There are fourteen cemeteries in Paris proper, of which three—Père-Lachaise, Montmartre, and Montparnasse—are particularly well known. Last week we took the metro out to Père Lachaise, the city's oldest, largest, and most famous.
Père Lachaise gets its name from a Jesuit priest, Père (Father) François de la Chaise, who was King Louis XIV's confessor and who convinced the monarch to help him buy some land outside the Paris walls for a Jesuit retreat. The Jesuits were eventually evicted and the property was bought by the city to build a graveyard. In 1804, Cimetière de l'Est was inaugurated to serve the eastern arrondissements and was later renamed Père Lachaise. But even with the new name it did not attract many funerals, so the administrators started transferring the remains of a few famous people, including La Fontaine and Molière, as well as the 12th century lovers Abélard and Héloïse, who share a stunning tomb.
The site of the graveyard is on a hill, and it's divided into, well, Divisions, which are like small city blocks, surrounded by cobblestone streets that have names like Avenue Principale and Avenue Circulaire. Some Divisions, especially at the top of the hill, are perfectly square, but my favorite area was along the winding Avenue des Acacias.
When we arrived we bought a cemetery map at the gate and started looking for "famous people." As we walked around, people would approach us and ask for directions to someone's grave. We got one request for Chopin and a couple for Jim Morrison, who seems to get way more visitors than he deserves and definitely more than many of his neighbors, causing tensions with the families of less famous individuals. His grave is continuously vandalized, and is blocked off so that people cannot get too close to it.
Looking for famous graves is not like driving around Beverly Hills looking for celebrities' houses. Famous French people don't necessarily have magnificent graves, and after visiting and being let down by a few of the more famous ones, like Honoré de Balzac's and Oscar Wilde's, we decided to just tour the site without the map.
And then today we were in the Place de Clichy area and decided to walk to the Sacré Coeur Basilica at the top of Montmartre in the 18th arrondissement and unexpectedly ran into the Montmartre Cemetery, which I did not know either. It's a lot smaller than Père Lachaise but not less impressive, and has it's own roster of notable interments, such as Edgar Degas, Alexander Dumas (fils), Hector Berlioz, Léon Foucault, and Charles Henri Sanson, executioner of Louis XVI. Emile Zola used to be buried there but was moved to the Panthéon in 1908.
Also interesting is the fact that here some of the dead live under bridges. The bridge is part of Rue Caulaincourt, which crosses one corner of the cemetery on a viaduct.
