To protect the town from settling down into this necropolis, vast sums were expended in substructures, so as to remove all danger of future collapse.
Gradually many other cemeteries that had been encroached upon, or surrounded, were required to yield up their dead, so that it was estimated that the catacomb contained the remains of three million persons. The bodies of some victims of the Revolution were placed here as well.
For many years the bones remained as they were thrown down on their removal, in heaps, but after 1812 they were gradually arranged in a fantastic manner, and turned into an exhibition for the curious. Sixty- three staircases lead from the different parts of the town into the catacombs, and are used by workmen and agents appointed to take care of the necropolis. Twice in the year tours of inspection are made by the surveyors, but visitors are no longer allowed access to the catacomb. There have occurred cases of men having been lost in the intricate labyrinth.
The crypts in which were laid the bodies of saints gave occasion to kings, princes, and great men employing like mausoleums.
The poor and mean might lie in the earth, but men of consequence must have vaults in which the members of their families might be laid. What hideous profanation of sepulchres would have been spared had the kings of France been laid in the earth! They elected to repose in the crypt of the splendid minster of S. Denis. When the Revolution broke out, the Convention resolved that the tombs should be destroyed in accordance with the motion of Barrère, 31st July 1793, "La main puissante de la République doit éffacer impitoyablement ces épitaphes superbes, et demolir ces mausolées qui rappeleraient des rois l'effrayant souvenir;" and "of the coffins of our old tyrants let us make bullets to hurl at our enemies." The decree for the destruction was sacrilegiously executed; the coffins were opened—Henri II. and his queen in their robes, Henri IV. in a perfect state of preservation, Louis XIV. still recognisable. The body of Turenne, with the fatal bullet visible in it, was preserved as a peep-show. The rest were thrown into "fosses communes" dug in the neighbourhood. By a singular coincidence, the work of desecration was begun on 12th October 1793, the anniversary of the day on which, one hundred years before, Louis XIV. had caused the demolition of the tombs of the German Emperors at Spires. Not only so, but the agent employed by the Convention was Hentz, a namesake of the superintendent of the work of destruction carried out at Spires.
And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges—Louis XI. escaped. He had been buried in a crypt at Cléry, and had been forgotten. In 1889 the abbé Saget, curé of Cléry, opened the vault and found the body intact. Louis XI. had this sepulchre made for himself during his lifetime. Now the visitor can take in his hand the head, and muse over it on the treachery, cunning, and cruelty that once lodged in that little brain-pan. Scott may have been incorrect in his history in "Quentin Durward," but he was accurate in his characterisation of the king.
The instinct of immortality is implanted in the human breast. The reverential care with which primeval man treated his dead, showed a confusion of ideas between soul and body. His senses told him, and told men in the historic period, that the body dissolved to dust, yet as a temple of the spirit it was treated with respect. The soul to the Egyptians was in some manner always related to the body. The "ka" must have something to which to return, if not to the mummy, then to its model.
The dead in the first ages were given the caves in which they had lived, but they began to press out the living, to monopolise all caves, and afterwards artificial dwellings were reared to receive them, stone structures, dolmens, that were heaped over with earth, to make them resemble their former subterranean habitations. Sometimes these structural caves consist of a series of chambers connected by a passage, the so-called allées couvertes of France, but of which we have fine examples in Scotland and Ireland.
Where huge slabs of granite, limestone, or sandstone were not available, the living scooped out underground cemeteries, closely resembling their own underground dwellings.
In the Petit Morin are many of these that have been explored and described by the Baron de Baye. I have already spoken of the habitable caves there found. But there were sepulchral chambers excavated in the chalk as well. These differ from the others in that the entrances are blocked by a large slab, and in some instances have sculptured figures in them of the goddess of Death, or of a stone hammer.