Pere Lachaise isn't any cemetery, it is the final resting place of some of the most notable people in French history. Père-Lachaise gets its name from the confessor of Louis XIV Père François de La Chaise, who lived in a house near the chapel built in this spot in 1682 until his death in 1709. On May 21, 1804, the land was reopened as a cemetery at the time far outside of Paris and called Cimitiere de l'Est. Rather unpopular due to the distance, few wanted to hold funerals or burials there.
The very first burial on June 4 was of 5-year-old girl Adelaide Paillard de Villeneuve. In 1805 they had an idea to move some famous names to Père-Lachaise. Two of the first of these famous people to find their way there were two of France's masters of words. The playwright Molière and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. Two large gravesites were erected side by side, although none of their remains are actually here, which is common amongst the more than one million people interred within the walls of Père-Lachaise. It isn't just famous people, anyone can be buried at Père-Lachaise which was also a first when it opened. With Moliere and Fontaine along, people clamored to spend eternity there. Colette, Pissarro, Ingres, Balzac, Delacroix, Géricault, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Victor Noir are just a handful of the names you can visit. I always have an ever-running list of tombs to search out.
You can almost hear the beautiful notes of one of his Nocturnes floating in the air as you get close to his tomb. Frédéric Chopin, the Polish virtuoso made Paris his home and staked his claim to the Romantic Movement of the 19th C. Arriving in September 1831 after his plans to move to Italy were thwarted by the Revolution through the country. Having a hard time getting a visa to France from Poland, he reached out to the French and was able to get a visa that stated he was “passing through on his way to London”. He never arrived in London staying in Paris the rest of his life and became a citizen in 1835. His life was filled with friends like Delacroix and Liszt and lover George Sand, but it was his music that still fills the air today. Between 1830 and 1832 he wrote three of his most famous pieces, Nocturne Op 9. The twinkly and graceful notes were written when he was just 20 years old. No 2 is one of the most recognized pieces of music in the world and is what I play many times in the background as I sit and write.
Like many great artists, Chopin died at a very early age. Rarely performing publicly and falling ill over the last few years of his life at 36 he died of tuberculosis.
Before he died Chopin planned out his funeral down to the last detail. He wanted it to be held in the Eglise de la Madeleine and Mozart's Requiem to be performed and this is where it all came screeching to a halt. At the time women were not allowed to perform in the church and it took almost two weeks for the church to give in and allow Jeanne-Anais Castellan and Pauline Viardot to perform, although they had to hide behind a black curtain.
Delacroix served as a pallbearer for his friend and would remember him in a painting that he had painted of him before he died that is now in the Louvre. Buried in Pere Lachaise in a grand tomb by Jean-Baptiste Clèsinger, son-in-law of his former lover George Sand. A marble Euterpe, the muse of music cries over a broken lyre. As he was lowered into the ground his very own funeral march, sonata no 2 was played. While his body lies in Père Lachaise in division 11, his wish was to have his heart buried in Poland.
Artist Amedeo Modigliano was born in Italy in 1884 and was rather sick as a child but a gifted artist at an early age. Arriving in Paris in 1906 with a bag full of money he lived fast and fueled with drugs and alcohol. His portraits have a style that is easy to spot and known as Modi. The models with their long faces and sharp edges found little interest in the art-buying elite of Paris. Suffering from mood swings and depression he turned to opium and alcohol which was encouraged with the crowd he kept in Paris at the time. Suffering from tuberculosis on and off throughout his life, it would be what would also take him down. On January 22, 1920, he was taken to the Hôpital de la Charité, suffering from tubercular meningitis and paralyzed he would die on January 24. His longtime love and girlfriend Jeanne Herbuterne, also pregnant with their child, couldn't take the grief and tossed herself from the 5th-floor window of her parent's apartment. At the time he was penniless when he died and was buried at the Bagneux Cemetery, but the two lovers were later moved to Pére Lachaise in division 96. Today his paintings sell for millions of dollars.
“Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.” These words were written by Guillaume Apollinaire, the Polish-Belarusian Italian-born French poet whose short life tells quite a tale. Born in 1880, he moved to Paris before the turn of the century and became friends with the biggest artists and writers of the time. Gertrude Stein, Max Jacob, Chagall, Cocteau, Rousseau, and Picasso as they explored the cafés of Montparnasse and Montmartre from morning to night. These relationships would lead the poet to become a noted art critic and one of the first to coin the term cubism. However, some of the friendships with the artists would land Apollinaire in hot water on September 7, 1911, when he was arrested with Picasso under suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa. After hearing of the theft of La Joconde, Apollinaire went to the Paris-Journal to report his former assistant Honoré Joseph Géry Pieret had stolen many sculptures from the Louvre in the past and sold them to the poet and Picasso. The police in turn arrested him and held him for a week before being released. At the advent of WWI, Apollinaire decided to become a French citizen and enlisted in the war, which would last until a piece of shrapnel tore through his helmet, almost killing him. The injury would alter his mind forever and he would die on this day two short years later at 38 in 1918 and laid to rest in Père-Lachaise in the 86th division.
Louis Visconti came from a long line of archaeologists and art lovers and enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and began to study under Charles Percier, a man who would also leave his mark on one of my favorite buildings in Paris. During his teaching, Percier was also walking over the newly built Pont des Arts to the Louvre where he was working under Napoleon Bonaparte breathing new life into the former palace of the kings. Visconti was taking it all in and when he finished school he began working for the city of Paris as architect of the 3rd and 8th arrondissement and their monuments. While his old teacher worked under Napoleon it was Visconti who was tasked with the job in 1840 to transform the city for the arrival of the former emperor's ashes as they returned to their final resting place. Visconti was also asked to create the casket that lies under the dome of Les Invalides holding Napoleon. One of my favorites, the Fountain of the Four Bishops in front of Saint-Sulpice with their angry lions guarding the parve was also from the mind of Visconti.
In 1851 Napoleon III asked Visconti to complete the design of the Palais du Tuileries and join the building to the Louvre. Immortalized in the painting by Jean Baptiste Tissier, Visconti is presenting his design to the Emperor and his wife Eugénie. You can see his plan of joining the two palaces creating a royal residence and offices for the second empire. It was the perfect job of Visconti in a place he loved. As a child, his father was named the curator of antiquities and paintings of the Musée Napoleon, later known as the Louvre. Visconti would grow up inside the Louvre and it would be the final project he never finished. Dying in 1853 of a heart attack he would never see his vision of the Louvre come to life
His tomb with a marble reclined image of Visconti over a bas-relief of the “New Louvre” was designed by Victor Leharivel who also worked alongside Visconti on the Louvre and can be found in division 4