Arrète! C'est ici la empire de la mort.
Apr. 8th, 2002 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quislibetThere are miles and miles of old quarry tunnels beneath the city of Paris, and in one small part of them are piled up the bones of some 6 million former residents transferred there in the 18th and 19th centuries when some cemeteries got a bit nasty.
So naturally a visit there sounded pretty spiffy.
On the afternoon of Thursday March 28 J. and I took the Metro from St-Paul to Denfert-Rochereau and had a bit of a snack at a nearby patisserie -- apple tarts. Yum. We nipped into a nearby Monoprix for water and a flashlight.
It was a long wait to enter the Catacombes, but fortunately we had our tarts to keep us busy, as well as a guide to the Catacombes and other parts of underground Paris. We were afraid from the line that we'd be going through with a large tour group of French 13-year-olds, but that turned out not to be. After a half hour or so we entered and went down a dizzying spiral staircase about 20 meters deep to the quarry entrance. We passed through a photo exhibit, then through a long tunnel, about 5' wide and 6-8' high, with a dim light every 20' or so. (I am mixing metric and English measurements, and will continue to do so.) I'm not normally claustrophobic, but this was getting to be a bit much, especially as it went on for the better part of a kilometer or so. Eventually it opened up into a large room. At one end was an archway, over which a sign informed us that we were about to enter the empire of death.
All righty, then.
And then it went on like this for about another kilomter of tunnels and small rooms with altars. (You can get a basic idea here -- not my pictures.) Numerous plaques invited us to contemplate our own mortality from a variety of perspectives, including a line from one of my favorite classical poems (an "eat, drink, and be merry... " affair):
pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / regumque turres.
(Pale Death, with impartial foot, kicks at the cottages of the poor and the towers of kings.) -- Horace, Carm. 1.4
Other plaques warned us to be mindful of our Creator, or not to speak ill of the dead, or to keep our silence altogether for we were mere mortals and in the presence of the majesty of death.
Not far from me someone was complaining about the water dripping from the ceiling.
The thing is, after a hundred meters or so of piled-up skulls and tibias (and only skulls and tibias; the walls were built up about head-high and all the other bits were tossed behind), you really don't need to see the other 700 m. I expected to be unnerved by the sight of six million dead people artfully arrayed, but somehow the bones were -- I don't know -- too old to be threatening, if that's the word I want. We concentrated on reading the inscriptions for a while, but they were likewise the same, and we soon realized that a couple hundred feet above us, living Parisians were enjoying a rather nice day outside.
We decided to take Horace's advice -- for that poem talks about how winter is dissolving into spring and so it's time to garland ourselves with flowers and suchlike before we croak -- and made our way to the surface, after being trapped behind some slow-moving fellow countrymen for a bit. Fortunately the spiral staircase at the other end was a bit shorter than the one at the entry, but we were still glad that we'd been unwittingly practicing for that moment on the YMCA Stairmaster.
The stairs up from the Empire of Death spit you out through an unmarked door onto a street about a mile from the entrance. I could see a pharmacy and a laundromat, as I recall.
The descent to hell is easy, but to retrace your steps back to the light -- is anticlimactic.
To narrate that particular Thursday is taking longer than I thought, but I suppose that's because I had a long train ride the next day during which to write about it, and so I have fuller material. Up next: a friendly gourmet store owner, the rue Mouffetard, toys and sinister CDs, the cuisine of Gascony (foie gras central), a visit with an old roommate, and the disheartening discovery that the Metro doesn't run much later than the MBTA.
-----
And more recently: this weekend, we went to garden stores, I studied a little, and we ate smuggled cheeses in good company.
So naturally a visit there sounded pretty spiffy.
On the afternoon of Thursday March 28 J. and I took the Metro from St-Paul to Denfert-Rochereau and had a bit of a snack at a nearby patisserie -- apple tarts. Yum. We nipped into a nearby Monoprix for water and a flashlight.
It was a long wait to enter the Catacombes, but fortunately we had our tarts to keep us busy, as well as a guide to the Catacombes and other parts of underground Paris. We were afraid from the line that we'd be going through with a large tour group of French 13-year-olds, but that turned out not to be. After a half hour or so we entered and went down a dizzying spiral staircase about 20 meters deep to the quarry entrance. We passed through a photo exhibit, then through a long tunnel, about 5' wide and 6-8' high, with a dim light every 20' or so. (I am mixing metric and English measurements, and will continue to do so.) I'm not normally claustrophobic, but this was getting to be a bit much, especially as it went on for the better part of a kilometer or so. Eventually it opened up into a large room. At one end was an archway, over which a sign informed us that we were about to enter the empire of death.
All righty, then.
And then it went on like this for about another kilomter of tunnels and small rooms with altars. (You can get a basic idea here -- not my pictures.) Numerous plaques invited us to contemplate our own mortality from a variety of perspectives, including a line from one of my favorite classical poems (an "eat, drink, and be merry... " affair):
pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / regumque turres.
(Pale Death, with impartial foot, kicks at the cottages of the poor and the towers of kings.) -- Horace, Carm. 1.4
Other plaques warned us to be mindful of our Creator, or not to speak ill of the dead, or to keep our silence altogether for we were mere mortals and in the presence of the majesty of death.
Not far from me someone was complaining about the water dripping from the ceiling.
The thing is, after a hundred meters or so of piled-up skulls and tibias (and only skulls and tibias; the walls were built up about head-high and all the other bits were tossed behind), you really don't need to see the other 700 m. I expected to be unnerved by the sight of six million dead people artfully arrayed, but somehow the bones were -- I don't know -- too old to be threatening, if that's the word I want. We concentrated on reading the inscriptions for a while, but they were likewise the same, and we soon realized that a couple hundred feet above us, living Parisians were enjoying a rather nice day outside.
We decided to take Horace's advice -- for that poem talks about how winter is dissolving into spring and so it's time to garland ourselves with flowers and suchlike before we croak -- and made our way to the surface, after being trapped behind some slow-moving fellow countrymen for a bit. Fortunately the spiral staircase at the other end was a bit shorter than the one at the entry, but we were still glad that we'd been unwittingly practicing for that moment on the YMCA Stairmaster.
The stairs up from the Empire of Death spit you out through an unmarked door onto a street about a mile from the entrance. I could see a pharmacy and a laundromat, as I recall.
The descent to hell is easy, but to retrace your steps back to the light -- is anticlimactic.
To narrate that particular Thursday is taking longer than I thought, but I suppose that's because I had a long train ride the next day during which to write about it, and so I have fuller material. Up next: a friendly gourmet store owner, the rue Mouffetard, toys and sinister CDs, the cuisine of Gascony (foie gras central), a visit with an old roommate, and the disheartening discovery that the Metro doesn't run much later than the MBTA.
-----
And more recently: this weekend, we went to garden stores, I studied a little, and we ate smuggled cheeses in good company.
