A secret city thrives beneath Paris

Sumary:

A new generation is carving out a unique chapter in the long history of the
subterranean city of darkness that exists in the vast network of tunnels and
catacombs beneath Paris.
The City of Light harbors a city of darkness, a vast network of
subterranean tunnels that once gave refuge to bandits, smugglers and
saints, and cradles the bones of some 6 million Parisians.

Today, this eerie maze is the haunt of living spirits, from youths looking
for adventure to urban explorers carving out a new frontier.

An underground movie house replete with bar and phone service, recently
discovered by police, is but a slice of the thriving underworld below Paris.

Some 185 miles of tunnels and underground passageways honeycomb the

underbelly of the city, most old quarries for the Lutecian limestone used to
build the French capital. Others house electricity and telephone cables.

In the deepest sphere, some 100 feet under, lie the catacombs, holding
ancient bones from overstocked cemeteries. Part of the catacombs are open
to the public, but dropping into the rest of the city of darkness is illegal
and can be hazardous.

Not for faint of heart

This is not a journey for the faint of heart. One way is a middle of the
night descent through a manhole and down a ladder. Once inside, a sand-
colored maze of galleries, nooks and crannies unfolds. Ominous holes
seem to descend to the center of the Earth.

It’s an all-weather trip that includes strolling, sloshing through mud and
slithering through narrow tunnels.

“Paris is a Mecca” for underground exploration, said Lazar Kunstmann, a

spokesman for the group that set up a cinema across the Seine River from
the Eiffel Tower. The group has seven other subterranean sites, he said,
refusing to give details.

In the eternal night of underground Paris, secrecy is sacrosanct, creating a

subculture with its own code and names.

Slipping into the underground, social classes melt away, and “there’s a
sense of having a double life,” said Patrick Aalk, a photographer with
more than two decades of experience as an urban explorer.

Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice discovered when she fell through a rabbit hole,
fear, intrigue and wonder await the subterranean traveler. Instead of a tea
party with the Mad Hatter, there are parties by flashlight in dank, musty
quarry rooms bearing names like “Byzance,” “the Cellar” or “Room Z.”
Newcomers leave graffiti, trash
But this strange universe is being increasingly scarred by “cataphiles” who
daub graffiti on walls or leave beer cans behind. Some quarry rooms are
covered in paint, irking another breed of subterranean spirits who call
themselves urban explorers.

The police chief in charge of subterranean Paris fears the new generation
of fun-seekers is on a collision course with the urban explorers who regard
the underground as part of Paris’ patrimony.

“It’s a milieu that is becoming more and more mixed ... with some people
who can be in opposition to others,” Commander Luc Rougerie told the
Associated Press.

Cataphiles have haunted the Paris underworld for decades, but the Aug. 23
discovery by police of the cinema, set up by an urban explorers’ group
calling itself The Perforating Mexican, revealed just how sophisticated life
below ground has become.

The cinema seated about 30 people on benches carved from rock — and
covered with wood for comfort, according to Kunstmann. The complex
included a bar, a restaurant and some annex rooms for privacy.

A toilet drew water from the Trocadero gardens above, where “there was a
permanent leak,” said Kunstmann. Electricity was siphoned off by
wrapping wires around the state power company’s cables, he said. “The
problem is not to leave a trace on the electricity counter.”

According to Kunstmann, the cinema, finished some 18 months ago, was a

renovation of a crude theater built three years ago.

Subterranean movie house surprises police

“There was a certain surprise” when police found the movie house,
Commander Rougerie conceded.

A less sensational but more worrisome discovery was made across town,
under the high-security La Sante prison. There, several tunnels, once shut,
were partially reopened. Fears that prisoners were plotting an escape or,
worse, that terrorists had invaded the underground set off alarms.

In the end, “We think it’s amateurs of the underground looking for an old
passage,” said Catherine Briguet, judicial police spokeswoman. There
have been no arrests, she said.
 Rougerie warns of dangers, from thin air that can cause queasiness to
cave-ins. He cited cases of people falling into 30-foot-deep wells or
getting lost. There are no known deaths.

The catacombs have inspired writers from Victor Hugo to Gaston Leroux,
whose “Phantom of the Opera” hid in “that infernal underground maze.”

“When you go down, you enter the city’s past. It’s a voyage into the
bowels of the city,” said Aalk, the photographer.

Long history as a hideout

Through the ages, the catacombs have harbored an eclectic lot. In the 13th
century, bandits hid under the Chateau de Vauvert, now the Luxembourg
Gardens, and sorcerers used the quarries for black masses during the 1348
plague.

