Entrances On August , , they discovered a cinema sixty feet beneath Paris. The sun was shining on the Trocadéro, the Eiffel Tower gleamed across the Seine, and deep below ground, police came across a sign. The officers were on a training mission, exploring the . miles of catacombs that twist beneath the th arrondissement. The former quarries are centuries-old, and the sign at the mouth of the tunnel read, “No public entry.” Police are not the public; they entered. Their headlamps flashed against the limestone walls and then suddenly the officers were surrounded. Invisible dogs snarled and barked from all sides. The men’s hearts hammered. They froze in their tracks. They cooed Arènes de Chaillot, are not quite any of these canine comforts into the dark. things. “We are the counterpoint to an era where In time, the officers’ lights found the system. everything is slow and complicated,” they explain. They found the stereo, with guard-dog yowls This group also balances the aspect of today that is burned onto a . They found three thousand instant and shameless, hysterically tweeting. They square feet of subterranean galleries, strung with are patient, serious, and they keep their secrets. lights, wired for phones, live with pirated electric- After the cinema episode, it would be two years ity. The officers uncovered a bar, lounge, workshop, until the city would see their work again. dining corner, and small screening area. The cin- ema’s seats had been carved into the stone itself, Porte-parole with room for twenty people to sit in the cool and I am late. Paris’s decaying public-transit system al- chomp on popcorn. most strands me at Gare du Nord and I arrive at Le On the floor of one cavern, officers discovered Pantalon out of breath, panicked, terrified that an ominous metal container. The object was fat, fes- Lazar Kunstmann has left. I slip past students in this tooned with wires. The police called in the bomb noisy bar, searching for the face I have seen in a squad, they evacuated the surface, they asked them- handful of photographs. I crossed the ocean to selves, What have we found? meet him and I may not get another chance. They had found a couscous maker. Lazar Kunstmann is stocky, in his late thirties. A few days after the couscoussière incident, offi- He has a shaved head. He is friendly. Too friendly, cers returned to the scene. This time they brought almost—the eagerness in his eyes seems utterly un- agents from Électricité de France. But they were clandestine. This is not the mystery man I envi- too late. Already someone had undone the gal- sioned: Kunstmann is warm, cheerful, and talkative. leries’ wiring, disappeared with the equipment, He first appeared in , the mouthpiece for a vanished with the booze. What had so recently group called La Mexicaine de Perforation (). been a private cinema, a secret hideout, was now Though it literally translates as “the Mexican of the just an empty quarry. The cinema’s makers had left Drilling,” its moniker is best understood as some- a note. “Ne cherchez pas,” they wrote. Don’t search. thing like “The Mexican Consolidated Drilling Au- Don’t search? For what? For whom? While the thority.” The organization was named for a bar in Agence France Presse reported a possible “extreme the th arrondissement’s Place de Mexico. , right-wing” connection, the speculated on a Kunstmann revealed, was responsible for the cin- full-fledged “underground movement.” All of Paris ema under the Trocadéro. dreamed of its subterranean screening society. “Two-thousand four was the first big discovery,” However, the people responsible for the cinema Kunstmann admits. “We were really caught in fla- under the Trocadéro, a place they dubbed the grante delicto.” I was living in Scotland at the time. The French cess into the tunnels. Although Parisians have been and British press were enraptured with the under- sneaking into the catacombs (known as carrières) for ground cinema and so was I. The appeal wasn’t just centuries, Kunstmann and his friends had no taste in the breadth of the cinema-builders’ imagina- for the usual “cataphile” hijinks. Too young to drink, tion but in their meticulous follow-through. “We not interested in drugs, they instead began to ex- covered our tracks,” Kunstmann reassured The plore, map, and expand the underground network. Guardian. “Short of digging up every cable in the Eventually, Kunstmann tells me, they entered a district there’s no way of knowing where we took “post-post-exploration phase.” After “you go, you [the electricity] from.” survey—then it’s time to do something.” Giddy and well spoken, Kunstmann was at the Five years after the discovery of the cinema, centre of every article. He had spent decades going Kunstmann has written a book exposing the full where he wasn’t supposed to: climbing onto roofs at scale of this “something.” In La culture en clandestins: age seven, sneaking through the subway at twelve, L’UX, published by the French imprint Hazan, Kun- delving into the Paris catacombs at fourteen. He and stmann reveals as just one wing of a larger his co-conspirators met at school in the s, when clandestine organization called . (pro- many Latin Quarter colleges still had basement ac- nounced “oo-eex,” like the French letters) has more than one hundred members, split into more public who stumbled across scattered fliers. “The than ten teams. While is dedicated to events, are simply interested in holding events in a other branches are devoted to maps, restoration, or free way,” Kunstmann explains. “Clandestinity is re- key-making. “[We] are determined to make these ally a detail.” abandoned places a theater for new experiences,” It’s the detail that allows them to continue what Kunstmann explains in his book. This means more they are doing. slip past the functionaries, under than it seems. In French, the word expériences con- the cordons, across miles of red tape. Their high- notes both “experiences” and “experiments.” it- concept installations use secrecy as a cover, but it’s self, an acronym for Urban eXperiences, borrows not their raison d’être. “We