What I saw was amazing, even though I had been prepared for it by
seeing many photographs. The corridor – and a mile of corridor beyond –
was just filled with bones. They were stacked, five feet high, on
either side of the walkway. There were no complete skeletons, and
instead the bones were organized so as to be aesthetically pleasing.
Most of what you could see were femurs, all stacked one upon another
like wood in a cord. Skulls were dotted throughout, as though placed by
some skeletal Bedazzler. They formed lines of definition in the walls
of bone, they formed patterns and images -a doorway, a cross.
The sheer number of the bones were simply overwhelming. In some spots
they were stacked as shallow as two feet deep; in others they seemed to
be stacked ten or more feet. Some areas of bone stretched away from the
main tunnels. I knew from research that only this section was arranged
so precisely; the rest of the Catacombs were a jumble of bones. I had
read about modern cave explorers making their way through those
tunnels, literally scrambling across a shifting mountain of skeletons
to do so.
There is no identity for the dead in the Catacombs of Paris. There are
no name plaques or grave markers; instead there are tablets saying from
which cemetery each particular skeletal section came. And since the
bones were mixed and matched there was no coherence for the dead
either; your femur could be far away from your skull, and I don’t think
I saw any pelvises at all. On a less metaphysical level there is no
class in the Catacombs; the remains of the famous, including Marie
Antoinette, are interred here just as anonymously as those of the
lowliest pauper tossed unceremoniously in Les Innocents’ death pits. In
fact her skull and his could very well be sitting side by side,
touching at the temple for the last three centuries.
I don’t know what human bones are really supposed to feel like; these
felt like stone. I had to reach out and touch them, and as there’s no
barrier between you and the remains, I imagine I’m not the first punter
to put his grubby mitts all over somebody’s ulna. I was especially
drawn to the skulls and their texture; some of the skulls were more or
less complete while others were cracked and smashed. I saw a couple of
skulls with holes in them; were these men who had been shot in the
head, or women who had been the victims of trepanning? Or were the
holes simply the marks left behind by three hundred years of vandals? I
did see a skull with graffiti written across its forehead. Strangely,
that didn’t feel disrespectful. Maybe it was the anonymity of the
skull’s original user, or maybe it was the intriguing understanding of
death that you slowly come to as you walk through these corridors;
certainly this graffiti was more tastelessly placed than the massive
wall of graffiti that lies just beyond the exit of the Catacombs, but I
feel like the intent is the same – it’s a way of personally and
momentarily beating death. It isn’t the skull being vandalized, it’s
mortality. It’s the assertion of present life when outnumbered by
historical death.
If honesty is called for here, I have to say I’m afraid of dying.
Terrified of it. And I don’t know what scares me more – the Roman
Catholic upbringing that keeps a small bit of Hell fired up in the back
of my guilt-ridden mind or the more existential terror of my
agnostic/atheist brain that tells me when I die that’s it. No Heaven,
no Hell, no nothing. No more Devin. That I end when this body gives up,
that the flame which makes me me, that makes me unique and that has
grown and changed and learned and loved and lost over the decades of my
life will be simply snuffed out, not transferred anywhere else. I’m
pretty certain that when I die that is all – I won’t know anything more
and I won’t go anywhere else, and that scares the shit out of me. But
standing down there, in the cold and the wet amidst the remains of so
many who had gone before me, it wasn’t quite as scary.
As a society we do everything we can to keep death away. We keep it
away not only literally with advances in medicine and technology, we
keep it away mentally by packing the sick away and separating dying
from the reality of life. Anyone who becomes interested in death is
labeled as a morbid freak. The reality is that there are only two
experiences all human beings are guaranteed to have, birth and death,
and being interested in either of them couldn’t be any less sick.
What’s sick, and what makes us sick as a culture and unable to deal
with a natural aspect of our lives, is the way that we kick death out
of our homes whenever possible. We don’t keep death and the dying at
arm’s length because of respect or dignity, we do it because of fear.
And the more we keep death away, the more we fear it.
In the Catacombs death isn’t just the norm, it’s beautiful. The rows of
bones are almost breathtakingly gorgeous, and the bones themselves are
elegant and lovely, wonderful pieces of design in their own right. And
after a while they lose the power of horror and just become pieces of
art. That was the point when I finally summoned up the courage to touch
them, when they had stopped being something that belonged in the props
department of a horror movie and became something lovely and real. And
there’s something endlessly respectful about taking these bones and
arranging them so delicately; these people no longer exist, their souls
are not in some other world or pleasure or of torment. They’re gone,
and these bones are the only things left of them, and those final
remains have been put to a better purpose than being hidden away in the
ground somewhere.
