The Catacombs

July 18, 2007 by Tiffany.

Day of the dead?  Well, not exactly but it could have been.  Today I went into Montparnasse and visited the Catacombs and nearby cemetery famous for its celebrity residents.  The catacombs were much as I expected, creepy and cool at the same time.  The actual bones didn’t freak me out nearly as much as the teeny, tiny stairwell that keeps twisting further and further into the unknown, and the subsequent miniscule “hallway” of the quarry underneath the subways and sewers of the city that and incredibly dark and damp.  The arrangement of the bones is really bizarre, and makes you almost forget that they are the carefully placed bodies of the deceased.

It took two years to unearth the cemeteries of Paris and fill the underground quarry.  Each night they would exhume the graves, pile them in a large wagon, drape a black cloth over the heap, and take them down into the quarry with a priest in tow reciting prayers and such.  The director didn’t like how they were initially throwing the bodies into piles, so he recommended they make designs with the femurs, tibias and skulls.  There are two places in the quarry tunnels where the ceiling forms a bell shape.  This is apparently what happens when the ceiling begins to weaken and is ready to cave in.

Supposedly they have methods of injecting it with concrete so that it won’t cave in, and businesses above those areas have to fill out special paperwork indicating that they realize the risk.  Let me tell you, this is not a fun thing to read when you’re standing underneath the bell.  Ugh.  Here’s a random skull someone must have thought to take outside and then reconsidered upon exiting.

Here’s one more picture I snatched off of the internet to show what it looks like.  It actually very dark and flash photography is not permitted but this picture shows it very well.

Afterwards I walked into this cemetery since the guidebook recommended it.  Very interesting how packed together and grandiose all of the graves are.

I managed to run across the graves of Jean Paul Sarte and Simone de Bouvoir.  I won’t pretend to know tons about either person, but thought it was cool to randomly run across their tombs.  Finally, I checked out this restaurant, La Coupole, where once again, famous Parisians dine before they end up in the famous cemetery down the street.

To be honest, I thought it was the restaurant in the area where Hemingway is said to have written most of The Sun Also Rises, but I was wrong.  I’ll have to check that one out another day.  Tomorrow: The Palace of Versailles.

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