It gets worse. In Paris, they'd buried so many corpses in the churchyards that they were exuding "corpse wax," which was then harvested and sold to be used in all sorts of products. Here's some stuff about it: https://museumsandmountains.com/want-a-tour-of-the-paris-catacombs/ >It all started with the Holy Innocents Cemetery (Cimetière des Innocents in French). Holy Innocents Cemetery opened in the Middle Ages. It was the oldest and largest cemetery in Paris. Originally, people were buried individually. But before long, to increase revenues for the church (they charged per “burial”) folks were being buried in mass pits of up to 1500 bodies each. Eventually, even this wasn’t enough to contain all the bodies and so they built something called charnel houses along the perimeter. Bodies were dug up and put in these semi-open “houses” that often reached at least two stories high. But not all the bodies were properly decomposed when exhumed. You can imagine the stench and general grossness of it all. > >By the late 1700s, more than 2 million bodies filled the cemetery. 22 parishes had sent their bodies to the Holy Innocents Cemetery, including the poor, plague victims, John Does who drowned in the Seine, people who died in the roads, and the crippled. In 1780 Mother Nature sent flooding rain to Paris, and a new solution had to be found. Miners had long since dug quarries beneath the city, and so that’s where all those millions of bones went. > >The bones were moved to the Catacombs starting in 1786. But did this take care of the problem at Les Innocents? Of course not, dead and rotting bodies can’t be neatly and tidily removed. Once the bones were gone, a whole lot of incompletely decomposed gunk was left behind. It had all melted into a large deposit of fat called adipocere. Tasty little tidbit: adipocere is commonly known as “corpse wax”. Specifically, your body fat, internal organs, and face turn into the stuff. Wet ground with no air does the best job at producing adipocere*. As the bodies were being removed from the cemetery, the officials collected the adipocere and later turned it into candles and soap. And then they sold it.