A Macabre View of Paris Part Three

I can't help but take advantage of the cemeteries of Paris to add to our macabre collection of Paris sights.  To pass them up would just be wrong--dead wrong.

 We begin at Pere Lachaise, the most popular cemetery in Paris.  I couldn't help but feel deep empathy with this poor fellow, who has obviously been weeping for a great many years.  But seriously, I wonder who would commission such an image for their family crypt?  He might be meant to represent mourning, or something similar, but even without the stains, he mostly looks comical, or at least overly dramatic.

   You might think this was actually a picture taken at Disney World's Haunted Mansion, since he looks much like one of the singing heads from that spooktacular ride.  However, this gentleman sits atop a memorial at Montparnasse Cemetery, not far from the grave site of none other than Charles Baudelaire.

Back at Pere Lachaise, you can find this dramatic and bizarre memorial to the Czechoslovakian soldiers who died in WWI.  The odd image here, of course, is the dying soldier, being held by the mythical warrior and his lady, as they are watched by a figure that could be either Death or simply a refugee from the ghastliness of the Great War.  Considering the carnage this generation had to see and embrace, I think this memorial is a bit restrained.

  And speaking of the ghastliness of war, this memorial is not dedicated to any men who died on the field of battle.  It is, instead, a reminder of the extreme cruelty of which man is capable .  These figures represent those souls who suffered such cruelty at Buchenwald.  Despite the grotesque figures on display, I still think this image shows great restraint in light of the reality of what Buchenwald represents.

And lest we forget what is underneath such elaborate and artistic monuments, let's take advantage of our ability to see what was once buried in the Cemetery of the Innocents before it was emptied to make way for Les Halles, the great Paris Market, and is now piled up in the caverns of the Paris Catacombs.

As they say...Paris is for Lovers.

My View of the Paris Catacombs

  I suppose I should really hold off this post until next October.  But I have such a problem only doing the things I should do.  And I really have a problem holding off on things I should hold off on.  So I'll just ignore the whole hold-off-till-October thing about this catacomb post.  The great news is that I run this blog and I get to decide what gets held off and what gets...the opposite of held off.  (Dropped On? I'm not sure about that one.  Anybody have any suggestions?)

  So on a rainy day in April, with a good bit of cold wind tossed around, we spent the morning seeking out Charles Baudelaire's grave at Montparnasse Cemetery.  It was pretty cold, the French guard gave us a map of the cemetery in Italian (presumably because Jennifer's French sounded like it came from Genoa) and we found good-old-Chuck's resting place.  Jennifer cried.  I didn't.

  So after this wonderfully uplifting experience (and here, you think I'm joking, but cemeteries really do sort of perk us up, which I would try to explain, but I just don't think I adequately can) we slowly sauntered up Rue Froidevaux, past Chez Papa's, to Place Denfert-Rochereaux, watched the school children line up at the little theater that was showing Charlie Chaplin movies (oh, yeah, I wanted to join them!) and then finally found Le Catacombes.

  This was one of the longest (or slowest-moving, to be more precise) lines we stood in during our entire trip.  We huddled on the sidewalk, as the wind, and occasional rain, worried at us.  We occasionally used the umbrella, chatted with the couple behind us from Washington DC, and took pictures of the lion statue in the center of the traffic circle, dedicated to la Defense Nationale 1870-1874 (which really didn't go too well, as I recall).  People were allowed into the catacombs a few at a time.  We never saw anyone come out.  The French lady ahead of us, speaking with her little girl, made several jokes about that.  The little girl thought that was funny.

  To enter the catacombs, you must descend a tightly spiralled stone staircase that drops down over sixty feet to the old mines of Paris.  Down here, some of the most iconic stone buildings of Paris began as rock quarried from these mines centuries ago.  In order to deal with the overcrowded cemeteries within the city, Paris officials finally decided on removing the nearly six million bones collected in the aboveground "charniers", which were ossuaries filled with the bones of the bodies from the many mass graves that were used in these early times.  Once a mass grave had been covered long enough to allow the decomposition of flesh from the bones, the mass grave was reopened and the bones stacked in the "charniers".  We call them charnel-houses.  Most of these bones came from near Les Halles, the food courts, from a cemetery known as The Innoccents.  From 1886 to 1888, most of these millions of bones were stacked in the cavernous mines under the old "porte d'Enfer" city gate.

