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with skulls or tibia tucked into their packs, a certain kind of souvenir-hunter combs Père-Lachaise searching for ceramic wreaths, stone heads, brass ornaments and, of course, bones. One egregious example of mindless souvenir hunting revolves around the cemetery’s most problematic resident: James Douglas Morrison, the “Jim” carved on scores of trees and tombs.
    Jim was none other than the celebrated lead singer of the Doors, who died in Paris of a drug overdose in 1971. From the start his grave attracted attention, much of it unwelcome. However, not long after the release of Oliver Stone’s movie The Doors , the numbers of rowdy Jim-worshippers swelled into the thousands. Many vandalized Morrison’s and other, nearby tombs. Someone even managed to break off and steal Morrison’s stone bust, probably at night.
    Why bother? For the same reasons the Grand Tour travelers of the eighteenth century looted the cemeteries of Rome, Naples, and Athens, perhaps. It may well be that for some benighted souls such trinkets represent a means of possessing the past, stopping time or climbing back through it to another age.
    “One day these hills with their urns and epitaphs will be all that remains of our present generations and their subtle contrivances,” wrote a prescient Étienne Pivert de Senancour in the early 1800s. “They will compose, as Rome was said to do, a city of memories.”
    In French the word souvenir indicates both objects and memories. Despite the eternal ambitions of the concession à perpétuité , though, nothing lasts forever, neither urns nor epitaphs nor even the memories associated with them. Who remembers Pivert de Senancour, for that matter, author of the deathless Reveries sur la nature primitive de l’homme , or fellow writer Benjamin Constant? Madame de Staël’s longtime lover, the acclaimed author of Adolphe and dozens of other works, Constant died fabulously famous in 1830, drawing one hundred thousand mourners to his funeral. Who remembers François Gémond, whose obelisk (in Division 25) is the tallest in Père-Lachaise? And what of Félix Beaujour (1765–1836)? His phallic stone tower in Division 48 rises from a rusticated stone drum to dizzying heights and is surely one of the world’s most astounding funerary monuments. The stones still stand but most of the men and women and their deeds have been forgotten.
    Each year dozens of tombs collapse, exposing generations of coffins stacked vertically underneath. The roofs of chapels give way. Trees fall in storms, crushing tombstones and statuary. Iron rusts and stones flake into nothingness. Families, too, disappear. If the city authorities deem a tomb abandoned—usually because it is unsafe to passersby—its owners have three years to respond and make repairs. If they fail, the city revokes the concession, removes what remains of the tomb, and resells the land.
    Eternity? The going price for a repossessed plot at Père-Lachaise is under ten thousand euros. That does not include work needed to make the site buildable, or, naturally, the cost of a monument. Private firms or family members must maintain the tombs and plots. The city of Paris merely sweeps and repairs the paved streets and gravel lanes, and plants the pansies or chrysanthemums in the cemetery’s many raised beds.
    Death goes on, you might say, but then so does life. Among the monuments, oblivious children play. Lovers entwine on hidden paths, unwittingly reenacting the passion of Abélard and Héloïse. Elderly gentlemen sit in the sun, reading Le Parisien, Le Monde , or Le Figaro , while widows, always outnumbering them, polish the granite gravestones or feed the stray cats. And then of course there are the tourists, most of them clutching maps as they trip from tomb to tomb many, doubtless, wondering why they are here and what it all means in the grand scheme of things. Père-Lachaise is a lively city of the dead indeed and it’s likely to remain so, perhaps not for