I lived in Paris for a year after I graduated and while I did quite sufficiently well visiting historic sites both touristy and more obscure to prompt the occasional comment that I knew the place better than many permanent Parisiens however I didn’t manage to ho everywhere, as I settled in and made friends I spent less time exploring with only my brieze block sized Guide Bleu for company. My stock excuse for omissions is that it makes a future visit a necessity rather than a luxury but the real reason I never went to the Catacombes was that I couldn’t find the entrance though reading reports of long queues it seems hard to believe that I could have. However since my attempted visit was on one of my last days I cannot believe I went when it was closed either. So until a return visit can be made, i must rely on my friend Oliver’s pithy comment thet you could make a lot of soup with the bones of so many Parisiens.
Nevertheles this visite manqué was one reason I picked up Andrew Miller’s “Pure”. I am afraid I hadn’t heard of it or him before I saw the paperback in the library despite them winning the Costa book award in 2011. Mind you 2011 was an introverted year for me: whelmed in pain both emotional and physical I probably was not at my most receptive.
Pure is set in Paris shortly before the Revolution and there is a suggestion that that will be a necessary purification process as much as the clearing of the literally overflowing cemetary of Les Innocentes that is the focus of the novel. The book begins and end at Versailles with the final image that of the bloated corpse of the elephant kept at court as a curiosity being dragged away a metaphor seemingly for the monarchy itself. In between we, through the eyes of the engineer, Jean Baptiste Baratte, charged with cleansing the cemetery we meet a vivid cast of characters, Armand the organist at the doomed church who embraces the future as a force of good almost as a religion, the sextons’s grand daughter Jeanne, the Monnard family with whom Baratte lodgeas, Heloise the cultured whore, Lecoeur, a former colleague of Baratte and a broken man, and his group of miners drafted in to extract the corpses but the most memorable character is perhaps the cemetery itself. It’s stench pervades all to the extent that Baratte’s family fear him ill when he returns on holiday to rural Normandy.
It is a clever novel – perhaps a little too much so. It is immensley enjoyable but maybe the mechamics are perhaps too evident, the contrasts between purity and violation, integrity and practicality, idealism and necessity. Perhaps the greatest impression is of life going on despite the traumas described and anticipated, rape, suicide and attempted murder Perhaps this quotation regarding the processions to the Porte d’Enfer (Gate of Hell – apt but coincidental name of the site of the catacombs) sums it up:
“Moralists, grimly amused, look on with folded arms, Foreign visitors write leters home, strain for metaphor, to see all France in this winding caravan of bones. Then the city offers a collective shrug. It looks around for other ways to amuse itself. The cafes. Politics. Another riot perhaps.” Nothing has a lasting impact and I am not sure this book will have a lasting impact on me much as I enjoyed it while reading it.
Miss Hathaway 