M. MIFROID TAKES THE LEAD
"When M. Longuet had recovered from the emotion with which my
explanation of the disappearance of the express had filled him,
he embraced me and handed me a revolver which he had found in the
pocket of Signor Petito. He did not wish to keep it on him. He was
desirous that I should be able, at need, to defend myself against the
eccentricities of which he feared, on grounds based, alas! on a too
real experience, the dangerous return. For the same reason he entrusted
to me a large knife which had also come from the pocket of Signor
Petito.
"We laughed; and then we set ourselves to consider our situation
seriously. M. Longuet went on emptying his pockets; and there came
out of them seven little electric lamps similar to those I had myself
bought before falling into this hole. He congratulated himself, saying
that his instinct had been right in urging him to take plenty of them,
for, adding my six to his seven, we now had thirteen lamps, guaranteed
to give forty-eight hours' light each, which gave us six hundred and
twenty-four hours of consecutive light. He added that since we should
not need light for the ten hours a day, afternoon--he was an advocate
of the; restful siesta--and night, during which we should sleep, we had
light for forty-four days eight hours.
"I said to him: 'You are altogether too old-fashioned, M. Longuet.
Cartouche immured in the Catacombs would have done exactly the same
with electric lamps as you are doing. But I, M. Longuet, I take your
seven lamps and add three of mine to them; and this is what I do with
them!'
"I threw them carelessly down against the foot of the wall.
"'There is no point in dragging about these _impedimenta_,' I said.
'Are you hungry, M. Longuet?'
"'Very, M. Mifroid.'
"'How long do you think you could be hungry?'
"Since he did not seem to understand, I explained that I meant to ask
him how long he thought he could remain so hungry without eating.
"'I am pretty sure,' said he, 'that if I had to stay forty-eight hours
as hungry as this...'
"'Let us suppose that you stayed as hungry as this for seven days,' I
interrupted. 'Three lamps would be quite sufficient for us, for at the
end of those three lamps we should have no need of light!'
"He had understood. But he smiled amiably, groped about, produced from
the floor a good-sized parcel, and said:
"'But you see, M. Mifroid, I need not endure this hunger a moment
longer than I need. I have here a ham which weighs ten pounds, or a
hundred and sixty ounces. I am assured that if a man chews it in the
manner invented by M. Fletcher of the United States, he can live for
an unlimited period on four ounces of ham a day, and retain the full
possession of his faculties and muscular power. We have therefore food
for one man for forty days, food for two for twenty days. And then'--he
paused, and a singular light came into his eyes--'I think, M. Mifroid,
that then--at the end of that twenty days, _one of us will Fletcherise
the other_!'
"'Nothing, M. Longuet, nothing would induce me to preserve my life by
the degrading practice of cannibalism!' I said warmly.
"'It is a sentiment which does you much honour, M. Mifroid,' said M.
Longuet. 'But there is no need, and indeed it would be impossible, that
we should both become cannibals.'
"I was extremely disgusted, naturally, that M. Longuet should have been
guilty of such an egregiously old-fashioned act as to be unable even
to make an unexpected visit to the Catacombs, through a hole in the
street, without bringing a ham with him; but I picked up the other ten
electric lamps. I did not let my natural annoyance find vent in words;
I only said to him, 'How on earth do you come to be walking about Paris
with a ten-pound ham?'
"'I am going to write my memoirs,' said M. Longuet. 'And since quiet
is necessary to the writing of one's memoirs, and I feared that you
gentlemen of the Police would do your best to rob me of that peace,
if I gave you the chance, I was going to shut myself in a little
hiding-place I know of with this ham, these electric lamps, and some
more necessary provisions which I had not yet bought, in order to write
uninterrupted. The paper and pens I have already purchased; and they
are in my hiding-place.'
"The excuse was valid, and there was nothing to be said. I set off down
the passage.
"'Where are you going?' he said.
"'It does not matter where,' said I. 'But it is necessary to go
anywhere rather than stay here, since here there is no hope. We will
consider our course as we walk. Our only safety is in walking; and
in walking for twenty days without taking any bearings we have every
chance of arriving somewhere.'
"'But why without taking our bearings?' he asked.
"'Because,' I replied, 'I have remarked that in all the stories of the
Catacombs it is always those bearings which have been the ruin of the
unfortunate people who have got lost. They mixed up their bearings,
were reduced to utter confusion, and fell into the exhaustion of
despair. In our situation we must avoid every cause for despair. You
are not in despair by any chance, M. Longuet?'
"'Not at all, M. Mifroid; I am only hungry. And I don't mind saying
that if I were less hungry in your delightful society I should have no
regrets whatever for the roofs of Gerando Street.'
"'We will eat presently, M. Longuet,' I said. 'An ounce of ham shall be
our evening meal.'
"M. Longuet smiled hungrily; then he said, 'Perhaps it would blunt the
edge of my appetite a little if you were to tell me something about
these Catacombs.'
