by Robb, Graham
The walls of rubble had been consolidated by masons dangling on the end of long cables. Only one man had fallen in, but after spending three hours in the darkness, imagining things that could not possibly exist, he had been winched to safety and recovered after a few days. The street was reopened to traffic in a surprisingly short time, and Dupont had been congratulated on his swift and effective operation. The new Dictionnaire Historique de la Ville de Paris had devoted a special section to him, using terms that some might have found a little extravagant:
Men such as the Sieur Denis [they meant Dupont] are a precious boon to Society. He has proved by his example that intrepidity in the preservation of Citizens is not the sole prerogative of the military professions, and that other breeds of men are ready to step into the breach to safeguard the lives of their Compatriots.
Beyond the end of the Rue de Vaugirard, the square where the Rue de La Harpe came up from the Seine was filled with carriages. The Rue d’Enfer had been closed off by the Highways and Buildings Police, and even a sedan would have been unable to get through. Charles-Axel levered himself out of the chair and squeezed through the crowd. At the junction of the Rue Saint-Hiacinte and the Rue d’Enfer, he showed the gendarme his copy of the King’s decree. It stated that ‘le Sieur Guillaumot’ was to ‘visit and reconnoitre the quarries dug in the City of Paris and adjacent plains so as to determine the encroachments and excavations that might injure the solidity of its foundations’. The agent ascertained that the gentleman possessed the proper credentials–he wore an embroidered coat and gave off a pleasant smell of flowers–and ushered him through the barrier.
Some people had gathered on the eastern side of the street, just before the convent of the Feuillans des Anges Gardiens. A man of Guillaumot’s experience had no need to ask what had happened. A faint odour hung in the air, which he recognized immediately. It was as though a cellar door had just been opened for the first time in centuries. The walls along the street appeared to be intact, but on the other side of a porte cochère, the slumped elevations of a stable block were an unmistakeable sign. He entered the courtyard and saw a neatly defined sinkhole with a diameter of about twenty feet. Placing one foot on the rim, he peered down into the pit. He estimated the distance from street-level to the top of the cloche to be fifteen feet. The fontis itself might extend another seventy or eighty feet.
It was only when he saw the engineers he had arranged to meet at the site of the earlier collapse that he was struck by the significance of the new hole. It had appeared at least half a mile closer to the centre of Paris than the subsidence of 1774. This was not the vague and rubbly zone of shacks and windmills by the customs barrier; it was Paris itself, with its monuments and spires. From where he stood, he could see the dome of the Val-de-Grâce, the towers of half a dozen churches, and, further down the street, on the line of the old Roman road, the dome of the Sorbonne and the towers of Notre-Dame.
The possibility that the Rue d’Enfer was sinking was remarkable enough in itself, not to mention the fact that the geological formations beneath the street had waited, so to speak, for the very day on which he assumed his duties as Inspector of Quarries. A superstitious man might have imagined that those ministerial delays had been engineered by some unknown power, and that the gradual fissuring and collapse of each successive stratum had been timed to produce a catastrophe on Thursday 24 April 1777. But Charles-Axel Guillaumot had lived in Paris long enough to know that coincidences were everyday events. The source of his agitation lay within, in the memory of those long years when his genius had been stifled and confined. He stood on the edge of the hole, as stones went skittering down into the darkness, and contemplated that gaping wound in the city’s foundations as an explorer might gaze on the shores of a new continent.
3
A FEW DAYS into the preliminary exploration of the quarry beneath the Rue d’Enfer, Guillaumot was not surprised to be told by some of the miners of a mysterious trail of footprints. In one of the vaulted cavities, the dust of ages had been disturbed as though by the swishing of a long tail. A worker who wore a sachet of crushed garlic and camphor around his neck (the miners’ trusted defence against the effects of noxious gas) told M. Guillaumot of a shadowy form he had seen fleeing along the tunnel. It had left behind ‘a funny smell’. Other miners subsequently described the figure as ‘green’ and ‘very fast’, from which it was inferred that the creature could see in the dark.
Even the most recent event always seemed to be attached to an ancient legend. Though no subterranean being had been reported before, it was said that anyone who saw L’Homme Vert would certainly die or lose a relative within the year. An uncle of one of the miners passed away barely a month after work began, and so the legend was obviously true…
For the first phase of consolidation, he divided his workers into three teams. The ‘Excavation’ team, composed of migrant workers, was to clear the galleries of rubble. Then the ‘Masonry’ team would reinforce the roof with pillars, using the stone that had been dug out by the excavators. Inspection pits were sunk at regular intervals from the street, causing road closures and general indignation. Finally, the ‘Cartography’ team would create a map of the underground labyrinth on a scale of 1:216–which meant that the map of abandoned quarries would be more detailed than any map that had ever been produced of the streets of Paris.
