Seven Ages of Paris (74 page)

In death democracy reigns. Close to the unadorned tombstone of Communist boss Thorez are massed the sumptuous vaults of the haute bourgeoisie, enemies of the French left. For while the scions of the pre-revolutionary nobility still tend to be interred (like Charles de Gaulle) in their own country parish churchyards, the remains of the bourgeois deux cents familles occupy a substantial part of Père Lachaise’s forty-four hectares. In row after row stand the mausoleums carrying the hyphenated names of great banking, mercantile and industrial families. Together they present the greatest collection of architectural singularity in all Paris. Miniature pyramids rub shoulders with gothic chapels decorated with gargoyles and lacy pinnacles. A reduced Madeleine vies with what seems to be a replica of the Panthéon or a tiny Taj Mahal; another caprice is a pyramid supported by turtles and illustrating on its four sides an ibis, a bullock, a car and a sunburst, the whole bombe surprise topped by a giant egg. One imposing tomb was commissioned by a chess enthusiast to accommodate an additional thirty-one occupants—on the ground that the chessboard holds thirty-two pieces.

Over this labyrinth of extravagance rises the imperious alabaster tower erected by a tycoon, at least half as high as the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. But few mausoleums are stranger than that inhabited by the Duc de Morny, Napoleon III’s natural half-brother, great lover and statesman of the Second Empire, which seems to illustrate every known style from Rome to Armenia, with a hint of the Bogumil heretics of Bosnia, and is crowned by four protuberances shaped like public drinking fountains or giant golf-tees. The closest approximation to it, though on a larger scale, is the cemetery crematorium, with poignant rows of plaques registering the incineration of such and such an inconnu killed in the Allied air-raids of 1944. Once the site of a Muslim enclave set up by Napoleon III—who was vainly seeking friends—to please the Turks, it was designed as a grotesque copy of Istanbul’s Aya Sofia, its furnace spiralling up from four ersatz minarets. Père Lachaise today still exerts itself to attract the bones of Muslim oil potentates. Behind the crematorium lies Isadora Duncan, the American dancer of the 1920s strangled by her scarf in an open-top car; while just across the way is Marcel Proust, concealed in the bourgeois family tomb constructed in honour of his father’s success as a professor of medicine.

From the imposing vulgarity of the nineteenth-century bourgeois repositories one turns almost with relief to the discreet imperial dignity of the tomb of Napoleon’s favourite actor, Talma, and to the less lavish memorials to the great writers, painters, musicians, scientists, soldiers and explorers. It is here that reside the foremost historical treasures of Père Lachaise. But the whereabouts of these distinguished men and women, strewn across the cemetery, are often hard to locate; the tomb of Alphonse Daudet, for instance, lies almost entirely hidden between two bourgeois family crypts. The gardiens are helpful, although they sometimes seem to follow whims of their own. On my first visit, in the 1960s, it was Sarah Bernhardt I particularly wanted to find, but they insisted on marking my map with the name of Edith Piaf, then recently buried (together with her stuffed rabbit, squirrel and lion), to the accompaniment of thousands of mourning fans. On my next visit, Colette, under a simply marked pink stone, was the name pre-empting all others.

Some groups, such as the marshals of Napoleon (the most eminent French soldiers, Turenne, Foch and Bonaparte himself, are of course enshrined in the Invalides), are conveniently clustered together. Here in Père Lachaise, as might be expected—given its founder—one can find names evoking the martial glory of the Empire: Davout, Gouvion Saint-Cyr, Ney, Grouchy and Masséna; Nansouty and d’Hautpoul-Salette, commanders of the celebrated cavalry charge at Austerlitz; and General la Valette, married to a niece of Empress Josephine, and condemned to death by the second Restoration, but saved by his wife, who switched clothes with him in prison. Though executed like Ney, Murat lies in a new crypt built by the family, which flourishes to this day; here too is the no less ill-fated General Huchet de la Bedoyère, who helped Napoleon escape from Elba and who was executed after the Restoration the following year, aged only twenty-nine. Another illustrious name in the Napoleonic section is that of General Hugo, father of Victor—who resides, however, at the Panthéon, the highest honour Paris can accord her grands hommes.

