Pierre GAREAU

The story

Pierre Gareau was a merchant. He died in Paris on 30 August 1815, “aged 49”, as his stone has it — the usage of the time giving the age rather than the year of birth. He left a widow and six children, who had a monument raised to him. The cemetery was then eleven years old: opened in 1804, it was still struggling to fill, and looking for dead men notable enough to make wealthy families want to buy a plot there.

That is where the importance of this grave lies. It carries the first life-size statue ever raised at Père-Lachaise: a marble Grief carved between 1816 and 1818 by François Dominique Aimé Milhomme. Before it, people put up steles, columns, chapels; nobody had yet stood a human figure at full scale above a dead man. Everything the cemetery would become — the open-air museum of funerary sculpture visitors walk through today — begins with this marble ordered by a merchant's widow.

The inscription then tells a succession of bereavements. Élisabeth Gareau died on 18 October 1816, at twenty-one. Jean-Baptiste Jules Gareau on 21 July 1818, at fifteen. Joseph Pierre Gareau on 9 March 1825, at twenty-eight. In ten years the widow who had ordered the statue for her husband had three of her six children cut beneath it. The marble Grief, carved for one dead man, was already watching over four.

A fourth name was added later, that of a survivor: Eugène François Garreau (1811-1888), a deputy — with one r more than his father, whom he lost at four and outlived by seventy-three years. The grave thus covers close to a century of one family, from a merchant dead under the Empire to a deputy dead under the Third Republic. It stands in Division 10, on the chemin Denon, a few steps from Chopin.