St. Denis, patron saint of France, said Mass in the quarries during the
Christian persecution, according to Simon Lacordaire’s “The Secret
History of Subterranean Paris.” During World War II, Resistance fighters
used the network as hideouts.

Scoundrels still haunt the underworld.

People have been caught stealing telephone cables, “to resell the copper by
the kilo,” Rougerie said. Some have also been found carrying old bones
from the catacombs.

Nearly two decades ago, there were reportedly 300 accesses to the
quarries. Most have been sealed, but new entryways are uncovered by
enterprising explorers.

Asked how many accesses exist today, Rougerie, the police official,
conceded: “There are those I know and those I don’t.”

VOCABULARY

Catacomb(n): an underground cemetery consisting of a subterranean gallery

with recesses for tombs, as constructed by the ancient Romans.
Subterranean(adj): existing, occurring, or done under the earth's surface.
Ex: the subterranean world of the behind-the-scenes television powerbrokers.
Honeycomb(n): a structure of hexagonal cells of wax, made by bees to store
honey and eggs.
Ex: a honeycomb of caves.
Frontier(n): a line or border separating two countries.
Ex: an end to frontier controls.
Harzadous(adj): risky; dangerous.
Ex: it is hazardous to personal safety.
Intrigue(v): arouse the curiosity or interest of; fascinate.
Ex: the cabinet was a nest of intrigue.
Sacrosanct( adj): (especially of a principle, place, or routine) regarded as too
important or valuable to be interfered with.
Ex: the individual's right to work has been upheld as sacrosanct.
Subculture(n): a cultural group within a larger culture, often having beliefs or
interests at variance with those of the larger culture.
Plague(n): a contagious bacterial disease characterized by fever and delirium,
typically with the formation of buboes ( bubonic plague ) and sometimes
infection of the lungs ( pneumonic plague ).
Ex: they died of the plague.
Persecution(n): hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political
or religious beliefs.
Ex: his persecution at the hands of other students.
Judicial(adj): of, by, or appropriate to a court or judge.
Ex: a judicial inquiry into the allegations.
Hideout(n): a hiding place, especially one used by someone who has broken the
law.
Ex: the kidnappers did not want their hideout discovered.
Life Below The City Of Light: Paris Underground

Sumary

This story on the Paris catacombs and underground is a collaboration

between National Geographic and NPR News. Geographic Photographer
Stephen Alvarez invited NPR's Jacki Lyden, contributing host and
correspondent, along on a three-week expedition below the City of Light;
the story is also the cover feature of National Geographic's February issue.
To be a cataphile, it helps to have feline nerves. Last spring, totally in the dark, I
joined an extraordinary variety of them — or urban spelunkers and explorers
who crawl and tunnel below the surface of Paris into the vast network of
catacombs and catholes below. Often beneath a manhole, and by traveling down
a ladder, they showed me an amazing world few Parisians have ever seen.

My first journey began on a May night in the Montparnasse neighborhood of

Paris — in the darkness before midnight. Along with Stephen Alvarez and the
National Geographic crew, we slid down a ravine and trudged along an
abandoned railroad. We hiked along for a mile in the pitch dark to avoid police
attention, because this activity is illegal, but happens anyway. If caught, there
can be fines.

We squeezed through a human-sized wormhole and suddenly dropped down 60

feet — and back 200 years into the past. The modern world had vanished. We
were lonely explorers, traveling single file amid silent bones, rocks and
countless antiquities in yawing, pitched quarry tunnels. I could imagine being a
miner.

Paris, City of Light, really is a tale of two cities. One of them is above ground,
with its beloved Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. That's the city the world
sees. And then there's the city very few us will ever see — an underground
Paris, the souterrain. Below the city, concentrated on the south bank of the river
Seine, hidden limestone quarries dating back centuries provided the stone for
Paris' great monuments like Notre Dame. The mining left behind a labyrinthine
maze — at least 180 miles of abandoned tunnels, secret rooms and caverns, odd
wormholes barely big enough to wriggle through, running directly below some
of the best-known city streets.

Exploring the Parisian underground is, of course, a French history lesson. On

stone walls, there is graffiti from the French Revolution. More recently, there
are former Nazi bunkers — and a few feet from them, hideouts for the French
resistance and giant columns to hold up edifices above, like the military hospital
Val de Grace.

