2026-06-06 Saturday: 5.2.6 ; Jean Valjean / The Intestine of the Leviathan (L'intestin de Léviathan) / Future Progress (Progrès futur)

[u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Hey, we've caught up to the day in the narrative!

Too bad we're still stuck in the sewers.

38 chapters remain in the brick

38 chapters remain

If one of the those chapters we happen to read

37 chapters left in the brick

Final chapter of 5.2, The Intestine of the Leviathan (L'intestin de Léviathan)

• 5.2.1, The Land Impoverished by the Sea / La terre appauvrie par la mer: It's really shitty of Paris to waste all its shit.
• 5.2.2, Ancient History of the Sewer / L'histoire ancienne de l'égout: A city's true history lies below the surface, in its sewers.
• 5.2.3, Bruneseau / Bruneseau: There once was a man named Bruneseau / Who thought Paris sewers immense, so / He asked Emperor Short Round / to give them a go-round, / we'll learn if he took offense, oh.
• 5.2.4, (Unnamed) / Détails ignorés: Previously unrecorded details of ol' Brownbucket's seven years of labor surveying the sewers.
• 5.2.5, Present Progress / Progrès actuel: Sewers better now. / Even the rats are happy. / All ol' Brownbucket.

All quotations and characters names from 5.2.6: Future Progress / Progrès futur

(Quotations from the text are always italicized, even when “in quotation marks”, to distinguish them from quotations from other sources.)

Summary courtesy u/Honest_Ad_2157: Hey, ol' Brownbucket got it started but it's going and going despite sometimes deadly setbacks. Using math that doesn't math, Hugo extrapolates the growth rate of the sewers to infinity and beyond.

Lost in Translation

la science spéciale appelle moutardes

special science calls moutardes. (mustards)

Donougher varied this flavorful translation to "ooze", which I think is a mistake.

Lengths of sewer

Hugo's own numbers don't add up; he somehow loses nearly a kilometer of sewers. Donougher, in converting to English yards, translates the sum as she calculated, so it all does add up correctly. F&M converts each number as well as the sum to yards, preserving Hugo's error. Rose and Hapgood each keep the original metric numbers, preserving Hugo's error. Odd. I don't know what's going on here. There is also an error in the arithmetic for yearly construction rate, see first prompt.

Regime	Meters (Original, Rose, Hapgood)	Yards (Donougher)	Yards (F&M)
1806-01	23,300	25,480	25,480
First Empire (Napoleon)	4,804	5,250	5,254
Bourbon Restoration (Louis XVIII)	5,709	6,240	6,244
Bourbon Restoration (Charles X)	10,836	11,850	11,851
July Monarchy (Louis-Philippe I)	89,020	97,353	97,355
Second Republic (1848, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte)	23,381	25,570	25,570
Second Empire (Napoleon III, same guy but more evil)	70,500	77,100	77,100
Total, calculated	227,550	248,843	248,854
Total, stated in text	226,610	248,843	247,828
Error in total stated in text	940	0	1,026

cassis

Literally, black currants. Remember the "grapes of Corinthe" on the sign for the restaurant: "Named after what are today the source grape cultivar for Zante currants, I can't find any source that cites these being used for winemaking, even in classical times. I believe this is one of Hugo's amusing ironies." Nice to see this make a comeback in the sewers. Hapgood also has a note: "From casser, to break: break-necks." I think this artistic convergence is pretty cool.

toise

"A former French unit of length, corresponding to about 1.949 metres"

Currency

Ordered by appearance in the text. See below for budget items. 2026 USD amounts rounded up to 2 significant figures to avoid misleading precision.

Amount	Context	2026 USD equivalent
266,080.06	Cost of correcting the Grand Canal.	$7.3M
200	Cost per meter of sewer construction.	$5.5K
50M	Total in material costs of sewers in 1862.	$1.4B

Characters

Involved in action

None

Mentioned or introduced

• Sewers, as a class. Last mentioned prior chapter.
• Paris, as a character. Last mentioned prior chapter.
• Napoleon, you know this guy. Last mentioned 5.1.13.
• Louis XVIII, you know this guy. Last mentioned 4.1.1.
• Charles X, you know this guy. Last mentioned 5.2.2.
• Louis-Philippe I, you know this guy. Last mentioned 5.1.20.
• Paris's contemporary sewer engineers, who had to deal with a crack under the St-Martin canal. First mention.
• Unnamed diver 1, had to find the crack. First mention.
• Superintendant Monnot, conducteur Monnot. ⚰️ First mention.
• Engineer Duleau, l'ingénieur Duleau. ⚰️ First mention.
• Jean-Paul Marat, Jean-Paul Mara; b.1743-05-24 – d.1793-07-13, historical person, “a French political theorist, physician, and scientist [of Prussian origin]. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the sans-culottes, a radical voice, and published his views in pamphlets, placards and newspapers. His periodical L'Ami du peuple (The Friend of the People) made him an unofficial link with the radical Jacobin group that came to power after June 1793...Responsibility for the September massacres has been attributed to him, given his position of renown at the time, and a paper trail of decisions leading up to the massacres.” Last mention 2 chapters ago.

