Part 18

That lugubrious institution, the Morgue, dates from 1714, at least; it was then a low room in the basement of the Châtelet, near the vestibule of the principal stairway, and in the court adjoining was a well, the water of which served to wash the corpses. It was under the care of the _filles hospitalières de Sainte-Catherine_, and was, as may be supposed, a noxious cell in which the bodies, thrown one upon the other, waited to be inspected by the light of lanterns by those searching for missing relatives or friends. In March, 1734, it was thronged with visitors attracted by the unusual presence of some fifteen or sixteen infantile corpses, none of them more than three years of age; it appeared that a celebrated anatomist, Joseph Hunault, had collected these subjects for his investigations, in the house of a surgeon, the affrighted neighbors had complained to the police, who had caused them all to be transported to the Morgue. A police ordinance of August 17, 1804, directed that this establishment be suppressed, and that all bodies drawn from the river or found elsewhere should be taken to the new Morgue on the Marché-Neuf, in the quartier de la Cité. The object of the municipal administration was to secure the recognition of the greatest number possible of these remnants of humanity, and for this purpose they were exposed, for three days at least, behind a glass screen protected by a rail, on inclined tables of black marble, the heads reposing upon a raised piece covered with leather. There was provided a room for the autopsies, containing two dissecting-tables; another for the washing of the garments found on the dead, and a third for those bodies recognized or in which decomposition had proceeded too far to permit of their public exposure. Two attendants were always on duty to receive any bodies that might be brought, at any hour of the day or night.

[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE CEMETERY OF PÈRE-LACHAISE.]

In 1809, it was proposed to transport the Morgue to a site between the Pont Saint-Michel and the Petit-Pont, but in 1830 it was enlarged and improved where it stood; in 1864, it was transferred to its present locality, behind Notre-Dame, between the Pont Saint-Louis and the Pont de l'Archevêché. The bodies were still exposed nude, with the exception of a leathern apron across the loins, on twelve black marble slabs, to the public gaze, with their garments hanging over them; to preserve them as long as possible, they were exposed to a constant sprinkling with fresh water. When recognized, or when they could no longer delay, they were carried into the adjoining _salle du dépôt;_ adjoining was the _salle d'autopsie_, and, on the ground-floor, the _salle des conférences_, in which the accused were brought before and after being confronted with the bodies of their supposed victims. Some of these arrangements are still preserved in the present institution; but, since the establishment of the _appareils frigorifiques_, or freezing machines, in 1881, the length of time during which a corpse may be preserved has been greatly extended, from one month to years, according to various claims. In the _salle d'exposition_ the temperature is maintained at about zero, Centigrade, freezing point, Fahrenheit; and in the cells in which the bodies are first placed, at fifteen degrees below zero, Centigrade. The bodies of criminals are not submitted to the public inspection. The garments are returned to the families, when the body has been recognized or burned; their sale has been forbidden since 1883.

All persons are formally invited to furnish any indications they possess that may lead to the recognition of the bodies, and are informed that they will be put to no expense. A photographic plant was installed here in 1877, and all bodies are photographed,--those which are not recognized before burial have these, their last portraits, affixed at the entrance. The number of corpses received annually is about nine hundred, including new-born babies, foetuses, and the remnants from the dissecting-tables, and this number increases year by year. In it are included also those bodies which it is desired to submit to a medico-legal examination. About six-sevenths of the total number exposed are those of men, and about one-seventh are never recognized. The sanitary surveillance is under the charge of three medical inspectors; not only are the autopsies here frequent, but there are also held many conferences in legal medicine, and there is a laboratory of toxicology. All departments of the establishment are cramped for want of space, and it is proposed to establish a distinct medico-legal institution on a new site, at the angle of the Quai aux Fleurs and the Rue du Cloître-Notre-Dame.