don’t seek out the for- the double meaning. bidden,” Kunstmann murmurs over radio-pop. The Arènes de Chaillot was built over a period “We just repudiate any notion of authorization.” of eighteen months. Starting in and continu- At the same time, ’s anonymity is a major ing every summer until the cinema’s discovery, the source of their allure. We are drawn by their gall, tunnels hosted Urbex Movies. It was a festival com- their pluck, but also the burnished gleam of a mys- bining careful programming and an unusual locale tery.The Arènes de Chaillot would not be the same to present discrete visions of urban life. Shorts and treasure if they were sanctioned, public-funded. features were grouped by unstated “intention,” to Kunstmann is surely aware of this, yet he balks at allow for each twenty- to thirty-person audience being part of “something ‘plugged in,’ elitist, .” “to discover, or merely to feel.” A similar philoso- do not wish to be a “secret society,” he insists. phy dominated ’s other major film festival, the “When I say secret society, you imagine, I don’t Sessión Cómoda. Whereas Urbex Movies screened know, like, in Eyes Wide Shut. But it’s more basic films like Eraserhead and Dziga Vertov’s Man With A than that. It’s the patronage system. It’s taking advan- Camera, the Sessión Cómoda had a narrower focus tage of a hidden alliance.” on the underground—showing The Third Man and The group’s operational need for clandestinity Jacques Becker’s Le Trou. These screenings took is offset by this distaste for old boys’ clubs. And so place nearby, but above ground, in the famous leave avenues for strangers to stumble across Cinémathèque of the Palais de Chaillot. Which their works, they have published a book revealing isn’t to say that the Sessión Cómoda was part of certain details, and years ago they resolved to never the Cinémathèque’s official program. No— hide what was in plain sight. This is why re- snuck in, week after week, year after year, entering vealed themselves in . Once the Arènes de (they claim) from a passage beneath the projection- Chaillot was discovered, with speculation mount- ist’s chair. ing—“In that instant,” Kunstmann says, “we had to For both festivals, audiences were drawn from clearly explain.” among ’s friends, associates, and members of the They didn’t divulge everything. D’Enfers Fetid gases would waft into the cellars of Châtelet, Parisians call it a gruyère. For hundreds of years, the marinating wheels of brie and braids of saucisson. catacombs under the city have been a conduit, Beginning in and for about a century, the gov- sanctuary, and birthplace for its secrets. The Phan- ernment enacted its grisly solution: it transported tom of the Opera and Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean six million skeletons to the southern quarries. Five both haunted these tunnels, striking students de- per cent of the catacombs remain ossuaries today, scended in , as did patriots during the Second and Racine, Robespierre, and Marat are among the World War. The Nazis visited too, building a dry, dusty residents. bunker in the maze below the th arrondissement. Entrances to the tunnels can be found in the Honeycombed across , acres of the city, the basements of hospitals, the cellars of bars, church vast majority of the tunnels are not strictly speaking crypts, subway tunnels, even at the bottom of “catacombs.”They house no bones. Limestone(and, Paris’s tallest skyscraper. Many of these access to the north of the city, gypsum) quarries, these are points have been sealed by the , who both pro- the mines that built Paris. The oldest date back two tect the city from the catacombs, and the cata- thousand years to Roman settlers, but most were combs from the city. Circulating in the carrières was excavated in the construction boom of the late made illegal in . Middle Ages, providing the stone that became That didn’t stop the catacomb craze. By the time Notre Dame Cathedral and the Louvre. Riddling Kunstmann and his friends were in college, almost the Left Bank, these tunnels were at first beyond the every Latin Quarter party would end below ground. city’s southern limits. But as Paris’s population grew, The fought back, deploying a series of barrier so did the city—and soon whole neighbourhoods walls that criss-crossed the passages, blocking the were built on this infirm ground. flow of visitors. The plan was good, but it only The first major cave-in happened in , when had so much effect: trespassers soon found ways an entire street collapsed not far from where the around—and through—the concrete blockades. Catacombs Museum stands today. After a similar in- By definition, Paris’s hundreds of catacomb cident three years later, King Louis XVI created the ramblers, its “cataphiles,” decline to follow the rules. office of the Inspection Générale de Carrières (, They are an odd gang of misfits—“urban explor- or General Inspection of the Quarries), designated ers,” vandals, kids who just want to hang out below with preventing further collapses. Officials went un- ground. They chatter on online message boards, derground: inspecting, charting, filling chambers share and hoard maps; they meander, explore, drink, with concrete, digging a new labyrinth of mainte- and drill through walls. By night they drop through nance tunnels. manholes, and emerge from them, dusty, at dawn. Then came the dead. In the late eighteenth cen- Members of spend time underground, but tury, Paris’s overcrowded central cemeteries leaked. Kunstmann insists they are not cataphiles. It isn’t just a matter of style. “The principle of is to pro- box and hit enter. There were no results. So I set voke experiences using every available part of the my nets wider. I posted a message saying I was city,” he says at Le Pantalon. “Not as visitors but as looking for contacts in the Paris “underground,” users. Users for something other than the simple figuratively and literally. I did the same on Twitter. aesthetic of the places. And for something other I emailed friends in Paris, types who organize con- than partying.” certs in subway cars, asking