I did the museum when I lived in Paris as a student. Now I had come back to visit the illicit underground, the tortuous 500-plus miles of it, "the infernal maze" of "The Phantom of the Opera" and Hugo's Hunchback, the galleries where Robespierre dumped his dead and prostitutes tricked in "Crypts of Passion" and anti-Vichy partisans fled SS troopers. Partisans of a sort still haunt the catacombs, young, well-educated, middle-class men who descend by the score weekly and often nightly to explore and throw parties and play cat-and-mouse with the "cata-cops" who patrol looking for them. They call themselves "cataphiles," which means, literally, "lover of the underground."
We settled down in a rocky alcove, a 13th century quarry, and poked candles into the soft, wet walls, which steamed from our human heat. We cooked canned beans and sausage, drank wine, lolled in the sandy earth, and Lezard Peint, who claims to have walked some 9,000 miles in the underground, explained the culture of cataphilia. "There's something that touches you deeply, sensually and psychologically, when you go below, when you are alone with the stone," he told me. Peint bears an uncanny resemblance to the actor Ed Harris, same high cheekbones and grin and same shaven widow's peak on his dome. Like all cataphiles, he goes by his cave-handle, his catanym: Lezard Peint translates as "the Painted Lizard," which makes me think, rightly in his case, of the chameleon. For the Lizard, whose real name is Eric Valleye (32 years old, Web site designer), is known as a master of subterfuge, one of the nastiest pranksters in the underworld.
"Christopher, watch out with Peint," one cata-girl had counseled. "He is feared by many. Sometimes he steals people's lights and maps and backpacks, and then you must find your way out in the dark. Fortunately, you don't stay lost for long, someone else usually comes along. Still ... he once forced a friend of mine to walk out of the catacombs naked.
"And everyone knows," she added, "that he has fascist/Nazi convictions."
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When I first met Peint in a cafe on the Left Bank, I confronted him with these stories, which amused him to no end, hearing his own legend recounted. He smiled broadly, showing clean, white, handsome teeth, which is remarkable among Frenchmen, and rather odd for this particular Frenchman, because the Lizard does not live what would be considered a healthy life. For starters, he never sees the sun. Sunlight, he says, makes him sleepy and weak, and he plans his life accordingly, turning in at dawn and waking at dusk, freelancing from his home. (Generally, he refused to meet or interview before midnight; "I'm still digesting breakfast," he'd tell me around 9 p.m. Breakfast is often something like cassoulet -- franks and beans.) This has been his biological schedule for close to 10 years, so you'd think his bones would have gone brittle from lack of vitamin D, and that he'd be depressed and pale and sickly and rotten-toothed. But no, there he was grinning like the Cheshire cat as I rounded out the litany of his perceived crimes. He shrugged, and sipped his wine.
"The naked guy? I've done that many times," he told me. "Many times! We always make it hard on the neophytes, the amateurs, the newbies. But I did not force these people to do what they did. One time four amateurs stumbled upon myself and a friend. They were complaining about their wet tennis shoes -- innocents, not much courage in them -- and they greeted us in misery, and I said, screamed more like, 'No! We do not talk! Get naked now! It is June 8, the day in the catacombs when we wear only the right sock!'"
And the young men took off their clothes. Just like that. They could've told Peint to go to hell -- Peint wasn't armed, wasn't physically threatening them, it was four against two -- but they didn't. They departed with one sock, a key for home, a candle and two matches.
The rites of passage in the catacombs are no different from the vicious hazing of American fraternity boys. Here's Lezard, say, on a warm night not long ago, dressed in full regalia, an SS lieutenant, looking supremely Aryan with his blue eyes and blond head, surrounded by 10 other "Nazis" in swastika'd armbands (one of them, amusingly, a large black man), singing old German war songs at full throttle, stomping through the tunnels, sieg heiling, the songs echoing down the halls for a half-mile. You hear that and you run. Or you meet them around a corner, accidentally, and they scream, "Was bist du hier? WAS BIST DU HIER?"
Next page: "Only one death we know for certain"