Nov 19, 2025
happy land impoverished by the sea day to all who celebrate <3
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happy land impoverished by the sea day to all who celebrate <3
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Round 2, Matchup 104: V.iv vs V.ii.1
Which chapter title do you prefer?
Javert Derailed
The Land Impoverished by the Sea
The sewer! It’s here!!
(I fully admit to being a fan of the sewer digression).
Hugo’s framing of the fact about the Chinese peasant has some racist elements (“to our shame”), but it also serves as an important framing device for the sewers as a whole: they represent waste in not only a literal sense, but the waste of the poor and the marginalized by a society that does not value them. China benefits from the peasant’s knowledge, recognizing that “manure” is “gold;” France wastes this.
This paragraph is also just beautiful:
“Those heaps of filth at the gate-posts, those tumbrils of mud which jolt through the street by night, those terrible casks of the street department, those fetid drippings of subterranean mire, which the pavements hide from you,—do you know what they are? They are the meadow in flower, the green grass, wild thyme, thyme and sage, they are game, they are cattle, they are the satisfied bellows of great oxen in the evening, they are perfumed hay, they are golden wheat, they are the bread on your table, they are the warm blood in your veins, they are health, they are joy, they are life. This is the will of that mysterious creation which is transformation on earth and transfiguration in heaven.”
I don’t know how accurate Hugo’s statistics are, but his general point about waste and disease certainly rings true. I’ve mentioned this before, but 1832 was the year of a cholera pandemic, and while it wasn’t known that cholera is spread through contaminated water at that time, it’s possible that Hugo was aware of such theories. And even if he was not, miasma theory – which posited that things like bad smells caused disease – was a really common theory in the 19th century and still would have led to concerns over waste disposal.
As for the Thames, as London (a sad city to Hugo because it’s sewer-less) grew dramatically in the nineteenth century, its challenges with waste disposal increased. Many of these issues paralleled problems in Paris, like the spread of cholera and pollution, but some were more specific to a city without a sewer (as there was nowhere for waste to go). Parliament eventually acted when the stench of the Thames got so bad that it was noticeable during its sessions.
I also love how Hugo is both really enthusiastic about sewers (he is choosing to write about them, after all) and really judgmental about them. He seems to say: “really? We’re spending this much on sewers?” While he is arguing that the waste that goes through sewers is valuable, he also seems to realize that his topic of choice here is a bit unorthodox, thus pointing out that this wealth could be spent on vague “splendors” instead. What these “splendors” are, of course, seem concrete – feeding the people by using manure to fertilize fields – but this aspect of the digression might have helped him appeal to middle- or upper-class audiences.
And of course, the link to Rome serves as a warning of the urgency of this issue. Rome was linked to greatness, but also to collapse; the Roman Empire fell, and Hugo’s implying that France could face the same fate without sewer reform.
The contrast is striking: from the beautiful and romanticized deaths to the inventive escape, and then to profound reflections on the utility of human faeces. Here we find ourselves in the sewers, surrounded mostly by that. Hugo laments how Parisians squander this resource by discarding it into the sea instead of utilizing it as fertilizer.
Some years back, I translated Vaclav Smil's book on energy and civilization, so I'm afraid I know more about fertilizers than I'd like. In short, using human waste directly as fertilizer isn't a great idea. It can contaminate the soil and pollute it with alkali and salt. Additionally, its nitrogen content is quite low. That's why Europeans paid a premium “to collect the dung of petrels and penguins,” to be precise, to collect guano from islands like Ichaboe—during Hugo's time, more than 300,000 tonnes of guano were exported from there, as it contained a much higher percentage of nitrogen.
And it’s so amusing to read that “Parisian guano being the richest of all.” But I’m afraid, it was not rich enough in terms of nitrogen content.
Nevertheless, the last few paragraphs describing "Paris beneath another Paris" are enthralling. The subterranean world of sewers with its own streets, squares, and crossroads—it's both organic, like coral, and artificial, akin to a city or a man-made labyrinth. This bleak depiction slightly echoes the digression about mines and miners, although that focused on intellectual and moral subversion rather than material mines. But it still feels as if there is a connection between sewers and mines.
Brickclub 5.2.1 “The Earth Impoverished by the Sea”
I’ve gotten used to it, but I think it’s worth taking a moment to just kind of sit and marvel at the transition here. Most perfect death scene in literature --> by the way Valjean spent all this time walking between bullets half-hoping one would hit him and now he’s rescued Marius --> HAVE YOU CONSIDERED WE’RE WASTING HUMAN EXCREMENT??
I do really appreciate the push towards notions of sustainability here, though Hugo is (understandably!) lacking on some of the finer points of epidemiology. I don’t know much about the purification of sewage for fertilizer; I know it’s very, VERY necessary to do it properly before a thing like this could work without causing a bunch of deadly outbreaks of things. He knows enough to worry about cholera in the drinking water, but I don’t think he really grasps that soil pollutants aren’t that different.
(Unfortunately, just killing microbes doesn’t seem to be enough anymore. I don’t know much about it, but I was reading recently about chemical contaminants in sewage that seem to be making implementing this whole fertilizer thing in current conditions actually pretty catastrophically bad.)
But anyway! I do love this push towards conservation of resources and sustainable agriculture, especially from a century and culture that tended to have a take-and-take-and-take mentality towards the world’s resources, and I’m not going to dock (many) points from Hugo for not having anticipated PFAS.
And, of course, it’s also just a big metaphor that’s calling bullshit on the idea of conceptualizing anything or anyone as useless waste. When he talks about Paris throwing five million a year into the sea, he means money--but the way it’s phrased he could mean people, and at some level, he does. The subterranean maze of the sewer is mines and miners all over again; we’re meant to recognize in this image the idea that some of the most important things happening right now are working underground and out of sight. We’re meant to remember that last time we saw this image, it was about humans.
Sewage as a metaphor for people has some serious and obvious pitfalls, but as a metaphor for how some people are treated and regarded by society, Hugo does have a point.
I’m trying to decide how okay I am with that metaphor, given that the read that says “some shunned and disregarded people are actually very useful, in their own way!” is really very bad. I think the more sensible reading is more like “some people are treated like shit--and even shit shouldn’t be treated like shit, so it’s horrific that people are.”
Even so, I have some qualms about the instrumentalization here. ”We should care about people because even the most disregarded could, with better care, be useful to society! Consider the nettle!” is... also troubling. People aren’t obligated to be of use to society to justify their existence, society should be obligated to be of use to people--all the people!--to justify *its* existence.
But we’ve come to the last big digression and one of the central metaphors of the book: the idea that society is fundamentally structured to treat some people as useless waste to be flushed away and disposed of somewhere out of sight--the way Valjean was, the way Fantine was, the way the nuns in the convent were, the way Eponine and Gavroche were, and even the Amis, with their invisible funerals, now have been. He’s appealing to economy rather than sympathy at the moment--but in his defense, he’s spent the rest of the book appealing to sympathy. His point is, this has been going on for centuries and it needs to end, now.
And he’s right.
V.ii.1 La terre appauvrie par la mer
Which is your favorite translation of this chapter title?
The Earth Impoverished by the Sea
The Land Impoverished by the Sea
Land Impoverished By the Sea
Round 1, Matchup 39: I.v.3 vs V.ii.5
Which chapter title do you prefer?
Money Deposited with Laffitte
The Land Impoverished by the Sea