Comparing Montmartre cemetery to Pere Lachaise cemetery: Montmartre has a nicer landscape, with tall trees and terraced into the side of the hill, but Pere Lachaise boasts more notables in its ground. All I know is that my family really needs a crypt for the afterlife. It would be like an eternity of 4th of July picnics, though I suspect that one might need a bit more room to breathe after a 150 years or so. Dreadlocked and pierced American girls made a beeline to fat Jim Morrison's grave. We went the other direction. Oscar Wilde's monument was crowded so we waited on a bench down the way. The stone itself is covered in lipstick-smeared kisses, which is kind of gross. Somehow we walked past Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas' twice. In the Paris Review collection I was reading, Stein revealed, in an interview from beyond the grave, that she was reincarnated as a South American cowboy to work out her gender issues. Edith Piaf and Marcel Proust have boring black slab monuments. Gericault, however, has a bronze of his disaster painting "Raft of the Medusa". Which is an odd choice. Heloise and Abelard looked quite content together in effigy.
Ate lunch at a cafe across the street from the Parc des Butte Chaumont. The waiter winked as we left as if to signify to us that he knew we were American but wouldn't let on. Thanks. Buttes Chaumont used to be a dead horse dump until it was remodeled as a park. A little temple rotunda sits atop a hill over a lake fed by a waterfall through a grotto. It's all fake but charming nonetheless. We sat and read our respective books for a bit until thunder came from a bright blue sky which seemed like a bad omen and a good time to split.
