September 16, 2025 • 36 mins
The Grim is opening the gate to Père Lachaise, Paris’s most legendary and haunted cemetery. Step through its rusted gates and wander the shadowed avenues of a necropolis that cradles the bones of revolutionaries, rock stars, and romantics, whispering stories richer than fiction.
Founded in 1804 as Napoleon’s answer to overflowing churchyards, Père Lachaise began as an empty hillside at the city’s edge. Only after the ceremonial reinterment of cultural giants like Molière did it transform into the most coveted final address in Paris. Today, more than 3.5 million visitors each year thread between its marble monuments, seeking ghosts both famous and forgotten.
Along moss-lined paths, we visit the graves of Jim Morrison, Héloïse and Abélard, Édith Piaf, Honoré de Balzac, and Eugène Delacroix. Yet Père Lachaise holds darker seams as well: the Paris Commune executions at the Communards’ Wall, the bloodshed of the 1814 assault, and echoes of the city’s violent past. Between chapels and catacombs, five thousand trees turn this cathedral of the dead into a living refuge for foxes and birds, where nature and mourning entwine.
Join The Grim as we descend into this cathedral of memory, where Paris wears its decay like perfume, old, intoxicating, and impossible to forget. The gates stand open. Will you step inside?
Support The Grim by buying a cup of our next Grave Grind!
https://buymeacoffee.com/kristinlopes
Find All of The Grim's Social Links At:
https://linktr.ee/kristinlopes
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kristin (00:13):
Grim.
Mourning and welcome to theGrim.
I'm your host, Kristin.
Today we're unlatching therusted gate and slipping quietly
into Pyrlachae, an acropolisnot merely of stone but of
legend.
Here, beneath Parisian skiesand crumbling angels, the dead
rest uneasily in marble rows,their names etched in shadow and
(00:34):
song.
The aroma of coffee mingles inthe air.
The gates stand open, stepcarefully, it's time to descend
into the hauntings of history.
In the heart of the Parisiancity of light, pire-le-chain
lingers in its long shadows, itsrusting gates seducing over 3.5
million souls a year.
(00:54):
Paris, in my opinion, wears itsdecay like a perfume, a scent
both old and dirty, yetirresistibly charming.
Fittingly, the city's mosticonic cemetery mirrors those
very qualities.
Its grounds are an ode to death, where every plant and lament
are tailored to grief.
Togon's cemetery feels almostdismissive.
(01:15):
It's truly a cathedral of thedead and, if I'm being honest,
it's a quiet wonder of the worldcloaked in moss and a testament
to the forgotten.
Wonder of the world cloaked inmoss and a testament to the
forgotten.
For Pierre Lachaix, its historyis as layered and
unapologetically Parisian as thecity of Paris itself.
Before it became a necropolisof the famous and forgotten, the
(01:35):
land belonged to a wealthy 15thcentury merchant known as
Champs-Élysées.
By the 17th century, the Jesuitshad claimed the hilltop estate
long after his death,transforming it into a secluded
retreat.
It was here Father Francois,known more familiarly as the
Père Lachaise confessor to KingLouis XIV, took up residence.
(01:56):
The cemetery bears his name,though he likely never imagined
it would one day become thesanctuary for the dead.
The Jesuits, ever loyal totheir monarch, renamed the area
Mont-Louis in honor of the king.
Louis himself is said to havevisited during times of unrest,
including the Font, a series ofcivil wars in France between
(02:16):
1648 and 1653.
He was also accompanied by hisbodyguards, who kept a residence
nearby on the property.
This meant that lavish partiesfollowed, though not just for
pleasure but as performances.
He created spectacles for thosehoping to secure the king's
favor, or perhaps that of hisconfessor.
After Pierre Lachaise's deathin 1709, the estate expanded,
(02:40):
but, like all things too closelytied to power, the Jesuits
eventually fell out of favor.
By the 1760s, they wereexpelled from France, the
property seized and the landleft to sleep for a time until
the dead began to arrive.
By the close of the 18th century, though, paris was teetering on
the edge of rot, the dead hadbegun to overrun the city.
(03:02):
Burial grounds spilled overchurchyards, soured the air, and
the fears of miasma, thepoisonous breath of decay, grew
louder with each passing season.
Death, once tucked neatlybehind chapel doors, had become
a public crisis, and somethinghad to be done.
And so, in 1804, underNapoleon's order, the city
(03:23):
established a grand,multipistible cemetery on the
eastern outskirts, a place ofdistance, air and order.
The land that had once hostedroyal confidants and jesuit
retreats would now serve thedead on a far greater scale
André Theodore Braunjardt, whosedesign evoked the regal
(03:43):
splendor of classical gardensand was further shaped by
Nicolas Fréchoux, the urbanplanner, who understood that
even the dead could benefit froma good publicity campaign At
first.
The location, however, workedagainst them.
Pire-léger was too far, toounfamiliar and too new.
It wasn't in the fashionablecenter of Paris, it was beyond
(04:05):
it.
Many Roman Catholics were alsohesitant to be buried in a
cemetery that hadn't beenconsecrated by the church.
As a result, pierre Lacheystood mostly empty in its
earliest years, for Froschouxwas clever To elevate the
cemetery's allure.
He orchestrated a performanceof the dead.
The cemetery's allure.
(04:25):
He orchestrated a performanceof the dead, reinterring the
remains of cultural titans likeMoliere and La Fontaine with
great ceremony, transferringthem from forgotten churchyards
to the sloping, tree-linedavenues of Pierre Lachaise.
It was a spectacle and Pariswatched.
Even writers took note.
Balzac, one of France'sliterary greats ever attuned to
death, desire and decay beganthreading the cemetery into his
(04:48):
fiction, transforming its stonesinto symbols.
Though the cemetery was neverdirectly mentioned Through his
prose, pierre Lachey found asecond life and in doing so drew
the living ever closer to thedead.
And it worked.
The curious came, the grievingfollowed, and soon the wealthy
arrived with their architectsand their marble dreams.
(05:09):
To be buried at, pyrrho Lacheybecame a final performance of
status, a tomb that spoke justnot of how one died but how one
lived.
The tombs began to rise,elaborate, towering, mournful
creations, miniature cathedralsand sculpted sorrows, each one
competing for attention andmortality.
By the late 19th century, eventhe rituals of fire had arrived.
(05:33):
A crematorium was built, addingflame to a place already
steeped in stone.
What had begun as a practicalsolution became something else
entirely A theater of memory, amonument to mortality and, for
many, a final performancebeneath the Parisian sky.
And speaking of finalperformances, no Grave of Pyrrho
(05:54):
Lachey draws the living, quitelike the resting place of Jim
Morrison, a man infamous forlosing himself on stage and
dragging audiences with him intothe abyss.
Talked among the tombs of poetsand revolutionaries, morrison's
grave, once unmarked and nearlyforgotten, has become a shrine
for the strange.
(06:14):
Like the man himself thatrefuses to fade quietly, it
haunts the cemetery's windingpaths, excelling myths and
murmurs of the American specterburied beneath the Parisian soil
.
Born in Florida on December 8,1943, he would become a prophet
of chaos, singer, poet,firestarter, hatched forever in
(06:36):
the mythology of American rock.
With a baritone voice soaked invelvet and venom, he conjured
incantations masked as songs,the end Riders of the storm.
When the music's over, each onecast a spell across the airways
of the damned.
As the frontman of the doors,he claimed, his soul was pierced
(06:56):
as a child on a desert highway,our bloody spirits of Native
American men leapt from thewreckage of a car crash and
slipped into him.
Whether an actual memory or amyth, it became Morrison's story
and his own haunting.
In 1965, he formed the Doorswith keyboardist Ray Manzarek
(07:17):
and the sun-drenched Bohemia ofVenice Beach.
They opened a gate into theworld of rock and roll, and
something darker stepped throughWith light by fire.
The world ignited, throwingthem from the shadows into the
limelight.
With each performance, though,morrison unraveled Drunken,
divine and dangerous.
A Dionysus on stage, a ghost inwaiting.
(07:40):
By the late 1960s, his voicehad become a literature for the
lost.
He read poetry into themicrophones like they were
altars.
