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cannot say how long it has been since I came to this house. The possibility of escape at first deprived all interest from the thought of marking time. And when escape was shown impossible, the revolution of hours was unimportant.
Then, too, there gradually crept upon me the suspicion that time inside the house was not the time of the outer world. My sleep was not my former sleep. I lay down to rest, without doubt. And in the conviction that I should sleep, I slept. But it was not the sleep of the necessity—and upon awaking, I was vaguely impressed with the unreality of the interval of unconsciousness. I did not experience that change of sensations that informs the waking of his sleep. And I did not dream.
From these circumstances, and after many hours of uselessly passing out the doors and returning, fretting every scheme of escape, I at length returned to the memory of my arrival and original imprisonment. I remembered it distinctly—it was burned upon my mind. But I now saw that while the main events were plain, the accessory details were unsettled and vague. There was a thinness to the episode—I am at a loss to otherwise describe it—that I could only associate with the falseness of my sleep.
But more that anything else, I was troubled by a gap between my earlier life and the events immediately preceding my arrival in the house. Both comprised connected images—both stood plainly in my mind—but they were strangely divorced, separated by an obdurate gap that no struggle of memory could bridge.
Then it was forced upon me, hour by hour, day by unmarked day, while an eternal and starless night passed outside the walls, that this was a dream, the continuation of a very long dream from which I had no apparent hope of escape—from which no length of pretended slumber could bring me freedom—and in which I still reside after a timeless time of many months or years, although my heart tells me my time has hardly begun and only days have passed.
By a dream I have been brought to this mansion of dreams, yet the books of the library tell their tales more distinctly than I ever knew in waking. And the thousand or ten thousand doors that open at my touch disclose scenes that break upon me with a novelty impossible to falsify and more real than my imagined slumbers. So going and returning through doors and consulting the illimitable library, I pass the time of an eternal dream in the imagination of discourse, without the distraction of which the unmarked hours can only obsess and destroy me. |
One day or night, opening one of the many six-paneled doors of the house, I was greeted by a spiral flight of concrete steps, dimly lit and pursued by an iron rail. The location of the door on the landing was such that I could do nothing but descend, which I did. And I knew, as always, that the firmness of my shoes upon the steps was an illusion belied by the silence of their tread.
The well continued for a considerable distance, passing several landings along the way. At the bottom, I entered a room that I at length identified as an excavation of a remote period. Passing from this room into a nearby corridor, I soon saw where I was. Upon either hand, stacked in intricate design on the walls were innumerable bones—tibiae, fibulae, femora cross-hatched like so many planks of parquetry and supporting or enclosing rows and columns of skulls. This then was one of the ancient limestone quarries of Paris, a network more intricate than its crochet of bones, known as the Parisian catacombs.
The earliest excavations of the quarries date to Roman times, when these depths provided the stone for the first of several walls that fortified the city. A mere fishing village1 grown with time and the animation of Roman influence, it became the throne of Clovis and Capet, and expanding steadily bore ever further through the substratum of rock that underlay it. In length of years, these excavations would become so thorough and extensive that they were a hazard to structures above them, which occasionally fell into the cavities beneath.
Yet the quarries were still quarries and no catacombs—no tomb for interladen bones. Indeed, the quarries were for many years forgotten; not so much in that they existed as in their particular points of access and general extent. The architect Mansart, who left his imprint so indelibly by the invention of the unique roofs that bear his name, was commissioned by the Queen of Austria to build the Val-de-Grâce church and abbey. While digging the foundations, he discovered the tunnels beneath. And the reinforcement of these for the support of the proposed structure occupied so much time and labor that the Queen, knowing nothing of the cause of the delay, had the architect replaced.
