“… I peered anxiously down a staircase, watching spiral stairs twist downward and disappear in a black hole. This dark well was an old mine shaft, the entrance to an abandoned limestone quarry holding the Paris Archives. I held a cold metal railing for balance and started down, moving carefully from one narrow step to the next. The farther I went, the darker it got and I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, dropping into a strange world. At the bottom of the mine shaft, I walked into a huge cave, a vast man-made underground cavern. Its high walls were scarred by the marks of chisels where miners tunneled under the Seine River, risking death to earn their living.

“The river’s unrelenting flow pressed against the roof of the cavern. Tons of water rushed above my head, leaking into the cave with a persistent dripping. This slow trickling mottled the sandy limestone walls in black streaks. Darkened walls vanished on all sides of me, making the cave look endless and that was close to the truth.

“This cave led to an underground city two stories below Paris, a sunken world called the Catacombs, a network of tunnels joining abandoned mines, aqueducts and filthy sewers. For centuries, fugitives hid in this bizarre underworld beneath the ancient core of central Paris. To escape the police, hunted criminals lived inside the Catacombs like Jean Valjean did in Les Miserables, the Victor Hugo novel made into a Broadway stage production. French Resistance fighters inhabited the Catacombs during World War II, hiding important documents in this ancient limestone quarry. Quietly, the history of Paris was taken from government buildings and moved into the cavern to prevent destruction by the Nazis. Decades later, the Paris Archives were still here.

“In front of me, acres of storage racks were spread with thousands of documents spilling over shelves – green cloth ledgers, loose sheaves of paper tied in ribbon and thick leather bound volumes heaped on each other. Adding to the chaos of paper, stacks of cartons leaned against the end of every row. All the cartons were labeled in the same tight, precise handwriting. It was an elegant old-fashioned style I’d seen every time I visited the Archives to do research. When I submitted questions, they were answered in notes written by Diane St. Remy, head of the Paris Archives. Diane’s familiar handwriting was on hundreds of cardboard boxes in front of me, heaps of boxes nearly blocking every aisle. She was the only person who knew this immense jumble of paper by heart and the best person to research who owned the arsoned warehouse.”