Cimetière de Montmartre: The Quarry of the Famous
Why is it significant?
Walk through the gate and down into the hollow. The cemetery lies below the level of the streets around it, and above the graves the iron bridge of rue Caulaincourt crosses the tombs, with traffic rumbling over the dead. Cats sleep on the warm stone.
Key Facts
| Place | Cimetière de Montmartre: The Quarry of the Famous |
|---|---|
| Address | 20 Avenue Rachel, 75018 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.88750, 2.33050 |
| Part of Walk | Painters, Windmills and Cancan: Montmartre, the Artists' Hill of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk through the gate and down into the hollow. The cemetery lies below the level of the streets around it, and above the graves the iron bridge of rue Caulaincourt crosses the tombs, with traffic rumbling over the dead. Cats sleep on the warm stone. This is the quiet underside of the hill you have just climbed.
The hollow is not natural. This was a gypsum quarry, one of many that gnawed into Montmartre for centuries. The white stone was baked into plaster, so much of it that fine plaster all over the world came to be called plaster of Paris. In these same quarries the naturalist Georges Cuvier studied the bones of strange vanished mammals, and used them to argue that whole species could disappear from the earth. The cemetery opened here officially in 1825, outside what were then the limits of the city.
And then, the residents. The painter Edgar Degas lies in his family tomb. Here are the composers Hector Berlioz and Jacques Offenbach, whose galop from Orpheus in the Underworld became the anthem of the cancan, Alexandre Dumas the younger, the poet Heinrich Heine, the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, with a statue of him as the sad puppet Petrushka, and the filmmaker François Truffaut. Stendhal is here too, under an epitaph in Italian that calls him Arrigo Beyle, Milanese: he wrote, he loved, he lived.
Look for the tomb of Dalida, the singer whose bronze bust you met on the hill: a life-size white statue of her stands beneath a golden sunburst, and the flowers in front of it are almost never allowed to wilt. Not far away rests Louise Weber, known as La Goulue, the queen of the cancan, who died poor and forgotten in 1929. In 1992 her remains were brought here from a suburban cemetery, back to the neighbourhood she had made famous.
Émile Zola was buried here too, until 1908, when his remains were moved to the Panthéon; his tomb is still here, and his wife lies in it. When you are ready, leave by the same gate, walk back along avenue Rachel to the boulevard and turn left. A red windmill is waiting for the finale.