CATACOMBS

Yeah!

I have paid 5 euro for an hour of wifi useage at the beautiful Charles de Gaulle airport. Even in spite of some routine mishaps I arrived 3 hours early for my flight, due to the unexpected express train I got on. It is very nice to be here, after dreaming of this moment during the whole long day of being locked out of my house and just wishing I were at home in my boring-ass town.

In other news, yesterday I went to the CATACOMBS!!!!!!!

It was so badass. I loved it. I have rad pictures to post but I don’t want to right now. I went down under the ground and saw the bones of a thousand years piled up in arcane shapes. I laid my hand upon a skull. I saw a Roman aquaduct. I touched the plaques carved by a hand over 200 years ago. I walked through the doorway over which was inscribed in French “STOP: THIS IS THE KINGDOM OF DEATH.” I heard a British girl yell “OY! FACKIN’ HELL TOSSER” at her boyfriend who had accidentally tripped her, and who then called her a “slapper.” It was like people from a Guy Ritchie movie were needing to kill time before a jewel heist or something.
do you want to hear about the catacombs? Their history, I mean. It is an amazing story, and I have an hour to kill.

I learned this story from reading Graham Robb’s incredibly good book “Parisians: An Adventure History.” Everything I am about to tell you is true, and yet, Robb claims that he has not seen mention of this origin story in any document since almost 200 years ago. The people of Paris have forgotten this story??? But you will see how much it affects them. But maybe it is better to forget.

THE STORY OF THE CATACOMBS:

In 1734 at the southernmost entrance to the city of Paris, people were waiting in line to go through customs and pay taxes on all the stuff they were going to sell at market that day, when suddenly an entire street of the city disappeared. The people described it as one moment they were looking at a row of houses, and the next moment they were looking at the row of houses behind that row. It took a few moments to realize that the ground had opened up all at once and swallowed everything. Panic ensued, no doubt apocalypse-based. The King’s architect was sent for. He got lowered down on a rope and discovered that underneath the street there was a vast, echoing cavern. What on earth??? He took some masons down there, and, working by dangling from ropes (!), they chucked some stone up against the walls and shored it up and washed their hands of the whole affair. Also I should add that the street that fell into the pit? It was called “rue de l’Enfer,” STREET OF HELL. True story!
A couple years later the new inspector of quarries, a guy named Guillaumot (these details and the spelling of his name are possibly wrong, as I am too lazy to get the book and check), was taking a trip out to this very spot in order to do a routine check on the shoring-up of the other guy when suddenly there was a huge commotion in the street and people were freaking out. He got out and realized that an additional section of street–close to the rue de l’enfer but not in the same exact spot–had fallen into a pit. Oh the people of Paris! Already so stressed out by the stench and shit and human decomposition filling their city, now they have to worry about literally Hell being right beneath them? What do you want from us, oh Lord?? Guillaumot looks down into this new pit and then looks up and realizes he can see Notre Dame from where he’s standing. Suddenly the full import of the situation is clear to everyone.

The King freaks out, understandably, and gives Guillaumot carte-blanche (as we say in France, HA HA) to do whatever needs to be done. Guillaumot is stoked, because secretly he is a real artist, or artise. He doesn’t really want to spend his time inspecting quarries. He wants to build and make. So he’s like, “I’m not gonna just stick up some new bracing walls, I’m gonna go down there and find out what’s up.” He goes down with a team of dudes, into the new pit, and what he finds is FUCKING AMAZING:

Basically he finds an enormous (and enormously tangled/complex) series of tunnels and huge caverns that run underneath almost the entire city of Paris. And slowly he realizes that they had been made by countless generations of overlapping civilizations, mining for limestone. Ancient Parisians went down there and pulled up the limestone that built Notre Dame. Before them, Romans! Romans built their temples with limestone from down here too! And before them, weird ancient Gaulish peoples he knows nothing about. Each successive set of limestone quarrymen has hollowed out huge spaces beneath the earth–probably at their time these quarries were far outside the city limits, is the point–and when they came upon the emptied-out quarries of previous civilizations they just seemed to have sort of shrugged and tunneled around and gone off in another direction.

He finds Roman coins, a broken bust of Caesar, weird stuff no one’s ever seen before. He finds fossilized seashells and realizes that Paris was once at the bottom of the ocean. Rumors spread that there are vampires down there.

