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After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access.

Behind that, a tunnel held a desk and a closed-circuit TV camera set to automatically record images of anyone passing. The mechanism also triggered a tape of dogs barking, "clearly designed to frighten people off," the spokesman said.

Further along, the tunnel opened into a vast 400 sq metre cave some 18m underground, "like an underground amphitheatre, with terraces cut into the rock and chairs".

There the police found a full-sized cinema screen, projection equipment, and tapes of a wide variety of films, including 1950s film noir classics and more recent thrillers.

...

Three days later, when the police returned accompanied by experts from the French electricity board to see where the power was coming from, the phone and electricity lines had been cut and a note was lying in the middle of the floor: "Do not," it said, "try to find us."

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Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.

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Amazing. 170 miles. What lies beneath, indeed.

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There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.

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Pity. You'd think if there were drunken orgies anywhere in Paris, they'd be in the old catacombs.

[ 21 September 2004: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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There exist, however, several secretive bands of so-called cataphiles, who gain access to the tunnels mainly after dark, through drains and ventilation shafts, and hold what in the popular imagination have become drunken orgies but are, by all accounts, innocent underground picnics.
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Pity. You'd think if there were drunken orgies anywhere in Paris, they'd be in the old catacombs.

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See, and the best I've managed is a furtive supercan of Pil while waiting for the LRT.

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Yeah, I can't say I've got up to much underground debauchery myself. Though one Friday night in Toronto I was waiting for a subway when a slightly drunken kind of business guy came over to me -- with one hand inside his overcoat. "Excuse me," he said, "do you drink?"

Cautiously, I allowed as how I'd been known to have a drink or two. "Then would you like a rum and Coke?" he asked. Out of his coat, where he'd managed to hold it precariously but without spilling, he brought a glass of, yes, rum and Coke. It still had some ice in it.

Turned out he and some buddies had been boozing in a local bar after work, and had bet each other they couldn't smuggle their drinks out. He'd managed it but then decided he didn't want it after all, so had been offering it to people on the subway platform.

cliquez

[ 21 September 2004: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

I don't really enjoy it much, after the original novelty. I prefer the open air, and picnics up on the Buttes Chaumont, with the little pavillion (one of those fake antique structures in vogue at the turn of the last century) and the infamous "Pont des suicidés" - though now it has anti-jump barriers.