Catacombs of Paris

This guide to the Catacombs of Paris opens with the words carved over the entrance warning that this is the empire of Death, then follows Philibert Aspairt, a hospital doorkeeper who wandered down alone in November 1793 and vanished into the tunnels. It traces the limestone quarries that built Notre Dame and the Louvre, the Left Bank collapses of the 1770s that exposed the danger beneath the streets, and the nighttime carts that began moving Paris's dead underground by torchlight in 1785. Listen for how the quiet changes as the tunnels open into the ossuary halls.