For the love of God, Montressor...

[Note: I realize that in my last post, over a month ago (!) I promised updates from my vacation in the south, but none of us can escape the fickle humours of the Fate, and in this case she chose to cut the thread of my computer's existence at a most inconvenient moment.  I have been, as a result, technologically impaired for the past few weeks, which has interfered with the posting.  Nevertheless, here I am again]

I am in Paris for the weekend, mostly to do interviews for my article on SF/F in France for Locus (http://www.locusmag.com/), although I am also taking the time to do some tourist-ing while I'm here.  I have to say, though, I could have orchestrated the schedule of my activities a little better!  Today was a logistical nightmare--I ended up crossing the Seine six times, and trekking for what feels like miles.  My feet will feel it tonight.

Part of the reason I ended up walking so much is because I covered two km alone underground.  This was not just the result of having to change trains in large metro stations (although sometimes they feel as if there are kilometers of tunnels to get though), but because I finally was able to get to a tourist attraction that I have had on my list since the first time I was in Paris, namely, the city catacombs.

 I am not sure if I can claim that my interest in the catacombs was a historical one, or if it was the less high-brow product of reading too many books about vampires in the last year.  It's true that it's a fairly morbid thing to want to see.  I had not realized how creepy it would be until I actually got down into the ossiary itself.

The catacombs were once the site of the Parisian quarries (so, apparently, you can go to the city and find employment in a quarry, like the boy in the temperance song), but when mining was outlawed in the city, the excavations were mostly filled in, and the remaining tunnels were designated as the depository for the bones from various city graveyards, which had been causing poor health conditions in more populous parts of the city.  To remedy this problem, they dug up all the bodies from their first resting places, threw the bones higgldy-piggldy in carts, and rolled them across town, draped in black cloth, to the site of the old quarry.  This began in the early 1780s, and I have to say that the idea of carts full of skeletons being trundled across Paris at that time is a potent auger of the slaughter that was going to come with the Revolution and the Terror.  On the other hand, it might not have stood out so much.  Death was never as hidden from view then as it is now, especially in the States.

Now, the catacombs are a standard tourist destination, and you have to queue for at least half an hour as they let people descend the long, spiraling staircase a few at a time, to wander along a set path through low-ceilinged tunnels (it's definitely not for the claustrophobic), and across the chambers of stacked bones, ornamented with various carved quotations expressing morbid Victorian-ish sentiments about the fate that awaits us all.  It's easy to imagine tourists of the the late 19th century tracing the same path, beneath the dripping walls, shivering and indulging their taste for the macabre.  Less easy to imagine, although the shadow of their past existence is more troubling, are the lives of the people whose anonymous bones line the walls.  There is no way to tell who is who, although in the course of the catacombs' completion, cemetaries were emptied that contained artists and poets, saints, and terrorists and victims of the revolution.  The man in the iron mask is even supposed to be there, somewhere.

Cre-e-e-e-epy