Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light Read Online Free PDF

statue of a stag and deer, and the busts of a score of forgotten men, famous in their day, stands a marble sculpture of Watteau posed beside a buxom demimonde. He seems pleased, at home, as do the drunken Silenus, falling off his mule, and the ecstatic Pan across the esplanade, whose lithe figure when glimpsed from the palace appears artfully framed by the Panthéon.
    I took another turn around the grounds, this time to admire the monuments to Baudelaire, Verlaine, Gérard de Nerval, and Delacroix. These weren’t military men or industrialists. Demigods, poets and artists, like guardian spirits, have always inhabited this park. At their feet, children spin on an old merry-go-round, pedal antique tricycles made to look like horses and royal carriages, or roar at the antics of Guignol and Gnafron at the park’s eternal puppet theater. Ponies troop up and down, followed by zealous road-apple sweepers armed with worn brooms. Businessmen and bus drivers unknot their ties and troubles and play bowls in the shade of spreading sycamores.
    As I drank in this cheerful spectacle, the bells of nearby Saint-Sulpice tolled four o’clock. Soon the gardens were swarming with perambulators, poussettes, cochecillos de niño, carrozzine , and whatever else the au pairs and young mothers choose to call a baby carriage in the Babel of languages they speak. Could it be the day-care centers had just closed? At length scores of starched-looking matrons from the luxurious apartments bordering the park were chatting away with immigrant maids and young bourgeois babysitters.
    The words of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, written more than two hundred years ago, sprang to mind: “This peaceful garden is free from the extravagance of the city, and immodest and libertine behavior is never seen nor heard … the garden is full yet silence reigns.” In truth, there is more joyous laughter in the Luxembourg nowadays than reverential silence, and I’ll bet there always has been.
    Before I knew it, the sun was dipping into the trees and the whistles of the gardiens had begun to blow. Children froze in their games. Lovers released their passionate embraces. Chess players stopped their clocks. And slowly, reluctantly, we took our leave as dusk spread above. I watched from outside the gates as gardeners, rarely seen by day, set to work with shovels and rakes, readying the Luxembourg for dawn.

A Lively City of the Dead: Père-Lachaise Cemetery

I rarely go out, but when I do wander, I go to cheer myself up in Père-Lachaise .
—H ONORÉ DE B ALZAC , in an 1819 letter
    fascination with death, what the French call nécrophilie , takes many forms, one of them so common it afflicts some two million individuals who each year enter the hallowed gates of Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris’s 20th arrondissement. Hilly, wooded, with winding paths knotted around crumbling tombs, this is without doubt the most celebrated monumental city of the dead in Europe. Surprisingly it stands within the limits of the sprawling French capital. It also happens to be about 150 yards as the raven flies from the office I rented for twenty years, which is why I became a Père-Lachaise habitué. I love many things about the place: the greenery, the lack of cars, the expansive views from looping gravel lanes and, of course, the sepulchral monuments. Père-Lachaise quietly merges ancient and modern death cults, thereby assuring itself perennial status on the top-ten list of Paris tourist sights. Peak attendance nowadays is on the newly fashionable Halloween, an Anglo-Saxon holiday, and on November 1 and 2, the traditional All Saints’ and All Souls’ days. But the procession to Père-Lachaise of curious funerary pilgrims knows no season and braves all weather.
    Amid the cemetery’s hundred lush acres stand faux Egyptian pyramids, mock Greek or Roman temples, and neo-Gothic chapels erected during the heyday of Romanticism two hundred years ago, when the cemetery opened for business. These