes the difference which separates the Jewry of the Judengasse from the Jewry of the Ghetto.
The sewer of Paris in the Middle Ages was legendary. In the sixteenth century, Henri II. attempted a bore, which failed. Not a hundred years ago, the cess-pool, Mercier attests the fact, was abandoned to itself, and fared as best it might. Such was this ancient Paris, delivered over to quarrels, to indecision, and to gropings. It was tolerably stupid for a long time.
It is swollen by small tributaries from either side; and, just below the settlement, an eastern dam with a small sluice has been thrown across the valley of the Franco-English company. As there is plenty of water in and near the mine, they should cut at once this abominable dam, which forms a pestilential swamp, the cess-pool of the neighbourhood.
And now the walls of flabby flagstones and the open-mouthed caves have begun again. Morning rises, long and narrow as our lot. We reach a busy trench-crossing. A stench catches my throat: some cess-pool into which these streets suspended in the earth empty their sewage? No, we see rows of stretchers, each one swollen.
An obscure ramification ever at work; a construction which is immense and ignored. As the reader sees, the subterranean labyrinth of Paris is to-day more than ten times what it was at the beginning of the century. It is difficult to form any idea of all the perseverance and the efforts which have been required to bring this cess-pool to the point of relative perfection in which it now is.
What was this ruffian religiously absorbed in the adoration of a virgin, watching over her, rearing her, guarding her, dignifying her, and enveloping her, impure as he was himself, with purity? What was that cess-pool which had venerated that innocence to such a point as not to leave upon it a single spot? What was this Jean Valjean educating Cosette?
The floor was very muddy and strewn with debris, principally of crackers. There was one hundred and eighty-two men in the building, all desperately wounded. They had been there a week. There were two leather water-buckets, two tin basins, and about every third man had saved his tin-cup or canteen; but no other vessel of any sort, size or description on the premises no sink or cess-pool or drain.
They have no dread of being dispossessed or deprived of the benefit of their improvements; they don't, we are told, pay rack-rents; yet the security which he must feel upon living under the protection of "the Liberator" cannot induce Mr Sullivan, of whose cabin we have given the description, to remove the filth "which has percolated from the cess-pool before his door, and which is trodden into a glutinous substance by the feet and hooves of the semi-naked children and animals who occupy his floor;" nor "to devote so much of his unoccupied time as would be necessary to render waterproof his cabin, which was falling into pieces."
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