Somehow Lydia and I woke up a little late that morning. I'm not quite sure what happened, but I remember that we had only 40 minutes to get ready, gather our things for another full day of exploring Paris, and riding the metro to the new location, far from the main river-street of Paris we were growing used to, to the cemetery of Pere leCheise. Once again, Lydia and I were totally fine being a tiny bit late, but we were concerned because we didn't want Kelsey to be waiting for us without some way to get a hold of each other. Bummer, a bit of extra stress.
We actually got ready within ten minutes (score!) and went downstairs. See, the last bit of food we had brought with us (to be specific, two old apples and a few small packets of yummy granola) had been eaten up for breakfast the day before, so we had nothing for our rumbly tummies that morning. We knew it would be a terrible idea though if we started another full day of walking without some sort of decent breakfast. Since we couldn't find a nearby grocery store the night before, we decided in our haste to go see just how much our not-free hotel breakfast actually would cost us. So we came downstairs fully ready with all the things we would need (like my awesome green bag I bought in the Hays that was working beautifully!) and checked the price.
We first turned around to leave once we learned how much the simple cold buffet breakfast cost. Really, we were hungry and willing to pay for breakfast, but eight euros was ridiculous! But when we reached the door, we realized that we really didn't know where to get any other decent food for the day, since nothing was in English, and we didn't know if anything would be available at this hour. So we spent a ton of money on a little breakfast and that was that. I had a croissant that was better than all the store-bought packaged ones I had bought at Tescos, but nothing else was spectacular at all. We quickly ate our fill of the small variety of cold breakfast things available, found that the fruit was sold separately in a vending machine in the same room, and left a tiny bit miffed. But not even a ridiculous breakfast price could dampen our spirits for our final huge day in Paris.
We got on the metro, now about ten minutes late of our meeting time, and navigated the different trains to the closest stop near Pere leCheise. We got there about fifteen or twenty minutes late and ran to the closest entrance, fearing that Kelsey would be worried we had forgotten or left her or something. Or maybe she had left herself after we didn't show up. We were relieved, however, to find that as we made our way quickly to the entrance, she came running up behind us! We asked her if she had already been here, but she said that she had only just gotten there and was sorry she was late. We breathed a bit sigh of relief and assured her she was fine. She told us though that she had just finished arranging for her bus trip out of France the next day, but something had gotten mixed up in the translation and she realized that the date was wrong on her ticket. It said she would be leaving late in the afternoon that very day, not the day after like she had planned. We told her we would travel with her to a bus station to get it fixed, but she said she wanted to see the cemetery first and then we could go get it fixed.
The walls of Pere leCheise were very tall, maybe 18 feet high with sharp rocks mounted all along the top to keep the birds off. There was a bunch of moss and ivy growing up the steep walls, which made it look even more eerie and old. The map we had did not give us much insight on where the entry point was into the cemetery, only where it was within the city. We saw a few people a little ways down that same stretch of wall who seemed like they were waiting in a line. As we walked to where they were standing, we found one little entry way with an old rusty fancy iron gate and a toll booth just inside the walls, though no one was inside. We checked the map and found that we had come just in time for the cemetery to be opened, yet still no one came to the booth. We made some small talk with the people in front of us before the gate; turns out they were tourists from Florida and had heard about this cemetery too, so they thought they would check it out today as well. We waited a bit longer before we decided to walk down the rest of the block and see if there was a better entrance around the corner. We left the Floridians and walked along that beautifully old and slowly crumbling wall around the corner. We walked a little farther and found a great opening in the wall, with a cobbled lane leading from the street into the cemetery so cars (or hearses) could drive in. There was no one at the toll booth there either, but the gates were wide open. I can't remember if we let the Floridians know about it then or not, but I unfortunately think we may have just gone inside and forgot them in our great wonder of the sight we had not expected.
I'm from America, Utah no less, if that hasn't already been incredibly obvious. In America, cemeteries are not, well, not the same. I keep trying to figure out how to describe the difference in words, but it's a lot harder than I thought. Rather than trying to spell out the differences, maybe I'll just try to explain what European burial sites, especially this one, was like in the hopes that you can feel that difference for yourself, rather than having me trying to blunder my way through such an endeavor.
