Possibly the most eccentric grave in Paris - and the competition is considerable - is that of the Famille Pigeon, writes Frank McNally
An inventor who died in 1915, Charles Pigeon's main claim to fame was the creation of an explosion-proof miner's lamp. But his tombstone is nothing more grandiose than a marble bed, in which he and Madame Pigeon are portrayed in mature marital bliss.
His wife is lying down, apparently about to go to sleep, while the inventor is propped up on an elbow, having just made an entry in his diary. The scene is intimate, yet there was no risk of it scandalising the public, even a century ago. Both spouses are wearing full formal dress, including a dinner jacket in M. Pigeon's case, under the blankets.
The contrast with the grave of Samuel Beckett and his wife - across the road in the main section of Montparnasse Cemetery - could hardly be more complete. In keeping with the writer's minimalism, the stone bears only names and dates - although, the day I visited, somebody had added a red rose.
Like the city itself, the cemetery is impeccably laid out along a series of broad avenues and narrower streets. Beckett's grave is prime property by any standards, fronting the elegant Ave de l'Est and just off the central roundabout. But the drawback is that you don't get to choose your neighbours here.
Just across the road is the final resting place of Serge Gainsbourg, something of a hero in France but best known outside of it for his part in the heavy-breathing pop classic, Je t'aime. That he was a much-loved man is clear from the grave, on which admirers have piled flowers, plants, pebbles, cigarette-lighters, and even toys, including a Teletubby.
Whatever the two men would have made of each other's company, they were being blessed equally last weekend by the trees that line Avenue de l'Est, carpeting the road, footpaths, and gravestones in green-yellow blossoms. It was a strange feeling walking underneath. Although there was hardly a breeze, the blossoms fell like snow, albeit of the wrong colour. You had to pinch yourself to be sure you had not joined Beckett and Gainsbourg in the Elysian Fields.
The cemeteries of modern Paris date from the revolutionary era, when the existing sites had become so dangerously overcrowded that, in one, the paupers' grave burst its seams and crashed into the cellars of the unfortunates who lived next door, whose health was already threatened by their proximity to it. Further burials were banned, and a few years later Napoleon ordered that henceforth, interments would be outside the city walls, in three huge sites, the largest and most famous of which is Père Lachaise.
Here, of course, lies Oscar Wilde, under a moderately eccentric - but thoroughly ugly - statue of an angel. Like Jim Morrison's grave elsewhere in the cemetery, Wilde's has long been a target for tributes bordering on criminal damage. Lipstick-covered kisses are a typical tribute. But the hacking off of the angel's manhood some years ago was the work either of a vandal or a sensitive art critic.
You can't escape sex in Paris, even in cemeteries. Another target for tribute-vandalism in Père Lachaise is the tomb of "Victor Noir", the pen-name of a journalist killed in a duel with Prince Napoleon in 1870; he is portrayed in effigy - prostrate after the shooting - on his tombstone.
Noir's death, and the rumour that he had planned to marry the day afterwards, made him a romantic hero. But his posthumous role as a fertility symbol may relate more to the fact that the sculptor gave him a noticeably enlarged groin. Down the years, women have taken to rubbing the affected area for luck, making it shiny. It became so embarrassing a few years ago that the cemetery overseers put up a fence.
Most of the city's tombs are perfectly respectable, and dull. The biggest are for the so-called " deux cent familles" - the wealthy few who pulled the strings in life and who in death are commemorated by sculptures of varying grandiosity. Many are topped by miniature temples, with a door and small altar inside. They look like stone phone-boxes, in which you might contact your ancestors.
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Of course, theplace to be buried in Paris is the Panthéon. Designed as a church in the late 1700s, but later deprived of its windows and turned into a mausoleum for secular saints, this is where the greats of French society are laid to rest, once their greatness becomes obvious. For some, this happens as soon as they die. Others have to serve decades in secular purgatory first.
" Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante," it says over the entrance. But femmesare allowed in now too, the ashes of Marie Curie leading the way in 1995, when they were reinterred - more than 60 years after her death - alongside those of her husband.
The Panthéon is a cathedral of the enlightenment. In place of an altar, there is an epic sculpture with grim-faced soldiers and the slogan " Vivre libre ou mourir". And suspended 67 metres from the centre of the great dome - as it was in the famous 1851 experiment - is Foucault's Pendulum, swinging magisterially just above the rotunda floor to demonstrate the earth's movement on its axis.
Apart from Voltaire and Rousseau, who face each other in tense silence across the main hall, there is a typically Parisian uniformity to the Pantheon's tombs. But the authorities make up for this with the colour and pageantry of the installation ceremonies, replayed on a highlights reel in one of the side rooms.
Some heroes are carried in at night, in torchlit processions; some get rousing speeches. A few even get fancy-dress parties. My favourite ceremony was the one for Alexandre Dumas, escorted to the Panthéon in 2002 by three musketeers on horseback, with his remains draped in a blue velvet cloth bearing the message: " Tous pour un, un pour tout."