Adventures with the dead

Today we went to Pere Lachaise cemetery, the final resting place of many notable figures including Oscar Wilde, Colette, Proust, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, and many more. The weather today really set the perfect ambiance for our somewhat morbid adventure - gray skies threatening to rain, a biting chill in the air, and cawing crows all about the cemetery.

The cemetery is huge and filled with opulent monuments, tombs, crypts, graves, and family mausoleums. Most of them are old and in a state of beautiful decay. Personal highlights include Colette's grave (which I visited ten years ago) and FINALLY seeing the memorial dedicated to revolutionaries of the Paris Commune of 1871. After the commune was squashed, they were lined up against a wall and shot in the back by a firing squad.

Nearby that memorial were multiple memorials dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust. The sculptures on at least a few of those memorials were of skeletal figures in various states of suffering. Intense and humbling, to say the least.

Oscar Wilde

Wreath on a Grave

Holocaust Memorial

JB Clement, Author of Le Temp de Cerises, a song sung by revolutionaries in the late 1800's

The memorial to the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune of 1871