Among the florid extravaganzas of the deux cents familles stand the more simple effigies of a M. and
Mme.
Pigeon, laid out on their sarcophagus like two Plantagenet crusaders, side by side in bed beneath a stone sheet—a model of French bourgeois constancy. But the most famous as well as the cemetery’s most senior incumbents are those doomed twelfth-century lovers Héloïse and Abélard. After many separations they lie together at last under an open gothic canopy (though whether the remains are really theirs has been questioned). Dating from 1701, an inscription composed by Héloïse’s successor as Abbess of the Paraclete Convent speaks with a surprisingly tolerant sympathy of “the love which had united their spirits during their lives, and which was conserved during their absence by the most tender and most spiritual letters.” Then there is Rachel Félix, the beautiful and impassioned actress of Louis-Philippe’s reign, who exchanged the pithiest of love letters with the Prince de Joinville. After seeing her on stage, the Prince despatched his card to her: “Where? When? How much?” Her equally concise response was, “Your place. Tonight. Free.” Aptly enough, her tomb bears just the succinct inscription “Rachel.”

Just beyond the main gate and inscribed with equal modesty is the tomb of a more recent lover who paid the price in full: President of the Republic Félix Faure. In 1899 the screams of a woman in extreme distress were heard coming from the President’s office. Orderlies who dashed to the rescue found a naked President of the Republic dead of a heart attack, his hand clutching with the fixity of muscles in spasm the hair of a sobbing redhead, in equal déshabille. (Some visitors feel Faure’s tomb is more deserving of the inscription accorded to the soldiers killed on the battlefield—Mort en brave.) A short distance away is the more recent grave of the pop singer Jim Morrison of the Doors, dead—mysteriously—at only twenty-eight. Here bands of devotees are likely to be found today rolling joints against a backdrop of Doors lyrics, declarations of love and paeans to drug use graffitied on to every surface within reach.

Right at the other end of Père Lachaise lies yet another penalized for the pursuit of illicit love: Oscar Wilde. In death poor Oscar underwent the same mutilation that Abélard suffered in life—a vandal emasculated the ugly Epstein angel that stands over his grave. Oscar’s manhood was later restored, and protected by a glass cage. A sign in English and French now says: “Do not deface this tomb; it is protected by law as an ancient monument and was restored in 1992.”

Near the outer wall lie the graves of two more recent literary partners, from the 1920s, in the “Love that dare not speak its name”—Gertrude Stein, patroness of the Lost Generation, and her “tiny, nimble and mustachioed” lover, Alice B. Toklas. Surprising, too, is the number of expatriates who—like Wilde—are buried in Père Lachaise. One is the renowned English roué and eccentric Lord Henry Seymour, founder of the exclusive Jockey Club but also one of the most popular figures with the Parisian proletariat of the mid–nineteenth century, who immortalized him with the jocularly appropriate sobriquet of “Milord l’Arsouille” (roughly, Lord Crapulence or Ruffian). His favourite pastime seems to have included shooting cigars out of the mouths of his servants with a rook rifle; putting itching powder in the clothes of his fencing master; and being boorishly rude to that unappealing last of the Bourbon monarchs, Charles X. He seems to have used his mistresses as sleeping potions. To one he wrote:

My dear Claire,

Come to Sablonville at 9 a.m. John [the valet] will introduce you into my chamber. Sit near my bed and watch well over my slumbers. Your beautiful eyes will perform miracles, calming my long-disturbed sleep.

Henry.

Milord l’Arsouille died miserably in the middle of a platonic affair, of anthrax. His half-brother, the fourth Marquess of Hertford, reputedly the richest and meanest man in Paris, also lies in the family vault at Père Lachaise; as does his natural son (it was a clan that went in for illegitimates), Richard Wallace, a man who did much to atone for the family shortcomings through his exceptional generosity to the needy during the Siege of Paris in 1870, later providing the city with drinking fountains for her poor which are still to this day known as “Wallaces.” Two distinguished nineteenth-century British admirals also ended their careers in Père Lachaise: Sydney Smith, who inflicted upon Napoleon one of his earliest defeats at the Siege of Acre, but subsequently became an ardent francophile, dying in Paris; and Alexander Cochrane, the officer responsible for burning down the White House during the War of 1812.

