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11.13.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine dated November twenty
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twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading
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service intended for people who are blind or have other
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disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
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join me now for part one of the article titled
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why Paris designed its peculiarly popular grand graveyards to evoke
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a celebration of life amid all the death cemeteries that
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inspired parks serve as unlikely tourist attractions in the City
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of Light, and prove that the end of the line
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is just the start of a new story. By Peter Ross.
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One summer afternoon in pere Lecheise, the sprawling cemetery in
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the east of Paris, a white haired man, neatly dressed,
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was tending his own grave, first away a spider web
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that had formed in a corner of his chapel, a
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small box like structure that he had chosen as his
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place of rest. He then swept the slabs that in
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time will be lifted to allow his coffin and that
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of his wife Anne, to be lowered into the earth.
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On a stone shelf was a large camera sculpted from
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black granite, its lens so polished that the man, a
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photographer named Andre Schabbat, could be seen in reflection. Finally,
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he stooped, not without effort, to lift a few strips
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of film brought as offerings by tourists, then wound these
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around the black metal gate at the front of the chapel.
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Shabat had longish hair and was wearing a gray check
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jacket with the purple pocket square. A Laika camera was
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slung over his right shoulder. Now eighty four, he has
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been documenting sumity since he was thirty, when he suffered
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three hard deaths in one year, the loss of both
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his maternal grandparents, his grandfather by suicide, and his new
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born daughter. He has traveled widely in pursuit of this passion,
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taking a quarter of a million pictures. If I photograph
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every cemetery in the world, he told me, half joking,
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then I will never die. He fears death and does
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not believe in an after life, yet he yearns for
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some sort of eternity. I want to be not forgotten.
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The solution a prominent location in pere Laches, which receives
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around three million visitors, a year. His chapel, built from
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limestone in eighteen fifty for one Anna Margherita Kutsch, was
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repurposed by Shabbat in twenty thirteen. Pear Leches, being prestigious graves,
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are in high demand. Space newcomers is limited, but places
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become available through various means. Every year, the cemetery repossesses
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around one hundred and twenty plots, often because they have
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fallen into disrepair. The remains are exhumed and moved to
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an ossuary, which was what happened with the bones of
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Madame Kutch. The monument is usually broken up unless it
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has historic or esthetic value, as this chapel does. Sitting
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on a busy route close to the burial place of
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the French pop star Elaine Bauchan, who died in two
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thousand nine, Schubat's grave is hard to miss. A q
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R code on the front directs the curious to his website.
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When he is gone, he will not be gone. People
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will still say his name, wonder about his life. Look
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at his black and white pictures of angels and rubs,
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crosses and skulls. The show, he said, with a smile,
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must go on. Paris, the city of light is also
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the city of death. It is a place where the
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dead are mythologized and memorialized with operatic intensity. The historic cemeteries,
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not only pere Leches, but also monmart and Montparnasse, among others,
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are theatrical and elegaic. The lives of celebrated citizens hymned
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in bronze and stone. The famous catacombs, with subterranean streets
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of unsung skulls, have a different grandeur, austere and uncanny.
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The very name seems to strike a lachrymose note. Paris's
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greatest aria, however, is pear Leches. This is the best
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known cemetery in Europe and perhaps the world. The graves
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of Edith Piaff, Frederic Chopin and Oscar Wilde are among
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the most visited of its seventy thousand or so to
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twos domes. Wild lies beneath a flying demon angel, as
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its sculptor Jacob Epstein described the figure. He carved it
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in London from a twenty ton limestone block, and in
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nineteen twelve had it transported to Paris, where it was
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immediately controversial. Its visible genitals considered indecent. In nineteen sixty one,
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the offending parts were smashed off by vandals, two English women,
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the story goes, and have been missing. Since do you
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really keep Oscar Wilde's balls on your desk? Is a
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question the cemetery manager is sometimes asked. He always denies it,
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and all I can add, having been in his office,
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is that I myself did not see them. Per Leichez's
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popularity is thanks in Part two such legends. It is
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a place of story as much as stone, but perhaps
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more to the way it looks. It's worn and melancholy
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charm hits the instagram's sweet spot. If it fits our
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idea of how an old cemetery should appear, that is
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because it invented the idea. Pere Lachaise opened in eighteen
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o four, the same year Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte decreed that
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France's cemeteries should be built just outside city limits. There
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was to be an end to burials in mass graves.
