More Dead History

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Mes semblables de Dieu,

One of the wonders of Paris is that when not stepping in dog turds one is forever stepping back in history, and yesterday I stumbled into the Cimetière de Picpus, site of the mass graves of 1,306 final victims of the Terror. Picpus is just a short tumbril ride from the Place du Trône Renversé (or “overturned throne,” its name itself later beheaded to be simply the Place du Trône), where the guillotine was moved in the summer of 1794 after shopkeepers near its more stylish and central location in the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) began to complain that the stench from the blood-soaked cobblestones was driving away customers.

(I suspect this may well have marked the beginning of the now-annual tradition of nearly all Parisians to flee the city during the hottest summer months, and perhaps even of their disinclination to pick up after their dogs. Maybe they originally hoped that the perfume of pervasive poop might mask that of baking blood, and when that failed—their canine poopers of choice being so small and the guillotine so busy—they fled to the seashore until cooler weather returned.)

But I digress. Parisians did grow tired of the daily carnage downtown, and moving the Big Blade to the Place du Trône allowed the Committee of Public Safety to continue a steady separation of corps and têtes, including the aforementioned 1,306 whose 2,612 parts were carted down the street and dumped in a couple of big holes at Picpus during the brief period from 14 June to 17 July—a mere ten days before the public got truly cranky, turned against the Committee, and sent its leader Robespierre to the scaffold himself.

You enter the grounds of the cemetery through a courtyard across the street from a Renault repair shop. Inside, a man takes three euros, opens a locked gate, and sends you wandering through a pretty little park to look through another locked gate at two big patches of gravel and grass with explanatory plaques. Picpus is really two cemeteries, one containing two mass graves of the decapitated, and then a rather sad little graveyard of the decapitateds' relations who died later from mostly bladeless causes. (I couldn’t help picturing them all interred wearing tee shirts silkscreened with the words “I’m with headless” and a little arrow pointing in the direction of the mass pit.) This area contains a few notable corpses whose heads were intact upon burial; the Noailles are buried here (the Comtesse of Noailles was to Marie Antoinette sort of what Judith Anderson’s Mrs. Danvers was to Joan Fontaine's character in Rebecca), as is the Marquis de Lafayette, who we all know and love as the French guy who lent his military expertise to help out our own revolution and now has a park named for him across from the White House where our own grouchy citizens gather to complain.

When I arrived at Picpus, the caretaker was very chatty, and after determining my nationality he asked, "So, tell me: Why do you speak English?"

"Huh?"

He repeated the question. "Why do you Americans speak English?"

"I don't think I understand what you’re asking me," I told him.

"It's the language of your oppressors! Why would you want to speak that? Didn't you fight to free yourself from the British? It makes no sense that you'd go through all that trouble, and then continue to speak their language!"

"Um..." I hesitated, not really sure if he was joking. "Well we were British for a long time. What would you have us speak? What do they speak in France's former colonies, like those in Africa?"

He grinned broadly. "Well they speak French, of course! But French is the language of freedom! English, well, ha, that's the language of slavery!!"

"Well, I suppose our Navajo might agree with half of that," I told him.

He laughed, shook my hand, welcomed me, and handed me two little pamphlets. One contained information about the cemetery and its history and the other was a small tract titled The Sixteen Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne. Before unlocking the inner gate and showing me how to let myself out at the end of my visit, he pointed to the entrance of the adjacent church and told me not to miss checking that out too. “It has the most important Virgin Mary in France,” he told me. “Very important, even if you’re not a Christian. It’s been recognized by a number of Popes, including Pope Pius X and that last one, the Polish one.”

Inside the cemetery, I read through the little tract he’d handed me. It tells the story of the Carmelites of Compiègne, a knot of nuns who since their order’s foundation in 1641 have been "doing good" by remaining silent, poor, and prayerful. In June of 1794, 16 of them were arrested, condemned to death (according to the tract, “for their fidelity to the religious life and for their great devotion to the Sacred Heart”), beheaded on July 17, and tossed with the others into the Picpus pit.

“What happiness to die for one’s God!” one was reported to have cried out from the scaffold. “May we be the last ones to die.”

As proof of the power of the sisters’ prayers, the tract tells that “just ten days later, ended the torment that for two years had shed upon France’s son’s (and daughters).” Say what? Granted, this little chapel with its "most important Virgin" is nowhere on the Magnificence Scale compared to Venice's
Santa Maria della Salute, but c'mon! Stop already with the adoration of Holy Virgins who seem to be everywhere blessing—with little or no success—the bejeezus out of people who are doomed! If she had been a real, live, breathing human being, no doubt she'd be vilified instead of venerated, and she'd be marched to the scaffold lickety-split. And I thought the deaths of Nixon and Reagan brought on amnesiac, rosy-hued posthumous saint status! Heh.

The tract then provides a prayer (which I will spare you) “for obtaining graces through the intercession of the Blessed Carmelites of Compiègne” and an address where anyone who has received graces and healings through such intercessions should immediately send notification of same, so that beatification procedures can be started, tout de suite.

Despite the multi-Pope appeal that Picpus presents, and an entertaining painting hanging in the church that depicts the martyred nuns silently, poorly, and devotedly praying beside the guillotine under the watchful (if ultimately no-count) eye of the Blessed Virgin, I must admit that more graveside fun was to be had on the other side of town, at the Cimetière des Chiens in Asnières.



If any of you were wondering where little French doggies go after they’ve taken their last supper at their favorite Parisian brasserie, it is here in this pet cemetery on the banks of the Seine. The sentiments engraved on their headstones are no less sappy and sentimental than those at the Pet’s Rest outside San Francisco, and they’ve been engraving sappy and sentimental doggerel and best wishes on headstones here considerably longer—since the late 1800s, in fact. Here too lie rabbits and cats and something that I think was a monkey (though possibly some breed of canine that was stylish for a mercifully brief time in the 1960s) and whose tombstone is adorned with her likeness, posed in what must have been her favorite gingham dress.

As I strolled past the many tombs of long-deceased Fifis and Mouchettes, I nearly stumbled over a woman who, looking quite fetching with a miniature French bulldog under her arm, sat weeping over the grave of another dog, now departed. I did not wish to disturb her by asking if the deceased was her current dog’s mother or if perhaps it was of a breed that no longer matched her shoes and I’d solved the mystery of what happened to all of Paris's no-longer-fashionable Jack Russell terriers. Whether the former or the latter, her grief over the dog-loss seemed genuine and bottomless, and if I’d been to Picpus first, I might have provided her with the words of prayer she could use to obtain the graces and intercession of the 16 headless, martyred virgins of Compiègne, but as it was I just left her and Fifi II to continue unassisted with their own miracle-free grieving process.

À bientôt au paradis,

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