similar questions. No Their ideas are not new. It is Guy Debord’s dé- one knew anything of Kunstmann, or of . tournement turned loose on geography, Situation- Next I scoured cataphile message boards, at least ism without the politics, a no-nonsense take on those that are public. Although these forums had Britain’s art pranksters, the . Yet these allusions discussed the group’s works and media coverage, betray ’s modest code—to do interesting things I found no traces of ’s authors. As Kunstmann without permission. This credo allows for superfi- later scoffed, these boards are full of typical internet cial punkery, sneaking into backyards, but consid- posturing—resentful quips and knee-jerk lols. ered seriously, it becomes a formula for being I finally found Kunstmann through private cor- brave, for pursuing dreams. Which is a sappy way of respondence with another journalist. He gave me saying, It grabbed me. an email address; that address told me to telephone a The first place I looked for was on Face- secret number. I asked for “Lazar,” Kunstmann an- book. I typed “Lazar Kunstmann” into the search swered, and we met at Le Pantalon. “Ordinary” cataphile contacts are less difficult aside, the cataphile community is civil. “In general to make. My online searchlights were glimpsed by we look out for each other,” agrees. They share a friend of friends, pseudonym Cavannus, who knowledge, lighters, cans of beer (never bottles, does “urban exploration” in Montréal. Cavannus which are still heavy when empty). “People know put me in touch with one of his cataphile pals in that if they get too drunk or if they get hurt, it’ll be Paris—a man with a fake Facebook account hard to get out.” named for a celebrated guru. He tells me to meet and Crato’s first descents were similar— him at Saint-Pierre de Montrouge church, to look they saw a hole, or heard about a hole, and they en- for a guy “on crutches.” Two days after meeting tered. Telling me, begins to cough. “Sorry,” he Kunstmann, as I ride the subway and climb up to wheezes, “I still have dust in my throat.” On that Alésia Square, there seem to be broken-legged peo- first journey, he and his friends ran into some un- ple everywhere. I imagine this as cataphile ground likely mentors—off-duty police officers who of- zero, a place where everyone has limestone dust in fered to give them a tour—“and then I spent the their hair. whole night underground.” The cataphile who meets me looks about thirty, his dark hair pulled into a ponytail. He gestures at his crutches and says he slipped coming out of a man- hole on the rain-soaked street. He is called . “Underground, everyone has a nickname,” explains to me. He didn’t choose his own, an acronym that refers to a famous department store. Someone else picked it about a dozen years ago, and it stuck. Other names are more esoteric, like Sork, or Crato, the man who eventually takes me into the tunnels. Some conjure deliberate images. One of the catacombs’ most notorious mischief-makers is Lézard Peint, the Painted Lizard, a “devil” with al- leged fascist connections, who has been known to steal fellow cataphiles’ lights or to seal up their in- tended exits. “What you are on the surface, you are under- ground,” Crato later says, sucking on a cigarette. “When you are a violent person, given to fighting— you’re the same below.” Scoundrels like Lézard ’s story is beguilingly simple. I could go, I re- bling down the slope to the tracks. This is the Petite alize. I could find an entrance on the internet, slip Ceinture, one of the city’s abandoned railways. It is inside, wander until I find an off-duty police officer almost silent. We walk. or a shy, kindly filmmaker. “It’s a very supernatural Crato has been visiting the catacombs for ten setting,” murmurs. “You’re completely au- years. He tells me how the original quarries were tonomous. There’s no light. There’s no electricity. built just wide enough for a man with a wheelbar- Just stones and water.” row—six feet by three feet. How they are a perma- But I am here to understand and this is not nent º Fahrenheit, day and night, winter and the way that works. That group does not rely on summer. “I remember once it was hot in Paris, re- word of mouth, happenstance, the kindness of ally hot, really horrible. Instead of dining in an strangers. sets goals and quietly executes them. overheated apartment, we went down into the cata- never gets lost. combs to eat.” I find Crato online, just as I found . After a time, Crato and I come to a large train Whereas , becrutched, does not volunteer to tunnel. The sunlight falls away behind us. It is easy play tour-guide, Crato—lanky, vaguely grumpy— to trip on the wooden ties of the tracks or on the makes the offer. “There are a lot of reasons to go irregular stones to either side. We turn on our flash- down,” he allows. “There are those who want to lights yet I can see neither end of the tunnel. I as- find a calm and pleasant spot. There are those who sume the problem is fog, but Crato speaks of fumis, go down to meet a partner. There are those who go cataphile smoke-bombs, made by mixing saltpetre to party. There are even those who go to watch with sugar and flour. They are hiding something movies. Everyone has their own reasons.” down here. We rendezvous on a bridge over train tracks. It’s Ten minutes into the gloom, Crato swings his the middle of the afternoon, cars whizzing by, flashlight to the right. The darkness slips into focus. clouds meandering across a dirty blue sky. We’re not Before me, where the tunnel wall meets the earth, far from Denfert-Rochereau, site of the official Cat- is a hole. acombs Museum. That plain stone building offers In , this is the “grand entrance” to the cata- historical displays, dioramas, entry onto a sanitized combs. A craggy break in the rock, no more than one-mile circuit of “legal” catacombs. This is not, two feet wide. Cataphile refuse is strewn nearby— cataphiles emphasize, the “real thing.” Besides—you empty beer cans, juice cartons, white paste from have to pay admission. carbide lanterns. This is just the second “grand en- We look both ways and, one at a time, jump the trance” that Crato has known. One day the will bridge wall. It is thick, high as my shoulders. My close it up, he says, fill it with concrete like the last jump is less deft than Crato’s. I struggle for a mo- one. But Crato hopes his fellow cataphiles do not ment and then I’m over, feet in the weeds, scram- dig a replacement straight away. Better to give the losers, the troublemakers, time to get bored and and his now-wife would spend all of Saturday find something else to do. The committed ones al- night in the tunnels, wandering until four in the ready know different ways to get in. The commit- morning. They would emerge, dust themselves off, ted ones are patient. Even Crato seems to think go to sleep—and on Sunday they would walk the that secrets are best. same route, retrace the same steps, above ground, hand in hand. Deeper While this is a beautiful image, it is the oppo- For Kunstmann and his associates, there is little site of what hope to accomplish. “It’s a typi- appeal to wandering around underground. Their cally Parisian phenomenon,” Kunstmann sighs. cinema aside, the catacombs are a means, not an “Nostalgia for a period we didn’t know. Areas end: a way to access work sites or to hide their ‘flashed’ in time. The work of is to de-flash, to tracks. But as a first-time visitor plunging into thaw, to transform.” these grey chambers, the experience is thrilling. It As Crato and I weave beneath the th arron- is a labyrinth of branching channels and sudden dissement, the subway murmurs in a passage over openings, cool and quiet. Most of the catacombs our heads. You could walk these caves in jeans and are dry, tall enough to stand in—but from time to sneakers, I think. I have read how the Painted time we duck or crawl, or swish into ankle-high Lizard has ordered people to do the circuit naked water. Still, they are not the dank, sweaty caves for his own wicked entertainment. I am in knee- I imagined. Even wading into a passage called high boots and a cardigan. Crato wears the basic Banga, whose thigh-high water swirls like miso cataphile uniform: hip waders, waterproof back- soup, the tunnel’s soft silence recalls a theatre, a pack, strong flashlight, gloves, a cap to keep off the wine cellar, an attic. dust. The athletics stores of Paris, he says with a In Kunstmann’s book, cataphiles like Crato are grin, sell a disproportionate number of fishermen’s called “bodzaux,” for their wet and dirty boots, or boots and impermeable packs. “Ravioli,” for their tendency to dine on boxed Although the catacombs are covered in graffiti dumplings. (“I prefer wine and sausage,” my guide tags, there are also sudden instances of art—amateur retorts.) Ravioli seek to “consecrate” the under- gargoyles, carved castles, life-sized sculptures of cat- ground, Kunstmann argues, guarding it from pre- aphiles. Crato brings me to La Plage, a large gallery cisely the kind of transformation that enjoy. with a sand-packed floor. Our flashlights sweep “[They] are protecting an image [of the catacombs] across wide murals: Hokusai waves and Max Ernst- and they want to keep this image intact for the feel- like portraits. In the Hall of Anubis we sit at a table ings it evokes in them.” chiselled out of stone. We light candles, drink beer, Crato speaks of these feelings without actually share cookies and chocolate. I am absolutely en- speaking of them. He talks about how years ago, he chanted. I have no idea of the time. For the most part, cataphiles don’t dispute Kun- “When you’re caught, you have the chance to stmann’s characterization of them. says his recognize or not recognize an infraction,” he ex- friends enjoy “taking photos, exploring a particular plains to me. “If you choose the latter, you’re sup- area, repairing things, going to spots where no one posed to get an appointment with a judge.” Crato has visited for a long time.” The community’s holy has been awaiting his court date for years—and grail, he suggests, is to clandestinely enter the Cata- counting down the days until the automatic combs Museum. I balk at this—the same place you amnesty triggered by each presidential election. can visit for just €, six days a week? “Yes,” he agrees, “but that’s the goal of tons of cataphiles. And they succeed almost every year—every year there’s a hole that’s drilled.” When cataphiles do stage large events, they tend to be one-off parties—not permanent “trans- formational” cinema installations. Crato remem- bers someone bringing down oysters—stupid, silly, “just as heavy on the way back as on the way down.” has organized two Breton-themed shindigs, where more than three hundred people joined dancers, musicians, and amateur chefs cook- ing subterranean crêpes. Among the largest celebra- tions was a farewell to Commandant Jean-Claude Saratte in . Head of the catacomb police for twenty-one years, Saratte was respected for his knowledge, instincts, and moderation—pursuing the drug user, vandal, or “tibia collector” instead of the gentle catacomb geek. Today, officers of (la Brigade d’Interven- tion de la Compagnie Sportive) patrol the cata- We emerge from the maze three hours later, comb thoroughfares handing out € tickets. The flashlights still shining, and again we are wreathed catacops are regarded with resentment and disdain. in smoke. It is dark as night. The opening of the But they force cataphiles to be vigilant: listening, railway tunnel is a circle of gold-white light in the looking out for standard-issue lights, sniffing for af- far distance. Treading toward the open air, out and tershave. It is illegal to drink on public streets, past the wild bright green of the weeds, it’s as if Crato proposes, but not beneath them. we’re passing through stained glass. On our way back along the tracks we meet a “They infiltrated the Panthéon.”This group had all quartet of cataphiles in black hoodies and running the keys; he doesn’t know how. The clock had been shoes, acquaintances of Crato’s. We talk. The con- broken. They fixed it. They have also held plays versation is a mixture of bravado, feigned