Catacombs

By Kate E. Lore

Catacombs de Paris is an underground tunnel. It feels cold like a shady spot on a late summer morning. It is an absence of sun, not necessarily a presence of chill. It has a smooth, yet uneven rock floor with the occasional puddle of moisture.

Catacombs de Paris stretches out for miles. Both sides of the wall seem to be covered in little dots: little specks of off-white, which create a sort of pointillism that, maybe if not faded to varying hues of nothing, may have once been beautiful. Everything inside is washed out completely. It’s a faded, colourless land of death.

Catacombs de Paris is, to this day, home to roughly six million dead human beings.

The walls are stacked with bones, not so much as a library is stacked with books, but more like how a log cabin contains logs. Human bones and skulls are arranged here in odd patterns that twist and bend and stack up to touch the low rock ceiling. And this goes on for some time.

It took from 1786 to 1788 to complete the Catacombs de Paris. Imagine handling and stacking six million people into neat little rows.

A young American girl enters the Catacombs de Paris alone. She waited in line, she paid for her ticket, and she went inside.

She looks into the bare eye sockets of a human skull. Maybe it’s a deeper connection than regular eye contact, or maybe she’s simply projecting her thoughts into a hollow, empty head.

The dead bodies had been collected throughout the years long before they built the Catacombs themselves. The American girl sees some examples of this. Glossy photographs preserved behind glass where dead human beings lie exposed, this ultimate necked, all around as far as the eye can see. The photo shows a moulting skeleton in a dress. What once had been a flowing gown now looks like doll clothes on a sick stick puppet. Half slumped over, the dead woman sits alone in a corner. Her mouth is hanging open. Was she singing or screaming, the girl wonders, because it’s quite hard to tell.

It was a tradition, they explain, that when a loved one died you kept them in this certain area and came back every so often to visit. They would change their clothes, do their hair, and leave them little gifts on a semi-regular basis, that is, every so often.

In 1793, Philibert Aspairt, a doorman, got lost in the Catacombs. His body was found 11 years later.

For those who were left to sit out and rot like life-sized dress-up dolls, it was only a matter of time.

Eventually, somewhere between children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, we all end up forgotten.

After enough time has passed with no visitors, the skeleton is collected and taken apart.

The dead human beings are broken down and reassembled as something new within the sculpture, the Catacombs de Paris.

There are graves dating from the 1800s in almost every city across America. Who visits these graves? For that matter, when was the last time you visited your great great Grandfather's grave?

In the Catacombs de Paris, human bodies were pulled apart. Femurs, fibula, tibia, skull and ribs.

The average human body contains 214 bones. Now multiply that by six million.

The young American girl steps around the corner and she sees this wall, immense before her, flowing and curving like the waves of a lake. Dull in color, yet full in shape, it is an architecture made of human building blocks.

Human femurs, fibula, and tibia are all weaved together in a tight, masterful pattern. Skulls are all together, looking out as one and leading the way to the focal point of this artwork, which is a single-standing fountain. It is walking inside a beautiful sculpture. It is a room made out of dead human beings.

Human bones all mingled together, the people here have no individual identity. There is no black, no white, no male or female, no upper or lower class, no shame, no pride. There are no lonely forgotten graves, or skeletons slumped and forgotten in corners. Here, six million people work together as one in this artwork that is itself an expression of death. And yet it’s as beautiful as life in all its simple glories, and these six million people are still visited and marvelled at by human eyes nearly every day.

The American girl takes a lungful of air and stands transfixed. She is thinking maybe Philibert Aspairt knew exactly what he was doing.

No separation between them: these stacked, sculpted, dried-out six million are luckier than most of us. They, in the end, will never be alone.

Kate E. Lore is a queer, neurodivergent, she/they, born in poverty to a single, widowed mother. Youngest of four, second to graduate high school, first bachelor's degree, first MFA in the family. A jack-of-all-trades, they split their time between fiction and nonfiction, screenplays, flash prose, full-length novels, painting, and comics.