The Best Time I Lost My Virginity In The Catacombs of Paris

by Laurence Dumortier

In the well-to-do neighborhood in Paris where I grew up in the late 1980s, social life for teenagers was arranged around the rallyes dansants. These were afternoon parties hosted by bourgeois mothers, with dancing and bridge lessons and — I’m not kidding — cucumber sandwiches. They’d hardly changed since the 1950s when my father was a teenager.

My mother was not a Parisian bourgeoise — she was American and had grown up working-class in a small town in Washington state — so she vetoed the rallyes for me, but there were so few other social outlets that my life consisted almost entirely of schoolwork, going to the movies with my best friend, and losing myself in novels. Meeting Victor opened another realm. Brilliant and athletic and wiser by far in pretty much everything, he lived in a little garden apartment with his bohemian mother in the 18th arrondissement, but had transferred to the fancy public school I went to in the staid, lily-white 16th. He made me feel more beautiful than I was.

I remember how different it was to go to the movies with Victor. Everything on screen seemed connected by electrified wire to what was happening inside me. Holding his hand or feeling the whisper of his breath in my ear as we watched felt somehow more real than anything I’d ever known.

I was transported by infatuation, but in one sense I remained practical and materialistic: I had a nagging preoccupation with the question of how to lose my virginity. It seemed like a meaningless concept that only did harm — boys at school used it as a taunt or a wedge, to separate the sluts from the prudes. My virginity loomed like an enormous wall to be scaled, and I longed to be on the other side, in the land of what I imagined to be free love and free thinking.

As much as I wanted to do it, I couldn’t quite picture the scene. I knew Victor had already had sex, so I had some trust in his technical know-how, but still. As anxious as I was to be relieved of my virginity, I had to nerve myself, and I had to find the right moment.

And then there was the question of where. It seemed like one of my family members was ALWAYS at home. Victor and I kissed in movie theaters and on park benches, but that was no way to get the deed done.

We decided to do it in the catacombs.

Yes, the catacombs.

Victor’s circle of acquaintances was much wider than mine — his mother treated him as an almost-adult and introduced him to all kinds of people, and he had more freedom to go out and stay up late. One day he’d met an aspiring cataphile, a guy named Freddy, and the opportunity came up to go underground.

Underneath the streets of Paris there is a network, about 200 miles long, of underground passages composed of former quarries where, starting in Roman times, limestone was mined to build the city. When some of the underground quarries started collapsing in the 1770s, swallowing up whole buildings and even streets, Louis XVI appointed an Inspecteur des Carrières to secure the structural integrity of the tunnels and passages. Around the same time, the Cimetière des Innocents — which had become a vector for illness and infection in the surrounding neighborhoods — was bulldozed over. Certain rooms in the old quarries were used as ossuaries for the remains of some six million Parisians. Most of the skulls and bones were left in massive heaps, but some were stacked and arranged into macabre rooms and made into an attraction for tourists local and foreign.

The rest of the subterranean tunnels are not for visitors. When the ossuaries first opened to the general public in 1875, a correspondent for the New York Times explained why the visitable portion was restricted to a circuit about a mile in length: “there is a certain danger of being lost, or, as frequently happens, a portion of the roofing falling in and crushing the exploring party.” All the same, these forbidden catacombs had their uses. They served as shelter for the Communards in the anti-monarchist uprising of 1871. During the German occupation of Paris in the 1940s, the Nazis used them as an underground bunker, while at the same time the French Resistance employed them to elude detection.

The Paris police have never completely succeeded in finding and sealing all the entrances. And so, for years and years, there have been Parisians of all stripes, the cataphiles, who’ve made it a point to explore and map the tunnels and pass on the information through confidential channels.

“Want to check it out?” Victor asked me.

I’d been to the tourist-catacombs on a middle-school field trip, but I’d had no idea about the vast network of forbidden tunnels. It never occurred to me then that we could use the catacombs for The Deed — they seemed too dank and morbid to get naked in — but they seemed like an adventure, at least. No one I knew had ever done this. Here again, Victor was offering me a portal into a different world. How could I not say yes?

I told my parents I was going to study at a friend’s house. Instead, Victor and I went to meet Freddy-the-explorer at the edge of the Parc Montsouris. Riding on the back of Victor’s Vespa, with the wind on my face, I had the odd sensation of hurtling breakneck toward something unknown and chancy. I couldn’t tell if I liked it.

We left the scooters chained at the entrance, and walked in the falling light, following the train tracks that cut through the park and into the tunnel where a catacomb-entrance was located. We moved out of the dusk and toward pitch-blackness, walking over the cross-ties, while Freddy counted the undergirding arches and service doorways. I pointed my flashlight at the walls, covered in graffiti, and joked with Victor about what it meant.

