The cemetery is an open space among the ruins,
covered in winter with violets and daisies.
It might make one in love with death,
to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
Death tourism: let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs among the tombs and rubble of Cimetière du Père Lachaise. That’s what they call it when you schlep across Paris to gawk at graves, and maybe that’s fair, maybe that’s exactly what it is, but so what? The stones here don’t give a damn about my motivations. They’re too busy being gorgeous, crumbling, covered in the kind of patina you can’t fake, the accumulation of a hundred wet winters and diesel exhaust and the breath of ten million pilgrims searching for something they probably can’t articulate.
This place is the real deal. Not some sanitized memorial park with regulation headstones lined up like tract housing for the dead. Père Lachaise is chaos made permanent: crypts stacked on crypts, crosses leaning drunk against mausoleums, cats prowling between the monuments like they own the joint. Which they do.
Some come here for Morrison or Wilde or Piaf, sure. Everybody does. But that’s just the gateway drug. The real kick is getting lost among the nobodies, the forgotten merchants and minor poets whose grand monuments are now just moss farms, whose immortality projects failed spectacularly. There’s something honest about that failure, something that cuts through all the pretense.
The place smells like wet stone and earth and time itself. Cobblestone paths wind uphill past enough wrought iron to build a battleship, past angels missing their heads, past flowers rotting in old wine bottles. It’s beautiful and it’s ugly and it refuses to apologize for being either.
This is what endures: not the fame, not the carefully constructed legacies, but the trees pushing through marble, the graffiti on celebrity tombs, the absolute indifference of stone to human vanity. You walk out different than you walked in, a little more awake to the whole absurd enterprise.