On the crest of the hill in Père-Lachaise, in a fine open space from which the tombs recede on all sides,--as if appalled at the presence of this horrible new-comer,--rises the tall Crematory furnace, with its quasi-classic columbarium behind it. Great improvements have been made in the material details of this method of disposing of the dead since its first revival in modern times, and even since the erection of this edifice,--but the overturning of immemorial prejudices proceeds but slowly. France claims the credit of introducing this excellent sanitary measure, and as far back as the end of the last century, in the year V of the Republic, a law was proposed by a commission of the Cinq-Cents granting to each family the privilege of choosing between inhumation and cremation for their dead. Later, "the administration centrale of the department of the Seine adopted a regulation prescribing the cremation of all those bodies destined for the fosse commune whose owners had not expressed, during their lifetime, a contrary desire. Under the Consulate, Madame Geneste, wife of the citizen Pierre-Francois Lachèze, chargé d'affaires of the French Republic at Venice, obtained from the préfet Frochot an authorization to cause the body of her deceased son to be burned. The préfet invoked, in support of his decision, this consideration, 'that the last cares to be rendered to mortal remains constitute a religious act of which public authority cannot prescribe the methods without violating the principle of liberty of opinions.' Madame Dupuis-Geneste, however, did not make use of this authorization."

In 1882, M. Casimir-Perier, then minister, proposed a law granting to every person who had attained his majority and to every minor who had been relieved from guardianship, the power to regulate all the details of his own funeral at his own discretion. The _Société pour la Propagation de l'Incinération_, which now includes six hundred members, had been founded two years before by M. Koechlin-Schwartz and M. Georges-Salomon, and this society caused to be erected, in Père-Lachaise, in 1887, on the plans of the architect Formigé, a building destined for the cremation of dead bodies,--this process, it was declared by the _Conseil d'Hygiène et de Salubrité de la Seine_, on the proposal of Doctor Bourneville, could be applied to the disposal of subjects from the dissecting-tables without any menace to the public health, provided that it was effected in suitable furnaces and without emitting any odor. M. Casimir-Perier's proposal was finally recognized by the Chamber and the Senate in 1886 and 1887, and this legal sanction decided the question practically in favor of the Cremation Society and of the Conseil Municipal of Paris, which had long been in favor of the optional incineration of the dead.

The first apparatus, a reverberatory furnace burning wood, was found to be entirely insufficient, and was replaced by a chamber of combustion filled with incandescent gas, much more elaborate in construction. A special apparatus, called a _Gazogène_, evolves carbon protoxide, which, set on fire by peculiar burners, produces a temperature of eight hundred degrees Centigrade in the chamber of combustion. The entire arrangement at Père-Lachaise is some nine mètres in height by five and a half in width, the actual furnace is below the chamber of combustion and not directly under it, this space being occupied by long, perpendicular flues through which the air--fed through a large horizontal shaft passing under the furnace--rises. In the chamber of combustion, into which the body is introduced in its coffin, the destruction was formerly effected by the aid of the actual flames, and the result was not completely satisfactory,--the skull was left almost intact and some of the bones, with a few fatty acids and salts. The attendants gathered these remnants up with pinchers, brushed the black and greasy residue from the bones, and placed the whole in a little wooden casket, about the size of a child's coffin, for final deposit in the columbarium. Now, by the improved process, the total residue that issues from the furnace is a quantity of white ashes, varying from nine hundred to twelve hundred grammes in weight, although the flame is no longer permitted to reach the body and the combustion is effected by refraction alone. A curious detail in both operations is that the liver is the last of the organs to be destroyed, and remains an incandescent mass when all the rest of the body has disappeared.

[Illustration: UNDERGROUND PARIS: ARCH OF THE GREAT SEWER, UNDER THE RUE ROYALE, CORNER OF THE RUE DE RIVOLI.

After a drawing by A. Montader.]

