Sometimes, in the process of having a good time (the French would be “on s’amuse,” or to amuse oneself), you stumble upon something that takes you right out of your little reverie and transports you to another realm altogether. This kind of thing happened to me the first time I assisted my OB/GYN professor in the delivery room. There I was, fussing about whether I was using good enough sterile technique, when WHAM! Life happened! The most recent edition of homo sapiens appeared and demanded some air to breathe and a little space on the planet to become something. I stood there, holding a little piece of God’s handiwork while the world stood still to look over my shoulder at it. An epiphany, of sorts.
Today was a day like that, but it started in a rather more mundane fashion: I went jogging. Our new hotel is near the Jardin du Luxembourg, a beautiful large park built by King Henri IV for his Italian-born queen, Marie of Medicis. It has a large pool, a very Italian-looking fountain, tennis courts, pony rides, a greenhouse for growing oranges, and a gigantic palace that now houses the French Senate (the same elected body as our U.S. senate). I did 3 laps around the periphery along with 30 or so other joggers, and headed back to the room. We got ready to leave, and breakfast came just in time to wolf it down and head out to the Odeon metro stop.
We took the metro north to the Sebastopol stop and changed to the #3 line westbound. We took it almost all the way to the end of the line, and got off at the Pere Lachaise stop. Three blocks south on Boulevard de Menilmontant we met our French instructor Marguerite at the gate to Pere Lachaise cemetery. This famous cemetery is built on a former Jesuit monastery that went broke around the time of the French Revolution, I think. Many illustrious people are buried there, including rock singer Jim Morrison, opera diva Maria Callas, writer Oscar Wilde, pianist and composer Frederic Chopin , and a host of French who’s whos.
It’s really quite impressive because, while the people are all buried in labyrinthine passages underground, the surface of the cemetery is crowded with mausoleums, which my Oxford dictionary defines as “a building, especially a large and stately one, housing a tomb or tombs.” The word is Greek in origin, from Mausolos, the name of a 4th century BC king whose tomb in Halicarnassus was apparently especially impressive. It turns out that Pere Lachaise is covered with these buildings, large and not so large, of every make, model, and description. Some are very well maintained, with flowers, pictures of the deceased, plaques, inscriptions, and even little chapels inside where the family can contemplate their lost loved one in peace. Others are run down, broken down, or crumbling.
The cemetery is huge: 700 x 1000 meters, or roughly 200 football fields crowded next to each other in a rectangular shape. Even in death, Parisians repose as they lived: the entire cemetery is divided into sections, like arrondissments, with winding lanes, little street signs, stairways, alleys, and houses crowded together. Each family member is buried beneath the family mausoleum, echoing the family orientation of living Parisians.
We didn’t cover nearly the entire cemetery, though we did walk from the main entrance around the entire south side to the very back, where Oscar Wilde’s tomb is, passing Jim Morrison’s on the way. The latter is not very impressive, but is very popular with the younger set. The former is apparently also very popular, because it is covered (I mean covered) with kisses. Sort of like the Blarney Stone, thousands of girls make a pilgrimage to Wilde’s tomb, smear on some lipstick, and kiss it. The result is impressive, if not a little offensive. Graffiti really isn’t big in Paris, as the French seem to have an instinctive respect for the old, the beautiful, and the sacred; it appears to me that the offenders are Anglos mostly. The graffiti is written in English, which would seem like a dead giveaway.
While on the way from Morrison’s to Wilde’s tomb, my little epiphany occurred, not in the sense of Christ’s manifestation to the Magi (Epiphany with a capital E), but a moment of sudden and great revelation (the original meaning of epiphany in the Greek is “to reveal”). At the far southeast corner of the cemetery stand the monuments to those deported from France to Nazi concentration camps, the “Monuments Aux Deportes.” There are around 14 of them or so, most representing those who died in a particular camp, or victims from a particular group, political party or nationality that perished.
The monuments are evocative and moving, each one compelling in its own way. Some are sculptures depicting emaciated inmates doing tedious work; one has a stylized victim rising upward amid flames; others have stately obelisks or statues with plaques affixed. One, from Neuengamme camp (pictured above), reads (by my translation): “under this stone rests a few of the ashes of seven thousand French martyrs assassinated by the Nazis at the Neuengamme camp. These have died so that we can live free. Their families and their rescued comrades have erected this monument in their memory November 13, 1949.”
Eyes welling with tears, I regarded, photographed, and read the inscriptions of each of these majestic and moving monuments, my eyes ultimately coming to rest on the final phrase of the memorial to the victims of Auschwitz, the mother lode of Nazi barbarism:
N’OUBLIONS JAMAIS!
WE WILL NEVER FORGET!
And God willing, we will not.
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