Fans of the Dead

No, I'm not talking about Deadheads here but tourists, myself included, who like to visit graveyards. The first place I went to visit in Paris was not the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre but Cimetiere Pere Lachaise. I went looking for Oscar Wilde and when I asked directions from a friendly entrance guard, he laughed, saying he'd assumed I was looking for Jim Morrison. The rock star's grave is impossible to miss, surrounded as it is by fans, many of whom deny the singer's death but walk off with various mementos, including the stone head (which must have fit neatly in a backpack).
Wilde was the Morrison of his time with just as many groupies kissing his tomb. (There's now a small plexiglass sheet protecting the famous sculpture.) There's also a piece--think codpiece--missing from the naked angel headstone. 
 Pere Lachaise abounds with dead celebrities like Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Chopin and famed lovers, Heloise and Abelard. (I can't help but think that if this was run by Americans, there'd be a cafe just outside the gates with a souvenir shop selling guides to the graves. There's no reason this shouldn't be as well run as the garden in the Musee Rodin or any other public space but it just exemplifies the very Parisian attitude that begrudges the necessary tourists.) An afternoon in the cemetery is like a stroll through an eerie park, with tumbled down stones, forgotten graves and countless cats stalking through the overgrowth. By far the scariest feature is the toilet, so make a pit stop before you go. 

When I went to Versailles, I was more interested in finding the grave of my favourite American author than I was in visiting the palace. The guard had just gone when I entered, but I figured it couldn't be that hard to find a single grave. Two hours later I was leaving, frustrated and exhausted, when I ran into the guard finally returning from lunch. He knew right away who I was looking for and led me to Edith Wharton in a matter of minutes. Wharton has one of the biggest gravestones and also one of the few rented in perpetuity. I knew her story but wondered about the number of abandoned graves of children, with 'for rent' signs adorning them instead of flowers.
I've never visited Cimetiere du Montparnasse even though it houses such late luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The walk up Boulevard Montparnasse has nothing to recommend it, least of all the Tour Montparnasse which is vastly overrated and ugly. (Why go anywhere else but the Eiffel Tower for a view of the city?)
I finally made it to the Catacombes where entrance is restricted due to weather. There's only a small portion of the 3,000 kilometre tunnel, stuffed with the bones of 6 million people, available for viewing but it's enough. The claustrophobia factor was enough to make me want to leave upon entering, but unfortunately, once I descended, there was only one way out. Of course the place was musty and dripping with water and I worried about slipping and putting my hand against the wall to balance, with the horrid possibility of having a shower of bones come down upon me.  I was so relieved to reach the exit that I didn't even mind the guard searching through my purse. A pilfered bone was the last kind of souvenir I wanted to bring home from Paris.