"'I think I ought to begin by giving you a general notion of the
Catacombs,' I said. 'Then you would better understand why it is
absolutely necessary to walk for a long time before getting out of
them.'
"The road we followed was a long passage of from fifteen to twenty feet
high. Its walls were very dry; and the electric light showed us a stone
free from any parasitic vegetation, free even from any mouldiness. It
was a sight which caused me some disquiet, for if we were to subsist
for twenty days on a diet of salt ham, without any vegetable food, I
feared that we might fall a prey to scurvy. My mind was at ease about
the matter of drink; for I knew that in the Catacombs there were little
streams of running water; and we had only to walk far enough to come
across them.
"M. Longuet could not reconcile himself to the idea that we were
walking _without caring where we were going_. I thought it wise to
make him understand the necessity of not caring where we were going.
I told him, as was the truth, that during the laying of the sewer
the engineers, having descended into the Catacombs through the hole,
had tried in vain to find their way about them and a way out. They
had had to give it up, and to content themselves with building three
pillars to prop up the roof, along the top of which their sewer ran,
with materials let down through the hole by which we had so hastily
descended, and which had been so definitely and unfortunately bricked
up over our heads.
"Not to discourage him, I informed him that to my certain knowledge we
could reckon on at least _three hundred and ten miles_[6] of Catacombs,
and that there was no reason that there should not be more. It was
evident that if I did not at once make clear to him the difficulty of
getting out, he would have yielded to despair at the end of a couple of
days' journey.
[Footnote 6: These are the official figures.]
"'Bear in mind then,' I said, 'that they hollowed this soil from the
third to the seventeenth century! Yes; for fourteen hundred years man
has raised from under the soil the materials which were necessary for
building on the top of it! So much so that from time to time, since
there is too much on the top, and in places nothing at all beneath, the
things on top have returned beneath whence they came.'
"Since we found ourselves under the ancient Quarter d'Enfer, I
recalled to his memory that in 1777 a house in d'Enfer Street was
in that way engulfed. It was precipitated a hundred and twelve feet
below the pavement of its own courtyard. Some months later, in 1778,
seven persons were killed in a similar landslip, in the district of
Menilmontant. I quoted several examples of a later date, laying stress
on the loss of life.
"He understood me and said, 'In fact, it's often more dangerous to walk
about on the top than underneath.'
"I had gained his attention, and finding him so cheerful and
interested, forgetting all about his hunger, I profited by it to
quicken our steps; and I chanted the most spirited chorus I could
remember. He took it up and we sang together:
'Step out! Step out, boys, with a will!
The road is hard and hot;
There's an inn beyond the hill
And good liquor in a pot!'
"That's the song that makes you step out!
"When we were tired of singing (one soon grows tired of singing in
the Catacombs because the voice does not carry), M. Longuet asked me
a hundred questions. He asked me how many feet of soil there were
between us and the surface; and I told him that according to the last
report it varied between eleven and two hundred and sixty feet.
"'Sometimes,' I said, 'the crust of earth is so thin that it is
necessary to prolong the foundations of public buildings to the bottom
of the Catacombs. Therefore in the course of our peregrinations there
is a chance of our coming across the pillars of Saint-Sulpice, of
Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, of the Panthéon, of the Val-de-Grâce, and of the
Odéon. These buildings are, so to speak, raised on subterranean piles.'
"'Subterranean piles!' he cried joyfully. 'Is there really a chance
that in the course of our peregrinations we shall come across
subterranean piles?'
"Then he returned to his fixed idea:
"'And in the course of our peregrinations is there any chance of our
coming across a way out? Are there many ways out of the Catacombs?' he
said wistfully.
"'Plenty,' said I. 'In the first place, there are exits in the
Quarter--"
"'So much the better!' he interrupted.
"'And others which are unknown, openings by which no one ever enters,
but which none the less exist: in the cellars of the Panthéon, in
those of Henri IV College, the Observatory, Saint-Sulpice Seminary,
the Midi Hospital, some houses in d'Enfer, Vaugirard, Tombe-Issoire
Streets; at Passy, Chaillot, Saint-Maur, Charenton, and Gentilly...
More than sixty...'
"'That's good!'
"'It would have been better,' I replied, 'if Colbert had not on July
11, 1678--'
"'Wonderful!' interrupted M. Longuet. 'You have as fine a memory as M.
Lecamus!'
"'It needn't astonish you, M. Longuet. I was formerly secretary of the
Commissary of the district; and it pleased me to take an interest in
the Catacombs, as it has since pleased me to practise the violin and
sculpture. You have not got beyond the old-fashioned Commissary of
Police, my dear M. Longuet.'
"He did not reply to that; he said, 'You were saying that Colbert on
July 11, 1678--'
"'In order to put a stop to the cupidity of the builders, issued an
order to close the openings into the Catacombs before Paris was quite
undermined. That ordinance of Colbert's has, so to speak, walled us up.'
