A la recherche de tombes perdues

With very few exceptions I'm not drawn to cemeteries but I had a morning free before my train to London, my room last night was close to the very famous and much-visited Père Lachaise cemetery and in all my trips to Paris I'd never seen it. So...

At the entrance, Ville de Paris workers were handing out maps marked with the locations of famous tombs. I'm about as interested in celebrities as I am in tombs but to create a route through the vastness, I put pencil rings round those of George Méliès, Bizet, Haussmann, Pissarro, Poulenc, Jim Morrison, Molière, Manu Dibango (I hadn't even registered that he'd died but hoped his tomb would liven the place up a little) and Oscar Wilde. After failing to find the first three on my route I gave up and just wandered in the general direction of Manu Dibango, comparing as I went the architecture of the grandiose, the competitive, the maudlin and the plain. After I'd failed to find Manu despite walking five tombs back from the path it was allegedly near, it occurred to me that Google maps might have him marked. Not a bad idea: some tombs were marked but the only one between where I was and the exit (for which I was more than ready) was Proust. Well why not? Since thoughts of Proust featured on my first blip in Paris a fortnight ago* it felt fitting to enlist him for my farewell.


*Apropos, I saw a sign on a door today: 'Be kind, go and find somewhere else to pee. This is a school.' (I rather think that people who need to be told not to piss outside a door are unlikely to be able to read.)