Most tourists who visit Pere Lachaise go to Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde and leave. That is fine. But the cemetery has 70,000 tombs and some of the most extraordinary stories in Paris are not on the tourist maps.
The grave of Rufina Cambaceres is not widely known, but it should be. She was nineteen years old when doctors declared her dead from a heart attack in 1902. She was buried. When the coffin was later opened, the evidence inside showed she had been alive when they sealed it. The scratches on the interior of the lid were unmistakable. Argentina changed its burial laws because of her case, requiring a mandatory waiting period before any funeral.
Oscar Wilde’s tomb is covered in lip prints. The cemetery installed a glass barrier to protect the stone from the chemical damage of lipstick, but visitors continue to kiss the glass. He died ruined, in a cheap Paris hotel room, after being imprisoned for homosexuality in England. His final words were about the wallpaper.
Victor Noir was a journalist shot dead at twenty-one in 1870 by a cousin of Napoleon III. His bronze tomb depicts him lying on the ground exactly as he fell. The statue has been touched so often in certain places that the bronze is polished gold. There is a Parisian superstition attached to it involving fertility, which explains the wear patterns.
Allan Kardec, the founder of spiritism, has the most visited tomb in the entire cemetery, more visited than Morrison, more visited than Wilde. People leave candles, flowers, and personal notes. A chain surrounds the dolmen-shaped tomb to limit direct contact, but the offerings continue regardless.
And then there is the story of Pierre Abelard and Heloise, the medieval lovers buried here together. In the twelfth century, Abelard was a respected scholar who fell in love with his student Heloise. Her family had him attacked and mutilated. They were separated for the rest of their lives, she became a nun, he a monk, but they wrote letters to each other for twenty years. The legend says that when Heloise died, Abelard’s arms opened in his coffin to receive her.
