Part Four: Eyes of the Visitors

 

They came with notebooks, lanterns, and trembling curiosity. Writers, travelers, scholars — drawn not by beauty, but by the strange allure of the preserved dead. The Capuchin Catacombs did not welcome them. They absorbed them.

Alexandre Dumas walked these halls in the 1830s, describing the catacombs as a place where “death had become a spectacle.” Guy de Maupassant followed, unnerved by the way the bodies seemed to lean toward him, as if listening. Carlo Levi, decades later, wrote of the catacombs as a mirror — not of death, but of society’s obsession with permanence.

You walk where they walked. The air is still, but heavy. The mummified faces do not blink, but they seem to see. You feel it — the gaze of the dead, not hostile, but curious. As if they wonder what you’ve brought with you. What grief. What guilt. What memory.

Tourists came too, in growing numbers. Some laughed nervously. Some cried. Some took photographs, hoping to capture something they couldn’t name. But the catacombs do not give up their secrets easily. They are not a museum. They are a haunted archive, and every visitor becomes part of the record.

The monks once believed that to preserve the body was to preserve the soul’s presence. Perhaps that’s why the catacombs feel so alive. Not with movement, but with memory. Each visitor stirs the silence, and the silence watches back.

You leave the gallery and step into daylight, but something follows. Not a ghost. Not a curse. Just a feeling — that you were seen. That the dead, in their quiet dignity, noticed you. And that somewhere in the dark, they are still remembering.