"...when good Americans die, they go to Paris."

(I really must re-read A Woman of No Importance one of these days.)

I stopped at a flower shop near Père Lachaise Cemetery to get some roses. The proprietress asked me, “C’est un offre pour la cimetière?”

When I said, “Oui,” she prepared the flowers for me – took the ties off, snipped off the ends of the stems, got the majority of the thorns off, and re-wrapped the roses in paper. Not bad for 8 euros.

I really enjoyed spending a sunny afternoon in this cemetery, which sounds like an odd thing to say, I know. High stone walls surround the more than 100 acres of tombs and block out pretty much all the street noise, so it’s very quiet and peaceful inside. There are trees everywhere, and benches to sit on.

The cemetery was named after Père François de la Chaise, who was Louis XIV’s confessor. It was established by Napoleon I in 1804, although it wasn’t a popular place to be buried in at first, being rather far from the city at the time. So the People in Charge organized a big to-do to re-bury the remains of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière. Later on, the idea was repeated with the supposed remains of Héloïse and Abélard, who have quite a nice monument. (I didn’t take a picture of it because there was scaffolding all over it since it was undergoing repairs.) After these fanfare events, everyone wanted to be buried with the famous people. Today there are more than 300,000 bodies buried there, as well as the cremated remains of even more people in the columbarium.

If you take bus 69 to its last stop, you end up at Porte Gambetta, which is one of the entrances. Then, if you cross straight through (more or less), you can take bus 69 back the other way.

I left roses at Oscar Wilde’s and Chopin’s graves. Wilde’s grave was just what I would expect of him – large, art nouveau, and covered in kisses and flowers. Although there’s a notice about not defacing his grave, few seem to comply. Somehow, I think he’d like all the lipstick marks, though.

Chopin’s grave had a veritable blanket of flowers around it. An older couple was there ahead of me, and they seemed quite pleased that someone my age would appreciate Chopin. The elderly gentleman kept nodding and smiling at me while I was arranging the roses I’d brought.

I also found the graves of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Colette, and Rossini, among (many many many) others. There are quite a few Holocaust memorials as well.

I highly recommend Waiting for Gertrude by Bill Richardson, if you want to read an imaginative book set in Père Lachaise Cemetery. It features the feral cats that roam the cemetery and take on the personalities of many of the famous inhabitants.

I was following the self-guided tour in the Rick Steves Paris Guidebook, when a couple approached me and asked, in French, if I knew where Edith Piaf’s grave was. The man then launched into a detailed explanation, in ever-more-rapid French, of everywhere they’d looked trying to find her grave, complete with almost stereotypical hand gestures to emphasize the effort of their quest. Since I could only catch a word here and there of what he was saying, and since I didn’t think offering “a droite” and “a gauche” and pointing up the path would do much good, and since Piaf’s grave was my next stop anyway, I just said “On y va,” and motioned to them to follow me. I’ve got to hand it to Rick Steves and his researchers. Their directions were very precise, so I was able to find it pretty easily and offer a “C’est ca!” with what was hopefully an appropriate fingerpointing flourish at the tomb to my new friends.

I'm not into photographing headstones, but I thought the sculptures on the graves were fascinating, so here’s a little photo essay of some of them:

This is above Chopin's grave: