Words in Stone

In 1853, a man named Prosper held a job at Père-Lachaise that no longer exists: conducteur, or guide. His task was to lead visitors and grieving families to the graves they were looking for, but Prosper had a passion of his own — copying down epitaphs. From this he produced a slim, two-hundred-and-forty-page book, Une Voix au Père-Lachaise (“A Voice at Père-Lachaise”), published at his own expense on the Rue de la Roquette, recording dozens of funerary inscriptions: poems from grief-stricken parents, declarations between spouses, professions of faith, philosophical maxims. On the grave of Jeanne-Marie Hardy, who died in 1823 at twenty-four, he noted these lines: “De toutes les vertus elle était l'emblème, / Elle n'avait qu'un défaut, c'était l'oubli d'elle-même” (“Of every virtue she was the very emblem; her only fault was forgetting herself”). For Constant-N. Pourchet, who died in 1847, this dizzying line: “Tu devais ne pas naître, ou ne jamais mourir” (“You should either never have been born, or never have died”). Prosper's book is a reminder that Père-Lachaise is not only an open-air museum of sculpture: it is a library, carved into limestone and granite.

Among the cemetery's best-known epitaphs, those written by poets are the most accomplished — and the most faithfully carried out. Alfred de Musset, buried in Division 4, had these lines from his elegy Lucie carved on his grave: “Mes chers amis, quand je mourrai, / Plantez un saule au cimetière...” (“My dear friends, when I die, plant a willow in the cemetery; I love its weeping leaves; their paleness is sweet and dear to me, and its shade will lie light on the earth where I shall sleep”). His wish was honoured: a weeping willow was planted on his grave, though it has been replanted several times since 1857. In Division 86, the grave of Guillaume Apollinaire bears a calligram made of green and white ceramic shards, arranged in the shape of a heart: “Mon cœur pareil à une flamme renversée” (“My heart, like an upturned flame”). The monument, designed by Picasso, was funded in 1924 by an auction of works by Matisse and Picasso. In Division 15, the Belgian symbolist Georges Rodenbach lies beneath a sculpture by Charlotte Besnard showing a man emerging from his grave, a rose in his hand. His epitaph asks: “Seigneur, donnez-moi donc cet espoir de revivre / Dans la mélancolique éternité du livre” (“Lord, grant me then this hope of living again in the melancholy eternity of the book”).

Père-Lachaise is not only an open-air museum of sculpture: it is a library, carved into limestone and granite.

Other epitaphs intrigue through sheer strangeness. In Division 6, the grave of Jim Morrison bears an inscription in ancient Greek, KATA TON DAIMONA EAYTOY — “True to his own spirit.” In Division 44, the granite dolmen sheltering Allan Kardec, the founder of spiritism, sets out his profession of faith: “Naître, mourir, renaître encore et progresser sans cesse, telle est la Loi” (“To be born, to die, to be born again and to keep on progressing — such is the Law”). It is one of the few graves in the cemetery where the epitaph states a metaphysical belief rather than a regret. In Division 89, the lines by Oscar Wilde carved on the back of his monument — a winged sphinx designed by Jacob Epstein — are taken from The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “And alien tears will fill for him / Pity's long broken urn, / For his mourners will be outcast men, / And outcasts always mourn.” And in Division 11, the painter and sculptor Arman had a plaque fixed to his grave bearing just two words: “Enfin seul !” (“Alone at last!”). The plaque was stolen on 4 November 2012.

The most striking epitaphs at Père-Lachaise are not always found on famous graves. Prosper's collection bears this out: on the stele of the Laurent family, he noted a line that sums up the fate of any family in two rhyming couplets: “Nous marchons vers un but dont aucun ne s'égare / Et la Mort réunit ceux que la mort sépare” (“We march towards a goal from which none strays, and Death reunites those whom death has parted”). On that of the widow Dufour, who died in 1842: “Sous ses verrous glacés la mort impitoyable / A pu seule enchaîner son active bonté” (“Only pitiless death, behind its icy bars, could ever chain her restless kindness”). In the nineteenth century, almost every grave carried its own text — a poem, a prayer, a farewell in verse. Over the decades, rain, frost and lichen have made many of these inscriptions unreadable. The formula “Regrets éternels” (“Everlasting regret”), so common on twentieth-century graves, came to replace texts that had once been more personal, more literary and more daring.

The visitor who takes the time to step off the marked paths and study the inscriptions finds that Père-Lachaise still holds unusual epitaphs. The grave of Fernand Arbelot, in Division 11, carries beneath its bronze sculpture, signed by Adolphe Wansart and dated 1946, these words from a couple: “Ils furent émerveillés du beau voyage — Qui les mena jusqu'au bout de la vie” (“They marvelled at the beautiful journey that carried them to the end of life”). The bronze man holds his companion's face between his hands, and the epitaph explains the sculpture: what he contemplates is not grief but gratitude. The epitaphs of Père-Lachaise form a literary corpus in their own right — more than two centuries of words that the living address to the dead, or that the dead, in one last act of authority, address to those who remain.