Cimetière du Père-Lachaise: Paris Part Quatre

I spent a cloudy afternoon at Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, a cemetery readers may recognize from Stephanie Perkins's Anna and the French Kiss or Vanina Marsot's Foreign Tongue. (If you sense a theme of me visiting places from these books. . . well, you're not wrong.)

The first thing you should know about Père-Lachaise is that it is HUGE:

This is a picture of me peering around a mausoleum near a path that goes on for a very long time.

Père-Lachaise features a circle with benches . . . and a speed limit sign. Graves rise up on a hill.

I felt like I was in a tiny town.

Here is a sad statue. (Although when my mother saw the picture she suggested that statue-woman simply had a headache.)

And while I'm on the subject of sadness, it's difficult to imagine coming to this place to mourn. As I wandered the cemetery with my friend, Becca, a chill breeze played with our hair and we heard ravens cawing. (If not ravens, then crows. All I know is that large black birds were making loud noises.)

We felt like we were exploring an elaborate horror movie set.

Crunchy fall leaves still littered the ground. It could've been October.

And I did not find this reassuring.

But at least this necropolis has division signs that look like street signs.

The signs didn't stop us from getting lost, though. Père-Lachaise is an astounding, wonderful (and free) place to visit but I recommend bringing a map of the cemetery or paying closer attention to the map at the front. I glanced at where Oscar Wilde's grave was and thought I could just angle in that direction. False. The graves are jumbled together in irregular lines and--as previously noted--it's a huge, huge cemetery. Becca and I didn't find a famous person's grave; we were happy enough just to find our way out.