from the notebooks of craig swanson
I was in Paris last week. I feel compelled to draw a cartoon about it, if for no other reason than I can begin, “I was in Paris last week.” Although I have been to the city several times, I had never been able to visit the Catacombs. Until now.
Catacombs are subterranean cemetaries. The origin of the word is unknown, but it appears to have been first applied to the underground cemetaries of the basilica of San Sebastiano, near Rome.
The Parisian catacombs are roughly 190 miles of tunnels under the city. Initially, they started out as quarries, but in the Eighteenth century, fearing epidemics, it was used to put the remains of the nearby overflowing cemetaries. It took many decades to (respectfully) cart the five to six million bodies of bones into the tunnels.
Today, the tour of the Catacombs takes you down a set of winding stairs about 65 feet. After a short distance, you come to a doorway with a sign above it: Halt! This is the empire of death (Arretez. C’est ici l’empire de la mort). You then wind through a maze of twisty passages, where the walls are built from human skulls and femurs. (I presume the rest of the bones are on the other side of these walls.) Along the way, you see plaques of aphorisms and poems, such as: “Where is Death? Always in the future or the past. As soon as he is present, it is already gone.”
The tour is only about a mile long, though it feels much longer. In order to keep you out of the other 189 miles of tunnels, they have set up barred gates. This is a good thing. I heard two separate stories about people who go lost (in the pre-gate days) and were found several years later.
During World War II the French Resistance set up their headquarters in these tunnels. They were also set up in the Parisian sewers (the other subterranean tour we visited on this trip).
My cartoon depicts the entrance to the Cattle Combs (”Halt! These are the cows’ combs”). While I was leafing through a book in the Sewer Tour gift shop (don’t ask), I saw a picture of a fellow who was living in the Catacombs. He was seated against the wall, with bottles strewn around him. Here, I replaced him with the cow, and the bottles with combs. I’m still searching for something interesting about combs for cows.
Here’s hoping I don’t get lost.
-March 2001
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