On January 15th, 2006 I took a train in Madrid at 10:00 am and arrived in Paris at 11:56 pm. after taking a connection on the Spanish/French border. It was quite a long ride, yes, but since one of the biggest dreams of my life was visiting the French capital, it was absolutely worth it.
The day after I visited the Tour Eiffel, walked by the Champ de Mars and the Champs Elysées, stopped by the Arc de Triomphe, and wandered around the surrounding arrondissements (pictures coming soon!)
I was planing to go to the Louvre the day after but I decided to continue wandering around the city instead: mainly by Montmartre and La Bastille. I also visited the two most famous cemeteries of Paris: Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse. Many distinctive personalities are buried in these places: from Frédéric Chopin to Rossini to Alfred de Musset to Porfirio Díaz and so on.
For I am a Literature geek and many writers are buried in Paris, I took pictures of their graves while visiting the cemeteries: while one can find Honoré de Balzac, Gérard de Nerval, Guillaume Apollinaire, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde at Père-Lachaise; the tombs of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Tristan Tzara, Julio Cortázar, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett can be found at Montparnasse. César Vallejo, the most universal Peruvian poet, deserves a special mention among the writers buried at the latter cemetery! He wrote a poem entitled “Black Stone Lying on a White Stone” in which he accurately predicted that he was going to day in Paris on a rainy Thursday. Nowadays, there are many little stones on his grave as a sign of admiration to his revolutionary poetry.
I have to add that I took pictures of the tombs of Molière, Antonin Artaud, Jim Morrison, Paul Éluard, Charles Nodier (Père-Lachaise), Charles Baudelaire and Claude Mauriac (Montparnasse) but unfortunately they are either blurry or terribly composed so I won’t bother to show them.
If you are a Literature geek and are wandering around Paris, visit Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse cemeteries especially if one of the listed authors is one of your favorite ones! Because, why not, right?…