The most serious obstacles were the numerous cloches. Removing one of those towering mounds of rubble was a risky operation, and so the masons, following the architectural plans supplied by Nature and refined by M. Guillaumot, turned each cloche into a beautiful, swirling cone of stonework that might have been copied from a strange, inverted cathedral. A lesser architect would have filled the void with rock and sand; Guillaumot created spacious vaults and porticos. Tunnels that had been clumsily hacked out by ignorant hands were dressed with freestone and dignified with coursed limestone walls. On smooth surfaces that would have graced a daylit avenue, salient frames were carved and inscriptions inserted–either painted or engraved–to indicate the place in the sequence of consolidations, the architect of the work (‘G’ for Guillaumot), and the date.
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25·G·1777
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For the rest of 1777, and throughout the following year, Charles-Axel Guillaumot matched his tunnels to the streets above. He dug twin galleries beneath the house-fronts on either side of the street, leaving the consolidation of the buildings to their owners. (This was, in part, because a landlord legally owned all the earth beneath his house: he could, if he so wished, try to dig a cellar all the way to hell.) But there was also a certain satisfaction in mirroring the streets and creating a subterranean image of the city. The street names were etched on stone plaques; a fleur de lys indicated the proximity of a convent or a church. Only a few outlying quartiers had numbered their houses (for the purposes of billeting), and so Guillaumot devised his own numbering system, and applied it so consistently that in that unpopulated world where every wall bore the initial G., a man could find his way more easily than in the congested labyrinth above.
For the first time since his student days in Rome, he found himself in a state of near-contentment. He had feared that the Inspector of Quarries would be little more than a glorified stonemason, but as the work progressed, he saw all around him the indestructible evidence of his own genius. Eighty feet below the Latin Quarter, he knew the silent joy of a man who devotes himself, body and soul, to a single passion.
In view of the accusations that were soon brought against him, it is as well to note that he was the unwavering friend of any man, however humble, who shared his passion. Twice a day, the miners were allowed to breathe the air and to feel the warmth of the sun. One of the miners, an old soldier, chose to spend his hours of freedom underground, carving a replica of Fort Mahon, which he had helped to capture from the British in 1756. One day, he was chiselling away at his model when the roof fell in. Guillaumot ordered a monument to be raised to his memory:
Here, after braving the battle’s fury for thirty years, this courageous veteran met his end, and died as he had lived, serving King and Country.
A poet was commissioned to write a eulogy to the work of consolidation. Since the work was far from over, it might be said that the Inspector of Quarries was tempting fate. Yet the subject of the eulogy was not the architect himself but the redemptive art he practised:
Without that art whose great power bears its weight,
The vast metropolis and all its palaces of stone
That make their ancient cradle creak and groan
Would have vanished into the bowels whence they came.
IT WAS PROBABLY inevitable that ignorance and envy would try to undermine his work. Dupont, whose consolidations had proved inadequate, tried to stir up rebellion among the miners by telling them that they were underpaid. In the echoing corridors of the Ministry of Finance, he whispered that M. Guillaumot was squandering public money, wasting millions of livres on needless masterpieces when they might have been spent on sanitation, roads and national defence.
Guillaumot paid less attention to these rumblings than perhaps he should. But they reached his ears at precisely the time when a terrible truth was dawning, compared to which his rival’s machinations were nothing but a spider’s web in a bottomless abyss.
4
WHEN THE SEPARATE sections of the underground map were pieced together, Charles-Axel saw the city’s past spread out before him like a gallery of historical paintings. The Gauls and the Romans had dug their building stone from open quarries near the Seine. Eventually, they had burrowed into the hills to the north and south, following the ancient bed of the river. As the city spread from the island to both banks, the quarries deepened, and Paris began to devour its own foundations–sand for glass and smelting, gypsum for plaster, limestone for walls, green clay for bricks and tiles. Giant wheels had once lined the Rue Saint-Jacques: a horse that walked three miles in a circle could winch up a six-ton block of limestone. Some of the best building stone, which had gone to make Notre-Dame, the Palais-Royal and the mansions of the Marais, had come from beneath the Rue d’Enfer. The miners had dug away as much stone as they dared, leaving just enough to support the roof. Years later, other miners had found the worked-out quarries, and dug down to lower layers. The floor of each quarry then became the roof of yet another mine, so that now, instead of finding solid rock beneath the tunnel floor, Guillaumot encountered vast cavities buttressed only by a few teetering piles of stone.
Far below the surface, he could hear the rumble of carriages above. It was perhaps at such a moment that he comprehended the full horror of the situation: the enormous weight of all the streets and houses of the Left Bank was supported by nothing but slender pillars of limestone.
The irreparable destruction of half of Paris would have been a disaster to rival the Great Lisbon Earthquake. But there was also another, more intimate threat. During his long hours in the underworld, his perception of the task had changed. Now, his own architectural wonders underpinned the city. They, too, would be annihilated if those feeble props gave way.
In the circumstances, he might be forgiven for the manner in which he swept aside the obstacles that were placed in his path by the envious Dupont.
