What are the secrets of the most famous of the million graves of the Parisian city of the dead, Père Lachaise

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Père Lachaise is the city of the dead in the middle of the city of the living, an elite district of Paris, whose population is miraculously collected from different eras, different countries, where sometimes irreconcilable opponents become neighbors. Death erases the boundaries - both those that separated the past and the present, and those that prevented us from approaching the powers that be and the stars of the first magnitude. Some of the famous dead, according to rumors, also entertain themselves by communicating with visitors - in any case, so the legends say.

Cemetery history

The Pere Lachaise cemetery itself has existed for a little more than two centuries, but the history of the land on which it is located includes much earlier and rather curious events. Since the fifteenth century, the first houses began to appear here, east of Paris and, generally speaking, quite far outside the then capital. By the seventeenth century, the territory was owned by the Jesuit order. The name - Père Lachaise - appeared thanks to the Jesuit monk, who for thirty-four years confessed King Louis XIV, for which he was awarded the highest favor: the confessor got as a gift an estate called Mont-Louis, located somewhere on the site of the current cemetery …

The monk François d'Aix de la Chaise has long since died, and the monastic garden with fountains and greenhouses, where French aristocrats loved to walk, fell into decay after the bankruptcy and the abolition of the Jesuit order, when at the beginning of the 19th century the territory was bought by the city of Paris in order to place it on it. cemetery. The old, Cemetery of the Innocents - that which was located on the site of the present quarter of Les Halles - was closed and destroyed, numerous remains were transferred to the catacombs - tunnels at the site of ancient Roman quarries near Paris, and, according to Bonaparte's decision, four cemeteries were to be opened according to the outskirts of the capital - in Montmartre, in the Montparnasse area, in Passy and along the Boulevard Menilmontand - where the Mont-Louis mansion was once located.

Opened in 1804, the Eastern Cemetery - and this is the official name of Père Lachaise - during the first years of its existence did not enjoy success with the relatives of the deceased. Then it was decided to transport the remains of some famous deceased in France to the cemetery. Louise of Lorraine, wife of King Henry III, was the first of them, but it did not work to attract interest in Père Lachaise. Then they relied on literature: in 1817, the remains of Moliere and La Fontaine were transported, and a little later - Pierre Abelard and his beloved Héloise.

The calculation was justified, and from that time on, the deceased Parisians began to rapidly fill the sections of the cemetery. By 1824, there were already more than thirty thousand burials here. To date, Père Lachaise has more than a million graves, not counting the urns with the ashes, which are in the wall of the columbarium. For two centuries, famous and even great figures of the past found the last resting place in the cemetery, the number of famous personalities whom visitors of Père Lachaise come to bow to is enormous. They are buried both under simple slabs and in luxurious crypts, some of which amaze with almost indecent luxury, others express the subtle and deep intention of artists and architects.

Therefore, now Pere Lachaise is primarily a huge open-air museum. And if the usual format of the museum usually does not allow you to forget that now is the twenty-first century, and outside the window is the world of electronic high technologies, then the old cemetery in the east of Paris is able to completely captivate the visitor with its atmosphere of the past. Old marble, stones covered with moss, dilapidated buildings, silence, broken only by the singing of birds, an endless number of streets and alleys, on which you often do not meet anyone alive - such is Père Lachaise today.

Famous graves

Even if there were no fascinating stories associated with the cemetery, they would still have been born - it is impossible for such an atmospheric place to do without legends. But stories, nevertheless, were, like legends, and when combined, they formed something like a folklore genre, into which guides are happy to immerse tourists.

Funeral March, the third movement of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2, was and is performed quite often during the funeral ceremony. It was also performed at the composer's funeral in 1849. And Chopin's heart, according to his dying will, was buried in Poland, in one of the churches in Warsaw. By order of Alfred de Musset, a romantic poet, an inscription about a willow planted on the grave was to be carved on his tombstone. It would seem that it is necessary and not burdensome to fulfill the will of the departed, but the trouble is that the willow does not take root in the place where Musset is buried, and numerous attempts made out of respect for the will of the poet cannot be crowned with success.

