My dear Claire,
Come to Sablonville at 9 a.m. John [the valet] will introduce you into my chamber. Sit near my bed and watch well over my slumbers. Your beautiful eyes will perform miracles, calming my long-disturbed sleep.
Henry.
Milord l’Arsouille died miserably in the middle of a platonic affair, of anthrax. His half-brother, the fourth Marquess of Hertford, reputedly the richest and meanest man in Paris, also lies in the family vault at Père Lachaise; as does his natural son (it was a clan that went in for illegitimates), Richard Wallace, a man who did much to atone for the family shortcomings through his exceptional generosity to the needy during the Siege of Paris in 1870, later providing the city with drinking fountains for her poor which are still to this day known as “Wallaces.” Two distinguished nineteenth-century British admirals also ended their careers in Père Lachaise: Sydney Smith, who inflicted upon Napoleon one of his earliest defeats at the Siege of Acre, but subsequently became an ardent francophile, dying in Paris; and Alexander Cochrane, the officer responsible for burning down the White House during the War of 1812.
Scattered among the vaults of the deux cents familles, the various great representatives of the arts make an imposing list: Molière, La Fontaine, Musset, the eccentric poet Gérard de Nerval, who trailed a tame lobster on a lead, and Honoré de Balzac. “Friendship and glory are the only inhabitants of the tombs,” wrote Balzac; while he had his hero Rastignac bury the penniless Père Goriot among the ranks of wealthy bourgeois that fill the avenues of Père Lachaise. (Père Goriot ends with Rastignac looking down from the cemetery on the great city lying below and issuing his famous challenge: “Paris, à nous deux maintenant!”) Transferred from defunct cemeteries within the old walls, Molière and La Fontaine now rest side by side, in two unassumingly dignified caskets. Alfred de Musset, whom debauchery carried to Père Lachaise at the early age of forty-seven, was blackballed from Milord l’Arsouille’s Jockey Club because his horsemanship was below standard; but on his death at least one of his ambitions was realized—that of having a birch tree planted to provide his grave with shade. Every summer evening Musset’s birch used to be lovingly watered by the gardiens, but eventually it had to be replaced. Alongside Musset lies Prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the Second Empire creator of modern Paris—so applauded by some but condemned by others for destroying the old centre of the city.
There are also the composers Bizet, Cherubini and Chopin (Maria Callas embarked on death here, but her ashes were later removed to be scattered on her beloved Aegean; Rossini, too, was transferred to his native Italy); and the painters Corot, Daumier, Géricault, David, Delacroix and Ingres. In contrast to Musset’s birch, fresh geraniums always seem to adorn the tomb of Chopin, renewed year in and year out by some anonymous admirers. Strangely enough the one person in Père Lachaise to attact even more attention than Chopin is a celebrated medium of the Second Empire, Allan Kardec, whose Stonehenge-like monument is often festooned with flowers by believers—apparently in hopes of transferring to themselves his physical potency. Another contemporary of Kardec’s with a special appeal for the fetishist is Victor Noir, a journalist shot down by an enraged Prince Napoleon in 1870, whose death provided a cause célèbre that made the Empire totter. The guidebook notes of Noir’s darkened bronze effigy that “a certain part of the body shines brightly, thanks to the caresses of sterile women.” It is not entirely clear why a defunct journalist should be held capable of such wizardry. A less sought-after writer, but one who exacts the compassion of fellow strugglers in Père Lachaise, is the Abbé Delille. An Académicien at the age of thirty-four, Delille was forced by the Terror into exile, where he married his strong-minded governess. She used to lock him up until he had finished his quota of verse each day; the strain seems to have proved too much for his eyesight, and he died blind in 1813.
Among the great actors and actresses here, Sarah Bernhardt has an honoured resting place at Père Lachaise, while a less enlightened age denied poor Adrienne Lecouvreur (mistress to Marshal de Saxe) access to hallowed ground despite the protests of Voltaire, so she still lies interred beneath the intersection of the Rues de Bourgogne and de Grenelle on the Left Bank. Close to the “Divine” Bernhardt lie together two more recent thespians, heartthrobs of mid-twentieth-century France—Yves Montand (born Ivo Livi) and Simone Signoret (born Simone Kaminker).
