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Introduction

Louis XIII had the imposing Bicêtre hospital ap-hp built for “soldiers crippled in the army”. Louis XIV converted it into a “hospice for poor beggars, a prison for the insane and a prison for swindlers and the most shameful class of libertines”. Under Louis XV, the establishment served as an asylum for nearly six thousand disinherited or disabled people.

In search of water

Two comfort elements were sorely lacking in Bicêtre: it lacked a water supply and a means of evacuating liquids from the vast estate. They began with the construction of a monumental water well that was admired by its contemporaries. Built from 1733 to 1735 to the designs of Boffrand, a great architect and first engineer of Bridges and Roads of France, it then served as a model for many other achievements of this type in the kingdom or in other countries.

Its depth is 57 meters and its diameter in the work is 5.20 meters. It has a useful height of 3 meters of water; this well is inexhaustible, because its base was dug in the coarse limestone where the water table and many springs are located. A platform 2 metres wide around its entire circumference was dug into the masonry, 4 metres above the water level, to allow workers to work and store the materials needed for its maintenance and repairs. In the centre, an imposing piece of machinery, revolutionary for the time, was used to draw water. A merry-go-round, powered by four to eight horses depending on the needs, brought up impressive buckets with a capacity of nearly 270 litres.

No doubt anxious to make the best use of an abundant workforce available, the administration of the Bicêtre ap-hp hospital replaced the horses for a time with prisoners or insane people from Bicêtre; seventy-two were needed to move the enormous winch. 140 cubic metres of water were drawn daily to be poured into a reservoir with a capacity of 1,100 cubic metres, built behind the well.

Getting rid of corrupted waters

The evacuation of waste water presented immense difficulties.

Initially, the riverside owners, the industrialists operating along the watercourse, as well as the Gobelins factory itself, expressed numerous complaints about the discharge of polluted flows into the Bièvre. After years of discussions, the hospital administration decided, in 1783, to eliminate the dirty water in the vast abandoned underground quarries under Bicêtre.

It therefore acquired two immense quarries a few hundred meters from the hospice, which it connected together by an aqueduct 2 meters wide and 32 meters long. Before evacuating the water into these underground passages, it was necessary to consolidate their roofs and walls; to this end, Charles François Viel de Saint-Maux, architect of the general hospital from 1784 to 1789, had solid millstone masonry built. The quarry floor was also dug to create a well 2 metres in diameter and 13 metres deep to provide plenty of water. Five wells were drilled to allow air to be renewed in the galleries.

The Bicêtre sewer operated for several decades without any major problems, but the infiltration of infected water into the ground and ultimately into the water table could only cause serious damage in the long run.

Thus, the wells in the neighbouring commune of Gentilly were contaminated, and a report from 1833 confirmed that “bacteria, probably from urine, were present in the water of several wells in the commune, making it unfit for domestic use”.