Cimitière Père-Lachaise
You wouldn't think a cemetery would be a great place for a date, would you? But Cimitière Père-Lachaise is actually a peaceful and romantic place, not to mention beautiful as well. Deven and I took a stroll amongst the headstones on our second anniversary last month. It's been two years since we began dating! It only gets better :) Love you, boo. (I'm just kidding. I've never actually called him "boo", ever. I just felt compelled to say it, for some ungodly reason.)
Anyway, the cemetery is gorg, and loads of famous people are buried here, including Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Collette, Jim Morrison, and others. The gravestones range in date from early 1800s (earliest we found) to today. It's quite odd to see a modern marble headstone next to two-hundred-year-old sepulchres.
Grave on left: weirdest one we saw. Apparently it belongs to one J. Laffitte, who invented the "plaques à souder," which we thought meant a soldering iron? So they decorated his grave with an anvil and chains?
Grave on right: Oscar Wilde's, of course. No, I did not kiss his grave, ew. (Do you think it's like the Blarney Stone? Except instead of the ability to tell lies, you gain rapier wit?) Apparently upon his death an "anonymous lady" donated a lot of money to bury him properly, so they commissioned a sculptor to build this Greek-inspired monument. When it was presented to the cemetery, the proprietors were shocked at its obscenity: the genitalia were huge! So the grave was wrapped in a shroud until they reached a compromise: the sculptor would affix a hastily-made fig leaf to the offending area. All was well for some time until several students sneaked in one night, aspiring to free Wilde's private bits and let them hang in all their manly glory. But when they tried to pry off the leaf, they broke off the whole thing. Legend says it's been used as a paperweight at the cemetery director's office ever since.
Side note: is this the reason a gravestone's letters are engraved? So moss could grow inside and make Robin shriek with typophilic glee? Because it really is quite beautiful, isn't it? Look at the H! Look at the E!