No two days are the same for Benoît Gallot, whose title since 2018 has been “curator” at the storied Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, the resting place of choice for the great and good of France and those who love them.
He might manage a team meeting, negotiate the sale of a family plot, supervise a sensitive exhumation, prepare for a celebrity burial, scout locations with a movie director, meet with a disgruntled visitor or authorize a commemorative ceremony.
And sign paperwork. Always more paperwork. Needless to say, Gallot does it all while impeccably groomed.
Trained as a lawyer, Gallot can add to his responsibilities Instagram star (@la_vie_au_cimitiere features his photographs), and now, author. His debut book, “The Secret Life of a Cemetery: The Wild Nature and Enchanting Lore of Père-Lachaise,” is an ode to the history and biodiversity of his family’s adopted home: He, his wife (first wary, now a funeral consultant) and their four children live full time within Père-Lachaise’s 110-acre grounds.
“To them, living in a cemetery is normal,” said Gallot when we recently chatted over videocall, together with the book’s translator, Arielle Aaronson. “Three of the four have never known anything else.” Growing up in a family of funerary marble workers, he has never found the surroundings morbid, either.
Père-Lachaise is the most-visited cemetery in the world — and site of the hardest plots to snag. Home to Colette, Susan Sontag, Eugène Delacroix, Isadora Duncan, Honoré de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, Abelard and Heloise and countless worthies of the French government and military, its verdant grounds attract a mix of tourists, school groups, pilgrims, groupies (Jim Morrison’s fervent fans rate their own sidebar) and plain old mourners from every corner of the globe.
“From an aesthetic perspective, Père-Lachaise is an ever-changing, ever-evolving work of art,” said the author and historian Greg Melville of the cemetery’s unique appeal.
“It’s lovingly maintained but by no means perfectly maintained,” he added. “Whether by conscious design or due to fiscal constraints, nature and time have taken the upper hand there among its monuments and mausoleums in a wild, marvelously unkempt way.”
It was during Covid — even as bodies appeared daily at the cemetery gates — that Gallot’s family came to fully appreciate the odd privilege of living in one of Paris’s most beautiful green spaces, a joy he seeks to share with the reader.
Since 2015, Père-Lachaise has been completely pesticide-free and, thanks in part to a sterilization program for feral cats, the ecosystem is booming. According to Gallot’s account, cyclamen and orchids thrive; beyond the famous foxes and weasels some 60 bird species have been spotted on the grounds. Local residents include woodpeckers, doves, crows, tawny owls and Little Sparrow Edith Piaf. (Plot 91, Division 97.)
Just as famous are the mausoleums and monuments. Gallot’s favorite piece, he tells me, is a figure by the sculptor Louis-Ernest Barrias known as “La Douleur”; because it’s on a private family plot, however, he’s powerless to give it the restoration it needs. Gallot also wishes new tenants, who tend toward minimalist simplicity, would get a bit more fanciful with their designs, but he understands the costs are prohibitive. (“Besides,” he adds, “it is not the mode.”)
Most of the mausoleums still belong in private hands; if family leases are not renewed, remains are discreetly removed to the ossuary. While Gallot speaks compellingly of the satisfaction of providing comfort to bereaved families (he oversees approximately 1,000 burials a year), one assumes a good deal of tact is often called for in such situations.
There’s also the matter of fitting multiple generations into a finite, often historically protected space, by means of commingling ancestors, adding shelving to neo-Gothic tombs and slipping in fresh coffins when prior occupants have made the inevitable transition to dust. The prohibitions on certain graveside trees are not purely aesthetic; roots must be considered. As Gallot writes, “Scarcity must be managed with care.”
It was not always thus. When it opened in 1804 as the city’s first municipal cemetery, designed to improve public health, Père-Lachaise attracted only 13 customers. Not all Parisians were eager to embrace Napoleon’s brand of secularism; although the hillside property may have been named for Louis XIV’s confessor, the newly minted emperor had declared that “every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion,” and strict Catholics were leery of unsanctified ground. (A Jewish section opened in 1810; the Muslim enclosure, the first in France, would open in 1857.)
In 1817, the officials launched a P.R. blitz designed to make Père-Lachaise the French cemetery. The playwright Molière was reinterred there, as was Jean de La Fontaine. Demand skyrocketed, and a new generation of French celebrities signed on.
The cemetery’s popularity is, of course, a mixed blessing: The newly bereaved do not always wish to be confronted, say, with day-trippers fondling the marble crotch of the legendarily virile journalist Victoir Noir; a guided tour group paying loud homage to Maria Callas; or the notoriously raucous Doors obsessives who throng to Division 6. Requests from paranormal investigators, hoping to monitor the spiritual situation overnight, are a constant irritant.
Despite having been born on Halloween, Gallot considers himself a realist who has never, in the years he’s worked at the cemetery, encountered any of its legendary specters, which are rumored to include Chopin, Wilde and the Devil himself.
“I don’t really like to feed into that,” he said. He did once come upon “hundreds of sacrificial chickens” in a tomb, which even he found disconcerting.
There have been other books on Père-Lachaise — its history, its architecture, purported hauntings. Naturally, it’s found its way into plenty of fiction; the cemetery has a memorable cameo in Nancy Mitford’s love letter to Paris, “The Blessing.”
“The Secret Life of a Cemetery” is another kind of love letter. Despite Gallot’s refusal to romanticize his workplace — indeed, because of it — his devotion paradoxically shines through. Not only is this a book that answers, fact for fact, everything you ever wanted to know about Père-Lachaise but were afraid to ask, it is also a portrait of a person who truly loves his work.
Gallot walks daily among the monuments, whenever possible going to his favorite area — Divisions 28 and 29, populated primarily by long-forgotten military figures from the Napoleonic era — which he describes as “absolutely serene.”
His profession, he said, has not changed his relationship with death, but the reverse. “My rapport with death? No,” he said. “What has changed is my rapport with life.”
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