fail, and, if you’re like me, asking yourself what you’re doing here in the first place, gaping at millions of weirdly displayed age-mottled bones.
Evidently I belong to a squeamish minority. Almost two hundred thousand tourists a year besiege the catacombs, loving them to death with cameras flashing and boots resounding. If ever there was a time you could quietly contemplate this disconcerting sanctuary’s significance—the backbreaking work of underpaid miners, the technical genius of Enlightenment thinkers and engineers, the anonymity of six million forgotten ancestors—that innocent time is long gone. As I clambered out of the caves a security guard was checking backpacks. A stolen skull stared forlornly from a table, and a youngster with a stupid grin was doing his best to talk himself out of trouble. “Happens all the time,” sighed a guard when I asked. “You’ve got to wonder …”
After the catacombs, the life-enhancing qualities of the subterranean Canal Saint-Martin can only come as a relief. You board a riverboat at the Arsenal marina, abutting the Bastille, then putter leisurely toward La Villette under several miles of vaults conceived by Haussmann—who else? But the first, the great Emperor Napoléon deserves some credit, too. He had the canal built as an open waterway. The relentless Baron covered the canal to thwart riotous Parisians who, he feared (based on the 1830 revolution) might use it again as a defensive moat. Happily, nowadays tour boats and pleasure craft cruise the canal and there is no echo of its bloody past.
Another sublime subterranean spot is the basement of the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville—the BHV department store—an unrivaled Aladdin’s cavern of hardware, now equipped with its own subterranean café-restaurant, Bricolo. And under Place de la Madeleine hide what may just be Paris’s most beautiful Art nouveau toilettes publiques , with carved wood panels, brass and mirrors, floral frescoes, and stained-glass windows in each cabinet . Here, once you’ve awakened the sleeping Madame Pipì (i.e., the bathroom attendant), you may tidy up like a real fin-de-siècle lady or gentleman.
Of course the greatest and most useful thing in Paris’s underground world is the Métropolitain, inaugurated in 1900. Its deepest stations are at Abbesses, halfway up Montmartre, and Cité, on the island of the same name. However, as if to prove that earlier centuries can’t claim all the glory, the Météor line running from Madeleine past François Mitterrand’s National Library is a staggering wonder of the subsoil, a postmodern folly, as symbolic of our times as the sewers or catacombs were of theirs. Glass escalators lower you into cavernous halls, then down to the platforms, where glass barriers prevent passengers from falling onto the tracks. Météor is driverless. Its path crosses the Marais. Whenever I ride it, I make a point of checking, irrationally, for traces of Paris history buried not far from our dusty, moldy cellar.
Place des Vosges
Sitting among old armor, and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show, and looked like a chapter out of one of his own books .
—C HARLES D ICKENS after meeting Victor Hugo in his Place-des-Vosges apartment, 1847
he Marais’s centerpiece Place des Vosges isn’t the biggest or the grandest of Paris squares, but it seems to me the most alluring. Under its arcades the noise of traffic fades—well, on three of four sides anyway—replaced by the splashing of fountains. Pigeons and sparrows duel over the steep slate roofs of the square’s thirty-six identical pavilions. Their brick and stone façades, never shaded by other buildings, catch the shifting light of the Paris sky. People stroll by, peering into shop windows. Waiters weave among café tables set out under
Evidently I belong to a squeamish minority. Almost two hundred thousand tourists a year besiege the catacombs, loving them to death with cameras flashing and boots resounding. If ever there was a time you could quietly contemplate this disconcerting sanctuary’s significance—the backbreaking work of underpaid miners, the technical genius of Enlightenment thinkers and engineers, the anonymity of six million forgotten ancestors—that innocent time is long gone. As I clambered out of the caves a security guard was checking backpacks. A stolen skull stared forlornly from a table, and a youngster with a stupid grin was doing his best to talk himself out of trouble. “Happens all the time,” sighed a guard when I asked. “You’ve got to wonder …”
After the catacombs, the life-enhancing qualities of the subterranean Canal Saint-Martin can only come as a relief. You board a riverboat at the Arsenal marina, abutting the Bastille, then putter leisurely toward La Villette under several miles of vaults conceived by Haussmann—who else? But the first, the great Emperor Napoléon deserves some credit, too. He had the canal built as an open waterway. The relentless Baron covered the canal to thwart riotous Parisians who, he feared (based on the 1830 revolution) might use it again as a defensive moat. Happily, nowadays tour boats and pleasure craft cruise the canal and there is no echo of its bloody past.
Another sublime subterranean spot is the basement of the Bazaar de l’Hôtel de Ville—the BHV department store—an unrivaled Aladdin’s cavern of hardware, now equipped with its own subterranean café-restaurant, Bricolo. And under Place de la Madeleine hide what may just be Paris’s most beautiful Art nouveau toilettes publiques , with carved wood panels, brass and mirrors, floral frescoes, and stained-glass windows in each cabinet . Here, once you’ve awakened the sleeping Madame Pipì (i.e., the bathroom attendant), you may tidy up like a real fin-de-siècle lady or gentleman.
Of course the greatest and most useful thing in Paris’s underground world is the Métropolitain, inaugurated in 1900. Its deepest stations are at Abbesses, halfway up Montmartre, and Cité, on the island of the same name. However, as if to prove that earlier centuries can’t claim all the glory, the Météor line running from Madeleine past François Mitterrand’s National Library is a staggering wonder of the subsoil, a postmodern folly, as symbolic of our times as the sewers or catacombs were of theirs. Glass escalators lower you into cavernous halls, then down to the platforms, where glass barriers prevent passengers from falling onto the tracks. Météor is driverless. Its path crosses the Marais. Whenever I ride it, I make a point of checking, irrationally, for traces of Paris history buried not far from our dusty, moldy cellar.
Place des Vosges
Sitting among old armor, and old tapestry, and old coffers, and grim old chairs and tables, and old canopies of state from old palaces, and old golden lions going to play at skittles with ponderous old golden balls, they made a most romantic show, and looked like a chapter out of one of his own books .
—C HARLES D ICKENS after meeting Victor Hugo in his Place-des-Vosges apartment, 1847
he Marais’s centerpiece Place des Vosges isn’t the biggest or the grandest of Paris squares, but it seems to me the most alluring. Under its arcades the noise of traffic fades—well, on three of four sides anyway—replaced by the splashing of fountains. Pigeons and sparrows duel over the steep slate roofs of the square’s thirty-six identical pavilions. Their brick and stone façades, never shaded by other buildings, catch the shifting light of the Paris sky. People stroll by, peering into shop windows. Waiters weave among café tables set out under
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