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two friends, forty takes, one adventure across continents
May 27th by may
Dear Adri,
Paris — the city of love, the Eiffel Tower, Edith Piaf, La Vie en Rose and all that jazz. Who wouldn’t fall in love with that Paris, the city of romance and lovely sidewalk cafes? On a recent visit to Paris, the first time I’ve been since a family holiday as a child (one I hardly remember), I was introduced to a different take on the city. You see, I asked my ragtag crew of Parisian musician/artist friends to take me to a place that defined Paris for them. I was expecting something else, but they took me to the cemetery instead.
Yup, the cemetery. Not just any cemetery mind you, but the Père Lachaise, possibly one of the largest cemeteries in the world with more than 300 000 graves, encompassing the size of 110 football fields.. or more. Where I come from, and I’m sure it’s the same elsewhere too, cemeteries are supposed to be eerie. They’re supposed to be interesting only to the most morbid of folks. Not this one. It was bright and cheery, almost like a park. People went there to hang out, just like my friends and I that weekend afternoon.
It’s like taking a stroll through a who’s-who of Western culture, art, music, literature and history. Consider the famous inhabitants of Père Lachaise: Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, Chopin. Balzac, Delacroix, Proust, Sadeq Hedayat, La Fontaine, Molière. You know how they say that because we all die alone, and take nothing with us, death is the greatest equalizer of all? Here, you see first hand how the famous experience even death differently from the rest of us. Jim Morrison’s grave is a hotspot for copulating lovers, and Oscar Wilde’s is full of fanmail in the form of graveyard graffiti. In some odd way, it’s all rather charming.
Matilde and I spent a fun afternoon just chilling out by the graves. She brought her baglama (Turkish lute) and we hung out with some random Portuguese nomads we’d met there. Think of it as providing entertainment to the long gone, though I wonder what Madame Piaf might have said about the racket we made.
Thanks
Mathilde Béchet for her fantastic company and her charms on the ukelele. Faire la bamboula!
Music
Keely Smith – April in Paris
The Doors - Light My Fire
Edith Piaf - La Vie en Rose
Chopin – Prelude in E minor Opus 28 n.4 (by pianist Ivan Ilic)
Posted in april, cemetery, europe, famous, france, french, grave, jazz, may, oscarwilde, paris, spring, video, writers.