Toby Limbach
12-18 category (16 years old)
PARIS, THE HIDDEN CITY
The concrete labyrinths of Paris hold many secrets. Some are dark and
lost, others dark and remembered. This story however, refrains from darkness,
and fights the black in it’s own backyard…Officially, The
Society lives in name only, a title graciously displayed on a black-and-white
police document somewhere in Paris, hidden under dusty memos and unanswered
correspondence. Unofficially, a group of dedicated men lie on grubby sleeping
bags in the heart of the sewers, their treasure waiting.
The dank, filth-ridden pipes of a cities waste-water are no place for
the remnants of a glorious past. Centuries of history, honour and French
magnificence lie rotting in neglect under the busy and uncaring streets.
Hidden in corners, underground warehouses and abandoned pipes sit artefacts,
sculptures and masterpieces of art, lost and ruined.
Their saviour Henri Dumont, all blue coat and black beret with a Gauloise
stuck to his lower lip, stumbled on them by accident. He’d followed
a backwater pipe looking for a dropped ring, and found a set of twelve
nestling in a rat bed. Realisation at his ancestor’s abused legacy
and anger at the world and immoral bars blaspheming the romance of France,
The Society was born.Under the ground, away from the hustle of
everyday life, The Society thrives. Commanding a network of workers
moving quietly and quickly along dark and lonesome tunnels, they pick
their target, and attack. Security, loose and bored with nothing to do,
is helpless under such a ferocious and mysteriously unnoticeable avalanche.
For The Society do not steal, do not damage, they repair.Sneaking
where no one can see them, the men and women of The Society live and breathe
where their work takes them, painstakingly restoring the artefacts of
France.
Dim torchlight shines when no one is looking, and soft clicking of metalwork
when no one is watching, The Society arrives, restores, disappears.
Hidden, mysterious, illegal, and glorious.Headquarters are hard to find:
the police have searched – not for their own purposes but from complaints
of other sewer dwellers – through many a cobbled alleyway in Paris.
The river, majestic if not dirty, runs the entire length of the city brushing
its banks with a carefree wander, and as such has been scoured by suited-divers
in the search for the law-breakers. The search even extended to the outskirts
of the city and the brusque blocks of sewerage plants. Henri Dumont was
questioned, his grateful comments towards The Society annoying
the authorities, but there was no evidence to convict him. There is no
evidence at all.
The latest target is Notre Dame de Piete. Vaulted beneath The Louvre
Museum, the recently found-and-famed statue of Jean Goujon was deemed
too costly to repair, shunted to the side by paper-pushing officials.
Bureaucrats, The Society decided, are too common in today’s
cities. Their important titles and offices, built for self-serving smugness
in a childish game of politics, had to be fought. Economics shouldn’t
run a city; welfare should, with the focus back on the citizen. Cities,
The Society decided, are the pinnacle of a civilization, the
focus of positive and ingenious creations designed by it’s inhabitants.
The pinstripe invasion, it has to be fought.Now the society is on the
move, prepared to break into the Louvre for the sake of history. Steel
doors await, blocking rusting pipes and close mechanical shafts to the
cold. De Piete doesn’t want to be disturbed; its cracking plaster
and fading paint peeling in a crate. An arm is missing, and the stones
in the headwear sold long ago for bread. It wants to be left alone, but
the society won’t let it. The former glory of France will be restored,
and the city will return to a place free from constraining purse strings.
The societies of old created them, The Society of today is keeping
them.
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