Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Père-Lachaise was once plastered with thousands of lipstick kisses. Since his burial in the Parisian cemetery in 1909, a ritual emerged in which visitors puckered up and graffitied the tomb in a gesture of adoration for the Irish writer. Over time, all those kisses damaged the stonework, staining the surface pink, red, and crimson. “A kiss may ruin a life,” Wilde once wrote in one of his plays. In this case, they almost spoiled his death too.
These days, a six-foot glass barrier encircles the tomb, and visitors kiss the glass instead. Wilde’s tomb has long been one of the more controversial in the Père-Lachaise cemetery, as it features a nude “flying demon-angel” which initially included carved genitalia. It caused a furore at the time it was unveiled, and the figure was eventually castrated by a pair of English women in the 1960s. The rumour spread that Benoît Gallot, the curator of the cemetery, currently uses the balls as a paperweight. “Do you have Oscar Wilde’s balls on your desk?” he is often asked. To which the answer is always a firm French: “Non.”
This is just one of many anecdotes from Gallot’s new book The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père-Lachaise. Gallot says the cemetery is often called the “Disney of Graveyards” for being a final resting place for many famous people. Americans make pilgrimages to the graves of Jim Morrison and Gertrude Stein; Poles honour the memory of Frédéric Chopin; Kurds pay respects to singer Ahmet Kaya; Italians visit Amedeo Modigliani’s grave; while the Irish and English stop to see the emasculated sphinx on Wilde’s tomb and try to seal their respect with a kiss.
The cemetery, which opened in 1804, is now the size of Vatican City and home to over a million interments. Before it opened, Parisians buried their dead in the city’s church graveyards, but these were starting to become dangerously overcrowded. In 1780, one churchyard simply collapsed under the weight of the dead, sending decomposing bodies into neighbouring cellars and triggering a public health crisis.
In 1803, the French government approved the transformation of a 17-hectare plot, once the retreat of Père François de la Chaise. It was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul, who issued the decree.
of Wilde’s grave covered in lipstick marks
1870) made by Jules Dalou
The architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart was commissioned to design a cemetery inspired by English landscapes with winding paths and groves of trees. Initially unpopular, its reputation benefited from a savvy marketing campaign, which involved the re-interment of Molière’s remains, and also those of the medieval lovers Héloïse and Abélard. By the mid-19th century, luminaries were vying for a plot in the VIP area.
Père-Lachaise’s most popular celebrity has been the Doors frontman Jim Morrison, who was buried there in 1971. He is to the cemetery what the Mona Lisa is to the Louvre, and thanks to him, it is the most-visited cemetery in the world. Fans often leave wine bottles, rolling papers, love letters and bird figurines to show respect. Bizarrely, there is now even a chewing gum tree where visitors stick gum on a nearby trunk as a new ritual, due to the barrier around Morrison’s grave.
As well as the tourists, Père-Lachaise is also known for other kinds of activity – it is said to be one of the most haunted spots in Paris, and allegedly home to occult practices, black masses, and séances. While Gallot insists many of these claims are exaggerated, some stories have endured: sacrificial chickens have been found in sealed vaults, tarot cards are charged by moonlight on the grave of the fortune teller Mademoiselle Lenormand, and people rub the bronze trousers of Victor Noir’s grave and put flowers in his hat if struggling with fertility.
The place itself is also fertile. After pesticides were banned by the city council in 2011, the cemetery underwent a quiet rewilding. Grass sprang up between the graves and wildflowers – orange marigolds, grape hyacinths, bright-yellow lotus – bloomed along the walkways. Bees returned. Woodpeckers, starlings, parakeets, and even foxes followed. Gallot explains that he set up his Instagram (@la_vie_au_cimetiere) to “show life between the tombs” and says many French cemeteries are changing thanks to the pesticide ban. “Life is coming back everywhere,” he tells me. “It is a real revolution in France.”
One day, during the Covid lockdown, Gallot crossed paths with a fox cub and uploaded a picture to his Instagram. The photo sent the press into a frenzy and wound up on the front page of Le Parisien. Cemeteries, it seems, can be sanctuaries for life as well as death.
The cemetery may as well be an open-air museum too, with its Gothic tombs, intricate stonework, ancient mausoleums, and funerary sculptures such as Albert Bartholomé’s Monument aux Morts, carved into the Charonne hill. This monument honours the memory of those whose remains are unidentified or missing, or who never had a grave. It shows two souls crossing the threshold into the afterlife while the living look on. As if to say, we rise, we fall, and eventually we will all follow in the footsteps of all who came before – whether we like it or not.
The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père-Lachaise by Benoît Gallot is out now
Saffron Swire is a freelance culture writer, reviewer and cartoonist
