Walking Among the Dead
By: Richard J. Goodrich
Tags: Travel, Catacombs, History, Paris, Philosophy

On a cool November afternoon, a hint of rain in the air, I caught the subway to Denfert-Rochereau, a stop in the 14th Arrondissement. Fortified with a quick bite to eat — a crepe from a street vendor — I was ready to depart bright lights and rushing traffic of the living to enter the land of the dead.

Storing the Dead

A portion of Paris’ history lies beneath its streets. Few visitors realize that a vast network of subterranean tunnels burrow beneath the city’s homes and buildings. During the Cretaceous period, Paris lay beneath the sea. Over millions of years, limestone and gypsum were deposited, creating an extremely valuable source of building materials. The Romans mined gypsum here, and near the end of the Medieval period, miners expanded the excavations, extracting the principal component of a famous product — plaster of Paris. The miners carved magnificent chambers beneath the surface and reinforced their excavations with stone pillars to prevent cave-ins.

In addition to gypsum, the miners also cut the blocks of Lutetian Limestone used to build the city. Over the centuries the mines closed and people forgot where the excavations lay. Occasionally, as the city grew and heavier buildings strained skyward, the Swiss cheese network of hidden excavations collapsed. Buildings and roads slid into the exposed voids, destroying parts of the growing city. In 1777, King Louis XVI created a new group of government architects, the Inspection Générale des Carrières. These officials were given the task of mapping and buttressing the caverns of the spent mines, reinforcing the voids to protect the buildings overhead.

By a happy coincidence, this exploration came at a time when the Parisian officials were grappling with another problem: the storage of the dead. For nearly ten centuries, Paris’ main cemetery, Saints-Innocent, had served as the final destination for the deceased. By the eighteenth century it was dangerously overcrowded. To meet the demand for burial, officials had, for centuries, exhumed bodies and stacked the bones in above-ground ossuaries. In some ossuaries bones reached a height of seven feet; occasionally the weight would breach the external walls, spilling bones into the basements of adjoining buildings.

Alexander Lenoir, a former policeman who had been seconded to the quarry mapping team, proposed a solution. Why not convert a portion of the underground tunnels into a giant ossuary? The bones could be transferred into the empty mining tunnels, emptying the city’s cemeteries.

In 1785, the project began. Workers removed bones from the ossuaries in the Saints Innocent cemetery and transferred them to the tunnels below Denfert-Rochereau. Fearing a backlash from the people and the church, the project took place under the cover of darkness. A steady stream of horse-drawn wagons rolled through the nighttime streets, carrying the dead to their new resting place. The bones were lowered into the caverns where workers stacked them in parallel rows, lining the sides of the tunnels.

By the end of the project, more than six million people had been shifted into the catacombs. The cemeteries within the city limits were emptied and closed; today the hallowed ground lies beneath modern buildings.

The Underworld

The catacombs are not easy to find. I searched the streets for quite some time before locating the nondescript entrance. After purchasing a ticket, I walked through a door and began the descent. The way is placarded with warning signs:

“Unsuitable for small children!”

“Severe exertion hazard!”

Obvious perils lurk below the surface of the earth.

I spun down the long cylinder of a spiral staircase, corkscrewing more than a hundred steps into the darkness. By the time I reached the lower level of the catacombs, I was a dizzy and over-rotated. It quickly became apparent that a dwarf would have a distinct advantage down here; the tunnel was low and my head brushed dressed stone from time to time.

The underground approach to the ossuary. Author photo.

The spiral staircase did not terminate at the ossuary. I had to walk through a connecting tunnel to reach my destination. According to the signs, the route traversed 1.5 kilometers underground. It seemed much farther: the tunnel stretched inexorably forward. Somewhere over my head, back in the land of the living, the sun rose and set, seasons changed, girls switched from woolly tights to short skirts and back again. At last the tunnel widened and I reached my destination.

A warning sign has been placed above the entrance to the ossuary: “Halt! You are entering the land of the dead.”

I took a moment for reflection, and then continued to advance. I walked beneath the lintel and entered a land where life no longer blooms.

It was astonishing.

Wall of bones, Paris Catacombs. Author photo.

Although I had expected to encounter the bones of the dead, foreknowledge fails to prepare you minds for the visual impact. The tunnels are lined, floor to ceiling, with great stacks of bones. They stretch into the darkness ahead like receding telephone lines, or parallel rows of firewood, cord after cord. The two walls consist of the stackable bones, mainly arms and legs, with the artistic insertion of the occasional skull. Those bones that did not stack well — ribs or a pelvis, for instance — were put somewhere else.

The walls of bones in the Paris Catacombs. Author photo.

The walls of bones stand nearly six feet tall and they seem to advance forever. The remains of six million people are down here. Skulls gape, empty-eyed, as I shuffle somberly past. It is a staggering, seemingly endless, monument to death, a reminder of mortality.

Memento mori

European religious art and often churches and cathedrals frequently employ skulls as a memento mori, the reminder of one’s own death. Although today we live, breathe, laugh and love, tomorrow we shall be dead. As Marcus Aurelius wrote:

Remember that you will soon no longer be a person or be anywhere, just like everything you see and everyone you know. Nature’s law requires that everything changes, is transformed, perishes, yields so that other things may take their turn to exist. –Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.21

Face-to-face with the dead, whose bones are now piled en masse, stripped of their individuality, I am drawn to reflect on the motto that often accompanies a memento mori: “as you are, I once was; as I am you soon shall be.”

Every single bone in this endless chamber once belonged to a person who walked the streets of Paris, who experienced the infinite variety of life. Saints and sinners, the exceptional and the mediocre, all have lost everything that confers meaning to living. All have been forgotten, plunged into an undifferentiated past.

I have never been anywhere that more profoundly illustrated our individual insignificance in the face of grinding eternity. As they are, I soon will be: part of a past that will quickly be forgotten.

The stacked bones only feel like they continue forever. Even the dead have an end. After passing through the ossuary, I reached another spiral staircase and revolved back up toward the light, into the land of the living. In the flat gray light of a Paris afternoon, a guard quickly searched my camera bag, checking to ensure that I have stolen no osseous trophies from below. The two skulls and a small pile of bones behind the guard suggests that this has been tried.

In a city that has no shortage of fascinating attractions, the Paris Catacombs offer something unusual: a glimpse of mortality.

Skulls in the Paris Catacombs. Author photo.

Interested in experiencing the Paris Catacombs? Visit the official website.