City of Ghosts

If you spook easily you would need a dose of sang-froid to spend an afternoon in PÈRE-LACHAISE CEMETERY as we did a few days ago. It is virtually a city of the dead, complete with a crisscrossing network of miniature streets, each lines with sepulchers and graves, many of which look like little stone houses. On a quiet afternoon in March the chestnut trees are all bare, and—I am not making this up—a flock of ink-black cawing crows are swooping up and down in the air, darting back and forth above the somber, silent graves.

The cemetery holds the mortal remains of some 300,000 French souls (plus one very famous American whose fire went out while on tour in Paris). You can follow trends in architectural and sculptural style over the past two hundred years in the way the graves and stone memorials are designed. The nineteenth century seems positively creepy in its funeral statuary. Weeping naiads and drooping willow trees adorn Greco-Roman motifs in an eerie union of Thanatos and Arcadia. At Père-Lachaise the favorite structure from the mid nineteenth century was a miniature stone house, often with a classical pediment and Dorian columns, and a cast iron door. By now many of the families who commissioned these memorials have died out or lost interest in maintaining them. (How much time recently have you spent visiting your great great great great grandmother’s gravestone?). This results in the truly lamentable sight of hundreds of these little houses left in deplorable condition, the iron doors rusted and left ajar, memorial plaques cracked or broken, and dead leaves and trash piled up inside. Poe would be right at home here.

But other graves are meticulously cared for. Abélard and Héloise, the great medieval scholars and lovers, have their own little portico, and they lie next to each other on top of a sarcophagus, a chaste twelve inches separating them. Yes Montand and Simone Signoret are also resting together in the same small plot. Guillaume Apollinaire’s grave is the most imaginative and—pardon my French—tasteful. It’s a raw granite stele on which is inscribed one of his poems. Delacroix’s is awful—a charcoal-black funerary bed. I’m sure there exists a precise term for this thing, but I don’t know it and don’t want to. It gives me the creeps.

We don’t do the pilgrimage to Jim Morrison, but we note with some pleasure that of all the tens of thousands of graves, the one that it is by far and away the most adored, the most visited and the most heaped with flowers and demonstrations of affection is that of a composer, “Fred. Chopin” (as the inscription reads). For all the politicians and wealthy businessmen and puffed up egos that take up room in this seemingly endless cemetery, the ones people gravitate to are those of the artists, and of those, it’s the ones who gave us beauty and a singular awareness of our humanity that receive the most visits. Thus, on this unremarkable weekday afternoon in March with tourist season months away, there is nonethelss a clutch of people clustered around Chopin’s grave, and there is a fresh pile of flowers beneath it.

Everyone who has made it through a nocturne or mastered one of his waltzes or ballades wants to have a digital photo taken in front of that simple marble edifice.

We get separated from each other, trying to find Sarah Bernhart. The little city of the dead is a maze of tiny paths and endless gravestones, and even with a map, it’s easy to get disoriented.

My cell phone rings.

“Where are you?”

“I’m on Boulevard Étrangers Morts pour la France. I’ll meet you at Balzac, and then we should go to Marcel Proust. Can’t not pay my respects.”