  After a faily long walk (the entire tour is about one and a half miles) through bare corridors, you will finally come to the entrance to the catacombs.  The wonderfully dark sign that announces the entrance reads: Arrete!  C'est Ici L'Empire De La Mort.  (Attention: Halt!  Here is the Empire of Death.)

  Right off you notice how damp it all seems.  Water drips down from the low ceilings.  Stalagtites have formed over the centuries, and there are puddles of water everywhere.  The path is this wet, gritty surface that adds a constant crunching sound all around as you pass through the halls of the dead.  Amazingly, though there are so many bones, they have not been haphazardly thrown into piles.  There are orderly stacks of femurs, tibias, and skulls.  What I did not see were hands, feet, hips, spines, or shoulder blades.  I suspect they were either hidden by the orderly piles of the straighter bones, jumbled below, or they were smaller bones that mostly fell apart and were not taken below.  I did not use an audio guide, and have not read enough on the subject to know for sure.  I kind of like not knowing that tidbit.  It sounds like something from a movie: Look at all these legs, arms, and heads...but where are the rest of the body parts?  (I might have to use that in a story one day.)

  Great care was taken to label the bone collections.  Stone signs designate the dates and the cemeteries from which the bones were taken.  There are many stone signs with bible verses on them, as well as selected poetic verses.  Too many to mention.  The winding tunnels are not too narrow, so if you have trouble with tight spaces I wouldn't worry.  However, realize, that once you begin, there is no going back.  The entrance and the exit are not in the same place.  You will have to walk the full tour to get back out.

  Eventually you climb another set of stairs and pop out on the Rue Remy Dumoncel.  Even this is wonderfully mysterious, since the exit is unmarked, and you can be pretty disoriented as you try to find your way out of this little neighborhood.

  There is a strict ban on flash photography, which makes little sense to me.  These bones are constantly wet, which is not doing them any favors, and flashes of light would not really do more damage to them, thought I suppose it would be distracting to have so many flashes going off in the semi-darkness.  But I was disappointed that I could not get many good shots with such low light.

A rare photo of yours truly, as photographed by my wife,
Jennifer.

  I wish we had been able to spend more time down there, but the self-tour is just one long constant walk, and you do not know how much is left, and before you know it you are at the end.  And you are aware that there are many people standing in the rain and wind waiting to get in.  But this is certainly a trip worth taking.  There is nothing like this in the world, that I am aware of, and if you are in Paris it must be a part of your trip.

My View of Paris Broadens

   We have discovered that it is far more worthwhile to walk the streets of Paris away from the popular tourist locations.  Such landmarks are certainly beautiful, but it is so much more stressful to be in the middle of harried tourists who have an agenda and are not about to be interfered with.  Take the road less traveled and you will see Parisians more relaxed and chattering away.  Here, after we wandered the Latin Quarter one evening, I saw this couple trying to decide if they wanted to eat at the Aux 2 Oliviers.  Shortly after this, near the French Senate, I realized we were about the only ones on the street, and the hour was getting late.  I decided not to tempt fate, and I steered us past Eglise St. Sulpice, back onto a major avenue, and then back home.

