A long, lazy weekend in Paris is a wonderful thing, especially in springtime. We didn't hesitate for a moment about going to see our daughter perform in a couple of Dance Band gigs last weekend. It's a funny thing when roles suddenly become reversed and the geriatrics become the groupies. In Paris though, on the left bank, the over sixties and seventies still tap their feet and jive along to the great American songbook. The soixante-huitards, who listened to jazz and blues at their parents' knees, are still full of that old Parisian 'joie de vivre' and 'je ne sais quoi'. With the sunshine dappling through the trees of the Luxembourg Gardens, they made the day. The youngsters were over the moon at such appreciation. Bien fait!
Afterwards, not wanting to cramp darling daughter's style, I decided, on a whim, to leg it south to seek out the old Barriere d'Enfer, Hell's Gate. It's now called Place Denfert-Rochereau, after an unfortunate French colonel who was roundly trounced by the Prussians during the winter campaign of 1870-71. The similarity in sound is undoubtedly a little French pun on its previous existence as hell on earth. Smack in the middle of a traffic traffic island, in commemoration of this dastardly defeat, is the Lion of Belfort. It is cast in bronze with its head facing westwards, away from Prussia, by Frederic Bartholdi of New York's Statue of Liberty fame. It serves as yet another reminder that we commemorate in order to forget, as Alan Bennet reminds us in 'The History Boys'. The defeat is long forgotten, like the lost souls below.
There are two stunning neoclassical buildings on the south side of the square, one next to the beautiful 'art nouveau' railings of the Metro, designed for the World Exhibition of 1900, and the other directly opposite. They once formed part of the original tollgates to the much hated Farmer's General Wall. Crippling taxes were levied on every item being taken in or out of the City of Paris and the road south was a profitable and essential thoroughfare. It was said that one passed through these tollgates in fear of one's life. So hated were they that during the steamy weekend of 12th July 1789 most of the tollgates were destroyed, presaging the bloodshed of the revolution that was to follow. These two, though, with their beautifully carved serene Greek maidens dancing around the architrave, miraculously escaped the revenge of the rampaging and angry mobs.
The rest of the history of this Place is now below ground, thanks to 'the man who saved Paris'. Graham Robb, in his charming and illuminating book, 'Parisians, recounts how in 1774 a gaping trench along the eastern side of the Rue d'Enfer opened up and swallowed all the houses for a distance of a quarter of a mile towards Paris. The Place d'Enfer really had become the 'Mouth of Hell'. The new Inspector of Quarries, whose job it became to inspect and report on the catastrophic collapse, was called Charles-Axel Guillaumot. The day following the collapse, he descended into the trench to a depth of eighty four feet and was truly shocked by what he discovered. The streets of Paris were perched precariously on top of massive undergound 'fontis', cavities, interspersed with 'cloches' of rubble liable to collapse at any moment, left by generations of earlier miners and quarriers who knew little of excavation. Paris had devoured its own foundations.
He made it his life's work to create spacious vaults and porticos to shore up the city above. Each 'cloche' was turned into a swirling cone of elaborate stonework and hacked out tunnels were faced with inscribed limestone walls. Amazingly, he recreated the above ground street names and a numbering system to identify the location of individual houses, to match his tunnels to the streets above and the landlords who were legally responsible for all the earth below ground level. The whole history of Paris was evident from this subterranean mirror image, from the Gauls and the Romans who had dug their building stone from quarries near the Seine, to the building stone below the Rue d'Enfer which had gone to make Notre Dame, the Palais Royal and the mansions of the Marais. Everything was there, bar the people who had made the history of Paris. All that rapidly changed.
On 30th May 1780 a brewer in the Rue de la Lingerie descended into cellar and found hundreds of decomposed and decomposing bodies piled there. Apart from the shock, it explained why his water was fetid. Since the arrival of the first smallpox epidemic some ten years earlier, which had killed off a tenth of the population and most of the infants under a year old, public health had become an issue. The overflowing graveyards of the Cemetery of the Innocents, close to what is now Les Halles and almost eight feet above the Rue Saint-Denis, were a major cause for concern. Nine centuries worth of putrefaction would be transported to an ossuary that Guillamot proposed to install in his waiting underground city. "Arrete, c'est ici l'empire de la mort," he would later have inscribed, his life's work done.
