We may marvel at Paris with its 2 million inhabitants, but let us also spare a thought for those who have made it their home, underground, the necropolis within the metropolis. If the cemetery residents themselves have little use for these addresses of the dead, those who survive, those who come after, feel a human need to nod their way, their place of burial in good and due form, to honor their grave, or, occasionally, dance on it.
While we’ve been burying our dead for as long as we’ve been human, and perhaps before, Père Lachaise is perhaps the reigning royalty of all graveyards.
Père Lachaise was named for the Sun King’s personal priest, and the land was commandeered in the wake of the French Revolution. When you’re cutting off up to twelve heads per five minutes (this, according to Marat) the question does arise of what to do with all the bodies. How do you clean up that kind of debris, especially when cutting edge medical science preached that “cadaverous humidity” poisoned the surrounding air with stinking ooze which, really, was as good an explanation as any for illnesses in a pre-germ theory of illness and contagion.
While many victims were simply tossed into mass unmarked graves, the idea of a bit of real estate for the deceased alone, outside the city limits, arose too out of a desire to wrest the resting from the authority of the Church who had the remit of burial and salvation. In June of 1804, the Cemetery of the East, aka Père Lachaise, opened for its first burial in grounds landscaped like a pleasant English garden, with greenery and blossoms promising something more to those who wanted to read them as such.
The first plans for the cemetery dreamt up an egalitarian place where the dead lay in the even-handed distribution of the hereafter, yet even at the merest glance shows clearly that all tombs were not created equal. But Père Lachaise introduced money into the equation. For a sum, the wealthy could have privilege of a permanent concession, a grave for the ages. Before that time a grave was something you essentially rented for a generation or so, before the bones went off to such places as the Catacombs, making way for new residents having recently shuffled off this mortal coil. Today’s price of $8,000 per square meter gives you an idea of how fortune affected the ideal of a level playing ground amongst the dead.
With names abounding such as Nijinsky, Callas, Balzac and Piaf, making a selection of which graves to visit is a challenge. These however stand as our suggestions of tombs where you might pay homage to some extraordinary souls, or at least their mortal remains
TEN TOMBS WE RECOMMEND AT PÈRE LACHAISE
- ABÉLARD Pierre (Héloïse et Abélard) 1079-1142 ›› division 07
He was the cool professor, the kind that brings his guitar to class. A poet of song, as well as a philosopher, Peter Abelard’s courses were the thing to take in those years of 1100 in the schools around Notre Dame that would soon after become the Sorbonne.
She was a student, but as a woman she couldn’t follow classes publicly. Héloise’s brilliance, however, outshone even the strictures put on women and learning in those years. Her uncle-guardian decided she needed a private tutor, and none would do but that hotshot Abelard. Private sessions were arranged and from a meeting of the minds there came a meeting that ended in child. Uncle swore revenge. He had Héloise packed off to a convent and Abelard jumped on a dark street corner and no more children would the man ever sire. The twists and turns of the burials of these real-life star-crossed lovers defies this short space. Suffice to say the Romantic era was indeed romantic enough to fall head over heels with their story and in 1817 they were brought to Paris’s new Cemetery of the East, perhaps the oldest bones herein, the elders of the Père Lachaise cadavers.
- MORRISON Jim (James Douglas) 1943-1971 ›› division 06
The most easily found of all the Père-Lachaise graves, as his devoted followers have graffittied tombs all over the graveyard to point the way to the final resting place of this enigmatic frontman for the Doors, a would-be filmmaker and poet in his own right. Heir to the Beats, themes of rootlessness and solitude underlie his lyrics and poems. But is he there or is he not? The rumors, as with Elvis and King Arthur, continue to swirl. After flooring massive audiences and courting scandal through the late sixties and seventies, he came to Paris and reportedly died of an accidental heroine overdose, or “heart attack.” The immediate death was hushed up and without an autopsy, the passing of such a figure of mystery has led to sporadic “sightings” of the man which confirm at least that he is now firmly rooted in legend.
- BERNHARDT Sarah 1844-1923 division 44
This diva of the theater, sovereign of the stage, began as an illegitimate child to a father who refused to recognize her. She said of him, after earning her world-wide fame and its attendant wealth, that as he didn’t recognize her, she would not recognize him. Her talent dazzled the likes of Victor Hugo, triumphing over audiences across Europe and even the US. She played trouser roles as well as the great heroines, indeed, she played Hamlet himself, even with an amputated leg nearly up to her hip. Yet still audiences swooned for her in Camille, in Cyrano de Bergerac, Werther, and so much more. The Lumière Brothers, pioneers of cinema, filmed her in 1895. At her death a little over 100 years ago, over 30,000 mourners attended her burial in this spot. She had enough practice. for she used to sleep in a coffin, to get into character as it were.
- CHOPIN Frédéric 1810-1849 ›› division 11
Virtuoso composer among the Romantics, the pianist Chopin lies forever here in Père-Lachaise. That is, except for his heart. That intimate vessel of sentiment his sister bore back to his beloved Poland, as he had asked. After tuberculosis which had long tormented the artist, carried him off at 39 years old, his old companion Liszt said of him “Chopin passed among us like a ghost.” While his fame and talent could easily fill halls, his preference was to play in the evenings, for a small circle of close friends, at dusk and after twilight, hence so many of his titles are Nocturnes, during which he invented, according to his mistress, the writer George Sand, la note bleue, or the blue note. This at least was destined to a great musical future where his own was cut short.
