July 12, 2023 • 12 mins
The most famous cemetery in Paris has some of the most famous people in the world buried there. And it's quite lovely.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's
Chuck Dave's here in spirit, and Jim Morrison's here in
spirit too. The Lizard King, Yeah, the very lizard King
do they call him?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
That's so lame he called himself that.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Come on, Jim, Sorry, Josh, I think he was super cool,
but that's just lame.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
I agree, And well we'll slam Jim Morrison at the end.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
All right. Well, the reason we bring up Jim Morrison's
because we're talking about Perry Lache's cemetery, one of arguably
the most famous cemeteries in the entire world, in no
small part because Jim Morrison's buried there.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, I mean a ton of famous people who will
go over in a minute. But have you ever been there?
Speaker 1 (00:48):
No? Never have?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Oh, okay, I have a couple of times. Both my
trips to Paris, my buddy Brett and I walked around
and went to Jim Morrison's grave as well. Quite a
few others did not leave any trinkets or anything, but
there were quite a few trinkets and marijuana cigarettes, jazz
cigarettes and all sorts of stuff like that, and a
(01:11):
bunch of hippies. But it's just a beautiful, beautiful stroll
because it's a beautiful cemetery.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, apparently it is the cemetery that kicked off the
gardener landscape cemetery craze, where they went from the old
medieval churchyards where they literally buried people on top of
other people for centuries to building a cemetery that's super
spread out, that's laid out with like nice shrubs and
(01:39):
trees and flowers and winding paths and places to sit.
Even like it was a radical departure from what people
had been doing in Europe all the way up to
that time. And it was I think first built in
eighteen oh four by Napoleon correct. I mean he built
it himself in.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
His spare time. He got a shovel, that's true. Should
thank our old friends at how stuffworks dot com and
Nathan Chandler for some of this and then some other
websites we went to. But we Yeah, Napoleon eighteen o four,
he said, you know what, let's let's build this thing.
It's it's going to be beautiful. It's going to be vast.
(02:18):
The pads are even going to have little street signs
on them. It's going to feel like a little miniature city,
and that's kind of what feels like when you're walking around.
It's the largest one in Paris, I say, obviously, but
if you've never been there, then you may not understand.
When you're in there, you realize just how big it is.
But it's more than one hundred acres large and has
over a million interments.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. That's per a guy named Keith
Egener who's a professor at the University of Oregon who
how stuff works talk to about it. He just happens
to be an expert in cemeteries, including pair Lach's Cemetery.
And one of the things that that I think you
kind of hit on that's worth saying is it has
a kind of like feel to it, so much so
(03:02):
that like the place is segregated essentially into neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
It is, and segregated by religion too. I don't know
if this is something they still do. It seems like
an outdated thing, but maybe they still do it because
of history.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Well, I have a feeling you get in where you
fit in in Pariloches because the cemeteries in Paris are
so full. Yeah, I saw that there's about five thousand
requests to be buried in any of Paris's fourteen city cemeteries.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Oh wow, but only one hundred and.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Fifty plots available per year among all fourteen, not just Pariloches,
but Parloches is probably in demand more than any other.
The problem is is that means that the price of
those plots has risen commensurate to that demand, and Paris
is very frequently chastised for basically making it seem like
it only wants the wealthiest citizens buried in its cemeteries.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I wonder if it's a case where you can just
out bid for these or what that process is like,
or if it's like, sorry, you know, you know that
you're on a list and you can't buy your way
up that list.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Or you go to the trouble of poisoning your direct
competitor and didn't think it through because now he got
the plot because he died before you did.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
That wouldn't be too hard in Paris, because you just
throw it in a croissant. Yeah, someone will eat it.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So who are the people that are buried there? Chuck,
give us a few names.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Well, how about a cliffhanger. We'll take a sort of
an early break here, because you know everyone's dying to know.
And we'll talk about some of those names right after this.
