Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  A child of eight, bored by the lecture, started crawling up the side of the cavern where the group clustered. The soft rock crumbled and shifted under his feet. My sleeping claustrophobia instantly burned white hot. If he caused a cave-in, I thought, I’d drag my broken body through the rubble and...The boy’s father persuaded him to stop fooling around, averting multiple catastrophes.

  Some Germans pushed forward through the crowd. The guide blathered on without stopping them, so Mason and I followed.

  We found a pair of niches carved with miniature cityscapes. Permanent Parisians said that the stonemason who sculpted them had been a prisoner in the city they represented. After he finished the carving, he tried to cut steps down from the street so the public could view his masterpiece. The stairway excavation caused a cave-in. The story, surely romanticized, said that he died with his chisel in hand.

  Next we came upon steps down to a well of perfectly clear water. Though the stone stairs looked sturdy enough, an iron gate blocked them off. A plaque said that the quarrymen used to drink the water. They called the well Samaritaine, after the woman Jesus met at the well. I wondered if this well had any connection to the department store. We could only look down into the shimmering water from what seemed like a balcony.

  Eventually we reached a doorway, the first since we’d come underground. Wooden obelisks, painted white and black, flanked yawning darkness. Above the lintel, a sign warned, “Arrêtez. C’est ici l’empire de la mort.” Stop. Beyond this is Death’s Kingdom.

  The warning had frightened away the Nazis, who never discovered the French Resistance, hiding in the catacombs after August 1944. Right beneath the Parisian streets, the Resistance had concealed a radio capable of reaching London. They worked in the tunnels until the liberators came. How terrifying could the Kingdom of Death be?

  We paused outside the doorway, while I gathered my courage. Taking my husband’s hand, I stepped through the portal, into the empire of Death.

  Pensez le matin que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au au soir et au soir que vous n’irez peut-être pas jusqu’au au matin.

  (Think in the morning that perhaps you won’t last until evening, and in the evening that you won’t last until morning.)

  Inside, the brown knobs of fibulas and femurs stacked higher than our heads. Skulls formed contrasting lines among the leg bones, a decorative motif. The round domed craniums were naked and sad. Empty eye sockets gazed patiently at us.

  Bone upon bone upon bone. The sheer number of these anonymous memento mori was staggering. I had trouble grasping the concept of 5 million skulls, 10 million shin bones, 60 million ribs.... If a human body has 206 bones, there must be over a billion bones stacked in the catacomb tunnels, assuming, that is, that the gravediggers found everything. I imagined some bourgeoise matron trying to gather herself together after the Trump of Doom sounded. The hipbone’s connected to the backbone.... Which one of these backbones is mine?

  Now that I thought of it, I wondered where the remainders of the skeletons lay. I expected to stroll past towers of hipbones and stacks of shoulder blades. Instead, we saw nothing but skulls and long bones. Everything else must have been tucked away. I stopped in the midst of a passage so narrow my elbows could have touched bones on either side. The caverns must have been enormous before these mortal remains filled them.

  Mason and I photographed everything that struck a chord in us: the walls and pillars and columns of bones, the piles that had collapsed and spilled their sad relics onto the stone floor, the arrangements of skulls and crossbones. I worried that the gloom might be too much for my little camera, even with the flash. Shadows lurked beyond the occasional round fluorescent light fixtures.

  Beautiful inscriptions graced plaques set amongst the remains. Here and there a yellow spotlight cast a narrow beam, but overall I was glad I’d brought that flashlight. Other visitors burned their fingers while lighting matches to read the inspirational words. One plaque spoke of shadows among shadows, another about the empty eyes of skulls and the full eyes of God. All men fall, several said. If you have seen a man breathe his last, you know what is in store for you.

  Why, I wondered, is Death female in French?

  Où est-elle, la Mort? Toujours futur ou passé. A peine est-elle présente, que déjà elle n’est plus.

  (Where is Death? Always in the future or the past. As soon as it is present, it is already gone.)