Having established himself as the man who could save Paris, Guillaumot was able to call on the assistance of policemen and spies. Some of the miners and miners’ widows who had been persuaded to petition the King for higher wages were sent to jail. Dupont himself was placed under surveillance. His home was searched, and he was threatened with exile to a remote province. He was asked to consider the unpleasantness of being ‘left to rot in a dungeon of the Bastille’. When he felt the ground give way beneath his feet, he signed a document that was, according to Guillaumot, ‘written in his own hand, freely, and at his own home’, announcing his immediate retirement, and acknowledging that Charles-Axel Guillaumot was a man of unimpeachable honour.
THROUGHOUT THE NEXT ten years, even in the deepest, most dangerous galleries, the miners sometimes saw the tall figure of M. Guillaumot walking the silent streets of his subterranean realm, his face as pale as though it were painted with white lead. No one questioned his decisions, and no one tried to reduce his budgets. Every line that he traced on sheets of drawing-paper turned into solid reality. While the King’s rebellious ministers grumbled at the continuing expense of Versailles, Guillaumot was quietly constructing the largest architectural ensemble in all of Europe. If those galleries had been placed end to end, they would have reached the edge of the Massif Central, two hundred miles away. More cartographers were employed on the map of the underworld than had worked on Cassini’s map of the entire kingdom. When he uncovered a mile-long section of the Roman aqueduct that had fed the baths on the Rue de la Harpe, he rebuilt and improved it, connected it to the repaired Médicis aqueduct that led to the Luxembourg and the Palais-Royal, adorned it with finely sculpted corbels, and created a dark triumphal avenue for the city’s fresh water.
Far from the light of day, Guillaumot attained a state of professional fulfilment in which the very notion of happiness had become irrelevant. His comprehension of the city’s past now exceeded anything that could be found in books. He amassed a collection of curious stone animals, and some intriguing formations that he took to be petrified fruits. There was no doubt in his mind that where he walked there had once been an ocean. One of the miners, a Breton sailor, claimed to have recognized the remnants of a ship in a layer of compacted silt. Perhaps more than two thousand years ago, a great flood had brought boulders of porphyry and granite from the south. Men who had lived there long before the Gauls must have seen their settlement destroyed by an unimaginable catastrophe.
He had seen with his own eyes what little remained of the city the Romans had called Lutetia–a shattered aqueduct, some brick walls and conduits, a few coins and broken busts. He knew that his own creation would outlive the city. When the centuries had turned the Louvre and the Tuileries to dust, the works of Charles-Axel Guillaumot would be the only evidence that Paris had once been great.
All his subterranean kingdom lacked was a population.
THEN, ONE DAY, across the river, the inhabitants of the Rue de la Lingerie found their cellars overrun with decomposing corpses. The Cimetière des Saints Innocents had been founded in the ninth century, just outside the city. It had remained in use for nine hundred years. As the graveyard filled up, the ground had slowly bulged, and, at last, one of the retaining walls had given way.
Guillaumot at once recommended that all nine centuries’ worth of putrefaction be transported to an ossuary that he proposed to install in the consolidated quarries. The plan was adopted. It was decided in addition that all the other corpses that were polluting the city should be moved to the same place.
Beyond the Enfer customs barrier was a street called La Tombe-Issoire. It owed its dismal name to an ancient funerary slab, which local people identified as the tomb of a Saracen giant called Isouard who had threatened Paris in the days of the crusades. It was there, beneath the street, that Guillaumot prepared a three-acre site, with an entrance in the Rue d’Enfer. In memory of Rome, he called his ossuary the Catacombs.
The biggest ever relocation of dead Parisians began in 1786. For more than a year, the inhabitants of several quartiers were kept awake by blazing torches, chanting priests, and carts that sometimes dropped portions of human body along the route. It was a fifteen-month-long procession in which the whole history of Paris was represented. There were nuns from convent graveyards and lepers from cemeteries that had once lain outside the city walls. The victims of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre were lumped together with the Catholics who had killed them. Some of the oldest bones came from unrecorded burial grounds. They were the remains of men and women who had died before Saint Denis had Christianized the city in the third century. It was said that the number of skeletons that made the journey to La Tombe-Issoire was ten times greater than the living popul
ation of Paris.
Guillaumot waited for the dead millions to arrive before completing his masterpiece. At Montrouge, beyond the Place d’Enfer, the skeletons were tipped into a hole. A dangling chain scattered the bones as they fell, and prevented them from blocking up the shaft. At the bottom, they were arranged in columns and courses. There were walls of tibias and femurs, decorative friezes of skulls, ‘and other ornamental arrangements in keeping with the character of the place’. Such was the architectural splendour of the necropolis that the horror of death was stifled by the multitude.
A FEW YEARS AFTER that great procession of the dead, when the Revolution had turned Paris into a hell on earth, the Catacombs received the anonymous bones of aristocrats who had perished in the great upheaval. Guillaumot himself spent that chaotic period in a prison cell, a victim of slander, disgruntled workers and his close association with the former regime. But he had the imperishable joy of knowing that his achievements would last forever. He was freed from prison in 1794 and continued as Inspector of Quarries and as Director of the Gobelins Tapestry Works until his death in 1807. Half his adult life had been devoted to the salvation of Paris.