(05:05):
All right, everyone, if you've been there, then you know
you can see Jim Morrison, the graves that I went to.
How about this, I'll read the ones that I went
to and then you can fill in the rest. But
I stopped by Oscar Wilde's grave, very nice. I stopped
by Chopin. I love Chopin is in Frederick, I like,
I mean, oh sure, let me see what other ones? Oh?
(05:28):
I went by Edith Piaff's grave, and I think there
was one more on this list, Proust Marcel Proust, yep.
I went by that one. I don't think I saw any.
I mean, I may have walked by and not realized
in my early twenties. Who is a door Duncan was
or something? But those are the ones that I made
a point to go see.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Is a door Duncan was a famous writer? She held
Paris Salon's eves Montan eve Montane is there. He's an actor.
Marcel Marceau, the famous mime, is buried there. In his
head sown is a three dimensional bust of him. Locked
in a permanent scream of terror.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Of course silent. Of course I've seen that one too. Actually,
that sounds.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Familiar Marcel Marceau's Yeah, I just made that up. Though
he's not really screaming on his headstone.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Oh he's not. Okay, then I didn't see it. What
have I seen like that though? Or did I just
have like an implanted memory.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I don't know. I think maybe you did pick up
one of those jazz cigarettes from Morrison's grave and walked
around with it.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I've held it all this time. It's vintage.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Another person there is Moliere, who was a very famous
actor from the seventeenth century, very beloved actor in the
seventeenth century, and he was one of the people who
kicked off the Perilochet Cemetery because at first it was
such a radical departure from the type of burials that
people were used to in Paris that it was not
(06:50):
immediately popular. The other problem is that when it was built,
it was built at the edge of Paris, so it's
kind of hard to get to. So to get people interested,
they actually found Moliere's remains. Allegedly it made a big
deal out of burying him there to just kind of
get some attention for it.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, because I think your choices before then you mentioned
those churchyards, and they always had well not always, but
even back then they had burial space issues because at
those churchyards they were just burying people on top of
one another, and they wouldn't necessarily bury your family together.
And it just seems like burial has always been a
(07:29):
problem in Paris for one reason or another. I guess
space for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Well, one of the other reasons that it's so tight
right now is because in the churchyards they just bury
people on top of people. We were saying. But in
Parloches and the other city cemeteries that followed, you could
buy a plot for eternity essentially, why they started to
run out of plots.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
That makes sense. Here's a couple more names. Gertrud Stein.
We didn't mention gertrud Stein. How could we not? Or
Sarah Bernhardt. Yeah, it's another big one. Who is George
Sarah Sarah?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
He was an Impressionist painter along with the.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Delac Oh, okay, yeah, he's.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Also buried there. And I misspoke. I said Isidore Duncan
was held the Paris salons and it was an author
and art collector. That was Gertrude's Gertrude Stein Isidore Duncan
was a beloved dancer in.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Paris, m and that was it was that after I
know they were both after the break. I just wonder
how many people just said, I'm done with this show.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
So the name itself, though, pear Lachaise comes from King
Louis the fourteenth Confessor.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Right, that's right, father, Oh boy, you need to take
this one, father Francois.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
And now you die de la chaise.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
That's die d ai exit. That's how that's pronounced die. Ok.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
So his name father is pair is father like as
in a priest also is a dad, but in French
and Lachaise means the chair, so his name is pair
the chair.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I think I'm the first person in history to turn
that up.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
To make that joke.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well, yeah, but it's a research based joke.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, sure, like all of our jokes. Sure, it's a
big tourist attraction. Now, like I said, obviously, you know
a lot of people go because it's it's not only
a place where you can go see Oscar Wilde and
kirchard Stein and pay your respects at their headstones. But
it is a as all urban cemeteries are. It's it's
(09:32):
a bit of a respite. It's a bit of a