In the funerary chamber, in which the mourners assemble, in the second story, the coffin is received by the attendants, placed on a metallic chariot, running on rails, the long shafts or extensions of which carry it, with its contents, directly into the fiery heart of the furnace and there deposit it. The time required for the complete combustion is, at present, twenty-five minutes for a child, and fifty-five for an adult. An urn of a peculiar model is now provided for the reception of the ashes, and this can be either buried in the family vault or placed in one of the cells of the municipal columbarium, erected in 1895. Although this latter receptacle does not, as yet, meet with much favor, and has been irreverently compared by one of the apostles of cremation to a shed, it might be made a very neat and unobjectionable mausoleum. At present, it is a species of lofty white marble arcade, or porch, the wall side of which is filled up with cells about two feet square, the panels closing which bear the name and dates of the occupant. This panelled white marble wall is, however, defaced by the black wreaths, beadwork, and artificial flowers which the misguided mourners hang over the remains of their departed. In this municipal columbarium, families have a right to deposit their ashes for the space of five years, at the end of which period the urns are taken out and emptied in the fosse commune. A concession perpétuelle for the urns in a cemetery may, however, be purchased for the sum of three hundred and sixty-nine francs and eighty centimes. The columbarium provides for three hundred urns; less than half these receptacles are as yet filled, but the number of cremations increases slowly year by year. There is also a similar establishment in the cemetery at Clichy, and others are projected for other sites.

Statistics show that the annual mortality in Paris is about 22.6 per thousand inhabitants, which the Parisian publications erroneously claim is below the average for large cities. In London, for example, in the week ending January 14, 1899, it was 18 per thousand, and averaged 18.5 in thirty-two provincial towns. In some of them, as Brighton, Derby, Leicester, and Hull, it ranged from 11 to 12.9; and the highest rates were from 22.4 in Manchester to 24 in Sunderland. It is a constant source of wonder to the newly-arrived in Paris, however,--especially if he be inoculated with modern ideas concerning sanitary sewage in dwelling-houses,--that the city escapes an annual epidemic of typhoid fever. So very primitive are the methods of cesspools, and the official emptying of them, in very many quarters of the city, that it is an article of faith with the citizens to close all their windows tightly at night,--an article of faith that is adopted by many American and English residents with the usual wholesome Anglo-Saxon ideas concerning ventilation of sleeping-rooms. It may be stated, however, as the result of much experience, that--even for those who are able thus to sleep in tightly-closed rooms--the open windows at night are _not_ deadly. The prejudice against night air, which is by no means confined to France, here takes on an acute form,--it is even asserted stoutly, and this, too, is believed sometimes by the otherwise intelligent foreigner, that the entrance of fresh air into the sleeping-room at night produces affections of the eyes. The quarters of Paris in which the mortality is the lowest--those which show quite white on the graded annual mortality plan of the city--are the arrondissements of the Élysée and the Opéra, 11.1 and 14.5 respectively; and those which are printed quite black on the same plan are those of the Observatoire and the Gobelins, 32.8 and 31.4 respectively.

Nevertheless, the sewerage system of Paris is conceived and carried out in its general plan with an appreciation of the requirements of modern sanitary science and an intelligent employment of the science of the engineer that are quite admirable. The methods of disposing of the city's refuse in use by many American municipalities, as those of New York and Chicago, are, by comparison, but dull and stupid perpetuation of antiquated traditions. The animated controversy over the great question of _Tout à l'égout_, "all refuse to the sewer," was not finally settled till 1894, and this method has as yet not been applied to all the quarters of the city, as stated above, but is being gradually extended, and nothing but time seems to be wanting to bring about in this capital a complete solution of one of the most difficult problems of material civilization. The object of the Parisian method is to avoid fouling the Seine in any way, and to utilize all the city's refuse, instead of throwing it away or allowing it to accumulate, a menace to health and a hideous nuisance. By an excellent system of underground conduits, well lighted and ventilated, the sewage and the rain-water are collected, carried by canals and pipes outside the city, and applied, after proper treatment, to the fertilization of certain arid tracts of land farther down the river. The principal agent in this "hygienic transformation of Paris" was the engineer Belgrand, who, at his death, in 1870, had increased the length of the municipal sewers from two hundred and twenty-eight kilomètres in 1860 to six hundred. It has now attained a total of fourteen hundred and twenty-one, representing a capital of a hundred and fifty millions of francs.

