The Bestiary in Stone

In Division 20 of Père-Lachaise, a bronze poodle has sat on a grave for more than a century. It stands 55 centimetres tall, muzzle raised, paws together. The family's name is Richeton: almost nothing is known of the deceased; of the dog, everything is known — its material, its dimensions, its pose. At Père-Lachaise, creatures of stone and bronze are everywhere. Dogs lying at the feet of recumbent effigies, lions crouched on plinths, snakes coiled upon themselves, butterflies perched on stelae, rearing horses atop military monuments, doves clinging to cypress branches, a winged sphinx of 20 tonnes carved from English stone. These are not decoration: every sculpted animal carries a message, codified by the marble-cutters' workshops and understood by the families who commissioned these graves. The funerary bestiary of Père-Lachaise is a lost language.

The dog is the most common animal on nineteenth-century graves. Lying at the foot of a recumbent effigy, head resting on its paws, it embodies fidelity — marital fidelity, fidelity to a master, fidelity to the Christian faith. The iconography comes from the Middle Ages, when a dog would lie at the feet of female effigies while a lion guarded those of male ones. At Père-Lachaise the dog takes every form: engraved in a medallion, carved in relief on a stele, sculpted in the round atop a tomb. The bronze poodle on the Richeton grave, in Division 20, remains the most striking for its size and realism. The lion, rarer, expresses the power of the deceased and the hope of resurrection. According to a medieval belief recorded in bestiaries, lion cubs were born dead and their father's breath brought them back to life after three days — a direct image of the resurrection of Christ. At Père-Lachaise, sculpted lions appear on military monuments and on the chapels of wealthy families, standing guard on either side of the entrance.

Of the deceased, almost nothing is known; of the dog, everything is — its material, its dimensions, its posture. That is often the fate of animal sculpture in cemeteries: the animal outlasts the memory of the one it guards.

A snake on a Père-Lachaise grave can mean several things. Coiled around a staff, it forms the Rod of Asclepius and marks the grave of a doctor. Add a cup, and it identifies a pharmacist: the snake drinks the remedies from the cup. But when it bites its own tail, forming a perfect circle, it becomes the ouroboros — the symbol of the eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Ouroboroi appear carved on chapel doors in Division 59 and on stelae in the older Divisions. The butterfly, another creature of transition, represents the soul's metamorphosis: the caterpillar is the earthly body, the chrysalis is the tomb, and the butterfly that emerges is the soul freed from the flesh. In Greek mythology, Psyche — the soul — had butterfly wings. At Père-Lachaise, the motif appears in relief on stelae, sometimes resting on a skull, bringing vanity and hope together in a single ornament. The dove, a divine messenger, symbolises purity and the soul's flight to heaven. It appears on children's graves, often paired with the lily. In Division 47, a marble statue depicts a veiled young woman holding a dove against her chest, with a second dove perched on her shoulder, a cypress branch in its beak.

Some of the animal sculptures at Père-Lachaise reach the scale of monuments. In Division 37, the tomb of General Gobert, killed at the Battle of Bailén in 1808, is crowned by an equestrian statue 3.1 metres tall, carved by David d'Angers: the general, struck down by a bullet, topples from his horse in one last movement. It is one of the most striking sculptural groups in the cemetery. In Division 12, the tomb of Théodore Géricault bears three bronze bas-reliefs signed by Antoine Etex: the Officer of the Imperial Guard's Chasseurs à Cheval, the Wounded Cuirassier and The Raft of the Medusa. Géricault, who died at 32 in 1824, had made the horse the centrepiece of his work — and the horse follows him even into stone. In Division 89, the monument to Oscar Wilde takes the form of a winged sphinx carved by Jacob Epstein from a 20-tonne block of Hopton Wood stone imported from England, completed in 1914. The work, inspired by Wilde's poem The Sphinx and by Assyrian statuary, caused a scandal when it was installed. In Division 49 lies Antoine-Louis Barye, the greatest animal sculptor of the nineteenth century, whose bronze lions and wild beasts fill museums around the world — but whose funerary bust, the work of the sculptor Moulin, was stolen in 2006.

A visitor looking for the animals of Père-Lachaise will not find them on any map. They are not listed, not signposted, not marked. One has to walk, look up, stop before the stelae. A snake coiled round a staff, in a quiet alley: the grave of a doctor. A butterfly in relief on a grey stone: a soul taking flight. A dog lying down, head on its paws: someone still waiting. The marble-cutters who carved these animals were not making art for art's sake: they were telling the story of the dead person's life, their virtues, their trade, their faith. The lion spoke of power, the dog of fidelity, the dove of hope. Two centuries on, the animals are still there — but the language they speak no longer is.