Les secrets de la Ville de Lumiere

Unless otherwise noted, all pictures are copyright of my friend, travel partner, and fellow guerilla urbanist Steve Duncan. Steve is a wonderful photographer, and specializes in underground and urban photography. Prints are available - visit his website at http://www.undercity.org

One of the most interesting things about this trip was getting to see the different layers of Paris. The catacombs themselves had some layers - often there were two different levels above each other, with manholes, stairs, and ladders further adding a three-dimensional element of height and depth. But visiting the catacombs also exposed us to the layers of Paris as a whole. Here’s a few examples.

Our Hotel: View from street level, view of our second-floor room (that’s the cata map on the table), view from the roof, view from underneath in the catacombs.

The Val de Grace: View from street level, view from underneath in the catacombs

The Cemetery Montparnasse: View from above, view from ground level, view from the catacombs underneath the western end, view from the ossuaries underneath the eastern end.

While we only visited the Cemetery Montparnasse in order to get a ground-level shot above the ossuaries, I actually discovered a few famous graves - the first being Alfred Dreyfus (of the famous Dreyfus Affair), and his family, (some of whom, as you can tell from the grave, were deported to Auschwitz). The second was a joint grave: Simone de Beauvoir and her “longtime companion,” Jean-Paul Sartre. I felt very French (and was endlessly amused) when I got to tell Steve to literally “meet me at the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre.” I also thought I had found the grave of Dr. Jack Kevorkian (one of the people he helped commit suicide, Merian Frederick, actually used to be our neighbor). I was a little thrown by the “Aram” before the “Jack Kevorkian,” but I figured this quote at the bottom of the grave was kind of indicative of the Jack Kevorkian we all know. But I was wrong - Dr. Jack’s currently still alive and in jail, while it’s lawyer and newsletter publisher Jack Kevorkian who died in 2003 and is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.

The shot of the cemetery from above was taken from the Tour Montparnasse - the best and least appreciated of the observation decks of Paris. In addition to our unofficial views, I had been up the Eiffel Tower on an earlier trip (as related here), and also went up to the roof of the Notre Dame on this trip. My advice is to save your money (and time spent waiting in line) for the Eiffel Tower, go on the Notre Dame tour only for the up-close view of the gothic architecture, and make sure to hit the roof of the Tour Montparnasse. Don’t pay though - just say you’re going up to the restaurant. Nobody checks tickets for the roof. And while the daytime view is certainly nice, make sure you’re up there at night - and you’ll see that Paris has truly earned its nickname of the City of Light.

We were a little Catacombed-out after our 30-hour marathon trip. Still, that didn’t mean we weren’t still up for seeing more of the hidden side of town. Steve wanted to visit the sewers before we left (there’s actually an official sewer tour that’s offered, but he’d already taken that and wanted to see the rest), and I wanted to run around the subway tunnels. Unfortunately, we didn’t get around to either one. Both sewers and subways are a lot riskier than the catas. A little more time, a few more contacts, we probably would have figured it out. But as it stood, we couldn’t even figure out what the third rail was on the subway tracks. Ah well, it’s always good to save something for the next trip.

Instead, we decided to see if we could visit an underground canal we saw on a map. I had been wanting to do a lot more walking around town, so I decided to scope it out on my walk earlier that day, and meet up with Steve later if it looked promising. I found both the north and south ends of the tunnel (the canal continues above-ground on either side). Both looked pretty secure - the walkways had locked fences, and they were arranged so that the only way around involved swimming.

Still, when I met Steve he wanted to see for himself. And it turned out we were in luck - one of the padlocks on the gate turned out to be so old that it broke off in our hand. In we went.

The canal itself wasn’t that interesting. What was interesting was the fact that we were right underneath where the Bastille used to be. Despite there being a “Bastille” stop on the subway map, the actual prison hasn’t existed since July 14th, 1789. What’s there now is the Colonne de Juillet, which bears a startling resemblance to the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn. While we were in the Canal, we noticed a door covered with a metal grate. That evening, David told us that when he was a kid you could break open the door, which led to the spiral staircase that went right up to the top of the Colonne. The Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial, which has been closed for decades, is something I’ve always wanted to climb, so when I heard David had gotten up its Parisian sibling, my jealousy was pretty palpable (Note: climbing of the Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial now accomplished. Re-opening to the public expected 2007).

Fortunately there were other climbing options that night. After visiting David, we headed north to the Church of St. Sulpice (which some readers might know from its role in the DaVinci Code). Steve left all his photography equipment back at the hotel. Sometimes you just have to go climb something interesting for the pure fun of it. This one was for us.

The church had scaffolding on the North tower. That was the good news. The bad news was twofold - there was a police station right across the plaza, and it had the same metal fencing as the Tour St. Jacques. This time, however, there’d be no digging under. The fencing wasn’t on grass, but on concrete. We had to find a way over instead.

Our best shot seemed to be this way. We both made it over, and up we went, hoping we hadn’t made enough of a racket that we were heard by the cops across the plaza. When I went back a few days later to take pictures, I noticed somebody had managed to open up another way in.

We got to the top, and after admiring the view and congratulating ourselves, we took the interior staircase down into the bell tower. Some of the Parisians have been all around St. Sulpice. For us though, the top and the bell tower were enough. It was amazing being in there - as opposed to the modern concrete bell tower of the Church in Reykjavik, which we had visited officially on our trip to Iceland, the bells of St. Sulpice were entirely supported by wooden scaffolding over 200 years old. We climbed around a bit, then headed back down. We noticed another interesting tidbit on our way. On the face of the tower was a plaque engraved in Hebrew with the name of God.