Akila Apart City 
It entered Paris from the south, skirted the Butte-aux-Cailles, crossed the 13th and met the Seine near the Gare d'Austerlitz. It gave a district its smell, gave streets their names, and disappeared so completely that most Parisians do not know it existed.
A country river
The Bièvre rises in the Yvelines and runs some thirty kilometres before reaching Paris. Its name is thought to come from the beaver, bebros in Gaulish, which lived on its banks.
Until the Middle Ages it was a river of meadows and mills, outside the walls. Abbeys built corn mills on it. The water was clear and there was fishing.
Then came the water trades. Tanners, leather-dressers, laundresses and dyers settled on its banks, because they needed a current to rinse and carry away. By the fifteenth century there were many. In the seventeenth the Gobelins manufactory, which dyed the wool for the royal tapestries, set up on its banks and emptied its dye baths into it.
An open sewer
Tanning used lime, tanbark, animal dung and a great deal of water. Dyeing used metallic mordants. All of it went back into the river.
By the nineteenth century the Bièvre was a cesspit. Contemporary descriptions agree and are not pleasant: black, thick water that changed colour according to what the Gobelins had dyed that day, and a smell that carried. The surrounding district, between rue Mouffetard and the Butte-aux-Cailles, was among the poorest and unhealthiest in Paris.
That is where, by a widespread etymology, the name of rue Mouffetard comes from: mouffette, a stench. The derivation is disputed, but it fits the place so well that it has survived every correction.
The cholera epidemics of 1832 and 1849 hit these streets hard. The Bièvre was named as the culprit.
The culverting
The work was done in sections from the 1860s and completed in 1912: the Paris stretch of the Bièvre was entirely covered and diverted into the sewer network. It no longer reaches the Seine in the open; it arrives through a drain.
Writers protested, Huysmans among them, who described her as a beggar being hidden away. Public hygiene won, and it is hard to fault it: the district stopped dying of cholera.
The quarter changed face in a generation. The tanneries closed or moved, the lanes were cut through, apartment blocks replaced workshops. All that is left are street names and inexplicable curves in the plan.
Following its line today
It is a walk for anyone who enjoys reading a city. The river has gone, but the relief and the plot boundaries remember it.
- Rue de Bièvre, in the 5th, between place Maubert and the quay: it led to one of the old arms.
- Rue Croulebarbe and square René-Le-Gall, in the 13th: the square occupies a former island in the Bièvre, and its slope is the valley.
- Rue des Gobelins and the manufactory, still working, which can be visited.
- Passage Moret and the last surviving tannery buildings around rue des Cinq-Diamants.
- Bronze studs and markers set by the City trace the line in the pavement at points.
Everywhere, look for streets that drop for no apparent reason: that is the valley.
A possible return
Since the 2000s stretches upstream, in the Essonne and Val-de-Marne, have been reopened and the river runs in the open again over several kilometres. Water quality has improved markedly.
In Paris itself the idea comes back regularly. It runs into a simple difficulty: the river is now a sewer collector integrated into the network, and under the old bed lie a century of métro, car parks and utilities. Reopening the Bièvre in Paris is not a matter of lifting a lid.
Partial works have nonetheless appeared in the 13th, where a thread of water has been brought back into a public garden. It is little, and it is something.
Frequently asked questions
Where did the Bièvre flow in Paris?
It entered through the south of the 13th arrondissement, skirted the Butte-aux-Cailles and the Gobelins district, and joined the Seine near the present Gare d'Austerlitz.
Why was the Bièvre buried?
For public health reasons. Discharges from tanneries and dye works had made it an open sewer, blamed during the cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century. Culverting was completed in 1912.
Does the Bièvre still flow?
Yes, upstream of Paris, where several stretches have been reopened in the open air since the 2000s. Within Paris it is part of the sewer network.
Can you see the Bièvre anywhere in Paris?
Not the river itself. You follow its line through street names, the relief, some pavement markers and a reinstated thread of water in the 13th.