Meanwhile, the city continued to grow. Nearly every parish had its own cemetery, but the largest, the Cemetery of the Innocents, was little larger than an American football field. And as the 18th century progressed, these cemeteries became insufficient for the city’s demand. The poorest were heaped into common graves. Where overcrowding was the worst, the bodies formed a vile morass that could be smelled in the nearby streets. In 1801, Prefect Frochot reported to Napoleon that decomposition took place as much on the surface as it did below. The grounds of the cemeteries were raised as much as five to ten feet by the ever-increasing volume of bodies. And on at least one occasion, a common grave of the Innocents subsided into the cellars of nearby houses, nearly suffocating their occupants.
But well before Frochot’s report, the first measures were taken. Fifteen years earlier, he commenced the project of removing from these cemeteries the remains of millions of dead2 and redepositing them in that portion of the quarries that lies below the 14th district. The initial work was completed in 15 months but the transportation of remains from other cemeteries would continue for another 80 to 100 years3. It was in 1809 that the bones were stacked in their present arrangement in order to appeal to visitors.
At the same time that the parish cemeteries were being evacuated, new cemeteries were established outside the old city, none of which are more extensive, opulent or well-known than Père-Lachaise. It was here that Rastignac, the hero of Balzac’s Père Goriot, offered his challenge to the great city—“Paris, a nous deux maintenant!”4 It is here that one may see an extravagance of monuments matching in absurdity if not in scale the wildest fantasies of Versailles—a miniature pyramid, Pantheon, Taj Mahal—a giant egg and a giant golf-tee5. It is here where rest the bones of Wilde, Molière, La Fontaine, Champollion, Bizet, Cherubini—and Chopin, his tomb always adorned with flowers.
Yet though Père-Lachaise contains many greats, it is thought the catacombs contains many others—Robespierre, Rabelais, Pascal, randomly distributed and namelessly arrayed. Nor does Père-Lachaise stand higher and more extensively over the city than the catacombs lurks more pertinaciously beneath. It is said to run for 300 kilometers with an area of 770 hectares6. Its passages, by virtue of collapse or filling with water, are in continual transformation. Maps are variable and none are authoritative or complete. It has many points of access and is said to have connections with the sewer and the subway. It is well-known that there is a door to the catacombs in the basement of the Paris Observatory. And many private residences have private access.
It would seem at a glance that no three places could be more different than Innocents, the catacombs and Père-Lachaise. The bones that lay in the rank mire at Innocents sit now in the nearly antiseptic pomposity of the catacombs’ ossuary. And the rudeness of both bears no comparison with the pristinely kept grounds of Père-Lachaise. Yet all three belong to one city, and the catacombs and Père-Lachaise are joined in the original cause exemplified by Innocents. The catacombs’ rigging of bones is only slightly less pretentious than the grotesqueries of the cemetery on the hill. And all are too much of themselves—too many bodies bloating the earth, a too-cunning arrangement of bones that had so shortly ago been thrown into an undifferentiated heap, and far too much of vaunting, primping monuments that are so inappropriate in form to their fundamental purpose that they might well be torn from their spots and thrown down in the tunnels with the bones.
And they are one in the imagination of my heart, which makes of the endless tunnels, endless doors; of preening tombs, the fond facilities of this house; and of the abscessed dead of Innocents, the suppurating grievance of my isolation, the deathly odor of my thoughts. And of the vanity and denial of those places of death, my thoughts, sick with themselves, conjure the mad purpose of him who made this house and the monstrous thing that lured me in a dream and trapped me here.
High on a hill or lying deep, buried in a cask or scattered, the dead at least have peace but I have none—none but the distraction of these words and the ever-briefer darknesses of false slumbers. |
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C O N T I N U E D I N I S S U E # 3
| Notes |
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| 1 |
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Then called Lutetia. |
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| 2 |
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Estimates vary between five and seven million. |
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| 3 |
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Estimates vary. |
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| 4 |
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“It’s just you and me now, Paris!” |
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| 5 |
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There is also a crematorium designed after the Sancta Sophia, according to the order of Napoleon III who wished to make friends with the Turks. He might have pleased them better had he chosen a building of Turkish construction: Sancta Sophia was originally built by the Emperor Justinian—as a Christian church. |
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| 6 |
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200 miles; 1900 acres. |
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