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Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones
May. 1st, 2014 09:18 pmSo, while we were in Paris, this being my third trip to Paris, the third time really was the charm and I finally got to visit the catacombs. Me being me, this should probably have been Stop #1 on Trip #1, but I’m not sure my dad would have been able to stand up straight in them.
After our utterly awesome and creepy foray through the catacombs, both the quarries and the ossuary, we went to the gift shop, where I proceeded to splurge on dumb stuff like a skull wine bottle stopper, but also bought a copy of the English-language version of The Catacombs of Paris by Gilles Thomas. I read the whole thing on the plane ride back home, as my Kindle decided to die an hour into the flight. (Thanks, Obama.)
This book might have been more useful to me when I was still within the catacombs, as my French is a bit iffy and the ossuary in particular is full of gloriously morbid, severe limestone plaques with quotes about death inscribed on them. The quotes represent all the best in Serious Death Talk that Western civilization has to offer, including quotes by Greek and Roman philosophers, French poets, and the Bible. (Everyone else, apparently, can go hang. But silently.)
Despite being about 120 pages long and slightly smaller than a DVD case (maybe the size of a Blu-Ray case? I am not sure, as I do not have Blu-Ray), this book is solid gold. It gives a pretty solid and up-to-date overview of the current visitor’s itinerary, walking you through everything you actually walk through but with much more information than is available on the wall plaques on the tour. (Another reason I think this books might have been better to have with me in the catacombs.) It also gives a ton of tantalizing glimpses into some of the other several hundred miles of catacombs beneath the city that the visitors cannot walk through, and an excellent brief history of the catacomb system as a whole. The first half of the book is mostly about the quarries, both in the past and present, as is the first half of the tour. The second half of the book, like the second half of the tour, is where things get grim, which is where we get into the ossuary.
The ossuary, despite being viscerally creepy because it is literally miles and miles and miles of stacked human bones, is not nearly as creepy as the stories behind why the ossuary was needed, and particularly the gruesome, stomach-churning accounts of the noxious public health hazard that was the Cimitière des Saints-Innocents, a cemetery that had been in use for 700 years and held the remains of over two million Parisians before turning into such an untenably disgusting pit of half-rotted medical waste that the city was forced to empty it and pave it over. The bones of those two million Parisians, plus an additional four million bones from the dozens of other cemeteries that had developed around Paris over the course of its two thousand year history, were all transferred to the empty caverns of the old limestone quarries that had once been safely outside of little baby Paris, and were now underneath it.
While this little book does not have the room to go into quite all the gory detail, it doesn’t pull any punches about what it does report, giving us photos of the ossuary, contemporary artwork of old Paris cemetaries, bone transfers to the ossuary, various important happenings in the ossuary’s history (it’s really weird for me to think that just the ossuary is nearly as old as the United States when it was created basically as a result of Paris getting too old to keep its whole past around), and a lot of awesome quotes from all kinds of historical primary sources. Most importantly, it has a “further recommended reading” list at the end, so morbid weirdos like me know where to get additional fixes of Weird History With Skeletons.
Overall it’s got quite a lot packed into for a short slick touristy kind of publication; I think my biggest criticism of it is that there are a few places where the English translation kind of falls down on the job—not enough to interfere with comprehension, but enough to make you break concentration and have to read the sentence a second time. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Catacombs, if you can get a copy (I don’t know if it’s old outside the Comptoire), and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who actually goes through the Catacombs, both as a souvenir as an enhancement to the tour experience.
After our utterly awesome and creepy foray through the catacombs, both the quarries and the ossuary, we went to the gift shop, where I proceeded to splurge on dumb stuff like a skull wine bottle stopper, but also bought a copy of the English-language version of The Catacombs of Paris by Gilles Thomas. I read the whole thing on the plane ride back home, as my Kindle decided to die an hour into the flight. (Thanks, Obama.)
This book might have been more useful to me when I was still within the catacombs, as my French is a bit iffy and the ossuary in particular is full of gloriously morbid, severe limestone plaques with quotes about death inscribed on them. The quotes represent all the best in Serious Death Talk that Western civilization has to offer, including quotes by Greek and Roman philosophers, French poets, and the Bible. (Everyone else, apparently, can go hang. But silently.)
Despite being about 120 pages long and slightly smaller than a DVD case (maybe the size of a Blu-Ray case? I am not sure, as I do not have Blu-Ray), this book is solid gold. It gives a pretty solid and up-to-date overview of the current visitor’s itinerary, walking you through everything you actually walk through but with much more information than is available on the wall plaques on the tour. (Another reason I think this books might have been better to have with me in the catacombs.) It also gives a ton of tantalizing glimpses into some of the other several hundred miles of catacombs beneath the city that the visitors cannot walk through, and an excellent brief history of the catacomb system as a whole. The first half of the book is mostly about the quarries, both in the past and present, as is the first half of the tour. The second half of the book, like the second half of the tour, is where things get grim, which is where we get into the ossuary.
The ossuary, despite being viscerally creepy because it is literally miles and miles and miles of stacked human bones, is not nearly as creepy as the stories behind why the ossuary was needed, and particularly the gruesome, stomach-churning accounts of the noxious public health hazard that was the Cimitière des Saints-Innocents, a cemetery that had been in use for 700 years and held the remains of over two million Parisians before turning into such an untenably disgusting pit of half-rotted medical waste that the city was forced to empty it and pave it over. The bones of those two million Parisians, plus an additional four million bones from the dozens of other cemeteries that had developed around Paris over the course of its two thousand year history, were all transferred to the empty caverns of the old limestone quarries that had once been safely outside of little baby Paris, and were now underneath it.
While this little book does not have the room to go into quite all the gory detail, it doesn’t pull any punches about what it does report, giving us photos of the ossuary, contemporary artwork of old Paris cemetaries, bone transfers to the ossuary, various important happenings in the ossuary’s history (it’s really weird for me to think that just the ossuary is nearly as old as the United States when it was created basically as a result of Paris getting too old to keep its whole past around), and a lot of awesome quotes from all kinds of historical primary sources. Most importantly, it has a “further recommended reading” list at the end, so morbid weirdos like me know where to get additional fixes of Weird History With Skeletons.
Overall it’s got quite a lot packed into for a short slick touristy kind of publication; I think my biggest criticism of it is that there are a few places where the English translation kind of falls down on the job—not enough to interfere with comprehension, but enough to make you break concentration and have to read the sentence a second time. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the Catacombs, if you can get a copy (I don’t know if it’s old outside the Comptoire), and I would definitely recommend it to anyone who actually goes through the Catacombs, both as a souvenir as an enhancement to the tour experience.