The Ossuaries of Paris: Underland and Pure
Almost a week since I finished it, I’m still thinking and dreaming of Underland, all for a very good reason.
Book serendipity is real. At a book sale a few months ago, I came across a copy of Arthur Miller’s Pure. I had never heard of it, but I fell for the premise, the story of a man assigned the task of demolishing an overflowing cemetery in Paris in the late 18th century. I didn’t start it right away, because I have only about a couple of hundred unread books bought previously around the house: for tsundoku is very real, but not necessarily bad, if I were to take this excerpt from Walter Benjamin’s essay, Unpacking My Library, to heart.
Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, “And you have read all these books, Monsieur France?” “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”
For me, a good way to work through my collection is to let my mood dictate my reading — not pressure of any kind. One morning, I can wake up thinking of the tropics of Southeast Asia and return to The Gift of Rain. Or I can dream of the wide sweep of American deserts and want to read Death Comes for the Archbishop. As the lovely people who join the DC Library’s Twitter weekly book chats will tell you, book polygamy is fine and entirely acceptable.
A more sensible way of picking up a new book is looking for some form of continuity in my reading, if the book I’ve just finished has me firmly by the heart and soul.
Diving into the chapter on the catacombs of Paris in Underland, I was pleasantly surprised by the mention of the aforementioned Mr Benjamin’s writing. It was only a week ago that I had read the library essay, and to come across a reference to his work for the first time ever in another author’s writing was quite a coincidence. Drawing on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which studies Paris and was not finished because the writer died by suicide before he could complete it, Macfarlane explores how the dark depths might have exerted their appeal in this piece of work.
It is clear that Benjamin’s imagination was strongly drawn to enclosed and underground spaces: the warren of the covered ‘arcades’ themselves, as well as the caverns, crypts, wells and cells that existed beneath Paris. Taken together, these sunken spaces comprise what Benjamin called a ‘subterranean city’, shadow twin to the ‘upper world’, and dream-zone to its conscious mind. ‘Our waking existence is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld,’ he wrote, memorably: the realm from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass by these inconspicuous places, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors.
Preparing for his underground sojourn, Macfarlane tells the story of the cemetery of les Innocents, beside the les Halles market, which was used from the Middle Ages until the late eighteenth century, accepting bodies beyond its capacity (with numbers seeming to peak during the plague), mass graves piling up, till the pressure increased so much that subterranean walls separating it from houses crumbled.
Into the cellar tumbled the contents of a common pit. You may, perhaps, imagine the disquiet felt by those who lived above that cellar, by their neighbours, their neighbours’ neighbours, by all those who, on going to their beds at night, must lie down with the thought of the cemetery pressing like the esurient sea against the walls of their homes. It could no longer hold on to its dead.
The excerpt above is from Pure, which has come into my life as a natural extension of the chapter from Underland. I’m fifty pages in and Miller’s young protagonist is acquainting himself with the stench of the cemetery, which pervades the air and the homes and the breath of those who live next door, a permanent part of them. I suppose graphic descriptions of the “movement” of the relics of les Innocents to the limestone quarries of Paris and other resting places lie ahead, but Macfarlane has prepared me for them. His claustrophobic journey through the catacombs and the nights spent wedged into shelves in the rock are material enough for nightmares.
These quarries that are now ossuaries once yielded their limestone to build the cities overhead. They are now tourist spots and party destinations. If you are curious and not easily spooked by the remains of the dead, look up Félix Nadar’s photographs of these catacombs for what they may have meant to the workers who carted remains from one part of town to another, a couple of centuries ago. A particular photograph described by Macfarlane is that of a worker moving a heap of skeletons from les Innocents to their new home, bones underfoot, his expression obscured by the flash of the camera.
I will not attempt to understand how books come into your life at the most suitable points; it is a hopeless exercise. However, I can still marvel at these wonders, because I don’t know why I picked up The Plague for the first time late last year, having owned it since 2012. Pure has so far been a promising extension of the grim reading I have managed to get myself into; it is past and present at once, with a glimpse of the future.
