Whilst I was surveying this district, in my usual solitary way, I met two gentlemen and a lady, acquaintances, who were descending into the catacombs, whose opening is just here, and I went down with them.
This nether world bears upon its vaults three fourths of the Quartier St. Germain, with its superincumbent mass of churches and palaces. The light of Heaven is shut out, and so deep a silence reigns in its recesses, that one hears his own footsteps walking after him, and is so vast that several visitors, straying away a few years ago, have not yet returned. The bones of fifty generations are emptied here from ancient grave yards of Paris, now only known to history. What a hideous deformity of skulls! After entering half a mile we saw various constructions, all made out of these remnants of mortality; sepulchral monuments, an entire church, with its pulpit, confessional, altars, tombs, and coffins; and the victims of several Revolutionary massacres, are laid out here chronologically. How unjacobinical they look!
On entering, you are confronted with the following inscription; “Arrête, c’est ici l’empire de la Mort!” and various other inscriptions are put up in the dead languages, and names often written upon skulls, to designate their owners. “Fix your eyes here,” said the lady; “this is the skull of Ninon de l’Enclos,” with verses.
“L’indulgente et sage Nature
A formé l’âme de Ninon
De la Volupté d’Epicure,
Et de la vertu de Caton.”
And this is her skull! Every one knows her history, but I will tell you a little of it over again. I will give you a list of her court. Molière, to begin with, and Corneille; Scarron, St. Evermond, Chapelle, Desmarets, Mignard, Chateauneuf, Chaulieu, Condé, Vendome, Villeroi, Villars, D’Etrée, La Rochefoucauld, Choiseul, Sevigné and Fontenelle. She was honoured with the confidence of Madame Scarron, and the homage, through her ambassadors, of the Queen of Sweden. She made conquests at sixty, one at seventy, and died at ninety. Her own son, the Chevalier de Villars, fell in love with her at fifty, and fell upon his sword when she revealed to him the secret of his birth. The Chevalier de Gourville confided to her twenty thousand crowns, when driven to exile, and a like sum to the Grand Penetencier; the priest denied the deposit, and the courtezan restored it, unasked.
I visited, a month ago, her chateau, and saw the rooms in which she used to give her famous suppers “à tous les Despreaux, et tous les Racines.” And this is her skull! While my doctor companions were turning it about, and explaining the bumps—how big was her ideality, how developed her amativeness, I turned her about in my mind, until I had turned her into shapes again—into that incomparable beauty and grace, which no rival was able to equal, and which sensuality itself was not able to degrade. I hung back the lips upon those grinning teeth, I gave her her smile again, her wit, and her eloquence. I assisted at her little court of Cyprus, in the Rue de Tournelle, where philosophers came to gather wisdom, and courtiers grace, from her conversation; I assisted at her toilette, and witnessed the hopes, the jealousies, the agonies, and ecstacies of her lovers. And so we took leave of the exquisite Ninon’s skull—if it was her’s.
The poet Gilbert, who died of want, has here an apartment to himself, which he had not above ground. It is inscribed with his own mournful epitaph,
“Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive,
J’apparus un jour, et je meurs.
Je meurs, et sur ma tombe, où lentement j’arrive,
Nul ne viendra verser des pleurs!”
I could not help contradicting him, for the life of me.
In the very interior of the cavern are collections of water which have classical names. Here is the Styx just under the Ecole Médecine, and the River Lethe flows hard by the Institute. We came at length to a cabinet of skulls, arranged upon shelves, some for phrenology, and some for pathology, exhibiting in classes the several diseases, which our doctors explained with circumstantiality to their sybil conductor; rows of toes, of fingers, and jaws, and legs which used to cut pigeon-wings, and pirouettes, alas! how gracefully.