Père Lachaise

Bonjour!
Today I visited another major Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise, in the 20th arrondissement.  It was much larger than Cimitière Montparnasse, and there were more tourists, but it's such an enormous area that it wasn't at all crowded or noisy, which was really nice.  (It was also easy to spot the graves of famous people, because those were the only places where there really were crowds of people.)  I didn't see Oscar Wilde's grave, but I did see where Edith Piaf and Jim Morrison are buried.

There were also a number of monuments to groups of people famous for reasons far less cheerful than their artistic success.  Part of the cemetery is known as le mur des fusilés, which could roughly be translated as "the wall of people shot to death," although it involved homages to people who were killed in other terrible ways, as well, particularly during the Holocaust.  Among other things, this part of the cemetery made me realize, as I hadn't really before, how strong the memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War are here--stronger, I think, than in the States--certainly due in part to the fact that such a large part of the war took place here.  In addition to the vivid sculpted images on many of these monuments, most also had inscriptions giving details about the circumstances of death for the victims they're commemorating.  Many of them ended with the same command: Souvenez-vous (remember).

Mauthausen

Auschwitz-Birkenau 

Dachau

Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen

However, the vast majority of this cemetery is made up of personal tombs, and, as at Montparnasse, I found some of these to be the most aesthetically interesting.  They weren't as artsy, on the whole, as the ones at Montparnasse (which was, after all, somewhat of an artistic neighborhood), but it was a very pretty place to walk through, nonetheless.  I especially liked the abundance of trees, moss, shrubs, lawns... greenery abounds here, which I though was a nice reminder that life continues on.