‘The Secret Life of a Cemetery’ by Benoît Gallot is an homage to Père Lachaise
The Secret Life of a Cemetery is a paean to the renowned Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. This slim volume by Benoît Gallot, its enthusiastic head conservator since 2018, is as crammed with quirky facts as the 110-acre cemetery is crammed with burial plots.
Père Lachaise is also awash in “tombstone tourism.” About 10,000 visitors a day seek the graves of some 4,500 notable figures in this “open-air Who’s Who.” The most visited gravesite in what Gallot calls “a five-star hotel for all eternity” is Jim Morrison’s, The Doors frontman who was buried there after his death in 1971 at age 27. Other popular tombs include those of singer Edith Piaf, composer Fredéric Chopin, writer Marcel Proust and novelist and playwriter Honoré de Balzac. Author Oscar Wilde’s gravesite is a big draw, in part because of the castrated funerary statue of a flying sphinx that adorns his tomb. Gallot writes that the sphinx’s stone testicles provoked a public outcry when the sculpture was unveiled about a dozen years after his death. One rumor has it that they were removed by two appalled English women. Another myth, which Gallot denies vociferously, is that they’ve been used ever since as paperweights by successive conservators.
Given the large crowds, security is a constant concern. Morrison’s grave became a pilgrimage site of such inappropriate, “unrestrained revelry” that a protective fence had to be erected around it in 2004. In the latest unsavory trend, visitors stick chewing gum on a nearby tree, which is now swathed in protective bamboo.
Gallot reminds us sternly that although Père-Lachaise is tantalizing for sightseers, filmmakers, taphophiles (people fascinated with epitaphs) and local flaneurs, its primary raison d’être is as a working cemetery, a placeb2%sm.hzing get thres gdlots.
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