There are many hundreds of people buried within the high walls of Pere leCheise, though there are no headstones like I am used to. Rather, anyone buried or represented in this great place lies in a very special place. The great majority of the dead lie in mausoleums. That's right, as in small stone house-like tombs that contain the stone coffin of the dead. Most of these have a little door of wood on the front, some with more locks than others, and they almost always have a glass pane in the front where one can look inside. It was extremely common to find a small round stained-glass window in the opposite wall. A lot of the smaller ones, all taller than me though no wider than my arm-span, were very similar in some ways, and yet they each had a few slightly different features; the way the name was inscribed on the mausoleum, where the name was inscribed, different kinds of doors, different windows, and some had additional carvings on the outside where most were very plain. I was touched more by the smaller differences that caught my eye. As I peered inside a few, I noticed some of these small mausoleums were completely empty inside, save for the coffin itself and the stone shelf set in the wall at the head of the coffin. Sometimes there was a bouquet of fresh flowers resting on the coffin, other times there was an ancient bouquet resting on the stone shelf or on the coffin itself, the flowers now a delicate bundle of orange thread-thin stems and petals. While many were mostly empty, some had a single chair beside the coffin. A few of these chairs looked sturdy, though old, and willing to bear the mourner and visitor. Many chairs lay beside the coffin in some form of ruin, either out of too much use or too much neglect and forgetfulness. The doors in the front of each of these similar small mausoleums also told their own stories. Some looked fresh and either new or well maintained. Some had many locks where others had only one for the knob. Many doors showed great age and frailty, but stayed where they were put. Other doors had fallen inside or outside a bit, or hung off one hinge a bit mournfully, though these were not common. Still, they were present as well.
It really was a special place of remembrance. That's the best way to say it without saying too much of anything. While every graveyard and cemetery is to represent those who have passed out of this world, this cemetery did it in a way that was truly special. If you went there for one you knew, the process was so much more intimate; you walked along the inner streets and blocks of tombs, walked up to the door of the one you had lost, entered into their home of stone, and sat with them in their resting place. You could close the door behind you, look out at the sky through the window of the door or look up into the stained glass window and talk or think or cry to the person who was resting in front of you under the stone. When you were finished, you left their home and closed the door behind you. As I write that, it helps a little to describe the process of what can make this place so special, but not even that really gets that different emotion across the way I want it to. I still can't put my finger on it, but perhaps I never will.
These small mausoleums were only one style of tomb. Some had a gigantic wall before the spot where they were buried in stone, and upon that wall so you could not see it were great sculptures of people in a Greek sort of style. These were incredible scenes of great ladies on great thrones, of people wrapped in sheets of cloth who looked like they were hovering above the ground, or other dramatic and fantastic scenes. They had a lot of writing on them, though it was all in French of course. There were also giant mausoleums the size of houses, all made of stone. These were all very different from one another, as they must have been commissioned and built in the fashion that the family or provider thought was best. These were incredible. I remember one had a great center domed roof with four smaller towers on each corner that also had a high domed roof. It was intricately carved, as it was all out of stone, but it was incredibly big. The last two styles of grave within the cemetery were located in two specific places. The first was the crematorium, within the heart of the huge cemetery (did I mention? This is a 110 acre cemetery and the tombs and mausoleums were packed very tightly together, just in case I didn't already mention how absolutely gigantic and packed this place is). We walked through this place very briefly, but we took time to look at one of the inner walls of the burial area of the crematorium. It was a very big courtyard area, with the open sky as the light source for this place. Along each of the inner walls were small squares on special kinds of bricks. Each of these square bricks displayed an engraven name and two dates. It was to be understood that the ashes of that person was contained in the space just behind that name. And there were thousands of names just within that first large courtyard. What was more sad than seeing so many tiny names on so many bricks about me was when I noticed that some of the names on the bricks were beginning to wear away. I believe that the cemetery now keeps very good records about who and where each person is buried, but without that, I became very sad at the thought that those people could be lost to us forever if we no longer had their names.The last type of tomb contained no bodies at all. Along the very back wall of the cemetery we found statues and huge stone figures, similar to the ones we had seen on some tombs. I thought that they were exactly that, just more incredible resting places. Fortunately though, much of these had English on them, and what was still in French possessed words that I still understood, words like Treblinka, Dachau, and Auschwitz. These were memorials to specific groups who had been murdered in the death camps of the Nazi Holocaust, and they were haunting. This was the first place where death was presented in horror, in sorrow, in pain, and in devastation. The massive statues were chilling, as they were supposed to be. I couldn't pull myself from this area, though I think my companions were more willing to move on than I was (which was fine, I intellectually understood that we had other places to go and other things to do in that day, but for some reason I really can't quite figure out is why I was so bound to these places emotionally.) I stayed for a bit, just staring up at these haunting figures placed to remind us of a time we can't really understand in the least bit, and tried to soak up what they wanted me to do. They wanted me to remember something, but it was something I had never known or experienced. They wanted me to feel something, but for as much as I felt, I knew it wasn't enough. I wanted to keep learning from that emotion, but I knew I couldn't reach everything these statues demanded that I feel, so I left, hoping that I had appreciated their purpose as best as I could on that day.