“These are the hieroglyphs of the dead,” I said, trying to make my voice hollow and echoey. “They tell us to turn back.”

“We’re not going to the skeleton-catacombs, silly,” Victor said. “These are the quarry-catacombs.”

“They’re all connected,” I said. “And anyway ghosts can pass through walls and partitions.”

“I want to pass through your partition,” Victor said, because we’d been making dumb hymen jokes at every opportunity

“That one says Go no further,” I continued, waving my flashlight over an elaborate tag. “You cannot un-see what is beneath.”

“Nah, I think it’s only the work of bougie wannabe-taggers,” Victor said.

Freddy stopped at a door and put his shoulder against it. “This is it. The entrance to the underworld,” he said, smiling, and pushed it open, revealing stairs leading to a dirt-walled tunnel. We were inside.

Freddy had a map that had been Xeroxed and passed down to him, with a crude layout of the catacombs’ rooms, arteries, minor passageways, and dead-ends. The map delineated the turf of rival crews.

“There’s two major gangs,” Freddy said, “The anarchist-slash-communists. And the skinheads.”

“Well, at least we know who to befriend!” I said.

Freddy corrected me: you didn’t want to antagonize either one, for obvious reasons, but you couldn’t be too friendly either. Though there was no danger of our buddying up with the skinheads, Freddy also warned us away from being chummy to the commies — so as to not attract the attention and ire of the skinheads. This outing was more complicated than I’d first imagined.

There were also notes penciled onto the map to show which tunnels were likely to be flooded after rains, which seemed at risk of cave-ins, and where there were deep wells and sudden steep declines in elevation. It’s difficult to find stats on how many injuries have occurred in the forbidden catacombs, but in 2011 three people were separated from their group and wandered around lost in the dark for two days. This past March, a guy fell into a narrow pit where he was trapped, badly injured, and had to be rescued by the fire department’s special catacomb brigade.

I trusted Victor. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have wanted to lose my virginity to him. But down here it wasn’t Victor I had to trust — it was Freddy, and I’d only met him that night. I knew nothing about him, except that he was a friend of a friend of a friend of Victor’s rather eccentric mother. For the first time I had a tiny inkling of why my parents might have kept me sheltered. It would be unforgivable to get myself killed in a limestone quarry underground. Still, a few minutes into the dizzying maze of our trek, I realized there was no turning back, and that the only course now was blind faith: Freddy was our only way back up to the surface.

Soon, things that had seemed remote and slightly comical on the map were coming horrifyingly to life. “Prepare to get wet,” Freddy said, laughing, as we turned down one passage and heard the splash of his step. Oh yes, ha ha, except that unlike Freddy I didn’t have rubber boots, only my Stan Smiths. With opaque water rising above my knees, my feet sinking into the mud of the bottom, I forced my mind away from what might be in the water: trash from the storm drains, or sewage, or, good God, decomposing rats. Instead, holding Victor’s hand, I concentrated on the geography of his palms and fingers, mapping them out in my mind — a callus here, a scar there — and imagined them sweeping over my skin.

We sloshed a hundred yards through the flooded passage before flashlight beams swung into view up ahead. The people coming toward us might be neutral explorers like us — or they might be territorial and volatile. There was no way to know, until we were close enough to have to squeeze against one another in the narrow corridor of packed earth. “Be cool,” Freddy said. “I’ll handle this.”

At first there were just their voices, salut, salut. Flashlights pointed down to not blind one another. Cigarettes shaken out of packs and lit. With the flare of the matches, I could see these were skinheads. I cringed and receded behind Victor and Freddy.

“Where are you headed?” one of them asked.

“La Plage,” Freddy said. It was a popular gathering spot: the room was large enough to accommodate a crowd, and its floor was sandy and dry.

“Watch out, there are CRS down the long gallery,” one of the skins said. The CRS were the special police forces commonly deployed for riots, and known for their brutality.

“Thanks. We’ll take the other way.”

We all nodded at each other, and we moved on. There was something oddly anticlimactic about this, as though my relief was deflating the adventure. Later I read about the right-wing cataphiles, who had in the 1930s plotted in the Salle Z, underneath the Val-de-Grace church, to assassinate Leon Blum, France’s first Socialist and Jewish prime minister. The contemporary skins wanted to take Salle Z back from the party-happy cataphiles and turn it back into reactionary headquarters. I was glad our encounter had been anticlimactic.

The threat of running into the CRS had forced us onto a roundabout route. We trudged for what seemed like miles underground, stumbling over uneven ground, misreading the rudimentary map, turning into dead ends and having to retrace our steps. The initial thrill faded to weariness, boredom, and the constant hum of anxiety.

