The Catacombs
I’d heard of the Paris Catacombs several times.
But something about this dark labyrinth, buzzing with small electric
lights throwing shadows against cold, grinning skulls, leading to huge
spaces filled with more vacant, gaping eyes, unknowing and unseeing,
piled together, cramped and condemned, raising only questions and never
revealing answers, reminded me too much of French bureaucracy, so I had
avoided it.
But I became immune
to French bureaucracy, so I decided on a trip to nearby Cemetery
Montparnasse as a kind of warm-up, if you’ll pardon the expression, and
took the latter of my MÈtro stop choices: Edgar-Quinet, Line 6, and
Raspail, Line 4. Edgar-Quinet lands you on Blvd. Edgar-Quinet. A few
steps south along the boulevard takes you to the main entrance. From
Raspail you land on Blvd. Raspail and take your first left onto Blvd.
Edgar-Quinet.
Enter the cemetery
gates, turn right, and you’ll see the first of many temples, filled
with crucifixes and holy figures, pretty picture windows and flowers. I
was almost moved to tears by the fact that the space inside was almost
the same as that of my studio apartment. But I felt a little strange
standing in front of some family’s tomb and mourning myself, so I moved
on.
Just past this is the modest
resting place of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and writer Simone
Beauvoir. Sartre apparently lived the last few decades of his life on
nearby Blvd. Raspail, making the immortal thinker a homebody in all
senses of the word.
A genuinely
touching aspect of the grave of Sartre and Beauvoir is a dedication
(larger than that to either Sartre or Beauvoir) to the memory of a 17
year old girl called Sohane, a French girl of Algerian origin, who was
burned alive in 1984 for refusing to follow some kind of rule or law (a
Muslim dress-code, according to one helpful mourner). Beauvoir is
described in the plaque as a writer who wrote for the freedom of women,
and Shoane as a martyr who died for it. It is very touching and strange
to consider that a philosopher, a writer, and an activist are still
working together from the grave towards a common goal in Paris.
Knowing
nothing of philosophy, I had always had a soft spot for Sartre because
of his classic one-liner: ‘Hell is other people,’ a statement as
exquisitely simple as it is painfully true. Just ask a cool British guy
called Sebastian, who I hooked up with and talked at for a period of
hours on my first visit to the graveyard. I will never forget some of
the looks we received as we stood in front of Charles Baudelaire’s
grave discussing ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’. But apart from Sartre,
Montparnasse holds yet another of the one-liner kings, Proudhon, the
anarchist thinker who came up with the immortal "Property Is Theft!"
To
be honest, I never really understood that one. What if you rent? What
does that make you? A liberal? As for Proudhon’s final property,
ironically enough, I couldn’t find it. The map I was viewing (a
signpost at the top end of Avenue de l’Ouest) was clear enough, and the
sections were clearly signposted, too, but I didn’t get there. In
truth, I was only interested in seeing if anybody had sprayed an
Anarchy sign on his tomb, or in the hope that some fan-club nuts might
have paid to have one painstakingly carved into a headstone.
All
the thoughts of Anarchy somehow lead me straight to the grave of Serge
Gainsbourg (Division One, along Avenue Transversale). Serge’s grave was
bedecked with photographs of the great man, along with mÈtro-tickets,
cigarettes, and even flowers. I don’t know much about Serge either,
only that he seems to have been loved for being unlovable, which is a
pretty good trick.
Apart from
Serge, Sartre, Proudhon, and Baudelaire, you will also find here the
Facist Pierre Laval, executed for treason; car-maker AndrÈ Citroen;
CÈsar Frank; and a famous victim of French anti-Semitism at the end of
the nineteenth century, Captain Dreyfuss. Some of the graves and
temples are amazing; some of the sculptures astounding, like the huge
hand over the grave of one Robert Thibier, who was probably the
sculptor. Unfortunately, the creator's name wasn’t listed.
Anyway,
having spent some time wandering around, staring at the head-stones and
into the temples, I was left with a feeling that the Montparnasse
philosophy dictates that, just because you’ve been dead for a few
hundred years, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t look good. And with that, I
was ready for the Catacombs.
