Something Thoughtful

   Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

                                     THE CONTINUING ALLURE OF GRAVEYARDS

 

On this blog, way back in 2014, I remember writing a posting called Let’sTalk of Graves, of Worms and Epitaphs. In it I explained my ongoing interest – not to say fascination – in cemeteries, especially old ones. I see them not only as peaceful places where one can ruminate, but also as repositories of history and reminders of past tastes. But when I wrote that posting, and having been to Paris for the first time since I was a child, I dwelt only on the Montmartre cemetery. Since then, and obviously before the pandemic changed the world, I have visited Paris three more times. I wrote the following item to celebrate visiting other Parisian graveyards, and submitted it to the travel section of a magazine. But alas, the magazine went out of business during the first round of the pandemic and the article was never published. So here I am presenting it to you as it was writ.

 

  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  *.  * 

            On our first trip to Paris, we spent some hours in the Montmartre cemetery way up on its hill. We dutifully saluted the graves of Hector Berlioz, Francois Truffaut, Heinrich Heine and other worthies. We weren’t sure we were impressed by the ostentatious red-stone grave of Emile Zola. For sentimental reasons, I kissed the monument to Marie Du Plessis  - the courtesan (i.e. high-class call girl) upon whom Dumas fils based his “lady of the camellias” in the play we now call Camille.

            On our next trip to Paris, I just had to see the Montparnasse cemetery, not too far west of the Seine, so that I could honour the grave of France’s greatest 19^th century poet Charles Baudelaire. Funny grave it is, too. Most of the inscription features Baudelaire’s unimportant stepfather General Aupick, with the great poet as an afterthought. At Montparnasse we could also visit the cynical genius Guy de Maupassant, the imposing crypt of Camille Saint-Saens and the more modest graves of Cesar Franck and Samuel Beckett. I had fun making a rude gesture at the double grave of those two charlatans and collaborators Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

A passing Frenchwoman said reprovingly “You’ll be remembered for that.”

“I certainly hope so,” I said.

 

But it wasn’t until our third trip that, after a long trudge up the Rue Henri IV, we at last got around to visiting Paris’s greatest necropolis, the Pere Lachaise, a huge 110 acres, east of Menilmontant and filled with more illustrious corpses than you could rattle a skeleton at.

What is this strange attraction of cemeteries? One thing I can tell you is that it is not morbid. It does not play to some sort of death wish or cult of the dead. Of course when you’re in Paris you spend hours in the famous art galleries and museums. You idle along the banks of the Seine looking at the bookseller’s wares in their lock-up boxes. You go to the opera. You visit crowded jazz clubs in the Marais (right bank) and even sweatier and shabbier jazz clubs west of the Sorbonne (left bank). You over-indulge in restaurants and wonder what’s left on your credit card. And you visit historic churches and discover that not all eminent people are buried in graveyards. Rene Descartes is interred in the church of Saint Germain des Pres.

All these things we have done in Paris.

But what if you want a quiet and big open space, with not too many visitors? Where can you enjoy the fun of the chase, as you look for the names of people celebrated or notorious? Go to an ancient graveyard, of course. For historical or cultural reflection, they are ideal. Plonk me down in London’s Highgate cemetery (home to the remains of everybody from Christina Rossetti to Karl Marx) or in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery (John Keats) or in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery (nearly every major Irish political figure – and it plays a big part in James Joyce’s Ulysses). For harmless hours, I’m in pig’s heaven.

So we walked through the gates of the Pere Lachaise on an overcast, but not rainy, winter’s day. The trees were bare. Crows cawed in them. As we wandered around the cemetery’s alleyways, paved with large, rough cobblestones, we thought it looked the way graveyards look in melodramatic movies with Victorian settings. But here it was in objective reality. Nature imitating art.

Almost at once we were accosted by a shabby-looking, middle-aged Frenchman who offered to take us on a quick tour of some of the more famous graves. Aware that he was a beggar, we took up his offer anyway and he rushed us to the tombs of Chopin, Balzac, Rossini and the painters Delacroix and Gericault (whose mausoleum is covered with a large bronze reproduction of his one famous painting, “The Raft of the Medusa”). But he wanted to rush while we wanted to amble, so we paid him off and proceeded on our more leisurely way.

We found ourselves rating tombs. Most modest tomb? That of the novelist Colette. Starkest and most memorable tomb? The rough-hewn, jagged monolith over the remains of the poet Apollinaire. Most seemly and orderly tombs? Those of Moliere and La Fontaine, in a section of the cemetery that existed before the Romantic era and the mania for self-aggrandisement in funerary design. Most hard-to-find tomb? We helped an Italian couple to search for the double grave of the artist Mogdiliani and his pregnant girlfriend, with whom he committed suicide. It turns out to be three rows in from the main path.

And most godawful ugly tomb? Regrettably, it’s the hideous square thing Jacob Epstein designed for Oscar Wilde’s grave, rendered even more hideous by the Perspex barrier that has been put around it to ward off graffiti-artists. I’m grateful that there is at least a decent monument to Oscar in Merrion Square in Dublin.

The part of the cemetery that sobers you is its south-eastern corner, where there are monuments to resisters who were executed in the Second World War (many of them communists). The graves that might make you tender-hearted belong to three women. Gertrude Stein’s modest tomb, with pebbles piled on it, Jewish fashion. Poor Sarah Bernhardt’s grave – once the idol of France and the most famous actress in the world. Now her neglected tomb overgrown with moss. Sic transit gloria mundi etc. And then the most loved grave of all. Edith Piaf’s, obviously, smothered in fresh floral tributes. Unlike Bernhardt, she lived in an age when her performances could be recorded and are still enjoyed by millions.

After hours of epitaph-hunting, there’s no moral to draw from our visit to the Pere Lachaise. Only that touring a graveyard in winter light is a restful thing to do. And you meet the ghosts of very interesting people.