He was arrested for obscenity,censored for daring too much,
but he still prowled across thestage, leather-clad and
half-possessed, as if each showmight be his last sermon.
In 1971, he vanished to Paris,herewith his muse in torment,
(08:06):
pamela Currisim.
They wandered the labyrinthianstreets chasing silence and
ghosts.
On July 3rd, morrison's bodywas found in a bathtub.
No autopsy, no certainty, justsilence.
He was only 27.
For years, jim Morrison's gravesat Pire-Lachaise stood unmarked
, anonymous, in the City ofLights.
(08:27):
A simple plot, no name, nomonument, only whispers and
conspiracy theories of themythical man.
French officials eventuallyplaced a modest shield over the
site, but even that was stolenin 1973.
In the cemetery's directory hewas misfiled under a name not
quite his own Douglas JamesMorrison, as if even in death
(08:49):
his identity refused to benailed down.
In 1981, a Croatian sculptornamed Mitlad Mikolan, moved by
Morrison's myth, created amarble bust and a new gravestone
to honor the 10th anniversaryof his death.
For a time the ghost had a face, but the vandals came and, like
so many of Morrison's memories,the bust was defaced, then
(09:11):
stolen entirely, in 1988.
Mccollum would craft another in1989, and later a bronze death
mask in 2001, though neitherremains at the gravesite.
Decades later, in May of 2025,the original sculpture
resurfaced, unexpectedly,recovered by the Parisian police
(09:31):
during an unrelatedinvestigation, the sculpture
becoming almost as ematic andpuzzling as the man himself.
In 1990, his father placed afinal marker on the grave a flat
stone bearing a cryptic Greekepitaph stating true to his own
spirit or, perhaps morechillingly, according to his own
(09:52):
demon and perhaps more a sinwas.
He left behind six albums, atrail of whispered poems and a
conspiracy and a myth thatrefuses to die within pure
lachey.
In its earliest years, thecemetery's gates opened not only
to the dead, but to a lovestory that would be carved into
(10:12):
its foundation.
It's a story tangled inphilosophy, ink and blood.
Fittingly Parisian, within is atomb that holds not just bodies
but letters, laments and a lovethat outlived flesh.
Here, encased in stone andsorrow, are the bones of Peter
Abelard and Heloise, two mindsset ablaze by thought and desire
(10:34):
, bound together in history bypassion, punishment and
ink-stained confessions.
He was the mind of his age, aphilosopher, scholar and heretic
of holy text, peter Abelard,topponied the cloisters of Notre
Dame.
His thoughts sharp as blades,his tongue gilded with rhetoric.
She was the niece of CanonFilbert.
(10:55):
Young Heloise, a luminous andlearned woman in a world that
punished such brilliance, fluentin Latin, greek and Hebrew, she
outshone her peers a candleburning too bright.
Their meeting was no accident.
Abelard offered to tutorHeloise and Filbert, eager for
(11:17):
his niece's advancement,welcomes the arrangement.
But Abelard's lessons quicklyturn into longing.
Beneath the guide of Pelagoji,he seduced her and she too,
clever not to see, chose to beseduced.
The scholar and his pupilbecame lovers, reckless and
radiant.
When Filbert learned the truth,rage shattered the illusion.
He separated them but couldn'tsever the bond.
Heloise had become pregnant andfled to Brittany to give birth
(11:38):
to their son, astrolabe, a childof stars and scandal.
A secret marriage followed,urged by Adelard to protect his
standing, but was resisted byHeloise who feared it would
diminish his greatness.
Yet she didn't want to just behis wife, she wanted to be his
equal.
Still, she eventually relented.
And like all things betweenthem, the union was both tender
(12:01):
and tragic.
Then came the Night of Blood.
Enraged, heloise's uncle,filbert, sought revenge.
And the dead of night, whileAbelard slept, filbert's men
crept inside their home.
Her father, however, didn'tchoose murder.
He chose something far darker,something more horrific.
Mutilating Abelard, theycastrated him, stripping him of
(12:22):
his manhood and condemning himto a lifetime of shame and ruin.
In an era already darkened bymedieval cruelty, the Acts still
managed to shock Christendom asnews spread of Filbert's
revenge.
Heloise, then, was sent to acommon to live out her days in
silence.
An ablard entered a monastery.
Their bodies separated, buttheir minds, their voices, their
(12:44):
longing remained entangled.
What followed was a series ofletters.
Unlike anything else from theMiddle Ages, the surviving
correspondence is a tapestry ofagony, intellect, love and
theology, giving historiansinsight into a side of medieval
life not normally found.
Halloways wrote not just as alover, but as a philosopher, a
(13:07):
feminist.
Before the word had even formed, she challenged the sanctity of
marriage, questioned divinejustice and refused to let her
desire be rewritten as sin.
You know, my beloved.
She wrote to him.
As the world knows now how muchI have lost in you and how my
sorrow for my loss is nothingcompared to what I feel for the
(13:27):
manner in which I lost you isnothing compared to what I feel
for the manner in which I lostyou.
Now, centuries later, theireffigies lie side by side at
Pierre Lachaise, hands nearlytouching lips, sealed forever.
Though the cemetery nowshelters them in solemn
stillness, their bones havewandered nearly as much as their
souls.
Appelard spent his final daysnot in Paris, but in quiet exile
(13:47):
, the priory of Saint-Marchel.
It was here, in April of 1142,that he passed away, a scholar
turned monk, a man once consumedby philosophy and passion, now
resigned to contemplation andash.
Not long after, peter, theVenerable friend, abbot and
final witness, penned a letterto Heloise.
In it, he described Abelard'spassing with a gentleness not
(14:10):
often afforded to heretics.
God now unfolds him in hisembrace in place of you, as
another you, and he keeps himhere for you until the trumpets
sound, until the Lord descendsand, through his grace, he is
restored to you again.
But Peter did more than justwrite.
In secret, and with tremblingpurpose, he ordered Abelard's
remains exhumed fromSaint-Marchel.
(14:32):
Personally and reverently, hecarried them to Periclete, the
very abbey where Heloise wasabbess, so he might lie beneath
the same roof, if only even indeath.
He assured those that would askthat Abelard had been absolved,
cleansed of heresy, and thatthe specter of the theological
scandal wouldn't desecrate hisgrave Leader.
Heloise would be laid besidehim, their two bodies, once torn
(14:56):
apart by violence, now reunitedin stillness beneath the chapel
stone.
But the rest was far frometernal.
Over the centuries, the remainswere disturbed, reburied, lifted
again and again.
The abbey grew in importanceand with each pressing age their
tomb grew more elaborate.
In 1779, what was supposed tobe their final resting place,
(15:18):
epilochili, was built anew, onlyto be destroyed in the chaos of
revolution.
Their bones were exhumed oncemore, this time carried to a
small parish church.
Then, in 1800, once more, thistime carried to a small parish
church.
Then, in 1800, andré Lenore, apainter and visionary with a
taste for ruins and resurrection, acquired what remained of the
couple.
He placed them on his displayin his Museum des Monuments
(15:41):
Francois, where scholarsmeasured their skulls,
catalogued their bones andwhispered of love, theology and
scandal.
But Lenore had grander plans.
In 1802, he had reconstructed atomb using fractured relics of
their past a preserved effigy ofAbelard from Saint-Marchel and
a headless 14th-centurysculpture.
(16:01):
He transformed into Heloise bygiving it a new face.
Around them here ranged Spoglia, carved stone from Metz,
saint-germain-des-pres and thewreckage of belief in empire.
A neo-gothic chapel rose aroundthem like a cathedral of ghosts
and splendor.
Stained glass windows wereimagined but never installed.
Still the tomb stood haunting,beautiful and strangely whole, a
(16:26):
monument not only to two loversbut to every aching heart that
ever longed for a forever.
In 1817, the tomb was moved onefinal time to its current home
in Père Lachaise.
In the 19th century thismonument became a gathering
place for the brokenhearted, ashrine where lovers cast letters
like spells and mourners leftflowers like prayers.
(16:48):
But perhaps in our modern hoursuch places no longer cradle
unrequented love.
Perhaps all that remains arethe embers of regret, divorces,
filed, silences grown too wideto cross.
What once burned now barelyflickers.
