Underground among Paris’s millions dead

Catacombs mix history, mystery, and adventure

January 23, 2011|Caroline Kinneberg, Globe Correspondent

PARIS — There are two kinds of gruyere in France: the literal one, an odorous, holey family of cheeses produced near the Swiss border; and the figurative one, the gruyere parisien, equally as earthy, porous, and complex. It refers to the tangle, deep under the city’s streets, of metro and train lines, sewers, and ancient quarries that extend much farther and are much more active than most Parisians realize.

The quarries have lived many lives. Originally providing limestone that remains the basis for the city’s classic streetscapes, they housed mushroom farms once rock extraction was halted. Sections of the mines not used for champignons de Paris were taken for a very different purpose. Because of the city’s exploding population, mass graves were overflowing, causing putrid odors and spreading deadly infections. From 1786 through 1814, the city emptied its graves and transferred bones into the quarries, including those of Robespierre and Rabelais, some of France’s most important historic figures whose skeletons remain anonymous among the others underground. Now a municipal museum called the Catacombs of Paris, the ossuary is the world’s biggest necropolis and one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions.

“Stop! It is here, the empire of death,’’ reads an epigraph from poet Jacques Delille that has marked the Catacombs’ entrance since they opened to the public in the 19th century. During summer tourist season, lines often wrap around the block and people easily wait an hour before entering. Why do 300,000 visitors per year choose to ignore the sign and step into the exceedingly creepy subterranean cemetery? “It evokes the stories of hundreds of millions of Parisians,’’ says Danièle Pourtaud, deputy to the mayor of Paris in charge of patrimony, referring to the 6 million people buried in the Catacombs. “It’s simultaneously a historical account and, it’s delicate to say a work of art, but a mise-en-scène.’’

Creative types have long drawn inspiration from the ghostly atmosphere. The French photographer Nadar, for instance, developed the use of artificial lighting in photography in the 1860s with images of the Catacombs. Today, tourists patter along the same hauntingly beautiful paths and rooms, past walls of bones stacked like Jenga sticks and engraved, dramatically lighted memorials.

But the 45-minute, self-guided ossuary tour only covers 2 kilometers of the 300-kilometer-long quarry system (about 186 miles), which has been off-limits to the public since 1955. And this is the gruyere the cataphiles can’t get enough of.