May 14, 2006B
By Steve Levin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PARIS -- I like offbeat tourist sites. Always have. In Calcutta, it was the infamous Black Hole. In Tel Aviv, it was the site of the Altalena Affair. In the Bavarian Alps it was Das Kehlsteinhaus, Hitler's Eagle Nest. That's why I wanted to see the "les carrieres de Paris," the city's burial "quarries," or catacombs, when my wife and I visited in January.
I can enjoy the Eiffel Tower, the Orsay Museum and the antique stores of Les Marais as much as the next person. But to me, the only antidote for a retrospective of French photographer Bernard Faucon is something along the lines of an underground cemetery. Besides, my first choice -- a walking tour of Paris' sewers -- was closed for the winter. We saved the catacombs for a day near the end of our trip when all we had planned was to visit to the Maillot Museum and to try and not break anything at the Daum crystal store. There was one caveat to the tour: My wife did not want any weird things dropping off the ceiling onto her head. It was a chance I was willing to take.
We took the Metro to the Denfert-Rochereau station in Montparnasse, and after a 10-minute search we found the nondescript entrance to the site at a small building located near the Place Denfert-Rochereau. A glass case in the entrance hall held a scale model of the catacombs. It looked like a well-organized ant farm, with perpendicular paths leading to and from various chambers.
For 5 euros each we were shown through a doorway to a narrow spiral staircase that descended dizzily to a dank, cool landing more than 60 feet below street level. A small gallery at the landing displayed some photographs and a history of the catacombs use as an ossuary, beginning in 60 B.C.E. with the open limestone rock quarries built by the Romans to the late 18th century when the quarries were first converted into subterranean mass graves.
The first bodies were brought to the quarries in 1786 from the Les Halles district of the city, where contamination from improper burials and church graveyards was spreading disease. Twilight, torch-led processions of shroud-covered wagons accompanied by priests brought the disinterred bones and rotting corpses to the quarries. By the time the transfers ended some 85 years later, about 6 million bodies lay beneath the streets of Paris in the 186 miles of tunnels.
Yet from that point we could not see a single bone. The gallery led to a dimly lit, paved passage that tottered unevenly off into the distance. There were no breaks in the yellow limestone walls. The passage smelled stale, providing the sensation of walking through a veil of old air that had last seen sunshine around the time of Julius Caesar.
That passage led to others, which turned here and there, occasionally offering views through barred doorways of bones and skulls down other alleys. Other tourists bounded past us, their conversations echoing back to us along with the flash of their digital cameras.
Our own conversation went something like this:
Wife: "Something just dripped on my head!"
Me: (giggling) "It's probably just water."
Wife: Silence.
We walked for what seemed a long time without seeing anything except more damp limestone walls until reaching a sign that read, "Arrete! C'est ici l'empire de la mort" (Stop! This is the empire of death). After that, it was wall-to-wall bones.
As we peered from one chamber down the hallway, it initially looked as if the limestone walls were studded with skulls. Upon entering the hall it became clear to us that the walls were actually piles of femur and tibia bones, neatly stacked same-side down to a height of more than 5 feet, the monotony punctuated only by skulls and barred-off passages leading to more bones and skulls.
There were no complete skeletons, no pelvic bones, no finger bones to fill in spaces like a calcium mortar or even the occasional neck bone to add context. At least not that we could see, although the dark areas stretching behind the bones could have been filled with such a potpourri.
Only 1.2 miles of the quarries' 186 miles of tunnels are open to the public. And that's likely enough. It's numbing to see millions of bones deposited neatly along thousands of feet of tunnels. If so inclined, one can touch the bones and pat the skulls. Give the laborers who deposited the bones credit for having a sense of humor; they made designs of crosses and hearts out of skulls. There are historical graffiti from the late 1700s on some walls; idiots from a more recent era have left graffiti on some skulls.
The numerous tunnels branching off the tourist path are blocked by bars, to prevent people from wandering off and suffering a fate similar to Philibert Aspairt, the doorkeeper of the Val de Grace hospital during the times of the French Revolution. He entered the catacombs alone in 1793 via a hospital staircase and was never returned.
Eleven years later, topographic workers found the remnants of his body, which, conveniently, had been gnawed to the bone by rats. They knew it was Mr. Aspairt by the set of hospital keys that remained. He was buried there.
He wasn't the only one to explore the catacombs. Victor Hugo used his knowledge of the tunnels in writing "Les Miserables." The parchment belonging to the Templars in Umberto Eco's novel "Foucault's Pendulum" was found in the catacombs. The French Resistance used the tunnel network during World War II, which was not unusual, since the Germans had established an underground bunker of their own in another area. In 2004, Paris police broke up a group that showed films in a hidden chamber of the catacombs.
A bigger worry in my mind than wandering off and disappearing or chancing upon Nazi holdouts was the possibility of roof collapses, the French answer to mine subsidence. Quaintly called "fontis" (downfalls) by the French, we saw the evidence of several during our tour, thousands of pounds of roof subsoil that had dropped to the ground and had been swept neatly aside.
By the time we had passed, oh, a million or so femurs, and had several unfiltered drops of undetermined liquid drip on us, we had picked up the pace of our self-guided tour. The only thing that slowed us down was the steep spiral staircase to the exit.
Back again into what passes as sunshine during the Paris winter, we were surprised briefly by the fact that the catacombs' exit was on a small back street far from the entrance, more than a mile to be exact.
We removed our coats and shook them vigorously, more to warm ourselves after being underground for an hour than to dislodge any catacomb critters.
|
