Cemeteries of Paris

Cemeteries of Paris

( Originally Published Early 1900's )

Is there any other city in the world where so many people voluntarily go to the cemetery like this on a given day? There are twenty-three cemeteries listed in Paris. Many of them can only be explained by the fact that they served the villages which lay outside the city itself. Even Père-Lachaise was outside the wall of 1784.

Pere Lachaise

Père Laohaise was Louis XIV.'s fashionable confessor (Landor has a diverting imaginary conversation between these two), and the cemetery took its name from his house, which chanced to occupy the site of the present chapel. The ground was enclosed as a burial ground as recently as 1804, which means of course that the famous tomb of Abélard and Héloise, to which all travellers find their way, is a modern reconstruction. The remains of La Fontaine and Molière and other illustrious men who died before 1804 were transferred here.

Père Lachaise cannot be taken lightly. The French live very thoroughly, but when they die they die thoroughly too, and their cemeteries confess the scythe. There may be, to our thinking, too much architecture ; but it is serious. There is no mountebanking, nor is there any whining. Death to a Frenchman is a fact and a mystery, to be faced when the time comes, if not before, and to be honoured. On certain festivals of the year there are a thousand mourners to every acre of Père Lachaise.

And then one enters seriously upon this strange pilgrimage among names and memories. Chopin lies here, his music stilled, and Talma the tragedian; Beau-marchais and Maréchal Ney; Cherubini and Alphonse Daudet; Balzac, his pen for ever idle, and Delacroix; Béranger who made the nation's ballads, and Brillat-Savarin, all his dinners eaten ; Michelet, the historian, and Planchette, the composer of Les Cloches de Corneville; Daumier, the great artist who saw to the heart of things, and Corot, who befriended Daumier's last years; Daubigny and Rosa Bonheur, Thiers and Scribe; Rachel, once so very living, and many Rothschilds now poorer than I.