Père-Lachaise

My day started with disappointment – or rather, the night was occupied with activity that foreshadowed disappointment. No, it wasn’t a general election; I had come down with a stomach bug that I was vaguely aware was going around. When my alarm went off, I wasn’t even asleep. That’s how much it kept me awake. I only slept another 45 minutes or so, after waving goodbye to Kenny with my little finger (a great effort), but I wasn’t getting out of bed just yet. I phoned home for a brief moan and ate a bit of bread for breakfast, just about all I was going to keep down.

I felt better even by mid-morning, as is the trend with this thing, and decided that some time in the afternoon, I was going to go out. Of course, I spent the next three hours trying to pick somewhere less challenging but in an area that I hadn’t explored yet. I succeeded in making a new priority-priority list (to augment the priority list that was created to augment the list), and from this decided to make bus riding a feature, heading down to the Seine and hopping on a bus to the 20e arrondissement (never been there before!) for the world-famous cemetery Père-Lachaise.

These plans never go smoothly, do they? I watched bus 81 depart without me from across the street, and when I got to the bus stop expecting another bus in seven minutes, it promised me a wait of nineteen. I wasn’t in a rush, but that was enough to send me into the metro – except that while I was working out a metro route, the bus arrived. So I returned to the original plan and took the bus down to the Palais Royal stop, where I should have found a stop for the 69 bus. There was no such stop in either direction.

Changing buses became a sightseeing excursion. Sadly, I had been all over this area on Friday looking for the 81 stop (will I never learn?), so the novelty was less novel than it might have been. I gave up opposite the St-Germain l’Auxerrois church and hopped on the 67 instead. This seemed to follow vaguely the same route for a few stops before crossing the river and going more or less precisely where I didn’t want to go. I was giving up hope of coming across the 69 and had the guidebook out, cross referencing the Left Bank section with my list of the list of the list, when at the Hôtel-de-Ville stop, the very last one before the Seine, we stopped at a shelter with a big blue “69” on the side.

I boarded the (very warm) bus a few minutes later and failed to find a seat. This would not have seemed so bad had I not already been queasy again after sitting over the buzzing engine on the 81, but since the first two stops in traffic took 15 minutes, I got worried. Someone finally got off the bus and let me sit down at Bastille, from whence it was a much faster journey. Excuse the digression. I happen to think that every detail of my day is fascinating.

I marched straight through the gates of Père-Lachaise, whereupon a bug flew directly up my nose. After some spluttering, the offending creature was ejected from my nasal region and my exploration could continue, if not quite unhindered by wildlife; the whole place is full of bugs. Not in a nightmarish, horror-film way, but definitely in an “ooh, tasty human!” sense.

A quick tip if you’re tackling Père-Lachaise: take the back gate in. It’s an expansive place, and that alone makes it tiring, but it also runs steeply uphill from the entrance. If you are to have any hope of finding the well-known graves, you’re going to have to climb over things and double back a lot, so get a good map and tackle it from the top. I didn’t do it this way – I had a map, but I started with a vigorous uphill walk for ten minutes or so, which didn’t make me terribly keen to venture downhill again, no matter whose grave I might trip over in the process.

All that said, it’s a fascinating place and shouldn’t be missed on a longer trip. The graves tumble up and down the hills without any decipherable order beyond the rough sector boundaries like a city of the dead. Each tomb is a monument to an individual or a family that has been built with all the character of a house. Gated tombs stand intriguingly ajar, drawing you in with brightly coloured stained glass at the rear, to yield only empty plant pots and cobwebs.

For the morbid, this is all no doubt a veritable theme park of death, and it’s certainly an odd sort of fun, but it does provide interesting fodder for reflection. The shinier tombstones are recent, and there are fresh flowers on most of these, while the tombs of the famous are tended by tourists and admirers who feel an unusual sense of responsibility to their heroes’ mortal remains. In between there are hundreds and thousands of tombs with their doors locked and rusting, cobwebs draped across their doors, glass broken to the elements. This is also a city of the forgotten.

