A Walking Tour Paris

Rue Emile Richard cuts the cemetery in two, with the Petit Cimetière on the street’s eastern side and the Grand Cimetière on the west. Horace Daillon’s lovely sculpture, the Génie du Sommeil Eternel (Spirit of Eternal Sleep), dates back to 1902 and stands at one of the more important cemetery crossings; while the remains of a 17th-century windmill overlook the Allee Raffet. This was formerly part of the Brothers of Charity monastery, on which the cemetery was built. Brancusi’s Kiss, a Cubist hommage to Rodin’s statue of the same name, stands at the southern end of the rue Emile Richard.

Many famous French men and women are buried here, including Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer whose trumped-up trial for treason in 1894 provoked the international scandal known as the Dreyfus Affair. Other somewhat happier figures include that of the mid-20th-century power couple Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Serge Gainsbourg, writers Guy de Maupassant and Charles Baudelaire, and the industrialist André Citroën (founder of the famous car company). Charles Pigeon, also an industrialist, is now more famous for his flamboyant tomb, which depicts him in bed with his wife. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of New York’s Statue of Liberty in 1886, is also buried here. Famous foreigners include Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, American actress Jean Seberg and the American photographer Man Ray, who did much to immortalise the cultural life of Montparnasse in the 1920s and ’30s.