After months of secret debate, a royal edict of 3rd April 1786 determined that the bodies would be transferred southwards by cart and wagon, along the cobbled streets over the Pont Notre Dame to the Barriere d'Enfer to fill Guillamot's empty spaces. It was a macabre, and hugely expensive operation, which almost bankrupted the state. The repercussions were enormous, not least because of the higher taxes that were required. The gatekeepers of the Farmer's General Wall scrutinised the incoming wagons with even greater vigour. It was said that the number of skeletons that made the journey to La Tombe-Issoire was ten times greater than the living population of Paris.
The bones were arranged in decorative banks of skulls, tibias and femurs with many carved maxims, poems and other sacred and profane epitaphs. There is equity in death here. The bones of victims of the Saint Bartholemew's Day Massacre are muddled up with those of the Catholics who killed them. Later, following the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, they were added to by the bodies of guillotined aristocrats. Camille and Lucille Desmoulins, Danton and Robespierre later joined them. Even poor Guillamot himself finished up here, lost amongst the other souls, when his gravestone in the Cimitiere Sainte Catherine disappeared. The remaining cemeteries of Paris were excavated in 1883 and Guillamot's bones were gathered up with all the others and deposited here in this vast ossuary. He has become part of the very structure he created, in memoriam.
Today, as you stand in front of the two very understated green 'porteils' that lead down the one hundred and thirty steps to the Catacombs of Paris, you realise that so much of the city's history lies here. There is no getting away from it, it is indeed the realm of death. There are the remains of between six and seven million Parisians laid to rest in high Romantic taste across a distance of two kilometres. The bones here are anonymous relics to a great and turbulent past. In an age when we shun death and tuck it away with pleasantries such as "passing away", a walk through the Catacombs provides a jolt to reality.
This is not the case at the Cimetiere of Pere Lachaise, laid out in 1804, north east of here. There, in contrast, you can walk with angels in the bright sunlight until you find whoever it was that you came looking for. The legendary lovers, Abelard and Heloise, rest here in a grand tomb, closer in death than they ever were in life. Edith Piaf is here too, in a very unremarkable grave. Ingres and Modigliani, Corot and Delacroix, Seurat and Pissaro are here, as are Balzac, Beaumarchais and Proust. Bizet, Poulenc and Chopin are also here. But it is to one grave in particular that most of us are drawn [two, I suppose, if you are a fan of Jim Morrison of The Doors, whose body has long since been returned to California but whose gravestone remains a place of pilgrimage].
The grave of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde is the main attraction. He was laid to rest here in 1900, after his final sad days eking out an existence in Paris in a solitary room [No 16] at the Hotel d'Alsace on the Rue des Beaux Arts. We see what he became from a painting in the Musee d'Orsay, in Toulouse Lautrec's portrayal of him as an overweight, red faced voyeur at the Moulin Rouge. As large in death as he was in life, Oscar Wilde's tomb is a fitting testament to one of our greatest writers. He lived his life as art and Jacob Epsein's carved angel celebrates the elegance of the man before his fall. It is a very early piece by Epstein and it takes your breath away. Having been to the Bourdelle Museum, at his studio in Montparnasse, I was struck for the first time by his influence on Epstein.
Bourdelle's bas reliefs must surely have provided the prototype. It matters not, for this is living art. The most remarkable thing about Epstein's tribute to Wilde, with its red angel lips, are the hundreds of lipstick kisses below. He was more loved in death than he ever was in life. 'I love you', 'Anna and Mary love you', 'Amor', 'Forever', 'Libertad Siempre' and many more messages are scribbled on the pale yellow stone in red lipstick. If I had a pound for every lipstick kiss, I would be a rich woman indeed. It is a moving, living tribute to the great man himself and it is done with love. This is not the stuff of irresponsible graffiti. 'Au contraire', it is an expression of the ultimate human manifestation of love, a kiss. Another lost soul, the writer of 'De Profundis', has finally found happiness at last under a sea of lipstick kisses. How happy I am to have seen it.
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