   This photograph I took is controversial.  The statue, Le Desespoir (Despair), by Jean-Joseph Perraud, is on display at the Musee D'Orsay.  We were not aware that the museum is in the middle of a battle with museum patrons over its new 'no photograph' policy.  In a recent move that no one on the museum staff can adequately explain, photographs have been prohibited in the museum.  Not just flash photos, which are prohibited in most museums due to the damage that thousands of flashes can do to many unprotected canvases.  The Musee D'Orsay has declared that any photographs are prohibited, and they have stood by their policy regardless of the public outcry.  They say it has to do with the rise of 'arms length' photos taken with camera-phones, though I have no idea how that can be a real problem.  Yes, it is annoying to see everyone with their cellphones in front of them, as if they were flipping off someone with an electronic bird, but that hardly constitutes reason to stop all photography.  To clarify how odd this rule is, the Louvre, across the Seine, allows pictures to be taken, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and nearly every other major museum.  Most of these art pieces are in the public domain, and have been photographed many, many times, so there is no question of copyright violations.  When a rather feisty looking staff-member began shaking her finger at me saying "no photo, no photo", I put away my camera, which, by the way, was around my neck when we entered the museum, and no one said a word to me then.  We viewed the few Van Gogh's on display, but were not impressed with the overwhelmingly large number of paintings that would have made Hugh Hefner proud.  I must say I was impressed at how every artist seemed to be able to fit at least one bare-breasted woman into the most mundane setting.

   We did not stay long at the D'Orsay.  It was poorly designed, confusing, and we felt as if we would be better off getting out of there.  It was cold and rainy outside, and we were right; walking the streets in the rain was better than staying in the D'Orsay.  Here, in the Rue de L'Hirondelle, I caught this scene that is too perfect to be real.  I am amazed at how often I can take shots like this with no one on the street.  And when I first lined up the shot, the street was indeed empty.  This is just across the street from St. Michel Fountain, a very busy and popular place, even late in the evening.  After getting one or two shots of the empty street, I could hear someone behind me.  I have learned how providential it is when someone does show up, since they almost always improve the scene.  Here, a shopper is carrying his recent purchase, and that pink bag is a great contrast to his broad-shouldered silhouette.  Just before this shot was taken, we ate at a little Pizza place on the Quai de Grands Augustins, which is just opposite the Palais de Justice.  It felt like any little pizza shop you might find in a small town in the Midwest states of the U.S.  The proprietor, a white-haired man who made many animated faces but said almost nothing, took our orders by encouraging us to point at the menu items.  We did, he nodded, and limped away.  At one point, I called to him, when he was just a few feet away, but his back was to me, and my loud "monsieur, monsieur!" was never heard.  We decided he must be deaf, and I went back to my pizza.  Then we watched him step outside, smoke a cigarette, and chat quite easily with two young French women for a long time.  We understood.  He had learned to shut himself off to the tourists, not wanting to struggle with either the language barrier or the bad manners of the tourist class.  Jennifer became bold, and when he came back in, she began to tell him that we were from Louisiana, and that his cafe-au-lait was as good as it is in New Orleans.  "Lousiana?"  He perked up.  "C'est tres Francais!"  (It is very French!)  Jennifer won him over.  He then spoke easily with us, hearing us just fine.  We loved his pizza shop, and hope to get back to it before we leave.

As I said, an unexpected visitor can improve a picture.  Down in the Paris Catacombs, I was having trouble taking pictures, since flash photography was prohibited, my camera would take the pictures, but with slow shutter speed to compensate for the lack of light, and I have never had a steady hand for that kind of work.  Finally, I found a better-than-average lit area where I could get a decent shot.  Just then, a little boy came over and began playing with the single spotlight behind us.  I was tempted to become annoyed, but then I saw his shadow-puppets and I wanted to capture at least one of them.  I did, but I had to act quickly.  He moved pretty fast--nearly as fast as the French words that trilled from his lips.  The bones in the catacombs are from the many cemeteries around the Paris area, where the dead were literally spilling out of the ground and the solution was to remove the older bones and stack them in the great empty stone mines that were left behind when the stone was removed to build such landmarks as Cathedral de Notre Dame and the many palaces and great monuments we will be visiting in the coming week.  There is nothing macabre about this tour.  It is actually quite lovely, and moving.  The signs tells us in which cemetery the bones were originally interred with their general dates.  We had to wait an hour and a half to take the tour, in very cold wind with a slight drizzle during some of it, but it was all worth it.