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  After months of secret debate a royal edict of 3 April 1786 finally de- cided the matter. The transfer would take place at night in the depths of winter. "Furtively, deceitfully, shamefully," as Hugo might have put it, they conjured away the dead from the centre of Paris down to this deserted spot in the south—along, indeed, the very same old north-south axis that the guillotine would take after the July Révolution of 1830.

  In December 1786 convoys of carts and wagons set out for Hell, rattling across the poorly paved streets over the Pont au Change and the Pont Notre-Dame, through the narrow lanes of the Îie de la Cité, and then down the two parallel streets of the Enfer and Saint-Jacques. The convoys were led by priests carrying torches and behind each convoy followed a municipal officer on horseback. Mercier records that the inhabitants in the neighbourhood of the Innocents "woke up, got out of their beds. One after another they appeared at their windows, half naked; others came out on the streets; the news spread; the young, the beautiful, gathered to gossip." What a contrast it made to the dead. It was Paris's last danse macabre. At the Barriere d'Enfer—the square where you stand—the dead of a Christian millennium were gathered in piles and carried down by labour gangs into the holes you will visit with your torch.

  There were far more bodies than ever expected. The piles were immense. The job was exhausting—and expensive. In February 1787 the work was interrupted. But in late August and through to October that year the convoys of the dead began rolling once more. By this time the kingdom of Louis XVI was faced with a bill for the transportation of bodies amounting to over 279,000 livres—a bill which could not possibly be paid. The state was bankrupt and the country was entering the first phases of the French Révolution. It was at this point that the conjurors began to develop their plans.

  Developments in the young science of chemistry, which had grown out of medieval alchemy, combined in many curious ways with the new culture of Révolution. Antoine de Lavoisier, who proved the law of the conservation of matter, would go to the guillotine for the income he drew from the Farmers General tax. The law of the conservation of matter would survive him and it would have a direct impact on what was next to be done with all those bodies now piling up in Hell.

  A quarrel had developed over the question of "putrefaction," how the flesh disappeared from the bone —a most topical subject in revolutionary Paris. The Hebrew word "Machabee," from which macabre as in danse is thought to derive, did originally connote the process of body rot. The eighteenth-century hypothesis of infection, thought to be due to smells in the air, had its origin here. Minds began to turn on how, chemically, one could speed up the process of rot and—in a project typical of the time—turn it into something beautiful. In the 1780s not only Lavoisier, in the apothecary and gunpowder rooms of the Paris Arsenal, was working hard on the problem. Also engaged on it was Dr. Michel Augustin Thouret, a member of the Société Royale de Médecine and friend of Benjamin Franklin, who claimed that bodies and earth, when combined in the right proportions and heated up to the right temperature, could be converted into blocks of glass. This intriguing thought led young revolutionary minds in Paris to propose that, following the transfer of the bodies to the "catacombs" of Hell, cremation ovens be built inside them so that on the surface would appear a huge solid pyramid of glass to the memory of the dead.

  One can understand why historians of death—they do exist— turned in horror when they rediscovered these ideas after the Second World War. Philippe Ariès, one such historian, argued that these eighteenth-century men of the Enlightenment were the forerunners of some of the worst twentieth-century attitudes towards death. They created feelings of repugnance and disgust for death, pushing it away from life, hiding it from life's pleasures—the beginnings of the consumer society. Death, he wrote, was "ensavaged." He quotes the Marquis de Sade's terrible ideas about nature destroying in order to create; that death only exists "figuratively and without reality"; the body loses all meaning. Modern sadism is thus born. Modern totalitarian plans of mass cremation for the purposes of hiding death already seem present.

  Ariès certainly had a point. Contemporary civilization does shun death, consigning it to the sick and the old—two groups which were better integrated in a culture that would not shun the face of suffering or turn away from the biological reality of death. When the authorities of Paris transported the guillotine down to Hell's Gate their main intention was certainly to hide death from the crowds of the morbidly curious. How much more so was this the case with this earlier mass removal of the dead from the centre of town to the hidden caverns beneath the Barrière d'Enfer.