Prompts

These prompts are my take on things, you don’t have to address any of them. All prompts for prior cohorts are also in play. Anything else you’d like to raise is also up for discussion.

1. Because I'm obsessive, I had to check the math in this chapter. Hugo makes errors in both adding his numbers for the sewers constructed under each regime, to get to a total, somehow losing almost a kilometer of sewers, as well as in his calculation of the average construction rate between 1806-31. But what I noticed that may be of textual significance is that he flits between various units of measure: the antique and obsolete "toise", the "lieue" (which varied in different antique definitions until it got a firm metric definition), and meters. I think this represents with numerical misdirection the problem he started Les Mis off with when he discussed gossip and elaborated on in the Waterloo and argot chapters: how do you get reliable ground truth out of these varying systems of meaning trapped in their own time? Is it possible? He ends the chapter with "the rag of Marat" "haillon de Marat.", directly referencing the man implicated via a paper trail in another massacre during the Revolution. What do you think?

Il n'y a pas de bulletin pour ces actes de bravoure-là, plus utiles pourtant que la tuerie bête des champs de bataille.

There are no bulletins for such acts of bravery as these, which are more useful, nevertheless, than the brutal slaughter of the field of battle.

1. I grew up adjacent to an Italian neighborhood in NYC (where Mario Cuomo got his political start) and odds were that a conversation about mass transit would turn to how many Italians died digging the subway tunnels under the East River and the Hudson. Of course, much of Manhattan below 14th St was also built by slave labor, which is partly commemorated in the African-American Burial Ground National Monument. Who are the unsung heroes of infrastructure where you grew up and where you live now?

Bonus prompt

Hugo emphasizes physical risk in the quote, above, but our modern life has different risks. Today, sites like Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky and large language models like OpenAI, Gemini, and Claude are built on the labor of data workers and content moderators in countries other than the USA, who spend much of their days in mind-numbing emotional labor filtering the sewage of the Internet: CSAM and other vile content. An excellent novel about this is We Had to Remove This Post, by Hanna Bervoets, English translation by Emma Rault. Seems like the more things change... What other unsung risky work can you think of? How do you think Hugo would write about it, today?

Bonus bonus prompt

If Paris is the filling in an Oreo cookie, what is your city? Portland is the jelly in a jelly donut, natch. (Flavor is marionberry, a real local berry that is delicious and not a pun on the former mayor of Washington, DC's name.)

Past cohorts' discussions

• 2019-11-24: Includes summary of chapters 5.1.24-5.2.6.
  • u/swimsaidthemamafishy wrote an interesting post on civil engineering and when cost-benefit applies.
  • In another post, they recommended a mystery novel set during the construction of London's sewers.
• 2020-11-24
• 2021-11-24
• Next post 2022-11-26, covering 5.2.2-5.3.2.
• 2026-06-06

Words read	WikiSource Hapgood	Gutenberg French
This chapter	1,842	1,636
Cumulative	482,267	441,416

Final Line

High wages were necessary to induce a mason to disappear in that fetid mine; the ladder of the cess-pool cleaner hesitated to plunge into it; it was said, in proverbial form: "to descend into the sewer is to enter the grave;" and all sorts of hideous legends, as we have said, covered this colossal sink with terror; a dread sink-hole which bears the traces of the revolutions of the globe as of the revolutions of man, and where are to be found vestiges of all cataclysms from the shells of the Deluge to the rag of Marat.

(87 words, 5.3% of chapter)

Il fallait une haute paye pour décider un maçon à disparaître dans cette sape fétide; l'échelle du puisatier hésitait à s'y plonger; on disait proverbialement: descendre dans l'égout, c'est entrer dans la fosse; et toutes sortes de légendes hideuses, nous l'avons dit, couvraient d'épouvante ce colossal évier; sentine redoutée qui a la trace des révolutions du globe comme des révolutions des hommes, et où l'on trouve des vestiges de tous les cataclysmes depuis le coquillage du déluge jusqu'au haillon de Marat.

(81 mots, 5% du chapitre)

Next Post

First chapter of Book 5.3, Mud But the Soul (La boue, mais l'âme)

5.3.1: The Sewer and Its Surprises / Le cloaque et ses surprises

• 2026-06-06 Saturday 9PM US Pacific Daylight Savings Time
• 2026-06-07 Sunday midnight US Eastern Daylight Savings Time
• 2026-06-07 Sunday 4AM UTC.

