![]() ![]() We met an English couple, confused by a concrete box with a black metal door labelled Famille de Gas. There are exceptions there’s a lovely statue of a little girl on Gustave Guillaumet’s grave and Nijinsky’s final resting place bears a delicate bronze of the dancer in character and thoughtful pose. Tomb designers are seldom artists of the same calibre as the famous departed. Inscriptions try to say too much and end up being pompous or trite. ![]() Tombs can often be pretentious or just plain kitsch. Francois Truffaut’s grave was a triumph of art direction simple marble adorned with a tiny jar of fresh red and orange roses. Here lie Stendhal, Delibes and Offenbach, as well as Mme Weber, inventor of the can-can, and Alphonsine ‘La Dame Aux Camelias’ Plessis. Less beautiful than Pere Lachaise it may be, but the brochure was gratuit, which immediately made us well disposed towards it. The entrance is overshadowed by an ugly iron bridge, but inside is an oasis in a particularly crowded part of Paris. When we’d found everyone we’d heard of in Pere Lachaise, we moved on to the Montmartre Cemetery. It will be demolished unless someone comes to claim it.’ On some mossy tombstones, authorities had posted bossy equivalents of abandoned vehicle notices, to the effect that (as far as our inadequate French could decipher) – ‘This grave appears untended. Other graves are falling into disrepair, the owners having moved on, leaving no forwarding address. ![]() So here’s something to keep you going while we’re off enjoying ourselves.’ Leaving plastic flowers seems to say, ‘We know we should think of you more often, but we have busy lives. Someone had planted and tended a lovely bed of purple irises on Charlie Chaplin’s family tomb. If you’re seriously devoted to the departed, you should go to some trouble, as a man was doing for Chopin, carefully arranging cut flowers in vases. One hopes the caretakers clean them up soon!’ There were bunches of them on the Auschwitz monument too, along with a hand-written note, in French, which read, ‘What horror! It is a disgrace to see these faded, artificial flowers as a memorial to these people. Poignantly, Piaf shares her grave with her two-year-old son, Marcel Dupont. She has a marble slab, a crucifix and an urn marked simply ‘EP’. We’d read that he was the celebrity most visitors come to see, but we found him tucked away behind a little fence, his grave adorned with last week’s drooping roses and a bunch of plastic flowers.Įdith Piaf is also a little off the path, opposite Modigliani. We had to share our James Douglas Morrison moment with a couple of other Doors fans, though there was no queue for tickets. The dead may be a little cramped, but there’s plenty of room for those of us still living to wander along the cobblestone paths, or to sit under the giant chestnut trees and reflect on what this life and death business is all about. The cemetery is popular, but at 44 hectares it’s the biggest park in Paris, so it’s anything but crowded. Their neighbour is the very quiet Marcel Marceau.Įach year Pere Lachaise attracts many thousands of visitors, maps in hand, sniffing around its 70,000 graves, looking for their favourite dead people. Now it’s home to Balzac himself, to Proust, Piaf, Seurat, Rossini, Chopin, Bizet, Delacroix, Gertrude Stein, Sarah Bernhardt, Charlie Chaplin and Jim Morrison. But when Balzac laid characters from his novels to rest in Pere Lachaise, tourists went looking for the graves of fictional heroes, and soon real people wanted to RIP there too. Even after a publicity campaign, involving moving Moliere and La Fontaine out there to pull in new customers, it continued to struggle for business. When it first opened in 1804, Parisians thought Pere Lachaise was too far out of town for grieving families to visit.
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