11.13.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
I will be reading the Smithsonian magazine dated November twenty
twenty five. As a reminder, Radio Eye is a reading
service intended for people who are blind or have other
disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. Please
join me now for part one of the article titled

(00:24):
why Paris designed its peculiarly popular grand graveyards to evoke
a celebration of life amid all the death cemeteries that
inspired parks serve as unlikely tourist attractions in the City
of Light, and prove that the end of the line
is just the start of a new story. By Peter Ross.

(00:48):
One summer afternoon in pere Lecheise, the sprawling cemetery in
the east of Paris, a white haired man, neatly dressed,
was tending his own grave, first away a spider web
that had formed in a corner of his chapel, a
small box like structure that he had chosen as his
place of rest. He then swept the slabs that in

(01:11):
time will be lifted to allow his coffin and that
of his wife Anne, to be lowered into the earth.
On a stone shelf was a large camera sculpted from
black granite, its lens so polished that the man, a
photographer named Andre Schabbat, could be seen in reflection. Finally,

(01:32):
he stooped, not without effort, to lift a few strips
of film brought as offerings by tourists, then wound these
around the black metal gate at the front of the chapel.
Shabat had longish hair and was wearing a gray check
jacket with the purple pocket square. A Laika camera was

(01:54):
slung over his right shoulder. Now eighty four, he has
been documenting sumity since he was thirty, when he suffered
three hard deaths in one year, the loss of both
his maternal grandparents, his grandfather by suicide, and his new
born daughter. He has traveled widely in pursuit of this passion,

(02:16):
taking a quarter of a million pictures. If I photograph
every cemetery in the world, he told me, half joking,
then I will never die. He fears death and does
not believe in an after life, yet he yearns for
some sort of eternity. I want to be not forgotten.

(02:36):
The solution a prominent location in pere Laches, which receives
around three million visitors, a year. His chapel, built from
limestone in eighteen fifty for one Anna Margherita Kutsch, was
repurposed by Shabbat in twenty thirteen. Pear Leches, being prestigious graves,

(02:57):
are in high demand. Space newcomers is limited, but places
become available through various means. Every year, the cemetery repossesses
around one hundred and twenty plots, often because they have
fallen into disrepair. The remains are exhumed and moved to
an ossuary, which was what happened with the bones of

(03:19):
Madame Kutch. The monument is usually broken up unless it
has historic or esthetic value, as this chapel does. Sitting
on a busy route close to the burial place of
the French pop star Elaine Bauchan, who died in two
thousand nine, Schubat's grave is hard to miss. A q

(03:40):
R code on the front directs the curious to his website.
When he is gone, he will not be gone. People
will still say his name, wonder about his life. Look
at his black and white pictures of angels and rubs,
crosses and skulls. The show, he said, with a smile,
must go on. Paris, the city of light is also

(04:04):
the city of death. It is a place where the
dead are mythologized and memorialized with operatic intensity. The historic cemeteries,
not only pere Leches, but also monmart and Montparnasse, among others,
are theatrical and elegaic. The lives of celebrated citizens hymned

(04:26):
in bronze and stone. The famous catacombs, with subterranean streets
of unsung skulls, have a different grandeur, austere and uncanny.
The very name seems to strike a lachrymose note. Paris's
greatest aria, however, is pear Leches. This is the best

(04:47):
known cemetery in Europe and perhaps the world. The graves
of Edith Piaff, Frederic Chopin and Oscar Wilde are among
the most visited of its seventy thousand or so to
twos domes. Wild lies beneath a flying demon angel, as
its sculptor Jacob Epstein described the figure. He carved it

(05:09):
in London from a twenty ton limestone block, and in
nineteen twelve had it transported to Paris, where it was
immediately controversial. Its visible genitals considered indecent. In nineteen sixty one,
the offending parts were smashed off by vandals, two English women,
the story goes, and have been missing. Since do you

(05:33):
really keep Oscar Wilde's balls on your desk? Is a
question the cemetery manager is sometimes asked. He always denies it,
and all I can add, having been in his office,
is that I myself did not see them. Per Leichez's
popularity is thanks in Part two such legends. It is
a place of story as much as stone, but perhaps

