"Where are you leading me, in the name of all that is miraculous?" I exclaimed, as my companion, laying violent hands upon my sash, almost dragged me down a flight of steps, which apparently led into the bowels of the earth. The appearance of the vast depth to which they descended being increased by a few hazy oil lamps that twinkled at the bottom.
"Excuse me, Monsieur," said I; "what the mischief—'t is a strange den this! I will go no further!"
"Courage, mon brave! courage! why we have only descended about a hundred steps or so;" replied the Frenchman, still continuing to descend. "You will find this an old and odd place too; but if you would escape an enraged rabble, the claws of the police, the maison de force, the prison, and the devil, follow me, and trust to my honour. I am Antoine St. Florian, Captain of the Garde du Corps, and late of the 23rd Grenadiers under the Emperor. You are safe—I know every nook in this subterranean world, for I have found a shelter in its ample womb many a time before to-night."
He still continued to speak as he descended, but the sound of his voice became lost in the vast space of the hollow vaults; my curiosity was excited: I still kept my sabre drawn, prepared for any sudden surprise or act of treachery, and continued to descend some hundred steps, to a depth which I afterwards ascertained to be 860 feet.
"This way, Monsieur; on—on yet!" exclaimed my conductor, hurrying me forward through a gloomy vault, and at that moment I heard the uproar of the multitude, and the buzz of their mingled voices resounding afar off, and high above us at the mouth of the lofty staircase.
The aspect of the place in which I so suddenly found myself was so strange, so novel, so grotesquely horrible, that for some moments I was unable to speak, and gazed about me in astonishment. The whole place seemed hewn out of the solid rock, and the height of its roof was about twelve feet from the floor, which was uniformly paved. In every direction caverns were seen branching off lighted by lamps which vanished away in long lines of perspective till they seemed to twinkle and expire amid the noxious and foggy vapours of this wonderful place, which appeared like a vast subterranean city, or the work of enchantment. The atmosphere was cold as that of a winter day, and I was sensible of the utmost difficulty of respiration.
Myriads of human skulls, grim, bare, and fleshless, with grinning jaws and eyeless sockets, piles of human bones, gaunt arms and jointed thighs, basket-like ribs and ridgy vertebræ, were ranged in frightful mockery along the sides of the vaulted alleys or avenues of this subterranean city of Death. The ghastly taste of some grim artist had arrayed all these poor emblems of mortality in the form of columns with capitals and arcades of intertwisted arches, but from every angle of which the bare jaws grinned, and the empty sockets looked drearily down upon us, producing an effect that, when viewed by the dim and uncertain light of the oil lamps, was alike wondrous and terrible. I was now in the Catacombs of Paris, that place of which I had heard so much.
To me, who had but recently left the Peninsula, the appearance of these remnants of the men of other years was less striking than it would prove to visitors generally; for many a time and oft, I had bivouacked where the dead of France and Britain lay unburied; and I thought of Albuera and the plains of Salamanca, where we had encamped within twelve months after battles had been fought there—and pitched our tents and lighted our camp fires on ground strewn, for miles and miles, with the half-buried skeletons of the brave who had fallen there, producing an effect that was never to be effaced from the memory. There the triumphs of death were calculated to impress the mind with melancholy; but here it was too grotesquely grim and horrible.
Scraps of verses from Ovid, Virgil, and Anacreon, appeared over the entrances of these caverns or crypts, in gilt letters that glimmered through the gloom; while, with a strange incongruity, but in true keeping with the morbid taste of the French, large red and yellow bills, the advertisements of the theatres, the fashionable hotels, concerts, and tailors, &c., appeared on different parts of the walls.
At a little distance there bubbled up a sparkling fountain, the plash of which rang hollowly in the vast vaults, as it fell into a large basin, where a number of gold fish were swimming. Over it shone the legend, in gilded letters—