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No more corpses grammed into churchyards already full to bursting.
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The dead had been a problem for Paris since the
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mid eighteenth century. A notorious incident in seventeen eighty scandalized
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the city when a basement wall on Rue de la Lingerie,
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bordering on the Cemetery of the Holy Innocence, collapsed inward
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under the thronging weight of the dead. The neighborhood's stank
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of rotting flesh, and people fainted in the street. The
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solution was to close the Sune Panemey and transfer its
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occupants to a disused quarry outside the city. In seventeen
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eighty six, the municipal ossuary, soon to be known as
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the Paris Catacombs, came into use. The problem of dead
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bodies became even more acute during the French Revolution. Where
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to store the abundant harvest of the guillotine. As the
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historian Aaron Marie Legacy observes in her book Making Space
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for the Dead, the only thing worse than a pile
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of decomposing bodies in the middle of one's neighborhood was
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a pile of decomposing bodies without their heads. Such situations
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were not just disturbing, but a public health crisis. Vapors
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released by bodies were believed to be the cause of disease.
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The new cemeteries established under Napoleon outside the city walls
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were nothing like the grim churchyards. The first of these.
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The Cemetery de Leste, as Pere Laches was known in
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its earliest days, was built in a hilly area on
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Paris's eastern outskirts, eventually renamed for Francois Deis de la
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Chies father Lachise, a prominent Jesuit priest who once presided
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over the estate on which the cemetery was built. It
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was designed as an elegantly landscaped garden, a place where
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one could breathe as well as grieve. The cemetery now
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receives eight thousand visitors most days, and as many as
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twelve thousand on Sundays, but it is big enough to
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absorb those numbers and still seem peaceful. Its one hundred
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and ten acres are laid out like a quaint little town,
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complete with cobbled streets and attractive signs. You can get
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lost there, especially in the so called romantic sector, where
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gridlike avenues give way to small winding paths and parakeets
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screeched through the trees. This new type of graveyard soon
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proved influential, Pere Lachse's father to the rural cemetery movement
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that saw large burial grounds open in the countryside near
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America's rapidly growing cities. There were a great many more
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citizens and a great many more dead. The first of
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the new cemeteries built to accommodate them, Mount Auburn and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
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was directly inspired by the layout and monuments of Pearliches,
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and it became a popular spot for Bostonians keen to
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stroll the grounds and enjoy the pleasures of landscape. In
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the mid nineteenth century, Mount Auburn was a major tourist
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destination in the United States. Its success led to the
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establishment of similar cemeteries, including Oak Hill and Washington, d c.
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And Greenwood in New York, and the popularity of such
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verdant spaces and spy in turn the establishment of sprawling
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urban parks. Thus, a Parisian cemetery, in a curious way
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is the grandfather of Manhattan's Central Park. Grand pere Leches.
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On a warm morning in June, I walked out of
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the metro beneath the station's pretty Art Nouveau sign and
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passed the unturning sails of the Molarouge. Commuter traffic growled
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over the Pont Coluncours, a bridge that since eighteen eighty
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eight has cut through Montmartre Cemetery. Observed through the bridge's
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steel lattice, The stone roofs of the funerary chapels resembled
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a townscape. A sign explained that the cemetery had opened
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in eighteen twenty five, the third such burial place to
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be established in Paris, after Pere Lachse and Montparnasse. They
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had to do two rough drafts before they made the
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prefect cemetery. The curator, Pascal Cassandro joked when we met
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in his office just past the entrance. Monmart In, the
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north of Paris, is the district most associated with the
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city's artistic history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
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and this is reflected in its graves. The painter Edgar
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de Gat is buried here, as is Hector Burliot's. The
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cemetery was the composer's favorite place to walk, especially in
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the rain. In eighteen sixty four, he had the remains
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of his first wife, the Shakespearian actress Harriet Smithson, exhumed
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and moved to the vault that he intended as his own.
