A cemetery made famous by its inhabitants and a church made famous by The Da Vinci Code

Day 21 France 2012

The goal for today was the Père Lachaise Cemetery and St. Sulpice Church.  We hoped to also see another church, but ran out of steam before we got there.  

The cemetery is the largest in Paris (110 acres) and is said to be the world’s most visited cemetery.  It holds the resting places of over a million famous and not so famous people. There is a columbarium that holds the ashes of lots more.

This is one of the underground vaults of ashes and there are huge above ground areas just like it.

 The official Paris information says that 2-3 million people have been buried there.  Interestingly enough, plots now are leased for 10 – 50 years.  If the families do not continue paying on the lease, the bones are dug up and the plot is leased to someone else.  There is an ossuary that holds the bones of everybody who has been removed from the cemetery.  

The Rick Steves’ Paris book has a walking tour through the cemetery that took us by some of the most famous of the graves.  The first one we came to was Oscar Wilde.  His tomb has a clear Plexiglas cage around it, and people have written all over it.

We came across the tomb of one of the inventors of the dirigible.   

Some of the tombs were topped with sweet statues.

Gertrude Stein’s tomb was covered with small “remembrance” stones that reminded me of Patricia Polacco’s book, “Mrs. Katz and Tush.”  Gertrude’s lover and friend, Alice B Tolkas, is buried next to Gertrude, and her bio information is on the back side of Gertrude’s tombstone.

There are several memorial stones and monuments to those who were killed by the Nazis either in concentration camps or as resistance fighters.

We came across this tomb for a guy named Leon Noel.  We have lots of Christmas decorations with NOEL written on them because it is Leon written backwards.  I guess this guy’s mother thought it was clever to name him Leon when his last name was Noel.

Jim Morrison has one of the most visited tombs.  There is a tree beside his grave that has lots of graffiti on it including some photos glued on the bark. We read where the administrators of the cemetery only agreed for him to be buried there when some of his friends said that he was a poet.

There are several other famous musicians buried there, including Chopin. 

One of the largest tombs is that of the legendary doomed lovers, Heloise and Abelard.

Rossini, who wrote the opera, “The Barber of Seville,” has a large tomb that was covered with fresh flowers.

We were tired from all the walking, so stopped by a sidewalk café close by and had one of the best lunches we have had on the whole trip.  We got the menu and couldn’t decide what we wanted to eat.  There was a lady sitting next to us whose food looked delicious, so I asked the waitress what that lady had, and then said that I would have what she was having.  Leon got so tickled since that statement reminded him of a movie we had once watched, “When Harry Met Sally.”  We had grilled lemon chicken kabobs, fried potatoes, and salad. We gobbled it up and took no photos.   

In the Metro on the way to our next stop was this ad for KFC hot wings.

We got off the Metro at the Luxembourg gardens.  Leon and I had visited them before, but they are just as beautiful and crowded now as back then.  It is the second largest garden in Paris, was started in 1612, and is in front of the French Senate building which is housed in the Luxembourg Palace.  There were lots of French uniformed guards all around the building.  One of them had a full time job keeping people from sitting or standing on the wall where these flowers were.  You can see one of the guards at the far corner of the building. 

We love how the French trim trees into neat little boxes in many of the parks.

Our next stop was St. Sulpice Church.  There was a street market of books and paintings set up in the square in front of the church.  Leon said that this was his kind of market since there were some chairs and tables set up and you could buy a glass of wine or brandy and sit and watch the people go by.

St. Sulpice is huge.  Some information says it is larger than Notre Dame and other says it is slightly smaller.  Whichever is correct, it is huge!  I could not get back far enough to get a photo of the whole church in one shot, so borrowed this photo from Wikipedia.  

Many people know this church from the book or movie, The Da Vinci Code.  In that book, there is something called the “Rose Line” that is called the zero longitude line or Paris Meridian.  In reality, there is a brass line on the floor of the church, but it was originally used to determine the winter solstice and Easter.   There was a lens or special pane in one of the high windows that at noon on the winter solstice allowed a ray of sunlight to shine down on the brass line inlaid in the church floor, and the light climbed up a white marble obelisk with a sphere and cross on the top. 

 At noon on the spring and fall equinoxes, the ray of light touches an oval plate of copper in the floor near the altar.
 

One of the side chapels in the church has some paintings by Delacroix (who is also buried in the cemetery we visited).  All the paintings have angels, but the most famous one is Jacob Wrestling with an Angel.

The pulpit is on the side in the middle of the church and is gold with white marble.  Notice the red and white marble decorations on the side.  The red and white marble came from quarries in Caunes-Minervois, which is where we had our little house down south.

The altar area is beautiful with tall candlesticks on either side of the cross.

We had planned to see one more church, but were exhausted from all the walking (7.2 miles) so decided to just come back to the apartment.  We stopped by a grocery store to pick up some staples and headed back home.  We just snacked for dinner and collapsed on the sofas to rest our feet and catch up on computer work.  It’s funny, but we each have our own computer, so often when we are all here, everybody is sitting with a computer in their lap.