Sources describe the burial ground, then called
Champeaux, and the associated church in the 12th century. Les Innocents had begun as a cemetery with individual sepulchers, but by then had become a site for mass graves. People were buried together in the same pit (a pit could hold about 1,500 dead at a time); only when it was full would another be opened. '' In the 14th and 15th centuries, citizens constructed arched structures called
charniers or
charnel houses along the cemetery walls to relieve the overcrowding of the mass graves; bones from the graves were excavated and then deposited here. Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, during the
Anglo-Burgundian alliance when
John Duke of Bedford ruled Paris as Regent after the deaths of
Henry V of England and
Charles VI of France, a mural of the
Danse Macabre was painted on the back wall of the arcade below the charnel house on the south side of the cemetery. It was one of the earliest and best-known depictions of this theme. It was destroyed in 1669 when this wall was demolished to allow the narrow road behind it to be widened. In the Cemetery, on Sunday, 24 August 1572, at noon, a
hawthorn bush, that had withered for months, began to green again near an image of the Virgin. That was interpreted by Parisians as a sign of divine blessing and approval to the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre that was begun on the evening of the same day against
Huguenots in the city. During the reign of
Louis XV, inspectors recorded accounts of the difficulties in conducting business in the area due to the unsanitary conditions of the cemetery, caused by overuse and incomplete decomposition of bodies. Two edicts by
Louis XVI to move the parish cemeteries out of the city were resisted by the church, which was operating from burial fees. To reduce the number of burials, the price of burials was increased. After a prolonged period of rain in spring 1780, conditions became untenable. On 4 September 1780, an edict forbade burying corpses in Les Innocents and in all other Paris cemeteries. Bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the Catacombs in 1786. Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into large deposits of fat ("corpse wax", or
adipocere), chiefly in the form of
palmitic acid. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and
soap made from human corpses. The church was destroyed in 1787 and the cemetery was replaced by a herb and vegetable market. The
Fountain of the Nymphs, which had been erected in 1549 next to the church, was dismantled and rebuilt in the center of the new market. Now known as the "
Fountain of Innocents", it still stands on
Joachim-du-Bellay Square. ==In modern fiction==