At the top of this post and to the right is a drawing of him. Unlike most who are interred in the cemetery, Baudelaire is resting with others. At the end of his life he was poor. He spent his last two years in a semi-paralyzed state. It was only after his death that his poetry began to contribute to his fame and that his rightful place in the French literary canon began to be acknowledge.
Click on any photo to see it larger and in more detail. It stands against a wall alone under the shade of trees at the end a dead end street. It is the wall I can see when I leave the apartment building, turn the corner, and look toward the walls of the cemetery that separate me from the tombs. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account.
You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. What an adorable and delectable existence is that! Email Address:. He was born in Wyoming and raised in Oregon.
Early this spring of I returned to Paris with my adult daughter Lenore. That will take us on a route straight through the wonderful Luxembourg Gardens. The Luxembourg Gardens are over four hundred years old and are one of the most popular places for Parisians and tourists alike. The combination of flowers, sculpture, water and a former palace are pretty hard to beat on a day like this.
Just outside the gates a vendor is offering these lovely pastel coloured roses for sale. Inside there are a lot of people lingering around the large pond. Unfortunately at this time of year, the fountains are not on which would make it even nicer, but then again the crowds would be much larger. Fortunately the flowers are in bloom, well ahead of their usual schedule. Here is Lenore among the primroses with the dancing faun sculpture and the palace in the background..
One of the great things about visiting cemeteries is that they are free and yet can provide hours of solitude and reflection with a good history lesson thrown in. While Pere Lachaise and Montmartre cemeteries do have some decent elevation changes, Montparnasse Cemetery does not.
Unfortunately even with a wide angle lens, there is no one good spot to get an overall picture of the place, but I did find this photo taken from the top of nearby Montparnasse Tower. The first thing on entering is to draw up a plan of the grave sites I want to visit and in what order.
Like Montmartre, Montparnasse Cemetery provides maps you can borrow that list and identify the most famous burials. As you can see the cemetery is divided into numbered sections. These correspond with markers on the ground so that if you can read a map you should have no trouble finding most of the graves although you might have to hunt a bit to find some of them. I write down the number of each section next to the list of names I have brought with me and soon we are off in search of our first celebrity burial.
As it turns out the first site we visit has a famous couple interred there — Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. Simone is widely credited as being the first modern feminist. It bothered my head way back in undergraduate philosophy and it bothers it today. Sartre won the Nobel Prize for literature in and famously declined to accept it some nine years before Marlon Brando pulled the same act and declined to accept his Oscar.
The major Paris cemeteries are nondenominational so you well might find a famous atheist buried next to a religious zealot. All are equal in death. People are still bringing tributes. You might not recognize the next guy up, but you can be sure the Mexicans would. So why is he buried here and not in Mexico? After trying to rig an eighth consecutive term in office, he finally triggered a revolution that led to his fleeing the country for Paris where he died not long after. He was perhaps the first of many foreign leaders or opposition leaders who chose the City of Light as their favourite place of exile.
Remember even that famous religious nut, the Ayatollah Khomeini chose Paris over say, Mecca as his place to brood over how many people he would have killed when he returned to Iran. I wonder if the Mexicans consider him the eagle, the snake or the cactus? Charles Baudelaire was as close to a French version of Oscar Wilde as you could get. Like Wilde, it was difficult to determine if his life or his art was more interesting.
Baudelaire is also remembered for his collection of prose poems entitled Petit Poemes en prose and for his translations of the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. Baudelaire died of venereal disease in - a condition which he contacted as a young man. From L'Albatros. All rights reserved. Hosted by UK Web. Solutions Direct.
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