Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day. Volume 2

When the canal de l'Ourcq was first opened, the work was carried out by a company to which was granted the right of navigation on the new channel, connected with the Seine by the canals Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis, but in 1876 the city of Paris repurchased this concession from the canal company. A supply is also drawn from several important artesian wells in different localities,—that of Grenelle, in the Place de Breteuil, driven between 1833 and 1852, draws the water from a depth of five hundred and forty-nine mètres and elevates it to a height of seventy-five. This supply is turned into that of the Ourcq. The artesian well of the Butte aux Cailles, begun in 1863, was resumed in 1892 and is just being terminated; the depth attained is some six hundred mètres. That of Passy, 1855-1860, somewhat less deep, supplies the lakes of the Bois de Boulogne; that of the Place Hébert, 1863-1893, seven hundred and eighteen mètres in depth, furnishes some large ponds in the neighborhood.

Among the great reservoirs, the most noticeable is that of Montmartre, rising high by the side of the church of the Sacré-Cœur, and containing within its gray walls no less than three lakes, one above another. The largest of all these storage basins in the city is that of the Vanne, at the side of the principal entrance to the Parc Montsouris; in its vast, vaulted enclosure, covered with turf, may be stored two hundred and fifty thousand cubic mètres of water. Visitors are admitted to the under vault, where, by the light of torches, the enormous walls and the innumerable columns that sustain this weight are dimly visible. The water of the Avre, drawn from the two sources of the Vigne and Verneuil, is to be stored in the still larger reservoir on the heights of Saint-Cloud, similar in construction and now nearly completed. Each of the three sections in which it is built will contain a hundred thousand cubic mètres.

The ancient mediæval methods have all been put away, the inevitable little open gutter running down the middle of the street—celebrated by Boileau and Mme. de Staël, and many others—has long since disappeared, but the water-supply is not yet entirely adequate, and the citizens may still suffer for the lack of a pure liquid to drink,—as they did through so many centuries. It not infrequently happens, as it did in the early autumn of 1898, that several quarters of the city are simultaneously deprived of eau de source, and compelled to use the river-water alone. Every effort is made to avert this—as it is rightly considered—calamity, the streets are placarded with official notices warning the inhabitants of the approaching curtailment of their supply, and they are notified in a similar manner when the scarcity is over. Two solutions have been proposed for this insufficiency, both of them involving such heavy expense that the municipality shrinks from adopting either;—the first, to supply every dwelling with a double set of pipes, one carrying the pure water of the aqueducts, and the other the river-water, forced up into the upper stories; the second is to go as far as the lakes Neuchâtel, or Geneva, for an uncontaminated supply. The complete application of the tout à l'égout system has been delayed by the want of the greatly-increased volume of water necessary for its application, and strong petitions have been presented demanding the postponement of the application of the law of 1894. The present supply is about a hundred and twenty-four litres of eau de source and ninety-six of eau de rivière daily for each inhabitant, but in summer this amount may become greatly diminished. Paris thus stands second in the amount of daily water-supply in the European capitals,—the figures ranging from Rome with four hundred and fourteen litres per capita, daily, to Constantinople with fifteen. London has only a hundred and seventy-three for each inhabitant daily; and Berlin, seventy-three, next to the Turkish capital. The figures for American cities are very much higher,—New York, three hundred and fifty-nine; Boston, three hundred and sixty-three; Philadelphia, six hundred; Chicago, six hundred and thirty-six, and Buffalo, eight hundred and forty-five (September, 1898).

