A CITY OF DEATH UNDER THE CITY OF LIGHTS   Special feature editorial by Druidess       "Stop!" the sign reads. 'This is the Empire of Death." The warning on Dante's hell-gate comes to mind: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Indeed, you've descended 85 dizzying steps on a creaky iron -cast spiral stair, and find yourself 200 feet below Paris' bright summer in a realm of cold, utter darkness and tens of millions of bones. You pass into a jagged corridor about three feet wide and six feet high. The skulls grin from walls nearly thirty yards thick with a mesh of leg and arm bones. It sounds like a bad horror movie, or the germ of a gothic novel   In fact, this is only the beginning of an hour-long tour of the Paris catacombs, visited yearly by more than 100,000 people. Underneath the splendour and regularity of Paris' streets lies what one might call the proper antithesis to the city of lights: a giant necropolis, where millions of dead repose en masse, lining the walls of a 200-mile maze of caves and carven passages. The history of the Paris catacombs goes back nearly two millenia. They began as Gallo-Roman quarry tunnels around 60 B.C., back when Parisii was the name of a local tribe recently pacified, and Paris was known as Lutece, a distant frontier outpost scorned by legionnaires. Arena, thermal baths, forum and temple were built from the high-quality calcite stone, which since has supplied the building blocks for most of the modern city. Around 1785, the government began converting 350 of these underground rock quarries into mass graves, to meet desperate overcrowding in the medieval cemeteries that dotted the center of Paris. The Les Halles district above was suffering from contamination of poor burials and mass graves in the churchyard cemetaries; there was much sickness in the area, and in some cases the ground level in the church yards had risen 10 to 20 feet just from the volume of the human remains in them; something had to be done.Initially, three million bodies, the combined dead of 400 years, were exhumed and transferred by horse-and-cart caravan every morning for two years, a morbid pre-dawn dance of death crossing the bridges of the Seine towards the hill at Denfert-Rochereau, where the mouth of the caverns was originally discovered. At the spot where the first bones were placed, a funerary altar stands, flanked by these words: "PRINCIPIUM ET FINIS. ETERNITE." Appropriately, this is where the tour begins.   The street-level entrance to the catacombs...     ...and the spiral staircase which descends into the earth.   The bone galleries, or ossuary, are no less balanced and precise than the Haussmanian avenues that make Paris a painter's delight. Ever fastidious, even when concerning six million nameless dead, the French arranged the bones aesthetically: skulls are balanced on tibias and femurs crossed or thatched to form struts, one atop the other. Some walls have skulls in rows and columns, like the floor plan of the trees in a Le Notre park. Death subordinated to art. It is eerily calming. Lone plaques and inscriptions lit by flashlight lend to the gloom: "If you have ever seen a man die, remember that one day that fate awaits you." Or: "Happy is he who always has the hour of his death before his eyes and is ready to die every day." Or: "Upon death, you leave everything."               The underground entrance to the Ossuary of Denfert-Rochereaux. Just inside this door rest the bones of millions of people.   You do leave everything behind when you enter the catacombs. The humid cave cold lights your breath. A drip, many drips, echo from the sweating ceilings. Your flashlight barely pierces the darkness. You've made sure to bring extra batteries? As we slowly make our way through winding passages, past cul-de-sacs, through barely navigable slits, into a wide hall where the sudden sight of a desk makes me laugh, my 21-year-old "cataphile" guide tells of a friend who ran out of batteries spelunking alone. He hasn't heard of him since. Les cataphiles' are a self-styled group of young Parisian catacomb-lovers who make weekend journeys into the netherworld to explore those endless miles which tour groups-- -and most Parisians---never see. Today, a vast underground network of sewers, canals, subway and utility tunnels, and catacombs crisscross and intersect in a honeycomb chaos. The cataphiles make it their playground. Graffiti artists make it a mammoth tableau. Numerous homeless have made a home in its nooks. Some cataphiles have claimed caves as private space, and outfitted them with radios, Coleman lamps, Bunsen burners, beds and couches. Even the elite Paris club scene has been attracted, literally, underground, sponsoring three-day LSD and 'ecstasy' parties, attracting hundreds of all-night revelers, who tramp through sewers and across subway tracks to find `la fete cata'---literally, `the cave party.'     Remains from the Carmes Convent, Place Maubert, depsoited Jan 25, 1814.   But this is nothing new. On April Fool's Day, 1897, 45 members of the Paris orchestra met in the catacombs, decked out in full tuxedo, for a clandestine performance. Prostitutes chased from street-walking became cave-walkers; and eventually had the Crypt of Passion named after them. During the Second World War, partisans repaired to the little known hide-aways. Balzac was said to have escaped his creditors through them. Robespierrc, Danton, and Marat, the three "Gods of the Revolution", came to the catacombs---discarded along with the unknown thousands they guillotined.     Remains from the Cemetery of St. Nicolas des Champs, deposited August 24, 1804.               Bodies from the riots in the Place de Greve, from the Hotel de Brienne, and from Rue Meslee, deposited August 28 and 29, 1788.   PREVIOUS STORIES:             The Jersey Devil                     Click below to return to