Travelers' Tales Paris (16 page)

LOREN RHOADS

O
SSUARY
,
FROM THE
L
ATIN FOR BONES, MEANS A CONTAINER OR
vault for the remains of the dead. A friend who'd lived in Paris had placed the Municipal Ossuary, the Paris Catacombs, on our must-see list. I wasn't entirely convinced. As much as I loved the busy, funereal jumble of Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the Paris Catacombs would be an encounter with death of a more embodied nature. I'd never seen a defleshed human skull before, never confronted the harsh reality of our interior structures. Death had come and gone from Père-Lachaise; in the catacombs, death lingered. Despite my curiosity, I was in no hurry to look the grave in the eye—such eyes as it had.

However, Paris during the Gulf War was bitter cold and increasingly menacing. While my husband and I had heard from
friends about the anti-American protests in Barcelona, the propriety of the
International Herald Tribune
had shielded us from the war's reality. Several days into our trip, we stepped out of the medieval splendor of the Musée de Cluny to find police cars and paddy wagons lining Boulevard Saint Michel. The sidewalks stretched away, ominously vacant. Turning a corner to escape, I stopped short in front of the dripping muzzle of a water cannon. The police had tested it in anticipation of the protest march.

Mason and I decided to avoid the Left Bank for a while. Our solution was to go underground.

For centuries, Christian philosophy taught that the soul was fundamental and the body mere dross, to be discarded. Simultaneously, the Church preached of the bodily resurrection. When the trumpet sounded on the final day, the dead would rise out of their graves to be judged. Bodiless spirits could not rise. Therefore, bodies could not be cremated or otherwise destroyed. They had to be buried, preferably in hallowed ground. Of course, such an interment required a donation to the church. Aristocrats and wealthy merchants might purchase coveted space inside the sanctuaries, but everyone else squeezed into the churchyards. The clergy were not eager to part with a guaranteed source of income by condoning burial in just any old place.

Unfortunately, the dead piled up faster than churches could be built.

The Cimetière des Innocents (near Les Halles) served as Paris's chief graveyard since the Middle Ages. For over 500 years, corpses were laid cheek by jowl in 30-foot pits, then blanketed thinly with earth. Cadavers were stacked layer upon layer, until they filled the graves. An estimated 2,000 bodies were interred there each year. Five hundred times 2,000...my mind boggled.

The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, glutted with corpses, inspired a theme in medieval art that found its highest expression in the woodcuts of Hans Holbein the Younger. The first known
Danse Macabre
was painted as a mural on the surrounding walls in 1424. The
Danse Macabre
, or Dance of Death, depicted the equality of all humanity before Death. Rank, wealth, and privilege offered no protection. Death, personified as a gaunt, anonymous corpse, always led his chosen victim away. In one of the earliest Parisian illustrated books, woodcuts thought to have been based on the Holy Innocents' murals show Death emasculated and naked, his abdomen yawning open upon shadows.

The origins of the word
catacomb
are uncertain. Linguists suggest it comes from the Greek
kata kumbas
, which means near the low place. It's unclear why this Greek phrase became attached to a district in Rome where, in the 2nd century A.D., Christians buried
their dead. Now the word is applied to any underground burial place.

The catacombs of Paris began as a network of quarries beneath the city. They provided stone to rebuild Paris according to Baron Haussmann's plan. After they'd been mined, the tunnels stood empty and unused.

Concurrent with the reconstruction of Paris in the 1780s, a movement gained momentum to clean out the old churchyards. The Revolution had loosened the grip of the Catholic Church in France. With Reason as the new philosophy, people questioned the Church's system of mass graves.

Accounts of the period speak of pestilential hellholes, jammed with liquefying cadavers. One report claimed that the notorious Cimetière des Innocents broke through an adjoining wall to spill corpses into an apartment building. Fearing epidemics, the city fathers voted to excavate the Parisian graveyards.

Beginning at dusk, charnel pits around Paris were emptied out by bonfire light. It was impossible even to consider individualizing the remains. The bones, loaded respectfully onto carts, were followed to the underground quarry by priests chanting the funeral service.

In 1786, once the ossuary was full, the Archbishop of Paris consecrated the residues of approximately five million people. Among the now-anonymous dead were Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry; Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's girlfriend; alchemist, spy, and reputed immortal Saint Germain; the philosopher of the Enlightenment, Montessqieu; Mirabeau, who advocated constitutional monarchy and whose corpse was ejected from the Panthéon; Danton, who participated in storming the Bastille and was guillotined during the Reign of Terror; Robespierre, who engineered the Reign of Terror and became its prey; and numberless victims of the guillotine.