At last we came to a ledge that had been carved out of the earth. This was the entry to what was called the chattière, the cat door, but it seemed to me it had nothing of the ease of a cat flap swinging. We climbed onto the ledge and crawled, wormlike, through a narrow horizontal crack in the massive wall. I shoved my backpack ahead of me and wriggled, the earth hard against my belly and shoulders. I have never felt that kind of terror, squeezed by dirt along the entire length of my body. But I had to keep moving, scared as I was, and so I did.

On the other side: an antechamber carved out of the limestone. And beyond that a vaster room, illuminated by actual torches, with rugs on the ground, and benches made out of crates — where a party was in full swing. The relief and joy of stumbling, filthy and exhausted, from a crack in the earth into a room full of people and music and drinks was the sweetest I’ve ever felt. The cataphiles cheered our entrance, and none of them seemed to be anarcho-communists or skinheads. Some were our age or thereabouts, and a bunch were middle-aged. One kid, handing us a drink, scanned the room and said “That guy’s a banker, that woman’s a sculptor, that dude over there is so secretive we don’t know what he does.” All of us were grimy and disheveled and joyful. For the next few hours we made friends with the party people, drank their wine, smoked their joints, and danced to their music.

When they heard about our journey through the earth, they laughed gently at our lack of expertise, but praised Freddy for nevertheless getting us there safely, and promised to guide us back to the surface in a much less circuitous way. I was ridiculously happy! Slightly stoned and slightly tipsy, I felt the beating pulse of my infatuation with Victor, and the music that reverberated in the subterranean room, and the feel of his hands on my hips as we swayed in time to the beat. “Here,” I told him. “I think we should do it here.”

And so it was that a week later, we were holding hands walking down the same train tunnel, trying to remember how many doorways until the right one. We’d gone right after school, thinking it was an improbable time for exploring and that we could find a private nook.

When I suggested it, I’d pictured the warm radiance of the party room. Just the two of us cuddling on a blanket laid out on the sandy floor of La Plage, all the time in the world to do our thing. But as soon as we reached the opening I realized there was no chance we’d be able to find our way back there without a map or a guide — and anyway, I could not go back through that water or the terrifying wormhole of the chattière. I’d held on to the cozy, joyful feeling of being in the party room and forgotten the panic of getting there.

The whole endeavor began to feel absurd and convoluted. It was ridiculous too, that I would journey underground just to get rid of my virginity — something I never wanted in the first place.

“We don’t have to, you know,” Victor said. But I wanted to.

Instead of following the tunnel from the week before, we explored cautiously in the opposite direction, not wanting to stray too far from the stairs. We found a little alcove around a corner and put down a blanket, then sat there trying to decide what to do.

“I’m pretty sure I can’t get naked,” I said, picturing someone walking in on us. I wished I had thought to wear a dress or skirt that I could just pull up, instead of jeans I would have to take off altogether.

“Let’s both go Winnie-the-Pooh,” Victor said, only it was Winnie l’Ourson.

So we kissed and touched each other bumblingly. And then we did it and it hurt like hell and the ground felt very hard under my back and it was all over rather more quickly than I’d thought, but I was glad.

I was glad, too, that I’d brought another pair of jeans in my backpack because I’d bled all over the ones I’d taken off, not having pushed them far enough away from me. The blanket was all bloody, and so were my legs. It looked a little like a murder scene. I knew the next time would be better, and that it would keep getting better, because this, certainly, was nothing to write home about. But it was done.

Thinking back over this episode makes me a little sad — that my feeling, in the end, was relief. I can’t recommend sex in the catacombs your first time (or really ever, for that matter). Even the backseat of a car will do better in a pinch. But I can’t really say I have regrets either. Within the confines of an absurd patriarchal structure that venerates virginity, Victor and I found a way to do things on our own terms, hilariously and awkwardly, and that was a kind of triumph. Victor and I broke up a year later, but before that we did find ways to be alone and relaxed together.

Back in the tunnel, walking out toward the park, we heard a sound in the dark and thought for a split second that someone was behind us — a park warden maybe, or even a cop. We were giddy, and we started to run. Our feet pounded the gravel as we sprinted toward the afternoon light ahead. The sweet, strange taste of exhilaration rose in the back of my throat, and even when there was no more air left in my lungs, we kept on running, until we were out of the tunnel and into the daylight. We dashed into the bushes and sat, panting and heaving and trying to be quiet though we only wanted to laugh. I had bloodstained jeans in my backpack and I could still feel the sharp pang between my legs when I moved a certain way. But my virginity no longer mattered, and that was good enough.

Laurence Dumortier is finishing a PhD in English with an emphasis on gender and sexuality. She writes essays and fiction. You can find her on Twitter.

Photo by Fraser Mummery, c/o Flickr.