Grave Afternoons

Paris has been called many things, with ‘City of Love’ and ‘City of Lights’ being the two most famous nicknames. Paris, however, is also a city of the dead, and especially of the famous dead.

The most famous cemetery in Paris has to be le Cimetière Père-Lachaise in the 20^th Arrondissement of the city. Not only is it the last resting place of La Môme Piaf, Gertrude Stein, Frédéric Chopin, and Oscar Wilde, it is also a surprisingly charming location for an afternoon walk. When promenading along the cemetery’s main roads, bordered by large trees that filter the sunlight, or winding through the smaller paths in between the gravestones, it is disturbingly easy to forget that this is, after all, a burying ground. The same is true for le Cimetière du Montparnasse in the 14^th Arrondissement, and Paris’ second largest cemetery after Père-Lachaise. Here, in the shadow of the Tour Montparnasse, one can pay one’s respects to Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Charles Baudelaire among others. 

            Of course, the tombstones and small family mausoleums do their best to remember a visitor of the fact that all around them are the remains of hundreds (if not thousands) of people. However, if one wants a bigger memento, one could take the short walk from the Cimetière du Montparnasse to the entrance of Paris’ Catacombes. 

 

Formerly quarries from which the stones for many of Paris’ medieval buildings (among them Notre Dame) were gotten, these subterranean tunnels were consecrated to hold the bones from several of the city’s over-flowing cemeteries on April 7, 1786.

            The walk through the catacombs, where bones are stacked almost as high as an average persons, with skulls running in between like a very chilling trim and Latin inscriptions on the walls, takes about 45 minutes. It feels a lot longer though. Especially when one reminds oneself that one is surrounded by the remains of about 6 million people. To put that in relation: in 2009 Paris had a little over 2.2 million inhabitants. So, if you feel like you need a small memento mori, Paris offers quite a few opportunities to get one.