Les catacombes

Hundreds of years ago (ok, really up until fairly recently) Paris was a dirty, smelly, diseased metropolis over-crowded with the starving poor and the nobles who took sadistic pleasure in abusing them. So it's no wonder that fatal maladies (mal-uh-dee: diseases) like the plague were rampant and sex-crazed Parisians without the money to put a toit (twa: roof) over their heads were having orgies in cemeteries.

Anyway, the few health nuts and moral crusaders left in this historical city decided to petition their corrupt members of government to do away with the millions of bodies buried in Paris' cemeteries (bodies that were seeping disease into the water supply, I remind you), thus also hopefully doing away with wide-open fields of publicfornication, sending these vilains (veel-en: naughty) fornicators back into the city streets where they belonged.

And so, in what must have been one of the most morbid and strangest sights in Paris (and keep in mind this city was occupied by Nazi Germany as well as hordes of Black Eyed Peas fans, so that's pretty morbid!), piles of bones were dug up night after night and carried down the city streets following a procession of priests murmuring derniers sacrements (dern-yay sak-ray-mehn: last rites) in the hope that the city would not forever be haunted by the disturbed ghosts of over six million Parisians who had once been laid carefully to rest. These corps (kor: bodies) were then thrown in a quarry in the middle of the Parisian terre (tehr: earth), now heaped in unidentified stacks of artistic skulls, shin, and hipbone displays creating a tapestry of the art of death in the damp, cold recesses of Paris' underworld.

My friends and I decided to take a coup d'oeil (koo doy: peek) at this site for ourselves (open to tourists of course at a charge of 6 euros a head, pun intended). At first the site of all the bones and death and a whole history of Parisians now piled on top of one another left me awed, then feeling a bit queasy. But after weaving through the underground site bombarded by yet another column constructed entirely out of côtes (kot: ribs), my friends and I were left with nothing to do but make jokes about it.

Regardless of your own fears of death or lack thereof, les catacombes are definitely worth a peek if you ever find yourself in Paris. I dare you.