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

are my favorite monuments, and their setting is wonderfully evocative. Moss-grown, lichen-frosted, and shaded by venerable, voracious vegetation, the graveyard’s first tombs were made in imitation of the antique, specifically of Rome’s tomb-lined Via Appia Antica. They too are now antiques—proof that time can render true what begins as falsehood.
    Scattered among these proto-memorials are Second Empire neoclassical piles worthy of Paris’s notorious 1853-to-1870 prefect, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Fewer in number but more remarkable are the eerily delicate Art Nouveau fantasies from the turn of the nineteenth century. The modernist Le Corbusier–style slabs salted around are devoid, like that worthy Swiss genius, of any perceptible humor or humanity. Each tomb faithfully mirrors the times in which it was conceived. There are even a handful of postmodern pastiches—a cat’s cradle of Plexiglas, steel, and stone, for example—expressing the confused brutalism of recent decades.
    The cemetery’s upper third marches across a plateau crowned, outside the cemetery’s walls, by Place Gambetta. In keeping with the precepts of the 1850s when this section was developed, the layout is a deadening, dull grid. Had it been easy, or even possible, Baron Haussmann’s minions would have done in the 1850s to Père-Lachaise what they did to Paris as a whole: tear up the meandering alleys and asymmetrical tombs, replacing them with an efficient checkerboard of plots for the disposal of the dead. But the modernizers failed, much to the relief of nostalgic lovers of Vieux Paris such as Victor Hugo, or Joris-Karl Huysmans. In his 1880 Croquis parisiens , Huysmans lashed out against the “tediousness” of Haussmann–style symmetry, seeing in the higgledy-piggledy Père-Lachaise and its rural surroundings “a haven longed for by aching souls.”
    Ironically, the thousand-plus seditious Communards massacred by Napoléon III’s troops amid Père-Lachaise’s tombs in 1871 are buried in the cemetery’s symmetrical Second Empire section. Haussmann, enemy of Communards and old Paris alike, wound up in Division 4, an older, less symmetrical area. He lies not far from such utterly un-Haussmannlike free spirits as Gioacchino Rossini and Alfred de Musset. Subversive Colette, lover of women and weaver of intrigue, is practically his neighbor, fifty yards away. There is no such thing as justice, poetic or otherwise, in death, the great equalizer.
    What has preserved unpredictable Père-Lachaise from the compulsive straighteners such as Haussmann is a legal concept that, like religious faith, defies logic and in so doing attempts to deny the temporal nature of human life and institutions. That concept is the concession à perpétuité , literally a concession granted forever by the city of Paris to families who own plots at Père-Lachaise. This was a novelty in the late 1700s, when the plan to create cemeteries outside Paris was hatched. Until then nearly everyone was thrown into common graves: only important churchmen, nobles, and the very rich rated individual burials, usually inside a church, under the paving stones.
    But new ideas on hygiene arising from the Enlightenment’s scientific advances, plus a renewed familiarity with the burial practices of the ancient Romans, led Paris’s administrators to ban inner-city cemeteries and under-floor burials in favor of sites beyond the city walls. The immediate stimulus for these reforms, however, came from the collapse of the cemetery of the Innocents (in the square of the same name near today’s Les Halles shopping center). When the bones and rotting corpses of millions of Parisians—about seven hundred years’ worth—burst through the graveyard’s walls into the surrounding neighborhood, administrators scrambled. They built the catacombs in abandoned quarries. Later, in 1804, they inaugurated the Cimetière de l’Est. “Eastern Cemetery” is the official name of Père-Lachaise