The Eleven O'Clock Cry

One evening in 1743, in a Paris drawing room, a scream cut through the walls. It was eleven o'clock. The guests froze. Claire Josèphe Hippolyte Léris, known throughout Paris as Mademoiselle Clairon, had just heard, for the first time, the voice of a man she had refused to see again on his deathbed. That scream, according to her own Mémoires published in 1798, would repeat every evening at the same hour for two and a half years. The actress was twenty. She was just beginning at the Comédie-Française. And, without knowing it, she had just given birth to one of the oldest legends of Père-Lachaise.

The man identified in the Mémoires only by the initials “M. de S…” was a young Breton, a suitor as ardent as he was rejected. Mademoiselle Clairon turned him away. He ruined himself for her, then, feeling death approach, begged her to visit him one last time. She refused. He died swearing he would pursue her after death as he had pursued her in life. That very evening, as the actress was entertaining guests at home, a scream rang out at precisely eleven o'clock — the exact moment, it would later emerge, of his death. There were many witnesses. Over the following months, the phenomenon recurred without fail: a scream, sometimes a noise like a gunshot, always at the same hour. The affair caused a stir in the Paris of Louis XV, and the actress's fame — she had been made a full member of the Comédie-Française as early as September 1743, after a triumph in Racine's Phèdre — gave her a visibility that an ordinary ghost story would not have had.

He died swearing he would pursue her after death as he had pursued her in life.

The story might have died out with the Age of Enlightenment. It resurfaced in February 1858, when Allan Kardec reprinted it in the second issue of the Revue spirite, under the title “Le revenant de Mademoiselle Clairon” (“The Ghost of Mademoiselle Clairon”). Kardec saw it as a documented case of obsession — a spirit attached to a living person by an unresolved emotional bond. The fact that the actress recorded the episode herself, that witnesses are named, and that the account had already been circulating since the eighteenth century, gives this story a particular standing in the spiritist corpus. Kardec, himself buried in Division 44 of Père-Lachaise, helped fix the legend in the folklore of the cemetery.

Born on 25 January 1723 in Condé-sur-l'Escaut, Mademoiselle Clairon died on 29 January 1803 in Paris, at the age of eighty. She was first buried at the Saint-Sulpice cemetery in Vaugirard. On 29 August 1837, her remains were transferred to Père-Lachaise, in Division 19, along the path that today bears her name — the chemin Clairon. It was at this time that the legend took its definitive form: the suitor's ghost, it is said, followed the actress to her new grave, wandering at night through the neighbouring alleys. The monument, adorned with a marble medallion made by the sculptor Noël Louis around 1890, bears a simple inscription: “Elle traça avec autant de vérité que de modestie les règles de l'art dramatique, dont elle sera à jamais le modèle.” (“She set out, with as much truth as modesty, the rules of dramatic art, of which she will forever remain the model.”) The plot, maintained free of charge by the City of Paris, remains one of the quietest in the Division.