ANOTHER grave evil produced by an insufficient water-supply is the lack of pressure in the pipes in case of fire, and the possible lack of water itself. The number of bouches d'incendie, or fire-plugs, which it is proposed to raise to eight thousand, placed a hundred mètres apart, in all the streets of the city, is as yet far from attaining that figure. The infrequency of serious fires in the capital is, however, very noticeable when compared with the losses of American cities. Various causes contribute to this result: the solid character of the dwelling-houses generally, especially in the older quarters of the city—the handsome, new apartment-houses that have been put up in such numbers of recent years in the neighborhood of the Arc de l'Étoile are, very many of them, much less well built; the general absence of furnaces and of those overwrought fires to which the severity of his climate incites the American citizen; the total absence of buildings of an inordinate height, and, in modern times, the much more restricted use of electricity and the consequent diminution of that too frequent danger of the present day, "defective insulation." The fire service is, also, very efficient; the brass helmets of the pompiers are as inseparable from any public performance, theatrical or musical, as the uniforms of the Garde Républicaine; these faithful sentinels are on duty behind the scenes as well as before them, and even up in the "flies," where, before the introduction of electricity, they were obliged to pass several hours in a temperature of, frequently, thirty-five degrees Centigrade, ninety-six Fahrenheit. At present, the fire department of Paris has adopted most of the modern improvements common to other civilized capitals, and the details of its service differ from those with which we are familiar principally in the military character given it.

The regiment of Sapeurs-Pompiers is, in fact, a regiment of infantry, lent to the city of Paris by the Minister of War. It is paid out of the municipal budget, with the exception of the pensions of the Legion of Honor, the military medal, and the retired list, which are the charge of the State. The regiment is composed of two battalions, of six companies each, with a total strength of seventeen hundred men. The pay of the men and their indemnities are the same as for the regiments of infantry in garrison in Paris, there are special privileges for the officers, and the quality of the recruits, especially with regard to their physique, is maintained at a very high standard. Their bravery, their efficiency, and their devotion are equal to those which are displayed so frequently by this well-organized service in other large cities, and are equally appreciated by the public; when, at the annual review at Longchamps on the day of the national fête, the regiment of sapeurs-pompiers defiles before the reviewing-stand, the great wave of applause and recognition which envelops it, drowning the other cheers in its roar, betokens the intimate appreciation of the Parisian, of high and low degree, of these unpretentious heroes.

By the new organization of this service, now in process of completion, the city is divided into twenty-four "zones," in the centre of each of which is a post of men and material, known as a centre de secours. The smaller posts, scattered through the city, in case of fire, notify by telephone these central stations and the état-major of the regiment, adjoining the Préfecture de Police; if the fire is of sufficient importance, the centre de secours sends a reinforcement and the steam fire-engine, the pompe à vapeur, but in very many cases the service of the latter is not needed. Its appearance in the streets is comparatively rare, and it is seldom driven at the mad gallop of the American machines. Moreover, its whistle is the curious thin treble so common in European motor engines, railroad and other. The old-fashioned hand-pumps have almost completely disappeared, with the exception of some localities like the Butte Montmartre, too steep to be approached by horses. In the central stations, the arrangements are those generally adopted nowadays to secure the quickest possible service,—even to the harness suspended from hooks in the ceilings to be dropped on the horses' backs, and the metal pole down which the men slide from their sleeping-rooms above.

For particular service, details for the theatres, balls, private clubs, etc., the number of men is fixed by the Préfet de Police, and there is extra pay in all these cases. The department is also called upon in case of street accidents, falling buildings, asphyxia in sewers, etc. The service material includes special apparatus for respiration in cellars, basements, etc., where the presence of gas or smoke is to be apprehended; and the great ladder, carried on a special truck, has a length of twenty mètres, greater than the average height of the Parisian houses. It is stated that the time allowed to elapse between the receipt of an alarm in the stations and the departure for the fire is often under a minute, and never exceeds two; in 1896, the time between the alarm and the attack of the fire was less than five minutes in ten hundred and seventy-nine fires out of a total of twelve hundred and four. In seven hundred and eighty-four cases, in the same year, the conflagration was completely extinguished in five minutes, and the very longest fire lasted six hours and a half.

