… Going Underground


Dante, Inferno

It all started with two apparently unrelated subterranean events. The first was a routine damage-control visit to our basement - the cave. Records indicate our Marais building got its façade in a 1784 remake of the neighborhood, near Saint-Paul's, but that the structure dates to about 1630, with foundations and cellar from further back, poised atop the long-demolished priory of Sainte-Catherine-du-Val-des-Ecoliers, founded in the thirteenth century.

You need a chopstick and a key to open our cellar door. Then you wind down a steep, moldering staircase into centuries past, into the chalky, muddy underbelly of Paris - what Victor Hugo called Lutetia, City of Mud, a reference to the ancient Gallo-Roman city that stood here. I struck a match, sizzling cobwebs as I went, wrenched open the rotting wooden door to our section of cellar, and dug out a pre-industrial candlestick holder. In the flickering candle flame I spotted a crack in the masonry I'd never noticed before. I could see nothing beyond, of course - the darkness was absolute. But I imagined an infernal world. […]

A kind of feverish curiosity seized me. Wherever I went in following days I peered down not up - into stairwells, into churches to see if they had a crypt, into road works, drains, wells. Slowly I began assembling a list of underground sites, a mental mole's map of Paris, including but not limited to classics like the sewers and catacombs.

On that list are nightclubs, supermarkets and shopping centers, a reservoir, the Senate building, movie theaters, the Opéra, swimming pools, crypts, wells, burial grounds, quarries, wine cellars, half a dozen museums, department stores, rivers, subways, secret passageways, a canal, dozens of train lines, a fabulous Art Nouveau public bathroom and more. Let's get one thing straight: I have never been a devotee of the underworld. But two things continue to fascinate me about subterranean Paris. There's the physical layer cake of civilizations, a millennial millefeuille of Gallic, Gallo-Roman, medieval, Renaissance and more or less modern constructions, with associated lore…

Perhaps even more intriguing, though, are the people I've encountered, who are obsessed by this buried metropolis….