Pere Lachaise Cemetery

Today is my last day in Paris, another day in the low 80s, and I decided to pay a return visit to this cemetery. I was last here 34 years ago, and James Douglas Morrison had been buried here only for 8 years, so it was early days, before his grave became a pilgrimage site, and well before he'd been mythologized. Today the grave, tucked behind a bunch of tombs of long forgotten C19th Parisians, is cordoned off by an ugly metal fence, and it's well trampled, littered with wilting flowers, bad poems on sun faded paper, a couple bottles of opened wine and other trash left by visitors. It's sad, but I think apt. People come here on a tour but many don't know why they're there. I talked to a family with early teen aged kids and the kids asked me who Jim Morrison was.
At Oscar Wilde's tomb, topped with this sculpture by Jacob Epstein, I heard people puzzling over who he was, why he was in a French cemetery, what the tomb meant, etc. I guess the single red rose still gets placed anonymously on his grave. If they'd thought to look, there was one there, on the verso of the statue, which has been sandblasted and is now protected by a Perspex wall. Apparently there's been a lot of vandalism of the tomb, and the angel's private parts have been smashed off. You can still read the traces of obscenities scratched on the stone.
Wilde, likewise, is just another C19th writer they might vaguely remember from high school English lit class.
Pere Lachaise is full of family tombs that have been vandalized or that are falling down, stained glass smashed, water bottles thrown in the crypts.
It's sad to see all the effort these long dead people put into being remembered. There are tombs here for men killed in the Great War, which will be 100 years ago in 2014.
There are new monuments there too, most to the memory of French people who died in concentration camps, or died as resistance fighters in World War 2.
The cemetery police come by and kicked out a group of people I passed who were picnicking on the grass near a shaded bench. Well, at least the read French well enough not to picnick in the garden of Rembrance, which I think may contain cremated remains.
It's a curious place. I looked all over for Sarah Bernhart's grave, but couldnt find it where indicated on the cemetery map and didn't bother trying to find Edith Piaf or Collette or any of the Impressionist painters buried there.
I developed an appreciation for French artistic and literary culture when I attended university, but I have to assume that for most foreign visitors to Pere Lachaise, it's just a creepy old graveyard. It certainly reminded me that time waits for no one and that I shouldn't spend too much time trying to fix the past and staying pissed off about yesterday losing my bike to a Parisian thief.