I remember looking down the lane where Lydia and Kelsey were walking together. All the sudden, I knew that I was in a really wonderfully beautiful place. I think this is because I had at that moment received a massive blast of the feeling of Autumn. There were fallen leaves all along the lanes, the leaves on the trees looked very old, like that of Autumn for some reason, and the morning light shone through the tall trees in that area in with a strong gold colour. That gold and amber light accompanied the dark and weathered stone of the beautiful mausoleums they walked between on that cobbled stone lane. Basically, it seemed to be a truly beautiful blast of Autumn, resting right upon my two companions as they strolled happily down the path, and I soon followed them in my new feeling of refreshment.
We had picked up a map in the central office building inside the cemetery shortly after we entered. What we found surprised us. We saw names and the locations of tombs on this map of people that we recognized, though were surprised to see. By following this map as quickly as we could, while still trying to soak in as much of the environment as we could, we visited the graves of: Bellini, Bizet, Chopin (covered in flowers), Rossini, Oscar Wilde, David, Delacroix, Fourier, Gericault, Seurat, as well as famous violinist Kreutzer, though I don't think we had time to visit him before we left. These are just a few of the many people whose graves we took time to stop and visit. We did not know or do not remember most of the names of those we saw, but we took time to stop in to see many.
Before we left, we also took some time to try to find the bullet holes in one of the main walls of the cemetery. There is no sign to mark this memorial, but Tom told us of a spot where one can still see a series of bullet holes in the wall. This was where a number of young school boys who were encouraging the revolution in France so many years ago were taken and shot by firing squad. We found a few spots that may bear the marks of those bullets still, but unfortunately, we were not positive. We did spend some time checking though before we bid Pere leCheise farewell.
It was nearly lunch time by the time we left Pere leCheise, though our slightly irritating breakfast had indeed kept us to the next meal well. We decided to go to the nearest bus stop so Kelsey could get her tickets fixed before we got some lunch. So we hopped on the Metro again and headed for a bus station. Lydia and I realized something troubling though. We knew we were leaving Paris that evening, and so we didn't want to buy more Metro passes, we just wanted to make the handful we had left last us through the day. Two more exchanges to get to Kelsey's bus stop and back though would cost us two more tickets, so we quickly decided that we would stop and wait at the underground Metro station where we would need to turn tracks in order to head back towards our Notre Dame home-base (since all the best things were along that same big river street) and wait for Kelsey to take care of her tickets. Kelsey would then get off at that same station on her way back and we would all make the turn together so we could get to Notre Dame at the same time, rather than trying to find each other outside Notre Dame again. When the stop arrived, we got off and sat in one of the few public benches in the middle of the two tracks. We were glad to sit for a while, for even though we were very used to being on our feet and walking around for many hours now, our legs were good to celebrate every chance we had to sit.
We waited there between twenty minutes and half an hour, Lydia and I, just sitting and chatting and thinking. The station was unusually empty, but we just thought that was lovely. After a while, Kelsey appeared and we hopped on the new train together, which was perfect because Lydia and I were still riding our single train ticket all the way from Pere leCheise to Notre Dame.
By the time we got there, we were all quite hungry. We decided to go back to the same bakery we went to the day before, since it was so yummy but so affordable, but this time walk it over to one of the gigantic pretty parks we had seen behind the Louvre.