Interspersed among the famous, some tragic inscriptions catch the eye, such as that on the tomb of a bereaved family man to a deceased wife, mother and daughter: “This tomb encloses, hélas, the three things which made the happiness of a father and a husband.”
Finally, there are the scientists and explorers: Champollion, the “Father of Egyptology,” who began deciphering the Rosetta Stone in 1822; Claude Chappe, the inventor of the semaphore, who when his patent was contested flung himself into a sewer in 1805, aged forty-two; Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (1727–1813), the biochemist who introduced the potato to a reluctant France. Potatoes had previously been thought fit only for animals, but Parmentier was so persuasive that soldiers had to be called in to guard his own stocks; several new recipes were named after him, and his tombstone bears a bas-relief of potatoes and a chemistry still. The Parisian inventor of the gas-filled balloon, Professor Charles, appropriately lies in Père Lachaise. Also keeping company with the Professor is one of the earliest aviation casualties, Mme. Blanchard, killed in 1819 on her sixty-seventh ascent, when she was accidentally brought down over Paris by a festive rocket.
Unless you have a family vault with a concession perpetuelle, it is difficult to obtain a lodging at Père Lachaise today. Plots can be “leased” short term, and after five years are cleared and relet, the remains deposited in a central ossuary. The cemetery is heavily overcrowded with some 10,000 tombs and the space was further reduced in 1874 when a tunnel of the Ceinture railway beneath it caved in, scattering corpses over the tracks; after that the whole section was emptied and turned into an avenue. Gaston Palewski, one of de Gaulle’s most senior colleagues, confided to me in the 1960s that he had just applied for a shady plot, but had been told that he could only be placed on the waiting list and—to his great distress—could not even be guaranteed a site “with a view over Paris.” On that same occasion, Nancy Mitford teased Palewski, her faithless lover, that she was sure that a space would be found, as “Every once in a while they dig up the old bones, and then grind them up to make cosmetics for Chanel.”
The demand is only too understandable. Apart from the honour of sharing the last resting place of so many illustrious sons and daughters of France, it would be hard to conceive of a more agreeable place in which to be laid away than Père Lachaise, with its glorious views over Paris and its many tree-lined avenues. There used to be a bistro opposite, on the Rue du Repos, called Mieux Ici Qu’en Face. But that has itself passed on, and—with the exception of the melancholy reminders of the Coin des Martyrs—Death shows few signs of his sting in Père Lachaise today. For mothers and children and laughing couples, the cemetery has become something of a family park. Gossiping nursemaids tether their prams to the tomb railings, to stop their charges accelerating away off down the steep slopes; children climb gaily over the grandest crypts, as soon as the gardiens’ backs are turned; and, just as Love and Death represent but two Janus faces of the same head, lovers sit heedlessly entwined on benches set in the sheltered alleys between the tombs—just as in the times of Père La Chaise himself the courtesans and gallants liked to travel out from seventeenth-century Paris to seek their pleasures on the Mont Louis.
Yet, for all the ephemeral human drama and sadness embraced in those shady avenues of Père Lachaise, rising above it all Paris lives on, grumbling but radiant, evolving but immutable—and eternal. Parisians may suffer perilously from ennui at regular intervals; but can Paris herself ever bore? Thoroughly female, at each age a particular woman or women, good or bad—a Héloïse, a Reine Margot, a Ninon, a Josephine, a Païva, a Sarah Bernhardt or a Piaf—arises to delineate its p
assing features, but in the end there is always only one: Marianne herself.
NOTES
The following source notes refer to works listed section by section in the Bibliography. I have found these texts outstandingly useful throughout: Bidou, Castelot, Clunn, Cobb (all the listed works), Couperie, Cronin (of the three listed, all provide outstandingly readable contributions to the history of Paris), Dark, Favier, Hillairet (the Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris is a classic work of reference, and an inseparable companion), Hofbauer, Lavisse (though compiled a century ago, an admirable general history of France), Littlewood, Maurois (though written just after the Second World War, a well-balanced and colourful account that doesn’t date), Sutcliffe (an excellent survey of the development of Paris architecture over the ages), Vallis (three volumes that provide an excellent guide arrondissement by arrondissement).
