Montparnasse . . . walled fortress of the dead

France fortifies well her cities of the dead.  I was to learn, this summer, that the high-walled estates we came across--in the heart of Parisian neighborhood, on prime Brittany coastlands, wrapped around three sides of village churches, in the middle of centuries-old farmland--were indeed cimetières, medieval-village-like in their clusters of crumbling stone edifices, irregular layouts, cobblestoned or otherwise stony paths.  And almost always the flowers, florist-shop luxurious in the clement climate of August in northern France.  And museum-quality statuary, perpetual tributes to those who have travelled before us to our next world.

Our first cimetière was Montparnasse.  Turned away after our first toolongwaitingline experience at the catacombs, we decided to explore this nearby cemetery.  It almost eluded us, posing, as it did, as someone's high-walled estate.  We had hoped for maps of the cemetery itself, with names of the famous dead buried there and the locations of their final resting places.  But Montparnasse was in flux, restorations and relocations alike. No maps to guide the feet of the curious, save for this one . . .

"Génie du sommeil éternel" (The Spirit of Eternal Sleep) given to the city of Paris by Horace Daillion in 1902

The names listed there read like a litany of my French literature immersion at Duke so many years ago: Baudelaire, Maupassant, Sartre.  I was to search in vain for their tombs, bypassing in my literary-icon state of awe the names of those to whom I have a deeper connection.  Jean-Pierre Rampal, the French flautist who inspired James Galway who inspired my daughter Kimberly (who had the privilege of meeting him backstage when we attended one of his performances).  Frederic Auguste Bartholdi who designed the Liberty Enlightening theWorld, the statue that guards the Ellis Island wall where my mother's name is, much to her dismay, engraved for all posterity.

Cemeteries in Paris are relatively recent cities, a mere two centuries old, created by order of Napoleon I.  Their predecessors were emptied, their denizens entombed in the catacombs of Paris, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Montparnasse Cemetery lies to the south of the Paris of the early 19th century; Père Lachaise to the east; Montmartre to the north; Passy near the Champs-Elysees. 

One somber note on the nature of man this side of that other world . . . Kelsey, my granddaughter, was to learn at seventeen what her mother learned on her first visit abroad at seventeen . . . hold tight to what you value; someone is watching.  Albrecht replaced her camera, last seen on a cemetery bench,  before dinner that evening--all but her awesome airplane flight sunset and firstdayinParis photos.  And I learned that my stumbling command of the French language was much too elusive when asked to speak on demand (I remembered the word for camera long after we left the grounds).

Montparnasse was the first of many French cemeteries we explored over those ten days, some infinitely more memorable because our ancestors are sleeping  there . . .  but it still ranks high on my list of places to visit/revisit.  And return to this city of the dead I shall, someday . . . in time and space.