Tombs of Absence

In Division 29, a stele adorned with a military medallion and a weeping veiled woman stands beneath the trees of the bosquet du Dragon. It is the first sculpture ever erected at Père-Lachaise, in 1809. Beneath the stone, there is nothing: the non-commissioned officer it honours, Antoine de Guillaume-Lagrange, fell on 4 February 1807 on the plains of Poland, and his body never left the battlefield. A monument with no remains has a precise name: a cenotaph, from the Greek kenos (empty) and taphos (tomb). The cemetery holds dozens of them, and each tells a story of absence.

On 16 December 1808, Guillaume-Lagrange's mother was granted permission to build a cenotaph on a perpetual plot. Her only son, born in Orléans, had enlisted in the 16th Dragoon Regiment and fought the campaigns of Austerlitz, Jena, Erfurt and Spandau before meeting his death at 25, at the entrance to a Polish village. The architect Étienne-Hippolyte Godde — who would later design the cemetery's main gate and chapel — carved a stele whose Latin epitaph commands the passer-by to stop: Sta viator, heroem vides — “Stop, traveller, you see a hero.” On the back, the mother had the story of her son's final moments engraved, his last words on the battlefield: “Ma mère! Ma pauvre mère!!” (“My mother! My poor mother!!”). Under the Restoration, the monument became a rallying point for Bonapartists, to the point that the authorities altered the roads and built around the grove to break up the gatherings. The Dragon's Grave is now a listed historic monument.

The first sculpture erected at Père-Lachaise, in 1809, honours a soldier whose body lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in Poland.

Other cenotaphs arise from a departure. In Division 4, the remains of Gioachino Rossini, buried in 1868, were transferred to the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence in 1887 at the request of a reunified Italy. His chapel remains — his widow, Olympe Pelissier, still rests there — but the composer's grave is empty. In Division 50, the monument to Victor Schoelcher, adorned with a bronze high relief signed by Fromanger, became a cenotaph on 20 May 1949, the date his ashes were transferred to the Panthéon alongside Félix Éboué. Léon Gambetta's stay was only brief: on 6 January 1883, 100,000 Parisians accompanied his coffin to Père-Lachaise, but the body moved on to Nice a week later, and the heart, kept separately, entered the Panthéon on 11 November 1920. At the columbarium, niche 16258, belonging to Maria Callas, has been a cenotaph since 1980: her ashes, stolen for a time by an admirer, were scattered in the Aegean Sea off the island of Skorpios.

The most unsettling case is that of graves where it is not known whether they ever held the right remains. In 1817, the prefect Frochot arranged for the presumed remains of Molière and La Fontaine to be transferred to Père-Lachaise, installed in Division 25 in solemn sarcophagi. The operation, designed to draw Parisians to a cemetery they still avoided, was a spectacular success — but the authenticity of the bones has always been disputed. For La Fontaine, buried in 1695 at the Cimetière des Innocents, whose remains were moved to the catacombs in 1786, the odds that the right bones survived the transfers are slim. For Molière, buried at night and without ceremony at the Cimetière Saint-Joseph in 1673, they are barely better. The same doubt hangs over Héloïse and Abelard, in Division 7: their remains passed through seven centuries of relocations before arriving at Père-Lachaise, and their authenticity has never been established with certainty.

The twentieth century gave Père-Lachaise another category of cenotaph: monuments to collective memory. From 1946 to 2017, 15 stelae commemorating the deportation camps — Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Mauthausen — were erected along the avenue circulaire, forming a memorial ensemble with no equal in France. These monuments hold no remains, but they anchor the memory of hundreds of thousands of dead with no grave in a place devoted to remembrance. A few alleys away, the Dragon's Grave, restored but once again worn, awaits the visitor on the path bearing its name. From one end of the cemetery to the other, from the private grief of a mother in Orléans for her son fallen on the plains of Poland to the collective grief of a nation for its deportees, the stone is the same. The emptiness it encloses says something different each time.