At the entrance of each of the twelve casernes, or barracks, of the regiment, the names of the officers and soldiers who have been killed in the discharge of their duty are engraved on a slab of black marble, the Golden Book of the regiment. In the court of the état-major the names of the forty sapeurs-pompiers who have thus died since 1821, are engraved on a marble panel. In his order of the day, March 11, 1888, "the colonel informs the regiment, with profound grief, of the deaths of Corporal Toulon and former sergeant Sixdenier, who perished yesterday, at noon, victims of their devotion, in endeavoring to save an imprudent workman who had descended, without taking precautions, into an excavation of the Rue des Deux-Ponts." Three citizens were also asphyxiated in trying to save him, two of whom died; "and the deaths of Sixdenier and Toulon will be for all another and a grand example to add to the history of the regiment."

A Parisian merchant or manufacturer, Dumourrier-Duperrier, in 1699, furnished the first effective, organized system of combating fires in the city, and in 1717 he received, by letters-patent, the direction of the Compagnie de Garde-Pompes, the origin of the present organization. In 1792, the total effective of this force was two hundred and sixty-three men, officers included, with forty-four force-pumps, twelve suction-pumps, and forty-two casks. The men were provided with uniforms and, later, armed with sabres; in the year IX of the Republic, the corps, then four hundred strong, was placed under the direction of the Préfet de police, under the general administration of the Préfet de la Seine. The frightful conflagration which ended the fête given by the Austrian ambassador, Prince von Schwartzenberg, to the Emperor, in honor of his marriage with Marie-Louise, in 1810, awoke public attention to the insufficiency of the arrangements for extinguishing fires, and in the following year measures were taken to secure a larger authority and more energetic action. Napoleon decided that the gardes-pompes should be put on a strictly military footing; an imperial decree of September 18, 1811, created a battalion of sapeurs-pompiers consisting of four companies with thirteen officers and five hundred and sixty-three men. For the first time, they were armed with muskets, and as a military force were held as an auxiliary in the police service and in the maintenance of public order. One of the articles of this decree provided for the payment of this force by the city until the establishment of a company to insure against fire,—which was held to foreshadow an intention to place this expense, at least in part, upon these companies, and thereby relieve the municipal budget.

During the Revolution of 1848, the provisory government thought it prudent to deprive the pompiers of their muskets; and in April, 1850, the President of the Republic disbanded the battalion and reorganized it, retaining a small proportion of the former members. Down to this date, it had been recruited from the engineers and the artillery of the army, but since then, from the infantry only. In 1860, the annexation of the banlieue necessitated a new reorganization; the successive augmentations of the force brought its total effective, in 1866, up to a regiment of twelve hundred and ninety-eight men, divided into two battalions of six companies each. The efficiency of the organization was greatly augmented by the introduction of steam fire-engines in 1873.

BY the law of December 29, 1897, all the communes of France were authorized to suppress their octroi duties upon "hygienic beverages," wines, ciders, beers, perry, hydromel, and mineral waters, and replace them by others, after December 31, 1898. As the entrance duty upon these boissons hygiéniques constituted a very important fraction,—in Paris, in 1895, sixty-eight million five hundred thousand francs out of a grand total of a hundred and fifty-five million six hundred and one thousand,—the question of supplying this deficiency in the municipal budget is exciting discussion. In case the octroi is not suppressed altogether, the communes are obliged to diminish the tax in certain proportions, according to their population and their locality,—the cider-producing departments standing on a different footing from the wine-growing ones. To replace the octroi, they are given their choice of five other taxes—upon alcohol, or upon horses, dogs, billiards, clubs, and various other articles of luxury. It was generally predicted in Paris that the consumer of alcoholic beverages would not experience any benefit from the removal of this tax.

Under the ancient régime, the octroi, like most other imposts and duties, was in the charge of the fermiers généraux, who obtained the royal authorization to enclose Paris within a wall to facilitate its collection. Consequently, one of the first manifestations of the Revolution was the demolition of these barrières by the people, on the very day of the taking of the Bastille. On the 1st of May, 1791, at midnight, all the gates of Paris were thrown open to the hundreds of vehicles, boats, and barges which had been waiting for weeks for this moment of free entry; a triumphal mast was erected in honor of the Assemblée and to celebrate the abolition of "the most odious of tyrannies;" the National Guard, under Lafayette's orders, paraded around the demolished barriers in the midst of the universal rejoicing. But, seven years later, the necessities of the municipal finances constrained many of the thus emancipated cities, Paris included, to return to the system of levying a tax on articles entering their gates, and the masons continued the work of enclosing the capital again within walls.

