We began our day by transferring from one metro line to another to get across the Seine to the Invalides stop a few blocks from the Rodin museum.
The Beaux Arts building, formally the Hôtel Biron, was purchased by Rodin at the turn of the century. He turned the ground floor into studios and later donated it to the French state. Outside is a large landscaped sculpture garden.
Famous works find their place among the trees.
Less singular are his various workings of Victor Hugo who, by the cut of his beard, could have been Rodin’s double. Victor crops up all over the garden in different strenuous poses. It’s as if Rodin felt Victor was the ultimate when it came to forces of nature. There’s a lot torque to the twist of Rodin’s sculpture, so that even two lovers embracing seem like they’re unsuccessfully trying to avoid pain. This is why Dante’s Inferno was the perfect storyboard for some of Rodin’s most arresting work.
In the museum there’s been an effort to preserve the studio atmosphere of Rodin creating the plaster molds for his sculpture, but the most interesting artwork in the museum is a painting he owned made by another artist.
Our next venture was to head back across the Seine to the Père-Lachaise cemetery. The Père-Lachaise is the Louvre of all graveyards, exhausting in its size, notable for the famous people buried there, and confusedly laid out. Peering at the odd map where the plots were gathered into weirdly shaped numerical districts, I knew my quest for Marcel Proust’s grave was going to be one of those trial and error efforts. After all, somewhere between 300,000 to 1,000,000 people are buried on these grounds. Here we were fresh from the Gates of Hell, pilgrims in the City of the Dead looking for District 85.
So we started off on one of the cobblestone paths (they all had mini street signs) in the general direction of the higher numbered districts. It was hard to get an appreciation for the different stonework designs. With urban density mausoleums crowded grave stones so everything seemed crammed together.
On the edge of District 5 we veered off the stony path to tread softer, narrower, trails and, in District 6,came across a group of people peering over a low fence at Jim Morrison’s grave. Moving in to get a closer look, I had to peel a child off the wrought iron bars of the fence. I doubt if Doors tunes were coming to his mind, but he seemed transfixed by Jim’s photograph propped in a frame on the tombstone. In my head Morrison was singing, “People are strange…”
Wending our way out of District 6 proved to be our directional unraveling. I wanted to go by the wall on our right, Ella wanted a more direct path up the middle. It made sense to not backtrack to the wall, so we started meandering or way sort of up the middle, but of course there were no direct paths that we could find no matter how many times we tried to figure out where we were on the district map.
At around the bent Moliere street sign (not necessarily meaning his grave was in the vicinity) Ella was fed up with losing our bearings and I, convinced that we had our bearings in hand, disagreed. Voices were raised. Then an older gray-haired man appeared like the angel in “It’s A Wonderful Life” and asked if we were looking for a particular grave. He spoke broken English in a soft voice and led us up a path past the enormous crematorium to District 85.
Then there he was laid beneath a shiny black marble slab covered with fresh flowers: Marcel Proust, a writer close to my heart—maybe the closest.
While I was preserving this memory of the Master of Memories, a guide came up with a couple tourists and began lamely mentioning that Proust was a French writer. French writer?? I growled back at him, “Marcel was the Dude!” The guide gave me a confused look. A young woman sitting on the curb behind me drinking a beer stood up stood up and said, “He’s right!” Apparently she grew up with her mother pinning Proust quotations on the wall. She reeked of beer and since she had that rangy wild look and was about the same age as Jim Morrison when he died, I thought she might be his ghost. In the City of the Dead there had to be ghosts everywhere including our grizzled pathfinder. The guide at graveside was doing his best to ignore us by pointing out to his tourists the name of Proust’s brother and sister-in-law inscribed on the side of the marble slab.
Morrison’s ghost then explained to everyone gathered that it was highly ironic since Proust’s sister-in-law tried to have his papers destroyed after he died because he was gay. I didn’t know if this was true (the sister-in-law part, not the gay part), but I wasn’t going to argue with a drunken ghost—not in a graveyard with half-a-million other ghosts. Morrison’s ghost then went on to say she hadn’t read “Swann’s Way”, but had heard the real person Proust based his character on was buried in an outlying area because he was Jewish. While she was alarming us to Belle Epoque prejudices, our good natured emissary from “It’s A Wonderful Life” smiled at us and asked if there any other graves we wanted to visit. I immediately mentioned Oscar Wilde since I thought he was in a nearby district.
Our angelic ghost quietly led us to a tomb with another assembled group of tourists signifying the spot. He then left us looking over the heads of the guided tour to admire the Art Nouveau Oscar inscribed above the tomb like a streamlined Egyptian sarcophagus.
That was enough famous dead people for Ella to handle in one outing and I was beginning to feel hemmed in by ghosts, so we wobbled our way down another cobblestone path leaving Moliere and company behind.
But the sun hadn’t yet set, so we got on a bus that took us to a stop by the Bastille. What a lonely monument! But it was honoring a truly free moment, Simone, and I paid my respects.
