A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
Visiting Paris for the first time—walking along tree-lined boulevards, sitting in parks, gazing at fountains, crossing the Pont Neuf, life eased and the voice inside me quieted. At the monumental, eye-popping beauty of the Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe, the Paris Opera, I sighed a slow sigh.
Song lyrics tell me to love Paris in the springtime, in the fall, every moment of the year. Poets proclaim Paris the City of Lights. Artists paint the splendor of its streets, its skyline, the Seine.
But I fell in love with Paris for keeping me alive. The Paris I love—and that loves me—was built by government bureaucrats spending government money to make Paris safe for children not yet born.
At heart, Paris is a city of visionary public works.
On board an excursion boat piloted by Paris Canal, I’m cruising on the Saint Martin Canal. Napoleon ordered its construction in the 19th century so canal boats could move merchandise and fresh water three miles into the city. The life-and-death public health raison d'être: combating cholera and dysentery.
Nearly half of the canal is covered by a vault or tunnel under the streets of Paris, running from the Bastille to the Rue du Faubourg du Temple. The boat passes nine locks and two swing bridges, two permanent roadway bridges, six pedestrian footbridges and Paris’ last remaining lift bridge.
To pay for the canal, a brand-new tax on wine was levied. No doubt—lacking concern or empathy for the health of Parisians—moss-minded, conservative politicians opposed it.
At the Catacombs the subterranean air is clammy, cool, mildly confining. I am five stories beneath street level—deeper than the deepest underground parking, the Metro or utility line tunnels.
Down, down, down into a labyrinth of passageways, caves and quarries where the French Resistance hid from the Nazis. Where five million bodies, um, sets of bones, are arranged in displays worthy of a Le Printemps window dresser.
The Catacombs date to the 14th century when private companies excavated limestone for the architectural edifices that define Paris. Notre Dame, Versailles, the Louvre. Unregulated digging resulted in large underground caverns—the superfund toxic waste sites of their day. By the 18th century, sinkholes were swallowing homes and whole streets, scaring the crap out of Parisians, so Louis XVI created a government agency to regulate and renovate the quarries.
At end of the century, a second public health menace hit Paris. Decaying bodies in common graves and cemeteries were overrun with rats who, sensibly if you are a rat, also invaded public markets and private kitchens. To control the scourge, the government moved corpses to the quarries outside the city limits. Today, the Catacombs testify to this controversial, and consequential, governmental campaign against the Covid plague of its time.
At the tour exit, the guide offers a cryptic, bone-chilling caution. “Don’t take any souvenir bones,” she says. For Halloween parties? For making soup broth? Replacement parts if I break an arm or leg?
Travel includes a nearly unlimited number of ways I can hurt myself by falling. Falling off high bluffs, into caves, under a bus, off a horse. Planes can fall out of the sky, cars collide, boats sink. And that’s just a worrisome start.
In Paris, the water won’t kill me, the cemeteries aren’t waiting for me and the rats are under control. Now, I just need to watch where I’m walking…