Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (40 page)

Rufina Noeggerath, aka “Bonne Maman” (1821–1908), is another, an Indian who, by a chain of extraordinary events, headed the Kardec congregation and left her body in Division 94. She continues to aid those with bad vision, it’s said. If they’re anything like me, few are capable of finding her tomb (its address is 82P1908). When I visited, spectacles and black patches had been left on the grave, and a glassy turquoise eye, the kind for warding off evil spirits. I shivered, thinking of my own patch and three sets of spectacles, and the evil-eye sign many superstitious folk have made when they see me.

Perhaps the most beloved spirit-seeker’s grave is that of Anne-Marie Le Normand. It lies, hidden, some twenty feet off Avenue Principale, in Division 3. Le Normand excelled at Tarots, thrilling 1800s socialites until she joined the ethereal crowd in 1843. On her simple gravestone “Mademoiselle” is carved—she dallied often and never married. Alongside the fresh flowers I spotted a low-relief cherub, a silver-plated cross, and a cryptic message on onion-skin paper. “Tell her I still love her,” pleaded the writer, in French, “you know who, dear Anne-Marie.”

Creepy? The prize at Père-Lachaise goes to admirers of Étienne-Gaspar Robertson (1763–1837), a self-styled “Phantas-magorist,” who wowed, terrified, and hoodwinked the credulous with his early magic-lantern shows. He still boasts cult status. His secret was smoke, mirrors, tulle cloth, and lenses—to magnify the ghostly images he produced. Tiered and towering, his tomb on Avenue Casimir-Périer, in Division 8, crawls with winged skulls, demons, and demonic owls, plus panels of flying skeletons and astonished spectators. It isn’t on the celebrity maps. One day, I was surprised to see the sepulcher gleaming white and clean. Who paid for the restoration, 170-odd years post-mortem? As if in answer, I found a plastic rat and rubber bat at the monument’s base. A guard said that, once, adepts of black magic gathered here at night to perform Satanic rites. Heightened security—thanks to Jim Morrison—and razor wire on walls put an end to that.

In honor of Serge Gainsbourg, I rode the Métro from Père-Lachaise to Montparnasse Cemetery. I didn’t meet the famous ticket-puncher—
Le Poinçonneur des Lilas
—for whom the cult singer’s best-loved tune is named. Technology eliminated Paris’s ticket punchers about thirty-five years ago. They live on in song, and in the many messages written on Métro tickets left at Serge’s tomb. Gainsbourg’s address is good, in the middle of this flat, neat graveyard, full of military heroes, literati, and red-blooded bourgeois. He lies in Division 1 off Avenue Principale and Avenue Transversale, with his parents, Olga and Joseph. Not bad for a guy born in 1928 as Lucien Ginsburg, son of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants. He died an ostensibly rebellious, chain-smoking, venerated drunkard, in 1991. The debauched persona he created—the cause of his early death—explains the beer bottle caps and cigarette butts, and the unopened packs of Gitanes, the brand of coffin-nail he preferred.

The profusion of objects—stuffed teddy bears, plaster caricature busts, wooden animal cutouts, lighters, and a big plastic jar full of tickets and messages—makes Gainsbourg’s a possible winner in the Paris hit parade of tomb-top clutter. In the jar are bar and restaurant receipts. I read one message. “We had a good one, thought of you, and had another and another.” Presumably the puppets, bird house, flattened glass marbles, and other tokens left for Serge refer to his lyrics. For those unfamiliar with them, a sheet of music and words in a plastic cover is at hand. I watched as a couple lifted the sheet and sang under their umbrella.

The cemetery’s other
poète maudit
—the rebellious bard of a bygone Paris—is of course Charles Baudelaire. He rates not only a modest family tomb—in Division 7—but also a magnificently bizarre cenotaph poised on Avenue Transversale between Divisions 26 and 27. On the tomb were Métro tickets in imitation of Gainsbourg, plus pebbles, rubber bands, and a handwritten letter on Best Western Hotels stationery. “Cher Baudelaire,” it read, “merci pour tes vers, une prof de lettres.” Why a lady literature professor would write the author of
The Flowers of Evil
, I couldn’t imagine. “Oh, he listens,” said a French teenager staring with saucer eyes at the tomb. “He helps us.”

Baudelaire’s cenotaph—a monument sans corpse—is a triumph of Art Nouveau. It shows the poet as a mummy, wrapped in cloth, while another, crazed-looking Baudelaire effigy towers above, riding a giant bat with folded wings. Near the mummy was an overturned flowerpot—for flowers of evil? I lifted it and found a copy of
Spleen
4—from the oral exam of the nationwide
Baccalauréat
examination, for high-schoolers.
Ah! Seigneur! donnez-moi
la force et le courage de contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût
, it reads. The invocation was two-fold, I realized. Baudelaire was being asked to intervene not just to give his passionate readers the strength to contemplate their hearts and bodies without disgust, but also to help them pass the rigorous
Bac
exam.

A newish holy site in Division 3 attracts fans from Buenos Aires, who leave behind airline tickets, pebbles, marbles, and more. The tomb is that of Argentinian novelist Julio Cortázar (1914–1984). Someone had carved a hopscotch pattern on the white marble grave. Others had contributed a black cat cutout, and half-burned candles. Here, too, were letters, many of them sun-bleached or washed by rain, and written in languages I couldn’t understand.

Near the exit, I stopped by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s abode. They lie together in Division 20. Surprisingly, two messages were addressed to the long-suffering, deep-thinking Beauvoir, without a word or token for JP. I couldn’t help wondering if the philandering existentialist philosopher’s Maoist ravings in later life had soured memories of him. Perhaps, if I’d been carrying a copy of
The Roads to Freedom
trilogy, I might’ve torn out a page and left it behind. “Thanks, JP,” I would’ve written, “your books changed my life (and just look at me now).”