  But perhaps we do need to look away from death. The kind of punishment inflicted on Robert-François Damiens on the Place de Grève would be intolerable today. Our view of justice has changed. No nation in Europe inflicts the death penalty, even for the most heinous of crimes, for the very sound reason that human justice is no longer considered infallible—and a death penalty cannot be reversed. The experience of two world wars has made us more modest. At the same time, it is true, we have pushed death into the background, beyond our daily preoccupations. As Ariès has argued, there is something unhealthy about this. But Paris's eighteenth-century hospices, her asylums and charnel houses—all open to the eyes and the noses of her citizens—would be wholly unacceptable in the prosperous urban life we enjoy today. Death has to be put aside.

  That is a thought to bear in mind as one descends the staircase in the old eighteenth-century barrière at Place Denfert-Rochereau to view the catacombs of Paris. The skulls and crossbones of tens of thousands of Parisians who walked the streets of the city over the last two thousand years look so calm down there; indeed, the sight of their remains, displayed on row upon row of shelves, provides a very physical dimension to the human reality of this city's long history. There is just one little moment of trepidation, as one steps in at the entrance. Inscribed above the gate is a line of poetry from an eighteenth-century abbot, Jacques Delille: "Arrête! C'est ici l"Empire de la Mort!"—"This is the Empire of Death!"

  * The Farmers General Wall was a toll barrier around the City of Paris, administered by the "Farmers General," a privileged group of sixty tax collectors nominated by the king's Ministry of Finance, who held a "farm" or "lease" on the royal state revenues. They enriched themselves through commissions on the taxes they collected on the king's behalf Their association went back to the thirteenth century and they were eventually abolished by the Constituent Assembly in 1790.

  *"We are three bandits here, / Out of the Forest of Bondi. / Heap of foul rabble! / While you see us victimized / Our friends feast in your homes. / You would do better going to work, / Heap of foul rabble / To buy yourselves shoes."

  * The Bastille, further upstream, was constructed by Philip Augustus's great-grandson, Charles V, who in 1370 ordered a "chastel Saint-Antoine" put up to defend his unprotected Hôtel de Saint-Pol. His Pre'vot—or governor—of Paris proved only too keen on the project, thereby earning himself enemies: he ended up as the first prisoner of the fortress.

  * See Villedieu (a name invented, it seems, by the eighteenth-century cataloguer), Projet de catacombespour la ville de Paris, en adoptant a cet usage les Carrieres qui se trouvent dans son enceinte que dans ses environs (London, 1782). In Histoire et descriptions de lieu, tome 2, No. 2, Bibliothéque de l'Histoire de la Ville de Paris, cat. I1943.

  2

  GAFLE DU NOFLD

  IF HELL is at the bottom of the map, then why not seek Heaven at the top, on the north side of town? On the land beneath this station trod one of the most celebrated Parisian saints, Vincent de Paul, the guide of lost children, the father of philanthropy, and one of the first teachers of modern philosophy—right here, where you gather your bags. And the story is an inspiring one. But it is also a tale of human failure, an example of what happens when noble ideas of charity are institutionalized. Above all, the story reveals what was, until very recent times, the terrifying experience of childhood for the majority of Parisia
ns.

  Historically, the entrance into Paris from the north via the old Roman road of Saint-Denis had never inspired thoughts of Heaven, nor did the Barrière Saint-Denis make one think for a moment of the Gates of Saint Peter. Travellers from the north were more frequently put in mind of another version of Hell. Graphic descriptions of what it was like to enter Paris through the Barrière Saint-Denis—today the site of the Gare du Nord—were given by Englishmen who took the trip at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the Continent opened up for the first time in over ten years.

  What made entrance into Paris from the north side so appalling was not, as at the Barriere d'Enfer, the emptiness of the land; it was the crowding. The whole of French rural civilization seemed to follow this route into town—wine wagons, hay carts and bullocks would line up at the gate. Chickens clucked and strutted in the alleys by Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis; through the old stone arch of the carpenter's abode on the left you might see a goat tethered, or even a cow; pigs were raised by the barrière, perhaps distant descendants of the runaway pig that killed Louis VI's son and heir in 1131 on the Grand Pont of the Îie de la Cité.

