Sewers

From Paris Hotels Reviews

The Sewers

A little way of east of the Quai Branly site, on the northeast side of the busy junction of place de la Résistance, is the entrance to the sewers, or leségouts (Sat-Wed: May-Sat 11am-5pm; Oct-April 11am-4pm; €4.10). They’re dark, damp and noisy with gushling water, but bot al smelly. The main part of the visit runs along a gantry poised alarmingly above a main sewer, where bilingual displays of photographs, engravings, dredging tools, lamps and other flotsam and jetsam turn the history of the city’s water supply and waste management into a surprisingly fascinating topic. A good companion guide might be Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: he turns the history of the sewer system – “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 pf the Deluge to the rag of Marat” – into a magnificent lecture, throwing in a diatribe on the waste of human excrement. Twenty-five million francs’ worth of manure was apparently lost to the city in 1860s alone.

The visit is more than half a publicity exercise by the sewage board, showing the natural water cycle becoming disrupted by the city’s over-dense population, and then slowly controlled by increasingly good management. What is doesn’t tell you is that the Achèves treatment plant, northwest of Paris, but around thirty times a year parts of the system get overloaded with rainwater, and the sewer workers have to empty the excess – waste and all – straight into the Seine.