And the fact that I was standing there, surrounded by these mortal remains, simply hammered home the fact that these bones are inside of me, and one day they will be all that is left of me. When that day comes all I’ll be good for is decoration, and there’s no hereafter to worry about. What I have to worry about is the herenow. Standing in the Catacombs reminds you that taking the couple of extra days and spending the couple of extra hundred dollars to go to Paris on a whim is always the right choice, because now is all you have. I won’t be able to look at the grandeur of the Louvre or marvel at the statuary of Notre Dame Cathedral from my cloud in Heaven; I have to enjoy these things now. Life is for the living, and once your life is over, you’re just another skull in the pile.
Even as I had my philosophical and theological musings, the realities
of the material world kept tugging at me. There had been a sign that
said no flash photography, but the other tourists in front of me (by
now I had encountered a melange of a couple of groups) were all using
their flashes. One woman was using a flash that strobed and which
seemed always on the verge of sending me into a seizure. My initial
photos had been coming out exceptionally poorly, so I took the lead of
these others and turned on the flash. I don’t know if I’m responsible
for the degradation of these bones at all; if so, they have millions
more, right?
those of my surroundings – the ceilings kept getting low, and I kept
getting splattered with droplets of cold roof sweat – and my
companions. I had fallen in amidst a group of French tourists, and they
reinforced what I had learned while jammed on the un-air conditioned
Metro earlier – like the stereotype says, the French do smell. These
people happened to smell like garlic slathered dog shit, and that was
in combination with the musty, stale and humid air of the crypt. The
stench was, on occasion, gag-inducing.
Finally the ossuary ended. There were some more tunnels, slowly leading
up. The path passed through a few more chambers (including the one
where a wall was emblazoned with scratched in graffiti, almost all of
it names, all of it defying mortality where it lived (so to speak)),
and then came to another staircase leading up. This one was 80 some-odd
steps, and again was tight and winding. This time I couldn’t see two
steps ahead of me, and that meant I never knew quite where I was in the
trip up. There had been a sign outside that warned the Catacombs were
not for those with heart weakness, and I could see why. By the time I
got to the top – where there was a defibrillator waiting! – I was out
of breath.
But when I breathed in the air tasted sweet. I had heard that
expression a million times and had written it off as a cliche detailing
a state of mind, not an actual olfactory concept, but it turns out that
the air can taste sweet. I breathed in deeply, enjoying the freshness
of the air of Paris, air that tasted so great in my nostrils and
replaced the musky crypt oxygen in my lungs. The exit to the Catacombs
is just as low-key as the entrance; you come out of a barely noticeable
little stone building on a quiet little side street. There is no gift
shop, nowhere to buy skull magnets or ossuary postcards. There are also
no signs telling you where the hell you are; the next day I walked by
this street and spent ten minutes just watching tourists – many of them
American – come out of the Catacombs and be baffled as to where they
were and where they had to go.
I turned towards the big street at the end of the block, figuring I
could get my bearings there. It turns out that street was the Rue
LeClerc, the street on which my hotel was located. I hadn’t just chosen
a hotel near the Catacombs, I had chosen one built right on top of
them.
It was a beautiful summer day in Paris, the most beautiful city I have
ever seen. I walked up the Rue LeClerc, the bones beneath my feet on my
mind the whole time. Later, in the Metro, I would wonder what tunnels
lay just behind the subway walls. But that would be the end of my death
tourism; a bad bit of decision-making would keep me from the world
famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery, and I would have to spend the rest of my
trip to Paris simply luxuriating in and falling in love with the
vibrant life of the city. But I don’t think my catacomb days are done:
I’m really excited to finally get to Rome and see some of those
catacombs, which date back thousands of years.
As far as I know there are no catacombs to tour in America. We just
don’t deal with death that way. And I don’t know that I would want to
see an American catacombs; there would be a gaudy gift shop at the
exit, and maybe a soft drink stand halfway through. The floors of the
Paris Catacombs were slippery because of condensation and the thinning
of the gravel at the end of the day; an American catacomb would have
covered walkways, and the bones would be behind glass. I would never be
able to reach out and touch the skull of someone who had died three or
four – or more – hundred years ago. The fear of lawsuits and the cost
of preservation would outweigh the simplicity and the immediacy of the
experience. But most of all it’s hard to imagine Americans, with their
continued superstitious attachment to the remains of the dead, allowing
bones to be stacked and arranged in works of beauty and grace. There is
no beauty and grace in American death, only pain and horror. That makes
me sad.