(05:56):
more to the way it looks. It's worn and melancholy
charm hits the instagram's sweet spot. If it fits our
idea of how an old cemetery should appear, that is
because it invented the idea. Pere Lachaise opened in eighteen
o four, the same year Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte decreed that

(06:18):
France's cemeteries should be built just outside city limits. There
was to be an end to burials in mass graves.
No more corpses grammed into churchyards already full to bursting.
The dead had been a problem for Paris since the
mid eighteenth century. A notorious incident in seventeen eighty scandalized

(06:41):
the city when a basement wall on Rue de la Lingerie,
bordering on the Cemetery of the Holy Innocence, collapsed inward
under the thronging weight of the dead. The neighborhood's stank
of rotting flesh, and people fainted in the street. The
solution was to close the Sune Panemey and transfer its

(07:02):
occupants to a disused quarry outside the city. In seventeen
eighty six, the municipal ossuary, soon to be known as
the Paris Catacombs, came into use. The problem of dead
bodies became even more acute during the French Revolution. Where
to store the abundant harvest of the guillotine. As the

(07:25):
historian Aaron Marie Legacy observes in her book Making Space
for the Dead, the only thing worse than a pile
of decomposing bodies in the middle of one's neighborhood was
a pile of decomposing bodies without their heads. Such situations
were not just disturbing, but a public health crisis. Vapors

(07:46):
released by bodies were believed to be the cause of disease.
The new cemeteries established under Napoleon outside the city walls
were nothing like the grim churchyards. The first of these.
The Cemetery de Leste, as Pere Laches was known in
its earliest days, was built in a hilly area on

(08:07):
Paris's eastern outskirts, eventually renamed for Francois Deis de la
Chies father Lachise, a prominent Jesuit priest who once presided
over the estate on which the cemetery was built. It
was designed as an elegantly landscaped garden, a place where
one could breathe as well as grieve. The cemetery now

(08:30):
receives eight thousand visitors most days, and as many as
twelve thousand on Sundays, but it is big enough to
absorb those numbers and still seem peaceful. Its one hundred
and ten acres are laid out like a quaint little town,
complete with cobbled streets and attractive signs. You can get
lost there, especially in the so called romantic sector, where

(08:54):
gridlike avenues give way to small winding paths and parakeets
screeched through the trees. This new type of graveyard soon
proved influential, Pere Lachse's father to the rural cemetery movement
that saw large burial grounds open in the countryside near
America's rapidly growing cities. There were a great many more

(09:17):
citizens and a great many more dead. The first of
the new cemeteries built to accommodate them, Mount Auburn and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
was directly inspired by the layout and monuments of Pearliches,
and it became a popular spot for Bostonians keen to
stroll the grounds and enjoy the pleasures of landscape. In

(09:40):
the mid nineteenth century, Mount Auburn was a major tourist
destination in the United States. Its success led to the
establishment of similar cemeteries, including Oak Hill and Washington, d c.
And Greenwood in New York, and the popularity of such
verdant spaces and spy in turn the establishment of sprawling

(10:03):
urban parks. Thus, a Parisian cemetery, in a curious way
is the grandfather of Manhattan's Central Park. Grand pere Leches.
On a warm morning in June, I walked out of
the metro beneath the station's pretty Art Nouveau sign and
passed the unturning sails of the Molarouge. Commuter traffic growled

(10:28):
over the Pont Coluncours, a bridge that since eighteen eighty
eight has cut through Montmartre Cemetery. Observed through the bridge's
steel lattice, The stone roofs of the funerary chapels resembled
a townscape. A sign explained that the cemetery had opened
in eighteen twenty five, the third such burial place to

(10:51):
be established in Paris, after Pere Lachse and Montparnasse. They
had to do two rough drafts before they made the
prefect cemetery. The curator, Pascal Cassandro joked when we met
in his office just past the entrance. Monmart In, the
north of Paris, is the district most associated with the

(11:12):
city's artistic history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
and this is reflected in its graves. The painter Edgar
de Gat is buried here, as is Hector Burliot's. The
cemetery was the composer's favorite place to walk, especially in
the rain. In eighteen sixty four, he had the remains

