Skeletons in the quarry

Michael's showcase day down in Orsay went well yesterday. His seminar had a pretty full room, and people seemed interested and he got some good questions afterwards. He also had a second more informal talk about some of the technical specifics of his work with his french counterparts, and that was also well received. So it was a very full day for him, but overall successful!

I went to visit the Paris Catacombs in the morning, which was an interesting experience. Basically, the entire underbelly of Paris is a network of very old quarries that were hewn out to collect limestone to build all the pretty buildings around here, dating back to Roman times. So it's a very extensive network of tunnels below the subway and sewers and the rest of the city. In the late 1700s, many of these started to collapse, as most weren't reinforced in any way (no such thing as OSHA in the 1100s), which started mass panics in Paris as whole streets and houses fell into massive sinkholes. King Louis XVI commissioned a project to survey and stabilize the quarries. At the same time, the cemetaries that had been used by Paris since it's founding were also starting to feel the strain of centuries of city life and poor sanitation, and literally started overflowing and poisoning people. That sounded pretty gross.

The solution, therefore, was to empty the cemeteries and put the bones into the miles of newly reinforced quarries, and thus the Paris Catacombs were inaugurated in the late 1700s. They basically excavated the ceremonies, has some priests pray over the mess, and then dumped the bones down shafts into massive piles, roughly grouped by cemetery. Then, because being macabre was fashionable during the Victorian era, they stacked up the skulls and femurs along the passageways and opened it up to tourists. It has apparently remained a popular curiosity, because the line to get in was incredibly long. 

The tour route was only 1.5 km, but there are something like 200 km of tunnel.

"Stop, here is the Empire of the Dead" - that's not dramatic at all.

Oh hello.

They got a little artsy

Behind the nicely stacked parts are just mounds of bone.

They even decorated the pillars? Apparently in the 1850s it was trendy to attend clandestine midnight orchestra concerts down here.

In the end, Michael is very glad that he had talks to give, because he would not have enjoyed the Catacombs.
We met up with Michael's old Harvard lab group mates, Nick (who we also saw in Vienna) and Augustine (who lives here), and went out for a very nice dinner. It was rather fun because Augustine just ordered everything for us, and it was all quite delicious. The restaurant owner even came over to show us pictures of the winery from which our wine came from, as if any of us knew enough about wine to appreciate the terroir in any real way. But it tasted good!