By the 1780s Paris had a serious corpse problem. The city had been
growing for millenia, and that meant generations upon generations of
its citizens had grown old and then died; the dead were buried in the
cemeteries around the city but space in these was limited. The
Parisians tried solving the problem the best they could – creating mass
graves, and building the cemeteries up so that some loomed ten feet
above street level, but these solutions didn’t take. The mass graves
were open pits of plague, creating illness in the wards surrounding the
burial grounds and providing feeding grounds for all sorts of vermin.
And corpses began falling out of the built up walls of the cemeteries,
leaving the rotting dead in the middle of the street. I can only
imagine the smell.
Something had to be done. In 1785 an idea
was hit upon: close the cemeteries (including the infamous and squalid
pit Les Innocents) and move all the bones underground. Paris is a city
with a secret: hundreds of miles of tunnels sit beneath the wide
avenues and tight, cobblestoned streets. There is of course the Paris
Metro, an extensive subway system, and the famous Paris sewers. But
older than both of them was a series of quarries. Started by the Romans
in BC 60, the quarries were the results of mining for limestone, of
which most of the city is built (giving Paris its distinct beige look).
Humongous amounts of limestone were quarried, and no one was keeping
track of the tunnels created by the mining; in 1776 the streets of
Paris began collapsing into the tunnels. Entire buildings went in.
Men
were sent in to explore and shore up the quarries. It soon became
obvious that these tunnels would be the perfect place to store the
bones of the millions who were buried in Paris’ many now-condemned
cemeteries. Starting in 1786, and continuing every single night for two
years, the bones of six million people were transported to the tunnels.
The bones were escorted by a priest who sang funerary songs; the
tunnels themselves were consecrated by the Archbishop of Paris. While
it took two years to move all the existing bones, bodies would keep
being brought to the catacombs for the next hundred years.
The Paris Catacombs are an integral part of the city’s history, real and imagined. The French Resistance used them to get around the city. Another kind of Resistance uses them in World War Z. They became the site of bloodshed during the 1870s, in the Paris Commune period. Vampires live in them in Anne Rice’s novels. And there’s even a movie called Catacombs, starring Pink, set there, although no film has ever shot in the actual Catacombs. Of course the Catacombs have captured the imagination of horror fans in general for decades; I first became aware of them reading Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
The Catacombs turned into a tourist attraction more or less immediately
upon their construction. Today about 1.7 kilometers of the catacombs
are open to visitors. Last week I was one of them.
I was in
London for a set visit and decided to spend a little extra time in
Europe. My original itinerary had me flying in on Thursday, seeing the
set on Friday and coming home on Saturday – that’s too much time
traveling, not enough time living. I had never been to Paris, and I was
under the impression that the Eurostar train connecting Paris and
London was reasonably priced (it is if you book three weeks in advance. Do it 7 days in advance like I did and you get raped), so I chose to visit the City of Lights.
Like all tourists, I had an agenda. But mine wasn’t to visit the art
museums or see the Eiffel Tower (although I did and it is completely
and totally worth seeing. Stunning beauty that cannot be captured in
photos or on film). Mine was to visit the dead.
To that end I
booked a hotel very near the entrance to the Paris Catacombs, which is
in the Place Denfort Rochereau, a not terribly touristy section of the
city. I had about 36 hours in Paris and, after checking in, washing up
and getting a bite to eat, I got in line for the Catacombs. You could
easily miss the spot – it’s an unassuming little black building on a
tree lined boulevard. If it wasn’t for the line outside you might never
know there was anything within.
The Catacombs let the last
person in at 4pm; there are only 200 people allowed inside at a time,
and you walk through at your own pace, so there’s no telling how long
the line will take. I lucked out, getting in line at 3pm and being the
second to last person allowed in for the day. I was in town alone, so I
had only George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London to keep me
company. Thankfully every single Parisian woman is beautiful, and I
took advantage of my hour in line to admire as many of them as
possible. One less beautiful woman actually approached me – a filthy
homeless hag, she put her cracked and yellowy hand on my beer gut and
said ‘Une bebe!’ I got trolled by the homeless in Paris.