Many difficulties attended the levying of this impost; "as soon as night fell," says M. Maxime Du Camp, "the city was literally taken by assault; the tavern-keepers of all the villages of the suburbs set up their ladders against the city wall, and the casks of wine, the bottles of brandy, butcher's meat, pork and vinegar, were lowered by means of ropes to the confederates who were waiting for them inside, in the chemin de ronde. Should some ill-advised customs clerk undertake to interfere with these fraudulent practices, he was set upon, beaten, gagged, and the introduction of the prohibited commodities continued undisturbed. They did even better; they excavated tunnels, which, passing under the exterior boulevards, under the wall of fortification, under the chemin de ronde, opened communication between the inns of the banlieue and those of the city; it was a veritable pillage,—the octroi was sacked." These violent measures have been replaced in the present day by more suitable ones, and the musée des fraudeurs, in the administration centrale of the octroi, contains a very curious assemblage of objects used in this contraband service. Alcohol was the favorite object of smuggling, and it was carried into the city in rubber corsets, worn under the blouse, rubber petticoats which would contain as much as thirty litres of the liquid, and were known as mignonnettes, false backs, false calves, false stomachs, and false upper arms, mostly in zinc. The women would not hesitate to appear as plantureuses wet-nurses, or as in an interesting condition; the vehicles were mined and hollowed with concealed receptacles, and even the collars of the harness; the blocks of granite, the rolls of carpet,—all the arts of the smuggler were employed. That very general popular disposition to consider the evasion of a customs duty as a trivial offence is as common in France as elsewhere.

At all the gates of the city, in the railway stations, and at the river entrances of the capital, the posts of the octroi are established, and the formula of address of the green-uniformed officials is generally the same: "You have nothing to declare?" Foreign visitors are especially advised against the carrying in their baggage of tobacco and matches, the manufacture of these being a government monopoly; French allumettes are very bad, but it is better to throw away your cherished boxes of neat wax-matches before entering the barriers. With these exceptions, the officials are tolerant of the introduction of contraband articles in small quantities,—a half-bottle of ordinary wine, two pounds of fish caught by hook and line, a pound of salt, a bundle of hay or straw, etc. The agents act under the authority of the Préfet of the Seine; the objects submitted to this duty, intended for local consumption, are designated by the Conseil Municipal and approved by the government. The officials have the right of search; dutiable objects to be carried through the city are entitled to "escort" by the agents of the octroi, or they may pay the tax at the entrance with the privilege of having it refunded when leaving. All the communes of the Department of the Seine, considered as the banlieue of Paris, have the right of levying an entrance duty upon brandies, spirits, and liquors. The penalties provided for smuggling are the confiscation of the article and of the means used in its transportation; a fine of from a hundred to two hundred francs, and even imprisonment, if the attempt has been made by means of escalade or subterranean proceedings, or with prepared methods of concealment. All dutiable articles must be declared, no matter how small the quantity carried.

As both the city and the State are interested in the collection of this tax, the agents have a double mandate to execute their duties, and the contraventions of the law are pursued at one time in the name of the public Treasury and the octroi, and at another in the name of the Préfet of the Seine. Each gate of the city has its peculiar class of produce to tax, according to the locality to which it gives entrance; and the daily receipts vary to an astonishing degree. At the Orléans dépôt, the duties on merchandise have reached a hundred thousand francs a day and fallen to five hundred; the Porte de Saint-Denis ranges from fifty thousand francs to four!

