A grave task

Winnipeg Free Press

a day ago

To manage the world's most prestigious graveyard is no small undertaking.
In a delightful dessert of words, Benoît Gallot is as lucid in his writing as he is in his affection for a gigantic gem — the 70 acres of beguiling cemetery called Père-Lachaise in the heart of Paris, where the dead are enveloped by life.
It is vital, says Gallot, the cemetery's curator, to recognize that traditional cemeteries will become extinct if they continue to do nothing more than mirror death, and death alone, by presenting it in a sterile and barren setting emblematic of bereavement.
The Secret Life of a Cemetery
'It took a 2011 decision by Paris City Council to change both my methods and my attitude. Goodbye pesticides, hello wild plants and animals,' Gallot writes. 'The cemetery I managed was no longer a place of death alone. Right before my eyes, it was becoming a haven of biodiversity for local plants, insects, birds, and even mammals.
'For years we turned away from cemeteries out of a fear of death. Now, the return of life may suddenly rescue them from the brink of extinction.'
Gallot, obviously a romantic, explains: 'the beauty of Père-Lachaise lies in the fact you can easily get lost. What I love most about the cemetery isn't the celebrity graves but the bewitching sensation you can only truly experience when you're no longer sure of where you are. It will take your breath away and spark an irrepressible desire to come back, just so you can lose yourself in it all over again.'
Père-Lachaise is a poignant marriage of 96,600 graves, over 200 years of history, the tombs of more notables than a history book, many of them blanketed with beautiful and bizarre tomb figures and an army of plants, flowers, wild animals, birds, insects and cats. They orchestrate a harmony of life over the dead. Père-Lachaise occupies about the same amount of land as The Vatican.
Père-Lachaise's residents include the remains of 4,500 luminaries such as Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Marcel Proust, Frédéric Chopin, Jim Morrison and Édith Piaf as well as painters such as Amedeo Modigliani, Eugène Delacroix and Georges Seurat. It attracts
3 million visitors a year, the most in the world.
Gallot became cemetery curator in 2018. As he puts it, 'I run an establishment where all the users are dead.' When Gallot was to be interviewed for the post, a colleague said: 'You're digging your own grave, man.' He and his family live on the grounds.
The curator says the celebrity tombs are the main attraction for tourists. 'It wasn't until the second half of the 19th century that funerary art reached its golden age,' he says. 'Prominent families abandoned any semblance of sobriety, building grandiose monuments to show off their status and celebrate their success.'
Gallot quotes Victor Hugo in Les Misérables: 'To be buried in Père-Lachaise is like having mahogany furniture. It is a sign of elegance.' (Hugo is not buried at Père-Lachaise.)
A question Gallot has been asked more than once: 'Do you really keep Oscar Wilde's balls on your desk?'
Jacques Brinon / Associated Press files
French singer Édith Piaf is one of many notable personalities buried at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
He explains that this question refers to Oscar Wilde's tomb, which featured a sphinx statue with stone genitals. When unveiled in 1912, it caused a public outcry and was covered with a tarpaulin. Allegedly two women removed the genitals. The only record of it is in a staff report in 1961 as follows: 'the testicles… have been damaged by an unknown person.' Ever since, says Gallot, countless articles have claimed that successive curators used Wilde's genitals as a paperweight.
'Naturally, when I began my new job, I searched every filing cabinet and combed through the paperwork my predecessor left me. Alas, I found nothing,' he says.
One burial site, a vault, was recently repossessed by the city. When gravediggers opened the vault, it was stuffed with 20 square feet of dead birds. Gallot speculates someone forced the birds through a crack in the gravesite after performing a voodoo ritual.
Gallot ponders what his own grave will look like. 'I think I'd like my tomb to be large enough to hold myself, my wife, and our children — if they so choose. It would resemble a little garden with a small shrub in the middle, where robins could come to nest. A bench would give loved ones or passersby a place to sit. On the headstone, beside a witty epitaph, a QR code would link to my Instagram account so that people could continue to 'like' me in death. An empty planter at the foot of my grave would collect rainwater to serve as a trough for foxes and a bath for birds.
'In short, I would like my grave to be a place full of life.'
Barry Craig is a retired journalist.