Often, there is flooding. "Put your feet like mine," our cataphile offered,
adjusting his headlamp. The 22-year-old Daniel Garnier-Moiroux is an earnest
and charming student at the Ecole de Mines, a prestigious engineering school.
He was telling me how to navigate several feet of water — but my boot slid off
anyway. Daniel goes below once or twice a week, for the experience of simple
solitude, of it not being "normal," for being down here with nothing but a
headlamp, backpack and maybe a map — just in case. (Other cataphiles use no
map at all and walk in darkness.)
"I've spent literally thousands of hours below ground," said Alvarez, who had
brought along his cameras and paraphernalia. He's a lifelong caver and famous
for it. "Down here, I go in and I'm lost immediately. Without someone to show
me around, I'd wander around till I died." An exaggeration for sure, but
strangely appropriate in the catacombs.

As we crawled, walked and loped, Daniel talked about possible dangers, the
most serious of them being a sudden fontis, or collapse. That's exactly what
happened in 1774 — when a street called Rue d'Enfer collapsed. (Interestingly,
the name of the street meant "Hell Street" and has been rechristened Denfert-
Rochereau.) King Louis XVI, who would later lose his head in the French
Revolution, ordered his architect to the underground to assess the damage.
Horrified, Charles Axel Guillaumot reported back that much of Paris could
collapse; it was built over fragile quarries that stretched for miles.
"They created the Inspection Generale des Carrieres [or quarries]," Daniel
explained, an agency that exists to this day. "For over a hundred years, begun by
Guillaumot, they lifted the quarry tunnel roofs, made right angles, consolidated
walls." He showed us how the inspectors matched streets above to
"intersections" below, and how they numbered the walls: G for Guillaumot,
1779, say, for the year, and 4 for the number of walls created in sequence that
year. Each inscription is etched in carbon black, and some are old French. On
one inscription on Rue Vaugirard I saw the words "au couchant, " indicating the
western side of the street where the sun would "go to bed."

Suddenly, there was singing and shouting and laughing in the distance: We had
stepped into the world of cataphile art. A burly man was touching up a mural of
a long wave that ran along three sides of an underground chamber. It was a
reproduction of the Japanese mural by the artist Hokusai, the joke being that this
part of the catacombs is called "La Plage," or the beach, because it's sandy.

The muralist introduced himself to me as "Psyckose," as many cataphiles use a

"nom de cave" to escape detection above ground by police. "The catacombs is
the cross [roads] of the world," he told me. "Everybody is coming here ... from
LA, from London, from South Africa. And everybody is totally naked —
because there is just dark, and nothing but dead space." That's naked in a
metaphorical sense, I gathered, and hardly dead!

One of the finest sounds below ground was the festive pop of bubbly. And one
of the dreamiest sights: Daniel's friend, Louis, lighting up the "dead space" with
a breathtaking fire dance. We watched firelight flicker up and down the walls as
Alvarez snapped away. As I poured the water out of my Wellingtons, we
toasted the catacombs.
And as we hiked out just before dawn, the birds were already singing, and the
city was quiet and lovely. But over the next weeks — and again in December —
I would return below for one adventure after another, for the cataphile universe
is as distinct as each and every person who inhabits it. And perhaps, I've
become a bit of a cataphile myself, but only on the radio can I be your guide.

VOCABULARY

Correspondent(n): a person who writes letters to a person or a newspaper,

especially on a regular basis.
Ex: she wasn't much of a correspondent.
Expedition(n): a journey or voyage undertaken by a group of people with a
particular purpose, especially that of exploration, scientific research, or war.
Ex: many of the expedition have passed rigorous courses.
Labyrinthine(adj): (of a network) like a labyrinth; irregular and twisting.
Ex: labyrinthine streets and alleys.
Monument(n): a statue, building, or other structure erected to commemorate a
famous or notable person or event.
Ex: a monument to Magellan is in the main square of the city
Resistance(n): the refusal to accept or comply with something; the attempt to
prevent something by action or argument.
Ex: he went underground and joined the resistance.
Paraphernalia(n): miscellaneous articles, especially the equipment needed for a
particular activity.
Ex: drugs and drug paraphernalia that had been discovered on the premises.
Exaggeration(n): a statement that represents something as better or worse than it
really is.
Ex: he was prone to exaggeration.
Architect(n): a person who designs buildings and in many cases also supervises
their construction.
Ex: a chief architect of the plan to slash income taxes.
Metaphorical(adj): characteristic of or relating to metaphor; figurative.
Ex: many of our metaphorical expressions develop from our perceptions of the
body.
Inscription(n): words inscribed, as on a monument or in a book.
Ex: the inscription of memorable utterances on durable materials.