Père Lachaise Cemetery (19)

Okay, my heart starts beating a little faster now that I get to write about Père Lachaise! Don't think I'm morbid or anything, but my visits (yes, two and soon to be three) to this famous cemetery may have been made during a five day stretch during which I also visited the Saint-Denys Basilica where all the French royalty is entombed and the Parisian catacombs.

Yeah, it's a little creepy and morbid, and I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I enjoyed it so much. There's something necromantic in me that's trying to come to light (ha! Light, death, ha!).

First, this cemetery is really beautiful. There are such charming tombs that it would be a shame not to show you at least a few. Some, I think, look more like little churches than graves. Further, the cemetery is a veritable little city within a city! The walks book calls the cemetery the "Parisian Necropolis," quite a fitting name.



As a fan of the "fantastic"--that is to say, I want to read ghost stories for a living (keep your fingers crossed for me that it works out)--I was most charmed by the tombs that look like they've been broken into... or out of!

Really creepy, huh?

Buried in Père Lachaise cemetery are all kinds of famous people like Chopin, Molière, Jim Morrison, the painter Georges Seurat, and of course Oscar Wilde, whose grave people kiss, either out of "appreciation" or as the "ladies' revenge" for his apparently sometimes misogynistic writings.

I am most excited about the cemetery because it figures prominently in two of my favorite works.

The first is a vignette from the film Paris, je t'aime, a French-American collaboration film that tells a love story for 18 of the 20 "arrondissements" (major neighborhoods) of Paris. This is one of my favorites from the film, and takes place in Père Lachaise! Check it out.

The second is the story I finished approximately four hours ago, called "The Room in the Dragon Volant" by Sheridan Le Fanu, an excellent tale I think everyone should read.

But that's just morbid me.