Spelunking the empire of death

In the catacombs beneath Paris, a legendary trespasser enacts the theater of psycho-terror.

By Christopher Ketcham

June 19, 2002 | "Fortunato!"
No answer still ... There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. -- "The Cask of Amontillado," by Edgar Allan Poe

We descended around midnight through a locked manhole near the Jardin de Luxembourg. We wore blue jumpsuits tucked into knee-high rubber boots, and thick gloves, and raggedy utility belts dangling Mag lights and Leatherman hand tools and battery packs that fed lamps atop yellow miner's hats -- not a high Paris fashion, but we looked like sewer workers; the few people on the streets ignored us when we brought out a special key, flipped the manhole up on its hinge and shot into the ground.

The manhole, however, would not close tight, so the grinning loudmouth named Lezard Peint, our leader, peeped out and yelled to a cardiganed grampus passing by. "For purposes of security, Monsieur," Lezard tooted in his splendid professorial French, "would you please jump up and down on this manhole when I shut it?" "What, young man?" the old man grumbled. "We require a push from above to get it closed. For purposes of security, Monsieur." The old man hopped, no doubt looking ridiculous, and the manhole thudded tight, and we could hear him thumping away as we fled into the darkness.

We tramped for a quarter-hour through a 3-foot-wide telecom tunnel lined with red and blue rubber pipes ("Ooh, they are beautiful!" someone exclaimed. "They are so pretty!"), finally arriving at a chiseled rabbit hole by the dirty floor. Waist 33 inches maximum. I went in prone, feet first, backed myself under the blue pipes, and for a fleeting moment I was afraid, the same way children are afraid of basements, of the Thing that lurks. Then I dropped out the other side, 10 feet down, into the catacombs of Paris.

We walked for miles: through foot-high crawl ways with sandy floors, and wild zigzags in squeezed defiles, and pools of clear, cold shin-high water that shivered in our lights. There was graffiti on the walls from the '80s and '90s, a palimpsest of tags and entreaties ("Lost in the catas! Help!"), and underneath the color were stonecutters' marks from the 1750s, the 1600s. Nearby, somewhere, was the Crossroads of the Dead, a low circular room filled with tens of thousands of rotting ribs, where you must crawl and the bones crackle like squashed waterbugs.

There are 560 miles of abandoned medieval quarry tunnels under greater Paris, the largest network of rock tunnels under any city in the world. The catacombs, as they're known, run at depths of anywhere from 20 to 120 feet, honeycombing the arrondissements of the Left Bank and the suburbs south of the city proper. They can be entered from Metro tunnels, utility systems, church crypts and the basements of homes, hospitals, lycées and universities (there's even an entrance in the deepest reaches of Tour Montparnasse, Paris' one skyscraper).

They are multitiered in places, connected by ladders and stairs and open wells. Some are rough-hewed, vast and echoing, 100 feet wide and 12 feet high, some smooth-walled and narrow as a little girl. The oldest date back 2,000 years, to the first Roman settlers, but the majority are products of the cathedral boom and urban expansion of the late Middle Ages, when demand for the thick limestone deposits along the Seine reached frenzied heights. Around 1785, long after the quarrying had stopped, the skeletonized remains of 6 million dead -- the entire population of the city's foul and overflowing central cemeteries -- were dumped underground, forming the largest mass grave on earth.

You can see portions of this necropolis, legally, at the Musee des Catacombes, on the Left Bank, where a rock-hewed placard welcomes, "Stop! You are entering the Empire of Death!" Thirty-three francs buys a hushed promenade through two miles of human ivory, but in summer the tourists pile up against the bone walls; the skulls get shined from so many interested hands.

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