  After 200 years and at least two burials, some of the bones were beginning to decompose. White down grew on one wall of shinbones. Elsewhere, two skulls had turned quite green. Some craniums sported round holes. I imagined someone grasping a skull, only to have it crunch beneath his fingertips like eggshell.

  I felt uncomfortable among all these human remains and tried not to think at all, but simply to follow the crowd as it moved on. My companion had not much to say; nor had I. Suddenly a burst of laughter broke from a small group of youngsters who were holding their burning candles beneath some of the skulls as if to try whether they would burn. I was at once jolted into remembering my nationality. I have been living away from China for many years and have acquired many Western habits, but my early upbringing in ancestor worship had not entirely left me. Worshipping one’s ancestors is not a bad practice; there is nothing silly in according one’s forbears due respect. To hold a lighted candle under skulls is a bad joke. Who knew whether those very skulls did not belong to the youngsters’ own long-deceased ancestors?

  —Chiang Yee, The Silent Traveller in Paris his fingertips like eggshell.

  I discovered that I’m funny about human bones. I find something especially creepy about the geometry of a skull, inside which someone once lived and loved and dreamed. A skull, more than any other relic, seems too personal to be examined by a stranger. All those skulls, all those empty eyes, unnerved me the most.

  Throughout the catacombs, everything was well within reach. Although a sign had cautioned us not to touch, nothing prevented us. We could have easily taken a souvenir. As an intellectual exercise, we speculated on how one might sneak human remains through customs.

  In reality, I had no desire to touch the bones or to allow them to touch me. Little matter that they could not possibly be contagious after so many years postmortem. I did not want to feel the brittle evidence of death beneath my fingers. If looking into the void meant the void looked back, I expected that touching Death meant that Death returned the gesture. You see where fondling Yorick’s skull got Hamlet. I kept my hands jammed resolutely into my pockets.

  Si vous avez vu quelquefois mourir un homme, considérez toujours que le même sort vous attend.

  (If you have ever seen a man die, consider always that the same fate awaits you.)

  One of the guidebooks had warned us to take sweaters but, compared to the January winds outside, the tunnels were comfortably warm. It might have been cozy, if it hadn’t been so damp.

  Tiny nubbins, future stalactites, hung from the ceiling. Water dripped incessantly, puddling on the floor. I didn’t want any of that water falling into my face. The sound, when the two of us stood alone amidst the dead, was like slowly falling tears. The atmosphere definitely affected me.

  The catacombs provided a perfect cathedral in which to meditate on the folly of human aspirations, to think about the war in the Persian Gulf. Death was so universal, so inescapable, why seek to hasten it? There were so many things I had yet to do before I could surrender to Death. Did those American boys in the foreign sand feel the same? Did the Iraqi boys? Wars should always be considered among memento mori like these. Perhaps life would seem more precious to the politicians who wage them.

  We rounded a bend in the tunnels in time to see a man in another group stumble. His friends snatched him back before he could topple into the stacked bones. What a nightmare that would be: falling into the arms of Death, hearing them snap beneath you. Once you stopped falling, the other bones would tumble down over your face. I shivered with empathy at his near escape.

&nbs
p; Mason was glad when we encountered the family with the small boy again. Imagine, he said to me, the dreams you would have if your parents had brought you here as a child. Instead I imagined the dreams I would have that night. This might be a good night to drink red wine before bed.

  The ossuary seemed to go on and on. I wondered if we’d gotten lost, since we separated from the tour, but locked gates clearly delimited the direction we could go. When at last we climbed the tall steps of the spiral staircase to the exit, we found ourselves on an unfamiliar street. The pedometer said we had gone only a mile underground.

  White powder edged our shoes, dried residue of the moisture on the path. The chilly January wind felt fresh on my face and in my lungs. I thanked goodness to find myself alive and in Paris.

  I linked arms with Mason. If we weren’t going to last until evening, I said, we’d better locate a pâtisserie. I had a burning desire for an apple tart.

