The Fatal Slab of the Chanaleilles

On Sunday 7 April 1895, the dowager Marquise de Chanaleilles and her daughter entered the family's funerary chapel on the main path of the third Division of Père-Lachaise. They carried wreaths of immortelles. The marquise was eighty-six years old. The stone slab forming the chapel floor rested on masonry supports above the vault. As the two women stepped over the threshold, the slab gave way beneath them. They fell into the vault below, six and a half metres down.

The Chanaleilles chapel occupies a perpetual plot in one of the oldest Divisions of the cemetery. The first marquis, Charles François Guillaume de Chanaleilles, a former captain in the king's navy and Peer of France, has rested there since 21 August 1845. His son Sosthène, the second marquis, a page to King Louis XVIII and an officer of the Légion d'honneur, joined him there in 1893. The dowager marquise, born Stéphanie de Berton des Balbes de Crillon, had come that Sunday to lay flowers on her husband's grave; he had died two years before. Her daughter Marie Isabelle, widow of the Marquis de Marcieu since 1888, accompanied her.

The stone slab gave way beneath their feet. The two women vanished into the vault below, six and a half metres down. The marquise died an hour later, in her daughter's arms.

The cemetery's keepers heard the cries for help. They rushed over with ropes and climbed down into the vault. In under ten minutes, both women had been brought back to the surface. They were carried to a chemist's shop on the Boulevard de Ménilmontant, where they came round. The Marquise de Chanaleilles was bleeding heavily. She died about an hour after the fall, in her daughter's arms. The Marquise de Marcieu, who had fallen on top of her mother, suffered a broken leg and a dislocated wrist. She was taken to the Hôtel de Chanaleilles, on the Rue de Chanaleilles in the seventh arrondissement.

The inquiry put the collapse down to the previous winter's frosts. Repeated freezing and thawing had loosened the cement holding the stone slab on its supports. The weight of the two visitors was enough to bring down a structure already weakened. The accident illustrates a recurring problem in late nineteenth-century Parisian cemeteries: the silent decay of funerary chapels, built to last but exposed to weather, frost and rainwater run-off without regular upkeep.

The Chanaleilles-Marcieu grave still stands in the third Division of Père-Lachaise. The Chanaleilles family, of knightly descent tracing back to the twelfth century, died out in 1925 with the death of Marie Isabelle — the daughter who had survived the accident. The name was later revived by adoption in the Colas de Brouville family. A street in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, the Rue de Chanaleilles, still carries the memory of the second marquis. Nothing of the accident remains visible on the chapel. Only the accounts in Le Figaro and La Presse, preserved on Gallica, still record the dull thud of a slab giving way on a Sunday in April.