Introduction
1 “human genius”: Maurois, p. 78
Age One 1180–1314
Particularly useful and to be recommended here: Baldwin; Druon, Kings and Paris (The Accursed Kings remains an enduring classic); Duby (one of France’s leading experts on the Age of Philippe Auguste sadly recently deceased); Geremek; Gilson; Holmes; Jordan; Lavisse, III; Radice.
1 “rusé comme un renard”: Lavisse, III, i, 119 ff
2 chansons: Maurois, 75
3 “great neurotics”: Druon, Paris, 95
4 “a poor house”: Holmes, 81
5 “All the organs”: Druon, Paris, 99
6 “a bitter thing”: Lavisse, III, ii, 183
Age Two 1314–1643
Babelon, Paris; Briggs, R.; Diefendorf; Garrisson, Henri IV; Greengrass; Lavisse; Ranum; Wolfe.
1 “heart of the kingdom”: Druon, Kings, 11
2 “Those who were left”: Ziegler, 83
3 “deep-rooted certainty”: Maurois, 117, 112
4 “animal violence”: ibid., 142–3
5 “not a woman”: ibid., 164
6 “before Paris”: Garrisson, 157
7 “Mistress, I am writing”: ibid., 164
8 “no meat”: Lavisse, VI, i, 322
9 “very wild place”: Ranum, 19–20
10 “skin and bone”: ibid., ii, 129
11 “the entire populace”: Greengrass, 251–3
12 “less astonishing”: Maurois, 172–4
13 “clip your nails”: ibid., 190
14 “An entire city”: Corneille
Age Three 1643–1795
Briggs; Cronin, Louis XIV (especially good on Fouquet); Mitford, Sun; Mongrédien, Montespan and Vie (especially on the “Affaire des Poisons”); Pevitt; Ranum; Trout; Voltaire.
1 “The civil wars started”: Voltaire, I, 64
2 “Well, it’s all over”: The execution of Brinvilliers and Mongrédien, Vie, 201; Voisin: Sévigné, 196, 240–1; Mongrédin, Montespan, 33, 75, 88
3 “with some pomp”: Mitford, Sun, 95
4 Blondel: Sutcliffe, 26
5 “he is sent forthwith”: Lister, 25
6 “four full dishes”: ibid., 148–68
7 “nothing of worse breeding”: Mongrédien, Montespan, 97, 296
8 “My dominant passion”: from Cronin, Louis XIV, 189
9 “the statue of Victoire”: Ranum, 284
10 “Before being at court”: Mongrédien, Vie, 20
11 “are you not the master?”: Pevitt, 300
Age Four 1795–1815
Out of a gigantic bibliography: Dallas, Horne (inevitably I drew some material from my own two books on Napoleon), Lanzac de Laborie, Robiquet, Willms.
Laborie provided me with one of the great finds of this book. Its eight volumes were published between 1900 and 1913, only for the onset of the First World War leave the sequence unfinished. I came across a copy, its pages still uncut, in the London Library. It is a marvellously well-researched work, amusing and packed with marginal information about Napoleon’s Paris.
1 “ruinous castles”: Horne, Austerlitz, 18
2 “You are barbarians”: Robiquet, 63
3 “talk about politics”: Willms, 94, n. 234
4 “The Paris of the rich”: Willms, 96
5 “church flummery!”: Robiquet, 46
6 “Goodbye to the Republic”: Jack, 22
7 “without over-excitement”: Laborie, III, 57–61
8 “I am not the lover …”: ibid., VI, 34, 37
9 warned Mme. de Staël: ibid., VI, 42
10 “comes from God”: Lefebre, 7
11 “Today’s fête”: Laborie, III, 11
12 “One must leave”: ibid., II, 170
13 “The French Republic”: ibid., VIII, 234–5
14 “What statue?”: ibid., II, 180–2
15 decrepit mammoth: Hugo, 179
16 King of Württemberg: Laborie, II 290
17 “Napoléonville”: ibid., 91, 191
18 Versailles: ibid., 191–2
19 “be ruined”: Robiquet, 174
20 “endless begging”: Reichardt, I, 25
21 “extreme overcrowding”: Willms, 118
22 impressionable German: Reichardt, I, 227 ff
23 prepare a gigot: Robiquet, 95
24 “je tremble”: Laborie, VII, 207–8
25 “People are determined”: ibid., 147 ff
26 “I am very dissatisfied”: ibid., VIII, 10, 16–17
27 Mlle. Aubery: ibid., 16–17
28 “the popular Empress”: Horne, Austerlitz, 257
29 “Crying like a a child”: Bruce, 436
30 “Iphigenia”: Maurois 339
31 “I swear to you”: West, 186
32 “We counted”: Horne, Austerlitz, 292
33 “I have become blasé”: Keats, 126
34 “in general terror-stricken”: Bruce, 463–4
35 “We women”: Maurois, 342
36 Mme. de Coigny: Laffont, 172
37 “Bois de Boulogne”: Gallienne, 77
38 “well-dressed people”: Denon, L’Oeil, 11
39 “bare walls”: ibid.
