Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #33: Bones, Bones, and More Bones Under the Streets of Paris

Special memento mori edition!

In the mid 1800s in Paris, a generation of proto-commuters stepped around M. Manet outside the Gare Austerlitz, and M. Monet inside. They long ago reached their final destination. Monet and Manet are at the vanishing point as well, however immortal their paintings.

Likewise, my Irish friend Seamus and I plunged into death, Paris-style, like Hamlet and Horatio but without the sparkling dialogue. He wanted to show me the catacombs, as a warm-up for a planned visit to W.B. Yeats’s grave in Drumcliff churchyard, in Ireland.

We departed the Metro at Denfert-Roucherot, and accessed the catacombs through a nondescript door in a blank wall in a low-rise neighborhood. The 14th arrondissement lacks tall buildings for a good reason: The substratum is laced with tunnels originally dug to extract the pale limestone that gives Paris buildings their glow. Those tunnels, plus adjacent  basements, were put to use when Paris' population of both living and dead people began to burgeon.