  How it all smelled. The historian, Thomas Carlyle, in his lyrical description of Paris at the time of the Révolution, was obviously borrowing from his own experience in the 1830s and comparing this to the southern Scottish towns of his childhood: "Mud-Town of the Borderers (Lutetia Parisiorum or Barisiorum)." The good Reverend Norgate had passed by those gates at the time of the Emperor's abdication in 1814; he complained that from there and downwards into the town's centre all he smelt was "effluvia and foetish gases"—he eventually fled to the western suburbs, which as it turned out was a good move, one that would be followed over the next few decades by much of Paris, thereby opening up new vistas along an east-west axis.

  English travellers in 1815 usually arrived in late evening; oil lamps strung across the street gave off a vague and demonic light—Paris's rebels hanged men from them: many travellers, with the gates behind them, felt closed in, terrified.

  On a "Map of the City of Paris Drawn Geometrically According to the Best Sources . . . By Maire, Geographical Engineer, 1808," one can see what lay behind it. "What an immense enclosure within the walls of Paris!" is inscribed on the map, the exclamation mark included. "It is larger even than the garden of the Thuilleries to the west of the Louvre Palace." Most of this area, including what is now the Gare du Nord, consisted of pleasant orchards and vineyards. A garden of Eden? Not exactly. On the enclosure's southern perimeter lay the Hospice Saint-Lazare, a medieval leper colony.

  Through the orchards and vines strolls a man with a sharp nose, a greying moustache and pointed beard—perspicacious and resolute: his eyes are narrow and a smile lights his face; he wears a priest's black tricorne and his clothes make a colourful sight. The nuns address him as "Monsieur Vincent"—his Christian name. It is May 1643. "The King is dead, long live the King!" And well they might cry it, for Louis XIV is not yet five.

  "It is said that one seeks the Kingdom of God. So seek it, it is only a phrase. But it seems to me a good phrase," said Monsieur Vincent yesterday. "It means that we must continually aim at what is recommended us: work perpetually for the Kingdom of God and not remain in a state of laziness, of arrest. Pay attention to one's interior life and regulate it. And the exterior life is not designed for amusement." He had been talking to the new Council of Conscience, set up for the child king. He had angered some on the Council who wondered if he were turning Protestant, or about as bad, becoming one of those hated Jansenists from Port-Royal in the south side of the city—their Augustine heresies came from dangerous Holland. Monsieur Vincent insisted he would stand by the Most Christian Monarch for the reformed Catholic faith. Cardinal Mazarin, the King's First Minister—who, oddly for a cardinal, had never been a priest—had guessed he meant it, but he would remain suspicious for the rest of his life.

  Care and action was the message Monsieur Vincent wanted to pass on to the King. It was a message for a child. Enfanter is another key word repeated in the fifteen volumes of his complete works. Enfanter, "to give birth"—a continual process, that of the interior life issuing forth into the exterior world: seek, seek, seek the grace of God, the love of God, caritas—charity. Prove its existence through works, act on its existence.

  Monsieur Vincent's perpetual enterprise of charity can be traced to his roots, a peasant born a "Depaul" in the flat Landes of Gascony His birth in 1581 occurred in the midst of a religious civil war, which is probably why he became such a man of action. As a child he dreamed of being a brave cavalier, like Cyrano de Bergerac; he had the same nose. But he became a priest instead, though a kind of cavalier priest. This was taken by some too literally. The story went around Paris that in the year 1607 he embarked from Spain to Rome in a fisherman's skiff for his ordination—around 800 sea miles. Barbary pirates captured him and carried him to Tunis where he was kept as a slave until he miraculously escaped a year later. Monsieur Vincent repeatedly said that it was a pack of lies. But the Parisians loved the tale because it seemed so like their favourite cure. That is undoubtedly why Louis Abelly wrote it all down in the first biography of Vincent de Paul, as he came to be known after his death in 1660. It could not possibly be true. It was a favourite literary genre. The most famous is told by Cervantes in the adventures of the Man of La Mancha, Don Quixote; Abelly's old French is an exact translation of Cervantes' old Spanish, published, it so happens, in 1607.

