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to this day.
    It may be hard to credit but in 1804 the site stood beyond Paris’s walls in rolling countryside. Known by various names, including Mont-Louis, the area had been covered since at least the Middle Ages by woods, vineyards, orchards, and market gardens. In the mid-1600s Jesuit father François d’Aix de la Chaise, better known as Père Lachaise, became Louis XIV’s confessor. An ambitious, worldly fellow, Lachaise eventually prevailed on the monarch to help him buy Mont-Louis and turn it into the country resort of Paris’s Jesuit brothers. Included in the deal was a nice little château for Lachaise’s personal use, perched at the hill’s highest point. The Jesuits were evicted in the 1760s and Mont-Louis passed through the hands of several private owners. Paris’s municipal authorities eventually bought it and created a graveyard to serve the city’s eastern arrondissements. Later still, the same authorities demolished Père Lachaise’s château. Since about 1820 a chapel has stood on the site.
    What’s in a name? François d’Aix de la Chaise isn’t buried in the cemetery that bears his name (he reposes beneath the church of Saint-Paul, in the Marais). Apparently, when it first opened, the clinical-sounding Cimetière de l’Est didn’t seem like the ideal place to bury loved ones. For this reason the site’s earliest developers hit upon the scheme of calling it Père-Lachaise, to give it a hallowed, Jesuitical ring. Then as now religiosity was an effective marketing tool. The cemetery was not consecrated ground under the Jesuits and is not consecrated today. By law French municipal graveyards must welcome all sects, creeds, and religions, as well as agnostics and atheists.
    These same developers used another clever marketing ploy to promote the cemetery. It involved relocating the tombs of a few famous dead, so that potential clients would be able to say, “Well, if Père-Lachaise is good enough for abbots and royalty it’s good enough for me.” The first celebrity corpses whisked to the cemetery were in fact those of the luckless abbot Abélard and his pupil Héloïse, the twelfth-century lovers whose tragic tale of emasculation (his) and enforced separation (mutual) was the rage among early 1800s Romantics. Abélard and Héloïse’s towering neo-Gothic tomb, still one of the most spectacular in Père-Lachaise, is the highlight of Division 7, the cemetery’s oldest section. For similar promotional reasons, Louise de Lorraine, widow of King Henri III, was shifted to Père-Lachaise from the convent of the Capucines, perhaps in a bid to entice Royalist customers. (Her tomb was later dismantled.) To make intellectuals and artists feel welcome, Molière and La Fontaine were disinterred from the Saint-Joseph and Innocents cemeteries, respectively, and placed in new tombs in Division 26, high on a hill. Never mind that the bones of both playwright and author had been mixed with those of other skeletons in a common grave; their tombs are in fact cenotaphs, since no one can be sure whose remains they hold.
    Soon after these transfers, another celebrated playwright was dug up and moved to Père-Lachaise: Caron de Beaumarchais, author of Le Mariage de Figaro . His original grave in the garden of his townhouse on what is now Boulevard Beaumarchais stood in the way of progress, so the move was both convenient and necessary.
    Though business was slow at first the twin ploys of the Jesuit’s name and the famous transplanted skeletons eventually worked. By the 1810s Père-Lachaise had become the resting place for families of high social standing or aspiration, those, in other words, with the money to buy a perpetual concession and build a monumental tomb. People spoke of the cemetery’s most desirable neighborhoods, paralleling them to Paris’s beaux quartiers . That explains why the roster of nineteenth- and twentieth-century marquee names with a slice of Père-Lachaise is a Who’s Who of France.
    Among