(11:34):
of his first wife, the Shakespearian actress Harriet Smithson, exhumed
and moved to the vault that he intended as his own.
The grave digger bent down and with his two hands
picked up the head already parted from the body, Burliotes
recalled in his memoir. Then, bending down again with difficulty,

(11:55):
he gathered in his arms the headless trunk and limbs
of Blackish man, which the shroud still clung to, like
a damp sack with a lump of pitch in it.
Burillios was sixty and ready, even eager to follow Smithson
into the grave, which he did five years later. Around

(12:16):
three quarters of the cemetery's visitors are tourists. Most of
the rest are locals and people visiting loved ones, some
so regular that staff know them by the hours they keep.
Le Dame de fuit Ours used to visit the grave
of her parents at eight every morning before work, but
now she comes at two p m and is known

(12:38):
as the Dame de Carteur's Ours. Then there is the
gentleman who arrives at three forty two p m with
an air of somber distance and walks to his wife's
resting place. When he leaves at four eighteen p m.
He is much more approachable. He stops and chats, may
even tell a joke, than crosses the street to a cafe,

(13:01):
does a cross road puzzle, and goes home. Montmart has
a resident population of tens of thousands of dead people
and some forty living cats. Chief among the latter is Victor,
a large black and white tom who can often be
found curled in sleep on a sun warmed gravestone. Victor

(13:23):
is le patron, the boss of the cemetery, a position
of supremacy earned through long service and ready claws. He
once held territory by the extraordinary tomb of Dalida, the
singer who took her own life in nineteen eighty seven
and whose grave is topped by a life sized marble statue,

(13:43):
but he has since annexed the zone around the cemetery's entrance,
where snacks are easier to come by. Cats inhabit Parisian
cemeteries in part because of an unfortunate tradition of abandoning
unwonted pets there. It is said that in the nineteen
eighties as many as four hundred were living among Montmartre's graves.

(14:07):
Since nineteen seventy eight, volunteers with an organization called Le
Col Duchat, the Cat's School and its offshoots have cared
for cemetery strays, feeding them, neutering them, taking sick animals
to the vet and giving them names at present. For example,
the cemetery of Saint wuiin a little north of Montmartre,

(14:29):
is home to Mercedes, Smurfette, Clarence, Honey, the sewer Guy, Melo, Missi, Mucchi, Calucha,
and zorro. I was told this by Natalie Rossi, the
treasurer of Le Colduchat de Peris, who is involved in
their care. The serene atmosphere of a cemetery is conducive

(14:52):
to a cat's rhythm of life, she explained. They can hunt, nap,
and slink unseen through the undergrowth, and they benefit from
the concern of people, often very lonely, who bring them
food while visiting the graves of loved ones. A cemetery
to these small creatures is a place not of death,
but of life, and Rossy suggested that can help us

(15:15):
see it as such too. The presence of cats in
the cemetery brings warmth and life to the place, just
like singing birds. There is nothing more esthetically pleasing than
a cat lying languidly on a grave. It is common
to find offerings at the graves of the famous dead,
and common for traditions to develop and evolve. Every July third,

(15:40):
the anniversary of Jem Morrison's death in Paris, a crowd
gathers by his resting place in Perliches. From the open
window of a nearby ground floor apartment, drifts an eerie guitar.
Then comes a tambourine shake and the familiar doomy baritone.
This is the end, beautiful friend. The doors Frontman's funeral

(16:04):
in nineteen seventy one is said to have lasted less
than ten minutes. The filmmaker Agnes Varda, later buried in
another Parisian cemetery, attended and said she was one of
only four people there. Since then, Morrison's plot, fenced off
and topped by an unremarkable stone block, has become a

(16:26):
kind of martyr's grave, sometimes attracting greater numbers and riskier
behavior than the cemetery has been able to handle. Twenty
or so years ago, management considered it a headache that
he was buried there. Now they consider it an honor,
and they recently took steps to make his tomb more
accessible by digging up four nineteenth century graves and landscaping

