"We dress up as Nazis, sure," Peint told me, "but we have no politics, none whatsoever. This is all ... theater. A game of transformations, masks. You see, it's a matter of taking people's expectations, the expectations wrought from fear, and creating an atmosphere so bizarre, so completely out of the norm -- that people do things that would be insane on the surface ... like shedding all their clothing except for the right sock."

It's a theater of cruelty, really. I thought of a home video I'd seen of a kid in the catacombs who was stripped to his underwear and grasping his chest, cold, while a cataphile named Riff, a professional psychiatrist, screamed at him an inch from his face, like a drill sergeant: "Omnamashiva! Say it with feeling!" But the kid produced a weak "omnamashiva." "Nooo! You little ... [Riff shaking his head, disgusted, looking ready to lash out, then, top of his lungs] OMNAMASHIVA!"

"Om-Om-namashi ... va?" The boy trembled, you could see the fear welling in his eyes; he was going to cry. The Painted Lizard filmed the proceedings.

So it was no surprise that when we broke camp, Lezard started lighting firecrackers to ease his boredom. Smoke and echoing blasts, confusion and yowling and laughter and voilà: Gone are Lezard and three of his buddies. Vanished. And I was left with a squirrelly little bespectacled clown named Gadget, who was coughing and half-blinded and tittering maniacally, and a quiet stocky older guy named Christophe, both of whom I'd known for exactly two hours. "Come," said Gadget, in kooky English. He extended a hand. "Come wiz me. I take you. Dead or alive. Come wiz me."

Soon we were very lost. "I'm missing something here," said Christophe, consulting his map. We doubled back, cut right, left, got swamped in some very high water, and about-faced once more.

Gadget was delighted. "This is where it gets good," he said. "This is why we descend. This is when you are like a child again or like a young man and you have just made love."

We stumbled down a tunnel thick with smoke, acrid choking fumes that stung the eyes -- Lezard had been here. Visibility dropped to two feet, blue in our light.

"You guys ever get hurt down here?" I asked. "Anyone ever die?"

"Oh, people open their skulls on the ceilings or they trip and hurt their ankles, but there is only one death we know for certain," replied Gadget, descending a staircase out of the plume. "Philibert Aspairt. Two hundred years ago."

And now, after much turning and twisting, we were passing by Aspairt's white limestone tomb, which was a good sign -- it meant Christophe had got his bearings. The grave is a pilgrimage spot for cataphiles, Aspairt a revered, almost mythical figure; upon the grave a votive candle burns, a fresh lily of the valley sits in a brandy snifter (someone had been here before us). Young Aspairt was a porter, a doorman, at the Val-de-Grace hospital who visited the catacombs on what became a famous mission of theft: He hoped to pilfer the wine caves of the monks of Chartreux. Aspairt disappeared on All Saints' Day in 1793; his body wasn't discovered until 1804. He was found clutching an enormous ring of keys, just a few yards from an exit; the irony was not lost on his discoverers and they buried him where he lay. It is believed that somewhere along the journey Philibert's torch went out. He probably roamed in the darkness for days.

We stood silently at the grave for a moment, then made a short hump to a masoned embrasure pierced by another of those astonishingly small rabbit holes that somehow fit grown men. Then we heard footsteps not our own. Were they behind us? Beyond the wall? The Lizard and his crew shadowing us, playing games? "Shht!" said Gadget.

"Police?"

"Shht!"

"Maybe police," Gadget finally said, and we threw ourselves headfirst into the hole.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The cataphiles are in relentless war, "une guerre souterraine," as Gadget calls it. Head-lamped cave-cops cruise the underground, chasing out trespassers, handing out thousand-franc fines, about $140. Manholes are soldered from above; whole teams descend hauling cement and cinder blocks -- an awful sweaty job -- to block off passages and seal up the rabbit holes. To no avail. Within days, the cataphiles go on the attack, using crowbars, sledgehammers, shovels, hydraulic jacks, high-powered rock drills: smashing the walls, busting the careful solders. One legendary manhole was closed and reopened and closed again 20 times in a week. The police, of course, find this infuriating; the cataphiles think it's hilarious fun.

The most famous of the cata-cops, Gadget tells me, was Jean-Claude Saratte, recently retired, a fat old man with a pug nose and loud voice and truculent style, a speechmaker of arcane poetic flourishes who cataphiles affectionately called "Papa." Saratte and the Lizard had a celebrated rivalry, for Saratte could rarely catch the Lizard, and when he did, the Lizard laughed at him. One night, caught, Lezard stood before a beaming Saratte, who told him, "Fold up your boules, take your pretty lamp and regain the entrance you seem to know so well!" Saratte also made sure to show off the new generation of helmet lamp he was using. "Pretty, eh? You don't have one of these, do you, Lezard?" "Ah," said the Lizard, pulling out the same model, "you mean this?"

Saratte said nothing more, and his band of young officers snickered behind him.

"Saratte was the bon papa, a great man," Gadget tells me. "We threw him a party underground when he retired. Hundreds of people lined up for his signature."

"How'd Saratte get through these tunnels, though, if he was so fat?" I asked Gadget as we squeezed along.

"Eh bien! That was Papa's trick, eh?"

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