Soupspoons jor Steam Shovels

Subway contractors in the U. S. have labor troubles, landslides and politics to contend with. Seldom if ever is their work stopped by any Ministry of Fine Arts.

Last week the French Ministry of Fine Arts ordered all construction stopped on the Boulevard St. Michel extension of the Paris Metro. Engineers and workmen were given a fortnight holiday. Excavating will continue during the fortnight, but instead of steam shovels and pneumatic drills, trained archeologists will be at work scraping the earth methodically away with garden trowels, ice picks, soup spoons. Fortnight ago the rattling drills of the subway contractors penetrated the long lost torture chambers of the Petit Chatelet. Last week the archeologists, scraping away with their soup spoons, declared that it was one of the most valuable historical finds in recent years.

In the 13th Century, the Petit Chatelet stood on the left bank of the Seine. Its grey twin towers made at once a gate to the city, a fortress, and a prison for thieves and political offenders. Old as was the Petit Chatelet, its winding subterranean crypts and dungeons were even older, and included a portion of a long forgotten secret tunnel under the Seine built when 9th Century Paris was besieged by fierce red-haired Norman pirates. The Petit Chatelet was pulled down in a popular uprising just before the Revolution, its more obvious cellars filled in and forgotten.

Two weeks ago the subway workmen struck a cellar that had not been filled in. Unimaginative French laborers who crawled in to look about with smoky acetylene torches, quickly crawled back, actively sick with horror. The scientists who took their places last week were delighted.

"It is due to the high arsenic content of the soil that these skeletons have been so well preserved," said a Sorbonne professor inspecting a cadaver whose clutching fingers showed the agony of his death. "This portion of the prison dates from the 12th Century, perhaps earlier." Skeletons sat upright against the dungeon wall. Some lay with heavy wooden collars about their necks, some were chained to blocks of stone.

Continued the professor: "Every metre of earth is valuable; we have already found what is probably the finest collection of instruments of torture in Europe."

His assistants continued to pick delicately with their ice-picks and scrape with their soupspoons, uncovering halberds, swords, knives, thumbscrews, eye-gougers, nostril tearers, tongs for tearing out tongues, racks, pulleys, finger choppers.