If you are planning a vacation in Paris, then you are probably imagining spending your days strolling alongside the Seine, perusing fabulous bookshops and sipping sublime hot chocolate in the afternoon sunshine on the Left Bank.
You are probably not imagining spending a few hours looking at a lot of old bones.
But if you are up for doing something slightly different in Paris, then a visit to the Paris Catacombs should not be missed.
A labyrinth of tunnels underneath the heart of Paris, the catacombs house the bones of six million Parisians and tell a fascinating story about the city’s history.
In fact, it’s such a great story that writer Andrew Miller decided to turn it into a work of fiction, the resulting historical novel Pure going on to win Britain’s Costa Book Award
But Pure is not for the faint-hearted. It is a grim and smelly book about bodies - lots of them. It is the 18th century, and Paris’s oldest cemetery is overflowing.
The Holy Innocents’ cemetery may have started out as your average church burial ground, but now it is a nightmare, with hundreds of thousands of bodies having been piled on top of each other for generations. And despite the bones being removed to be put in ‘charniers’, there is still insufficient room for the endless supply of new corpses. The nearby residents have had enough and are complaining that their water is being poisoned by the rotting flesh and the stench has become unbearable, so the authorities decide something has to be done. The bodies must be removed. And this is where our novel begins.
A young engineer named Jean-Baptiste is hired by the authorities to remove the corpses, an immensely difficult feat requiring all his skills. But there’s an added challenge beyond the engineering concerns; our young hero has been told he must do the job in secret.
What follows as poor old Jean-Baptiste tries to deal with this grizzly nightmare is fabulous. I relished this book – and if you are someone who enjoyed the novel Perfume, or The Shadow of the Wind, then I think you’ll love this one as well. There are some terrific characters, especially from within the nearby family that Jean-Baptiste lodges with, as well as amongst those who befriend him and try to help him with the project. And fortunately there’s also a little romance for our earnest young engineer.
Of course you have to be up for being a bit grossed out from time to time – there’s no protecting of your sensibilities here. This is a cemetery after all….
Back to real life, and we see the Parisian authorities had a grand plan for all these bones. It identified some likely looking disused quarries, had them strengthened and consecrated and at nightfall singing priests would lead processions of remains from the cemetery to what are now the catacombs.
They are open to visitors from 10am until 8pm most days, but there are sometimes long queues to get in as only 200 people are allowed in at one time.
If you are not freaked out by the idea of being 20 metres below ground in a maze of tunnels with the bones of millions of souls - then I highly recommend you give this more unusual tourist attraction a go. But make sure you read Pure first, and it will mean so much more to you.
Pure by Andrew Miller
Engraving of the Paris Catacombs in 1855
Charnier at Holy Innocents Cemetery