But the legend of love isenough.
Here their story becomes aspell past generation after
(17:09):
generation across the achingearth.
Because in the end it's notonly Hallowes and Abelard who
lie here, it's every soul whoever loved beyond the boundaries
of what was allowed, no longercondemned, no longer alone.
Perhaps it's not their bodiesbeneath the stone but their
legend of love that binds themin eternity.
(17:31):
After a spellbinding tale offorbidden medieval love, how
else could Pierre Lachey seducethis soul With the melody of
love itself, the voice of France, edith Piaf, born full of
longing, ever in love, ever inParis.
Her voice still drifts among thetombs and echoes across stone
and shadow, never silent, nevergone.
(17:54):
Edith Giovanni Guessant wasknown to the world as Edith Piaf
was more than a singer she wasthe sound of Paris, breathing
through heartbreak.
She reigned over the cabaretsand shadowed music halls with a
voice that could cradle you orcut you, often in the same
breath.
Paris was still shaking fromwar and Edith came into the
(18:14):
world not with lullabies butwith the echoes of loss.
Her mother, a straight singerof Italian and Cabal descent,
abandoned her at birth.
Her father, a circus acrobatenlisted in the French army.
Soon after leaving Edith to beraised among strangers and
shadows, she spent her earliestyears not in warmth but in a
brothel run by her grandmotherin Normandy.
(18:36):
Here, among the courtesans andcandle smoke, the child was
passed from hand to hand,watched over by the women of the
night.
When Edith fell ill, caratitisstole her sight for nearly four
years.
It was these women, with whatlittle they had, who pulled
their coins in faith to send heron a pilgrimage to St Therese
of Lisieux.
And, whether by miracle ormemory, the child's vision
(18:59):
returned.
Piaf would later call it divinegrace.
Others might say she simply sawtoo much of the world too soon.
From age 14, she was singing onthe streets beside her father,
performing while he tumbled andbowed.
By 14, she was singing on thestreets beside her father,
performing while he tumbled andbowed.
By 15, she was on her own,surviving by song and cigarette
smoke.
Her voice, raw, cracked, real,was impossible to ignore.
(19:22):
Paris itself seemed to hushwhen she sang.
One night, fate stepped out ofthe fog in the form of Louis
Lepley, a cabaret owner andtalent scout.
With a fear for misfits andmelancholy.
He found her on the Montemariesidewalk singing to survive.
And he knew at once this girlwasn't just good, she was a
legend waiting to be written.
(19:43):
He took her in, gave her astage, gave her a name La Momie
Piaf the Little Sparrow, small,fragile and untamed.
He taught her how to perform,how to channel every scar and
sorrow into song.
He dressed her in a simpleblack dress that would become
her uniform, her armor, hershroud.
But Paris Zever, the ficklelover, turned quickly.
(20:06):
In 1936, louis Lepley wasmurdered.
The press circled like vulturesfeeding on whispers that tied
Pia to the mobsters who killedhim.
She was questioned, humiliatedand nearly blacklisted.
The city that had applauded hernow turned its gaze away.
To survive, she had to bereborn again.
She set the street girl imageand took back her full name EF
(20:29):
Piaf.
Under the guidance of lyricistRaymond Asso and composer
Marguerite Monod, she found hervoice anew.
They crafted songs that weren'tjust music but memoirs Love,
loss, longing, and each lyric aconfession pulled from the
bloodstream.
And Paris listened.
The sparrow had been somethingmore than a singer.
She was a vessel for everybroken heart.
(20:51):
She became the soundtrack ofthe city's pain, its passion,
its post-war hunger for beautyand truth.
She simply wasn't justperforming.
She was bleeding on stage andthe crowd couldn't look away.
The war came like a slow eclipseover Paris by 1940, the city
was occupied and the cabaretsflickered like candles in a
(21:11):
storm.
But Edith Piaf kept singing.
Some called her courage, otherscompromise.
She performed in nightclubs, inbrothels and in private salons
where German officers drankchampagne and asked for encores.
She entertained the enemy, theysaid.
She kept the lights on whileothers were extinguished and for
a time the question of whethershe was a collaborator or simply
(21:34):
a survivor hung over her likesmoke.
But the truth, like mostlegends, is murky.
She did travel to Berlin in1943.
Invited to perform for Frenchprisoners of war, piaf posed for
photographs with them, smilingand theatrical, then returned to
Paris.
Yet those same photos wouldlater be used to forge false
(21:55):
documents, helping several ofthe men escape.
Her secretary, a member of theresistance, later testified that
Pia smuggled Aiden into campsand used her fame to move
through occupied France like aphantom.
She lived in a bordello, stepsaway from Gestapo headquarters.
She sang love songs beneathNazi banners.
But perhaps her greatest act ofresistance was not in what she
(22:17):
said, but in what she neverstopped doing Giving voice to
longing to freedom, to the echoworld that refused to be
silenced.
By 1944, as the Alliesapproached, pia stood on the
stage in the Moulin Rouge, a newlover by her side actor and
singer Yves Mondin.
In the Moulin Rouge, a newlover by her side actor and
singer Yves Mondin, she was nolonger a street singer or a
(22:39):
cabaret girl.
She was the soul of Parisharnished, tired but unbroken.
When liberation came, somesought to punish her.
She was summoned to testify,accused of collaborating, but
the charges never stuck.
Perhaps it was her charm,perhaps it was the truth,
perhaps it was because Pariscouldn't bear itself to exhale
the voice that had become itsown, and so she sang on.
(22:59):
In 1945, when the war ended, shewrote what would become her
most iconic anthem, la Vie enRosa, a hymn of aching hope, a
love song for a city trying tobelieve in beauty again, like a
spell that will fill deeply, forthe song that would define her.
From the cafes of Mont Marie tothe dance halls of Manhattan,
(23:20):
piaf would become a symbol ofresistance, of romance and of
something real in anincreasingly artificial world.
She sang of love that rarelyhad her own peace.
Her personal life unraveledbeneath the weight of grief.
In 1949, the love of her life,boxing champion Marcel Zerdin,
boarded a plane to New York tobe with her, but it never
(23:41):
arrived.
Their craft crashed into amountain in the Azores, and him
with it.
Piaf, shattered, wrote him al'amour, a wake of his death, a
song for his ghost that hauntedher.
And yet she continued to climb.
She toured America, performedon the Ed Sullivan Show and
filled concert halls acrossEurope and South America.
(24:01):
Her voice, though, cracked withpain, held power.
Every note was a wound reopened, and the world couldn't get
enough.
But fame has its hunger.
A car crash in 1951 shatteredmore than bones in Piaf, pulling
her into a spiral of morphine,brandy, sleepless nights and
phantom pain.
More crashes followed, withmore pills and more men.
(24:24):
She married twice after heraccident, once to singer Jacu
Pils and then to Theo Serapo, aGreek hairdresser 20 years, her
junior.
Love for Piaf was both refugeand ruin.
By 1963, piaf found she wasdying of cancer.
She weighed less than 70 pounds, and yet in April of that year
(24:44):
she recorded one final song.
On October 10th 1963, sheslipped away in her villa on the
French Riviera, surrounded byshadows and morphine, her body
ravaged by cancer and years ofsorrow.
She was just 47, though she hadlived twice that burning twice
as bright.
Her husband, theo Serapo,secretly transported her body
(25:08):
back to Paris, so the city wouldbelieve she died at home among
its spires and cobblestones.
Her funeral procession, though,brought Paris to a standstill.
More than 100,000 mournersflooded the streets.
People wept openly, clutchedrecords to their chests and
whispered lyrics like prayers.
It was the only time the cityhad come to a full stop since
(25:30):
the liberation.
The Catholic Church, though,denied her a proper requiem mass
.
She had lived too wildly,married after divorce, sung in
brothels and loved withoutapology, but the people gave her
a funeral of saints.
In 2013, 50 years after herdeath, the church reversed its
(25:51):
judgment and held a requiem inthe very parish she was born.
By then, of course, she hadalready become a myth.
Her resting place is a simpleblack marble slab in Pierre
Lachey.
Where she lies alongside fellowartists and thinkers, inscribed
with her name is that of herhusband, theo Serapho, and the
phrase love conquers all.
