I See Dead People

Or, at least I see where they are buried.

For my birthday, Brice gave me a 2-hour guided tour of Paris to take with him.  Since the weekend of March 17-18 was the only weekend we knew we'd both be around, I let him pick any of the tours offered that sounded interesting.

He chose Pere Lachaise Cemetery, and I'm really glad he did, because I've been dying (no pun intended) to visit it.  The cemetery, which opened in 1804, is the biggest in Paris itself and to date, one million people have been buried there.

It was a bit drizzly (ok, actually pouring) as we headed to our destination, but by some stroke of luck, the rain stopped and the skies even brightened a bit as we arrived at the cemetery just after 3 pm.  We quickly found the tour group that had started about 5 minutes earlier and started our walk of the cemetery along with about 15 other people.

We visited a lot of graves - some of people I had heard of and some of people I had not.  I knew Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, and Jim Morrison were buried here, but we didn't actually see those tombs.  However, famous graves (to me) or not, our tour guide was fantastic. She was animated and had great stories to tell almost everywhere we stopped. And, though the tour was in French, I actually understood almost everything. Yeeeesssss...my French is actually getting better!

One of our first stops was the Memorial to the Dead (Aux Morts), sculpted by Bartholome. It depicts several stages of death - fear, acceptance, resignation, excitement. (A copy of this plaster mold is at the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, which I saw last week.)

Another interesting stop was the site of Abelard's tomb.

 Taken from http://listverse.com/2011/10/27/top-10-fascinating-graves-in-pre-lachaise/,
"The story of the love between Abelard and Heloise was one of the best known romances of the middle ages. Abelard was one of the great French philosophers and logicians of his day. Being one of the great teachers of the time, he was hired to teach Heloise, a rich young noble woman. Heloise and Abelard started an affair which led to an illegitimate child and a secret marriage. When Heloise’s uncle found out about the affair, he had Heloise placed in a nunnery and Abelard was castrated. The letters the two sent to each other over the course of the rest of their lives are – justly – famous. The bones of the two lovers were buried together under a grand tomb in 1817. A tradition of modern lovers leaving letters at the tomb of these two great, though doomed, lovers has arisen."

Apparently their love created a scandal, especially because Heloise said she went into the nunnery not because of her love for God, but because of her love for Abelard. Also, apparently castrated men cannot become priests because they are not "whole," and priests must be whole (this is according to our tour guide - I'm not sure if it is 100% accurate or not).

We also visited the graves of Chopin, La Fontaine, and Moliere (La Fontaine and Moliere are right next to each other).

Chopin was Polish and French. His body is here, but his heart was removed for burial in Poland.

At La Fontaine's grave, most everyone on the tour recited "Le Corbeau et Le Renard," one of his most well-known fables. Apparently, all French school-children must memorize it (they learn a lot of poems par coeur, by heart), so almost everyone knew it. When I came home and told Ophelie and Philippe about this part of the tour, they started to recite the fable too.

Victor Noir's grave is a symbol of fertility and as you can tell from the picture, there are certain parts of his body that are rubbed more often than others...

Again, according to the Top 10 Fascinating Graves in Pere Lachaise website, "Victor Noir is more famous for his death and his grave than for his life. Noir was born Yvan Salmon, but adopted a pen name when he moved to Paris to take up journalism. When a cousin of the Emperor challenged the owner of the newspaper for which Noir worked to a duel, Noir was sent, as one of the seconds, to arrange the details of the duel. When the Prince referred to Noir and a companion as ‘menials’, a slap was exchanged, with either Noir striking the Prince or being struck by him, and the Prince then shot Noir dead. To mark Noir’s grave, a bronze statue of the man lying supine as if just shot, his hat lying beside him, was erected. This statue has since become something of a fertility symbol. Due to the naturalistic style of the sculpture there is a rather prominent fold in Noir’s trousers which make him appear to be aroused. It is said that by rubbing this area and leaving a flower in Noir’s hat, a woman is guaranteed a husband within the year. While the rest of the statue is covered with verdigris, Noir’s crotch gleams, proving the popularity of this particular myth."

We visited quite a few other graves of people whose names I didn't recognize - one was a singer and another was in film. We also saw the grave of Marcel Marceau, the famous mime. According to our guide, he may have been the inventor of the Moonwalk, and he and Michael Jackson had an admiration for each other. (Apparently if you search YouTube you can find videos of both of them, but I won't include the links because I can't access U.S. YouTube videos from France and I don't know if those of you reading this in the U.S. could access French YouTube links if I posted them.)

This tour of Pere Lachaise was definitely worth the 2 hours. Both Brice and I learned a lot and we agreed that we lucked out by getting a good guide who really enjoyed sharing the stories of each individual with us.