d with a
public sewer were required to make connections with this and drain into
it all the refuse of their _cabinets d'aisances_. This connection was to
be made within the space of three years, and a proportionate tax for
this privilege was laid upon each dwelling. But the streets in which
there are no public sewers,--including those private streets,
_impasses_, and _cites_ which the municipality considers as the property
of individuals, and for which it provides neither policemen nor
street-cleaners,--and those buildings in which this connection has not
been made, still furnish occupation for those nocturnal vehicles the
mere thought of which drives the careful citizen to close his windows.
In the seventeenth century, this nocturnal agent was known as _Maitre
fy-fy et des basses-oeuvres_, and he fulfilled his task by carting his
material to one of the public dumping grounds and there discharging it.
Many of the now picturesque sites of the city owe their characteristics
to these eminences of refuse,--the Buttes of the Rues Meslay and
Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, Bonne-Nouvelle, des Moulins, the labyrinth of
the Jardin des Plantes. "The _voirie_ of Montfaucon," says M. Strauss,
"with its infected basins, its pestilential reservoirs, its charnier and
its gibbet, was a cause of shame and anxiety to several quarters of
Paris; even after being transferred from the Faubourg Saint-Martin to
the foot of the Buttes Chaumont, it was an object of horror and disgust.
An army of rats garrisoned the charnier, whilst the basins overflowed
with rottenness. This horrible establishment had its clientele; in 1832,
the Prefet de Police, M. Gisquet, found, according to the account of M.
Mille, a hideous thing,--individuals who, in the midst of these lakes,
fished up again the dead fish.

"In 1848, this notorious laystall was installed in the forest of Bondy,
where it has undergone various transformations; for many years the
basins were encumbered with a stock but very slightly appetizing; to
reduce these mountains of refuse to industrial products was a very
serious undertaking. After being, by slow desiccation by drying in the
air and grinding, transformed into a fertilizer called _poudrette_, they
are subjected to various chemical processes; there is extracted from
them sulphate of ammonia, etc. The odors which are disengaged during
these operations, while not injurious to the health of man, are not of
those which leave public opinion indiffe