To the establishment of the octroi municipal et de bienfaisance by the Directory is due that of the great dépôts or entrepôts of wine and alcohol on the quais of the Seine,—the importers finding it very inconvenient to pay the duties upon all their casks on their first arrival. They are, therefore, allowed to store them, under the supervision of the octroi, and pay as they are sold. When the ancient corporation of the crieurs jurés announced throughout the city the arrival of a shipment of wine, the purchasers would throng to the banks of the Seine; when Louis XIV granted the first authorization to establish a halle aux vins, on condition that the profits should be divided with the Hôpital Général, the site selected was the Quai Saint-Bernard, the entrepôt of Bercy being then a market outside the city walls. The latter, on the site of the ancient Halle des Hôpitaux of the seventeenth century, developed greatly after its incorporation within the city limits; it is at present divided into two sections, Le Grand Bercy and Le Petit Château. The city is the proprietor, and rents spaces to applicants, generally for a year at a time. The octroi is stationed at every gate of exit, and at numerous posts within the enclosure. Not only is the wine stored here, but it is blended and assorted in great tuns, and there is also storage for alcohol, liquors of all kinds, and oil. The huge enclosure is very carefully policed, not only for the detection of thieves, but also of fraudulent practices; at night there are four rounds, of which the second and third are made by guardians armed with revolvers (a recent innovation), and accompanied by eight shaggy watch-dogs.

AMONG the scientific establishments of the city may be mentioned the observatory established on the top of the Tour Saint-Jacques, the beautiful fragment remaining of the old church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie, demolished in 1789. In the vaulted open chamber of the base of the tower stands a statue of Pascal, who, from the top of it, repeated his experiments on the weight of the air; and on this top—only fifty three mètres from the pavement—there has been in operation for the last seven or eight years a meteorological observatory. The varying conditions of the atmosphere, the winds, and the smoke which pollutes it, are closely investigated, weather predictions are hazarded, and the observers even descend into the sewer at their feet, under the Rue de Rivoli, to investigate and analyze the subterranean air. About 1885, M. Joubert, the director, established here a gigantic pendulum, to repeat the experiments made by Foucault at the Panthéon in 1851, and afterward a water-barometer, the only one in existence. The incongruity of this modern scientific apparatus on top of this mediæval tower, among the four monsters of the Evangelists at the corners, is rather amusing,—even the statue of Saint James himself carries placidly an anemometer on his back.

Another of these minor municipal details—and possibly a more affecting one—is the official Dépôt des Marbres, established adjoining the official museum of the Garde-Meuble at the end of the Rue de l'Université, by the side of the Champ de Mars. Here are deposited irreverently and in various stages of dilapidation all the official statues, royal, imperial, and republican, that have out-lived their day. "The marble of the statues of the State," said a cynical sculptor, "has the peculiarity of cracking after only a very short period of use." Some of these official marbles have had a longer period than others; but they all end here. Our illustration shows a corner of this depository,—at the angle, Napoleon III, sculptured by Iselin; behind him, a relief representing the return of the ashes of his great uncle; in the foreground, the Imperial eagle, with his fiery glance forever dimmed, and, at the left, a seated figure of Louis XVIII. Kings, potentates, and powers, official allegories, emblems, and symbols, are all set down here together, at the mercy of the weather. In the adjoining grand central pavilion are accumulated the official portraits of these departed rulers, including very many of the late Emperor and Empress,—"all the old rattles of France, all the playthings that she has broken."

If the city is regardless of the effigies of her deposed rulers, she at least has some consideration for the living citizen who falls into trouble. The official Mont-de-Piété, or pawnbrokers' establishment, stands always ready to rescue him from the grasp of the usurer—provided he has some security of any kind to offer, and although its services are not altogether gratuitous, they are of very great benefit to the public. No private individual is allowed to make a business of lending money on personal objects. It was by letters-patent of the king, dated 9th December, 1777, that the original establishment was authorized, to be placed under the inspection of the Lieutenant Général of Police and of four Administrateurs of the Hôpital Général; the amount to be loaned to applicants was fixed at four-fifths of their value on objects of gold or silver, and at two-thirds on all others. The administrators were permitted to establish branch offices in different quarters of the city, and the central bureau was located in the Rue des Blancs-Manteaux, where, very much enlarged, it still is. This institution proved to be of the greatest service to the people, well-to-do as well as poor, but the undiscriminating Revolution promptly abolished it as a monopoly, and was forced to restore it under the Directory, May 22, 1797. By the law of February 4, 1799, no similar establishment could be opened without the consent of the government.