indiffer- here, and projected films. He explains everything ence, outbursts of earnest feeling. They talk of girls, with a weird, wry solemnity, as if he both hates and parties, police, numbskulls with smoke bombs. relishes being asked. “Untergunther,” he says finally, These men seem so gentle. ’s rejection of this though he doesn’t know how to spell it. “Look it community seems unkind. No, Ravioli are not en- up on the internet.” gaged in the same activities; no, their ambitions are What the internet will tell you is that the Un- not to the same scale. But if want to be some- tergunther are a branch of . Whereas the Mexi- thing other than a secret club, at least they could be can Consolidated Drilling Authority are dedicated friendly with their neighbours. to events, the Untergunther are the organization’s Kunstmann sees it differently. are absolutely restorers. In September they came here, to unrelated to these cataphiles, separate “from the one of Paris’s most important monuments—and start.” “We were learning from one experience to they went to work. another,” he says. “We had an intention for these The Panthéon was commissioned by Louis XV places.” Besides, his group is not based in the cata- in , as a tribute to Saint Geneviève. By the time combs. As Paris was to learn, they hide in the above it was finished in , the French Revolution had ground as well. guillotined the church idea. Instead, the domed neo- classical cathedral became a mausoleum for great Flying Saucer French citizens. Voltaire, Rousseau, Émile Zola, and On December , , after fifty years of silence, Victor Hugo are buried in its crypt; so are Marie the clock of the Paris Panthéon began to ring. Curie, Louis Pasteur, and Louis Braille. In the centre Two and a half years later, I arrive at the build- of the Panthéon’s floor, where architect Soufflot had ing for a tour. My group’s guide is a man in his imagined a statue of Ste. Geneviève, Foucault’s pen- fifties, bird-haired, who talks in clipped and con- dulum swings. Tourists like me come and gape at the centrated French. He doesn’t mention the Pan- way this simple experiment, commissioned by théon’s clock. Nor are there any references in the Napoleon, offers evidence of the rotation of the written program. After the tour ends, as the other planet. It is such an unassuming marvel. tourists disperse, I ask him a question: “Didn’t Another modest wonder lies at the end of the something happen with this clock?” We are stand- main hall, on the left, above a doorway. The Pan- ing directly beneath the three-foot minute hand. théon’s clock is not an elaborate timepiece, like the The guide looks startled. “There are these people. . ”. Prague Orloj. The face is about as tall as a person, he begins to say. He does not make eye contact. mounted on frosted glass. The clock hands and roman numerals look like they are made of cast Viot is a clockmaker, formerly head of restoration iron. Built by the house of Wagner in , it is for the Swiss house Breguet. He is also a member of plain, even austere. But for one year, this was the . Viot observed the rust caked on the Wagner’s Untergunther’s project. machinery and ruled that it was a “now or never” “[The Untergunther] have compiled a huge list moment. If the Panthéon’s clock were ever to tick of slowly degrading places,” Kunstmann told a Na- again, it would need the Untergunther’s help. tional Geographic reporter in . “The list is too On September , , the group formally big to ever be completed in our lives so each year adopted the project. Soon after, an eight-person we choose [just] one.”The Untergunther have only “core”—including Viot and Untergunther leader three conditions for accepting a restoration project. Lanso—went to work. Using a copied key, they infil- First, to have the technical ability. Second, to have trated the building after dusk, dodged security the means. And third, to have the desire. By , agents, and made their way up. High above the clock they claim to have completed about twelve pro- that had lured them there, the Untergunther arrived jects, including the Panthéon, a hundred-year-old at a cavity along the base of the building’s dome. government bunker, a twelfth-century crypt, and a This dusty, neglected space became their home. First World War air-raid shelter. They called it the Unter und Gunther Winter “[We] are only interested in a very precise part of Kneipe, (the Untergunther’s Winter Tavern), taking [French] cultural inheritance,” Kunstmann writes in their inspiration from a door marked . A sim- his book. “The part that is non-visible.” These are ilar whimsy had inspired the Untergunther’s nam- not just places that are inaccessible or hidden to the ing, back when they were just known as “the public, like the mechanisms of a clock, but also sites restoration wing.” Unter and Gunther, Kunstmann that are invisible to their administrators. Since the says, were the names of the imaginary guard-dogs city administration scarcely has enough money to in the Arènes de Chaillot’s security system. maintain what is in plain view, suggests, it is For the next twelve months, the Panthéon was doomed to ignore what is not. the Untergunther’s playground. They learned every This is a beautiful idea, but only compelling if nook and cranny, copied every key, learned the acted upon. The Untergunther could be fakers, habits of every guard. It was made easier by rela- blowhards taking credit for conveniently hidden tively lax security. When I visited in , there restorations. Yet as with the and their rock- were still no real security badges, and both of my hewn cinema, the endeavour at the Panthéon dis- tour guides failed to count the group with their misses doubt. clickers. According to Kunstmann’s stories, had The Panthéon’s nineteenth-century clock had already used the Panthéon to stage plays and other been broken since the s, left to decay, but it events; the Untergunther’s residency was just a dif- caught the eye of a man called Jean-Baptiste Viot. ference of scale, of persistence. First they had to figure out what was wrong Stopping Time with