#Black and White
paints of obelisks and crosses break the pattern of the bones in the Paris
catacombs
THE CITY OF LIGHT HAS
A darker twin. While the Paris that knows sun and rain is home to some two
million people at its centre, another six million Parisians can be called on
during visiting hours in their paralled city, 20 metres below street level. Or
at least, what’s left of them.
The Paris Catacombs were quick solution to a mounting
problem. By the late 18th
century, the medieval cemeteries could not keep up with the growth of
the city. Old graves were dug up and bones tossed into attic-like charnel house
to make room for more burials, but neigbour complained that milk and soup would
spoil within hours because of the miasmas wafting their way, and in one
notorious case the walls of a bone repository broke under the strain, spilling
a morbid cascade into nearby houses. This was the Age of Enlightenment, and
something had to be done.
Luckily, under the hill of Montparnasse to the south of the
city, Paris already possessed a network of tunnels, built from Roman times
onwards to quarry high-quality limestone for buildings such as Notre-Dame. From
1786, the old city-centre cemeteries were gradually emptied, and their contents
brought to the mineshafts in a nightly stream of hearses accompanied by the
chanting of priests. The last of the transfers to the catacombs was made in
1860, by which time vast suburban cemeteries such as Pere Lachaise had relieved
the burden on the city.
The level of the catacombs is reached by means of a spiral
staircase, but there is a long preamble of tunnels before the bones themselves.
Many still bear a black line painted along the roof to help 19th-century
quarry workers navigate in low light, and water drips from the ceiling in
places. The catacombs proper begin with a doorway over which written: ‘Arrete! C’est ici l’empire de la mort’
(Stop! Here is the empire of death). This is the first of many cheery
inscriptions that were designed, in the words of the quarries’ overseer Louis
Etienne Hericart de Thury, to ‘break the sinister and dark monotony’ of the
catacombs, and to put the living into a philosophical frame of mind.
‘Think that in the morning you may not last until evening,
and that in the evening you may not last until morning,’ reads one. ‘God is not
the author of death,’ reminds another. The embankments of bones on either side
of the passageways have signs stating the original cemeteries and dates of
reburial. Passing these carefully stacked communities of the dead feels at
times strangely like wandering through a sepulchral wine cellar, but even here
the human urge to be decorative expresses itself in patterns of skulls and
femurs.
The first bones had been thrown in haphazardly, in a
rationalist 18th century that just wanted these unsavoury remains
put somewhere safely out of sight. But when burial resumed after a hiatus
caused by the turmoil of the French Revolution, Romanticism had become the
zeitgeist, and the catacombs were refashioned into a place where visitors could
enjoy a kind of dignified melancholy. Their modern successors are returned to
the surface by way of an unmarked door, onto an unremarkable Parisian
backstreet, perhaps now taking a little more care crossing the road on the way
back to the Metro station.
Queues to get in can be long (sometimes over an hour), so
try to arrive before the catacombs open at 10am. Dress for a temperature of
around 14ᵒC,
with a few drips of water from the ceiling.
