THE FLOODS AT TOULOUSE.
IT is difficult for Englishmen who have never quitted their own country to imagine what a great flood is, to comprehend the destruction a river can inflict, and above all, to realise the special horror, a horror like that caused by an earthquake, which water can inspire in those who suffer from its ravages. In this island, it may be stated broadly, the true fear of nature, as of a capricious or even malefic power, which has affected the creed and even the tempera- ment of so many nations, and which, in the East, is an ever-present cause of melancholia, has never been generated, for nothing exists to generate it. We abuse our climate habitually, but it is the least catastrophic in the world. England has been visited by pestilences, by the potato-disease, by great fires, and by terrible casualties, like the bursting of the Holmfirth reservoir ; but it has never, since the Norman Conquest, seen a drought sufficient to cause a true famine,—a famine such as that of Asia Minor, in which half a population may perish. It has never in historic times been visited by an earthquake severe enough to destroy a city. It possesses no record of a storm destructive enough to be considered anational calamity. Audit has never, that we can recall, been visited by a natural flood of the first magnitude. Indeed, unless one of the Westmorland Lakes should burst—an impossibility—the materials for a first-class flood are not stored up in England anywhere. There is no mountain range in Britain on which the snow lies in masses from year to year. or on which the mass of snow is large enough to make its speedy melting dangerous to the valleys. When the waters are " out " here, damage enough is done, but it is damage to crops and property, slow damage, damage from too much water rather than from a flood. The water seems to well up, and gradually submerge everything, rather than rush like a torrent, sweeping away houses, trees, and the very surface of the earth itself. People are drowned now and again in little valleys where a ' burn ' becomes a torrent, but a great flood is an almost impos- sible event. In France, on the contrary, superior as her climate is in ordinary times, severe drought has once or twice occurred, the storms, though not quite of Asiatic proportions, can work terrible destruction among the crops, and some of her most glorious valleys are overhung by potential reservoirs, which may and do burst at intervals. The valley of the Garonne, for instance, perhaps, all circumstances taken into account, the richest in the world except the valley of the Thames, is dominated by such a reservoir, the masses of snow which accumulate on the upper heights of the Pyrenees. In ordinary times this snow melts gradually and trickles down in hundreds of rivulets over a granite soil which absorbs nothing to the larger streams, which fill the two rivers that unite a short distance from Toulouse into the Garonne, and make the prosperity of the rich surrounding plain. When, however, from any cause the snow melts too rapidly, as is believed to have occurred this year, the heat and the rainfall having been both unusually great and lasting for three weeks on end, the channels cannot convey the water, which rushes in broad torrents to the streams, which again, owing to some configu- ration of the soil, cannot carry away the unwonted mass of fluid. The water collects into a lake, sometimes miles in
length and breadth, and forty feet deep, a veritable reservoir ; and then bursts through the open mouths left by the rivers into the valley of the Garonne, with as resistless a force as the great Sheffield reservoir burst into the little vale below it. The Garonne fills and fills till it overtops its lower bank, and then as the supply increases hourly, its sweep over the lower ground becomes as resistless as that of a slow storm-wave. The effect is not quite so scenic, because of its gradual approach ; but the Garonne must have rushed over St. Cyprien, bringing a mass of water equal to that contained in a reservoir twenty miles long by ten wide and thirty-eight feet deep. The guarder of St. Cyprien lies, as poor quartiers are apt to do, on the lower side of the river, but it was considered from long experience safe enough. The people were flooded every twenty years, but they were not often killed, and they bore the inconvenience, as people bear all moderate calamities caused by nature, in consideration of low rents, and never dreamt of a flood which might sweep their faubourg totally away. This year, however, heat, rainfall, and wind seem all to have united ; the Garonne on June 23 was overfilled in an hour, and in six hours the upper valley had been turned into a bursting lake, and a flood which, like an earthquake, makes its victims think the laws of nature are overturned, and that there is no help even in Heaven, came rushing towards the city.
