In the Case of Sand as in That of Woman, There Is a Fineness Which Is Treacherous — Les Misérables

He felt that he was entering the water, and that he no longer had a pavement under his feet, but only mud. It sometimes happens, on certain shores, that a man walking far from land at low tide suddenly notices that for several minutes past he has been walking with some difficulty. The beach under foot is like pitch. His soles stick. The strand is perfectly dry, but at every step, as soon as the foot is raised, the print is filled with water. The immense beach is smooth and tranquil. Nothing distinguishes the soil that is solid from that which is not. The man is not uneasy. Only the heaviness of his feet seems to be increasing. All at once he sinks in. He glances at his feet. They have disappeared. He tries to retrace his steps and sinks more deeply than before. Then, with indescribable terror, he recognises that he is caught in a quicksand, and that he has beneath him that frightful medium in which neither man can walk nor fish can swim. He flings away his burden, if he have one. It is too late. If the beach is deserted, all is over. He is condemned to that terrible interment which seizes you erect and in health, which drags you down by the feet, and which, at every effort, draws you a little lower, leaving him time to survey the horizon, the trees, the sails, the sun and the sky. His mouth cries aloud. The sand fills it. Silence. His eyes still gaze. The sand closes them. Night. Then a hand projects, waves, and disappears. Sinister obliteration of a man. It is the earth drowning a man.

This melancholy fate, always possible on certain sea beaches, was also possible, thirty years ago, in the sewers of Paris. The water filtered into friable strata. The foot-way gave way. This crevice, the hiatus of a gulf of mire, was called a fontis. What is a fontis. It is the quicksands of the seashore suddenly encountered under the surface of the earth. It is not earth and it is not water. If the water predominates, death is prompt. If earth predominates, death is slow. Can any one picture to himself such a death. If being swallowed by the earth is terrible on the seashore, what is it in a cesspool. Instead of the open air, the broad daylight, the clear horizon, those free clouds, those barks in the distance, succour possible up to the last moment: deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover. To shout, to struggle, and to agonise, with that enormous city which knows nothing of it all, over one's head. Inexpressible is the horror of dying thus. Death sometimes redeems his atrocity by a certain terrible dignity. On the funeral pile, in shipwreck, one can be great. But not here. Death is filthy. It is humiliating to expire. Mud is synonymous with shame. Everywhere else the sepulchre is sinister. Here it is deformed.

The depth of the fontis varied. Sometimes three or four feet, sometimes unfathomable. Here the mire was almost solid, there almost liquid. A child can escape where a man will perish. The first law of safety is to get rid of every sort of load. Every sewerman who felt the ground giving way began by flinging away his sack of tools. The fontis were due to friable soil, landslip, rain, the weight of houses. Sometimes the mischief was betrayed in the street above by a space between the paving-stones, and the remedy could be applied. It also frequently happened that the interior ravages were not revealed by any external scar, and in that case, woe to the sewermen. Ancient registers name several who were buried in this manner. There was also a young viscount, a hero of a silk-stocking assault, who took refuge in a quagmire to escape a husband and was drowned there. When the woman was informed, she demanded her smelling-bottle, and forgot to weep. In such cases, there is no love which holds fast. The sewer extinguishes it.