Her grave is a quiet tribute,yet the steady stream of
(26:13):
visitors who leave roses, lightcigarettes and write song lyrics
on nearby stones shows that hervoice, a timeless part of
Paris' soul, continues toresonate far beyond the
cemetery's walls.
Standing within Pire Lachaise,we move on next to a man who
built the literary necropolisand is now a permanent resident
(26:33):
of a real one.
A man who built the literarynecropolis and is now a
permanent resident of a real one.
Every ghost has an origin, andfor Honoré de Balzac, the
haunting began in his own cradle.
Born into a home built on thecold foundation of ambition and
a loveless marriage, he was achild abandoned by warmth, sent
away at birth and kept at achilling distance upon his
return, his only affection camefrom books devoured in the
(26:55):
school's solitude punishmentcell they called the Alco, where
he inhaled the world and forgedthe tools to dissect every soul
he would ever meet.
The city of Paris called himback, but the legal career his
father envisioned felt like adeath sentence To Balzac, the
wall was a theater of ghouls, acatalogue of greed, betrayal and
(27:16):
bitter inheritance.
He fled to a garret, choosingstarvation over a spiritual lie.
From this wrought a monstrousambition was born.
He would perform a literaryautopsy on an entire nation.
He called it a comédie humaine,a city of paper and ink,
populated by the living, thedying and the damned.
His work became a nightlyritual, a kind of dark magic
(27:40):
filled by rivers of black coffee.
He became a ghost in his ownlife, a specter wrestling souls
onto the page, bleeding his ownbetrayals and debts into his
characters.
Until the line between creatorand creation blurred, a
desperate, consuming lovebloomed on the edge of the grave
with Helena Hanska, a countesswho pursued him through letters
(28:03):
for 15 years.
He married his dream justmonths before the ink ran dry
for good.
Balzac died in 1850, consumednot by sickness but by his own
creation.
At his funeral, victor Hugodeclared A nation is in mourning
for a man of genius, and so helies with Empire Lachey, his
(28:24):
monument by Redin leaningforward as if still straining to
write one more line.
But a man like Balzac is nevertruly silent.
He isn't buried here, he'splanted.
His ghost walks off his pagesand into our world.
Honorary to Balzac did notmerely write about the human
soul, he exhumed it.
(28:45):
He pinned its writhing form tothe page and dared to look back
at us from the abyss.
Next we approach a soul wheremany, beneath the crumbling
pillars of revolution, a childof uncertain lineage of
whispered scandals and risingempires, eugene Delacroix came
into the world in April 1798,under the heavy breath of
(29:07):
history, carrying the restlessspirit of romanticism before it
even had a name.
His mother was a descendantfrom artisans, but his father's
identity was a matter of stateintrigue.
It was claimed the true bloodin his veins belonged to
Talleyrand, that limpingarchitect of French diplomacy.
Whether by blood or by favor,talleyrand's shadow would follow
(29:29):
Delacroix, opening doors inpalaces and salons.
But he was never content to sitbeneath chandeliers.
He painted like a man,possessed a revolutionary in
vision, if not in politics.
While his rival Ingress chasedsymmetry and order, delacroix
reached for chaos, for riot,rupture and color that bled and
screamed.
(29:50):
He found truth not in polishedmyths, but in blood-soaked soil,
in storm-ridden shores and inShakespeare's ghosts and Byron's
doomed heroes.
His brushstrokes gaveexpression to a caged soul, and
at the salon, his paintingsshocked society the Barque of
Dante, the massacre at Chios,the death of Sarah and Apollos.
(30:10):
The critics deemed them toowild, too sensual, too full of
death.
Yet what they called vulgar,the people called real.
Delacroix's art was history asa raw wound dripping with
consequence.
His masterpiece, libertyLeading the People, proved the
most dangerous of all.
A woman, crowned in tricolor.
She stepped over the dead witha musket in her hand.
(30:32):
She wasn't a goddess, but aghost of hope rising from the
smoke.
A truth so potent that thegovernment bought the painting
only to hide it away.
Delacroix didn't chase utopia,but pure emotion, despair,
longing, rage, ecstasy.
His travels to Morocco andAlgeria gave him what he called
living antiquity cities andpeople untouched by the
(30:55):
Enlightenment.
He returned to Paris,transformed, filling his
journals with their light andchaos.
He worked feverishly, sometimes15 hours without pause, feeding
on coffee and solitude, untilhis body gave out.
When death came in August of1863, it was quiet.
He left simple orders, no deathmask, no likeness.
(31:18):
Let the work speak, let thebody disappear, but Delacroix
never disappeared.
After his death, he remains oneof the greatest painters of our
time, entombed fittingly amongthe same society that once
branded him vulgar.
His grave is modest, but hispaintings are masterpieces that
live on.
They continue to inspire awe,shock and intrigue in visitors,
(31:42):
forever remembering a man whowanted nothing more than to be
forgotten.
Pierre Lachey always has a wayof revealing itself anew with
every visit, no matter how longyou linger.
Its beauty, often calledunparalleled, never fails to
inspire a sense of awe.
It's clear how this cemeteryinfluenced the design of many
(32:02):
others, from London'sMagnificent Seven to Bonaventure
and countless others, provingits power and beauty extend far
beyond its famous names buriedwithin its walls, pire-le-chez
may be a place of pilgrimage andbeauty, but do not be mistaken
these are not entirely peacefulgrounds.
The city of stone has its ownscarred history, its own ghosts
(32:26):
of war, and its soil has beensoaked in blood more than once.
The silence here is deceptive,for these avenues have twice
echoed with the sounds of battle.
In 1814, during the final daysof the Napoleonic Wars, russian
soldiers stormed over thetombstones in a desperate fight
for Paris.
But a far darker memory isetched into its eastern wall.
(32:50):
In the final bloodied week ofthe Paris Commune in 1871, the
cemetery became the laststronghold for the
revolutionaries.
Here, among the graves of theirancestors, 147 communards were
cornered, lined up against thewall and slaughtered by
government troops, their bodiesthrown into an open pit.
(33:11):
This unquiet ground haunted bythe specters of a forgotten
civil war.
Beyond the violence enactedwithin its walls, the cemetery
also stands as a solemn witnessto the horrors of the wider
world.
Three memorials bear the weightof the First World War, while
monuments to the victims of theHolocaust rise like stark
warnings from the earth,memorializing those deported to
(33:34):
concentration camps from whichthey never returned.
This place is not just acollection of personal sorrows
but a landscape of collectivehuman tragedy where different
faiths Christian, jewish andMuslim find a common home for
their grief.
Every style of Bunari art isrepresented in this empire of
(33:54):
death, forming a ghostlyarchitectural timeline.
Skeleton gothic spires claw atthe sky, grand Haussmannian
burial chambers stand like coldminiature mansions for the elite
dead, and ancient mausoleumsbrood like forgotten pagan
temples.
Every tomb is a story, everypath is a journey through a
(34:15):
history written not in ink butin stone, sorrow and blood.
It's easy to mistake the silencefor this place for peace and
solidarity.
Yet some of its residents arenotoriously restless and
visitors are truly never alone.
They say that the ghost of JimMorrison still lingers here, a
smoke-like figure captured in achilling photograph unable to
(34:36):
leave the site of his.
Morrison still lingers here, asmoke-like figure, captured in a
chilling photograph, unable toleave the site of his pilgrimage
.
Other hauntings are moreinsidious, burrowing not into
your ears but into your mind.
Then there are places where thesorrow is too immense for a
single ghost, like theCommunard's Wall, a scar on the
earth that radiates a colddespair from the mass grave of
147 slaughtered revolutionaries.
(34:57):
To walk these paths is to feelwatched, to hear whispers on the
wind and to understand thatthis is not a place of rust but
an unquiet city where the deadare not entirely forgotten or
gone.
Père Lachaise is far from astatic museum of the dead.
It remains an active cemeterywith a long waiting list.
For its coveted plots To beeligible for burial, one must
(35:21):
have either lived or died inParis, and even then plots are
often temporarily leased.
If a family's concessionexpires, the remains can be
exhumed and moved to thecemetery's ossuary to make room
for new residents.