At its reconstitution under the Directory, it made its loans at the rate of thirty per cent., this was gradually reduced to twelve, and it was not until after the Revolution of 1830 that the figure was fixed at nine. At present, the interest and the charges amount to seven per cent. In the first century of its existence, from 1777 to 1877, the total amount of the loans advanced was two trillion three hundred and eight million six hundred and fifty-five thousand six hundred and ninety-six francs. The number of objects pledged was over a hundred and twelve million five hundred thousand, of which there were redeemed, or sold as forfeited, a hundred and ten million seven hundred and ninety thousand.

The first of the succursales, or branch establishments, was for a long time in the Rue Bonaparte, the ancient Rue des Petits-Augustins, in the neighborhood of the École des Beaux-Arts; in 1814, a royal ordinance authorized this succursale to enlarge itself, and granted to it an old building and a slice of the garden of the Musée des Monuments français, on several conditions, one of which was that it should transport to Père-Lachaise and reconstruct there the tomb of Héloise and Abélard, which was in the ceded portion of the garden. This was faithfully carried out, but in 1833 the State changed its mind, the cession was revoked, and the Mont-de-Piété was obliged to restore the ground and demolish its building, but was not reimbursed for its outlay on the tomb of the lovers. At present, the succursales are three in number, in the Rues de Rennes, Servan, and Capron, and there are bureaux auxiliaires for very nearly all the letters of the alphabet, by which they are designated. These latter have no storage-room, and consequently are unable to deliver an object redeemed until the following day; the transportation of these pledges through the streets is effected in the company's own wagons, and with every precaution against loss. In the auxiliary bureaux, or bureaux of the quarter, no loan is made for a greater sum than five hundred francs, while in the central establishment the limit is ten thousand francs, but all the regulations are otherwise the same; only one style of ticket is used, and this varies in color according to the year, being white, pink, yellow, green, etc., in sequence.

By the terms of the present regulations of the establishment, the object offered as a pledge is appraised by eight official commissaires-priseurs who are responsible for the deficiency in case the object, being neither renewed nor redeemed, is sold at public auction at less than their valuation. As may be supposed, they take care to guard against this eventuality,—the amount to be loaned on each pledge being the same proportion of its value as that fixed by the ordinance of 1777. The disappointment of the borrower at the inadequate sum offered him is not considered; but it has been proposed to establish by law a percentage nearer the actual market value of the security. The borrower is also subject to a tax,—of one per cent. on the sum he receives, without regard to the duration of the loan, and of six per cent. additional,—three for interest and three for running expenses. This last is calculated proportionally on the sum received and on the length of time the pledge remains unredeemed, counted by fortnights; loans of three, four, and five francs, not remaining unredeemed longer than two months, are not subject to this six per cent. tax.

Careful precautions are taken against the Mont-de-Piété being made a receptacle for stolen goods. The applicant for a loan must be known and have a permanent residence, or be vouched for by some one fulfilling these requirements; a married woman must bring the authorization of her husband, and no loans are made to minors. If the employés have any reason to suspect the integrity of the applicant, his loan is refused until he furnishes more satisfactory guarantees. In one year the number of watches recognized as stolen was two hundred and fifty, out of a total of three hundred and fifty thousand received. Loans are made for a year, at the longest, but in practice two months of grace are added; if at the end of this period the object is not redeemed, it is sold at public auction. Some of these pledges have been in the establishment for forty, forty-five, and fifty years, and very many for twenty,—constantly renewed and never redeemed. When sold, the surplus or boni remaining after deducting all charges is held at the disposal of the owner of the pledge for three years, and then turned over to the administration of the Assistance Publique.