break from the hustle and bustle to stroll around this shady,
beautiful park almost with dead bodies all over the place.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Wow, that's amazing, because yeah, I think how many people
visit a year? Do?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
They say about four million people every year? That is
a lot. I mean, there's it's definitely, I mean it's large,
but it's not like you're going to stroll for three
hundred feet without seeing another person. People all over.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, So if you wanted to get there, you would
go to sixteen Rue de Repos, which means repose, which
means rest. It's very appropriate name for a city cemetery
street that it's on, right, And one other thing about
it that really stuck out to meet Chuck was that
they also buried eb Lard and Heloise, who were definitely
(10:23):
worth looking into and I think we should actually do
a short stuff on them. But they were one of
the most famous couples of the medieval era, maybe of
all time, like a real life Romeo and Juliet, right
and quite the same, but was still very tragic, but
they wrote letters to one another. I feel like we've
talked about them before. They wrote letters to one another
(10:45):
that were preserved, and these love letters are just so
amazing that people still read them today.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And that was another case of they were kind of
putting that out there too, like, oh, they're buried here
as well, to try and pump up interest.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Right exactly. They brought them together in the afterlife by
reburying them together in a specially designed crypt.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
That's really nice. I would say that, I know we
did Hollywood Forever or did we do the other one
in la.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
We didn't do.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Oh yeah, we did both.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I don't think so. No, I said we didn't. Okay,
just for us lawn, Yeah, that's my understanding.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
All right, Well, all of these We have Oakland Cemetery
here in Atlanta, which is very nice as well, and
all of these places are great, but none of them
hold a candle to that little cemetery in Woodstock, New
York where you can go see Levon Helm and Rick
Danko's gravestones from the band. Okay, fair enough, my favorite cemetery.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I've got nothing to top that. So I think that short.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Stuff is out.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's
Chuck Dave's here in spirit, and Jim Morrison's here in
spirit too. The Lizard King, Yeah, the very lizard King
do they call him?
Speaker 2 (00:15):
That's so lame he called himself that.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Come on, Jim, Sorry, Josh, I think he was super cool,
but that's just lame.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
I agree, And well we'll slam Jim Morrison at the end.
Speaker 1 (00:31):
All right. Well, the reason we bring up Jim Morrison's
because we're talking about Perry Lache's cemetery, one of arguably
the most famous cemeteries in the entire world, in no
small part because Jim Morrison's buried there.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, I mean a ton of famous people who will
go over in a minute. But have you ever been there?
Speaker 1 (00:48):
No? Never have?
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Oh, okay, I have a couple of times. Both my
trips to Paris, my buddy Brett and I walked around
and went to Jim Morrison's grave as well. Quite a
few others did not leave any trinkets or anything, but
there were quite a few trinkets and marijuana cigarettes, jazz
cigarettes and all sorts of stuff like that, and a
(01:11):
bunch of hippies. But it's just a beautiful, beautiful stroll
because it's a beautiful cemetery.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
Yeah, apparently it is the cemetery that kicked off the
gardener landscape cemetery craze, where they went from the old
medieval churchyards where they literally buried people on top of
other people for centuries to building a cemetery that's super
spread out, that's laid out with like nice shrubs and
(01:39):
trees and flowers and winding paths and places to sit.
Even like it was a radical departure from what people
had been doing in Europe all the way up to
that time. And it was I think first built in
eighteen oh four by Napoleon correct. I mean he built
it himself in.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
His spare time. He got a shovel, that's true. Should
thank our old friends at how stuffworks dot com and
Nathan Chandler for some of this and then some other
websites we went to. But we Yeah, Napoleon eighteen o four,
he said, you know what, let's let's build this thing.
It's it's going to be beautiful. It's going to be vast.
(02:18):
The pads are even going to have little street signs
on them. It's going to feel like a little miniature city,
and that's kind of what feels like when you're walking around.
It's the largest one in Paris, I say, obviously, but
if you've never been there, then you may not understand.