The first principle of Belgrand's system was to avoid any discharge from the sewers into the river during its course through Paris. The great main sewer, the _collecteur général_, of the right bank, called the collecteur d'Asnières, follows the quais from the basin of the Arsenal to the Place de la Concorde, then burrows under the heights of the Batignolles to reach Clichy; the collecteur général of the left bank, which includes the poor little Bièvre, traverses the bed of the Seine by means of a siphon at the Pont de l'Alma and is prolonged by the collecteur Monceau, which passes under the hill of the Place de l'Étoile to join the collecteur d'Asnières. A third collecteur, known as the _départemental_, or _du Nord_, at a higher level, receives the drainage of Belleville and Montmartre, and issues from the city by the Porte de La Chapelle to reach the Seine at Saint-Denis. A new siphon, constructed under the Seine in 1895 and 1896, unites the collecteur général of the left bank to the collecteur d'Asnières. The sewage of the Iles Saint-Louis and de la Cité is carried by two other siphons to the collecteurs of the quais of the right and left banks.

A new main sewer, called the collecteur général de Clichy, was commenced in 1896, to supplement those of Asnières and Monceau, become insufficient; this passes under the Avenue and the Rue de Clichy to terminate at the Place de la Trinité. The prolongation of the line of the Orléans railway to the Quai d'Orsay, by means of a tunnel, has necessitated a very important modification of the sewers of the left bank of the river, which has had much to do with the lengthening of the work of excavation which has so greatly annoyed the dwellers on this side of the river in 1898 and 1899. It was understood that this excavating was to be done entirely underground, whereas it has blockaded many of the narrower streets, and even when it tunnels it contrives to raise the street level about a mètre and substitute a wooden floor, as along the Quai Voltaire. It is stated that this work will cost the railway company not less than five million francs.

[Illustration: UNDERGROUND PARIS: LICENSED RAT-CATCHER IN A SEWER.

After a design by G. Amato.

Henri Dayre: Chasseur de rats de la Ville de Paris, fournisseur de toutes les Sociétés de France et de l'Étranger.]

The diameter of the vault of the _égouts collecteurs_ varies between four and six mètres; that of the _égouts secondaires_ from two mètres to three mètres, seventy centimètres; that of the _égouts ordinaires_, including ten varieties, from one mètre to one mètre, seventy-five. The size the most in use has a diameter of one mètre, forty. The problem of purifying and utilizing the contents of the sewers, which were provisionally discharged into the Seine at Saint-Denis and at Asnières, occupied the attention of the municipality from the period of the establishing of the collecteurs, but the vigorous local opposition which was encountered greatly delayed the carrying out of these projects. Consequently, the purification of the river is not yet complete. On the sandy and arid plain of Genevilliers, situated in the first loop of the Seine, beyond Clichy, the experiment of fertilizing with this drainage was commenced in 1869. At present, the ground thus under cultivation includes some seven hundred and ninety-five _hectares_,--about two and a half acres each,--of which six belong to the city of Paris and constitute the model garden. The remainder is held by private individuals, who pay a rental of from four to six hundred francs the hectare. The distribution of the sewage is effected by agents of the administration in regular rotation, in three zones. In 1896, each hectare absorbed thirty-seven thousand and sixty-seven cubic mètres. All varieties of vegetables are grown, and this land, on which were raised formerly only meagre crops of rye and potatoes, is now a flourishing garden.

