STAGGERED WATER

I remember the time when doctors recommended that we filter our drinking water; it had to be sterilized, then whipped, to give it back its gases!

After which, other doctors warned us: "Do not filter your water! You remove all the ferments that help digestion! ... The bacilli of typhus, tuberculosis, angina? ... You have them all in your mouth, as well as others that decency forbids us to name. It is not the bacilli that spread diseases, it is a set of circumstances that irritate these little companions of our humanity".

So we drank a little of everything; this time, we tasted creosote. Let's be frank, it was not too unpleasant; we drink a quantity of water, very expensive, which has an even more unpleasant taste. In the most remote provinces, there are old ladies who put rusty nails in a carafe, and then drink this water; others put tar in their glass; others quassia shavings, etc.

If the City of Paris cared about taxpayers, it would qualify the water it distributes to them every day; we would know, for example, that Monday is tar day, Tuesday is sulfur day, Wednesday is iron day, Thursday is carbonic acid day, and so on; what a saving for those who are forced to drink mineral water! ...

Very recently, twenty-five pharmacists were convicted because they had made diet water with Seine water! ... Yet there is no creosote in the Seine. Will justice prosecute the Spring Water Service?

We have captured all the pretty streams within a hundred-kilometer radius, and the writers have groaned. We know that these springs are purified with bleach, and that no one complains; let us accept our creosote without complaining.