Uber driver Gaëlle Rochon was on her way to pick up a couple at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. She thought this was a charming name for what was once an abandoned limestone quarry used as a garbage dump and a pit for dead horses. In 1867, the putrid site was transformed into a popular Paris park, a romantic landscape painting come to life with a faux Roman temple atop a lushly landscaped, dramatic peak on a mountain in the center of an artificial lake. When Gaëlle looked at that lake, she imagined the dead horses floating just below the surface.
Of course, she’d always been more interested in what lay beneath Paris, and in the city’s past rather than its present. It was her father’s fault. The widower had spent his life as an égoutier, a worker in the sewers, pushing muck along the channels with his ever-present rabot, a pole with an angled paddle at the end. On nights and weekends, he and his beloved precocious daughter explored the secret world of the catacombs. When her father died five years ago, she followed his final wishes and scattered his ashes in the ossuary beneath place Denfert-Rochereau. Now, when she wasn’t driving the streets of Paris, she spent every free moment wandering the two hundred miles of forbidden catacombs beneath them, the sewers, subways, canals, quarries, and crypts that made up the underworld. She was twenty-seven years old, five foot three, blond, and slim. Maintaining her weight was important for crawling through some of the tight tunnels between chambers without getting stuck.
She knew her way around Paris much better from below than she did from above, except when it came to the nineteenth arrondissement, where Parc des Buttes-Chaumont was located. This was her neighborhood, and this Uber pickup was her first of the day. She pulled up to the park’s entry gate at place Armand Carrel in her rented Peugeot 508 sedan and got out to greet her clients.
Gaëlle wore a gray pantsuit and an open-collared white shirt so that she looked more like a personal chauffeur than a taxi driver.
The stylish young couple, obviously Americans, immediately double-checked her identity from her photo and the make of the car that popped up on the Uber app on the man’s iPhone. She opened the back door of the Peugeot for them in the meantime.
“Good afternoon,” she said. “Where can I take you?”
“Au Vieux Campeur, 48 rue des Écoles, s’il vous plait,” the man said.
“Oui, monsieur.” He got extra points from Gaëlle for having a perfect French accent.
She knew Au Vieux Campeur well. It was a sporting goods shop that sold a lot of the equipment that cataphiles like her needed to explore the underground. The store was in the heart of Saint-Germain on the Left Bank, which was great news, because getting there would take the couple past a lot of Paris highlights, like the Pompidou Centre and Notre Dame, and that usually led to a more generous tip. She got behind the wheel and headed west on rue Armand Carrel.
“My name is Nick, and this is Kate,” the man said in English.
“Nice to meet you,” Gaëlle said.
“We’re thrilled to meet you, too, Gaëlle,” Kate said. “We’re looking forward to you showing us around after we do some shopping.”
“Are you interested in a city tour?” Gaëlle asked them.
“Definitely,” Kate said.
“I can show you the sites, but I have to warn you, I’m not a tour guide,” Gaëlle said. “You’ll get better details from your guidebook.”
“Not for the catacombs,” Nick said. “We’d like to see what lies beneath Paris.”
She eyed him suspiciously in her rearview mirror. Who were these two? How did they know she was a cataphile?
“There’s a tour of les catacombes ossuary at place Denfert-Rochereau,” she said. “I can drop you off out front. Tickets are twelve euro. I can pick you up at the exit on rue Rémy Dumoncel when your tour is over.”
“We want to see more than the bones,” Kate said. “We’d like to get a feel for the catacombs as a whole, the entire network of subways, sewers, quarry galleries, and access tunnels under Denfert-Rochereau.”
“What makes you think I know anything about that?” Gaëlle asked.
“Because you were practically raised down there, and the sewer workers are like your family,” Kate said. “That’s why the police and the agents of the Inspection Générale des Carrières turn a blind eye to your trespassing. Anybody else who spent as much time down there as you do would have been put in jail or bankrupted with fines by now.”
It was obvious to Gaëlle now that it was no coincidence they’d ordered an Uber pickup at Buttes-Chaumont Park. They knew she’d be the closest Uber car because they knew that’s where she lived. They were waiting for her. That creeped her out big-time.
“How do you know who I am?” she asked. “Who are you?”
“Two fun-loving, adventurous people who are very curious about the underground,” Nick said. “And who have the resources to find the best person in Paris to be our guide.”
“We’re sorry if you feel we’ve invaded your privacy,” Kate said. “We meant no offense or harm. We’ll make up for it by paying you your day fare plus a thousand euros to take us on a guided tour of the underground.”
The money was definitely enticing, but she couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that came from these two Americans knowing so much about her.
“I don’t have the gear for it, and neither do you,” Gaëlle said.
“That’s why we’re heading to Au Vieux Campeur,” Nick said. “We’ll buy whatever is needed for ourselves and for you. So you’ll also be getting brand-new spelunking gear out of this on top of what we’re paying you.”
The deal was getting better every minute, but even so, it felt wrong, like she was betraying something sacred. The catacombs were her sanctuary.
“If you’re looking for a place to take that unique Paris selfie that nobody else has to show off to your Facebook friends, then forget it,” Gaëlle said. “The real catacombs, not the cleaned-up, well-lit portion that’s open to the public, are not a tourist attraction. It is a very special place that needs to be respected.”
“We’ll treat it like a church,” Nick said.
“It’s also rough and dangerous down there. There are no bathrooms, drinking fountains, or places to get a latte. The air can be dusty and foul. You’ll have to crawl through some tight spaces, wade through raw sewage, and walk through unstable caverns that could collapse at any time. If you’re the slightest bit claustrophobic, you will be entering hell,” Gaëlle said. “It’s a rugged wilderness. It’s not a walk in the park.”
“We can handle ourselves,” Kate said.
Gaëlle glanced back at Kate and Nick and appraised them. They were fit, and there was a steely confidence in Kate’s eyes. Gaëlle believed they could take care of themselves. Even so, she didn’t like it.
“The spiders down there are as big as your hand and have a nasty bite,” Gaëlle said. “The rats aren’t afraid of people and will attack if they feel cornered. There’s rat feces and urine everywhere and, if it gets in an open wound, it can kill you.”
“And yet, you love it underground,” Kate said.
“The catacombs are left over from underground quarrying for limestone that began in the thirteenth century and didn’t end until 1860. For centuries, people have worked or sought refuge in the catacombs. There’s sketches, murals, carvings, and graffiti from the Prussian war, the storming of the Bastille, the German occupation during World War II, the riots of the 1960s, every historical event you can think of and some you never heard about.”
“It’s a natural museum,” Nick said.
“It’s much more than that,” Gaëlle said. “There’s also the bones of six million Parisians down there, nearly three times the living population of Paris. Maybe their ghosts are there too, and that’s what makes the silence so profound. It’s an escape from everything, true peace. There are places so quiet, it feels as if you’ve escaped from your body and merged with the earth and everybody who has ever walked on it. The past is alive down there in ways no museum could ever be.”
“Now you know why we picked you as our guide,” Nick said. “Do we have a deal?”
“If I see you take a single selfie,” Gaëlle said, “I’ll smash your phone with a rock.”