Paris bulletin 3 2009

I went to Père Lachaise cemetery yesterday, a mild early spring day in Paris, with a hint, but only a hint of sun. I’d forgotten what a tightly packed place it is, especially at the bottom of the hill which is how most people approach it - from line 2 of the metro. The graves feel as though they’re struggling for space like you imagine trees struggling for light in a tropical jungle. Here are hundreds upon hundreds of ‘old’ French families, a roll-call of the aristocracy cheek by jowl with the well-heeled bourgeoisie. In amongst all these crumbling ‘sépultures’ with their rusting doors and baroque statuary are quantities of other nationalities: Chinese, Armenian, Italian, Russian, German, British…

Up near the top of the hill there is a fine tomb – empty now – to General Antranik, ‘héros national arménien, dont la dépouille mortelle a été transférée en Arménie le 17 février 2000’. He died in 1927 so it took 73 years before he was finally lain to rest in his native country. The story of Armenia’s sufferings is one we know too little of in the UK.

You get a helpful map at the entrance, telling you which allée to head for to pay your respects at the graves of such famous names as Isadora Duncan, Stephane Grappelli, Poulenc, Alice B Toklas, Piaf, Chopin, Proust, Balzac, Molière,Yves Montand and Simone Signoret – and Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison of course. A group of lads from a high school in Aberystwyth accosted me to ask the way to Jim’s grave. I hadn’t a clue but found them someone who had. There are no further signs once you leave the entrance so you either have to have a map of your own or just go for a wander and see who you find on the way.

That’s what I did and on my way out came across a monument I might not have noticed, glutted with names and dates as one is by the time you’ve spent an hour or so among the stones. It caught my eye because it was in English. Here is what was carved into the stone:

‘This monument was erected  by Robert Blair Kennedy to the memory of his eldest daughter, Alice Maude Kennedy died 1 December 1856, aged 6 years 9 months and to his wife Alicea Margaretta Kennedy, died 25 December 1856, aged 26 years 9 months.

On one side:    ‘There are days that might out-measure years

  Days that obliterate the past

  And make the future of the colour which they cast.’

And on the other:

‘Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery

 And life to the bitter in soul.’ (Job 3, 29)

At the back of the stele is another name: Charlotte Eyre, died 10 December 1856, aged 62 years. That’s all we ‘know’ but not all we feel. Such inconsolable grief and loss in those words, those names, those dates …

And then as if this was not enough, to find a few yards further on the grave of Yilmas Guney, Turkish film-maker who died in exile in Paris at the age of 47, the maker of one of the all-time great films: Yol.

There’ll be snowdrops and daffodils pushing through in English country graveyards by now. Next time I go to Père Lachaise I’ll take some flowers for little Alice and her mother, and for Charlotte Eyre who was perhaps her nanny.