Even Victor Hugo couldn’t run his harried hero Jean Valjean through the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables (1862) without pausing—pausing, indeed, for a whole chapter—to remark that it really would be better if some use could be found for Paris’s waste. In a section regrettably cut from the musical, Hugo outlined his plan for “a double tubular apparatus, provided with valves and sluices,” to carry it back to the fields.
