The cemetery is not so much about death as it is about life itself, and a man's tomb tells his story even better than when he was alive.
Text / Contributing Writer Si Lu from Paris
Edited by / Zhou Jianping [email protected]
Climbing high and looking far away is a common habit of young people in other provinces
Montmartre is a good place, but I don't go very often, first, in the remote north of Paris, and second, tourists rub shoulders and pickpockets. My friend H lives in a lovely penthouse in Montmartre and occasionally asks me to come to the underground arts theatre company or some quirky exhibitions. On this day, we had a drink on the balcony of her house on a bright afternoon, looking at the snow-white corner of the Sacré Coeur, and I envied her scenery, but she smiled and said that maybe all the top floors in Paris could overlook the Sacré Coeur. Instead, she talked about how a friend's father came to Paris from a small town in the French provinces and spent half his life, but insisted on being buried in a nearby Montmartre Cemetery where the Church of the Sacred Heart can be seen.
Montmartre Cemetery
In addition to sighing, I want to visit Montmartre Cemetery again. While it was not too late, he hurriedly bid farewell to H.
To walk from the H family to the cemetery, you need to walk through the Church of the Sacred Heart, located at the highest point of the Montmartre Highlands, which is also the commanding height of the whole of Paris, and climb up the stairs, unconsciously already out of breath. In good weather, the grass in front of the church was as usual full and full of people. The black teenager who juggled soccer at the church gate, presumably a squatting entertainer with a government subsidy, once again attracted the applause of a new audience. The sneaky gypsy girls next to me were also quite familiar—it turned out to be the ones who tried to cheat me out of money last time, and they naturally didn't recognize me, but I kind of recognized the joy of old friends.
The church dome in the sun is shining white, condescending, and the panoramic view of Paris is as follows: Paris has never had skyscrapers, and even the elegant and sturdy Parisian houses on the cluster of flat floors are so small that the viewer, who should be small, has the heroism of owning the whole city. I must have shared this sight and this mood with countless people throughout history: the legendary patron saint Saint-Denis of the whole of France, who was martyred here by the butcher's knife of the Romans, and the land was named Montmartre (meaning Mont des Martyrs' Hill); such as the members of the Paris Commune who fired the first shot from this commanding height, who briefly took control of this beautiful city, and finally lost all their lives here, where there was no way back and almost all of them died— the Church of the Sacred Heart was built Another example is the provincial man in H's story, who is so fond of the Church of the Sacred Heart, presumably a regular visitor here, perhaps like Balzac's provincial youth Rastigné, who once stood on this high ground overlooking the capital and said to the array of nothingness: "Let's fight." ”
Montmartre, Paris
The "Provincial Youth" made its first appearance in history, probably Napoleon, the little man of Corsica. Previously, due to the strict class of imperial power and aristocrats, Paris was an unattainable legend for ordinary people in the provinces. Coincidentally, it was in Montmartre, the highest place, that the Russian cannons fired at Paris, ending the myth of Napoleon. Nevertheless, his great achievements encouraged aspiring young people in the provinces. After the Revolution, the door valve was reshuffled, and the power vacuum was left behind him, which became a once-in-a-lifetime upward passage for the young people at the bottom. "Go to Paris!" Like Napoleon, the opportunity to seek a career with personal intelligence is no longer so out of reach. These ambitious lives dominated 19th-century French literature. Interestingly, in these stories of joy and sorrow, ascending to the horizon is almost a common hobby of provincial youth, presumably only in this way that the anonymous can have the city imagined, not just an insignificant passerby.
Stendhal: "Milanese, written, loved, lived"
Descending the steps next to the Church of the Sacred Heart is the lively rue norvins (road name), along the way are small bars and restaurants, which are currently mainly tourist business, but more than a hundred years ago they received poor and marginal people, tramps, drunkards, prostitutes and, of course, poets and artists. In the 19th century, before the Ottoman plan to transform Paris, Montmartre was only a poor and desolate village outside the city, famous for its windmills, wine gardens and unconventional entertainment venues, free atmosphere, low rents, and a large number of artists from all over the country and even the world, trying to use this as a springboard to conquer Paris with literature. The hillside square on the side of the road, where visitors can now get a sketch for a few euros, was once the residence of Cézanne, Picasso, Modigliani, Dalí and countless other familiar names, where they witnessed their youth years of warming and poetry and wine, and when they became famous, they almost invariably moved away.
Painter of The Hilly Square
From rue norvins to rue lepic (road name), it is gradually deserted to inaccessible, and the simple stone walls and houses can faintly see the shadow of the village two hundred years ago. After the pancake mill painted by Renoir No. 89 and van Gogh's house at No. 54, walk up to a dilapidated iron bridge covered with graffiti, and the top of a large cemetery slowly emerges from the bridge, which is the Montmartre Cemetery.
