Michael and Ruthie's adventure in Paris
A Visit to the cemetery
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Thursday January 15th
We made a decision to pick the rainless days for walks and the days forecasted for rain museum/indoor days. So today was rated as a sunny day and we still wanted to hang around are arrondissement, the 20th. Get to know the hood a little better.
So we decided to go the The famous cemetery south and east of us the Père-Lachaise Cemetery famous for Jim Morrison of the Doors grave, where it is considered an accomplishment for young couples to make love on his grave. Given the mean temperature of 37 degrees we felt this to be an unlikely sight this time of year. Among the other notables you may have heard of buried there are: Chopin, Champollion, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Delacroix, Bizet, Proust, Balzac, Colette, Molière.
After much consultation from our maps we were on foot and on our way.
This sculpture shows an Angel holding back the dead from the wall of the cemetery. The second pictures show an inscription which is a quote from Victor Hugo.
For you who read French fogive my translation :
'What we ask from the future is justice not vengeance.'
(This would be a fitting remark for Obama's address on the 20th)
After a few false starts we finally found our way in a gate that was open to the public
At the gate to the cemetery, like the maps sold in Beverly Hills of the homes of the stars, maps of the famous dead were hawked. We chose to wander among the acropolis unguided, allowing the serendipity of the day to be our guide. This cemetery has many of the dead in crypts larger than the average Parisian apartment.
Many in wonderful states of decay
reminding us of how unimportant the important are, give or take a few centuries. Of course, some of the important are still important to some, and since new graves are being dug today as we walk through, some of the unimportant to us, are important to some. But to us who know so few of these names, they are part of a landscape of reminders of lives lived. Cemeteries for me, are a memento of those lives. Recalling in my imagination those fresh faced youths clinging to their parents hands, as their hands were held by their children and as their children now throw a clod of earth into their open graves. I looked around at the beautiful erosion, the lichen eating away at the stone, the metals doors to the crypts either gone or rusting away but in such beautiful iron reds. Ah, I love these brief breaths that I breathe. And so it goes. A fitting place to come to, before my birthday comes.