When you're in there, you realize just how big it is.
But it's more than one hundred acres large and has
over a million interments.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. That's per a guy named Keith
Egener who's a professor at the University of Oregon who
how stuff works talk to about it. He just happens
to be an expert in cemeteries, including pair Lach's Cemetery.
And one of the things that that I think you
kind of hit on that's worth saying is it has
a kind of like feel to it, so much so
(03:02):
that like the place is segregated essentially into neighborhoods.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
It is, and segregated by religion too. I don't know
if this is something they still do. It seems like
an outdated thing, but maybe they still do it because
of history.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
Well, I have a feeling you get in where you
fit in in Pariloches because the cemeteries in Paris are
so full. Yeah, I saw that there's about five thousand
requests to be buried in any of Paris's fourteen city cemeteries.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Oh wow, but only one hundred and.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
Fifty plots available per year among all fourteen, not just Pariloches,
but Parloches is probably in demand more than any other.
The problem is is that means that the price of
those plots has risen commensurate to that demand, and Paris
is very frequently chastised for basically making it seem like
it only wants the wealthiest citizens buried in its cemeteries.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
I wonder if it's a case where you can just
out bid for these or what that process is like,
or if it's like, sorry, you know, you know that
you're on a list and you can't buy your way
up that list.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
Or you go to the trouble of poisoning your direct
competitor and didn't think it through because now he got
the plot because he died before you did.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
That wouldn't be too hard in Paris, because you just
throw it in a croissant. Yeah, someone will eat it.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
So who are the people that are buried there? Chuck,
give us a few names.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Well, how about a cliffhanger. We'll take a sort of
an early break here, because you know everyone's dying to know.
And we'll talk about some of those names right after this.
(05:05):
All right, everyone, if you've been there, then you know
you can see Jim Morrison, the graves that I went to.
How about this, I'll read the ones that I went
to and then you can fill in the rest. But
I stopped by Oscar Wilde's grave, very nice. I stopped
by Chopin. I love Chopin is in Frederick, I like,
I mean, oh sure, let me see what other ones? Oh?
(05:28):
I went by Edith Piaff's grave, and I think there
was one more on this list, Proust Marcel Proust, yep.
I went by that one. I don't think I saw any.
I mean, I may have walked by and not realized
in my early twenties. Who is a door Duncan was
or something? But those are the ones that I made
a point to go see.
Speaker 1 (05:49):
Is a door Duncan was a famous writer? She held
Paris Salon's eves Montan eve Montane is there. He's an actor.
Marcel Marceau, the famous mime, is buried there. In his
head sown is a three dimensional bust of him. Locked
in a permanent scream of terror.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Of course silent. Of course I've seen that one too. Actually,
that sounds.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Familiar Marcel Marceau's Yeah, I just made that up. Though
he's not really screaming on his headstone.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Oh he's not. Okay, then I didn't see it. What
have I seen like that though? Or did I just
have like an implanted memory.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
I don't know. I think maybe you did pick up
one of those jazz cigarettes from Morrison's grave and walked
around with it.
Speaker 2 (06:27):
I've held it all this time. It's vintage.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Another person there is Moliere, who was a very famous
actor from the seventeenth century, very beloved actor in the
seventeenth century, and he was one of the people who
kicked off the Perilochet Cemetery because at first it was
such a radical departure from the type of burials that
people were used to in Paris that it was not
(06:50):
immediately popular. The other problem is that when it was built,
it was built at the edge of Paris, so it's
kind of hard to get to. So to get people interested,
they actually found Moliere's remains. Allegedly it made a big
deal out of burying him there to just kind of
get some attention for it.
Speaker 2 (07:08):
Yeah, because I think your choices before then you mentioned
those churchyards, and they always had well not always, but
even back then they had burial space issues because at
those churchyards they were just burying people on top of
one another, and they wouldn't necessarily bury your family together.