In the cemetery, you can find entire mausoleums, created on a grand scale and conspicuous extravagance. Other graves, from which one cannot help expecting representativeness, turn out to be modest granite slabs, the main thing in which are the names carved on the stone. Often not only the name, but also the dates are confusing - as with the tombstone of Modigliani, buried next to his wife - and not only with her. She threw herself out of the window the day after her husband's death - being nine months pregnant.

On the grave of Guillaume Appoliner, an avant-garde and anarchist who was once suspected of kidnapping the La Gioconda, there is a menhir monument designed by Pablo Picasso.

Among the most visited graves of the cemetery is the burial place of Jim Morrison, the leader of The Doors. The musician's fans come here to pay tribute to his memory in their own ways - with a guitar and marijuana. The bust that was once installed from the burial site has disappeared.

In the columbarium of the Pere Lachaise cemetery there are the ashes of those whose remains were cremated, among them is the ballerina Isadora Duncan, the wife of Sergei Yesenin, who died in 1927 by a tragic accident. It is striking that her two children - 7-year-old Deidri and 3-year-old Patrick - are buried in the same cemetery - and also after a car accident that took their lives 14 years earlier.

Rituals on graves

Some of the graves have become the center of rituals, which, despite the opposition of the cemetery administration, are constantly performed by visitors. A kind of leadership here belongs to the writer Oscar Wilde, or rather, to his grave, over which there is a monument with a sphinx carved out of stone. People come here for good luck in love - both representatives of the traditional form of relationships and those who consider themselves to be minorities. For a long time it was considered a good luck tradition to whisper your wish and kiss the Sphinx, often visitors left inscriptions made with lipstick.

But in 2011, the administration of the cemetery put up a transparent wall around the monument, which covered the stone statues; now, however, the fence itself takes kisses.

At the grave of Allan Kardek, there are always many flowers - cut and in pots. His real name was Hippolyte Leon Denizar-Rivay, he was a spiritualist, famous in the second half of the 19th century, an expert in the theory of communication with representatives of the afterlife. Recognized on the wave of interest in the occult, the author of the "Book of Mediums" at some point changed his name to the pseudonym Allan Kardek - so, according to the message he received from the spirits, the name of Riva was in the last incarnation of a druid. Legend has it that Kardek said shortly before his death. is: "".

Another "address" of Pere Lachaise, where cherished dreams can come true - the grave of the journalist Victor Noir, who was killed in 1870 by the nephew of Napoleon III Pierre Bonaparte. The sculpture on the tomb depicts Noir in the position in which he was found after the murder. With all the details - including those piquant ones that have become a reason for thousands of tourists to visit the grave and make a wish: some at the same time ask for masculine strength, others - the speedy happiness of motherhood. This requires you to rub the sculpture in a specific place.

One of the most terrible legends is associated with the resting place of Baroness Elizaveta Alexandrovna Stroganova, married to Demidova, who died in Paris in 1818. Allegedly, the will of the deceased said that whoever spent 365 days and 366 nights in her crypt would receive a huge amount of gold rubles. The main condition was not to go outside, it was allowed to receive and transfer everything necessary to the attendants of the cemetery. They say that several daredevils tried to fulfill the will of the late Baroness, but could not stand it for several days, and some even lost their minds. Of course, the stories also feature the phenomenon in the crypt of the ghost of Stroganova, and the terrible questions and answers that each of those striving for wealth had to listen to.

Many monuments and crypts of Père Lachaise, even without legends, make an eerie impression: a large number of graves from the century before last are abandoned - there is no one to look after them, stone buildings and monuments are dilapidated and crumbling.

On the territory of the cemetery, there are a great many different monuments dedicated to the victims of war, prisoners of concentration camps. There is also the Wall of the Communards, at which in 1871 147 members of the Paris Commune were shot. In a grim irony of fate, Adolphe Thiers, on whose orders the execution was carried out, is also buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery.

Epitaph on the grave Oscar Wilde reads - "". And, complementing the great classic, - on the tombstones of the stars, crowning the places of their last refuge.