40 “some big losses”: Denon, Correspondance, 3518
Age Five 1815–1871
Balzac; Chastenet; Flaubert; Gautier; Goncourt; Haussmann; Horne, Fall (inevitably I have drawn on my own The Fall of Paris for material on both the Second Empire and the Siege and the Commune of 1870–1); Sutcliffe (especially for analysis of the impact of Haussmann); Willms.
1 “a submissive bigot”: Maurois, 357–62
2 “a place one avoids”: Lewald, VI, 57
3 “pale spectre”: Bidou, 354
4 “that illustrious valley”: Balzac, Père Goriot, 1–3, 8, 14
5 “remain lying there”: Alphonse, 8ff
6 “are like children”: Rambuteau, 269
7 “the post-chaise”: Laver, 174
8 “hurling itself down”: Dark, 115
9 “a special dirty glove”: Willms, 200
10 “breaking glass”: Guedalla, 54
11 “a small aristocracy”: Willms, 243
12 “a carnival-like exuberance”: Flaubert, 325
13 “Nine hundred men”: ibid.
14 “vulgar-looking man”: Horne, Fall, 20
15 “We ripped open”: Haussemann, 54ff
16 “bobbing manes”: Vallois, I, 10
17 “art elbowed”: Horne, Fall, 4
18 “MacMahon’s defeat”: Baldick, 169
19 “Europe’s heart”: Horne, Fall, 73
20 “the animals observed”: ibid., 178
21 “it is all over”: ibid., 266
22 “your profession?”: ibid., 337
23 “des candides”: Cobb, Tour, 128–31
24 “we saw the insurgents”: Horne, Fall, 381, 383
25 Communard prisoners: ibid., 405–7
26 “A silence of death”: ibid., 420
Age Six 1871–1940
Baldick; Cronin, Eve and City; Dallas, 1918; Flanner, American and Yesterday; Pryce-Jones (a valuable British contribution to the story of the Occupation); Rose (for deta
ils of the entrancing Josephine Baker); Shattuck; Thurman (an outstanding recent biography of Colette).
1 “You are young”: Baldick, 193–5
2 “painter called Degas”: ibid., 206
3 “I regret”: Horne, Fall, 427
4 “wholesale copulation”: Baldick, 307
5 “ ‘The swine!’ ”: ibid., 398
6 “Nobody can imagine”: Gosling, 70, 112
7 “an ill-made beast”: Cronin, Eve, 250
8 “was still Athenian”: Maurois, 470
9 “A dark resentment”: Guedalla, 138
10 “You are weary”: Laffont, 244
11 “beautiful to fight”: Gillet, 289, 299
12 “much nervous excitement”: Bertie, I, 3–11
13 “strong measures”: Cronin, Eve, 442
14 “Paris will be burned!”: Tuchman, August, 374
15 “destruction, ruins”: Galliéni, 59–64
16 “two foreign countries”: Horne, Price, 190
17 “People are getting away”: Bertie, II, 291
18 “a vivid impression”: Dallas, 1918, 348
19 “Paris is a bitch”: Wiser, 66
20 “entirely nude”: Flanner, Yesterday, xx
21 Josephine Baker: Rose, 97ff
22 “qu’il était beau”: Rearick, 94
23 “I understand”: Miller, 148, 166
24 “Paris! Viens avec nous”: Weber, Hollow, 161
25 “a frightful place”: Shirer, 125
26 “la masse de manoeuvre”: Churchill, II, 42
27 “France deprived of Paris”: Horne, Lose, 562
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