Underrated in charm and quality of defunct residents, Montmartre proved a rewarding finale, the perfect crepuscular venue to end a daylong graveyard crawl. While seeking the facilities, on Chemin des Gardes, I happened upon Montmartre’s lamented songstress, Yolanda Gigliotti, alias Dalida. Though inauspiciously sited near the bathrooms, her glitzy sepulcher was thronged. Graying swingers wearing headphones lurked nearby, mouthing the words to tunes I never knew, but probably should’ve. Gigliotti was of Italian parentage—like many “French” heroes—but was born in Cairo. She became “Miss Egypt” in 1954, starred in innumerable B movies, and eventually migrated to Paris. Chronically unhappy, she committed suicide on May 3, 1987. Her origins explain the pharoah-like gray-green granite and life-size statue, heavy on the gold. Her tragic death seemed a good enough reason for her fans to look downbeat.

There were no notes or tickets for Dalida, just official commemorative plaques. As I was departing, though, I witnessed something curious. A visitor laid a letter on the tombstone, set a rock atop it, and left. Seconds later, a maintenance man snatched the letter and stuffed it into a plastic garbage bag—where I could see others. “Not allowed,” he said, wagging a finger, when I asked him why. “Montmartre isn’t Montparnasse or Père-Lachaise, you know!”

Plenty of Montmartre celebs attract visitors. Some leave tokens—for singer Jean-Claude Brialy, or Alphonsine Plessis, both in Division 15. Plessis was the real-life courtesan Alexandre Dumas fils used to model Marguerite Gautier in
La Dame aux camélias
. Dumas himself, laid out like a pope, has a broken toe and nose—plucked off, perhaps, by souvenir hunters. But by far the most startling was a tomb in Division 22, near the kitsch, be-ribboned bronze bust of ballet legend Vaslav Nijinski. A mound of toe shoes covered the mossy slab. On it was carved the name “Taglioni.” Some of the shoes were rotten, others burned, still others fresh. Dozens of them spilled onto the leafy cemetery floor. I scanned my memory, came up empty, and decided to wait.

Eventually, an elderly gent mosied over. He’d been cleaning a tomb nearby. “Taglioni?” he asked. “A great Romantic ballerina, died in the 1880s. Every dancer in Paris has come here since, to leave her first pair of toe shoes, a rite of passage.” The mound was distressing and I said so. The man sighed. “Marie isn’t even buried here. Her mother is. Scrape off some slippers and read the inscription. Marie is in Marseilles. But try telling a ballerina …” I pondered this tidbit, waiting in the rain. When the sun began to set, a whistle blew, breaking the spell. No ballerinas had tiptoed by. I was glad. To each his quirky fantasy.

The Janus City, or, Why the Year 1900 Lives On

If you love life you also love the past, because it is the present as it has survived in memory
.

—M
ARGUERITE
Y
OURCENAR

Paris is a museum, and that is a privilege. But if it wants to be loyal to its history, it needs to innovate, to dare—it needs to move into the twenty-first century
.

—B
ERTRAND
D
ELANOË
, Mayor of Paris

t was a mild morning by Paris standards: five degrees Centigrade. The previous night’s storm had blown itself out, like the countless Réveillons de Saint Silvestre, those midnight New Year’s bashes that on this occasion linked December 31, 1899, to January 1, 1900.

Had you arisen early, before the capital’s bleary revellers, and ridden to the observation deck at the eleven-year-old Eiffel Tower’s top, you would have gazed down on a strangely familiar city. Familiar in its layout of cannon-shot boulevards lined by Haussmann-style apartment buildings, its Arc de Triomphe, Garnier Opéra, and Bastille Column, its topography of sinuous river and gentle hills topped, at Montmartre, by the great white wedding cake of the new Sacré-Coeur basilica.

Familiar, yes, yet wonderfully, disconcertingly different.

Once Parisians had awakened to that first day of the twentieth century, hungover from champagne, absinthe, and ether (or exhausted from serving the privileged classes who fêted through the night), the boulevards and the Champs-Elysées had begun swarming, as they always did.

They swarmed with a cacophony of carriages—tens of thousands of fiacres and cabriolets jolting over the wooden or stone cobbles. Steam-powered, electric, or horse-drawn streetcars lurched among the waves of hurried workers, of
boulevardier
hucksters and strolling flâneurs populating this metropolis of more than three million. Nearby on the river, the first
bateau-mouche
, named
Le Vieux Mouche
, chuffed from bank to bank, avoiding barges and small freighters, using the Seine as another of the city’s thoroughfares.

Had you brought binoculars with you to the Eiffel Tower, you might have spotted pairs of society gentlemen removing their redingotes and top hats, preparing to duel on the Île de la Grande Jatte or, perhaps, in one of the lavishly landscaped
bois
edging Paris—the Bois de Boulogne or Bois de Vincennes. Duels were still de rigeur for the offended gent. Even the sensitive, the hypnotically intellectual Marcel Proust fought one.

Looking to the left or right of Sacré-Coeur, on rutted lanes like the Allée des Brouillards, you might have caught sight of a yoked water-bearer bent under the weight of buckets, for running water was not yet available to all. Or maybe you would have seen a lamplighter turning off a
bec de gaz
in the many neighborhoods not yet served by electricity.

Had you sniffed at the air you would have smelled the plumes of noxious smoke curling from factories scattered across town, in the courtyards of crumbling palaces—everywhere, in fact, except perhaps in the fashionable 7th, 8th, and 16th arrondissements. There the mansions of the
grandes familles
and the
nouveaux riches
vied to outdo each other in ostentation and ornament.