Amidst the graves, the cemeteryfunctions as an unofficial
nature preserve and one ofParis' most vital green spaces,
(35:50):
with over 5,000 trees providingsanctuary for birds, lizards and
even foxes that live among thetombs.
As the wrought iron gates ofPire-le-achey groan shut behind
us, the stories slip back intostone and the dead return to
their uneasy rest.
But they're never quiet forlong.
Pyrrha Lachey has moreresonance that will lead us to
return soon on the Grimm.
Thank you for joining us as wecrossed over the veil into
(36:11):
Pyrrha Lachey, descending intothe hauntings of history, the
veil into beer lachey,descending into the hauntings of
history.
The gate is sealed, the veildrawn, but death keeps no
calendar.
We'll return, as we always do,on the Grimm.
Grim.
Mourning and welcome to theGrim.
I'm your host, Kristin.
Today we're unlatching therusted gate and slipping quietly
into Pyrlachae, an acropolisnot merely of stone but of
legend.
Here, beneath Parisian skiesand crumbling angels, the dead
rest uneasily in marble rows,their names etched in shadow and
(00:34):
song.
The aroma of coffee mingles inthe air.
The gates stand open, stepcarefully, it's time to descend
into the hauntings of history.
In the heart of the Parisiancity of light, pire-le-chain
lingers in its long shadows, itsrusting gates seducing over 3.5
million souls a year.
(00:54):
Paris, in my opinion, wears itsdecay like a perfume, a scent
both old and dirty, yetirresistibly charming.
Fittingly, the city's mosticonic cemetery mirrors those
very qualities.
Its grounds are an ode to death, where every plant and lament
are tailored to grief.
Togon's cemetery feels almostdismissive.
(01:15):
It's truly a cathedral of thedead and, if I'm being honest,
it's a quiet wonder of the worldcloaked in moss and a testament
to the forgotten.
Wonder of the world cloaked inmoss and a testament to the
forgotten.
For Pierre Lachaix, its historyis as layered and
unapologetically Parisian as thecity of Paris itself.
Before it became a necropolisof the famous and forgotten, the
(01:35):
land belonged to a wealthy 15thcentury merchant known as
Champs-Élysées.
By the 17th century, the Jesuitshad claimed the hilltop estate
long after his death,transforming it into a secluded
retreat.
It was here Father Francois,known more familiarly as the
Père Lachaise confessor to KingLouis XIV, took up residence.
(01:56):
The cemetery bears his name,though he likely never imagined
it would one day become thesanctuary for the dead.
The Jesuits, ever loyal totheir monarch, renamed the area
Mont-Louis in honor of the king.
Louis himself is said to havevisited during times of unrest,
including the Font, a series ofcivil wars in France between
(02:16):
1648 and 1653.
He was also accompanied by hisbodyguards, who kept a residence
nearby on the property.
This meant that lavish partiesfollowed, though not just for
pleasure but as performances.
He created spectacles for thosehoping to secure the king's
favor, or perhaps that of hisconfessor.
After Pierre Lachaise's deathin 1709, the estate expanded,
(02:40):
but, like all things too closelytied to power, the Jesuits
eventually fell out of favor.
By the 1760s, they wereexpelled from France, the
property seized and the landleft to sleep for a time until
the dead began to arrive.
By the close of the 18th century, though, paris was teetering on
the edge of rot, the dead hadbegun to overrun the city.
(03:02):
Burial grounds spilled overchurchyards, soured the air, and
the fears of miasma, thepoisonous breath of decay, grew
louder with each passing season.
Death, once tucked neatlybehind chapel doors, had become
a public crisis, and somethinghad to be done.
And so, in 1804, underNapoleon's order, the city
(03:23):
established a grand,multipistible cemetery on the
eastern outskirts, a place ofdistance, air and order.
The land that had once hostedroyal confidants and jesuit
retreats would now serve thedead on a far greater scale
André Theodore Braunjardt, whosedesign evoked the regal
(03:43):
splendor of classical gardensand was further shaped by
Nicolas Fréchoux, the urbanplanner, who understood that
even the dead could benefit froma good publicity campaign At
first.
The location, however, workedagainst them.
Pire-léger was too far, toounfamiliar and too new.
It wasn't in the fashionablecenter of Paris, it was beyond
(04:05):
it.
Many Roman Catholics were alsohesitant to be buried in a
cemetery that hadn't beenconsecrated by the church.
As a result, pierre Lacheystood mostly empty in its
earliest years, for Froschouxwas clever To elevate the
cemetery's allure.
He orchestrated a performanceof the dead.
The cemetery's allure.
(04:25):
He orchestrated a performanceof the dead, reinterring the
remains of cultural titans likeMoliere and La Fontaine with
great ceremony, transferringthem from forgotten churchyards
to the sloping, tree-linedavenues of Pierre Lachaise.
It was a spectacle and Pariswatched.
Even writers took note.
Balzac, one of France'sliterary greats ever attuned to
death, desire and decay beganthreading the cemetery into his
(04:48):
fiction, transforming its stonesinto symbols.
Though the cemetery was neverdirectly mentioned Through his
prose, pierre Lachey found asecond life and in doing so drew
the living ever closer to thedead.
And it worked.
The curious came, the grievingfollowed, and soon the wealthy
arrived with their architectsand their marble dreams.
(05:09):
To be buried at, pyrrho Lacheybecame a final performance of
status, a tomb that spoke justnot of how one died but how one
lived.
The tombs began to rise,elaborate, towering, mournful
creations, miniature cathedralsand sculpted sorrows, each one
competing for attention andmortality.
By the late 19th century, eventhe rituals of fire had arrived.
(05:33):
A crematorium was built, addingflame to a place already
steeped in stone.
What had begun as a practicalsolution became something else
entirely A theater of memory, amonument to mortality and, for
many, a final performancebeneath the Parisian sky.
And speaking of finalperformances, no Grave of Pyrrho
(05:54):
Lachey draws the living, quitelike the resting place of Jim
Morrison, a man infamous forlosing himself on stage and
dragging audiences with him intothe abyss.
Talked among the tombs of poetsand revolutionaries, morrison's
grave, once unmarked and nearlyforgotten, has become a shrine
for the strange.
(06:14):
Like the man himself thatrefuses to fade quietly, it
haunts the cemetery's windingpaths, excelling myths and
murmurs of the American specterburied beneath the Parisian soil
.
Born in Florida on December 8,1943, he would become a prophet
of chaos, singer, poet,firestarter, hatched forever in
(06:36):
the mythology of American rock.
With a baritone voice soaked invelvet and venom, he conjured
incantations masked as songs,the end Riders of the storm.
When the music's over, each onecast a spell across the airways
of the damned.
As the frontman of the doors,he claimed, his soul was pierced
(06:56):
as a child on a desert highway,our bloody spirits of Native
American men leapt from thewreckage of a car crash and
slipped into him.
Whether an actual memory or amyth, it became Morrison's story
and his own haunting.
In 1965, he formed the Doorswith keyboardist Ray Manzarek
(07:17):
and the sun-drenched Bohemia ofVenice Beach.
They opened a gate into theworld of rock and roll, and
something darker stepped throughWith light by fire.
The world ignited, throwingthem from the shadows into the
limelight.
With each performance, though,morrison unraveled Drunken,
divine and dangerous.
A Dionysus on stage, a ghost inwaiting.
(07:40):
By the late 1960s, his voicehad become a literature for the
lost.
He read poetry into themicrophones like they were
altars.
He was arrested for obscenity,censored for daring too much,
but he still prowled across thestage, leather-clad and
half-possessed, as if each showmight be his last sermon.
In 1971, he vanished to Paris,herewith his muse in torment,
(08:06):
pamela Currisim.
They wandered the labyrinthianstreets chasing silence and
ghosts.
On July 3rd, morrison's bodywas found in a bathtub.
No autopsy, no certainty, justsilence.
He was only 27.
For years, jim Morrison's gravesat Pire-Lachaise stood unmarked
, anonymous, in the City ofLights.
(08:27):
A simple plot, no name, nomonument, only whispers and
conspiracy theories of themythical man.
French officials eventuallyplaced a modest shield over the
site, but even that was stolenin 1973.
