At this cemetery, we found the graves of Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Callas, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and some others. Seeing these graves can be a quieting experience, but it can also be a nonevent, depending on your mood and your connection to the person. Most of the famous people continue to have fresh flowers, poems, and memorabilia placed on their tombstones by fans. Other not-so-famous people’s tombstones are mossy with neglect. Some crypts are littered with trash, their windows broken and carved text fading. Only fame preserves, and even that will be fleeting for all but a very few.
When we were at Proust’s grave, a landscaping crew was noisily shredding some tree branches they had just pruned. Solemnity is not always guaranteed, even in the most solemn of places. Work must go on.
This cemetery was also host to several WWII monuments – one for each of the worst concentration camps that French citizens were sent to, and several more to the victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Even though relatively few French citizens were carted off during the war (I believe it was in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds or millions), these monuments were extremely evocative and emotionally hard hitting, perhaps even more so than visiting one of the camps itself.
The monuments to members of the French Resistance movement were also moving. They brought to life the ideas of French philosophers such as Camus and Sartre, who were victims of the occupation and worked with the Resistance. According to them, none of us is immune to hard and sometimes deadly choices. Any one of us could be put in the position of those French citizens, under a foreign and tyrannical occupation, and any one of us could be forced to choose between fighting and dying painfully, and cooperating at a loss of all dignity. According to Camus, trying to escape the choice was effectively choosing. Few of us can imagine this predicament, yet we are all susceptible to it.
After this, it was time to take it easy for awhile. The internet was accessible down in the lobby of our hotel (which doubled as a café), so we were able to take turns getting caught up on email and the like, without the rush of timed access as had been the case in all of Italy. We also got to take a shower for the first time in a few days, as the accommodations in Rome had been less than desirable.
In some cities breakfast is made available in the lobby of whatever hotel you are staying in. In some cases this will be included with the price of the stay, as in Rome, and sometimes it will cost extra, as it did in Munich. However, the cost in Paris was a staggering 7€ a plate. After a little wandering, we managed to find a small market and buy some baguettes, nutella, and fruit juice, which was enough to eat breakfast for three days, all for a measly 5€.
We soon discovered that 7€ a plate for breakfast was actually an average to low price for a meal at most restaurants in Paris. The prices for standard meals were usually much higher. There are some exceptions – restaurants will usually sell Paninis for 5€ apiece, and this tends to be enough food to keep you going. There are also Turkish restaurants that sell food at comparable prices. To eat a real French meal was, however, beyond our means on this trip.
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