It’s this healthy balance of remembrance and forgetfulness that makes the classic European cemetery so enjoyable to visit. The most human fear seems to be that we will be forgotten. Everything we strive to achieve – significance – screams this. Of course I want to be remembered; I want to be a writer, which is, after all, the most neurotic, narcissistic and insecure vocation. Yet we are all to be forgotten at some point; if we are remembered, our graves are forgotten. If our graves are known, our deeds are obscure. If our deeds are recorded, our personalities will be lost. If anything remains after that, what do we care? We’re dead. Well dead. Totally dead. Kaput. Shuffled off this mortal coil. Washed up, cashed in, and checked out.

All this death talk is giving me a yearning for Hamlet soup. You know, a consommé devoutly to be wished?

Grooooan. Okay, okay.

Of course, nobody comes to Père-Lachaise because they’re interested in the forgotten. We go for the famous people we never knew. Amid all this forgetfulness and personal remembrance, the majority are there in celebration.

In my case, it was darling Oscar who brought me to Père-Lachaise. It’s unusual for me to actively like dead people (so difficult to strike up a conversation), but I certainly like the voice speaking from his work, whether his plays, novel, short stories, poetry or essays. A verbal polymath with incisive insight, and unconventional but genuine integrity, Oscar Wilde sought to live beautifully and generously, if certainly not easily.

Despite his remarkable body of work, during his lifetime one could have forgiven Oscar Wilde for developing a persecution complex, and for this reason it is so nice (I really can’t think of a better word; Oscar, forgive me) to see his memorial, donated by an artist fan and covered – and I mean covered – with lipstick kisses, Wildean quotations and messages from fans. All of this is condoned by the cemetery, of course, and it’s just so Oscar. I went skipping around the cemetery from that point.

My route was somewhat demanding, so I didn’t find all the graves I was curious about. My only two requirements were Oscar Wilde and the commune memorial, but on top of that I found a few others. I didn’t get a picture of Collette’s tomb, though that was the first I saw, near the entrance.

For a publicity boost to kick start burials, the cemetery management had Heloise and Abelard, La Fontaine and Molière moved here. These are the tombs of La Fontaine and Molière:

Just over from Oscar, I had a lost generation moment with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.

The only artist I tracked down was Corot:

And a final celebrity in Sarah Bernhardt:

Most of these I found myself nearby in my more purposeful quests. Even so, I was pretty tired by the time I got to the far corner having barely scratched the surface. I made it to the Mur des Fédérés. The glory days of the Commune ended here, in Père-Lachaise itself, where Adolphe Thiers’ ruthless order to kill the remaining supporters culminated in a frantic chase through the graves until they were rounded up and shot against the rear wall of the cemetery. The wall is now a memorial, with many of the key players buried in individual graves facing the wall.

No single event or period haunts Paris like the Commune. The mediaeval is domesticated, the Renaissance papered-over, the Sun King appropriated, the Revolution muted, Napoleon sanitised, 19^th-century skirmishes forgotten (Les Misérables, anyone?), and one must hunt for my beloved Belle Époque. Only Haussman has fingerprints everywhere. The Great War has scarred the city’s churches and is writ large in the Parisian taste for very modern stained glass, the Occupation in living memory and spoken of in hushed tones. Only the ghosts of the Commune walk the streets of Paris unhindered, and they are everywhere; in the cafes of the Left Bank, in the churches of the Right, barricading the streets of Montmartre, in the half-dismantled Imperial monuments, and here in Père-Lachaise.

Running downhill to the memorial, facing each other across the paths, are the memorials to those killed in the resistance and deported to concentration camps.

There are at least eight or nine of these, and I found myself unexpectedly angry. It’s okay; I hadn’t just caught on to what the whole war was about, but over the past couple of years I’ve been an unfortunate witness to a surprising and appalling amount of ridicule of France and the French that inevitably focuses in on the war and covers disingenuously predictable and historically indefensible ground. It’s not something I’m typically tolerant of or laid back about (I think I scared a teen backpacker in Waterstone’s once), but above all I would like to send all those people to Père-Lachaise to stand before these memorials and ask why the loss of these lives leaves them somehow unmoved.

On my way down the hill I happened upon this family tomb.
I did a double-take, as I missed the final "t", and read it as Famille d'Enfer - which I read as "family from hell."

The metro journey back was unexpectedly scenic, with the line running above ground through much of the 20e and 19e arrondissements. I could even see the Canal St-Martin from up there!