Adventures in Paris: I See Dead People

On previous visits to Paris, I'd paid homage to most of the major "must see" tourist sites. Eiffel Tower, check. Louvre, check. Musee d'Orsay, check. Versailles, check. Sacre Couer, check. Arc de Triomphe, double check ( even hauled my ass up the stairs to the top. IMO a waste of time. There are much better views from the steps of Sacre Couer and from the Pompidou Center).

But I had never set foot in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery nor the Pantheon, the mausoleum that houses the remains of France's most honored men (and a few women). Since, we're getting close to my favorite holiday, Halloween, and I have a somewhat morbid streak, I figured it was time to do the crypt crawl.

Pere Lachaise is a large "city of the dead" as we call them in New Orleans with the rich, famous, infamous and not-at-all-famous thrown together for all eternity. The architecture alone is worth seeing as are the gloriously eccentric funerary mementoes on display.

Here you'll find, among others, the grave sites of French author Colette, Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (can't miss his tomb covered with an sphinx-ish sculpture and umpteen billion lipstick imprints) and American rock star/bad boy Jim Morrison. There are always a few faithful devotees hanging around the famous graves. Even the dead have their groupies.

The uber-dignified, yet still creepy, Pantheon originally was constructed as a church to St. Genevieve, but in the wake of the French Revolution, it was turned into secular meeting place/mausoleum dedicated to memorializing the intellectuals of France. Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, both Curies, Pierre and Marie, and Louis Braille are among those interred here. There's also a slew of Napoleon's generals. Apparently just being a FoN (Friend of Napoleon) imparted greatness by osmosis. Napoleon, by the way, is not interred here. He has his own monument/tomb over at Les Invalides. He would like that.

Impressive, but overall the Pantheon is a little cold and emotionless. But then again that should be expected from a monument to dead intellectuals.

I didn't include the underground Roman catacombs on my Paris "to do" list; seemed a little too goth, even for me, with all those skulls and bones right out in the open. I also tend to be claustrophobic. However, I was able to descend into the caves of Reims' famous champagne houses with no problems, so the catacombs remain a distinct possibility for another time.

Hey, I'll use any excuse to return to Paris.