The Secret Life of the Cemetery It is the famous Paris cemetery of Père Lachaise. This slim scroll by passionate director Benoît Gallot since 2018 is full of eccentric facts, like the 110-acre cemetery is packed with burial sites.

Père Lachaise also woke up in the "Tombstone Tour". About 10,000 tourists seek graves of about 4,500 famous figures in this "Who Is Who" every day. Jim Morrison's, the cemetery of what Gallot calls "a five-star hotel" is Jim Morrison's, the host of the door, where he was buried after he died at the age of 27 in 1971. Other popular graves include singer Edith Piaf, composer Fredéric Chopin, writer Marcel Proust Proust and novelist and dramatist Honorer Honore Balzac. The cemetery of author Oscar Wilde is a big attraction, partly because the funeral statue of cast-cut Sphinx adorns his grave. Gallot wrote that the stone testicles of the Sphinx sparked public protests about a decade after the sculpture's death. There was a rumor that they were deleted by two shocked British women. Gallot denies another myth that they have been used since the continuous protectors were used as paperweights.

Given the large crowds, safety is a constant problem. Morrison's grave became such an inappropriate, "ruthless carnival" pilgrimage site that in 2004, protective fences had to be erected around it. In the latest unpleasant trend, visitors stick gum to nearby trees and now wrap it with protective bamboo.

Gallot reason It is a working cemetery, a place for bereavement.

Of Père-Lachaise's 3,000 new crew members each year, the cemetery's crematorium has been cremated by nearly 2,000. Still in the niche purchased in Columbia, or scattered in the commemorative green of the cemetery. The rest are rare plots of land that are open in family graves or due to expired "concessions", which refers to a term purchased for a specific length of time under the system compiled by Napoleon I in 1804. These concessions replaced ordinary graves, and throughout Paris, in the cemetery, the bodies piled up unparalleled. In one of his better translations, Gallott describes the massively stacked graves as “Macabre Mille-Feuilles.”

The cemetery of the East, as Père Lachaise was originally called the new man of Napoleon when it opened in 1804. It was designed by architect Alex and Re-Théodore Brongniart in the ruins of the Jesuits and the home of Louis XIV's repentant Francois d'Aix de la Chaize. Brongniart strives to preserve the natural landscape of Charonne Hillside, and his naturalist design ushers in a wave of rural cemeteries. Finally known as pèrelachaise, it expanded five times, the most recent in 1850. Its 110 acres of land now accommodates about 1.3 million bodies and 4,000 trees.

I picked up what this insider thinks of pèrelachaise Hope it will be like Patrick Blaley's 2023 memoir All the beauty in the world, one View of the glorious behind-the-scenes guards commemorating the Metropolitan Museum of Art. but Gallot faithfully translated French prose and stale observations from Arielle Aaronson of the French, better at capturing the institution’s nuts and bolts better than its soaring spirit.

The author comes from a family of graves in the small French village of Bray-Sur-Seine. He trained and said his friend was a rude when he was serving as an assistant counselor to the cemetery in the city of Paris when he was his first job in the death care industry, his friend made him rude, “You are digging your own grave, man!” But he took pride in his various responsibilities of his position and touted the advantage of raising four children on the lush cemetery, a "open-air museum" filled with beautiful statues, statues, busts, busts and mausoleums.

He was particularly excited about the ban on the rebirth of all pesticides in 2015, which made pèrelachaise not only a place of death, but also a "new life", "a safe haven for the biodiversity of local plants, insects and even mammals". His photos capture the hidden life of the cemetery – the fox kit, the cat, the stonemason, and some of the 60 species of birds he found during his evening walk – and created a feeling after starting to post them on Instagram during the pandemic. Many are copied in black and white in English. The French version has a site map with full photos and notes, far more than charming.

Gallot was so happy with his positive review that he joked that one day he would be "associated on his grave" with the QR code linked to his Instagram account so that people can continue to like "My Death". Cemetery humor.

Heller McAlpin has been reviewing NPR's books since 2009.