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The grave digger bent down and with his two hands
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picked up the head already parted from the body, Burliotes
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recalled in his memoir. Then, bending down again with difficulty,
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he gathered in his arms the headless trunk and limbs
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of Blackish man, which the shroud still clung to, like
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a damp sack with a lump of pitch in it.
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Burillios was sixty and ready, even eager to follow Smithson
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into the grave, which he did five years later. Around
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three quarters of the cemetery's visitors are tourists. Most of
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the rest are locals and people visiting loved ones, some
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so regular that staff know them by the hours they keep.
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Le Dame de fuit Ours used to visit the grave
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of her parents at eight every morning before work, but
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now she comes at two p m and is known
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as the Dame de Carteur's Ours. Then there is the
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gentleman who arrives at three forty two p m with
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an air of somber distance and walks to his wife's
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resting place. When he leaves at four eighteen p m.
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He is much more approachable. He stops and chats, may
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even tell a joke, than crosses the street to a cafe,
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does a cross road puzzle, and goes home. Montmart has
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a resident population of tens of thousands of dead people
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and some forty living cats. Chief among the latter is Victor,
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a large black and white tom who can often be
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found curled in sleep on a sun warmed gravestone. Victor
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is le patron, the boss of the cemetery, a position
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of supremacy earned through long service and ready claws. He
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once held territory by the extraordinary tomb of Dalida, the
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singer who took her own life in nineteen eighty seven
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and whose grave is topped by a life sized marble statue,
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but he has since annexed the zone around the cemetery's entrance,
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where snacks are easier to come by. Cats inhabit Parisian
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cemeteries in part because of an unfortunate tradition of abandoning
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unwonted pets there. It is said that in the nineteen
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eighties as many as four hundred were living among Montmartre's graves.
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Since nineteen seventy eight, volunteers with an organization called Le
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Col Duchat, the Cat's School and its offshoots have cared
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for cemetery strays, feeding them, neutering them, taking sick animals
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to the vet and giving them names at present. For example,
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the cemetery of Saint wuiin a little north of Montmartre,
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is home to Mercedes, Smurfette, Clarence, Honey, the sewer Guy, Melo, Missi, Mucchi, Calucha,
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and zorro. I was told this by Natalie Rossi, the
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treasurer of Le Colduchat de Peris, who is involved in
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their care. The serene atmosphere of a cemetery is conducive
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to a cat's rhythm of life, she explained. They can hunt, nap,
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and slink unseen through the undergrowth, and they benefit from
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the concern of people, often very lonely, who bring them
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food while visiting the graves of loved ones. A cemetery
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to these small creatures is a place not of death,
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but of life, and Rossy suggested that can help us
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see it as such too. The presence of cats in
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the cemetery brings warmth and life to the place, just
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like singing birds. There is nothing more esthetically pleasing than
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a cat lying languidly on a grave. It is common
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to find offerings at the graves of the famous dead,
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and common for traditions to develop and evolve. Every July third,
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the anniversary of Jem Morrison's death in Paris, a crowd
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gathers by his resting place in Perliches. From the open
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window of a nearby ground floor apartment, drifts an eerie guitar.
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Then comes a tambourine shake and the familiar doomy baritone.
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This is the end, beautiful friend. The doors Frontman's funeral
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in nineteen seventy one is said to have lasted less
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than ten minutes. The filmmaker Agnes Varda, later buried in
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another Parisian cemetery, attended and said she was one of
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only four people there. Since then, Morrison's plot, fenced off
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and topped by an unremarkable stone block, has become a
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kind of martyr's grave, sometimes attracting greater numbers and riskier
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behavior than the cemetery has been able to handle. Twenty
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or so years ago, management considered it a headache that
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he was buried there. Now they consider it an honor,
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and they recently took steps to make his tomb more
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accessible by digging up four nineteenth century graves and landscaping
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the area so that wheelchair users could draw here. And
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why not the vibe these days is comradeley, and the
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problems of sex and drugs at the grave are in
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the past. One hears because the fans got old. Life
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moves on even in a graveyard. When I first went
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to Montparnasse Cemetery twenty five years ago and visited the
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grave of the great French singer songwriter Sarage Gainsbourg, his
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stone was covered with objects that suggested a desire to
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share his pleasures, half empty bottles of champagne, half smoked cigarettes.
