The Parisian Catacombs

There are the remains of approximately 6 million human beings resting in the tunnels beneath the streets of Paris. Under Louis XVI, with municipal cemeteries overloaded, Paris began to transfer the remains of those who had sufficiently decomposed, already in mass graves, into the long tunnels, the results of many years of quarrying stone. These are the tunnels that figure in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and have also been the hiding place for many resistance movements, most notably in World War II. Deeper than the Metro, they are also the site of frequent vandalism, and occasionally need to be closed down: there are unofficial entrances all over Paris, but the Place Denfert-Rochereau, only about a 15-minute walk north of my dorm, is the official tourist entrance. The catacombs probably extend as far as my dormitory, at least: if I dug downward from my room, I would probably find myself in the necropolis.

I visited the catacombs with Bruno the other day, and was glad I had a partner, although I will say that after seeing thousands and thousands piles of stacked femurs and skulls, several meters deep, I had become rather inured: the 72,897th felt exactly the same as the 72,896th. A relatively small portion of the galleries were open to the public; occasionally, we would catch glimpses of levels above and parallel to ours. We saw ancient well-shafts, and the high conical results of old cave-ins, named for their resemblance to church steeples (Cloches de fontis, "subsidence steeples"). There was a certain care taken in the arrangement of the bones, and the skulls were often arranged in order to form crosses and other shapes. Poems and quotation, mostly from French and Latin authors, on the nature of death and the dead, added a certain contemplative element to the display. Bruno knows Latin, and we jointly struggled through the single quote from Homer, in Ancient Greek (somehow, Homer managed to say "it is impious to scorn the dead" in just three words). Whenever a room had been filled, the city authorities would write, above the entrance "Arrête ! C'est ici l'empire de la mort, (Stop! Here is the empire of death). What is it about fear of caves and the subterranean? Throughout the journey, I was reminded of one work of fiction after the other: the end of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; "The Cask of Amontillado;" and, finally, A Passage to India.

It was a long climb down, and a long climb up, although, I suspect, shorter than the Clock Tower back home. A chilly day, we stopped at a cafe, and I had some excellent cocoa.

~JD

"Ainsi l'empereur Frederic Barberousse, en 1155-1158, manifeste son souci des ecoliers qui voyagent pour etudier et qui, de ce fait, quittent leur famille, depense beaucoup d'argent, font nombre d'efforts et s'exposent a bien des dangers" [Thus the emperor Frederic Barbarossa, in 1155-1158, showed his worry for schoolboys who went abroad for their studies, and, because of this, left their families, spent great deals of money, took great pains, and exposed themselves to many dangers] (Jean Verdon, Voyager au Moyen Age, p. 187).