- DELACROIX Eugène 1798-1863 ›› division 49
Master of glorious harmonies of hue and violent clashes of color, you’ll have encountered him in our Louvre tour, the man who painted the Death of Sardanapalus and Liberty Leading the People. In his lifetime a superstar of oils and pigment, Delacroix championed the cause of Romanticism (he was one of the close friends Chopin played for and painted his portrait), until his untimely death, also from tuberculosis. He fought to free the creative spirit from the strictures of authority and suffocating precedent. As Alexandre Dumas (author of The Count of Monte Cristo) said of him, “He sees the ugly rather than the beautiful, but his ugliness is always rendered poetic, through deep feeling.” Somehow this master colorist, hero of the painter’s palette, is under a headstone of darkest volcanic rock. Yet it is in accordance with his wishes, modeled after an antique sarcophagus. Is its blackness a choice to have all the spectrum’s colors in one to crown his grave?
- MARCEAU (Marcel Mangel) 1923-2007 division 21
Renowned for his alter ego, the mime Bip in his top hat and striped shirt, the performer touched audiences the world over who have raved over his silent art. What is less well known is that, being Jewish in Occupied France he was hidden (his father was deported to Auschwitz and there murdered) and in turn joined the French Resistance and helped Jewish children to cross over into Switzerland. His code name, Marceau, he took as his stage name. Creating Bip in the immediate post-war years, he declared “I want to build a world as I would wish it, show the rip in the material, the evil, in showing not the abandon of hope but its cry. I believe in human redemption through the theater.”
- PROUST Marcel 1871-1922 ›› division 85
Perhaps the 20th century’s greatest writer, his opus magnum Remembrance of Things Past, more recently translated to In Search of Lost Time, is a suite of fictionalized reminiscences of a vanished Parisian high life, as brought about by the taste of small bakery sweet, a madeleine, dipped in tea. Its pages include thinly veiled portraits of over one hundred characters, some of whom are interred here, such as the Greffuhles (division 43) and Charles Haas (division 28). The author passed from pneumonia, but one might argue that it was really exhaustion from the 1, 231, 972 words it took him to complete the seven volumes of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Published from 1913-1927 at the author’s expense, today those volumes stand as an unparalleled literary monument.
- STEIN Gertrude 1874-1946 ›› division 94
This American expat exploded on to the literary scene having authored (perhaps!) the purported Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her life partner (also division 94). Together the couple held a Saturday salon whose heyday lay in the post-WWI years. She collected her guests like her paintings, with quite as much of a taste for the eccentric and brilliant. The habitués read like a ship’s manifest of Modernism: James Joyce, Juan Gris, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gavin Williamson, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson,, Francis Picabia and Henri Rousseau. Some of those guests, you will find buried here such as Apollinaire (div. 86) and Marie Laurencin (div. 88). She coined a name for them, calling them, for the ages, the Lost Generation.
- WILDE Oscar 1854-1900 ›› division 89
His last words, in a seedy Left Bank Hotel in 1900, were "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." Thus this brilliant, flamboyant, and tragic figure, martyr to the love, as he described it, “that dare not speak its name,” kept his wit to the very end. Master of the bon mot, Oscar Wilde is so beloved a figure that the authorities had to keep his fans from leaving lipstick kisses all over his tomb thereby damaging the monument that he almost, due to scandal, did not get. In 2014 the authorities covered it with a kiss-proof glass to protect it from ardent admirers of he who died thinking his name cursed forever after. But then again, with his taste for paradox he also said, “One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down everything except a good reputation.”
- WRIGHT Richard 1908-1960 ›› division 87
Born on a Mississippi plantation to a sharecropper and schoolteacher themselves children of the enslaved, Wright’s 1940 groundbreaking novel Native Son shocked the US as it laid bare the brutal racism suffered by African Americans, and made it impossible to further turn a blind eye to it. Raised in part by his abusive Seventh Day Adventist grandparents, who forbade books in the house, nonetheless the young boy cherished dreams of authorhood. Despite sparse schooling, he was his junior high valedictorian but had to quit school to stave off poverty for his family. By way of Chicago and New York City, he eventually found his home as an expat in Paris in 1946, gaining citizenship the following year. Here he rubbed shoulders with the Existentialist crowd. Sartre and Camus were among his companions and he grew especially close to Simone de Beauvoir. After he arrived he wrote "I've never felt a moment of sorrow." The FBI relentlessly tracked the militant anti-racist for thirty years as a “subversive element” and his daughter to this day holds that he died not of the reported heart attack, but of assassination. The unexpurgated versions of Native Son, Black Boy, and other works saw the light of day only in 1991. He rests, we hope in peace, under a marker of black marble in the back of the cemetery, near the Columbarium.
We hope this brief glimpse of the celebrated talents and minds through history is helfpul in your pilgrimage through Père-Lachaise, and its permanent residents.
It is no accident that in Père Goriot, Balzac (div. 48) ends that most Parisian of chronicles in Père-Lachaise. After the young provincial Eugène de Rastignac has learned the bitter lessons of the capital’s subtle ways and secrets, he climbs the cemetery hill, looks over the capital and issues the challenge “A nous deux maintenant,” or in other words, “Watch out Paris, here I come.”