(16:51):
the area so that wheelchair users could draw here. And
why not the vibe these days is comradeley, and the
problems of sex and drugs at the grave are in
the past. One hears because the fans got old. Life
moves on even in a graveyard. When I first went

(17:13):
to Montparnasse Cemetery twenty five years ago and visited the
grave of the great French singer songwriter Sarage Gainsbourg, his
stone was covered with objects that suggested a desire to
share his pleasures, half empty bottles of champagne, half smoked cigarettes.
On returning not long ago, I found none of that. Instead,

(17:36):
there was a fresh cabbage a reference to his record
lome a tete de choux The Man with the Cabbage Head,
and a metal pail full of subway tickets left in
tribute to Le puin counur de Lilas, a popular nineteen
fifty eight song about a metro employee driven to thoughts
of shooting himself by the futility of endlessly punching holes

(18:00):
in billets. Jane Berkin, Gainsburg's former partner, collaborator and muse,
died in twenty twenty three. Her ashes were interred only
a short walk away a cubbly stuffed monkey. I noticed
sat on her grave, an homage to the cover of
the classic Gainsborough album Histoire de Melody Nelson, on which

(18:24):
she holds a similar toy. Berkin placed the original monkey
next to the singer in his coffin to act as
his guardian in the after life. As soon as a
famous person is laid to rest, they are absorbed into
the history of the place. Narrative is greedy. It demands
new characters and story lines. I ask theirri Le Roy,

(18:48):
one of Paris's best known cemetery guides, how long he
waited before a burial before including a celebrity in his tour.
I don't wait, he replied. Montparnasse, unlike Hilley, Perelicheise and
Montmarch is flat. The Montparnasse Tower, a huge, dark office block,

(19:09):
looms like Cubrick's monolith. Beyond the cemetery wall, to the
right of the main entrance is the shared grave of
the intellectuals Jean Paul Sautre and Simone de Beauvoirs. He
died in nineteen eighty. She outlived him by six years,
during which time she addressed him in print. You are

(19:30):
in your little box. You will not come out of it,
and I shall not join you there. Even if I
am buried next to you, There will be no communication
between your ashes and mine. It is a supremely dispassionate view,
and yet their simple pale headstone has become, in a
way a symbol of human connection and love. It was

(19:53):
covered when I visited in bright red lipstick kisses. Lipstick
had also been used to color the name on the stone.
The top of the grave could hardly be seen for
bouquets of flowers and many notes, most in Chinese characters
written on the back of postcards, scraps of paper, and

(20:13):
cardboard strips torn from a box of sanitary pads. Kissing
this grave is a new phenomenon. Cemetery workers wash the
lipstick off, but it keeps coming back. The craze is
perhaps driven by social media, and yet it seems to
belong to an older tradition of shrines and holy relics.

(20:35):
A few young women were gathered around the grave, taking
pictures of one another and writing notes that they placed
among the flowers on the stone. This woman is Simone
and she is a feminist in Paris, one told me
in English, using the present tents, we are from China,
and we learn from her. We get power from her.

(20:56):
In China, there are a lot of unfair situations between
men and women. So after reading her book The Second Sex,
we learn a lot. You came here because of the book,
I asked, yeah, exactly, And after they had gone, I
took pictures of the notes and later had them translated.
They all thanked Beauvoirs in the warmest terms for the

(21:20):
strength and inspiration of her work as a girl from
a small town. One wrote, I finally achieved my dream
of coming to a bigger world. Another said I had
to come to France. I had to see you. This
is the power of cemeteries. They offer the false intimacy
of the grave. We stand at the place where a

(21:41):
body lies and feel a stronger connection to that person
than we would elsewhere. It is a familiar experience in
the places where our own loved ones rest, but it
is also true of strangers who have somehow become important
to us. In this way, cemeteries are libraries of the dead.

(22:02):
Each stone is a life to read and ponder. How
we read a graveyard depends on who we are. Different
eyes and minds see it in different ways. For example,
When I walked one morning through pere Laches in the
company of the journalist and author Camille Peh, I found
a different cemetery from the one I thought I knew.

