Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (11 page)

My mind boggled at Balmès’s words. Could his cellar be linked to the one under our building, a mere two hundred yards away as the mole burrows?

A kind of feverish curiosity seized me. Wherever I went in following days I peered down not up. I peered into stairwells, and into churches to see if they had a crypt, into road works, drains, and wells. Slowly I began assembling a list of underground sites, a mental mole’s map of Paris, including but not limited to classics like the sewers and catacombs.

On that list are nightclubs, supermarkets and shopping centers, a reservoir, the Senate building, movie theaters, the Opéra, swimming pools, crypts, wells, burial grounds, quarries, wine cellars, half a dozen museums, department stores, rivers, subways, secret passageways, a canal, dozens of train lines, a fabulous Art Nouveau public bathroom, and more.

Let’s get one thing straight: I have never been a devotee of the underworld. But two things continue to fascinate me about subterranean Paris. There’s the physical layer-cake of civilizations, a millennial mille-feuille of Gallic, Gallo-Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and more or less modern constructions, with associated lore.

Perhaps even more intriguing, though, are the people I’ve encountered who are obsessed by this buried metropolis. Take, for example, the thousands of (mostly young) Frenchmen and women who spend countless hours on their hands and knees delving into the 175 miles of Paris’s abandoned limestone quarries, a subterranean cityscape as porous as the proverbial Swiss
fromage
(Victor Hugo, better than I at simile, compared it to a sponge). Parisian cave mavericks are known as
cataphiles
—lovers of catacombs. Because the quarries have been off-limits since 1955,
les cataphiles
are pursued in an endless game of cat-and-rat by a special police squad, the Brigade de Dispersion et d’Intervention en Carrière (BDIC), whose members are nicknamed
cataflics
—catacomb cops.

Decked out in survival gear, complete with rubber boots, waterproof packs, and powerful flashlights,
cataphiles
will do just about anything to get into the intestine-like quarry passages and watery chambers a hundred feet or more below the city’s surface, a mole’s paradise where the weather, light conditions, and temperature—50 to 55 Fahrenheit—never change. They throw drug parties, conduct spooky chthonic rites, play at Phantom of the Opera or at Jean Valjean escaping the gendarmes. They carve tables and chairs or entire subterranean theaters from the live rock walls, create art galleries, hold secret meetings, and screen movies, tapping into the city’s underground power grid for their electricity. Wherever bones have fallen into the lightless tunnels from the cemeteries above—at Père-Lachaise or Montparnasse, for instance—hardcore
cataphiles
crawl undaunted over mounds of moldering skeletons. Skulls are favorite trophies.

I’ve long wondered whether the
cataphiles
are misunderstood Romantics or certifiable loons. Whichever, they’re sometimes extremists who belong to rival bands and wear costumes—including Nazi uniforms. Most have cryptic nicknames. They often cut through the metal bars or drill through the cement blocks and walls installed by
cataflics
over the 388 known quarry entrances, many of them in abandoned railroad tunnels. They sometimes use dynamite to blow open new access holes. To elude the
cataflics
or other
cataphiles
, they toss smoke bombs then disappear into the labyrinth. Some get lost for hours or days. Some get hurt. Some have no doubt died underground, like Philibert Aspairt. In 1793 this doorman at the Val-de-Grâce convent descended into the cellars to fetch a bottle of liquor; he turned the wrong way and was found eleven years later under what’s now Rue Henri Barbusse. The spot has been a
cataphile
pilgrimage site ever since.

Mystery, danger, disobedience, a yearning for things lost, hidden, dead—this is what motivates many of Paris’s peculiar cave people, anomalies in the Internet age, and therefore somehow remarkable if not endearing.

But as a former longtime commandant of the BDIC told me one day, those thinking of joining a band of
cataphiles
for a foray should know that some cynical veterans also use their smoke bombs to frighten and disorient
touristes
, meaning first-time visitors. As in fraternity-style hazings, newcomers are sometimes stripped of their flashlights and clothes, then left to whimper in the impenetrable darkness. “In case that isn’t enough to discourage you,” added the commandant’s successor, when I spoke to him, “there is always Mother Nature.” Bona fide claustrophobia is unpleasant, but it’s nothing compared to leptospirosis, a potentially lethal illness carried by germs in rat urine. Before venturing into Lutetia’s muddy bowels, therefore, savvy
cataphiles
get immunized against it. “Be warned,” say the
cataflics
, sounding like the soothsaying damned in Dante’s
Inferno
.

