The fifth most popular attraction in Paris celebrates its 200th anniversary this month rather regretting the pulling power of its better-known residents — and fed up with the behaviour of their fans.
The Père Lachaise cemetery, the vast, Gothic and often tumbledown final resting place for nearly one million souls, drew more than two million visitors last year, behind only Notre Dame, the Eiffel tower, the Louvre and the Pompidou centre on the city’s must-see list.
The tombs of some of its denizens — Chopin, Edith Piaf, Molière, Bizet, Oscar Wilde — are redoubtable tourist magnets, but for the cemetery’s 100 staff it means extra work to keep the cemetery clean and clear of litter, graffiti and at times unorthodox tributes.
All are eclipsed by the necropolis’s biggest draw, however: the gravestone of Jim Morrison. Christian Charlet, who is responsible for the cemetery and its 70 000 tombs, would happily do without the Doors frontman, who passed out in his bath (and into legend) in Paris in July 1971.
”We’d like to kick him out, because we don’t want him, he causes too many problems,” Charlet said. ”If we could get rid of him, we’d do it straight away.” Unlike many of the tombs, Morrison’s is on a perpetual lease.
Père Lachaise has had to hire a security guard to watch over the singer’s last resting place. Fans still queue to take a picture, mutter a few words or lay something — a flower, a note, a candle, a cigarette butt — on his tomb. Before the guard’s appointment, they would converge to smoke pot and (it is whispered) have sex.
A couple of years ago, things got so bad that relatives of some unfamous Frenchmen buried nearby got up a petition to ask for the body to be exhumed and sent home. ”People come here not to worship the dead, but think they can do what they want, as if it was a rave party,” said Charlet.
Père Lachaise’s current popularity is in contrast to its early days, when the cemetery — which opened in May 1804 — was given the cold shoulder by Parisians accustomed to their dead being tossed into common graves. An 1817 advertising campaign, and the transfer to the site of Abelard, Heloise, Molière and La Fontaine, made little difference, and it was not until Balzac featured the cemetery in his 1835 novel, Le Père Goriot, that it became fashionable to buy a plot.
The cemetery, a vast park in north-east Paris, spread over 44 hectares and boasting 6 000 trees, also holds the remains of Proust, Balzac and Simone Signoret.
The most-visited (and vandalised) grave after Morrison’s is that of Wilde.
The author’s towering memorial features a very obviously male angel. Soon after Wilde was buried in 1900, a former headkeeper, out of deference to local feeling, castrated the sculpture and for years used the testicles as a paperweight.
Despite a plaque reading ”Respect the memory of Oscar Wilde and do not deface this tomb”, the vandalism continues: a tradition has arisen of planting purple lipstick kisses on Wilde’s tombstone.
Cemetery stonemasons say that marker-pen graffiti can be cleaned off, and scratched messages rubbed down with sandpaper, but lipstick contains fats which sink into the stone and cannot be removed.
Even some non-celebrities’ gravestones attract attention: the statue of Victor Noir, a dashing young journalist killed in 1870, has become a fertility symbol, its crotch rubbed to a brassy shine by women seeking to increase their chance of conceiving. – Guardian Unlimited Â