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On returning not long ago, I found none of that. Instead,
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there was a fresh cabbage a reference to his record
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lome a tete de choux The Man with the Cabbage Head,
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and a metal pail full of subway tickets left in
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tribute to Le puin counur de Lilas, a popular nineteen
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fifty eight song about a metro employee driven to thoughts
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of shooting himself by the futility of endlessly punching holes
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in billets. Jane Berkin, Gainsburg's former partner, collaborator and muse,
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died in twenty twenty three. Her ashes were interred only
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a short walk away a cubbly stuffed monkey. I noticed
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sat on her grave, an homage to the cover of
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the classic Gainsborough album Histoire de Melody Nelson, on which
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she holds a similar toy. Berkin placed the original monkey
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next to the singer in his coffin to act as
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his guardian in the after life. As soon as a
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famous person is laid to rest, they are absorbed into
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the history of the place. Narrative is greedy. It demands
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new characters and story lines. I ask theirri Le Roy,
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one of Paris's best known cemetery guides, how long he
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waited before a burial before including a celebrity in his tour.
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I don't wait, he replied. Montparnasse, unlike Hilley, Perelicheise and
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Montmarch is flat. The Montparnasse Tower, a huge, dark office block,
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looms like Cubrick's monolith. Beyond the cemetery wall, to the
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right of the main entrance is the shared grave of
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the intellectuals Jean Paul Sautre and Simone de Beauvoirs. He
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died in nineteen eighty. She outlived him by six years,
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during which time she addressed him in print. You are
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in your little box. You will not come out of it,
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and I shall not join you there. Even if I
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am buried next to you, There will be no communication
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between your ashes and mine. It is a supremely dispassionate view,
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and yet their simple pale headstone has become, in a
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way a symbol of human connection and love. It was
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covered when I visited in bright red lipstick kisses. Lipstick
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had also been used to color the name on the stone.
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The top of the grave could hardly be seen for
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bouquets of flowers and many notes, most in Chinese characters
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written on the back of postcards, scraps of paper, and
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cardboard strips torn from a box of sanitary pads. Kissing
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this grave is a new phenomenon. Cemetery workers wash the
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lipstick off, but it keeps coming back. The craze is
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perhaps driven by social media, and yet it seems to
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belong to an older tradition of shrines and holy relics.
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A few young women were gathered around the grave, taking
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pictures of one another and writing notes that they placed
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among the flowers on the stone. This woman is Simone
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and she is a feminist in Paris, one told me
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in English, using the present tents, we are from China,
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and we learn from her. We get power from her.
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In China, there are a lot of unfair situations between
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men and women. So after reading her book The Second Sex,
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we learn a lot. You came here because of the book,
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I asked, yeah, exactly, And after they had gone, I
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took pictures of the notes and later had them translated.
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They all thanked Beauvoirs in the warmest terms for the
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strength and inspiration of her work as a girl from
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a small town. One wrote, I finally achieved my dream
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of coming to a bigger world. Another said I had
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to come to France. I had to see you. This
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is the power of cemeteries. They offer the false intimacy
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of the grave. We stand at the place where a
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body lies and feel a stronger connection to that person
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than we would elsewhere. It is a familiar experience in
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the places where our own loved ones rest, but it
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is also true of strangers who have somehow become important
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to us. In this way, cemeteries are libraries of the dead.
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Each stone is a life to read and ponder. How
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we read a graveyard depends on who we are. Different
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eyes and minds see it in different ways. For example,
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When I walked one morning through pere Laches in the
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company of the journalist and author Camille Peh, I found
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a different cemetery from the one I thought I knew.
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Pet was showing me Mayr Lches mother Lches, a name
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she had coined to express her feminist reading of the space.