Scattered among the vaults of the deux cents familles, the various great representatives of the arts make an imposing list: Molière, La Fontaine, Musset, the eccentric poet Gérard de Nerval, who trailed a tame lobster on a lead, and Honoré de Balzac. “Friendship and glory are the only inhabitants of the tombs,” wrote Balzac; while he had his hero Rastignac bury the penniless Père Goriot among the ranks of wealthy bourgeois that fill the avenues of Père Lachaise. (Père Goriot ends with Rastignac looking down from the cemetery on the great city lying below and issuing his famous challenge: “Paris, à nous deux maintenant!”) Transferred from defunct cemeteries within the old walls, Molière and La Fontaine now rest side by side, in two unassumingly dignified caskets. Alfred de Musset, whom debauchery carried to Père Lachaise at the early age of forty-seven, was blackballed from Milord l’Arsouille’s Jockey Club because his horsemanship was below standard; but on his death at least one of his ambitions was realized—that of having a birch tree planted to provide his grave with shade. Every summer evening Musset’s birch used to be lovingly watered by the gardiens, but eventually it had to be replaced. Alongside Musset lies Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the Second Empire creator of modern Paris—so applauded by some but condemned by others for destroying the old centre of the city.

There are also the composers Bizet, Cherubini and Chopin (Maria Callas embarked on death here, but her ashes were later removed to be scattered on her beloved Aegean; Rossini, too, was transferred to his native Italy); and the painters Corot, Daumier, Géricault, David, Delacroix and Ingres. In contrast to Musset’s birch, fresh geraniums always seem to adorn the tomb of Chopin, renewed year in and year out by some anonymous admirers. Strangely enough the one person in Père Lachaise to attact even more attention than Chopin is a celebrated medium of the Second Empire, Allan Kardec, whose Stonehenge-like monument is often festooned with flowers by believers—apparently in hopes of transferring to themselves his physical potency. Another contemporary of Kardec’s with a special appeal for the fetishist is Victor Noir, a journalist shot down by an enraged Prince Napoleon in 1870, whose death provided a cause célèbre that made the Empire totter. The guidebook notes of Noir’s darkened bronze effigy that “a certain part of the body shines brightly, thanks to the caresses of sterile women.” It is not entirely clear why a defunct journalist should be held capable of such wizardry. A less sought-after writer, but one who exacts the compassion of fellow strugglers in Père Lachaise, is the Abbé Delille. An Académicien at the age of thirty-four, Delille was forced by the Terror into exile, where he married his strong-minded governess. She used to lock him up until he had finished his quota of verse each day; the strain seems to have proved too much for his eyesight, and he died blind in 1813.

Among the great actors and actresses here, Sarah Bernhardt has an honoured resting place at Père Lachaise, while a less enlightened age denied poor Adrienne Lecouvreur (mistress to Marshal de Saxe) access to hallowed ground despite the protests of Voltaire, so she still lies interred beneath the intersection of the Rues de Bourgogne and de Grenelle on the Left Bank. Close to the “Divine” Bernhardt lie together two more recent thespians, heartthrobs of mid-twentieth-century France—Yves Montand (born Ivo Livi) and Simone Signoret (born Simone Kaminker).

Interspersed among the famous, some tragic inscriptions catch the eye, such as that on the tomb of a bereaved family man to a deceased wife, mother and daughter: “This tomb encloses, hélas, the three things which made the happiness of a father and a husband.”

Finally, there are the scientists and explorers: Champollion, the “Father of Egyptology,” who began deciphering the Rosetta Stone in 1822; Claude Chappe, the inventor of the semaphore, who when his patent was contested flung himself into a sewer in 1805, aged forty-two; Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1727–1813), the biochemist who introduced the potato to a reluctant France. Potatoes had previously been thought fit only for animals, but Parmentier was so persuasive that soldiers had to be called in to guard his own stocks; several new recipes were named after him, and his tombstone bears a bas-relief of potatoes and a chemistry still. The Parisian inventor of the gas-filled balloon, Professor Charles, appropriately lies in Père Lachaise. Also keeping company with the Professor is one of the earliest aviation casualties,
Mme.
Blanchard, killed in 1819 on her sixty-seventh ascent, when she was accidentally brought down over Paris by a festive rocket.

Unless you have a family vault with a concession perpetuelle, it is difficult to obtain a lodging at Père Lachaise today. Plots can be “leased” short term, and after five years are cleared and relet, the remains deposited in a central ossuary. The cemetery is heavily overcrowded with some 10,000 tombs and the space was further reduced in 1874 when a tunnel of the Ceinture railway beneath it caved in, scattering corpses over the tracks; after that the whole section was emptied and turned into an avenue. Gaston Palewski, one of de Gaulle’s most senior colleagues, confided to me in the 1960s that he had just applied for a shady plot, but had been told that he could only be placed on the waiting list and—to his great distress—could not even be guaranteed a site “with a view over Paris.” On that same occasion, Nancy Mitford teased Palewski, her faithless lover, that she was sure that a space would be found, as “Every once in a while they dig up the old bones, and then grind them up to make cosmetics for Chanel.”