Autumn

Our last day in France, so perhaps it’s appropriate we visit a cemetery.  (Or maybe we’re celebrating Day of the Dead a little late this year.)

This is the rather odd cenotaph of Charles Baudelaire, whose actual grave is elsewhere in the Montparnasse cemetery.  He’s got two effigies: squatting all scowly up top, and wrapped up like a mummy down below, and in the middle there’s this dog, or maybe an insect, with its head just below Beaudelaire’s elbows— it’s so eroded it’s hard to tell what it was originally.

Elsewhere in Montparnasse, I found Eugene Ionesco, Sartre and de Beauvoir (in the same grave), Alfred Dreyfus, Jean Seberg, and a great many people less famous, or at any rate less famous to the 21st century casual observer.  One person wanted to be buried beneath a bronze fish, another in a castle, another in a pyramid, and a great many in spooky gothic crypts.

I did not see Jim Morrison, who is buried with Oscar Wilde in Pere Lachaise, in another part of the city.  Actually he won’t be buried there for long, because rent on his grave is about to expire, and he’ll be moved, presumably to be replaced by someone less likely to bring junkies into the cemetery.

We are about to have a final meal, then pack and otherwise prepare for the journey home tomorrow.

Visiting Montparnasse set me to thinking how I’d want to be buried, assuming of course that I do.  What’s going to be on your tombstone?