In the cemetery's directory hewas misfiled under a name not
quite his own Douglas JamesMorrison, as if even in death
(08:49):
his identity refused to benailed down.
In 1981, a Croatian sculptornamed Mitlad Mikolan, moved by
Morrison's myth, created amarble bust and a new gravestone
to honor the 10th anniversaryof his death.
For a time the ghost had a face, but the vandals came and, like
so many of Morrison's memories,the bust was defaced, then
(09:11):
stolen entirely, in 1988.
Mccollum would craft another in1989, and later a bronze death
mask in 2001, though neitherremains at the gravesite.
Decades later, in May of 2025,the original sculpture
resurfaced, unexpectedly,recovered by the Parisian police
(09:31):
during an unrelatedinvestigation, the sculpture
becoming almost as ematic andpuzzling as the man himself.
In 1990, his father placed afinal marker on the grave a flat
stone bearing a cryptic Greekepitaph stating true to his own
spirit or, perhaps morechillingly, according to his own
(09:52):
demon and perhaps more a sinwas.
He left behind six albums, atrail of whispered poems and a
conspiracy and a myth thatrefuses to die within pure
lachey.
In its earliest years, thecemetery's gates opened not only
to the dead, but to a lovestory that would be carved into
(10:12):
its foundation.
It's a story tangled inphilosophy, ink and blood.
Fittingly Parisian, within is atomb that holds not just bodies
but letters, laments and a lovethat outlived flesh.
Here, encased in stone andsorrow, are the bones of Peter
Abelard and Heloise, two mindsset ablaze by thought and desire
(10:34):
, bound together in history bypassion, punishment and
ink-stained confessions.
He was the mind of his age, aphilosopher, scholar and heretic
of holy text, peter Abelard,topponied the cloisters of Notre
Dame.
His thoughts sharp as blades,his tongue gilded with rhetoric.
She was the niece of CanonFilbert.
(10:55):
Young Heloise, a luminous andlearned woman in a world that
punished such brilliance, fluentin Latin, greek and Hebrew, she
outshone her peers a candleburning too bright.
Their meeting was no accident.
Abelard offered to tutorHeloise and Filbert, eager for
(11:17):
his niece's advancement,welcomes the arrangement.
But Abelard's lessons quicklyturn into longing.
Beneath the guide of Pelagoji,he seduced her and she too,
clever not to see, chose to beseduced.
The scholar and his pupilbecame lovers, reckless and
radiant.
When Filbert learned the truth,rage shattered the illusion.
He separated them but couldn'tsever the bond.
Heloise had become pregnant andfled to Brittany to give birth
(11:38):
to their son, astrolabe, a childof stars and scandal.
A secret marriage followed,urged by Adelard to protect his
standing, but was resisted byHeloise who feared it would
diminish his greatness.
Yet she didn't want to just behis wife, she wanted to be his
equal.
Still, she eventually relented.
And like all things betweenthem, the union was both tender
(12:01):
and tragic.
Then came the Night of Blood.
Enraged, heloise's uncle,filbert, sought revenge.
And the dead of night, whileAbelard slept, filbert's men
crept inside their home.
Her father, however, didn'tchoose murder.
He chose something far darker,something more horrific.
Mutilating Abelard, theycastrated him, stripping him of
(12:22):
his manhood and condemning himto a lifetime of shame and ruin.
In an era already darkened bymedieval cruelty, the Acts still
managed to shock Christendom asnews spread of Filbert's
revenge.
Heloise, then, was sent to acommon to live out her days in
silence.
An ablard entered a monastery.
Their bodies separated, buttheir minds, their voices, their
(12:44):
longing remained entangled.
What followed was a series ofletters.
Unlike anything else from theMiddle Ages, the surviving
correspondence is a tapestry ofagony, intellect, love and
theology, giving historiansinsight into a side of medieval
life not normally found.
Halloways wrote not just as alover, but as a philosopher, a
(13:07):
feminist.
Before the word had even formed, she challenged the sanctity of
marriage, questioned divinejustice and refused to let her
desire be rewritten as sin.
You know, my beloved.
She wrote to him.
As the world knows now how muchI have lost in you and how my
sorrow for my loss is nothingcompared to what I feel for the
(13:27):
manner in which I lost you isnothing compared to what I feel
for the manner in which I lostyou.
Now, centuries later, theireffigies lie side by side at
Pierre Lachaise, hands nearlytouching lips, sealed forever.
Though the cemetery nowshelters them in solemn
stillness, their bones havewandered nearly as much as their
souls.
Appelard spent his final daysnot in Paris, but in quiet exile
(13:47):
, the priory of Saint-Marchel.
It was here, in April of 1142,that he passed away, a scholar
turned monk, a man once consumedby philosophy and passion, now
resigned to contemplation andash.
Not long after, peter, theVenerable friend, abbot and
final witness, penned a letterto Heloise.
In it, he described Abelard'spassing with a gentleness not
(14:10):
often afforded to heretics.
God now unfolds him in hisembrace in place of you, as
another you, and he keeps himhere for you until the trumpets
sound, until the Lord descendsand, through his grace, he is
restored to you again.
But Peter did more than justwrite.
In secret, and with tremblingpurpose, he ordered Abelard's
remains exhumed fromSaint-Marchel.
(14:32):
Personally and reverently, hecarried them to Periclete, the
very abbey where Heloise wasabbess, so he might lie beneath
the same roof, if only even indeath.
He assured those that would askthat Abelard had been absolved,
cleansed of heresy, and thatthe specter of the theological
scandal wouldn't desecrate hisgrave Leader.
Heloise would be laid besidehim, their two bodies, once torn
(14:56):
apart by violence, now reunitedin stillness beneath the chapel
stone.
But the rest was far frometernal.
Over the centuries, the remainswere disturbed, reburied, lifted
again and again.
The abbey grew in importanceand with each pressing age their
tomb grew more elaborate.
In 1779, what was supposed tobe their final resting place,
(15:18):
epilochili, was built anew, onlyto be destroyed in the chaos of
revolution.
Their bones were exhumed oncemore, this time carried to a
small parish church.
Then, in 1800, once more, thistime carried to a small parish
church.
Then, in 1800, andré Lenore, apainter and visionary with a
taste for ruins and resurrection, acquired what remained of the
couple.
He placed them on his displayin his Museum des Monuments
(15:41):
Francois, where scholarsmeasured their skulls,
catalogued their bones andwhispered of love, theology and
scandal.
But Lenore had grander plans.
In 1802, he had reconstructed atomb using fractured relics of
their past a preserved effigy ofAbelard from Saint-Marchel and
a headless 14th-centurysculpture.
(16:01):
He transformed into Heloise bygiving it a new face.
Around them here ranged Spoglia, carved stone from Metz,
saint-germain-des-pres and thewreckage of belief in empire.
A neo-gothic chapel rose aroundthem like a cathedral of ghosts
and splendor.
Stained glass windows wereimagined but never installed.
Still the tomb stood haunting,beautiful and strangely whole, a
(16:26):
monument not only to two loversbut to every aching heart that
ever longed for a forever.
In 1817, the tomb was moved onefinal time to its current home
in Père Lachaise.
In the 19th century thismonument became a gathering
place for the brokenhearted, ashrine where lovers cast letters
like spells and mourners leftflowers like prayers.
(16:48):
But perhaps in our modern hoursuch places no longer cradle
unrequented love.
Perhaps all that remains arethe embers of regret, divorces,
filed, silences grown too wideto cross.
What once burned now barelyflickers.
But the legend of love isenough.
Here their story becomes aspell past generation after
(17:09):
generation across the achingearth.
Because in the end it's notonly Hallowes and Abelard who
lie here, it's every soul whoever loved beyond the boundaries
of what was allowed, no longercondemned, no longer alone.
Perhaps it's not their bodiesbeneath the stone but their
legend of love that binds themin eternity.
(17:31):
After a spellbinding tale offorbidden medieval love, how
else could Pierre Lachey seducethis soul With the melody of
love itself, the voice of France, edith Piaf, born full of
longing, ever in love, ever inParis.
Her voice still drifts among thetombs and echoes across stone
and shadow, never silent, nevergone.
(17:54):
Edith Giovanni Guessant wasknown to the world as Edith Piaf
was more than a singer she wasthe sound of Paris, breathing
through heartbreak.
