Paris has always had a certain charm for the millions of Americans that visit each year. For instance, It’s the city of romance, home of the Eiffel Tower. A place of deep history, of baguettes and croissants. A city of mean people, nice people. Cafes, existentialism.

How boring. I mean, Las Vegas literally has an Eiffel Tower too, and also the most convenient places to destroy your marriage. To find the real attraction of Paris, you have to dig a little deeper—below ground.

Not in the catacombs either, but in the sewers. The sewers of Paris proved to be one of the most unique, repulsive, and utterly fascinating experiences of my Bookpacking trip. For a first-time reader of Les Miserables, our excursion through the underground gave the book a profoundly cinematic feel. It became a novel I could more personally connect to, and I achieved Victor Hugo’s vision of a text that engages with the social by connecting with the individual.

The way Hugo kicks off this section of the book is already intense. In one simple sentence, he writes that “Paris pours twenty-five million a year down the drain.” Quite a lot of money even just in the abstract. But I wondered what it exactly meant to “pour” that much money down the drain—even as the section continued on, I don’t think I fully appreciated that number.

In comes my lover and my muse, Bookpackers™. When you walk through the literal pipes that Hugo talks about, the loss of money starts to make more sense. The idea that manure could be worth so much seems a bit questionable at first, but when you see the sheer depth and expansiveness of the sewer system, you suddenly understand the potential benefits that are being lost down under. You become as passionate about excrement as Hugo is.

Money is only the first lesson of this experience. Walking into the sewers, I had a frame of reference for what a good sewer should be, at least according to Hugo. He argues that “it almost realizes the ideal of what is meant in England by the word ‘respectable.’” In fact, he makes a bold claim: “It is decent and drab; well laid out.”

I’m not sure that I would use these words in 2023, but I get the premise. These sewers were logically designed, and honestly, not as gross as you’d think. It’s respectable in its efficiency, in its tangled pipework, and in its appropriate number of rats and roaches. When Hugo describes the sewers this way, it’s not that the sewers are pleasant by any means, but that they work in the way they need to, and that they are not desanitizing the outside world.

So I pretended I was Jean Valjean for a moment. I have Marius on my shoulders, and I need to wade my way through these dark, but organized tunnels. Jean Valjean’s thinking of going downstream and his paying attention to incline feels genuinely genius. It is a maze, but it is a maze with order. And that’s what makes the sewers such a great plot point.

Even Hugo says it himself, “the sludge observes a decorum.” As I watched the water rush under the grating, I saw the delicate balance. Any misdirected flow could ruin entire water supplies and contaminate our very society as a whole.

It only got more dramatic from here. Putting myself behind Jean Valjean’s eyes, I tried to imagine the panic and stoicism and distraught and success he was bombarded with. Here is a passage in particular I found especially poignant:

“His first sensation was blindness. Suddenly, he could no longer see anything. He also felt that within a moment he had become depth. He could no longer hear anything … He slipped, and realized the flagged surface was wet … A whiff of foulness signaled to him what place he was in.: (1143)

This is close to what it felt like to a modern explorer of this museum curated experience. I could see most things, fortunately, but it was dark enough to be uncomfortable. I heard the voices and groans of my classmates, but not much from above. I stepped on wet surfaces, and yes, it smelled terrible.

It smelled so terrible that I gagged a few times. Even taking a sip of water (from my water bottle!) tasted gross. And then I thought about how Jean Valjean ate Marius’ bread down there, covered in the sludge. Something about these physical sensations humbled me—Jean Valjean was really in quite the pickle. To do all of this while being submerged in the sewage with absolutely no one else is just harrowing.

It was like I was performing his character, actually. We’ve seen Les Miserables as a musical and also as a movie musical, but what about a simple dramatic film? In this sequence of events, I can imagine an actor conveying such a powerful story of resilience and justice—here in the sewers, Jean Valjean is being guided by such a strong love for his adopted daughter that he’s doing whatever it takes to make it out alive. This is arguably the most physically descriptive description of Jean Valjean we’ve gotten: a man in survival mode.

There really is something so personally touching about this. Father issues, am I right? In the claustrophobia of the sewers, you can’t not empathize with Jean Valjean. The sewer sequence became something so humanizing for me after going down there myself. It was a small fraction of what occurred in the fiction, but it’s enough to capture the grandeur of the story.

Truly, Hugo poses an important question. What are the things we hide below the surface, tucked away and unobtrusive to our daily lives? That kind of sanitation is something we take for granted, and one we count all our blessings for among going down there ourselves. In a more poetic sense, I like to think that this section of the book leaves us with an important message. Social change doesn’t just happen on the barricades or in the streets, but underground. It happens in the dark corners of the world and the uncomfortable spaces, the ones few have the bravery to enter. We can pick the easier battle, or we can pick the one that really counts—can I say that I would always choose the latter? We take our comforts in life as givens, but perhaps we need to approach the boundaries of human experience to uplift the people we love in a way that is truly everlasting.