He realizes that all the past eons’ worth of miners have just sort thrown rubble limestone up into these teetering columns at strategic places, to hold up the roof. He realizes that this “roof” is now the streets of Paris. He’s down there listening to carriages rumbling by above his head. He’s like “holy shit.”

So then he spends THIRTY YEARS down there, making his masterpiece. He clears out all the tunnels and all the caverns, and shores up every wall with good solid smooth rock. He makes it a little fancy, even, with cathedral ceilings, and periodically he carves the date and his initials into the wall to mark the progress of the work. He makes the tunnels correspond to the streets above, so that theoretically you could walk the exact same path (“Take the rue Montorgueil to the rue Etienne Marcel, turn left,” etc. etc.) except UNDERGROUND. He has plaques carved with the street names that the tunnels correspond to.

He finds a section of a Roman aquaduct and FIXES IT UP so that it brings fresh water to a whole neighborhood of Paris.

Periodically there are new cave-ins and he goes and incorporates the new pits into his master plan. The people of Paris slowly forget he’s down there. BUT THEN, one day, the people in some outlying neighborhood wake up after a particularly hard rain to find that their cellars are full of dead people.

This is a true crisis–not only disease but vampires and various religious issues involving consecrated ground–so they call Guillaumot, who goes down into the tunnel and pit system underneath that neighborhood and finds that the graveyard–one of the oldest in the city, so, really goddamn old–has like SWELLED and finally BURST through the limestone underneath the ground. Over the past 1100 years or so, they kept stuffing bodies in there, and you know after a few centuries the first couple rounds of bodies/coffins/headstones have disappeared or moved around, so nobody realized how jam-packed things were getting in there.
Guillaumot has this crazy idea. So for months and months, ONLY AT NIGHT, with priests chanting and incense burning, carts go wheeling by carrying all the skeletons of the city to a designated pit that goes down into this series of caverns and tunnels I’ve been telling you about. Almost all the cemeteries of Paris are cleaned out and the bodies taken to this pit. There are people who died yesterday and people who died 900 years ago. Old bones, new bones, whole skeletons, bits of people, jewelry, etc.

When the carts get to the pit Guillaumot has chosen, their contents get dumped down into it. He’s rigged up a swinging chain that swings down in the mouth of the pit and breaks up the incredible cascade of bones as it falls, so the mouth of the pit doesn’t get plugged up with human bones.

Finally, when all the bones are down there–MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF THEM–he goes down there and arranges them into crazy walls with patterns and signs and decorations. A whole wall of femurs with skulls forming a shape of a cross in them. A whole wall of skulls. It’s artful and strange and grisly. Then a priest blesses the entire system of tunnels that is now completely paved and walled and decorated with human bones, and boom, that’s the story of the catacombs.

For a long time they kept putting people down there and emptying cemeteries into it. There are people who died in the revolution. Probably Robespierre and Demsoulins and Danton and all our buddies from the Terror are down there, but anonymously (mass grave situation with the whole guillotine and all). Probably Louis XVI is down there, and Marie Antoinette. Guillaumot himself ended up down there, when the cemetery where he was buried was emptied into there in the 19th century.

I knew about the bones and the catacombs, but I didn’t know the whole story and history, and it so blew my mind. I also didn’t know that the bone part of the catacombs is a tiny fraction of the actual whole tunnel system. So today, when you go down there, you can see all these tunnels branching off into blackness. Apparently there are tons of illegal secret places to get down into them, and kids go down there and have raves and stuff illegally (youtube it! It is crazy!!!!!), and supposedly there are age-old da Vinci Code style secret societies who have secret opulent rooms down there, and, how amazing is this–the Paris Police have an entire department that JUST PATROLS THE CATACOMBS.

People who illegally go down there and love it down there and party down there are called “cataphiles.”

The police officers who just patrol the catacombs are called “cataflics.”

So now I’m at the airport 3 hours early and I suddenly had the horrible realization that I am about to get on an 8 hour flight and I don’t have anything to read in English. I went to a bookstore, and of the 20 English book they had, 18 were Dean Koontz and the other two were a John Irving and this book “Sea of Poppies” by Amitav Ghosh, which I bought because it was short-listed for the Booker Prize and that’s all I know about it. It’s amazing what a huge comfort it is to just have a book to read. What if it is the greatest book I’ve ever read??

***later update: it was not***