Twenty metres beneath the streets of Paris, far below the rattling Metro, lay the Catacombs. One descends 130 steps down a narrow, spiral stairwell into silence and darkness; aside from the occasional noisy tourist, the only sound to be heard is the gentle gurgling of some unknown aqueduct, no doubt channelling sources away from the area.
The Creation Of The Catacombs And Ossuary
The Paris Catacombs were created at the end of the 18th century, when sanitary conditions at the Saints-Innocents cemetery at Les Halles became unbearable. After a tireless search, the French government decided upon an abandoned stone quarry, at Denfert-Rochereau, the original gates of the city, just south of the centre.
On 7th April 1786, a procession of chanting priests led a parade of black-covered, bone-laden, horse-drawn wagons through the deserted streets of Paris, bearing the remains of more than six million deceased Parisians to their new resting place at the ossuary. The only exception were those were killed during the French Revolution a few years later, whose bodies are the only remains to have been buried directly in the catacombs.
There, the bones were thrown into the corridors and left; it wasn’t until 1810, that the then ossuary inspector, Hericart de Thury, decided to create a façade of neatly piled skulls and tibias, behind which the remaining bones were left in a heap.
The catacombs have remained a unique, though morbid, tourist attraction since the middle of the 19th century. And there is no question why.
Underneath The Streets Of Paris
Once at the bottom, visitors follow a winding hallway of mortared stone, which leads to a series of sculptures, most of them of the mines before they became an ossuary. There is also a replica of the fortress at Port-Mahon, the largest town on the island of Minorca, which is extremely impressive; it had been sculptured by a quarryman named Decure, who was believed to have been held prisoner at the fortress by the English.
Another stretch of dark, twisting hallways, and you reach the entrance to the ossuary, a narrow door graced with the inscription “Arrete, c’est ici l’empire de la mort” (literally, “Stop, this is the empire of death!”).
Quietly walking through this maze of halls and caverns, one can’t help but feel both amazed and saddened by the carefully placed bones, many of which are almost artistic in the way they have been left. A barrel-shaped array of skulls, which hide a pillar supporting the ceiling, in the ‘Crypt of the Passion’, is particularly astonishing. And amid all these deathly sculptures are numerous reflections on he fragility of human life, carved attentively into the stonewall.
Also intriguing are the rusty gates, which block many dark passages leading to ‘invisible’ corners of the catacombs – many of them remain un-renovated, or are simply un-navigable for regular tourists.
At the end of the two-kilometre walk through the catacombs, and up the 83 steps to street level, one can’t help but feel grateful to be returned to the world of the living.
Nicole Mansour - My name is Nicole Mansour, and I am a graduate of the Actors Centre Australia with an Adv. Dip. in Performing Arts. After spending several ...
