Les Catacombs de Paris

28/3/13 Thursday
This afternoon we decide to brave the cold and the queue and visit Les Carrieres et Catacombs de Paris. They're in the 14e on the Left Bank, so quite a hike if we were to walk, and our remaining time is limited today so we take the Metro. I've been here before when my lovely sons were teenagers about 7 years ago and we all enjoyed this unusual Paris attraction. I'm pretty sure it was a lot less well known then though, as the queue was a lot shorter than today - we almost give up before we start, but being the optimist I am I predict no longer than an hour, and so we join the queue. In 2005 we stood in the cold and snow for about 20 minutes as we waited, it was late December. Today, late March, we wait for just over an hour and the weather is no warmer - the teensiest snowflakes begin to fall sparsely, very exciting for my hubby :-) For me, this is week 5 of freezing weather and I think I'm a bit over cold really................!!
Finally inside, we trek down 130 stairs into the maze of tunnels beneath the streets of Paris. Since this is my second visit, I ask my writer husband if he'd like to blog this one. Here are his thoughts:

My family has the attitude that the body is merely a temporary container for the eternal soul, so a cardboard box in an unmarked grave or a surreptitious sprinkling of ashes is the cheapest, and therefore the most appropriate, way to dispense with the thing. Far from being disrespectful, the joy of knowing that our loved one has ‘gone home’, and doesn’t need the temporary and flagging receptacle any longer is a cause for celebration.

Hence our visit to Le Cimetière du Père Lachaise a few days ago (see previous blog post by ma belle femme) :-) left me both perplexed and bemused by people’s attempts to leave an eternal reminder or tribute to themselves or their loved ones. One fellow obviously decided that having the tallest grave ‘tower’ would make him feel better after he was dead, and the offending edifice has probably surprised or confused or offended millions of graveyard perusers since its ridiculous erection. Ironically, searching for the offender’s name to ascribe him the opprobrium due is pointless - the carved lettering is weathered and illegible. All his aspirations have been washed away in the rain.

French Philosopher Albert Camus (1913 - 1960) is reputed to have said “Death is philosophy’s only problem”. After visiting the catacombs today, I can reliably state that death is not only philosophy’s problem..... it was a huge problem in Paris. The skeletal remains of 6 - 7 million Parisians garishly stacked in the disused quarry system attest to the fact that the limited cemeteries could not contain their burgeoning dead.

I expected our visit to the catacombs to leave me with an enormous sense of the millions of ‘people’ represented by the bones. A mass of humanity, the weight of six million humans, a sense of the enormity of history. Multiplied by the years, 300 million years of life, stories - 300 billion personal relationships, world events.... I expected, wanted, to be crushed.

But it’s dark down there. And wet in some places, muddy. After waiting up on the street for an hour in the freezing cold while a front moves over Paris, you don’t want to get wet - so we ran past 10 million stories to avoid a drop down our necks.

There was one place that was well lit. The bones look old, and decayed. The audio guide tells me that they were all thrown into these underground cavities 30 years before someone decided to make an arrangement with them. Perhaps a Bohemian entrepreneur worked out the lifetime net worth of a hundred years of tourism, and convinced the city councilors that with a bit of effort "gay Paree" could make a fortune. It wouldn’t have taken long to work out that only femurs could make a decent wall, everything else just slid into a heap. It would have taken less time to see that walls of stacked femurs were incredibly boring. Skulls, however, have some appeal. They bring out the sense of the macabre in a most effective way. In the right light (darkness) it seems like they could be looking at you. Gulp.

Human inventiveness and attention span being what they are, plain femur walls holding back piles of assorted bones soon morphed in to the occasional femur and skull barrel, skulls forming crosses...... it doesn’t take long to imagine a game of skull football developing among the underground workers.  

Nowadays it’s an offense to touch the bones. Holding a skull to give yourself a sense of....... something....... is effective but frowned upon. A single jawbone on a bench near the exit is testament to the attraction of holding a piece of a past life - the fear of retribution for removing it (or the disapproval of a girlfriend?) overcame the novelty.  Perhaps ‘pillar man’ from the cemetery wanted to avoid such ignominy? or such anonymity? Perhaps the idea his toe-bone could end up so separated from his tail-bone gave him conniptions? Maybe the idea of being so spread out lessened his sense of identity too much? Shame about the rain.........

As for me, I think about the 6 million people who are represented here by their bones and I marvel at the fact that our God knows each one, none have been forgotten, and that every hair on every head was numbered in its day. It's mind-boggling!! I enjoy looking at the plaques (those that I can read without a good light and my glasses!!) and in particular I think about one that states "Les yeux de Dieu sont toujours sur les justes et ses orielles entende leurs prieres" - it's from Psalm 34 and I wonder why they left out the rest of it - "but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil, to blot out their name from the earth" - perhaps that was a little too confronting for those left behind............!!!
Time to head back to the land of the living - 83 claustrophobic spiral steps up to street level............ :-)