In 1874, the Municipal Ossuary opened to viewers, including Bismarck and Napoleon III.

“Come, people of the world!” I imagined a barker calling. “Step right up. Here is the Greatest of Masters!” Who wouldn't be tempted to pay the admission and take a look? The more I considered the exploration before me, the more my curiosity increased. What could possibly be down there?

A spiral staircase of stone wound down and down and down until it reached a path paved with dressed stone and edged with pebbles. The stone was a buttery yellow, warmed by bare light bulbs on the arcing ceiling. I couldn't touch the sides of the tunnel when I stretched out my hands, but I didn't reach up to measure the short distance overhead. A sign said we were twenty meters below the streets of Paris, deeper than the Métro. Thank goodness Paris isn't prone to earthquakes.

My guidebook recommended keeping close to a tour group, as the tunnels stretch for miles. It related a cautionary tale about a Parisian who went downstairs to check his wine cellar and took a wrong turn. Seven years later, he was discovered, mummified.

Permanent Parisians
, a guide to the dead in Paris, said there were no catacomb tours and you were on your own. It suggested you take a flashlight. I wondered if a ball of string was in order, too.

As we discussed the discrepancy, my husband turned a corner to find a large tour group blocking the tunnel ahead of us. The guide talked interminably in French about the composition of the rock, the excavation of the tunnels, the quarriers themselves. While the quarry is historically significant, in terms of the architecture of modern Paris, that wasn't nearly so interesting as death.

A child of eight, bored by the lecture, started crawling up the side of the cavern where the group clustered. The soft rock crumbled and shifted under his feet. My sleeping claustrophobia instantly
burned white hot. If he caused a cave-in, I thought, I'd drag my broken body through the rubble and...The boy's father persuaded him to stop fooling around, averting multiple catastrophes.

Some Germans pushed forward through the crowd. The guide blathered on without stopping them, so Mason and I followed.

We found a pair of niches carved with miniature cityscapes.
Permanent Parisians
said that the stonemason who sculpted them had been a prisoner in the city they represented. After he finished the carving, he tried to cut steps down from the street so the public could view his masterpiece. The stairway excavation caused a cave-in. The story, surely romanticized, said that he died with his chisel in hand.

Next we came upon steps down to a well of perfectly clear water. Though the stone stairs looked sturdy enough, an iron gate blocked them off. A plaque said that the quarrymen used to drink the water. They called the well Samaritaine, after the woman Jesus met at the well. I wondered if this well had any connection to the department store. We could only look down into the shimmering water from what seemed like a balcony.

Eventually we reached a doorway, the first since we'd come underground. Wooden obelisks, painted white and black, flanked yawning darkness. Above the lintel, a sign warned, “
Arrêtez. C'est ici l'empire de la mort
.” Stop. Beyond this is Death's Kingdom.

The warning had frightened away the Nazis, who never discovered the French Resistance, hiding in the catacombs after August 1944. Right beneath the Parisian streets, the Resistance had concealed a radio capable of reaching London. They worked in the tunnels until the liberators came. How terrifying could the Kingdom of Death be?

We paused outside the doorway, while I gathered my courage. Taking my husband's hand, I stepped through the portal, into the empire of Death.

Inside, the brown knobs of fibulas and femurs stacked higher than our heads. Skulls formed contrasting lines among the leg bones, a decorative motif. The round domed craniums were naked and sad. Empty eye sockets gazed patiently at us.

Bone upon bone upon bone. The sheer number of these anonymous
memento mori
was staggering. I had trouble grasping the concept of 5 million skulls, 10 million shin bones, 60 million ribs.... If a human body has 206 bones, there must be over a billion bones stacked in the catacomb tunnels, assuming, that is, that the gravediggers found everything. I imagined some
bourgeoise
matron trying to gather herself together after the Trump of Doom sounded. The hipbone's connected to the backbone.... Which one of these backbones is mine?

Now that I thought of it, I wondered where the remainders of the skeletons lay. I expected to stroll past towers of hipbones and stacks of shoulder blades. Instead, we saw nothing but skulls and long bones. Everything else must have been tucked away. I stopped in the midst of a passage so narrow my elbows could have touched bones on either side. The caverns must have been enormous before these mortal remains filled them.