Within six hours of the first alarm of an unusual rise in the water, the Garonne had swept away every bridge of Toulouse except one, the old stone bridge of St. John, and flowing in an unbroken rush into St. Cyprien, rose above the streets so rapidly that the terrified inhabitants were compelled to take refuge in the upper stories. Scores of persons appear to have been strangled by the flood—all the slaughterers in the great abattoir, for example, being killed at once —but the great loss of life arose from another cause, which recalled the idea of earthquake to the wretched people. The rushing water felled the weaker houses as giant shells would have done, and under- mined the foundations of the stronger, till through one entire night, houses were toppling as in an earthquake, and the awful scenes at and around Cucuta, in New Granada, on May 18, when 16,000 persons perished at once by earthquake, were repeated in Languedoc. Escape, if the houses once shook, was, of course, hopeless. There were the walls above and the water below, and a stream outside in which a boat could scarcely live. Nearly 1,000 persons are known to have been killed in St. Cyprien alone by the falling houses, trees, and monuments, or to have been drowned in escaping from upper stories, or capsized in boats which put out into the streets to rescue the sufferers,—sometimes, to the credit of human nature be it spoken, if not of human reason, with a priest on board to give absolution to the dying as they swept past. The flood seems, in fact, like war, to have brought out the strongest feelings of those attacked, and French papers are full of stories of acts of heroism performed by individuals, and of explosions of class dislike—the workmen stoning the gentry who went to see the scene—and of instances of mania produced by fear. The villages beyond Toulouse, and presumably on lower ground, were in some instances swept away bodily, the church, in one instance, being the only building left standing, and in another, a mill, so injured that it must be blown up. The ravages extended over more than 100 miles, and at one time fears were entertained for Bordeaux itself. The destruction of property is, of course, greater than that of life. Neither vineyards nor houses can run away. The quartier of St. Cyprien, with its 30,000 people, has, in the words of the official report, "ceased to exist," and its whole population is houseless, without furniture, clothes, or food. In St. Cyprien and the villages 100,000 persons are believed to be destitute. The crops over hundreds of square miles have been de- stroyed, and in many places the very ground has been swept away. It is calculated that the actual loss in cash exceeds four millions sterling, and that years must elapse before the suffering districts can again resume their old appearance. Of course, the Government is doing what it can, but beyond displaying an energy, often misdirected, in blowing up dangerous buildings, compelling the people to observe order, and feeding them, even the Government is almost powerless. Even the State cannot re- store to the people all they have lost, and it is by no means cer- tain that it can prevent similar disasters for the future. It is doubtful whether the most obvious expedient—the excavation of an overspill canal, specially to carry off surplus water—would be either sufficient or possible. The arrival of the flood is so rapid, the mass of water so vast, the formation of a lake in the low land between the slopes and the bed of the river so instantaneous, that any canal it would be feasible to cut might on the next recurrence of the fatality, so to speak, be drowned by the advancing wave, as the Garonne was itself. It is thought that by greatly deepening the channel of the Garonne, beyond the confluence of the mountain streams, aid might be afforded ; but that device, though most beneficial against an ordinary rise of the waters, would be worthless against a flood of this kind, while a dyke, even if it could be constructed, would not be a safe reliance. A dyke against ever-present water may be a perfect defence, but a dyke against a flood which comes in its highest fury only once a century, and in a dangerous form only once in twenty years, is pretty certain to be neglected. If the boats of a ship were always required they would always be ready, but being wanted only in extremity, even- the fear of death, of ruin, and of lost reputation, does not suffice to compel ship-captains to keep them in order. Planting the slopes makes the channels deeper and the rains more regular, but the expedient is a slow one, and requires determined attention, which even Governments become in the end unwilling to pay. The expropriation of the most dangerous places by the State or the Municipality is the most certain expedient, though no doubt it increases greatly the ten- dency to crowding on the higher lands, the inconvenience of a daily walk from a distance completely conquering the dread of a disease, and even the annoyance of high rents. We doubt, when the first agitation is over, whether a suffi- cient remedy will be attempted, or whether the State will set itself to do more than preserve life. That, however, is certainly within its power. It must be within the means of a city like Toulouse to keep up a system of watchers during the dangerous three months of the year, to record the presages of severe floods, and to keep the citizens warned by telegraph when the symptoms are becoming threatening. Indeed, General Nansouty already devotes himself to this work, residing in an observatory which he has built on the Pic du Midi; but he requires telegraphic communication with the plains. The rainfall can be measured, the heat recorded, and the volume of water pour- ing from the mountains be observed. This is the most severe and the most sudden flood of the century, but the loss of life even in this instance would have been averted by three hours' warning. In England such a warning would be partially useless, for the people would not quit their homes or abandon their property ; but in France, an official order can be supported by troops and carried out without resistance. St. Cyprien will be pulled down under official orders, and the authorities who are powerful enough to complete the destruction caused by the water are strong enough to enforce any reasonable precautions against its fury. All experience, however, shows that men learn nothing from these catastrophic calamities, that unless a misfortune recurs at regular periods, it does not convince men's minds that it must return, and that the majority succeed in forgetting the eruption, or the earthquake, or the flood, as they succeed in forgetting death. They would not forget death for a day, if all the deaths of the year occurred on the shortest day.
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