Père Lachaise

The Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris covers 44 hectares, and is the final resting place for many famous and wealthy people. There are over 70,000 burial sites here so a map is needed, and some good walking shoes. I had booked a tour of the cemetery, but the transport strike has made it hard for guides to get into the city so it wasn’t able to go ahead. Instead I picked up a free map from the tourist office inside the cemetery and walked up to the very top of the hill to see who I could find. It is quite a beautiful place to walk through on a cloudy winters day (with or without a map), and the large black crows sitting atop the mossy tombs adds to the atmosphere. Jim Morrison from the Doors is buried here and his grave is the most popular; a little too popular perhaps because so many people stopped by to see him and pour him a beer or whisky that it is now fenced off. Oscar Wilde’s tomb also is partially fenced, with a note asking people not to write messages on it. Chopin looks very stately in marble. Victor Noir, a journalist who was shot by the cousin of Napoleon, has become a sex/fertility god in the afterlife. Atop his grave a life sized bronze statue shows him as he lay dead, and it has a rather large bulge in his trousers that people come to rub (along with his shoes and lips) in the hope that his virility will pass on to them. At one stage a fence was also erected (pardon the pun) around his grave, but there was such a huge protest from the female population that it was taken down! Some graves have been carefully tended and are easy to find even by a poor map reader. Others are in such disrepair you cannot tell who resides there. Delacroix, Proust, Marcel Marceau, Molliere and many others are visited only by the seasons now as their tomb sites are too weathered to be recognised. But maybe that is ok. Soundtrack for the day is La Vie En Rose by Edith Piaf, who is also buried here with her family.

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