The Montmartre Cemetery is part of the modernization of Paris and was originally an abandoned quarry on the northern outskirts of Paris. In 1786, in order to improve the city's sanitary conditions, Louis XVI ordered the closure of all cemeteries in the city of Paris and moved to the ground; in the early 19th century, the Parisian Priest Lachaise Cemetery on the east side, the Montparnasse Cemetery in the south, the two cemeteries are most famous for the burial of many world-class celebrities, as well as the slightly deserted Montmartre Cemetery in the north and the Parsi Cemetery in the east.
The quarry was once located in a sunken depression, and the only narrow entrance to the cemetery was hidden under the steps of the bridge, which was difficult to find, invisibly preventing many passers-by. Entering the cemetery, you will be empty, as if entering a cool and quiet garden, with tall chestnut, maple and cypress trees scattered on both sides of the road, rustling. The main roads have road names and numbers, which is no different from a real city. The profession of the tomb owner jumped out alive: sculptor, musician, writer ... They were another group of larger people behind the famous artists who came out of Montmartre, most of them drowned in the dust of history, born from all over the world, and eventually became permanent residents of Montmartre.
On the roadside map, the tombs of celebrities are marked with asterisks. "Paris is like a deceptive bunker, and all the youth of the provinces are ready to attack it... In these contests of talents, wills and achievements, there is a tragic history of a generation of young people over the past three decades. Balzac said. In this garden that accommodates 300,000 people in two hundred years, these "stars" are like a conclusive merit book, covering up the painful struggles of countless lives behind them.
The old bridge I passed before I came in spanned the entire cemetery. In 1888, Montmartre had been transferred to Paris, and an iron bridge was needed to be built across the cemetery to connect to the city center, and in this project to repair the bridge and demolish the cemetery, a tomb surnamed Bell was excavated. A few years later, the once-snubbed novel "The Red and the Black" attracted attention and became popular, and people realized that this Bell was its author Stendhal. After several fan fund-raisings, the tombstone is made of fine marble, and the epitaph is still in the original Italian: "Arigo Bell, a Milanese, has written, loved, and lived." ”
The provincial youth, unwilling to reveal his hometown, Grenoble in the east, on his epitaph, used the romantic and freehand technique of "Milanese"; without even using his real name, his original name was Henry Bell. In 1799, at the age of 16, Bell graduated from high school, won the Prize in Literature and Logic, and left his hometown to apply for the École Polytechnique de Paris. But he was soon captivated by the beauty of the metropolis, gave up schooling, and first decided to become a playwright, an ambition that ended quickly when he was abandoned by the actress he loved; and also wrote art reviews, which had nothing to do but a few books that were accused of plagiarism. With the admiration for Napoleon, he followed the army to the European continent, and should have done a lot, but the killing and cruelty of the war made his sensitive mind uneasy. He was not a warrior and commander fighting on the front line, but often hid in the rear, and Milan was one of his comfort nests. With the defeat of Napoleon and the advent of the Restoration Dynasty, he was forced to leave his deceitful government. At the age of nearly 50, in loneliness and poverty, he began to write "The Red and the Black", putting the ideals, passions and depressions he had experienced all his life into the shy, embarrassed, inferior and eager provincial youth Yulian Soyurli.
In the novels of various provincial scenes, the success of the provincial youth is nothing more than two, one is the steady rise of diligence, and the other is the exhaustion of bottomless means, Stendhal and his Jullien do not have the willpower and patience of the former, but they maintain a sensitive and kind heart and cannot do the latter. When the prosperity was over, he was anonymous, "to the happy few", and he only wanted to share his thoughts and experiences with those few who could understand him, and no longer struggled to gain fame and fortune in the world.
"I will be famous in 1880" was Stendhal's prophecy to himself. At the end of the 19th century, when people opened the dusty "Red and Black", they were surprised by the mixture of intense emotions and whiplash reason, and he had come to Paris because of his excellent literature and logic, which was his unique background. Jullien's subtle psychological experience like the wings of a fluttering butterfly, the contradiction that is imminent under the iron wall of society, the failure to be loyal to the soul of the self, is incompatible with the 19th century, but it is in line with the tastes of modern people. After more than fifty years, Bale, who had hit the wall everywhere in reality and finally became himself, finally conquered Paris and the world with jullien.
"Semi-upstream society"
The cemetery is not so much about death as it is about life itself, and a man's tomb tells his story even better than when he was alive. Not to mention that reading a variety of strange epitaphs is a literary pleasure, just looking at the tombstone itself can find the true love and character of the tomb owner: Romanesque, Renaissance, Gothic stone carvings with different forms reveal their tastes before they were born; moss-covered family churches are the joy and harmony of the family; those exquisitely carved sculptures are pomp and pride that they are unwilling to give up until death.
The tomb of The Little Dumas is very recognizable, and he lies there in the form of a sculpture, and in the tomb pavilion above his head, he writes: "I exist in life and death." My death is more important than my life. For life is only a part of time, and death is eternal. He became eternal not only as dumas's son, but thanks to a provincial woman not far away, the tomb of Marie Dupresy, hidden in a corner, as white as her other world-known name, Traviata.
If the way out for young men in the provinces in the 19th century could have been a black scepter and a red saber, Demi-Monde was one of the few ways out for young women from the provinces who wandered to Paris. Demi-Monde means "another world" in French, which originally meant a man's world of mistress and pleasure outside of his serious social responsibility, but the Chinese translation of the word is more subtle - "semi-high society". These poor girls followed their lovers and dependants into the sound dogs and horses of high society with one foot, while the other foot was firmly nailed to their provincial homeland.
Hiking trails to Montmartre
The portrait on the side of the tombstone has been stolen. In the end, the top prostitute removed the aristocratic pseudonym and returned to her real name in the Normandy countryside, Alphoncina Placei. Exploited as a child laborer and child prostitute by her alcoholic father at an early age, she came to Paris at the age of 15 to become a washer and starved. This girl with amazing beauty has "jet-black hair, snow-white skin, and lips redder than cherries" in Dumas's pen. She put on the best dress and looked around in the crowd of Montmartre. Soon, one provider after another offered her increasingly extravagant life and inflated ambitions. In less than a year, the wealthy throughout Paris flocked to her, and some even trained her in culture and etiquette. Open salons, visit theaters, talk and behave elegantly like a noblewoman with a melancholy beauty. In fact, she was shrewd, stoic, good at manipulating, profligate, and how many people were ruined because of her, and the overwhelmed little Dumas had to take the initiative to say goodbye, of course, he was not in front of her roster. "Love is a terrible thing for someone like me," she wrote to a friend. At the age of 23, tuberculosis caused her appearance to decline day by day, and everyone avoided her. She died alone and was thrown into the graves of the nameless and nameless poor. To pay off her huge debts, countless of her jewels and relics were auctioned off. Compared with her burial, the auction became a sensational event in Paris, with celebrities and celebrities attending. "It's the reincarnation of Joan of Arc," the English novelist Dickens, who was present, mocked the Parisians' voyeurism about the auction. Two of Alphoncia's lovers reburied her in the Montmartre Cemetery, and dumas, after attending the auction, was busy packing her up as the heroine of a great love story for months. Later, she was constantly interpreted by the drama opera ballet, no longer herself, but permanently frozen in a pure and beautiful image of people's fantasies sacrificed for love, as if all the harsh life did not leave a trace on her.
At that time, the members of semi-high society usually included not only high-level socialites, but also various actresses. A column called "Semi-High Society" featured several photographs of dancers that caught people's attention: the Alsatian girl Louis Weber. At the age of 15, she followed her boyfriend to Paris to break into the world, she was quickly abandoned, from a washer to a painter's model, and dance was her life's mission. After some hard work, in the red mill a few hundred meters from the Montmartre Cemetery, she boldly lifted the corner of her skirt and kicked her legs all the way to the top of her head, creating the Kang kang dance, which is still the symbol of Paris. She was as brash as a man, often unscrupulously drinking the wine out of the guests' cups, and was known as the la goulue (gluttonous person). Once the highest-paid dancer in Paris, various posters featuring her are still posted everywhere in Montmartre. Unlike most semi-high-society women, she never clings to the glory and wealth, and independence is her pursuit from beginning to end. For more freedom, she resolutely left the Moulin Rouge and embarked on a national tour. Her parisian splendor failed to replicate, her savings depleted, and she made a living by performing in her husband's circus.
Mill, Red, Moulin Rouge, Montmartre
Finally, one day, people found that the former pillar of the Moulin Rouge returned to the vicinity of the Moulin Rouge to set up a stall selling cigarettes and matches and other miscellaneous items. She raised a lot of old and weak animals, would light a cigarette for the dancers who left work at night, often cooked soup to help people who were poorer than her, and people called her "Goulue Mother". In the last image left, she is bloated, selling things on the side of the road, smiling and greeting pedestrians, stepping on a dance point from time to time, and being as dashing as she was in her heyday. Before she died, she was still applying for a legal stall. "Tell people I'm a good girl" was her last words. From the peak of life to the trough, she has a true bohemian spirit, worthy of the title of Queen of Montmartre. Nearly a hundred years later, her great-granddaughter's book brought this forgotten past back into the public eye, and the Paris government decided to move her tomb elsewhere to the Montmartre Cemetery, and she finally returned to her favorite place.
The evening sun dissolves through the dense leaves into dappled dots of light, swooping down on the huge stone paved road, like a mysterious robe. Wildcats jump up and down on benches on the side of the road, vehicles passing the iron bridge rumble, children's laughter is heard from the school behind the cemetery, and life and death meet naturally. I walked up the hill to the top of the cemetery, looking at the location of the Church of the Sacred Heart, and remembered the provincial youth that H had said, which one was his tomb, I had no way of knowing. But I believe that in the fight with the river of destiny, even if he cannot change the direction of the river, he must have found the wave that belongs only to him.
On the way back, I saw the Church of the Sacred Heart again, and the white crystal lights of the church under the twilight were like a temple that was close at hand and out of reach, and like a lighthouse that illuminated the whole city.
Maybe H is right, all the top floors of Paris can see the Church of the Sacred Heart.