The Empire of the Dead

When I first walked around Paris, I told myself I was going to walk above ground rather than take the metro.  I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and stroll through the café-riddled streets where vendors sold pain au chocolat.  I wanted to spend every minute possible soaking up my surroundings.  Even if I were on some uninteresting street at least it would be an uninteresting Parisian street. 

If I took the metro, I’d simply be underground, staring at outdated advertisements for movies that have already been released.  I could be riding through the dark tunnels of any city equipped with a subway.  However, I soon discovered that what lurks beneath the avenues can give a city some character. 

My tent-mate Aaron convinced me to see the catacombs.  He had thoroughly researched activities in each city and saved these plans on a Microsoft document on his miniature laptop.  I read a few travel books by Bill Bryson to get a sense of the places I would be visiting, but I didn’t peruse Lonely Planet guides for ideas how to spend my time.  Instead, I planned on wandering around each city to see what I would bump into.

But when I happened to befriend a man with the necessary preparations, a navigational knack, and an ambitious pace, I decided to abandon my plan in favor of his.  Aaron is one of the oldest travelers on the tour which only allows people from ages 18 to 35.  He is a thirty-year-old engineer who is very devoted to his career, and his viewpoint of the world is rational and scientific.  I can talk to this man about a variety of subjects so long as they are factual.  I sense that he wishes he could be more emotive, more sociable, but I admire his lone-wolf lifestyle.  He has his own prerogative and doesn’t let others distract him from accomplishing his goals.  The down-side of his strict autonomy is that he doesn’t really ask me many questions.  He does most of the talking. 

Bridget and Ash, sisters from rural New Zealand, tagged along as well.  They are an extremely cheerful duo, and I was very pleased they decided to join us.  They have very humble and optimistic outlooks, which was very refreshing, because I never felt like we had to impress each other like people so often do when they form friendships.  Conversations came naturally, and even during silences I felt comfortable saying nothing. 

Since Aaron researched the route, he took the realms and guided us to the metro.  I decided to seize every opportunity to practice my French, so I asked many strangers for directions even when I was fairly confident I was going the right way.  Double-checking was just another way of reinforcing vocabulary.  Even when I could see the signs for the metro, I asked two police officers to point me in the right direction.

I imagined my American self disappearing the more I spoke in a foreign tongue which wasn’t foreign here.  I wondered if the strangers I asked for directions would ponder where I came from.  At best, I hoped they assumed I was from a far-flung corner of France where they speak very long and proper sentences with funny accents.  I came from the land where people phrased questions like this:  “Is it that you can tell me where is the metro?”

After following superfluous directions from numerous pedestrians, we reached the entrance of the catacombs and stood in line for roughly thirty minutes.  In the queue, we met a Brazilian who was studying English in London.  During his time off, he decided to visit Paris.  His English was fluent, but his conjugation and expressions were often silly.  He was extremely talkative and child-like.  He kept repeating that there was a monster lurking underneath the concrete.  In retrospect, he probably loved the way the words rolled off his tongue, and he spoke often, perhaps to keep practicing with English speakers.  Essentially, I was doing the same thing with strangers, but I wasn’t following anybody around to improve my language skills.  I quickly bothered people and then left them alone. 

We descended into the catacombs via a circular, vertiginous staircase that seemed to last several minutes.  Before I reached the bottom, my head was spinning in such a manner I haven’t felt since discovering the euphoria of twirling quickly on my kitchen floor like a pirouetting ice skater.  Finally there was gravel under my feet and a dimly lit corridor lay ahead. I could hear the faint sound of trickling water.  If I weren’t surrounded by a group of people, I would be slightly afraid.  The low-ceiling path was not a straight shot.  This dark hallway was more akin to a cave than the organized streets above.

Aside from a few rock sculptures of buildings, there wasn’t much to see at first, until we reached the ossuary where all the skeletons are stored.  Before entering, I read the inscription on the arch above the doorway:  “Here lies the empire of the dead.” 

Massive piles of bones were stacked on top of one another.  Intermittently, skulls protruded from the tibia-walls.  Some craniums were cracked.  Several teeth were missing.  The air, or lack thereof, was frigid, and the walls were full of passages about mortality:  “Think in the morning, you won’t live to see the evening.  Think in the night, you won’t live to see the morning.”  These quotes were both macabre and inspirational. 

Considering that most of these underground crypt-mates have been dead for over two hundred years, the catacombs are both fascinating and eerie.  The corpses were dug up from their graves and deposited into the catacombs because various cemeteries were removed to make room for new constructions.  The dead were forced to lie with new neighbors.  Their tibias and fibulas are all mixed together like a morbid salad of bones. 

Above my head is a metropolis teeming with life, yet I’m wandering through an uncatalogued library of displaced and anonymous skeletons.  As the day waned, I rejoined the land of the living with a rejuvenated appreciation for my properly functioning organs and vocal chords.  Without them, I could not pester another Parisian for directions to my next destination where my working bones would take me.