  On Loren Rhoads’s first visit to the Catacombs she was overwhelmed by the emotional confrontation with “Death.” She is not sure she could have survived it if her husband had not been there to hold her hand.

  A brisk fifteen-minute walk away the word museum takes on new meaning at the Museum of the Sewers. Entered through what looks like a big manhole on the sidewalk at the southern end of the Pont de l’Alma, it is both museum and sewers, that is, a section of the sewers—les égouts in French—that has been adapted to give tourists an idea of what the entire 1,320-mile network looks—and smells—like. (Actually, it doesn’t smell too bad—a sort of musty damp smell most of the time.) It has a little museum, with paintings, drawings, and photographs accompanied by texts—in French, English, German, and Spanish—explaining how the sewers were built and work.

  For centuries the city’s sewage ended up in the Seine, which also provided some of its drinking water. Not a good idea, concluded Napoleon, who ordered construction of the first underground sewage canals to take the waste away from the river. By 1850 there were already 100 miles of canals, but the real turning point came in the second half of the 19th century, when Baron Haussmann tore down central Paris to make way for the broad avenues and fine buildings to be seen today. He assigned an engineer, Eugene Belgrand, the job of building a proper sewer network beneath the newly transformed city. His legacy is one of the most extensive urban sewer systems in the world. Much of what exists today was his work....

  The underground network, though, serves other purposes. In Les Misérables, the Victor Hugo novel that became a hit musical, Jean Valjean saves his wounded enemy, Marius, by carrying him to safety through the sewers. During World War II, when Paris was occupied by Nazi Germany, the French Resistance would hide and plot there. Today the city’s water supply, telephone and electricity lines, and pipes carrying compressed air to hospitals run through the network of underground canals. Even the turn-of-the-century system of delivering express letters through pneumatic tubes survives. It now connects only Government ministries and Parliament, but it explains the occasional rattling sound that can be heard at the Museum of the Sewers.

  —Alan Riding, “The Sights Beneath the Sidewalks,”

  The New York Times

  MICHELE ANNA JORDAN

  Paris Rapture

  Testing one’s mettle in the City of Light.

  I ARRIVED AT THE GARE DE LYON ON THE NIGHT TRAIN FROM Milan at 7:22 a.m. Having treated myself to a first-class sleeper (the best travel money I have ever spent), I was in pretty good shape: well-rested, not wrinkled, and most importantly, not carsick. A porter helped me get my luggage to a locker and by 9:30, I had a hotel room nearby and was ready for my single day in the City of Light when it began to rain. After a long hot bath, it still was pouring but I was not to be daunted. I opened my red umbrella and hit the street, determined for adventure. I was one of the only people in sight but I hurried on, ignoring the water seeping into my red shoes and splashing against my legs.

  I walked to the nearby Bastille in search of an interesting restaurant. I was longing for oysters, but more than that I wanted authenticity, a place without tourists where the waiter would not condescendingly address me in English as I struggled to speak my best French. Alas, I had left behind my Food Lover’s Guide to Paris and would have to rely solely on my good instincts, which were a little frayed after nearly three weeks on the road.

  I walked for what seemed like hours, and after lingering in a lavish outdoor market a stone’s throw from the Seine, intuition served me well. I settled into a comfortable table in a small wine bar that had simply looked right. Soon, I was sipping champagne and nibbling walnuts while I slowly considered each menu item. If I had but one meal in Paris, I told myself, it would be grand. Three hours later the singularly most indulgent, decadent solo activity I have pursued concluded with a strong cup of café crème. Every minute had been divine.

  How could such a simple blend of sugar, butter, eggs, flour, and a touch of lemon unleash the flood of memories that filled those volumes of prose we know as Remembrance of Things Past? For Proust, the memories began one wintry day when his mother sent out for “one of those squat, plump little cakes called petites madeleines which look as though they have been moulded in the fluted valve of a scallop shell.” With his madeleines Proust drank an infusion of tilleul, a tea prepared from the dried blossoms of the linden tree. Proust continued: “I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that had happened to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.”

