Fall colors come to the City of Light

Paris is a pretty city all year long, and every season has its attractions, but there are a lot of trees here, and when the fall colors arrive, there are places in the city that are spectacularly beautiful.  I strolled through two places that brought that home to me.  The first was the Parc des Buttes Chaumont up in the nineteenth arrondissement, and the second, just today, was the city's most famous cemetery, Pere Lachaise.  Both are not too far from where I live--lucky me--so I was able to walk to both of them from my apartment.  The Park des Buttes Chaumont was a gift to the city of the emperor Napoleon III and his ever-present prefect Haussmann, who formed it from an abandoned gypsum quarry.  As a result, it is very dramatic, with many steep hills, a beautiful lake, and views galore.  I wondered through it watching the Parisians at play--one can sit on the grass here--and took some photos.  Yellow was the color here--lots of hues on a sunny day.  This park also has a waterfall, which, considering it sits in the middle of a large city, is pretty cool.  Rather than babble too much about it, I think I'll let pictures do the work, then we'll go on a walk through Pere Lachaise.

The cupola sits at the top of the highest point in the park, and one can see a great deal from there, including, in the distance, the church of Sacre Coeur on the Montmartre hill, the subject of an earlier post.  But mostly, it's just a beautiful park where one can relax and catch the last rays of the late fall sun.  Parisians love their parks!

 Just today, I decided to visit Pere Lachaise.  The cemetery is only a few blocks from my apartment, and I've strolled through it many times.  Today, however, was November 1, All Saints Day, a very important holy day in the Catholic calendar, and also a public "holiday" in France, which has always had an interesting and somewhat complicated relationship with the Catholic Church.  At any rate, by tradition, Parisians visit the cemeteries on All Saints Day and place flowers on their family grave sites or just bring flowers to leave for others.  It's a very "flowery" holiday!  I'd hoped for lots of sunshine today, but I didn't get it.  Still, even though it was a bit gray, the late fall colors were rich, and I took a variety of photographs as I wondered through the cemetery.  It was crowded today with family members but also with quite a number of flaneurs, so I had more company in my strolling about than usual.

This is the "Mur des Federes," sacred ground to the Left in France.  In 1871, when the city was surrounded by German troops during France's first of three wars with that country, a proto-socialist government was formed which became known as the Paris Commune.  Marx hailed it as the first effort at a Communist Revolution, but it was a far more complicated affair than that and is well worth reading about.  Once the Prussian/German siege was lifted, the French Republic destroyed the Commune in a bloody repression, the last act of which was to take prominent members of the city government, line them up against this wall, and execute them.  Needless to say, once Socialists came to power in France, they made it a memorial, and the graves of prominent Socialists and Communists are nearby.  It's a fairly solemn place, and today, an extraordinarily beautiful one.

Interestingly, one of the most famous graves in the cemetery is also one of the most modest, but it is also the most visited.  I've never happened by it without seeing a crowd there.  For a while, the French had to post a police officer there to keep souvenir seekers from chipping off pieces of the grave stone--including the graves nearby, which infuriated families and motivated some to start a petition to get Jim Morrison transplanted out of the cemetery.  They failed, and he's still there--and still visited, all the time.

In fact, the most interesting thing about Morrison's grave is not the grave, which, as you can see, isn't much to look at, but the crowds of people who come to see it.  Today, of course, there was a larger than usual crowd milling around.  I do sometimes wonder what on earth the Lizard King would have made of it.  He was not notable for caring much about his fans.  Well, he's long past caring now.

One of my very favorite tombs in the cemetery is the cool art deco grave of Oscar Wilde.  Wilde died in relative poverty in Paris (quipping that he and poverty were not "well joined").  It is traditional when visiting his tomb to kiss it, preferably with a very strong lipstick on.  And women aren't the only ones who do it either!  Wilde was great fun, and I have no doubt he would have been pleased to be well visited.  He loved his public.

After my visit to Oscar, I wondered a bit, finding colors and taking photos.  It was getting late--Daylight Savings Time ended here this weekend--but I still managed to get what I thought were some lovely late fall pictures of one of the city's more...er...peaceful places!

Visitors often want me to take them to Pere Lachaise when they come, and I usually oblige.  It certainly is an impressive cemetery, but I confess that I generally prefer a live Paris to a dead one.  That said, Parisians do have great style, whether it's their fashions, their food, their art, their buildings, their literature...or their tombs!