To Live and Die in Paris

We spent much of our last visit to Paris, during the NATO bombing of Kosovo in the spring of 1999, wandering two of the city’s great cemeteries – Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse. I enjoy cemeteries, probably because I can still leave whenever I wish, and the sprawling ones in Paris, with their landscaping, neighborhoods and shrines, are reminiscent of cities within a greater city, ideally suited for walking and meditation.

It was Easter weekend, early in April, and the chestnut trees that line many of the streets in Pere Lachaise were in blossom. Mostly we wandered, though I wanted to visit Proust’s grave, which we found surrounded by elderly Italian women on tour. They spoke, took pictures and ate sandwiches wrapped in white paper. They were friendly and laughing and one agreed to photograph us as we stood beside the stone marking the resting place of Proust and his family. Randomly strolling the cemetery we found the graves of Apollinaire, Max Ernst, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde. The most shrine-like was Jim Morrison’s, where flowers, letters, candles, bottles, photographs and CD covers were heaped as though in preparation for a fire (Yes: “and our love become a funeral pyre”). Morrison’s stone and the others nearby were densely covered with grafitti, as they had been when I first saw them in 1973, two years after Morrison’s death.

I went to Montparnasse Cemetery mainly to visit Beckett’s grave. His stone resembles a low Japanese table cut from black marble. Its reflective surface returns the mourner’s stare and is marred only by the names and dates of Beckett and his wife, Suzanne Descheveaux-Dumesnil. Laid on the stone was a single desiccated red rose. Also in Montparnasse we visited the graves of Julio Cortazar, Alfred Dreyfus, Sartre and Baudelaire. We had trouble finding Baudelaire’s, because it is marked by a needle-shaped stone on which the largest name, near the apex, is Jacques Aupick, the poet’s detested step-father.

In his essay “Imagine Paris,” John Berger, who has lived in France for more than 30 years, writes:

“Often cemeteries are unexpectedly revealing about the life of the living. And this is true of Pere Lachaise. One needs a map, for it is large. Sections are built like towns – with streets, crossroads, pavements: each house is a tomb or a mausoleum. The dead rest there in furnished property, still protected from the vast exterior. Each tomb has a license and a number: Concession Perpetuelle Numero…It is the most urban and the most secular cemetery.”

After roaming the cemeteries and the city’s other sights, we sat for hours in sidewalk cafes and watched the human parade, and ate grand meals three times a day – French cuisine, of course, but also Italian and Argentine. In my bag I carried books by Borges and one of Paris’ closest observers, Walter Benjamin. Perhaps this is a useful prescription for living: Do not shun the dead. Remember, visit and honor them. But do not shun the living or their pleasures. In And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, Berger writes:

“Human happiness is rare. There are no happy periods, only happy moments.”

Paris, for us, was a bundle of happy moments, one I have relived by writing this.