I took a walk yesterday to Pere-LaChaise Cemetery, which is not too far from where I'm staying, with Steph and Alek, here in Paris. I had remembered it from my first trip to Paris 16 years ago, but wanted to see a few things that I missed back then, like the grave of Oscar Wilde. Along with Wilde's grave, the 106 acre cemetery contains the graves of Balzac, Edith Piaf, Modigliano, Chopin, Jim Morrison, Moliere, Marcel Proust, the painters Delacroix and Ingres, and many other notable folks. It is by far the most eerie, mystical enclosure I have ever encountered.
Marcel Proust‘s grave was a simple, elegant slab.
Eugene Delacroix‘s was equally stately, decorated with a single pink flower.
Two musicians at opposite ends of the musical spectrum reside in Pere-Lachaise. Chopin's grave is much less visited than Jim Morrison‘s, whose location can be found by looking for the crowd and following a trail of graffiti on other graves to his rather unimpressive resting place.
But by far the most impressive grave in the cemetery is Oscar Wilde‘s rectangular, Art Deco monolith. His name, lightly engraved on the front is adorned with thousands of lipstick kisses from visitors to the grave site, many of which have faded to a dull purple or brown. As in life, he remains an original.
The cemetery is a maze and mosaic of graves worthy of the legends of prostitution, necrophilia, and black magic that surround it. It's an amazing place to visit. While walking through Pere-Lachaise with its tall, black spindly trees, iron gates, stone paths, and murders of crows, it often feels as if you are being watched. Perhaps you are.
But Pere-Lachaise would fit better in no other city in the world than Paris, whose long, gray afternoons serve to actually make it more beautiful.
Oscar Wilde: “Biography lends to death a new terror.”