"At this moment we were passing a pillar. I examined the structure and
said: 'Here is a pillar which was built by the architects of Louis XVI
in 1778, in the course of the consolidation."
"'That poor Louis XVI!' said M. Longuet. 'He would have done much
better to consolidate the monarchy.'
"'That would have been to consolidate a Catacomb,' said I felicitously,
though I believe that the word Catacombs is only used in the plural.
"M. Longuet had taken the lamp from me, and without ceasing he turned
its ray from right to left as though he were seeking something. I asked
him the reason of this action which began to tire my eyes.
"'I'm looking for corpses,' he said.
"'Corpses?'
"'Skeletons. I have always been told that the walls of the Catacombs
are lined with skeletons.'
"'Oh, that macabre tapestry, my friend (I already addressed him as 'my
friend' because I was so pleased with his serenity in such serious
circumstances), that macabre tapestry is barely three quarters of a
mile long. That three quarters of a mile is very properly called the
Ossuary, because skulls, ribs, shin-bones, thigh-bones, collar-bones,
shoulder-bones and breast-bones form its sole decoration. But what
a decoration! It's a decoration composed of three million and fifty
thousand skeletons, which have been taken from the cemeteries of
Saint-Médard, Cluny, Saint-Landry, the Carmelites, the Benedictines,
and the Innocents. All the bones, well sorted, arranged, classified,
and ticketed, form along the walls of the passages, roses,
parallelograms, triangles, rectangles, spirals and many other figures
of a marvellous exactitude. Let us desire, my friend, to reach this
domain of death. It will mean life! For I do not know a spot in Paris
more agreeably frequented. You only meet there engaged couples, couples
in the middle of their honeymoon, lovers, and, in fact, all the happy
people. But we are not there yet. What is three quarters of a mile of
bones out of three hundred and ten miles of Catacombs?'
"'Not much,' he said with a deep sigh. 'How many miles do you think we
have gone, M. Mifroid?'
"I begged him not to waste time in calculations which must be entirely
futile; then, to cheer him up, I told him the story of the janitor
and of the four soldiers. The first was very short: there was once a
janitor of the Catacombs who lost his way in them; they found his body
a week later. The second tells of four soldiers of the Val-de-Grâce
who, by the help of a rope, descended a well two hundred feet deep.
They were in the Catacombs. Since they did not reappear, they let down
drummers who made all the noise they could with their drums. But since
in the Catacombs _sound does not carry_, no one answered the roll-call.
They searched for them. At the end of forty-eight hours they found them
dying in a cul-de-sac.
"'They had no moral force,' said Theophrastus.
"'They were idiots,' said I. 'When one is stupid enough to lose one's
way in the Catacombs, one is unworthy of pity, I will go so far as to
say, of interest.'
"Thereupon he asked me how I should myself escape losing my way in the
Catacombs. Since we reached a place where another passage crossed the
one we were in, I could answer without delay. I said:
"'Here are two passages, which are you going to take?'
"One of them ran directly away from our starting-point; the other
almost certainly returned to it. Since it was our purpose to get away
from our starting-point, M. Longuet pointed to the first.
"'I was sure of it!' I exclaimed. 'Are you quite ignorant of the
experimental method? The experimental method in the depths of the
Catacombs has demonstrated for centuries that every individual who
believes that he is returning to his starting-point (at the entrance
to the Catacombs) is moving away from it. Therefore the logical thing
to do to get away from one's starting-point is necessarily to take the
road which seems to bring you back to it!'
"We turned down the passage by which we appeared to be retracing our
steps. In that way we were sure that we were not journeying in vain.
"My two stories had carried us over another mile; then M. Longuet said:
'I must really have my supper.'
"We had our supper, an ounce of ham each. There was some difficulty
in judging how much an ounce was; but we did the best we could. He
instructed me in the method of eating one's food discovered by M.
Fletcher of the United States. We divided either ounce into four
mouthfuls, not that they were by any means mouthfuls; and we chewed
each patiently till we had extracted from it the last vestige of
flavour. I could well believe him when he assured me that in this way
we obtained from it the whole of the nourishment it contained. For
my part, I should have been delighted to extract the last vestige of
flavour from fifty more such mouthfuls.
"After this meagre, but doubtless exceedingly nourishing supper, we
continued our journey. We went another four miles, when I confessed
that I began to feel tired. I was somewhat surprised to find a
manufacturer of rubber stamps, a sedentary pursuit, like M. Longuet
to be endowed with such untiring vigour. On learning from my watch,
which he still carried, because he said he found it a comfort to carry
somebody else's watch, that it was eleven o'clock, I suggested that we
should go to sleep.
"His fixed idea, that we should find an exit from the Catacombs, led
him to display some reluctance. But I pointed out to him the extreme
improbability of finding an exit in the first twenty miles of three
hundred and ten; and we composed ourselves to rest.