Most casual underground thrill-seekers—meaning people like you and me—start and end their visit to subterranean Paris at Les Catacombes. You might better spend your time reading a page or two of
Les Misérables
, or looking at Félix Nadar’s sublime 1861 photographs of this bizarre realm (Nadar actually invented flash photography to immortalize Paris’s sewers and catacombs). A better place to begin an underground itinerary is the unsung Crypte Archéologique, beneath the square facing Notre-Dame cathedral. This admittedly tame display of ruins, jazzed up with clever spotlighting, nonetheless provides a potted history of Paris from pre-Roman times forward. You see maps and mockups of the city as it spread from the Île de la Cité outward, a history written in rubble. There are Roman roads and the rooms of Roman houses, medieval staircases and wells, and an egg-shaped section of nineteenth-century drainage tunnel. A hodgepodge, the crypt hints at the true buried treasure of this ancient, palimpsest city: an understanding of the past and a perspective on the present.

You can continue a Roman-to-medieval visit at the Musée de Cluny, built atop Imperial-era baths (the cold, warm, and hot rooms are still there, in ruins, plus plenty of archaeological finds). Within a few hundred yards of the crypt and Cluny are several centuries-old Left Bank cellars open to the public. The most easily accessible lie under the celebrated (or notorious) Caveau de la Huchette and Caveau des Oubliettes, both nightspots. Here you descend into atmospheric jazz dens, under venerable vaults where unspeakable horrors—torture, imprisonment, and execution—were once daily occurances. At La Huchette there’s even a skeleton on view, and a well-worn chastity belt. A quarter-mile west, another chastity belt lurks in the buttressed basement of Le Relais Louis XIII restaurant, which is built atop the defunct Grands Augustins convent, an institution whose members were presumably familiar with such contraptions.

In my desultory pursuit of information relating to Paris’s underbelly, I have discovered that many of the Latin Quarter’s hundreds of
caves
were formerly linked by secret passages, some leading into abandoned Roman quarries beneath the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, which is now crowned by the Panthéon. In the Second World War both Nazis and Résistance fighters scurried through these passageways, and in the 1950s and ’60s moviemakers showed their “underground” films here—a dauntingly close ordeal according to friends who participated and lived to tell. Nowadays among young Parisians the term “underground”—in English—once again means subversively cool, hip, or trendy, in part because the clandestine film screens of old started up again in the early 2000s, organized by a mysterious band of vaguely anarchistic sometime
-cataphiles
with a quirky political agenda.

In the hit parade of infra-Paris sites, the Louvre’s Carrousel area offers the subterranean spectacle of Charles V’s moat and walls—a seductive alignment of round tower bases and inclined ramparts. For the aesthetic experience, however, my favorite dens are underneath the Hôtel de Beauvais and the Marais historical society’s sixteenth-century headquarters, the Maison d’Ourscamp, both in Rue François Miron. The Gothic vaulting and elegant columns originally supported several parts of a now-demolished thirteenth-century abbey. In each of the two cellars is a well, a common feature of Paris houses before the arrival of Baron Haussmann and his waterworks engineer, Eugène Belgrand, in the mid-1800s.

To grasp the revolutionary aspects of Belgrand’s sewers and water supply try imagining a filthy, disease-ridden Paris where groundwater and the Seine were contaminated, waste flooded the streets, and thousands died every year from water-borne diseases. Victor Hugo may have lamented the passing of this soulful, pestilential city, but not Nadar, whose black-and-white photos show Belgrand’s spacious conduits in all their stunning symmetry. Today they’re much as they were when built in the 1850s—orderly, clean, utterly unromantic yet redolent of a sickly sweetness Hugo would have loved, for the streets of his Vieux Paris were legendary for their stench of decomposing cabbage.

Let’s be honest, it helps to be a historian or an engineer to enjoy the sewers. Nowadays only a quarter-mile section of them under the Quay d’Orsay is open to the public and only on foot (when I first visited Paris, visitors toured the sewers in rowboats). But your average sewer-goer is too baffled and nauseated to study the museum displays, which range from gumboots to computers, or appreciate the ingeniousness of the gravity-flow tunneling, the tunefulness of the gurgling gutters, and the beauty of the brownish cascades. Surprisingly, many of Belgrand’s 150-year-old devices are still in use, including giant wooden balls that rumble through the system’s 1,300 miles, crushing muck as they go. To me this revolting spectacle conjures up images of the big nightmarish ball in the cult 1960s TV series
The Prisoner
, and like its star, I long for escape.

