The World’s Most Visited Cemetery, Père-Lachaise, Paris

Zagan the motorhome’s occupants have ridden the Paris metro to see the world’s most visited cemetery, Le Cimetière du Pere Lachaise, and what a place it turned out to be. This huge cemetery contains the graves of over 800,000 Parisiens, including those of well known politicians, writers, singers, poets, adventurers, victims of assassin’s bullets, actors and everyone else you can imagine.

I’ll fess up from the start, cemeteries are my thing. Whenever we come across one, from the ornate stone and marble villages of the Catholics, to the brutally austere unmarked rocks in the Muslim deserts, I try to take the time to look around and reflect. Weird to some folks, but the thought “memento mori”, “remember death”, is essential to my mind, in trying to live a good life. 

A few people we’ve had the good fortune to meet on our travels no longer breathe air on this Earth. Some knew they were ill, and were taking the opportunity to chase down long-suppressed dreams to travel. Others knew nothing of what lay in store, but were still deliberately living life according to this maxim: momento mori: remember death. They could have carried on working, earning more money, building a bigger and safer nest egg, which might have been the biggest mistake of their lives. Death comes to us all, and it’s critical to reflect on that fact when making each decision we come across: one day I’ll die, with that in mind, should I really take the ‘safe option’?

I digress, back to business! Our friends Rose and Paul have headed back to Australia. Just over a day after leaving, while we’re still in the exact same spot we’ve been for days, they’re almost directly beneath us, on the other side of Earth in Australia. Weird. After they’d gone we decided to stay in Paris a few more days as we’re liking it here. The benign weather’s helping, as is the discovery of the suburb of Suresnes just over the Seine from us, with its cafes and restaurants. One afternoon we popped over there to enjoy a €16 delicious lunchtime menu du jour of confit de canard (fat-preserved duck), watching the street market slowly pack up alongside us.

Yesterday we took to the Paris public transport system, using the shuttle bus from the campsite to get to the Porte Maillot metro stop, about 20 minute’s away, where we bought one-day Zone 1 and 2 Mobilis tickets for €7.50 each from the ticket office. These give unlimited metro and bus travel in the centre of Paris (out to the Seine), and include the Funiculaire de Montmartre at Sacre Coeur. By the end of the day we’d taken 6 metro rides, nipped up the Funiculaire and taken the 244 bus back to the campsite.

We arrived at Pere Lachaise from the Philippe Auguste metro stop, which is close to the cemetery entrance with the ‘Conservation Office’. This has free toilets, a drinking water fountain and gives away maps to the cemetery and I dare say will have very knowledgeable staff if you’ve questions on where to find people. Yep, a map for a cemetery, it’s that big.

The cemetery’s split into divisions, separated by named ‘chemins’ or pathways. The map shows the locations of the 85 most visited tombs, including Frederic Chopin, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde. The 23 most visited memorials are also listed, including deeply moving ones to the victims of the Nazis at Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Mauthausen (and many others – Europe was covered in death camps 70 years or so ago).

We did what most folks do, I suspect, and picked out the famous names we knew and wandered along to see their graves. They were easy to spot when you got close, as someone else was already there! Even in death the celebrity status of some Pere Lachaise dwellers caused the maintenance staff problems: folks have taken to kissing Wilde’s tomb covering it in lipstick (it’s now protected with a plastic wall, which is also covered in lipstick kisses). Jim Morrison’s grave had to be guarded at one point as folks were knocking back drugs and making love on his grave (looked rather uncomfortable to me).

One lesser-known chap, journalist Victor Noir, was assassinated at 22 and now has a bronze statue of him fallen with a bullet to the chest laid on his grave. As a tour guide was telling some other visitors at the time we arrived, the artist gave him a ‘semi erection’ under his clothes, which ladies wanting fertility or a better sex life had taken to rubbing, as evidenced by a rather shiny crotch (Ju stayed clear). A fence was popped up at one point, but had been removed following protests.

Another unusual statue caught our eye of two guys laid under a cloth, hand in hand as we later found out, balloonists Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel. These unfortunate adventurers were in a balloon called Zenith back in 1875, and were trying to climb higher than anyone had ever done before. This, they didn’t achieve, and died in the attempt. A third balloonist survived. 

As we were about to leave the cemetery the sound of music caught our ear and we turned to see a funeral party gathering outside the crematorium. Turbaned chaps were taking the steps into the huge building, while other mourners in white greeted friends outside. Tears flowed, as the coffin was lifted and carried inside a poignant reminder the cemetery’s still in active use. Momento mori folks, it comes to us all.

Cheers, Jay