Underworld Paris - p.1

Date: Wednesday, 4 April 2012 09:11 am (UTC)From: [identity profile] adja999.livejournal.com
Ah, Tina's friends can look like living corpses indeed. I feel compassion for addicts. I mean, at the very first, they were just stupid enough to touch the stuff, but once you're hooked, it's an addiction and I think it's mean to say they're just dumb to go back. It's like a disease. So, yeah, like you. Pity.
Irritation because they can be quite poluting.

As long as you feel safe, I guess it's somewhat okay.

"Trees"? What are trees? Huh.

Alright. Well. I'm gonna assume you don't know much about the Parisian Catacombs.
So... Paris used to be a lot smaller. It had a whole bunch of cimetaries, and they grew and grew and the city spread around them. As the city got bigger and the dead didn't rise up again and the living kept dying, the cimetaries became more and more crowded.
I don't know if they still do that, but back then, when that happened, they tended to dig up the oldest graves and put the remains in mass graves. It worked for a while but it eventually started to become unsanitary.
When the mass graves started to burst into neighboring caves or underground levels of houses... They thought they had to do something.
Weirdly, the concern for public health (and smell, bleh) happened at the same time as the revolution, when it was customary that excuted people were hung and were supposed to be left until their corpses rot enough that the head would detach and the body fall on their own. Which would take anything between three days and three weeks. And where were those public excutions held? On the market place. Picture people shopping for fresh meat or fruit or bread, weaving around the alleys of the market and side stepping cadavers. Grossed out yet? (I think back then, even if there were pandemics at time, like the plague, they used to have a much stronger immune system probably in spite and because of that)
Anyway... The cimetaries were either destroyed or confined to a certain number of spots, the mass graves were empties and they chose underground places in and around Paris to stack what now remained. So, bones.
We have celebrities down there, phisolophers, the guys that made our constitution or the Human Rights charter (do you say charter in English? We say 'Charte' so I assume), etc... And the commoner as well. All we know, is that when you walk along the halls, there are plaques with the cimetary of origin. Sometimes the cimetary section.
They have doomsday messages, too. Very LoTR like. "Here rest the dead that never shall be woken." "Life is futile and we all end up here." etc... All gloomy and creepy. (I love it.)
You can visit the catacombs. They have really had fun with it. They made it a beautiful setting. It's a cave like underground, mostly dug into the stone, sometimes they added a stonewall for support. And then the rooms walls are lined with bones. Litterally. And they tried to make it harmonious. The skulls sometimes draw a figure. Or they're gemetrically pleasing. I honestly never knew we were so stackable in death.
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