And it just seems like burial has always been a
(07:29):
problem in Paris for one reason or another. I guess
space for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
Well, one of the other reasons that it's so tight
right now is because in the churchyards they just bury
people on top of people. We were saying. But in
Parloches and the other city cemeteries that followed, you could
buy a plot for eternity essentially, why they started to
run out of plots.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
That makes sense. Here's a couple more names. Gertrud Stein.
We didn't mention gertrud Stein. How could we not? Or
Sarah Bernhardt. Yeah, it's another big one. Who is George
Sarah Sarah?
Speaker 1 (08:05):
He was an Impressionist painter along with the.
Speaker 2 (08:07):
Delac Oh, okay, yeah, he's.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Also buried there. And I misspoke. I said Isidore Duncan
was held the Paris salons and it was an author
and art collector. That was Gertrude's Gertrude Stein Isidore Duncan
was a beloved dancer in.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
Paris, m and that was it was that after I
know they were both after the break. I just wonder
how many people just said, I'm done with this show.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
So the name itself, though, pear Lachaise comes from King
Louis the fourteenth Confessor.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
Right, that's right, father, Oh boy, you need to take
this one, father Francois.
Speaker 1 (08:40):
And now you die de la chaise.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
That's die d ai exit. That's how that's pronounced die. Ok.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
So his name father is pair is father like as
in a priest also is a dad, but in French
and Lachaise means the chair, so his name is pair
the chair.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
It's pretty good.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
I think I'm the first person in history to turn
that up.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
To make that joke.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Well, yeah, but it's a research based joke.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Yeah, sure, like all of our jokes. Sure, it's a
big tourist attraction. Now, like I said, obviously, you know
a lot of people go because it's it's not only
a place where you can go see Oscar Wilde and
kirchard Stein and pay your respects at their headstones. But
it is a as all urban cemeteries are. It's it's
(09:32):
a bit of a respite. It's a bit of a
break from the hustle and bustle to stroll around this shady,
beautiful park almost with dead bodies all over the place.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Wow, that's amazing, because yeah, I think how many people
visit a year? Do?
Speaker 2 (09:48):
They say about four million people every year? That is
a lot. I mean, there's it's definitely, I mean it's large,
but it's not like you're going to stroll for three
hundred feet without seeing another person. People all over.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Yeah, So if you wanted to get there, you would
go to sixteen Rue de Repos, which means repose, which
means rest. It's very appropriate name for a city cemetery
street that it's on, right, And one other thing about
it that really stuck out to meet Chuck was that
they also buried eb Lard and Heloise, who were definitely
(10:23):
worth looking into and I think we should actually do
a short stuff on them. But they were one of
the most famous couples of the medieval era, maybe of
all time, like a real life Romeo and Juliet, right
and quite the same, but was still very tragic, but
they wrote letters to one another. I feel like we've
talked about them before. They wrote letters to one another
(10:45):
that were preserved, and these love letters are just so
amazing that people still read them today.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
And that was another case of they were kind of
putting that out there too, like, oh, they're buried here
as well, to try and pump up interest.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
Right exactly. They brought them together in the afterlife by
reburying them together in a specially designed crypt.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
That's really nice. I would say that, I know we
did Hollywood Forever or did we do the other one
in la.
Speaker 1 (11:14):
We didn't do.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
Oh yeah, we did both.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I don't think so. No, I said we didn't. Okay,
just for us lawn, Yeah, that's my understanding.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
All right, Well, all of these We have Oakland Cemetery
here in Atlanta, which is very nice as well, and
all of these places are great, but none of them
hold a candle to that little cemetery in Woodstock, New
York where you can go see Levon Helm and Rick
Danko's gravestones from the band. Okay, fair enough, my favorite cemetery.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
I've got nothing to top that. So I think that short.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
Stuff is out.
Speaker 1 (11:48):
Stuff.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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