Paris Mort

A path in Cimetiere du Pere Lachaise

Paris Day Three

Paris is a city of the dead.

History is the story of the dead. More than any city I have been to – and Guangzhou is almost as old as Paris – there is an awareness of death because you can’t escape the past. Every place I have been here in these three days tells of what came before. It is an unbroken chain from then to now.

For Proust, perhaps there was no past in that the past was always present. This city is bewildering. I spent almost the entire day walking, beginning at Pere Lachaise, where you go to see where the famous dead are buried. Balzac, Proust, Moliere, Wilde (who would be mortified with the banalities written on his tomb, and I am not sure how he would react to the kisses lipsticked onto it), Chopin, and other merer mortals lay here for us to walk around.

It is the more prosaic tombs that tell a more significant story. One that is engraved with “The Family …” but contains only one man. Others that speak of Auschwitz and WWII, as heavy a weight then as it is in Sebald’s writing.

You become startlingly conscious of all the bodies buried under your feet, and the progress in us that brought you to this spot. The labyrinth of remains that snakes underground supports it, and only if we forget, are we in danger of caving it in. Contrasted to China where they can’t build quickly enough to leave the past behind.

At the south end of Champs Elysees

Here you can’t if you try. You turn a corner, and there is another statue, another monument, another fountain, another event. I wandered about rather aimlessly, going from the cemetery to park to gallery to cafe to park to gallery to cafe built over catacombs and with a guillotine (Caveau du Oubliette) then down the rue de Rivoli past the Louvre,

and then down the Champs Elysees, which bookended by an obelisk and The Arc.

La Place de la Concorde.

At times it seems the city is one monument to itself. Experiencing this sense of ceaseless time – mournful, proud, hopeful – is worth the cost of the ticket.