When I
finally got in the anticipation was huge. This is a big tourist
attraction – 100,000 visit it a year – but it’s not major like the
Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. I didn’t actually know anyone who had been
to the Catacombs, and many of the web pages that talked about them were
sketchy. This was obviously the kind of attraction people visited when
they had run out of other things to do in Paris; it’s sort of telling
that this was my very first stop.
Eight Euros later, I went
through a turnstile (a turnstile at either end of the catacombs keeps
count of how many people are down there) and began descending the
stairs. There are 130 steps down, and they’re narrow, winding,
spiraling stairs. You can never see more than a few steps ahead of you,
and you begin to get dizzy making the tighter and tighter turns.
Finally the stairs end in a series of rooms; it looks like any other
museum with large, text-filled illustrations on the walls detailing the
history of the Catacombs. Some of the people who had come in ahead of
me were dilly dallying around there; I had already read up on the
Catacombs’ history and was dying to get to the main show: death.
I
left those rooms and began walking through a series of tunnels. Cramped
and low-ceilinged, these tunnels are lit by very dim lights every few
feet. There’s a sudden change from the initial chambers; it’s cooler
and damper, and the floor is now gravel laid haphazardly over slick
limestone. There were tourists in front of me, and I could hear the
voices of tourists behind me as I made my way through these tunnels.
At
first I was disappointed. Where the hell were the bones? I didn’t come
to Paris to walk through some old tunnels (and they’re old. There are
engravings on the walls marking when they the tunnels were built; the
first one I saw was 1781). But my disappointment faded away as the
tunnels got creepier and creepier. They got darker, it seemed, and they
got colder. The tunnels kept turning right and left; some branching
tunnels were closed off by metal gates. I knew that there was over 300
kilometers of these tunnels under Paris, and the only thing keeping me
from accidentally wandering into that maze was an employee keeping a
gate locked.
As I got further in creepy became actually scary.
I couldn’t see anyone in either direction, and there were no more
voices. The only sounds in the wet, chilly darkness were my feet on the
gravel, my breathing and the dripping water from the ceiling. It was
like being in a dungeon, trapped and alone. There were holes in the
walls; it was so dark I couldn’t see if they were recesses or looked
into other passageways. Either way I didn’t want to get too close – no
one had advertised this as a haunted house type attraction, but it was
too easy to imagine an arm darting out of one of them.
By now
I was getting actually scared. My jet lagged brain, which is pussified
at the best of times, was running a mile a minute – what if some
prankster had closed the gate I was supposed to walk through and opened
another one, sending me into the wrong part of the Catacombs? What if
they closed the tunnels with me still in it? And even less rationally,
how could you have the remains of six million people jumbled together
and not end up with at least one angry spirit? I’m an avid Ghost
Hunters fan, and I have to admit that half the photos I was taking were
attempts to capture the image of a ghost.
Here’s some footage
I took of myself in the Catacombs. If I had known that my Flip Mini had
such good lowlight photography, I would have used it the whole way.
Feel free to laugh at me here, I’m being pretty ridiculous.
Finally
I heard voices ahead of me again. It felt like I had been alone down
there for ages, but it was probably just three or four minutes.
Thankfully I hadn’t yet ascended to that Lou Costello stage of fear,
which is just below wetting your pants, but I think I could have made
it there with another ten minutes of quiet, solitary wandering. How do
people work down in the Catacombs? What does that do to your psyche?
I
tried to ask the next human being I saw, who happened to be a security
guard hanging around at a bend in the tunnels. This part of the
Catacombs had a couple of sculptures – models of castles or cities. I
have to admit that I have no idea what they represented or why they
were there (the explanatory plaques were all in French), but they
looked gorgeous. I approached the guard who was just chilling there in
a little plastic chair (I’m assuming to make sure tourists didn’t make
off with pieces of the sculpture), but he predictably didn’t speak any
English.
Continuing on I came to another small room, this one
with a gated off staircase leading down to a pool of brilliant blue
water. That’s the “Footbath of Quarrymen,” and it was built to allow
some access to water for the workers (I think. All this info was in
French. I’m doing my best here). Still no bones, but I finally felt
like I was getting somewhere.
And indeed I was. It even darker
in the next chamber, and there was another guard sort of hanging
around. I saw a doorway but could not see anything through it; above
the doorway was an ancient sign that read:
ARRETE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT
Stop! This is the Empire of the Dead
Now that’s how you label a doorway. I stepped through.
