The Bones of a Story

Content warning: if you are squeamish about skeletons this is not the post for you. 

I'm in Paris at the moment, having a lovely week away with my husband. We promised ourselves this would be the first trip we'd do, post-Covid. Although of course the pandemic hasn't gone away, travel restrictions have eased enough and we thought we should just get on and keep our promise to ourselves.

Today we took a trip to the Paris Catacombs. It's somewhere I've wanted to visit for a while but never got round to, until now. What an awesome place this is!

In the Catacombs

A little history for you: in the late 1800s Paris had was terribly overcrowded - both the living and the dead. Cemeteries inside the city limits were overflowing. Bodies had been exhumed and the remains stacked underground. In 1780 a basement wall in Saints Innocents (spookily, right where our hotel is) collapsed due to the weight of the mass grave behind it - the cemetery here had been in use for 1000 years. Something had to be done.

Under the Left Bank area of Paris were a series of tunnels and chambers, where limestone had been quarried for building purposes. It was proposed that the overflowing cemeteries were closed, the remains exhumed and stored in those underground passages. New burial grounds were consecrated outside the city.

Barrel - ends of femurs and skulls make up the shape

Overnight, wagons containing hundreds of thousands of bones were carted from the old cemeteries to the new ossuary. Initially the bones were simply dumped in the old quarries, but from 1810 a project was put underway to organise them and turn them into a visitable mausoleum. The larger bones, mostly femurs, and skulls were stacked in decorative formations with smaller bones left jumbled behind. It opened to the public in the early 19th century.

No one knows exactly how many peoples' remains are here, but it is well into the millions. Today the public can walk through a couple of kilometres of underground passageways lined with bones, after descending 131 steps down from the entrance. It's an amazing experience, a chance to contemplate the vast numbers of people who have walked this earth before us, an opportunity to think about death and what we leave behind.

I've seen bones used as a decorative feature before - in the Chapel of Bones, Evora, Portugal which I visited a few years ago. I remember feeling incredibly moved by it - especially when I noticed one arch was made of skulls that were far smaller than the others, obviously the remains of babies and small children. Heartbreaking.

Chapel of Bones, Evora, Portugal

The Paris Catacombs were less moving, to me at least. The skulls were adult sized and because I'd read up on the history before we visited and knew where the bones had come from, it seems in a way to be a better thing to do with them. There's a reverence to the way they are laid out, a feeling of calm and peacefulness (despite the visitors). They had to be moved, and here they are, in what is hopefully a final resting place.

In a few of my dual timeline novels, the historical mystery is resolved when remains of a person who'd disappeared are found, centuries later. I have written about skeletons on more than one occasion, but never imagined seeing so many all together. There's a story in there somewhere - the nightly procession of carts taking bones from the old cemeteries, the men working below ground tightly stacking femurs to create walls of bones, the carving of plaques stating from which cemetery bones in that area had been brought.

Bones from the Trinity Hospital, placed here in 1814