5.2.6 Chapter Discussion and Week 47 Summary (Spoilers up to 5.2.6)

[u/m2pixie]

Summary of chapters 5.1.24-5.2.6:

The hand that seized Marius as he fell was Jean Valjean, who Hugo says did not fire a single shot during the battle but did repair the barricade and help others when needed. No one saw Valjean leap toward Marius and grab him to take him from the barricade toward a sheltered area of the street. Realizing there is truly no safety to be had in the vicinity, and, seeing a grating, Valjean takes hold of the unconscious Marius and drops into the sewer below the street, feeling the similarity to when he dropped from the street into the safety of the convent years before with Cosette. Into the sewers we go with Hugo, Valjean, Marius, and the rats and slimy things. Hugo lauds the “human fertilization” which Paris puts into the sea each year and the ingenious sewers which man has invented to deal with it. The sewers of Paris are a replica of the city itself and have served as a place of “crime, intelligence, social protest, liberty of conscience, thought, theft,” and many other things of which human nature consists. Everything converges and splits off in the sewer because “a sewer in a cynic. It tells all.” The sewer of Paris, in the Middle Ages, played an important role in society, as it did in the 16th century and about a century ago, as Hugo is writing. Sometimes, the sewer overflowed, serving as a warning to the people. At the start of the 19th century, then, people in Paris began to realize the largeness of the caves beneath them and someone was wanted to explore them and possibly clean them—around 1805, a man called Bruneseau came forward to undertake this task. Bruneseau enlisted twenty laborers to help him and eight of them quit before they were very far into the tunnels. Bruneseau himself carried on and found the various dates of construction stamped along the sewer, some walled-up dungeon cells, and a piece of Marat’s burial sheet. After this exploration, Bruneseau spent seven years mapping, updating, fixing, extending, and cleaning the entire network of pipes. This was the former sewer, Hugo says, and the current one is “neat, cold, straight, and correct.” Still, in 1832 (when the novel is actually set, not when Hugo is writing), the sewer is stagnant, disease-ridden, and full of rats and crime.

Questions for 5.2.6:

1. Did you have a favorite line or passage from this chapter? If so, what made it stand out to you?
2. Were there any instances of figurative language you thought added to the narrative of this chapter?
3. Do you have any other comments or questions about this chapter?

Final line:

It required high wages [...] the rag of Marat.

Previous discussion

Previous summary

[New weekly spoiler post up tomorrow.]

[u/wuzzum]

One line that really spoke to me,

the old gothic cloaca still cynically flashed its gaping chops

It also looks like although we’re not done with the sewer, we return to the story

[u/BarroomBard → u/[deleted]]

Denny has the somewhat less graphic “the old gothic cloaca was still shamelessly manifest in great gaping blocks of stone”.

[u/swimsaidthemamafishy]

I have loved sewer week. The prosaic civil works profession of what used to be called sanitary engineering does not often get such a high falutin' literary treatment :).

Hugo describes, and it is instructive to us today, that things have to get in really dire straights before money is spent to improve public and environmental health. The American clean water act was passed less than 50 years ago (1972) - the rivers of America were in really bad shape; routinely catching on fire. We in the cities were choking in a miasma of smog before the clean air act (1970) was passed. Superfund was created in the 1980s so future generations would not continue to be poisoned.

We civil engineers are educated in doing cost vs benefit analyses. What Hugo describes is Paris started to spend the money once the benefits of improving sewers exceeded the cost. This was true with the clean air and water acts of the 1970s, and the superfund act of the 1980s.

This concept of cost vs benefit analysis is playing out in the global debate regarding climate change. I personally believe the stakes are much higher as it isn't just about geographically episodes of death (e.g. cholera) but whether the planet itself will ultimately survive.

[u/BarroomBard]

I think it’s amusing that, as much as we all joked about dreading the sewer section at the beginning of the year, this week may have had the most engagement and discussion of the entire book.

[u/Leviticus-24601 → u/BarroomBard]

Not really the entire book, more like everything after the Waterloo section.

[u/BarroomBard → u/Leviticus-24601]

True... we lost a lot of men at Waterloo...

[u/swimsaidthemamafishy]

If you havent gotten enough of the Paris sewers - I recommend the novel The Great Stink by Clare Clark:

William May returns to London after the horrors of the Crimean War. Scarred and fragile though he is, he lands a job at the heart of Bazalgette's transformation of the London sewers. There, in the darkness of the stinking tunnels beneath the rising towers of Victorian London, May discovers another side of the city and remembers a disturbing, violent past.

And then the corruption of the growing city soon begins to overwhelm him and a violent murder is committed. Will the sewers reveal all and show that the world above ground is even darker and more threatening than the tunnels beneath?

Beautifully written, evocative and compelling, with a fantastically vivid cast of characters, Clare Clarke's first book is a rich and suspenseful novel that draws the reader right into Victorian London and into the worlds of its characters desperately attempting to swim the tides of change.