Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [167]
“But why have you brought me here”
Another voice: “My dear Balsamo! Playing with the myth of immortality, eh?”
“Idiot! Immortality is not a myth. It’s a fact.”
I was about to leave, bored by this chatter, when I heard Salon. He was speaking in a whisper, tensely, as if gripping someone by the arm. I also recognized the voice of Pierre.
“Come now,” Salon was saying, “don’t tell me that you too are here for this alchemical foolishness. And don’t tell me you came to enjoy the cool air of the gardens. Did you know that after Heidelberg, Caus accepted an invitation from the king of France to supervise the cleaning of Paris?”
“Les facades?”
“He wasn’t Malraux. It must have been the sewers. Curious, isn’t it? The man invented symbolic orange groves and apple orchards for emperors, but what really interested him were the underground passages of Paris. In the Paris of those days there wasn’t an actual network of sewers; it was a combination of canals on the surface and, below, conduits, about which little was known. The Romans, from the time of the republic, knew everything about their Cloaca Maxima, yet fifteen hundred years later, in Paris, people were ignorant of what went on beneath their feet. Caus accepted the king’s invitation because he wanted to find out. What did he find out?
“After Caus, Colbert sent prisoners down to clean the conduits—that was the pretext, and bear in mind that this was also the period of the Man in the Iron Mask—but they escaped through the excrement, followed the current to the Seine, and sailed off in a boat, because nobody had the courage to confront those wretches covered with stinking slime and swarms of flies...Then Colbert stationed gendarmes outside the various openings of the sewer, and the prisoners, forced to stay in the passages, died. In three centuries the city engineers managed to map only three kilometers of sewers. But in the eighteenth century there were twenty-six kilometers of sewers, and on the very eve of the Revolution. Does that suggest anything to you?”
“Ah, you know, this—”
“New people were coming to power, and they knew something their predecessors didn’t. Napoleon sent teams of men down into the darkness, through the detritus of the capital. Those who had the courage to work there found many things: gold, necklaces, jewels, rings, and God knows what else that had fallen into those passages. Some bravely swallowed what they found, then came out, took a laxative, and became rich. It was discovered that many houses had cellar trapdoors that led directly to the sewer.”
“Ca alors...”
“In a period when people emptied chamber pots out the window? And why did they have sewers with sidewalks along them, and iron rings set in die wall, to hang on to? These passages were the equivalent of those tapis francs where the lowlife gathered—the pegre, as it was called then—and if the police arrived, they could escape and resurface somewhere else.”
“Legendes...”
“You think so? Whom are you trying to protect? Under Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann required all the houses of Paris, by law, to construct an independent cesspool, then an underground corridor leading to the sewer system...A tunnel two meters thirty centimeters high and a meter and a half wide. You understand? Every house in Paris was to be connected by an underground corridor to the sewers. And you know the extent of the sewers of Paris today? Two thousand kilometers, and on various levels. And it all began with the man who designed those gardens in Heidelberg...”
“So?”
“I see you do not wish to talk. You know something, but you won’t tell me.”
“Please, leave me. It’s late. I am expected at a meeting.” A sound of footsteps.
I didn’t understand what Salon was getting at. Pressed against the rocaille by the ear, I looked around and felt that I was underground myself, and it seemed to me that the mouth of that phonurgic channel was but the beginning of a descent into dark tunnels that went to the center of the earth, tunnels alive with Nibelungs. I felt cold. I was