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my favorite residents are botanist-agronomist Antoine-Augustin Parmentier of potato fame (his tomb is surrounded by potato plants), essayist Louis-Sébastien Mercier (author of Tableau de Paris and Le Nouveau Paris ), military heroes Maréchal Ney and Kellermann (both rate a Paris street in their honor), not to mention Chopin, Balzac, David, Gustave Doré, Oscar Wilde, Guillaume Apollinaire, Amedeo Modigliani, Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Gertrude Stein, and Yves Montand. Just about every distinguished poet, writer, musician, composer, statesman, military hero, doctor, actor, playwright, scientist, blueblood, industrialist, and plutocrat of the past two hundred years lucky enough to have died in or near Paris is buried here. Montparnasse’s celebrated cemetery pales, ghostlike, in comparison.
    But it’s not merely the one million illustrious occupants of the seventy thousand tombs strewn picturesquely along ten miles of paths veining the cemetery’s panoramic parklands that draw visitors to this preternaturally Parisian necropolis. There is an additional, intangible attraction I notice each time I wander here: the cult of the dead, the fascination, sometimes morbid, that the living feel toward the related phenomena of death, time passing, and collective memory. This fascination takes many forms, and Père-Lachaise accommodates them all, embracing the rites of conventional Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and adepts of black magic. Even believers in the transmigration of the soul are well served. For the delectation of Spiritists there is the flower-strewn sepulchral monument, perpetually besieged, dedicated to Allan Kardec, father of this curious creed. His tomb is in Division 44 near the crematorium and every time I pass it, Kardec’s followers are there by the dozen. They lay hands on the tomb and, they claim, communicate with their master.
    Nature and the elements play a big part in the Romantic spell Père-Lachaise casts on visitors. Magnificent trees sprout from graves, consuming them one particle at a time. Ravenous roots and trunks bear up bits of stone, iron, or bone. The most astonishing sepulcher-devouring tree I know is an arm-span-wide purple beech on the Chemin du Dragon (in Division 27). Its gray, elephantine roots have been delving for decades into the Duhoulley family plot. They have obliterated at least one other tomb and are inching toward its neighbors.
    If you fancy a frisson, take a look at the imposing sepulcher in Division 8 of Étienne Gaspard Robertson (1763–1837), a magician. Winged skulls, like demonic cherubs, perch at each corner of the massive tomb. Adepts of black masses swear the skulls swirl into the air with Robertson on moonless nights. In keeping with the symbolism of superstition, there are real, live feral cats and owls in many a ruined family chapel. Some nest in the boughs of ancient horse-chestnut trees. They scurry and flap in the twilight as they feed off the countless rodents that day-trippers seldom see. I have had the honor of seeing the rats and cats, owls and bats, having, on several occasions, been among the last visitors escorted out at nightfall.
    Friends still ask me what it was like to work in an office practically in the cemetery’s back yard. I tell them the truth: I went to Père-Lachaise almost daily, to stroll and meditate, and I still cross Paris at least once a week to do the rounds of my favorite graves and monuments. In this Honoré de Balzac (buried in Division 48) is my mentor. In the 1810s and ’20s the sardonic novelist noted that he wandered among the tombs regularly to cheer himself up. It is cheering, in a way. I find nothing bizarre about eating lunch on a bench among the sepulchres when the weather is nice, for instance. But most people I know recoil at the thought of a picnic at Père-Lachaise.
    Innocent picnicking is one thing, I retort. Scavenging for souvenirs is another. Just as visitors to Paris’s catacombs sometimes emerge