Memento Mori

Mes petits vivants, this is a long post with diverse offerings. But the first and longest leg of the journey takes place in the catacombs.

I offer you the same warning the signposts outside the catacombs offer visitors. Those of you with weak hearts or stomachs may be upset by what's ahead. For the rest of you with a taste for the morbid--greetings, brothers and sisters!--welcome to L'Empire de la Mort: the Catacombs of Paris.

First, a petit history lesson. On the catacombs--and on me.

The original idea behind the catacombs was this. Underneath the city of Paris is an anthill-like network of quarries, mined over the centuries. After a time, the quarries were shut down for work, leaving a ghostly, labyrinthine underground series of tunnels.

Meanwhile, Paris--like the rest of Europe--had begun by the nineteenth century to have a large storage problem. 

In the countryside, burying the dead is an easy prospect. One has plenty of room. Family graveyards offer enough accommodation. As with space for the living, square footage is relatively cheap.

Cities, however, are another story.

Those of you who have been to classic European cemeteries like Père Lachaise (I plan to make yet another pilgrimage there as well; I've visited twice, but not since I've lived here) will know how tightly packed together the graves are. Family plots are a good way to economize space: simply fit the new bodies side-by-side, on top of, or directly over the old ones. But even then, like an overstuffed Hefty bag in a college dorm room, despite your best efforts to cram everyone in, you will inevitably exceed maximum capacity.

The result: by the nineteenth century, Paris, like the analogical aforementioned dorm room, had an enormous, disgusting sanitation problem. Bodies were putrefying above or barely below ground, contaminating the water supply and causing a general oppression of the senses and the public health. Whereas San Francisco solved its dead problem by emptying the cemeteries for the valuable land and moving their inhabitants to a necropolis in Colma--now the record-holder for highest per capita rate of dead people in the world, who literally outnumber the living--Paris found another way.

So in the nineteenth century, the bones from the last several hundred years were exhumed from the city's cemeteries and relocated into an ossuary: lining the walls of the former quarries under the fourteenth arrondissement.

The stuff of nightmares, one would think. In fact, it's the stuff of tourism.

Amy, Sophia and I decided to make a day of it. We met outside, chattered in feeble French in the tree-dappled mid-afternoon sunlight as we stood in line, and listened to a street musician singing American acoustic music and accompanying himself on the guitar.

Then we paid our reduced student fee and descended down a winding staircase with so many steps I no longer had any sense of place. I might have been anywhere. I might have been nowhere. The identically placed, sickly yellow lights offered no clue. We could hear and see no one but ourselves, our voices bouncing against the narrow cylinder hollowed out of the stone.

It occurred to me, as we descended, that we would inevitably climb up the same number of steps on our way out. But that would come later.

We walked through the tight, low-ceilinged tunnels of the quarry. We tried to fill the chamber with our chatter, but the sounds died as they hit the wall. The crowds from outside the door were nowhere to be found. It was just the three of us, as though we'd found our way into this cold, endless warren and were about to be found and eaten by the creature that had burrowed it. I began to feel a growing sense of dread. What had I gotten myself into? Would the ossuary be like this? Would my mild claustrophobia get the best of me, causing me to faint into a pile of bones?

I'm pretty robust at the moment about the morbid. I've also had phases of an almost Victorian obsession with death culture. It's riveting to study our reactions to something that's absolutely final, absolutely inevitable, absolutely universal.

But my history with the skeleton in particular has been--to say the least--involved.

As a child, I was so terrified of skeletons that I couldn't even watch movies with skeletal-faced villains. My nightmares frequently featured dancing skeletons, talking skeletons, rooms full of skeletons hanging from racks like split pigs in one of those eerie slaughterhouses. But even my fear was fraught with ambivalence. When my family visited Santa Fe one year, somewhere around El Día de los Muertos--I must have been about five or six--I developed a consuming obsession with the wooden sculptures, common in Southwestern boutiques at that time of year, of skeletons doing everyday things: playing in mariachi bands, fishing, the works. I especially couldn't tear my eyes away from one: a mermaid.

Like this, but without the sailor.

I was, at the time, enamored of Ariel from Disney's The Little Mermaid. I think the grotesque prospect of her dead and skeletal brought home unconsciously the fact of my own mortality, though that prospect in itself would not grip me in full force for another year or so.

My helpless, naked fascination caused my family to tease me about it for years. Even now, my dad's creepy-voiced cry of "Skeleton mermaaaid!" is a piece of family lore.

I sometimes think, though, that kids have it right. There's a lot more sense in the fear of death than in the fear of, say, plane flights, or public speaking. After all, the fear of death is the most natural, rational fear there could be. It will happen. It will happen to you. It will probably be ugly, and possibly painful. And a century or so later, in all likelihood, no one will remember you.

But we learn to manage. And we deny what is to me, perhaps, the most hideous thing about death: its utter, merciless anonymity.

The catacombs will not allow you to ignore it. The anonymity and equality of the dead is absolute and naked. Scholars, peasants, the murderers and the murdered, the heads of the highest families (no pun intended) and the lowliest streetwalkers: everyone side by side, intermixed, sockets-in sockets-out.

