the Adventure Lifestyle magazine

"T H E Q U A R R T E S T A M E N T S E S 0 P A S T T H A T R U T H L E S S L Y A U S T 0 T H E " R S U N D E R G R 0 U N D B E A U T y. style, a speech maker of arcane poetic flourishes who cataphiles affectionately called "Papa." saratte and Lezard had a celebrated rivalry, for saratte could rarely catch the Lizard, and when he did, Lezard laughed at him. One night, caught, Lezard stood before a beaming saratte, who told him, "Fold up your boules, take your pretty lamp and retreat via the entrance you seem to know so well!" saratte also made sure to show off the new generation of helmet lamp he was using. "Pretty, eh? You don't have one of these, do you, Lezard?" "Ah," said Lezard, pulling out the same model, "You mean this?" saratte said nothing more, and his band of officers snickered behind him. *** Gadget, 35, whose real name is Bertrand Jannes, is a professional lock·pick, not criminally employed but a well·known expert in safe· cracking. "Having the right key to the right door is everything down here," Gadget tells me. Indeed, the cataphiles literally dream of keys, golden keys that open all doors, and they are constantly committing petty thefts to acquire more of them. They'll hit post offices, construction sites, utility substations, Metro stations, churches. "Go to a psychologist, he'll say, 'Ooh la la, you need sex,'" a cataphile named Olrik Ie Gangster once told me. "No. We just need more keys." Lezard, Olrik and Gadget might break into the offices of the Inspector General of the Quarries, the city agency that oversees safety in the catacombs. Or they'll snatch locks off doors, make a mold, and replace the lock without anyone knowing. Once they tricked a subway worker, alone at the 1 AM closing of the Metro, into believing they were police and lending them his passkey. They thanked him, exited the station, and locked him inside. They have keys to some of Paris' greatest monuments- Notre Dame, the Opera, the Pantheon-and passkeys, courtesy of the post office, to almost every apartment building across the city. *** The average Parisian assigns to the cataphile empire every possible terror and perversion, making of the maze a kind of collective urban id. That's no surprise. For hundreds of years, there were monster myths of the catacombs: the Green Man stalked and ate vagrants; the Little Devil of the Quarries collapsed the foundations of buildings. The Little Devil, who had bleeding eyes and wild hair, delighted to topple the surface·dwellers into his realm. Today, there are stories of black·massing witches and rapine skinheads and sex orgies in piled bones; these new myths percolate to the surface, propagated and advanced by modern·day Little Devils like Lezard Peint. The media sucks it up: Dozens of sensationalist catacomb exposes have aired on French television over the years. "Eighty-five percent of cataphiles have sexual problems," one cataphile told a major network interviewer-cut to a "dramatic reenactment" of ten guys fondling a girl's femurs. The punch line, however, gets nixed. "Yes, 85 percent!" the cataphile laughed. "That's 15 percent less than people who don't do the catacombs." The cataphiles don't ponder much on the esoteric meaning of their travels-if indeed there is any. "The old myth of the cave is that it's a woman's vagina," Olrik Ie Gangster told me with a yawn. "Frankly, that's ... [here he gave a vigorous pumping motion over his crotch]. Look, I go down not to get inside my mom's belly. I go for amusement, to discover my city." Or as another cataphile put it: "The quarries are testaments of the past that ruthlessly addict us to their strange underground beauty." So we trek on and on: two dozen winding passages, feet getting soaked, we've walked at least 15 miles, maybe more. Ahead, I am told, is another hole, one that will take us back to the telecom tunnels and out into night and air, and I'm hungry for it. I'm sick of the catacombs, the growing claustrophobia, the humidity. I want out. But when I haul up the rear, Christophe and Gadget are tugging at what looks like a thick iron sheet placed over the hole from the other side. Someone has interred us. "He would do th is," Christophe mutters, nodding fatefully. "He would." "Who?" I ask. Gadget turns to me, no longer laughing. "Who do you think!? The bastard himself. Lezard! The bastard!" • A R E F T H E D D I C T T R A N G E

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