the clock. The became a makeshift li- doesn’t have a blog. Members share a single brary, stocked with books on vintage timepieces email account. Lazar Kunstmann is not on Face- and easy chairs that transformed into inconspicu- book, and the group’s other members do not speak ous wooden crates. Gradually the team concluded to the press. In this era of full disclosure, of never- that one of the clock’s integral components, the es- ending networking, forwarding, and sharing, it is capement wheel, had been sabotaged—likely by an an organization that refuses friend requests. Mem- employee decades ago. The mechanism had eventu- bers have only as many contacts as they require and ally been replaced with an electric mechanism, but they will not invite you to events. this, too, had been sabotaged. Finally, they learned The group’s secrecy makes it hard to check that fully restoring the Wagner clock would not their facts. Almost everything one can check out just mean fiddling around behind its face—the an- does check out. For the rest, you have to believe or tique mechanism had machinery located in several disbelieve their claims. Kunstmann says the group different parts of the building. has between one hundred and one hundred and The “flying-saucer-shaped” atelier of the Un- fifty members ranging from age eleven to fifty-six. tergunther became a not-quite-state-of-the-art They are mostly professionals in their late thirties clockmaker’s workshop. The Untergunther carried and early forties. ’s groups formed “by accident” up thousands of euros in tools, materials, and in the early s, gradually formalizing and adopt- chemicals. They installed thick red curtains along ing names. They are the product of “aggregation,” its chilly outer wall, because, Viot said, “a clock- the regrouping of kindred spirits within “the same, maker can’t do anything with mittens on.” They very reduced, geographic area.” posed for photos among the Panthéon’s statues; Of the dozen teams that Kunstmann says exist, they watched fireworks from the roof; they made a only three have been revealed—, the Unter- new escapement wheel and cleaned the clock ma- gunther, and a group called the Mouse House, re- chinery piece by piece. cent inductees, allegedly an all-female “infiltration Usually, Kunstmann writes, sites restored by unit.” All members benefit “from access to a [Paris- the Untergunther remain “just as inaccessible and wide, universal, integrated] map, all the possible unknown as they were before their repair.” The keys, all the possible knowledge.” By sharing re- Untergunther do not need to trumpet their ac- sources, pooling expertise, everyone is able to complishments: they seek only the immediate sat- “work less for the same results, or to work the same isfaction of renewing part of their city. Often, the amount for a better result.” sites’ invisibility even shields them from further Viewed a certain way, offers the same thing damage. Alas for the Panthéon’s clock, this obscu- as Wikipedia or Google Earth—information for rity was not to be. the community to do with as they please. But whereas Wikipedia relies on the wisdom of the I glimpse the tiniest sarcastic roll of the eyes. masses to perfect its frustratingly imperfect data, “Pfft. I don’t know.” while flash-mobs rally as many participants as possi- At the end of September , the Untergun- ble, remains private. They reject openness, spurn ther claim they met with Bernard Jeannot, adminis- crowds. The group’s discretion allows them to slip trator of the Panthéon, and his assistant Pascal below the authorities’ radar, to operate with im- Monnet. (In the book, Monnet’s name loses an n.) punity, but there is more to it than that: by closing Jeannot was thrilled, delighted with the Untergun- the network, they accomplish better works. There ther’s ingenuity, marvelling at their secret workshop is no need to screen a film before thousands, to and horological handiwork. Monnet was less en- trumpet mysteries from the rooftops, to bring thused. Still, everything seemed set for the clock to dancers and musicians and chefs making crêpes. be mounted, for it to resume functioning—except quietly create wonders, carefully rescue treasures. that it didn’t. Weeks passed. The administration, Members are expected to be capable, informed, au- allege, did not want to reveal their failure to main- tonomous. “Everything is dedicated to avoiding tain the clock, or the way it had been restored. wasted time,” Kunstmann says. The doing, not the With real sorrow in his voice, Kunstmann con- discussion, is what matters. fesses they “misjudged the internal tensions that Because of this pragmatism, the Untergunther ruled at the [the organization responsible for always knew they would have to reveal their ven- Paris’s monuments] and the administration of the ture to the Panthéon staff. “If you want a monu- Panthéon. How different interests would exploit mental clock to work, someone has to mount and this affair to pursue their own agendas.” Shortly maintain it,” Kunstmann explains. Two, ten, or after the was revealed, Bernard Jeannot fifty years after the gears are set in motion, they left—or was forced out of—his job. Monnet as- must still be regularly tended. “The logic always cended to the top seat. “That was the defeat,” Kun- being to minimize the amount of work for a stmann says. “That was the fuck-up. That we given project; it’s a conversation we had with the underestimated these factors.” whole group. At a certain point, the administrator It was an oddly naïve mistake. Most citizens of would need to be clued in.” Paris—indeed, most citizens of the world—know to Standing with my tour guide under the clock’s never underestimate the hopelessness of their bu- black hands, I ask him whether the mechanism reaucrats. Blinded by their own panache, assumed still works. their work would be embraced by the people they “No.” shamed. Instead, two months later, the clock still had “Why not?” not been mounted. “Management took a piece away.” The Untergunther are usually content for their “Why?” restorations to remain hidden, but they were