From
Cemetery Montparnasse, you only need turn right at the main entrance
and hook back onto Blvd. Raspail, then follow it down to Pl. Denfort
Rochereau, face a giant statue of a lion, and look to the building in
front and to the left of its left nostril. It’s that simple. Or get off
the mÈtro at Denfort-Rochereau, Line 4, and use sortie ‘rue
Denfert-Rochereau’, which will leave you standing directly opposite.
The Catacombs are open Tue-Sun 10.00-4.00.
I
was amazed by the queue. I had expected to see a few people milling
around, of course; a grumble of tourists smelling a photo-opportunity
with death, but I was greeted by a line stretching a long way back. It
looked more like the crowd for the Louvre; the Mona Lisa lovers.
"Damn," I thought, "maybe they buried her here? Maybe they’ve got her
skull on display and I’ve missed all the snappy adverts: ‘Meet Mona In
The Catacombs! Wonder At The Mystery Of That Toothy Grin! Fitted With
Realistic Hair! Photos 10 €."
Yes,
it was the tourist crowd. Somebody somewhere was making a fortune from
selling bright orange shirts and trousers that were neither long nor
short, just stupid. All those little family groups. The women and
children suffering meekly under the enforced enthusiasm and cross-eyed
leadership of the dominant males. The crappy camaraderie.
I
heard one guy telling his partner, "I don’t care what the guide-book
says! I spoke to an actual French man!" I realised then that life is so
much sadder than death. I put my shades on, to protect my eyes from the
blaze of orange, and looked down the queue. "Maybe they’re here to be
buried?" I thought hopefully. But they weren’t, and I knew it, so I
joined them.
One woman was
freaking out because a spider had found its way onto her. Odd,
considering that she was about to descend into one vast, dimly-lit,
grinning pit of death. So we waited. Then we went in, paid our five
euros, and began descending the steep, narrow, winding stairway to the
Paris Catacombs.
After a long,
dull start, in which minding your step on the rough ground and minding
your head on the low ceiling takes up most of your thoughts along some
ancient, extremely narrow passageways, you come to a large, circular
opening. Then the skulls start.
Walls
made of bones, interlaced with grinning skulls, some lit, some
half-lit, some with shadows creeping over them, searching out the deep
eye-sockets. Dates on plaques. The ancient dead. More skulls. Some
chest-high bone walls showing how far back these catacombs go.
Thousands of dead; a sea of bones, the odd skull sitting atop; some
tilted in the half-light, looking for all the world like the fleshy,
bald heads of living men. They did live once. All of them. You know
that. They walked around above, dreamed, laughed, played it out,
schemed and struggled until their turn was over. Now they were here.
I
preferred them to the tourists, somehow. In fact, I stopped and waited
until the low orange grumble had faded to dark silence, and I found
myself alone, just me and the dead. I soaked it up. It felt good.
Peaceful. Here were the real dead of Paris. Old bones even before they
were so rudely dug up, probably already forgotten, and dumped here back
in 1785.
These were the guys and
girls who knew what being dead and gone was really all about. Here
death actually was the great leveller, not like in Montparnasse
Cemetery with all its poseurs, its unsophisticated and
fashion-conscious nouveau-dead like Citroen and Laval, demanding
attention and maudlin sentiment. Here was a real community of corpses.
Their own skulls were their tombstones; their bones piled beneath them,
testifying to the fact that they once stood and walked in the sun.
The
labyrinth wasn’t really a labyrinth. It was low and claustrophobic in
places, dripping water and wet underfoot here and there, but there was
no way to get lost. For us, there was still a way out. And the tourists
were long gone. They had collected all the drama they needed for all
the phone-calls they were going to make, for letters they were going to
write, and I had collected all the information I needed for the article.
I
said goodbye to the dead and started making my way back up towards the
light, towards a nice guy who would check my bag to make sure I hadn’t
stolen a skull (to stick a candle on the next time I sacrifice a
goat?), who would then smile and point me out towards a street I had
never seen before in my life, where I would be blinded by the sun and
the blaze of slow moving orange grumble.
Oh well, C’est la vie†!
Les Catacombs, Place Denfort-Rochereau, 75014, Paris. Telephone: 01.43.22.47.63.
Entrance: 5€. Call for discount information.
Entrance:
Place Denfort-Rochereau. Exit: Rue Remey Dumoncel. Turn right and
continue along to Avenue Du General Leclerc. Turn right again to head
back towards Place Denfort-Rochereau.