(22:24):
Pet was showing me Mayr Lches mother Lches, a name
she had coined to express her feminist reading of the space.
While waiting for her to arrive, I had looked at
the pere Lichse map displayed just inside the main entrance
of the one hundred and fourteen famous names. Fifteen were women,

(22:46):
All those grandzonumes, not many granfemmes. Pet campaigns to correct
the imbalance, raising public awareness of women whom she feels
deserves to be better known. Antoissin All Saints Day, November first,
the grounds of French cemeteries are bright with chrysanthemums and

(23:06):
crowded with people visiting the graves of family and friends.
In recent years, Peh has organized a Feminist to Saint
as a public event, she and fellow activists take flowers
to a dozen of the dead and speak about their
lives and achievements. It's an act of remembrance and celebration,

(23:28):
she said. It's about telling their stories in a joyous way.
She took me to visit a few. First, we called
upon the photojournalist Gerreta Tarro, who was killed in nineteen
thirty seven while covering the Spanish Civil War, and then
we walked to the resting place of the American writer
and art collector Gertrude Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklis.

(23:52):
Peh pointed out that eminent men often have sculpted likenesses
on their graves. The novelist Balzac, for instance, is depicted
with strong features and splendid leonine hair, but female statuary
is mostly restricted to pleruses, weeping women, blandly beautiful symbols
of grief. A man can be seen on his grave

(24:15):
as a living person, pe said, women just represent ideas
or are at the service of mourning. The great man Steyne,
who in life appeared to be hewed from stone, would
make a fine bust. The final stop on our tour
was the grave of painter and sculptor Rosa Bonneur, who

(24:37):
died in eighteen ninety nine. Her tomb is decorated with
a swooping palm branch. A little paint brush had been
tucked behind the bronze leaves, perhaps the start of a
new tradition. Other visitors seeing it may do the same,
and in this way the tomb will become ever more visible.
Six years ago, when pat first started showing people around Parlichees,

(25:01):
almost nobody knew who Boneu was. They knew the name,
but couldn't place her. Now she and her work are
much better known. It is a form of resurrection, a
reputation reborn in part from the place where the body lies.
Peh put it a different way. Graves have a life
of their own. The workers were on strike, so the

(25:25):
catacombs had closed to the public, but I still could
go down. Eileen Fairmanieu said she would take me. It
would be just us and six million dead. I say
six million, but it could be three million, or four million,
or five The precise figure is uncertain. The catacombs are

(25:46):
a series of ossuaries places for keeping bones, and Ferminieux
is in charge of communications, a spokesperson for Skulls. We
met at the entrance a former toll house in the
south of Paris, and she led the way to a
spiral staircase that would take us into a former quarry
sixty five feet beneath the streets. You really feel she

(26:09):
said that you are going down, down, down, in time.
One hundred and thirty one steps later, we were lower
than the metro, lower than the sewers. We had gone
below the belly of the city and were passing through
its guts. The catacombs received their first bones from the
Cemetery of the Holy Innocence. The exhumations from the cemetery,

(26:33):
where citizens had been laid to rest since at least
the twelfth century, were carried out at night and took
more than a year. A seventeen eighty seven illustration by
Jean Nicholas Sobret depicts an infernal scene. Light and smoke
rise from a great pit, illuminating the homes and the
church overlooking the cemetery. Priests chant the Office of the Dead,

(26:57):
while a coffin is raised on ropes and a cart
stands ready to rattle the bones over the Paris streets.
Just beyond the city walls. The remains were tipped down
a deep quarry shaft, which is why none of the
skulls in the catacombs have their lower jaws. They broke
off on impact. The souls of the dead were treated

(27:19):
with greater care than the bodies. The quarry was consecrated
to make it fit for Christian burial. Limestone quarries, some
dating to the medieval period, honeycombed the ground beneath the
great city. In the second half of the eighteenth century,
houses and streets started to collapse into the galleries below.

(27:40):
To save citizens from the abyss, the quarries were condemned
and stone pillars were constructed to hold up the roof.
This required further tunneling, the result of which is that
the plan of southern Paris as it was in late
seventeen hundreds has its mirror image below ground. This concludes

(28:01):
readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for to day. Your reader
has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have
a great day.