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Last month, on a holiday in Paris, the family chose one day to segregate itself by gender. My wife and daughter went to the shops, while my son and I went in search of the tombs of our heroes.
We were living behind the Eiffel Tower, about two miles away from our first port of call, the cemetery in Montparnasse. It was a lovely summer day, about 20 degrees Celsius in the sun, so we chose to walk. The buildings we passed were elegant, dating from the 19th century, with attractive little balconies with flower pots in them. But soon we had left the present for the past, now walking past structures built of glass and concrete. The last landmark before our destination was the largest, and ugliest — this was the Montparnasse railway station.
Amidst this modernist architecture the cemetery itself was an oasis of calm — and charm. Its lanes were nicely shaded, with benches at appropriate intervals. A map at the entrance helpfully listed the luminaries buried there, with directions as to how to get to them. There were some sites I was especially interested in, others my son was particularly keen on. But there was also the odd grave both of us wanted to see.
In the last category was the tombstone of the famous (and famously radical) writer-couple, Jean Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir. Sartre died in 1980; his lover, comrade and co-worker passed on six years later. She was interred along with his remains, in a modest, unadorned memorial just to the right of the main entrance of the cemetery. We had thought there would be many gifts of tribute on their grave — all we found was a novel by Sartre left by an admirer.
Sartre lies at one end of the cemetery; at the other end is the grave of his classmate and long-time rival, Raymond Aron. Born in the same year, Sartre and Aron were close friends while growing up. During World War II, when France came under German occupation, they shared a common distaste for the Nazis. After the conflict ended, their paths began to diverge. As a utopian leftist, with a fascination for revolutionary change, Sartre became a sympathizer and fellow traveller of the Soviet Union. As a pragmatic liberal, who practised the politics of accommodation and compromise, Aron inclined more towards the United States. Both were prolific writers — Sartre specializing in novels and works of philosophy, Aron in books on sociology and current affairs.
I have read little of Sartre, but I owe a fundamental intellectual debt to Raymond Aron. As a doctoral student in sociology, I read, and re-read, his two-volume work, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, which contains a series of brilliantly crafted essays on the great social thinkers of the 19th and the early 20th centuries. So after my son took me to see the Sartre and de Beauvoir tombstone, I insisted on seeing Aron’s. Where the radical is buried with the lover he never married and with whom he had a famously ‘open’ relationship, the bourgeois liberal lies with his family members — namely, his father, mother, uncle, wife and son.
Aron studied in Germany, which came in handy, since two of the subjects in Main Currents are Karl Marx and Max Weber. These two are commonly regarded as part of the ‘trinity’ who founded modern sociology — the third being Aron’s fellow Frenchman, Émile Durkheim. After I read the summaries of their work in Main Currents, I was directed by my teachers to the originals. So I read some works of Marx and Weber, and, with great profit, Durkheim’s classic studies of suicide and primitive classification. I was therefore delighted to find that this French master was also buried in Montparnasse. On his grave, a Japanese sociologist had left a note of appreciation, to which this Indian added his own postscript.
Among the other graves we visited was that of the playwright, Samuel Beckett, which was also surprisingly short of tributes. My son particularly wanted to see the grave of Serge Gainsbourg, a man I had never heard of. He was, I was told, a great singer and songwriter, and so it appeared, since his tombstone was by far the most heavily decked of all, with loads of pots, cards and bouquets on it.
These gifts by visitors apart, it struck us both that the tombstones themselves were uniformly spare. All they had was the name of the person buried underneath, with no other mark of identification. We were not told, for example, that Beckett had won a Nobel Prize in literature, or that Sartre had been offered the same award but had refused it. About the only decorative grave in the whole cemetery was that of the great chess player, Alexander Alekhine. This featured a massif in black stone, some 10 feet high, with lettering in gold listing five names, of which Alekhine’s was only one. The others were of sundry officials of the FIDE, the International Chess Federation, which had the monument erected at some expense and with much disdain for aesthetics, only so that the names of bureaucrats would be placed alongside that of a man who actually played the game.
By the time we had finished it was two in the afternoon. We had a quick lunch at an Indian eatery outside (run by a Pakistani, who accepted our sincere congratulations on his country having just won the Twenty-Twenty World Cup), and then proceeded by Metro to our next destination. This was the cemetery at Le Pére Lachaise, which is much larger and far more difficult to navigate, with its circular lanes criss-crossing one another at irregular and irrational intervals.
The brochure we bought at the entrance to this cemetery listed some four or five hundred graves of significance. With the time at our disposal, we had to be brutally selective. So we first looked for, and found, the tombstone of Balzac, which had a bust of the bearded novelist atop it. Then we moved on to see the remains of Oscar Wilde, which lie under a strange, hippo-shaped monument erected by Jacob Epstein. We found a group of (almost certainly gay) Americans hovering around it, posing, by turn, for pictures. A sign instructing visitors not to deface the installation had been massively disregarded, for Epstein’s creation had love notes written all over it.
For our final visit, we had to choose between Chopin and Jim Morrison, a Pole and an American respectively. In the event, rock won out over classical music. Morrison had died in Paris in 1971, aged all of 27, and probably of a drug overdose. As in Montparnasse, the musician proved more popular than the writers, thinkers and politicians combined. Morrison’s grave was barricaded; it seems that in the past visitors had, as a mark of their devotion, made love and injected themselves with heroin on it. One had now to see the tombstone from a distance of three or four feet; close enough still to lay one’s mark on it. We noticed that on the grave had been thrown flowers, notes, very many cigarette packets, and at least three empty whisky bottles.
The nice thing about these Paris graveyards is the ecumenical mix of Frenchmen and foreigners. It is said that if a Hindu dies in Benaras, he goes straight to heaven. It appears that Paris fulfils something of the same function for those in the creative arts. Why else would so many of the greatest modern writers, musicians and thinkers have chosen to take their last breath in a city that was not their own?
