Latest news with #BenoîtGallot
Winnipeg Free Press
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
A grave task
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.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
He's Made a Home at the World's Most Popular Cemetery
No two days are the same for Benoît Gallot, whose title since 2018 has been 'curator' at the storied Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the resting place of choice for the great and good of France and those who love them. He might manage a team meeting, negotiate the sale of a family plot, supervise a sensitive exhumation, prepare for a celebrity burial, scout locations with a movie director, meet with a disgruntled visitor or authorize a commemorative ceremony. And sign paperwork. Always more paperwork. Needless to say, Gallot does it all while impeccably groomed. Trained as a lawyer, Gallot can add to his responsibilities Instagram star (@la_vie_au_cimitiere features his photographs), and now, author. His debut book, 'The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père-Lachaise,' is an ode to the history and biodiversity of his family's adopted home: He, his wife (first wary, now a funeral consultant) and their four children live full time within Père-Lachaise's 110-acre grounds. 'To them, living in a cemetery is normal,' said Gallot when we recently chatted over videocall, together with the book's translator, Arielle Aaronson. 'Three of the four have never known anything else.' Growing up in a family of funerary marble workers, he has never found the surroundings morbid, either. Père-Lachaise is the most-visited cemetery in the world — and site of the hardest plots to snag. Home to Colette, Susan Sontag, Eugène Delacroix, Isadora Duncan, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, Abelard and Heloise and countless worthies of the French government and military, its verdant grounds attract a mix of tourists, school groups, pilgrims, groupies (Jim Morrison's fervent fans rate their own sidebar) and plain old mourners from every corner of the globe. 'From an aesthetic perspective, Père-Lachaise is an ever-changing, ever-evolving work of art,' said the author and historian Greg Melville of the cemetery's unique appeal. 'It's lovingly maintained but by no means perfectly maintained,' he added. 'Whether by conscious design or due to fiscal constraints, nature and time have taken the upper hand there among its monuments and mausoleums in a wild, marvelously unkempt way.' It was during Covid — even as bodies appeared daily at the cemetery gates — that Gallot's family came to fully appreciate the odd privilege of living in one of Paris's most beautiful green spaces, a joy he seeks to share with the reader. Since 2015, Père-Lachaise has been completely pesticide-free and, thanks in part to a sterilization program for feral cats, the ecosystem is booming. According to Gallot's account, cyclamen and orchids thrive; beyond the famous foxes and weasels some 60 bird species have been spotted on the grounds. Local residents include woodpeckers, doves, crows, tawny owls and Little Sparrow Edith Piaf. (Plot 91, Division 97.) Just as famous are the mausoleums and monuments. Gallot's favorite piece, he tells me, is a figure by the sculptor Louis-Ernest Barrias known as 'La Douleur'; because it's on a private family plot, however, he's powerless to give it the restoration it needs. Gallot also wishes new tenants, who tend toward minimalist simplicity, would get a bit more fanciful with their designs, but he understands the costs are prohibitive. ('Besides,' he adds, 'it is not the mode.') Most of the mausoleums still belong in private hands; if family leases are not renewed, remains are discreetly removed to the ossuary. While Gallot speaks compellingly of the satisfaction of providing comfort to bereaved families (he oversees approximately 1,000 burials a year), one assumes a good deal of tact is often called for in such situations. There's also the matter of fitting multiple generations into a finite, often historically protected space, by means of commingling ancestors, adding shelving to neo-Gothic tombs and slipping in fresh coffins when prior occupants have made the inevitable transition to dust. The prohibitions on certain graveside trees are not purely aesthetic; roots must be considered. As Gallot writes, 'Scarcity must be managed with care.' It was not always thus. When it opened in 1804 as the city's first municipal cemetery, designed to improve public health, Père-Lachaise attracted only 13 customers. Not all Parisians were eager to embrace Napoleon's brand of secularism; although the hillside property may have been named for Louis XIV's confessor, the newly minted emperor had declared that 'every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion,' and strict Catholics were leery of unsanctified ground. (A Jewish section opened in 1810; the Muslim enclosure, the first in France, would open in 1857.) In 1817, the officials launched a P.R. blitz designed to make Père-Lachaise the French cemetery. The playwright Molière was reinterred there, as was Jean de La Fontaine. Demand skyrocketed, and a new generation of French celebrities signed on. The cemetery's popularity is, of course, a mixed blessing: The newly bereaved do not always wish to be confronted, say, with day-trippers fondling the marble crotch of the legendarily virile journalist Victoir Noir; a guided tour group paying loud homage to Maria Callas; or the notoriously raucous Doors obsessives who throng to Division 6. Requests from paranormal investigators, hoping to monitor the spiritual situation overnight, are a constant irritant. Despite having been born on Halloween, Gallot considers himself a realist who has never, in the years he's worked at the cemetery, encountered any of its legendary specters, which are rumored to include Chopin, Wilde and the Devil himself. 'I don't really like to feed into that,' he said. He did once come upon 'hundreds of sacrificial chickens' in a tomb, which even he found disconcerting. There have been other books on Père-Lachaise — its history, its architecture, purported hauntings. Naturally, it's found its way into plenty of fiction; the cemetery has a memorable cameo in Nancy Mitford's love letter to Paris, 'The Blessing.' 'The Secret Life of a Cemetery' is another kind of love letter. Despite Gallot's refusal to romanticize his workplace — indeed, because of it — his devotion paradoxically shines through. Not only is this a book that answers, fact for fact, everything you ever wanted to know about Père-Lachaise but were afraid to ask, it is also a portrait of a person who truly loves his work. Gallot walks daily among the monuments, whenever possible going to his favorite area — Divisions 28 and 29, populated primarily by long-forgotten military figures from the Napoleonic era — which he describes as 'absolutely serene.' His profession, he said, has not changed his relationship with death, but the reverse. 'My rapport with death? No,' he said. 'What has changed is my rapport with life.'
