Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [81]
I walk on through the galleries and read about some of the people whose bones are thought to be in here. Madame Elizabeth, the king’s sister. Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress. Robespierre and Danton. The writer Rabelais and the actor Scaramouche. I bet there are some interesting conversations down here at night.
I keep reading and learn that after Robespierre fell, there was a backlash against the political group he led—the Jacobins. Young aristocrats who’d survived his reign launched the White Terror and beat up Jacobins in the streets. They also gave Victims’ Balls—dances for people who’d lost a family member to the guillotine. Dancers wore their hair cut short, like the condemned, and tied red ribbons around their necks to mark where the blade fell. Some of the balls were even held in the catacombs.
I look for more information, trying to find out if people used the catacombs to hide themselves during the Revolution, stupidly hoping that there might be something—a paragraph, a line—on a crazy girl who dressed like a boy, set off fireworks, and kept a diary. But there isn’t.
The galleries end. A sign on the wall points the way to the ossuaries and tells me that in the event of a power failure, emergency lights will come on and I should follow the black stripe spray-painted on the roof of the tunnels to the exit.
I walk on, behind an older couple, a group of teenagers, and the Americans, and find myself in a low-ceilinged stone corridor, a former quarry. It’s cold and I have to crouch as I walk. A few more yards, and I’m in the Port Mahon gallery, where a quarryman who was a soldier in Louis XV’s army carved a model of a fortress where he was once kept as a prisoner. Next I pass the quarryman’s footbath—a deep, still well of clear groundwater—and then I’m at the entrance to the tombs.
The panels at either side of the doorway are painted black and white. There’s an inscription above them. Stop! This is the empire of death, it says. And suddenly I want to go back. Back through the gallery, back up the staircase, into the light. But I don’t. I get a grip because I want to know what this place is. I want to know where Alex was.
I walk through the doorway. And then I see them, the bones. Wall after wall of human bones. The sight of them all stops me cold. There are skulls piled on skulls. Femurs on femurs. Some are neatly stacked. Others are worked into decorative patterns—stripes and bands and crosses and flowers. It feels like I’ve stumbled into the basement of a mass murderer with a flair for interior design.
The people around me, the ones who were joking and chattering just seconds ago, are silent now. Some are walking around in a hushed sort of awe. Some can’t take it and want to go back. I hear a sniffle, a sob. I turn around and see that the EverReadies weren’t prepared for everything after all. The mother is upset. Looks like microfleece only wicks away sweat, not death.
I keep going. So do the tunnels. They go on and on. I walk for ten minutes, twenty, thirty, and still there are more bones. There are fountains, too, and headstones, crosses, and obelisks. There are poems and lamentations. There are warnings and iron gates to keep us from going the wrong way. Plaques explain that the bones I’m looking at are from the Cemetery of the Innocents or the Cemetery of St. Nicholas, but they don’t explain how there can be so many of them.
Who were they all?
I keep walking. And I must be going too slowly or taking too long, because everyone else is way ahead of me. I’m by myself and it’s so quiet. I think of Alex as I walk, and what it must’ve been like to be down here alone, with only the light from a lantern. And the thought’s so awful, I walk a little faster. A few minutes later, I come to a split in the tunnel and I’m not sure which way to go. The black line on the ceiling veers off to the left,