curi- ous about their Panthéon handiwork. did not came, reportedly from the Maison Lepaute, refused know whether their repair job had even been suc- to sabotage the mechanism. Instead, he removed cessful. They decided to test it on a day when the the escapement wheel—the same piece damaged Panthéon was closed. The options were few— those decades before, rebuilt by Viot. At :, the Christmas Eve, New Year’s Day, May . Wagner mechanism stopped. On December , the Untergunther once Kunstmann is still livid. “The notion of conser- again slipped past security and into the building. vation, the value of the objects in Monnet’s care, They mounted the clock. It began to chime. The don’t concern him. He thinks only of his career, to mechanism was found to lose less than one minute have a good retirement.” per day—Viot deemed it “acceptable.” I write to Monnet, asking for his version of But when Monnet returned from his holiday, events. The Panthéon administrator responds in an he marched up the Panthéon’s steps and gazed furi- unmistakeable tone: “I absolutely refuse to discuss ously at the tick-tick-ticking timepiece. He called a this file. It is part of an active case and the law pro- clockmaker to unmake the clock. The man who hibits me from commenting.” After the story of the clock repair broke, jour- wheel, stealing it from Monnet’s office. claim nalists swarmed—and Kunstmann once again came to have used the Panthéon for another full year, stag- forward, revealing all. “Underground ‘terrorists’ ing photo exhibits and a festival of police films. And with a mission to save city’s neglected heritage,” the clock? “[It] is simply waiting for its chance to shrieked the Times of London’s headline. Monnet run again,” Kunstmann toldThe Architects’ Journal. agreed with this characterization, pursuing the Un- The way that Untergunther tell it, this acquittal tergunther in court. But there was one problem: was inevitable. ’s members are so clever, after all. they didn’t seem to have committed a crime. Noth- They are so sophisticated. They are a world away ing was damaged during the Untergunther’s stay at from hoi polloi like Crato, caught in the catacombs the Panthéon, and at the time there was no such and awaiting presidential amnesty. are not Ravi- thing as “trespassing” on public property. (This has oli. And you would certainly never see Kunstmann since been rectified, with a bill passed in December in the same room as the Painted Lizard. .) Authorities had to wait almost an entire year before finding a reason to bring in. La-zar Kunst-mann On August , , Panthéon security claimed The Painted Lizard, wrote American journalist to find four members trying to force the building’s Christopher Ketcham, is “one of the nastiest locks. The case was heard on November , , pranksters in the underworld.” Cavannus, a former before the th Chambre du Tribunal de Grande Parisian now living in Montréal, says something sim- Instance. The sought a total of €,. for ilar: “Dangerous. To avoid.” Another catacomb rat damage to public property. The accused: Sophie goes further. “The guy’s a megalomaniacal jerk and Langlade (surely Lanso, the Untergunther’s leader), deserves no publicity of any kind,” G——wrote in thirty-five, unemployed; Dorothée Hachette, an email, asking that I not use his name. “He is a thirty-nine, nurse; Christophe Melli, thirty-eight, lesser human being.” artistic director; Eric Valleye, thirty-eight, film- Ketcham recalls seeing a photograph of the maker. Four members of Untergunther, revealed Lézard (and a black friend) in Nazi uniforms, before the court. “singing old German war songs at full throttle, “A real experiment never presumes its results,” stomping through the tunnels, sieg heiling, the Kunstmann says. “If someone had asked us, ‘What songs echoing down the halls for a half-mile.” He’s are the chances that one day you will appear in court a fascist, G—— tells me. “In the s him and an- to talk about the repair of the clock?’ We would other guy going by the name of Ktu used to beat have said, ‘Zero per cent? One per cent?’ The im- people up. They had the network shared, one ‘gang’ probable is still within the realm of the possible.” held the south, the other the north. . . . Idiots are in The charges were ultimately dismissed. Kunst- awe of him because he can break into anywhere mann says took back the removed escapement [but] an asshole is always an asshole.” I obtain the Untergunther’s court records less awful lot like Lézard. Kunstmann, the German word than a week after my visit to the catacombs. I “art-man.” Lazar Kunstmann—Lézard art-man? Google the names—Sophie Langlade, Dorothée After that, I’m running. I dig into the Unter- Hachette, Christophe Melli, Eric Valleye. Slim pick- gunther website, .org. I discover the site’s files ings, except for Valleye. He is named in Ketcham’s reside on a different server, and I note the : article for Salon. Valleye, Ketcham writes, is http://web.mac.com/peint/. the real name of the Lézard Peint. I scour cataphile forums for photographs of the Lizard, search Flickr. Most photographers lack ’s discretion. I find the Lizard, head bowed, in a series of subterranean snaps. It is the same man with whom I clinked glasses at Le Pantalon. When I go back to speak to , his ankle has healed. I ask the question whose answer he neglected to volunteer last time. Yes, the cataphile admits, “Lazar and Lézard Peint are the same single person.” I do not know how to feel. Thrilled by my discov- ery? Proud of my detective skills? Or utterly deflated, imagining as an asshole’s practical joke? It is as if I am back underground. This time I have no leader. “Lazar always had a group of friends, but they didn’t particularly have a name,” says. He sug- gests they adopted the name after the discov- ery of the cinema, Untergunther after the discovery of the clock, after the publication of his book. Whereas claim to have more than a hundred members, and Cavannus guess that “Kunst- mann’s group” are no more than twenty. The Unter- “We dress up as Nazis, sure,” the Lizard said, gunther say they have completed a