Philibert Aspairt

...

so the person he's talking about, his name is Philibert Aspairt, and he was a doorkeeper for the Val-de-Grace Hospital.

Um, I th- I'm, I'm assuming that's the person you're talking about.

Yeah, that's the one.

They're stacked in the same wall, part of the same pattern, supporting the same weight.

In November of seventeen ninety-three, during the Revolution, a man named Philibert Aspairt descended into the catacombs and never returned.

The details of his story are sparse but vivid.

He was a doorkeeper at the Val-de-Grâce Hospital, a military hospital on the Left Bank that had been established in the seventeenth century by Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis XIII, in a former Benedictine abbey.

Some accounts suggest he was looking for a rumored cache of Chartreuse liqueur stored in the cellars of a nearby monastery, drawn by the prospect of free drink in an era of revolutionary scarcity.

Other accounts offer no motive at all, presenting his descent as an act of curiosity or perhaps foolishness, the kind of impulsive decision that seems reasonable in the moment and catastrophic in retrospect.

Whatever his reason, Philibert Aspairt entered the tunnels beneath the Val-de-Grâce and was never seen alive again.

The date of his descent is recorded as November third, seventeen ninety-three.

Some of the first tales date back to the height of the French Revolution.

It started on November third, seventeen ninety-three, when a doorman named Philibert Aspairt went missing.

He worked at a local hospital in Paris.

And given all of the political unrest at the time, his disappearance wasn't a high priority for police or city officials.

It was on the ground seemingly as though the person had dropped dead in the middle of their journey.

When the construction workers searched the body, they found a key ring with the name of a local hospital printed on it.

So they presumably notified the police, who concluded this was Philibert Aspairt, the missing doorman.

It still wasn't clear how he'd ended up underground, but the investigators had a theory.