Fezzik In Paris

“That is the most disgusting museum in Paris,” the Purrito said flatly.

Mounting the final few steps that released us from the admittedly smelly subterranean sanctum of Paris’ wastewater, I found that I was having a hard time disagreeing. That said, I had a just-acquired 3€ rat-shaped magnet with the words visite des égouts de paris in my camera bag, so my response was more of a cackle than an agreement.

The Purrito sighed as I laughed again and told me “You know we already have two stuffed rats. We couldn’t buy a stuffed sewer rat because three would be a collection.”

I smiled, shrugged, and noted that the guy at the “gift shop” (in his Paris city services coveralls) looked at us like we were lunatics for wanting to buy something. I further noted that I found his reaction particularly odd, given that we weren’t the only people in the “museum” (which is really a fully-functioning, if very mildly Disneyfied (there are walkways, handrails, and you don’t need to bring your wellies) and labeled stretch of the 2100km-long Paris sewer system).

My lovely wife, who does not share my interest in infrastructure, but who kindly trudged behind me as I said “neat,” “gross,” or “I wondered how they dealt with that” approximately 75 times each shook her head and smiled bemusedly at me.

“Let’s go,” she said, as we headed off to the Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibit, the line for which we would find far too long for our tastes.

I strongly suspect that this will wind up being one of our most vividly-remembered museums.

I don’t know if I should mention this.

The street-level entrance to the cathedral of weird smells. The museum is almost hilariously inexpensive; at 4.40€ per person, it’s certainly the cheapest museum we’ve been to in Paris.

The stairs down…

They (perhaps wisely) ease you into the whole “oh, by the way, you’re under the street and in a sewer now, just in case you, you know, didn’t realize that.”

There was no label on this diorama. Somebody has a sense of humor.

This is Stéphane le Shrimpie (I made that up). He’s the crustacean Waldo of the water cycle posters.

One of the manual(!) devices used to de-sand and de-grit the tunnels.

Both Napoléon I and Napoléon III poured huge amounts of money and manpower into the sewer infrastructure during their respective reigns; it’s something I definitely did not know about, and which the museum noted (Louis XIV was another sanitation champion).

Eww.

Hm.

This section of the museum was loud (just in case it wasn’t obvious, this isn’t waste sewage; that’s handled in non-human-accessible round pipes).

It’s a museum. Learn.

The sewer section in Les Mis is apparently an accurate rendering of the system at the time; per the exhibit, Hugo was a friend of the chief sewer inspector.

What is, in effect, a massive wooden pig (there’s a French name for it that I don’t recall); these are dropped into the actual effluent lines to clean them.