dozen different “but we have no politics, none whatsoever. This is projects, to have hosted dozens of events, but all. . . theater. A game of transformations, masks.” there’s scant evidence. Perhaps it is because these ac- I consider the Lizard, reformed, assisting the pa- tions were secret. Or perhaps they didn’t happen. tient restorers of the Panthéon’s clock. Perhaps he points to another sign of obfuscation in met them below ground. And then suddenly the Kunstmann’s book. The volume is peppered with darkness slips into focus. Lazar, after all, sounds an comic relief courtesy of Olrik and Peter, ’s goofy, incompetent jester duo. Olrik is real, well known never, he insists, “physically violent.” “For a Ravi- underground. But Peter? “He is maybe Lazar,” oli,” he writes, “anything outside of routine is psy- supposes. “I looked into it. It might be him.” Peter, chologically violent.” He does concede that one of I note, is the French word for farting. Ktu’s friends might have knocked some heads. At that noisy, crowded bar, as I set a pint of Leffe And then I receive a message from Lanso. This before him, Kunstmann had confessed that he is unexpected. The head of the Untergunther does sometimes “gives simple answers to questions that not relish the spotlight, hasn’t written any books, deserve complicated ones.” Months later, I contem- never talks to journalists. She has not contacted me plate as a tall tale, an exaggeration, the invention before. “I know that [catacomb adventures] are of an arrogant catacomb trickster. And yet the truth very entertaining to foreign readers,” she writes, still feels just out of reach, beyond the beam of my her verbiage precise. “It’s the exoticism of ‘subter- flashlight. It is as if I can hear the footfalls. ranean Paris.’ But it’s not what defines []. We are people who realize projects without asking permis- Misdirection sion. That’s all.” Almost a month after our meeting, I confront Lazar From there, Lanso acknowledges that ’s cast Kunstmann (a.k.a. Lézard Peint, a.k.a. Eric Valleye) of regulars, the nicknames most often cited, may over email. Fifteen hours later, I receive a reply. Kun- now seem like mischievous cataphiles. But she says stmann says the Painted Lizard does not exist. He these are part of a “media group” led by Kunst- claims that this character’s reputation is intentional, mann—a team meant to dazzle and distract the invented, part of a concentrated effort to muddle press, mesmerizing us with catacomb talk. perceptions of . Stories of villainous cataphiles “The small world of the catacombs, which is ap- quickly take over the discourse, masking any other parently your place of departure, easily amplifies the activities. I am reminded of a comment he made at importance of Lazar’s band of rascals,” Lansar writes. the bar that night. “A secret launches any informa- “Lazar is a good spokesman . . . but all of the intox tion,” he said, leaning forward in his chair. “It’s a [obsfuscations] and [media] diversions that he has very simple principle. ‘I’m going to tell you some- been able to do, he and his friends, both in the press thing. It’s a secret—above all don’t tell it to anyone.’ and [among cataphiles], gets linked to our activities, You will see two other people and say to them, ‘I’m which they have nothing to do with.” Kunstmann is going to tell you something. It’s a secret—above all an important member, Lanso admits, but the Unter- don’t tell it to anyone.’ In four seconds, everybody gunther and most of the rest of “have nothing to knows.” The greater the tale, the bigger the lizard, do with ‘cataphiles,’ nor even the catacombs. Noth- the faster word spreads. ing to do with Ravioli forums nor the beliefs and Kunstmann admits that one “operation,” be- myths of these places. Nothing to do with the tween and , “was mildly violent”—but dozens of confusing articles conceived by Lazar and his cohorts between and . Nothing to do I have reached a dead end. Lanso’s secrets are tan- with the folklore of the Latin Quarter so dear to the talizing, but I can neither confirm nor deny them. previously-mentioned.” ’s deepest riddles cannot be Googled. The ques- Kunstmann’s tales, the activities he recounts, tion I ask is, Do I believe them? And then I ask, Do the cataphile culture he invokes—it is, Lanso sug- I want to believe them? And then I know my answer. gests, a fumis. It is smoke. It is the smoke that fills our vision, fills newspaper pages, conceals the Exits group’s true projects and real work. Despite their unassailable secrecy, still have Look to the Untergunther website, available in something to offer the rest of us trapped on the far French and English, a kind of souped-up press re- side of the smokescreen. Kunstmann talked about lease, useful for journalists. Look to Zone Tour, this as we finished our beers that night. “Over maintained by Olrik and Kunstmann, ostensibly a time,” he said, “I’ve noticed that the principal rea- website for Paris cataphiles but purely in English. son that completes its projects is that we dismiss Look to an article in Zurban magazine, two years past inhibitions.” before the “restoration wing” of announced The organization simply tries things. If one idea themselves. There are the “Untergunther,” doing doesn’t work, they move on to the next. And nothing more than run-of-the-mill culture jam- whereas doubt inhibits, precedents inspire new ex- ming, changing George V subway station signs to periments. “If someone says tomorrow, ‘Ah, I’d love “George W.” Fog, smoke, misdirection. to fly across the Atlantic,’ no one would say, ‘It’s im- As for what this “real work” is, Lanso will not possible! It will never work!’” Kunstmann said. “If it’s say. These projects, she underlines, are secret. “Don’t already been created, it must be possible to recreate.” think that I say this against you, or against journal- We cannot join . They will not tell us who ists in general. It’s the same for everyone. To be able they are, or what lies at the heart of the maze. But to do what we do, this is how it has to work.” we can do as they did. We can make our own maps.