Louvre-Lachaise

Père Lachaise cemetery in winter. Photo: Syced, CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

Paris represents a certain kind of modernity. It is a faded grandeur that has cemented itself at the world’s avant-garde. Its buildings stand proud, but the pipes leak and ceilings sag on the interior. It was planned to impress with its innovative regularity. The metro counts itself easily across the city: 1, 2, 3, 4… Even the trees are regularly planted, lining the labelled boulevards that cast their even lines from landmark to landmark. It is by means of the dead mathematical economy of this grid that the millions of citizens teem and trample each other to get around each day.

I was unsurprised when they told me that the city’s largest green space was a cemetery. La Cimitière du Père-Lachaise is large enough that even its alleys are named and street-lit. Each sepulchre stands like a phonebox or a church; the lucky ones have their own stained glass. Cemetery sectors are crowded with names like miniature arrondissements, and every tomb is old like the houses on Parisian streets, I suppose the only difference is that these inhabitants are long passed. The glowing souls that once illuminated the city’s social life lay there too, their history is superimposed not only on the rest of the town but on this graveyard microcosm, too.

From the chapel atop the hill of Père Lachaise opens a view of the Montparnasse skyscraper and the rest of central Paris that lies below it. Through this window of the trees, the cemetery appears as the microcosmic reflection of its town. The gap in the trees becomes the threshold of the mirror. I cast myself through this surface to the first arrondissement, burrowing underneath the pavés in a metro carriage, then climbing to the surface only to redescend into the crypt-like interior of the Louvre.

Here again, I find myself caught amongst the excesses of categorised space. Each bloc is named: Richelieu, Lully, galleries, galleries, galleries. Here again, the dead and their tombs, their art, their stained glass are frozen in time and perused enthusiastically by voracious tourist visitors. Again, there is no less the impression of being lost amongst alleys and rooms that resemble each other as there is in the uniform streets of the centre. It is a wonder that life proceeds under such conditions: compressed, labelled, repeated, full. Each street corner and station thrums with its lack of fresh air. A million ancient, medieval, and modern faces cast their eyes out at me from every corner of the museum, the city, and its graveyard, watchful on the hill.