12.10 // 12:45pm
The Montmartre Cemetery is the cemetery one reads about in the novels of Dickens and Leroux --in fact, the very one I had always pictured, though I had never been here to see it. The entrance is easily missed, tucked away beneath the road, but stepping through the gate suddenly brings you back to the 19th century. Even some of the newer graves, those closest to me now, mostly of shiny black marble with golden plates announcing the name and epithet of the deceased beneath, somehow don't detract from the elegant age of the cemetery overall. The older graves seem closer to the heart of the cemetery, that area closest to and beneath the road, while the newer, shinier tombstones climb up the hill. Despite the stone walkways here and there that provide some guidance as how to best walk along gawking at the often opulently-carved tombstones, statues, and . . . I don't know their actual names, but what appear to me to be family shrines. Some are locked, but many of the small stone closet-sized shrines have their iron doors standing open, and inside the afternoon sun glows through brightly stained glass depictions of saints and crosses. The names of the families are proudly etched above the doorways: Sibire, Pauwels, Clavel de Aillon, Thomas-Gomand, etc.; inside spiderwebs clutter the corners of even those shrines containing fresh flowers, and most certainly those with dried and dusty bouquets, or no bouquet at all.
I've searched for any familiar names, but have almost given up. I've heard Alexander Dumas' son is buried here, but if so, I can't find his name on any of the tombs, which seem stacked on each other, pressed into one another's sides. The fresh flowers placed on some graves seem an insult to the cracks and crevies age has wrought in the old stones. I expect only dead flowers in a cemetery so old, and even if the newer graves don't detract, the new flowers somehow do. It's a sign of love, I suppose, of memory and devotion.
Impossible! A black cat is actually running around; his head just popped up on the other side of a grave. I called to him in English "Here, sweetie" and he mewed loudly but seems otherwise uninterested in me. His green eyes are fixed on the two large black crows perched on the eaves of Famille J. Claude-Gaulthier's shrine.
Red ivy has conquered the far wall and it is breathtakingly beautiful. Invasive vines have slithered their way along the top of the stone-brick wall at the far side of the cemetery, and the waxy red leaves ooze down behind the tombstones like drops of blood. The metaphor is necessary; the leaves scream poetry.
I'm not alone here. A group of three gentlemen and two ladies, British I think from the accents that color their loud whispers, walk down the central stone pathway, stopping only to photograph a couple of graves and point out the pretty flowers to one another. They're missing the cawing of the crows, though, the steady rumble of the traffic along the nearby road, the watermarks left on the columns and corners of the tombstones. Any grave older than forty years doesn't seem to have held its own against the weather much at all. Despite the traffic, the cemetery feels like a world of its own. I wish I had a bouquet of flowers to leave on a random grave.