Nadar took some of his most ghoulish images not in the sewers but in Les Catacombes, in 1861. They capture that most sublime moment of Haussmann’s modernization of the city: the stacking of the bones of some six million dead, many of them transferred here starting in 1786 from the cemetery of the Innocents, near what is now Les Halles. Unlike those of Rome, Paris’s catacombs are an ossuary, created for practical reasons: to empty the Innocents of a decomposing cargo that had burst through walls to poison the surrounding neighborhood.

The catacombs provide proof, if any were needed, that our modern age has no monopoly on perversity. Toward the end of the Ancien Régime the ossuary became a rendezvous of depraved aristocrats. The Comte d’Artois, later King Charles X, held torch-lit
fêtes macabres
here with ladies in waiting from the court in Versailles. The site was officially opened to tourists only in the 1870s, after Haussmann had sanitized it. Nadar’s photos show workers sorting and stacking the bones dumped here from a dozen graveyards (all Paris’s inner-city cemeteries were eventually cleared), building decorative retaining walls with femurs, tibia, and skulls and tossing smaller bones behind.

Accessing the catacombs is still a daunting experience. A descent down the spiral staircase that worms a hundred feet beneath Place Denfert-Rochereau, the main entrance to the site, is guaranteed to leave you dizzy. Claustrophobics need not apply. You enter a mile-long maze of tunnels that zigzag toward what nineteenth-century commentators, paraphrasing Dante, dubbed “the realm of the dead.” As you march single-file over slippery stones, preceded and followed by hundreds of fellow visitors, it’s little comfort to know that sections of these ancient former quarries have collapsed as recently as 2010. You squelch over mud, wondering when the lights or ventilation might fail, and, if you’re like me, asking yourself what you’re doing here in the first place, gaping at millions of weirdly displayed age-mottled bones.

Evidently I belong to a squeamish minority. Almost two hundred thousand tourists a year besiege the catacombs, loving them to death with cameras flashing and boots resounding. If ever there was a time you could quietly contemplate this disconcerting sanctuary’s significance—the backbreaking work of underpaid miners, the technical genius of Enlightenment thinkers and engineers, the anonymity of six million forgotten ancestors—that innocent time is long gone. As I clambered out of the caves a security guard was checking backpacks. A stolen skull stared forlornly from a table, and a youngster with a stupid grin was doing his best to talk himself out of trouble. “Happens all the time,” sighed a guard when I asked. “You’ve got to wonder …”

After the catacombs, the life-enhancing qualities of the subterranean Canal Saint-Martin can only come as a relief. You board a riverboat at the Arsenal marina, abutting the Bastille, then putter leisurely toward La Villette under several miles of vaults conceived by Haussmann—who else? But the first, the great Emperor Napoléon deserves some credit, too. He had the canal built as an open waterway. The relentless Baron covered the canal to thwart riotous Parisians who, he feared (based on the 1830 revolution) might use it again as a defensive moat. Happily, nowadays tour boats and pleasure craft cruise the canal and there is no echo of its bloody past.

Another sublime subterranean spot is the basement of the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville—the BHV department store—an unrivaled Aladdin’s cavern of hardware, now equipped with its own subterranean café-restaurant, Bricolo. And under Place de la Madeleine hide what may just be Paris’s most beautiful Art nouveau
toilettes publiques
, with carved wood panels, brass and mirrors, floral frescoes, and stained-glass windows in each
cabinet
. Here, once you’ve awakened the sleeping
Madame Pipì
(i.e., the bathroom attendant), you may tidy up like a real fin-de-siècle lady or gentleman.

Of course the greatest and most useful thing in Paris’s underground world is the Métropolitain, inaugurated in 1900. Its deepest stations are at Abbesses, halfway up Montmartre, and Cité, on the island of the same name. However, as if to prove that earlier centuries can’t claim all the glory, the Météor line running from Madeleine past François Mitterrand’s National Library is a staggering wonder of the subsoil, a postmodern folly, as symbolic of our times as the sewers or catacombs were of theirs. Glass escalators lower you into cavernous halls, then down to the platforms, where glass barriers prevent passengers from falling onto the tracks. Météor is driverless. Its path crosses the Marais. Whenever I ride it, I make a point of checking, irrationally, for traces of Paris history buried not far from our dusty, moldy cellar.