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  

We took one more quick trip with David into the Catacombs.   There’s plenty written about the catacombs (in fact, David contributed to this book) - unfortunately for me, they’re pretty much all in French.   So while spending hours exploring on our own was great, it was also really nice going with an expert guide who could answer our questions and explain all the interesting things in depth.   We also got to go the fun way again: opening up a manhole in the sidewalk and climbing down instead of schlepping down the abandoned rail tracks. There was pretty much only one place we hadn’t seen that we wanted to: underneath the Val de Grace.  

David set the pace.    Throughout the convoluted, hour-plus journey he didn’t glance at the map once.   It got a bit tricky toward the end: we had to duck under some cables and navigate a shallow archway filled 3/4 of the way high with water, and then wiggle through about 100 feet of this.

We emerged into here, and continued further underneath the Val de Grace.   There’s probably no other area of the catacombs that has more history - both true and apocryphal - associated with it.     It’s most noteworthy for its association with Queen Anne of Austria - and even has a section named for her.   It is said that it was here that she conspired with her Spanish relatives against her husband, Louis XIII (they’re the King and Queen in the Three Musketeers).   Its structure seems to reflect this brush with royalty also.   While understandably most everything in the catacombs seemed to be designed without much regard for aesthetics, under the Val de Grace things, like this gate, seemed to all have a little extra ornamentation thrown in.   It’s also one of the oldest parts of the catacombs, discovered in the 1600s when Louis and Anne commissioned a church and abbey to be built for the celebration of the birth of their son and heir, Louis XIV.  

While tales of royal intrigue are all very romantic, the most interesting thing we came across was much more mundane - the bottom of the Queen’s Chamberpot.   Yes, when residing at Val de Grace, right here is where the Queen’s other dirty business ended up.  

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