Frog & Fog (33)
Beside Montsouris Park stood the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. Unlike London, which liked to plan everything in the city center, people in France preferred to place certain facilities in the suburbs.
Paris's city center was filled with exquisite old buildings, and demolishing them had become increasingly difficult. Not to mention the crowds—people came from all over the world to buy property in Paris. By comparison, only the suburbs had enough open land for students to use as football fields.
There were many hollows beneath Paris, hidden underground like a complex maze. The tunnels were long and intricate, and no one knew exactly what they looked like in their entirety.
When the city had only 300,000 residents, the distance between those quarries and the city had been safely sufficient. But after generation upon generation of expansion, people forgot those quarries existed. Many did not even realize that their new homes, offices, monuments, luxury shops, and cafés had actually been built atop exceedingly fragile foundations.
Until 1774, when the city within a thirty-meter radius of Rue d'Enfer suddenly collapsed into a thirty-meter-deep hole. After similar incidents and accidents, Louis XVI established an oversight body in 1777 for underground quarries and abandoned caverns, known as the General Inspectorate of Quarries. It was responsible for investigating and repairing Paris's underground voids to ensure the safety of the city above.
But cave-ins still occurred from time to time. Perhaps while you were sleeping soundly in some quaint old hotel, you would suddenly be jolted awake by a thunderous roar. Then you would discover that you were plummeting at terrifying speed, falling straight to the first floor or even deeper. White bones would surround you, and worse still, if no one rescued you in time, you would soon become one of