Cimetiére du Pére Lachaise, Paris > Reviews > City of the Dead

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I don’t usually visit graveyards for a fun day out, but this was in the nature of a pilgrimage. I’ve always been fond of Edith Piaf’s songs, and after I’d read the biography written by her half sister, Simone, I felt I understood her to some extent. Her early years were deprived and full of abuse, her health was always poor, and you could see why she destroyed herself with booze, drugs and generally hard living, and why she treated the men in her life so badly. In a sense, she was a monster, but one forgives her a lot. I was to be in Paris for a few days, and I decided to visit her grave in Père Lachaise cemetery.

You take the Metro to any of three stations : Père Lachaise, Gambetta or Philippe-Auguste, in east Paris. The Metro is easier to cope with than the London Underground, and if you plan to use it much you can buy a booklet of tickets, un carnet, to save money. The area is a bit rough according to the Parisians, with a large immigrant population, but no-one menaced me in any way, and I had a good, cheap lunch at an excellent Afro-French restaurant. Then I went into the cemetery grounds. But it’s no ordinary boneyard. This is a necropolis. And totally fascinating. Have look on

www.france-andom.com/escapades/perelachaise/pagesen (a view from above)
www.victorian.fortunecity.com/tollington/ 4/aug98/augcem (general stuff)

You find yourself in an timeless little town, with paved streets, trees lining their sides, street lighting, and along the roads little house after little house, containing the coffins of the dead, sometimes entire families. Now and again there would be something hugely ornate, or exotic like some of the Chinese tombs I saw. It was autumn, a bleak, dank, misty day, and the trees were almost leafless. Condensation plopped off them into the silence, a funereal accompaniment to my footsteps. Impossible to believe that the bustling quarter of Ménilmontant was so nearby. Not a sound could be heard. It was a most melancholy yet fascinating scene. As I walked along the dismal avenues, I began to be aware of the vast size of the place. Few living people were about, and slightly neurotic thoughts came into my head. I could be in some Kafkaesque situation, doomed to wander among the dead for ever. Cats slunk about here and there in the shadows, and a superstitious mind could have entertained sinister thoughts about those, as well.

But then, suddenly, the sun came out, and I was in front of the huge monument under which lies Oscar Wilde. It is indescribably ornate, not to say vulgar, and the intended splendour was a bit marred on this occasion by someone’s having castrated the huge reclining statue. Serves him right for flashing his rather large bits so blatantly. I dare say they patch him up again from time to time. Now I was finding names of other people I’d heard of. Here was Jim Morrison. Near him, alive, squatted a freaked-out French hippie, smoking something that smelt like burning rugby socks, and apparently doing his best to send his brain on the fast track to outer space. I found Chopin, de Musset, Balzac, Rossini, Colette, Hugo, politicians galore, Napoleon’s Marshall Ney, the doomed mediaeval lovers Héloïse and Abelard, but not Piaf. Here and there were sculptures to commemorate the French dead who have no graves, the victims of the concentration camps, statues stark, metallic, almost unbearably poignant as they reared gauntly towards the sky. In the middle of the cemetery I found a small church. Two bent little men were decorating the door with wreaths and black ribbons in preparation for a funeral, in the French way. They were quite ancient, and in my morbid mood I wondered if they were resigned to joining, very shortly surely, the silent inhabitants of their workplace.

Then, after roaming for what seemed a couple of miles, and probably was, I found Piaf. She lies in plot 97, which she shares with Modigliani and some ordinary French citizens. Knowing Piaf’s penchant for the outrageous I’d expected something flamboyant, ornate, but this simple grave would not be out of place in an English cemetery. It is plain black marble, strewn with flowers by her admirers, and inside it there are two other people. Her father, Gasson, is there, if indeed he was her father. Her mother was never quite sure. Gasson had her out on the streets of Paris almost as soon as she could walk, helping him in his busking. He does not seem to have cared for her much at all, in spite of her crowd-drawing ability even when she was small, and at one period she was put in an orphanage. Well, Edith had a strong sentimental streak, and perhaps she wanted to be reunited in death with the only parent-figure she had. The other person in there is Théo Sarapo, her last husband.

Her track record with men was absolutely terrible. The more educated ones tired of her tantrums and soon dumped her. They probably found her B.O. a bit much, too, since Edith didn’t like washing or changing her underwear. Rougher types got dumped by her. Two died in accidents, including a certain Marcel, heavyweight boxing champ of France at the time. Then, when she was prematurely old in her late forties, the pretty, expressive hands gnarled and crabbed with arthritis, the voice cracking, she met a handsome young Greek, Théo, and took him under her wing to encourage him as a singer. She’d already done this with Charles Aznavour, Yves Montand and Georges Moustaki, none of whom could put up with her tantrums for long. Théo, young enough to be her son, seemed genuinely to love her. Oh, yeah ? Latching on to a famous older woman for what he could get ? Not at all. She soon became ill, and during her last long, unpleasant illness he cared for her devotedly, doing the most menial and intimate tasks of the kind which are usually left to professional nurses. The terrible photograph taken of her in death by some prying journalist is something I wish I had never seen. After she died, he was distraught. Perhaps he didn’t want to live without her, and got careless, for he was killed in a car accident not long after her death. So there she lies with her two men.

The Foreign Legion adored her. She sang about them, took many lovers from among them, and they have erected a monument in her memory, with the simple inscription, ‘Pour leur môme Piaf. La Légion.’ Their kid. They adopted her wholeheartedly. I could almost hear her voice…….’Mon Légionnaire’; and that song she recorded with Théo just before her last illness. It’s almost unbearably poignant. ‘A quoi ça sert l’amour?’ he sings. What’s the use of love ? She answers, ‘What’s the use ? Regarde-moi ! regarde-moi! Just LOOK at me ! Look at ME!’ Up the scale they go, her once powerful voice now slightly out of key, labouring over the higher notes, but full of triumph and pride.

As I stood gazing at her grave the sun vanished again, and with it the illusion of life and warmth. The cats, who had been basking in its rays, and looking fairly sleek thanks to the many devoted people who come regularly to feed them, slunk off again. It began to drizzle, it seemed suddenly much darker, and I shivered. Making my way out I looked about for the Piaf museum, which is somewhere near there, but no-one could tell me where to find it. What I did find, though, and it did me a power of good, was a sensational cake shop at 150 rue de Ménilmontant, and I treated myself to a great, gooey, delicious confection.

Sometimes you need to remind yourself just how good it is to be alive.