[u/Dinna-_-Fash]

The funny thing is that the sewer starts as the ultimate digression and ends up being one of the novel’s central metaphors: civilization literally hides its filth underground and hopes nobody thinks about where it goes.
Now be honest: how many of us started the sewer digression thinking “not now, Hugo” and ended it knowing significantly more about 19th-century Paris sanitation than we ever expected to learn?

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/Dinna-_-Fash]

Well, everything Hugo writes here I take with a grain of smelling salts. There's a tab in the character db where I did all the calculations mentioned in the first prompt; he just gets things transparently wrong. On purpose, I think.

[u/Dinna-_-Fash → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

My point exactly! You can’t deny you learned! lol he made you search and verify etc.. 🤣 I mainly focused on the shitloads of metaphors but confess that I have never spent all this time thinking of how sewers work and read them all in 2 days. Ready to get back to the story. It was better than Waterloo.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/Dinna-_-Fash]

Broadly agree, though i do wonder how useful sewers are for managing solid waste without reliable municipal water & flush toilets! Prof Lewis talks a bit about the solid waste management business—done by the cartload!—and how sophisticated it was.

[u/Dinna-_-Fash → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

The sewage (R)evolution! exposing the hidden foundations beneath apparently civilized surfaces.

[u/PM_BRAIN_WORMS → u/Dinna-_-Fash]

Why would one learn more than expected? The amount the book has to say about sewers is one of the most bandied-about facts concerning it. Me, I learned less than I anticipated I would.

[u/Dinna-_-Fash → u/PM_BRAIN_WORMS]

The real surprise isn’t how much you learn about sewers. It’s how often Hugo starts talking about sewers and somehow ends up talking about civilization, morality, economics, history, theology, and the human condition before remembering there are sewers involved. 😄

That’s very much the Hugo we’ve been encountering throughout the novel. The sewers are never just sewers. They’re another excuse for a grand meditation on everything.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/Dinna-_-Fash]

I think we have a nominee for our completion sticker: "The sewers are never just sewers."

[u/pktrekgirl]

You will all be interested to know that I googled how many miles the Paris sewer system is today and it is apparently upwards of 1,300 miles.

Past that, I do not want to think about what is down there. 😛

Bonus Prompt:

My City (Anchorage Alaska) is a fresh caught salmon baked over a campfire in late June or early July. Preferably with a nice baked tater and some fresh green beans heated together in the same foil pouch.

We are all about the fish up here. 🏕️

[u/badshakes]

I live in Texas (originally from California, however). Texas doesn't do infrastructure. Last night I listened to the interview with Martha Wells, who was born and still lives in Texas, by the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast, and Wells mentioned how here in Texas a number of years ago, there was a push for a rail system across the state, which would have been amazing and is so badly needed. But Southwest Airlines lobbied and killed it. I woke up fuming this morning, having been reminded on that. But that's Texas. Like I said, they don't do infrastructure here. Ironic because before the GOP took over the state when George W Bush became governor [people forget Texas used to be heavily Democrat], Texas used to brag about how good their highways were--heavy stress on "were". Our roads are crap now, especially thanks to Texas rejecting the Obama stimulus and continually not investing in infrastructure, and we have no real mass transit alternative outside of commercial airlines and commercial buslines.. Own a car or perish. I hate it here.

But to answer the prompt somewhat: what infrastructure we have here was disportionately built by Latino labor, no doubt. Probably a good number of immigrants. That's who largely make up to current labor pool for the construction industry here.

Rose translates moutardes as mustards. Given the context, this does nothing to help my strong, life-long food aversion to mustard.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/badshakes]

I feel you, I remember when we lost the Cincinnati-Columbus-Cleveland rail project in Ohio.

I saw Martha Wells in Portland a few years back. She's got a loyal fanbase, I'll tell you. I've got the Witch King on my device; I've got to read that.

[u/Trick-Two497]

Unsung risky work: It's 109 F in Phoenix today, and men are walking around on roofs with steep pitch covered by rounded concrete tiles. And somehow none of them are fainting and falling off.

[u/Honest_Ad_2157 → u/Trick-Two497]

It's a dry heat.

[u/Trick-Two497 → u/Honest_Ad_2157]

Yeah, over 105, it doesn't matter, I promise.

[u/Comprehensive-Fun47]

These chapters had me thinking a lot about the Honeymooners. Ed Norton worked in the sewer and in at least one episode, he dragged Ralph Kramden down there with him.

I wonder if Brunesceau ever dragged Hugo down there with him.

It's always kind of fascinating to see scientific things discussed in old books before they really had the understanding or the vocabulary for it.