Père Lachaise Cemetery might be best known as the final resting place of Jim Morrison, but take one step inside its gates and you'll realize it's much, much more than that. As the sounds of the city fade away, you'll only hear the caws of the resident ravens and the crunching of dead leaves under your feet as you pick your way through the most elegant, beautiful decay you've ever seen. Bring your camera and make sure you've charged it fully, because you won't be able to stop yourself from capturing every square inch of this amazing secret garden of the dead.
Père Lachaise is the final resting place of France’s best and brightest, collectively representing a constellation of lifetime achievements from Balzac’s La Comédie humaine to Seurat’s pointillism. But one tomb, that of Victor Noir, represents posthumous fame. The journalist was shot dead by Pierre Bonaparte (great-nephew of Napoleon), whose acquittal sparked violent public outrage. Renowned artist Jules Dalou sculpted a life-size bronze statue for Noir’s grave, depicting him struck dead, his hat fallen to the ground. But a visible bulge in Noir’s trousers has eclipsed his journalistic career, making him a symbol of fertility in this city of the dead. Women are known to leave flowers in his hat, kiss his lips, and rub his genitals—now a conspicuously oxidized protrusion.
The cemetery sprawls in all directions, impossibly massive. The stones swarm over the hills so thickly that they seem to fall on top of one another. The rich and famous of a former world live here—Edith Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt, Frederic Chopin, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Georges Bizet—and around them rest millions of entombed, buried, and cremated remains from near and far. At Père Lachaise Cemetery, the whole of the place is a testament to the unstoppable power of death, yet in each stone there is a personality—a struggle in which the extinguished life makes one final stand. And then you come to these two stones—their arms reaching and holding one another—and in isolation you must ponder the gesture, and wonder if it has made any difference at all.
On the afternoon of November 30, 1900, Oscar Wilde lost “a duel to the death” with the wallpaper in his room at Hôtel d'Alsace. "One or the other of us has to go," he said. The Irish literary genius was buried in the suburban Bagneux Cemetery, and later moved to where he now rests at Père Lachaise (an eclectic neighborhood of the dead including Jim Morrison, Chopin, Bizet, Edith Piaf, Balzac, Proust, Moliere, and Delacroix). Imposing stone walls guard this tranquil Parisian otherworld. As you proceed into its midst, the hubbub of life drifts into the background and the quiet stillness of death takes hold. Over the back in Division 89 on Avenue Carette flies the demon-angel atop Wilde’s modernist tomb. Some mourners mark their respect with a rose. Others remember by pressing their painted lips to his cold tomb. A simple kiss. And each kiss is a symbol of what one passionate admirer has scrawled on Wilde’s tomb in red lipstick: “Je t’aime Oscar!”
Père Lachaise Cemetery might be best known as the final resting place of Jim Morrison, but take one step inside its gates and you'll realize it's much, much more than that. As the sounds of the city fade away, you'll only hear the caws of the resident ravens and the crunching of dead leaves under your feet as you pick your way through the most elegant, beautiful decay you've ever seen. Bring your camera and make sure you've charged it fully, because you won't be able to stop yourself from capturing every square inch of this amazing secret garden of the dead.
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