“…somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.”
~Virginia Woolf
"Je ne sais pas" was his reply. The man smiled and shrugged his shoulders. In the eternal night of underground Paris, secrecy is sacrosanct, creating a subculture with its own code and names.
I suppose you know, said Clive the Man about Paris that you are sitting on an underground river. It turns out he's wrong for once: we may be sitting over underground hot springs, quarries, canals, cemeteries, mushrooms, shrimp and fig trees, but not a river. The age-old story of an underground river that flows across Paris is pure hogwash, according to Georges Verpraet's weird guidebook to subterranean Paris called, naturally enough, Paris: Capitale Souterraine.
Freshwater shrimp live under the Denfert-Rochereau Metro station near Montparnasse, traces of Stone Age mammoths have been found on the Left Bank's Rue Violet, and in 1954 geologists struck oil in the Paris substrata.
The traffic jams on the Boulevard Richard Lenoir cover a mile long underground canal through which over 10,000 tons of barge traffic pass each day. Under the nearby column in the Place de la Bastille lie several heroes, some Merovingian bones that were put there by mistake, and an imperfectly preserved mummy that the Louvre had to get rid of in a hurry.
Under other parts of Paris there are bank vaults, nightclubs, wine cellars, an antique store, offices, and the remains of mineral springs that once made Passy and Auteuil fashionable spas. Under the Marche St. Honore, near the Concorde, lies an up-to-date bomb shelter.
Scholars before M. Verpraet have been fascinated by underground Paris. In the 19th century, archaeologist Theodore Vacquer discovered such important ruins as the baths of Cluny, while in our own time Armand Vire, of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, has found forty-four of molluscs living under the pavements, and many strange mutated creatures that were always white, translucent and blind. In 1944 two botanists decided to study plant life along the Paris Metro lines. They found no fewer than 200 species. They hit pay dirt under the Jaures Metro stop, where they discovered a veritable kitchen garden of peas, tomatoes, peach, apple, chestnut, date and fig trees-all apparently grown from vegetables and pits that strap-hangers had tossed away. From 1812 to about seventy years ago, the most famous underground flora in town was, of course, the champignon de Paris, the common button mushroom that was grown in disused quarries located in such places as Chaillot and Menilmontant. The quarries, which were in use from Roman times until about 1910, provided gypsum and limestone for Notre Dame and other Paris monuments.
With 300 kilometres of tunnels, the quarries have provided excellent hiding places for criminals, martyrs, magicians and vagabonds. Marat ducked into the tunnels below Montmartre in 1789 and Louis XIV contemplated hiding with his family under the Tuileries. In 1943, the tunnels of St. Denis served as an escape route for twelve captured British soldiers.
More obvious, there are 2,000 kilometres of sewers under Paris and, of course, the catacombs. Unlike the catacombs of Rome, which served as a refuge for early Christians, these are just 250 years old. They came into being when it was decided, for reasons of public health, to close down cemeteries in the centre of the city. By 1871, 30 cemeteries had been emptied and workmen had made decorative pyramids from the loose bones. As a result Catholics and Protestants, revolutionaries and aristocrats, Rabelais and St. Clotilde all lie brachium to brachium.
Fascinating, if you dig that sort of thing.
