The Secret Lifetime of a Cemetery is a paean to the famend Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. This slim quantity by Benoît Gallot, its enthusiastic head conservator since 2018, is as full of quirky details because the 110-acre cemetery is full of burial plots.
Père Lachaise can also be awash in “tombstone tourism.” About 10,000 guests a day search the graves of some 4,500 notable figures on this “open-air Who’s Who.” Essentially the most visited gravesite in what Gallot calls “a five-star resort for all eternity” is Jim Morrison’s, The Doorways frontman who was buried there after his demise in 1971 at age 27. Different in style tombs embrace these of singer Edith Piaf, composer Fredéric Chopin, author Marcel Proust and novelist and playwriter Honoré de Balzac. Creator Oscar Wilde’s gravesite is an enormous draw, partially due to 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 a couple of dozen years after his demise. One rumor has it that they had been eliminated by two appalled English girls. One other delusion, which Gallot denies vociferously, is that they have been used ever since as paperweights by successive conservators.
Given the big crowds, safety is a continuing concern. Morrison’s grave turned a pilgrimage website of such inappropriate, “unrestrained revelry” {that a} protecting fence needed to be erected round it in 2004. Within the newest unsavory development, guests stick chewing gum on a close-by tree, which is now swathed in protecting bamboo.
Gallot reminds us sternly that though Père-Lachaise is tantalizing for sightseers, filmmakers, taphophiles (individuals fascinated with epitaphs) and native flaneurs, its major raison d’être is as a working cemetery, a spot of consolation for the bereaved.
Of Père-Lachaise’s 3,000 new occupants per yr, almost 2,000 are cremated within the cemetery’s crematorium. Stays find yourself both in a distinct segment bought within the columbarium, or sprinkled on the cemetery’s Memorial Inexperienced put aside for that goal. The remainder are interred in household tombs or within the uncommon plots that open up as a consequence of expired “concessions” — a time period that refers to plots purchased for particular time period lengths underneath a system codified by Napoleon I in 1804. These concessions changed the widespread graves through which our bodies had been piled unhygienically in churchyards all through Paris for hundreds of years. In considered one of his higher turns-of-phrase, Gallot describes the mass stacked graves as “macabre mille-feuilles.”
The Cemetery of the East, as Père Lachaise was initially referred to as when it opened in 1804, was the primary to satisfy Napoleon’s new laws. It was designed by architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart on the location of a Jesuit retreat and the house of Father Francois d’Aix de La Chaize, confessor to Louis XIV. Brongniart strove to protect the pure panorama of the Charonne hillside, and his naturalist design ushered in a wave of rural cemeteries. Finally identified merely as Père Lachaise, it was expanded 5 occasions, most lately in 1850. Its 110 acres now accommodate round 1.3 million our bodies and 4,000 timber.
I picked up this insider’s view of Père Lachaise hoping for one thing akin to Patrick Bringley’s 2023 memoir, All of the Magnificence within the World, a superb behind-the-scenes guard’s-eye view of the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork. However Gallot’s extra workmanlike prose and infrequently trite observations, faithfully translated from the French by Arielle Aaronson, is best at capturing the nuts and bolts of this establishment than its hovering spirit.
The creator comes from a household of grave stonemasons within the small French village of Bray-sur-Seine. He was skilled in regulation, and says his associates ribbed him when he took his first job within the demise care trade as assistant basic counsel for the Metropolis of Paris Division of Cemeteries: “You are digging your individual grave, man!” However he writes with pleasure of the various tasks of his place, and touts some great benefits of elevating his 4 youngsters on the plush cemetery grounds, an “open air museum” crammed with lovely statues, effigies, busts, and mausoleums.
He’s significantly excited by the rebirth that has adopted the banning of all pesticides in 2015, making Père Lachaise not only a place of demise however a spot of recent life, “a haven of biodiversity for native vegetation, bugs and even mammals.” His pictures, which seize the hidden lifetime of the cemetery — fox kits, cats, stone martens, and among the 60 species of birds that he is noticed on his night strolls — created a sensation after he began posting them on Instagram throughout the pandemic. Many are reproduced in black and white within the English version. The French version, with its full-color pictures and annotated website map, is much extra charmant.
Gallot is so delighted by the acclaim that he jokes about sometime placing a QR code linked to his Instagram account on his grave “so that individuals might proceed to ‘like’ me in demise.” Graveyard humor.
Heller McAlpin has been reviewing books for NPR since 2009.