  —Patricia Wells, The Food Lover’s Guide to France

  I followed my flute of champagne with the richest, densest slab of foie gras I have ever tasted, served with sweet butter and a basket of crispy toast and accompanied voluptuously by a 1988 Roumaud Sauternes, a truly rapturous combination. I ate slowly, relishing each bite and reading from a favorite book, Greil Marcus’s In the Fascist Bathroom (known in its American edition as Ranters and Crowd Pleasers). Throughout my travels this tome on punk music is the one book that held up to all of my culinary indulgences. Everything else paled in comparison to what I was eating and drinking but Marcus’s tight, intense essays formed the perfect literary counter-part to my gastronomic adventures, perhaps because he, too, eats with relish and enthusiasm. It helped that I knew that the final piece, a bizarre story called “I Am a Cliché,” had been at least partially inspired by a solo meal he’d had in Paris a few years earlier.

  My foie gras was followed by an enormous portion of steak tartare, the most ethereal version I’ve encountered, if indeed you can apply the term ethereal to a mound of chopped raw beef and in my lexicon you can. An accompanying side dish of pommes à l’huile and tiny leaves of mâche in a delicate vinaigrette added both virtue and contrast, while a glass of 1990 Pierredon—a very pleasant Bordeaux—fit like the proverbial glove.

  Nearly all French eateries, even the lowliest cafés and bars, offer a cheese course and here there was an interesting selection rarely if ever seen in America. A thick slice of Cantal, a tangy hard cheese from Auvergne garnished with white raisins soaked in Sauternes and a final glass of Bordeaux (St. Estephe Beau Site) alongside, brought the extravaganza to a delightful close.

  I ate and read with languorous pleasure, recalling musical moments that resonated with Marcus’s. Seconds after I came across a reference to “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes, the song began to play on the wine bar’s radio. The rain stopped, a bit of sun broke through the grey day and I wished the moment could last forever, so complete did life seem there in that tiny dark café.

  Following whatever you want to call what I had just done—my indulgence, my feast, my folly—I walked for several hours, not with any particular purpose but simply to absorb through my pores as much of Paris as I could. A well-known destination—the Louvre, say, or the glittering activity of the Champs-Elysées—seemed pointless with such limited time,
particularly since my meal had lasted until late in the afternoon. I also knew that I had a hidden agenda—secretly, I was hoping that if I walked enough I might be hungry again before day’s end.

  After relaxing briefly in my hotel room, I set out again, this time crossing the Seine and thinking I might walk to Notre Dame. But adventures unfolded quickly and among other things, I found myself assisting an old woman across the street. She had been leaning against the traffic signal in the center of the road, unable to go on. An hour later, I had gotten her to the train station and comfortably situated in a wheelchair, with a porter to escort her onto the train to Lourdes and its healing waters, where she would seek relief from the various afflictions of age. She was from Florida and had made many trips to Europe by herself. As I walked back to the street, I wondered how she made it on her own, if someone like me came to her rescue in other places.

  It was now close to 11:00 p.m., and everything was drawing to a close, my day in Paris, my extended European adventures, my energy, and my appetite. I walked purposefully towards my hotel, the sensible thing to do. But across from the Gare de Lyon, seafood restaurants still bustled with the night’s lingering customers. Oysters of every sort and size beckoned from mounds of ice. What the hell, I said, and walked in.

  Ten minutes later, I was seated at a window table before a towering platter of ice and oysters, a half bottle of a crisp, flinty Sancerre chilling next to me. I ate the oysters ever so slowly and after the first two, closed my book and looked out onto the Parisian streets. The contrast to my earlier meal was significant. Then everything had been so dark and rich, so nearly sexual in its voluptuousness, that each bite filled me with guilty pleasure. Now, it was all lean and bright and spare and I felt myself growing lighter as I lingered over each oyster. I am sure I glowed with contentment.