A second agricultural establishment at Achères, farther on, on both sides of the Seine, was inaugurated in 1895, the larger portion of which is held by individuals, but as each hectare of land can absorb not more than forty thousand cubic mètres annually, it has been found necessary to seek additional _champs d'épuration_. These have been secured by the municipality at Méry and les Gresillons and in their neighborhood, still farther westward, and the completion of these is promised for the summer of 1899. In the model garden of Asnières, all varieties of culture are practised, the sewage is carried in trenches into the cultivated land in such a manner as to bathe only the roots of the plants. The extremely winding course taken by the Seine west of Paris renders it necessary for the conduits conveying this drainage to cross the river three times before reaching Achères, as may be seen by reference to the map. From the _usine elévatoire_ of Clichy it is carried under the Seine by a siphon, four hundred and sixty-three mètres in length; the aqueduct crosses the river again near the usine de Colombes, opposite Argenteuil, on a steel bridge, and again near Herblay, by another siphon. In 1897, on the total surface, a thousand hectares, under cultivation, there were spread seventy million cubic mètres of sewage.

After many and long debates, carried on both in the Conseil Municipal and the Chamber of Deputies, the much-discussed question of _Tout à l'égout_ was disposed of by a law passed on the 10th of July, 1894, by which the proprietors of all houses situated in streets provided with a public sewer were required to make connections with this and drain into it all the refuse of their _cabinets d'aisances_. This connection was to be made within the space of three years, and a proportionate tax for this privilege was laid upon each dwelling. But the streets in which there are no public sewers,--including those private streets, _impasses_, and _cités_ which the municipality considers as the property of individuals, and for which it provides neither policemen nor street-cleaners,--and those buildings in which this connection has not been made, still furnish occupation for those nocturnal vehicles the mere thought of which drives the careful citizen to close his windows. In the seventeenth century, this nocturnal agent was known as _Maître fy-fy et des basses-oeuvres_, and he fulfilled his task by carting his material to one of the public dumping grounds and there discharging it. Many of the now picturesque sites of the city owe their characteristics to these eminences of refuse,--the Buttes of the Rues Meslay and Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, Bonne-Nouvelle, des Moulins, the labyrinth of the Jardin des Plantes. "The _voirie_ of Montfaucon," says M. Strauss, "with its infected basins, its pestilential reservoirs, its charnier and its gibbet, was a cause of shame and anxiety to several quarters of Paris; even after being transferred from the Faubourg Saint-Martin to the foot of the Buttes Chaumont, it was an object of horror and disgust. An army of rats garrisoned the charnier, whilst the basins overflowed with rottenness. This horrible establishment had its clientèle; in 1832, the Préfet de Police, M. Gisquet, found, according to the account of M. Mille, a hideous thing,--individuals who, in the midst of these lakes, fished up again the dead fish.

"In 1848, this notorious laystall was installed in the forest of Bondy, where it has undergone various transformations; for many years the basins were encumbered with a stock but very slightly appetizing; to reduce these mountains of refuse to industrial products was a very serious undertaking. After being, by slow desiccation by drying in the air and grinding, transformed into a fertilizer called _poudrette_, they are subjected to various chemical processes; there is extracted from them sulphate of ammonia, etc. The odors which are disengaged during these operations, while not injurious to the health of man, are not of those which leave public opinion indifferent; the girdle of insalubrious establishments which immediately surrounds Paris, individual _dépotoirs_, private _voiries_, manufactories of fertilizing materials, is no less menacing than disgraceful.

"A single establishment is an exception to this rule, it is the dépotoir of La Villette, in the neighborhood of the _Marché aux bestiaux_. It would never be thought, from its appearance, that it was the nightly rendezvous of the most infectious scavengers' carts that traverse Paris. A coquettish garden, of a surprising greenness, all flowery and perfumed, charms the eyes; the receiving cisterns conceal themselves under vaults that do not reveal their secret to the first comer. The basin of the water of the Ourcq has the most innocent air in the world, and the return-pumps reveal nothing.

"All night long, the dépotoir is visited by vehicles, two or three hundred in number, which arrive in single file, with a mysterious heaviness, to discharge themselves in the cisterns. What a discharge! a thousand to twelve hundred cubic mètres--of matter!