Frog & Fog (35)
People in France loved running, so Alessandro, who had once played on his school football team, did not look out of place as he ran while scouting out Montsouris Park.
From satellite images, Montsouris Park looked like nothing more than a patch of greenery. Yet aside from the psychiatric hospital closed to outsiders, the park was actually a flat-topped hill. Inside it lay a hidden underground palace, supported by countless columns, with crystal-clear blue-glowing water beneath its vaulted ceiling.
This was the Montsouris Reservoir. Its purified water was enough to supply a quarter of Paris's population. The man responsible for designing it was Eugene Belgrand, who had also designed the underground museum beneath the Saint-Martin Canal. While Haussmann designed the buildings above ground, Belgrand built aqueducts and reservoirs, channeling spring water and river water into Paris to free its people from the threat of cholera.
Belgrand's enormous underground system became a major exhibit at the 1867 Paris International Exposition, and the Montsouris Reservoir's scale, complexity, and cost were among the greatest of the late nineteenth century. Excavation began in 1868, and construction took five years. By then, Napoleon III's empire was already on the verge of collapse. Belgrand had originally intended to display the reservoir as a new exhibit to the guests attending the exposition, but after the Second Empire ended, the matter was dropped. The succeeding Third Republic continued funding its construction because of its practical use. Naturally, it was not built as grandly as Belgrand had first envisioned, but even in its unfinished state, it was enough to leave people awestruck.
Beneath the reservoir was the old Capuchin Quarry. The stone used to build Notre-Dame Cathedral had been quarried there. Both the quarry and reservoir were open to the public, and Alessandro went in