She reigned over the cabaretsand shadowed music halls with a
voice that could cradle you orcut you, often in the same
breath.
Paris was still shaking fromwar and Edith came into the
(18:14):
world not with lullabies butwith the echoes of loss.
Her mother, a straight singerof Italian and Cabal descent,
abandoned her at birth.
Her father, a circus acrobatenlisted in the French army.
Soon after leaving Edith to beraised among strangers and
shadows, she spent her earliestyears not in warmth but in a
brothel run by her grandmotherin Normandy.
(18:36):
Here, among the courtesans andcandle smoke, the child was
passed from hand to hand,watched over by the women of the
night.
When Edith fell ill, caratitisstole her sight for nearly four
years.
It was these women, with whatlittle they had, who pulled
their coins in faith to send heron a pilgrimage to St Therese
of Lisieux.
And, whether by miracle ormemory, the child's vision
(18:59):
returned.
Piaf would later call it divinegrace.
Others might say she simply sawtoo much of the world too soon.
From age 14, she was singing onthe streets beside her father,
performing while he tumbled andbowed.
By 14, she was singing on thestreets beside her father,
performing while he tumbled andbowed.
By 15, she was on her own,surviving by song and cigarette
smoke.
Her voice, raw, cracked, real,was impossible to ignore.
(19:22):
Paris itself seemed to hushwhen she sang.
One night, fate stepped out ofthe fog in the form of Louis
Lepley, a cabaret owner andtalent scout.
With a fear for misfits andmelancholy.
He found her on the Montemariesidewalk singing to survive.
And he knew at once this girlwasn't just good, she was a
legend waiting to be written.
(19:43):
He took her in, gave her astage, gave her a name La Momie
Piaf the Little Sparrow, small,fragile and untamed.
He taught her how to perform,how to channel every scar and
sorrow into song.
He dressed her in a simpleblack dress that would become
her uniform, her armor, hershroud.
But Paris Zever, the ficklelover, turned quickly.
(20:06):
In 1936, louis Lepley wasmurdered.
The press circled like vulturesfeeding on whispers that tied
Pia to the mobsters who killedhim.
She was questioned, humiliatedand nearly blacklisted.
The city that had applauded hernow turned its gaze away.
To survive, she had to bereborn again.
She set the street girl imageand took back her full name EF
(20:29):
Piaf.
Under the guidance of lyricistRaymond Asso and composer
Marguerite Monod, she found hervoice anew.
They crafted songs that weren'tjust music but memoirs Love,
loss, longing, and each lyric aconfession pulled from the
bloodstream.
And Paris listened.
The sparrow had been somethingmore than a singer.
She was a vessel for everybroken heart.
(20:51):
She became the soundtrack ofthe city's pain, its passion,
its post-war hunger for beautyand truth.
She simply wasn't justperforming.
She was bleeding on stage andthe crowd couldn't look away.
The war came like a slow eclipseover Paris by 1940, the city
was occupied and the cabaretsflickered like candles in a
(21:11):
storm.
But Edith Piaf kept singing.
Some called her courage, otherscompromise.
She performed in nightclubs, inbrothels and in private salons
where German officers drankchampagne and asked for encores.
She entertained the enemy, theysaid.
She kept the lights on whileothers were extinguished and for
a time the question of whethershe was a collaborator or simply
(21:34):
a survivor hung over her likesmoke.
But the truth, like mostlegends, is murky.
She did travel to Berlin in1943.
Invited to perform for Frenchprisoners of war, piaf posed for
photographs with them, smilingand theatrical, then returned to
Paris.
Yet those same photos wouldlater be used to forge false
(21:55):
documents, helping several ofthe men escape.
Her secretary, a member of theresistance, later testified that
Pia smuggled Aiden into campsand used her fame to move
through occupied France like aphantom.
She lived in a bordello, stepsaway from Gestapo headquarters.
She sang love songs beneathNazi banners.
But perhaps her greatest act ofresistance was not in what she
(22:17):
said, but in what she neverstopped doing Giving voice to
longing to freedom, to the echoworld that refused to be
silenced.
By 1944, as the Alliesapproached, pia stood on the
stage in the Moulin Rouge, a newlover by her side actor and
singer Yves Mondin.
In the Moulin Rouge, a newlover by her side actor and
singer Yves Mondin, she was nolonger a street singer or a
(22:39):
cabaret girl.
She was the soul of Parisharnished, tired but unbroken.
When liberation came, somesought to punish her.
She was summoned to testify,accused of collaborating, but
the charges never stuck.
Perhaps it was her charm,perhaps it was the truth,
perhaps it was because Pariscouldn't bear itself to exhale
the voice that had become itsown, and so she sang on.
(22:59):
In 1945, when the war ended, shewrote what would become her
most iconic anthem, la Vie enRosa, a hymn of aching hope, a
love song for a city trying tobelieve in beauty again, like a
spell that will fill deeply, forthe song that would define her.
From the cafes of Mont Marie tothe dance halls of Manhattan,
(23:20):
piaf would become a symbol ofresistance, of romance and of
something real in anincreasingly artificial world.
She sang of love that rarelyhad her own peace.
Her personal life unraveledbeneath the weight of grief.
In 1949, the love of her life,boxing champion Marcel Zerdin,
boarded a plane to New York tobe with her, but it never
(23:41):
arrived.
Their craft crashed into amountain in the Azores, and him
with it.
Piaf, shattered, wrote him al'amour, a wake of his death, a
song for his ghost that hauntedher.
And yet she continued to climb.
She toured America, performedon the Ed Sullivan Show and
filled concert halls acrossEurope and South America.
(24:01):
Her voice, though, cracked withpain, held power.
Every note was a wound reopened, and the world couldn't get
enough.
But fame has its hunger.
A car crash in 1951 shatteredmore than bones in Piaf, pulling
her into a spiral of morphine,brandy, sleepless nights and
phantom pain.
More crashes followed, withmore pills and more men.
(24:24):
She married twice after heraccident, once to singer Jacu
Pils and then to Theo Serapo, aGreek hairdresser 20 years, her
junior.
Love for Piaf was both refugeand ruin.
By 1963, piaf found she wasdying of cancer.
She weighed less than 70 pounds, and yet in April of that year
(24:44):
she recorded one final song.
On October 10th 1963, sheslipped away in her villa on the
French Riviera, surrounded byshadows and morphine, her body
ravaged by cancer and years ofsorrow.
She was just 47, though she hadlived twice that burning twice
as bright.
Her husband, theo Serapo,secretly transported her body
(25:08):
back to Paris, so the city wouldbelieve she died at home among
its spires and cobblestones.
Her funeral procession, though,brought Paris to a standstill.
More than 100,000 mournersflooded the streets.
People wept openly, clutchedrecords to their chests and
whispered lyrics like prayers.
It was the only time the cityhad come to a full stop since
(25:30):
the liberation.
The Catholic Church, though,denied her a proper requiem mass
.
She had lived too wildly,married after divorce, sung in
brothels and loved withoutapology, but the people gave her
a funeral of saints.
In 2013, 50 years after herdeath, the church reversed its
(25:51):
judgment and held a requiem inthe very parish she was born.
By then, of course, she hadalready become a myth.
Her resting place is a simpleblack marble slab in Pierre
Lachey.
Where she lies alongside fellowartists and thinkers, inscribed
with her name is that of herhusband, theo Serapho, and the
phrase love conquers all.
Her grave is a quiet tribute,yet the steady stream of
(26:13):
visitors who leave roses, lightcigarettes and write song lyrics
on nearby stones shows that hervoice, a timeless part of
Paris' soul, continues toresonate far beyond the
cemetery's walls.
Standing within Pire Lachaise,we move on next to a man who
built the literary necropolisand is now a permanent resident
(26:33):
of a real one.
A man who built the literarynecropolis and is now a
permanent resident of a real one.
Every ghost has an origin, andfor Honoré de Balzac, the
haunting began in his own cradle.
Born into a home built on thecold foundation of ambition and
a loveless marriage, he was achild abandoned by warmth, sent
away at birth and kept at achilling distance upon his
return, his only affection camefrom books devoured in the
(26:55):
school's solitude punishmentcell they called the Alco, where
he inhaled the world and forgedthe tools to dissect every soul
he would ever meet.