  That Parisians should embrace Vincent de Paul as their own Don Quixote indicates the kind of man he was: a figure of brave deeds who was often criticized for his theatricality by his royal enemies. Monsieur Vincent's masses in the old leper colony of Saint-Lazare — the chapel lay on what is now Boulevard de Magenta—were celebrated before a congregation drawn from every section in life. Rich men, poor men, noble ladies and prostitutes, orphans and princes showered praises on him; they loved what they heard. Action, he preached, must be supported by one vital impulse, one single will; the question was how to keep it sacred, how to prove it came from the Kingdom of God. "It must be like a spring," he sang out in his musical voice, "that makes all the organs of the body tremble." Perpetual action, perpetual conversion— Saint Paul was his favourite apostle. "My God," exclaimed a man in the congregation, "there's a priest who says mass well: he must be a saint." And so he became.

  Enfanter, care, action: Monsieur Vincent regarded his greatest achievement to be the establishment of the Daughters of Charity, those nuns we saw. Their mother house was created here in 1683. Their task was to bring aid and succour to foundling children.

  There was a crying need for those Daughters. At the time Louis XIV succeeded to the throne, the wastrels of Paris had become such a common sight that people compared them to swarms of flies rising out of the dung and the dead. Seventeenth-century Paris was not unlike today's worst corners of Bucharest, or of Calcutta. Children robbed and killed. Their weapon was the sling, orfronde as it was known. Paris was a hotbed of violence, a violence that exploded into civil war five years after Louis' accession. Appropriately, they called the war the Fronde. It divided the royal family and the Church, it separated the Paris Parlement from the monarchy and, for five long years (1648-53), it split up Paris into warring factions, any of Monsieur Vincent's noble friends were among the rebels; he lost his position on the Council of Conscience, and his relations with the unordained Cardinal Mazarin became very strained.

  The Daughters of Charity, nevertheless, continued their work on Paradise Street. They installed in their high wall a small revolving wooden door; le tour it was christened. Desperate young mothers would place their children there, ring the bell and then run away. That little door kept turning until 1863.

  THE ABANDONMENT OF children was not invented in the seventeenth century. The earliest image we have of a Parisian face— discovered in 1878 by the archaeologist Eugène Toulouzé in a Roman cemetery behind the Port-Royal maternity hospital—is that of a child who may well have been abandoned
; it was around a year old and mud, turned to concrete, had received an imprint of the dead infant's face. But the charitable mysticism of Saint Vincent de Paul was transmuted into the politics of Louis XIV, which in its turn would lead to a veritable industry of abandoned children by the time of the French Révolution. It was a good example of how—as a later Parisian, Charles Péguy, was to describe the process—mystique would slip into politique, and how politique would sink further down into the foulest, most repressive type of bureaucratic administration.

  There is something terrible about the story. It is as if goodness could only become evil, as if a saint's charity was fated in "Mud Town" to develop within a generation into a source of selfishness and exploitation. Heaven would become Hell, hope would be turned into despair. The work of another churchman is worth noting here, one who developed a whole philosophy out of this very point. While the French capital was convulsed in unending cycles of violence in the name of a better world, an English vicar looked across the Channel from his quiet parish of Albury in Surrey and wrote, in 1799: "The increase of population is necessarily limited by the means of subsistence," and the "superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence by misery and vice."

  The Reverend Thomas Malthus was not impressed by Parisian claims for the perfectibility of man. "Passion between the sexes" was the key to the degenerate process on God's earth. "It appears that a society constituted according to the most beautiful form that imagination can conceive," Malthus claimed, "would, from the inevitable laws of nature and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period, degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known State at present." Or as the Parisian song of the 1930s went, "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"— "The more it changes, the more it stays the same." All your charities will come to nought: within thirty years you will be back in "Mud Town." It turned out to be a fairly accurate prediction. "Towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes, no observable progress whatever has hitherto been made," noted the solemn vicar of Albury.