And so we reach the entrance.

The doorframe above us reads, "Halt: Here is the empire of the dead." [See also: Lasciate ogni speranza, voi chi entrate.] My companion on the right is Sophia.

There's a lot of human congestion in these first few steps. One looks down the corridor and sees nothing but bones. It astounds one: how high they are piled, the litter of broken pieces and crowns of skulls, like shards of pottery. It's a shock at first, like dipping one's foot into very cold water. But the mind soon accommodates--that is to say, stops trying to understand--the magnitude and significance of what one is seeing, and just as the body accepts the coldness of the water after a few moments and one can plunge in, so too can the visitor cross the threshold (and stop taking pictures, like this one, of the first few feet).

Most of the catacombs are far too dark for pictures to turn out. Even these, the highlights, are grainy and can't convey the overall experience. But if you look beyond the well-lit foreground, you can catch a glimpse of the bones that line the next row, and the diagonal skull design that crosses it.

The general formation is a great stack of long bones--your arms, legs, etcetera--interspersed by layers of skulls. Like a skeleton layer cake.

Amy (left) and Sophia (right) were eager to take pictures as well. Here the light is just good enough to make out a plaque.

Here's a good example of a slightly deviated pattern. Others included Christian style crosses and X-formations (which I imagine are a little trickier). Hey, even grave exhumers and ossuary assemblers get bored sometimes.

It's the closest I can get to giving you an idea of how many bones there are.

This is a typical engraving in Latin that designates the cemetery of origin for each section. You'd be surprised at how little space the occupants of each graveyard take: most between three and ten meters in width, I'd estimate.

These were not the only words lining the walls and pillars. Others were quotations--mostly from Classical philosophers--about the nature and inevitability of death. It's very French to make such a primal, grisly, morbid attraction an occasion for philosophical reflection. But then, as the French philosopher Rousseau pointed out, death makes philosophers of us all.

The ceilings were wet. Yes, wet. Cold cave water dripped on our heads as we walked through the alleys of bones. It was horrifying. My shoes accrued a thin layer of bone-colored mud (not from the bones themselves, of course, but from the natural color of Paris earth--see for reference the stone that comprises most of the buildings).

While snapping this picture, I actually saw another visitor reach on top of a pile, grab a fractured femur, examine it, and replace it a few inches over from where she had removed it. I don't believe in an afterlife, and I'm not superstitious, but that spectacle raised all of the taboo hairs on the back of my neck.

A cleverly executed central pillar.

It's interesting that by the end of one's journey through the tunnels (only some of which are open--there are many more closed off by gates that one can peer into until the bones are swallowed into darkness), one has nearly the same sensation that my family calls Museum Overload Syndrome. In fact, going to the Louvre and going to the catacombs aren't so different, really. One sees the range of humanity, preserved to glorify le Patrimoine (the French have a healthy love affair with their heritage). Some mute inglorious Hugo there may rest. But in the end, does it matter whether we're the head second from the left, fourth section of one of the western walls, or entombed in the crypts of the Pantheon?

Let's ascend, shall we, and head for Montmartre?

Amy and Sophia had been there before--Amy lives in the general neighborhood now, as a matter of fact--but I'm ashamed to admit, as a writer and bourgeois bohemian, that I'd never set foot in the 18e before. I've now been put right.

On our way from the Métro stop to n'importe où, we passed Les Deux Moulins, which is, of course, the café for which Amelie worked in the eponymous film.

I ducked in to get a picture. It was difficult to wedge into the doorway, as the café is naturally a huge tourist magnet. The movie's a cult favorite here and abroad.

We began our ascent to Sacré-Cœur, where there was to be a Festival des Vendages (harvest festival). On our way, we passed a show that currently featured a performance by what looked to be professional lip synch artists.

At the top of the butte, we found the sun about to set and promptly reached for our respective cameras. Here's the southwest view; beyond the tall building that juts into the yellow part of the sunset--Montparnasse--is my neighborhood.

A better view of the lawn, and a gesture at the southeast.

The church itself. Same spot: just pivoted 180. Lots of people here for the festival, and for general weekend gaiety.

By the time I could turn back around, the sun was already halfway out the door. He didn't even say goodbye.

The Festival. We didn't stay for long--just enough to wander around and buy some vin chaud (the French take on Glühwein: a hot mulled wine with sweet spices).

The picture is really grainy, because I used the absolute maximum zoom. But this is the Eiffel Tower, lit up, framed by a luscious raspberry twilight, with a sliver of moon just pierced by the tip of the spire. I couldn't capture exactly what I saw, but it's a memento for me and a taste for you.

And to leave you on a pleasant image: one of the famous moulins. I couldn't help it.

So we descend into the depths of the morbid and come back up to beauty and life. That's the magic of living in a city like this, and perhaps the true answer to my childhood anxieties: death and life, honest and open, side by side. We can't defeat it, but we can invite it to the table.

À la prochaîne.