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While waiting for her to arrive, I had looked at
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the pere Lichse map displayed just inside the main entrance
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of the one hundred and fourteen famous names. Fifteen were women,
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All those grandzonumes, not many granfemmes. Pet campaigns to correct
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the imbalance, raising public awareness of women whom she feels
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deserves to be better known. Antoissin All Saints Day, November first,
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the grounds of French cemeteries are bright with chrysanthemums and
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crowded with people visiting the graves of family and friends.
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In recent years, Peh has organized a Feminist to Saint
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as a public event, she and fellow activists take flowers
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to a dozen of the dead and speak about their
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lives and achievements. It's an act of remembrance and celebration,
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she said. It's about telling their stories in a joyous way.
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She took me to visit a few. First, we called
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upon the photojournalist Gerreta Tarro, who was killed in nineteen
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thirty seven while covering the Spanish Civil War, and then
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we walked to the resting place of the American writer
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and art collector Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklis.
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Peh pointed out that eminent men often have sculpted likenesses
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on their graves. The novelist Balzac, for instance, is depicted
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with strong features and splendid leonine hair, but female statuary
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is mostly restricted to pleruses, weeping women, blandly beautiful symbols
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of grief. A man can be seen on his grave
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as a living person, pe said, women just represent ideas
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or are at the service of mourning. The great man Steyne,
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who in life appeared to be hewed from stone, would
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make a fine bust. The final stop on our tour
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was the grave of painter and sculptor Rosa Bonneur, who
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died in eighteen ninety nine. Her tomb is decorated with
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a swooping palm branch. A little paint brush had been
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tucked behind the bronze leaves, perhaps the start of a
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new tradition. Other visitors seeing it may do the same,
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and in this way the tomb will become ever more visible.
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Six years ago, when pat first started showing people around Parlichees,
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almost nobody knew who Boneu was. They knew the name,
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but couldn't place her. Now she and her work are
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much better known. It is a form of resurrection, a
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reputation reborn in part from the place where the body lies.
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Peh put it a different way. Graves have a life
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of their own. The workers were on strike, so the
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catacombs had closed to the public, but I still could
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go down. Eileen Fairmanieu said she would take me. It
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would be just us and six million dead. I say
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six million, but it could be three million, or four million,
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or five The precise figure is uncertain. The catacombs are
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a series of ossuaries places for keeping bones, and Ferminieux
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is in charge of communications, a spokesperson for Skulls. We
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met at the entrance a former toll house in the
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south of Paris, and she led the way to a
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spiral staircase that would take us into a former quarry
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sixty five feet beneath the streets. You really feel she
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said that you are going down, down, down, in time.
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One hundred and thirty one steps later, we were lower
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than the metro, lower than the sewers. We had gone
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below the belly of the city and were passing through
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its guts. The catacombs received their first bones from the
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Cemetery of the Holy Innocence. The exhumations from the cemetery,
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where citizens had been laid to rest since at least
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the twelfth century, were carried out at night and took
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more than a year. A seventeen eighty seven illustration by
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Jean Nicholas Sobret depicts an infernal scene. Light and smoke
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rise from a great pit, illuminating the homes and the
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church overlooking the cemetery. Priests chant the Office of the Dead,
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while a coffin is raised on ropes and a cart
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stands ready to rattle the bones over the Paris streets.
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Just beyond the city walls. The remains were tipped down
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a deep quarry shaft, which is why none of the
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skulls in the catacombs have their lower jaws. They broke
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off on impact. The souls of the dead were treated
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with greater care than the bodies. The quarry was consecrated
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to make it fit for Christian burial. Limestone quarries, some
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dating to the medieval period, honeycombed the ground beneath the
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great city. In the second half of the eighteenth century,
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houses and streets started to collapse into the galleries below.
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To save citizens from the abyss, the quarries were condemned
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and stone pillars were constructed to hold up the roof.
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This required further tunneling, the result of which is that
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the plan of southern Paris as it was in late
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seventeen hundreds has its mirror image below ground. This concludes
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readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day. Your reader
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has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have
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a great day.