The city of Paris called himback, but the legal career his
father envisioned felt like adeath sentence To Balzac, the
wall was a theater of ghouls, acatalogue of greed, betrayal and
(27:16):
bitter inheritance.
He fled to a garret, choosingstarvation over a spiritual lie.
From this wrought a monstrousambition was born.
He would perform a literaryautopsy on an entire nation.
He called it a comédie humaine,a city of paper and ink,
populated by the living, thedying and the damned.
His work became a nightlyritual, a kind of dark magic
(27:40):
filled by rivers of black coffee.
He became a ghost in his ownlife, a specter wrestling souls
onto the page, bleeding his ownbetrayals and debts into his
characters.
Until the line between creatorand creation blurred, a
desperate, consuming lovebloomed on the edge of the grave
with Helena Hanska, a countesswho pursued him through letters
(28:03):
for 15 years.
He married his dream justmonths before the ink ran dry
for good.
Balzac died in 1850, consumednot by sickness but by his own
creation.
At his funeral, victor Hugodeclared A nation is in mourning
for a man of genius, and so helies with Empire Lachey, his
(28:24):
monument by Redin leaningforward as if still straining to
write one more line.
But a man like Balzac is nevertruly silent.
He isn't buried here, he'splanted.
His ghost walks off his pagesand into our world.
Honorary to Balzac did notmerely write about the human
soul, he exhumed it.
(28:45):
He pinned its writhing form tothe page and dared to look back
at us from the abyss.
Next we approach a soul wheremany, beneath the crumbling
pillars of revolution, a childof uncertain lineage of
whispered scandals and risingempires, eugene Delacroix came
into the world in April 1798,under the heavy breath of
(29:07):
history, carrying the restlessspirit of romanticism before it
even had a name.
His mother was a descendantfrom artisans, but his father's
identity was a matter of stateintrigue.
It was claimed the true bloodin his veins belonged to
Talleyrand, that limpingarchitect of French diplomacy.
Whether by blood or by favor,talleyrand's shadow would follow
(29:29):
Delacroix, opening doors inpalaces and salons.
But he was never content to sitbeneath chandeliers.
He painted like a man,possessed a revolutionary in
vision, if not in politics.
While his rival Ingress chasedsymmetry and order, delacroix
reached for chaos, for riot,rupture and color that bled and
screamed.
(29:50):
He found truth not in polishedmyths, but in blood-soaked soil,
in storm-ridden shores and inShakespeare's ghosts and Byron's
doomed heroes.
His brushstrokes gaveexpression to a caged soul, and
at the salon, his paintingsshocked society the Barque of
Dante, the massacre at Chios,the death of Sarah and Apollos.
(30:10):
The critics deemed them toowild, too sensual, too full of
death.
Yet what they called vulgar,the people called real.
Delacroix's art was history asa raw wound dripping with
consequence.
His masterpiece, libertyLeading the People, proved the
most dangerous of all.
A woman, crowned in tricolor.
She stepped over the dead witha musket in her hand.
(30:32):
She wasn't a goddess, but aghost of hope rising from the
smoke.
A truth so potent that thegovernment bought the painting
only to hide it away.
Delacroix didn't chase utopia,but pure emotion, despair,
longing, rage, ecstasy.
His travels to Morocco andAlgeria gave him what he called
living antiquity cities andpeople untouched by the
(30:55):
Enlightenment.
He returned to Paris,transformed, filling his
journals with their light andchaos.
He worked feverishly, sometimes15 hours without pause, feeding
on coffee and solitude, untilhis body gave out.
When death came in August of1863, it was quiet.
He left simple orders, no deathmask, no likeness.
(31:18):
Let the work speak, let thebody disappear, but Delacroix
never disappeared.
After his death, he remains oneof the greatest painters of our
time, entombed fittingly amongthe same society that once
branded him vulgar.
His grave is modest, but hispaintings are masterpieces that
live on.
They continue to inspire awe,shock and intrigue in visitors,
(31:42):
forever remembering a man whowanted nothing more than to be
forgotten.
Pierre Lachey always has a wayof revealing itself anew with
every visit, no matter how longyou linger.
Its beauty, often calledunparalleled, never fails to
inspire a sense of awe.
It's clear how this cemeteryinfluenced the design of many
(32:02):
others, from London'sMagnificent Seven to Bonaventure
and countless others, provingits power and beauty extend far
beyond its famous names buriedwithin its walls, pire-le-chez
may be a place of pilgrimage andbeauty, but do not be mistaken
these are not entirely peacefulgrounds.
The city of stone has its ownscarred history, its own ghosts
(32:26):
of war, and its soil has beensoaked in blood more than once.
The silence here is deceptive,for these avenues have twice
echoed with the sounds of battle.
In 1814, during the final daysof the Napoleonic Wars, russian
soldiers stormed over thetombstones in a desperate fight
for Paris.
But a far darker memory isetched into its eastern wall.
(32:50):
In the final bloodied week ofthe Paris Commune in 1871, the
cemetery became the laststronghold for the
revolutionaries.
Here, among the graves of theirancestors, 147 communards were
cornered, lined up against thewall and slaughtered by
government troops, their bodiesthrown into an open pit.
(33:11):
This unquiet ground haunted bythe specters of a forgotten
civil war.
Beyond the violence enactedwithin its walls, the cemetery
also stands as a solemn witnessto the horrors of the wider
world.
Three memorials bear the weightof the First World War, while
monuments to the victims of theHolocaust rise like stark
warnings from the earth,memorializing those deported to
(33:34):
concentration camps from whichthey never returned.
This place is not just acollection of personal sorrows
but a landscape of collectivehuman tragedy where different
faiths Christian, jewish andMuslim find a common home for
their grief.
Every style of Bunari art isrepresented in this empire of
(33:54):
death, forming a ghostlyarchitectural timeline.
Skeleton gothic spires claw atthe sky, grand Haussmannian
burial chambers stand like coldminiature mansions for the elite
dead, and ancient mausoleumsbrood like forgotten pagan
temples.
Every tomb is a story, everypath is a journey through a
(34:15):
history written not in ink butin stone, sorrow and blood.
It's easy to mistake the silencefor this place for peace and
solidarity.
Yet some of its residents arenotoriously restless and
visitors are truly never alone.
They say that the ghost of JimMorrison still lingers here, a
smoke-like figure captured in achilling photograph unable to
(34:36):
leave the site of his.
Morrison still lingers here, asmoke-like figure, captured in a
chilling photograph, unable toleave the site of his pilgrimage
.
Other hauntings are moreinsidious, burrowing not into
your ears but into your mind.
Then there are places where thesorrow is too immense for a
single ghost, like theCommunard's Wall, a scar on the
earth that radiates a colddespair from the mass grave of
147 slaughtered revolutionaries.
(34:57):
To walk these paths is to feelwatched, to hear whispers on the
wind and to understand thatthis is not a place of rust but
an unquiet city where the deadare not entirely forgotten or
gone.
Père Lachaise is far from astatic museum of the dead.
It remains an active cemeterywith a long waiting list.
For its coveted plots To beeligible for burial, one must
(35:21):
have either lived or died inParis, and even then plots are
often temporarily leased.
If a family's concessionexpires, the remains can be
exhumed and moved to thecemetery's ossuary to make room
for new residents.
Amidst the graves, the cemeteryfunctions as an unofficial
nature preserve and one ofParis' most vital green spaces,
(35:50):
with over 5,000 trees providingsanctuary for birds, lizards and
even foxes that live among thetombs.
As the wrought iron gates ofPire-le-achey groan shut behind
us, the stories slip back intostone and the dead return to
their uneasy rest.
But they're never quiet forlong.
Pyrrha Lachey has moreresonance that will lead us to
return soon on the Grimm.
Thank you for joining us as wecrossed over the veil into
(36:11):
Pyrrha Lachey, descending intothe hauntings of history, the
veil into beer lachey,descending into the hauntings of
history.
The gate is sealed, the veildrawn, but death keeps no
calendar.
We'll return, as we always do,on the Grimm.
Popular Podcasts
My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com