Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck Dave's here in spirit, and Jim Morrison's here in spirit too. The Lizard King, Yeah, the very lizard King do they call him?
That's so lame he called himself that.
Come on, Jim, Sorry, Josh, I think he was super cool, but that's just lame.
I agree, And well we'll slam Jim Morrison at the end.
All right. Well, the reason we bring up Jim Morrison's because we're talking about Perry Lache's cemetery, one of arguably the most famous cemeteries in the entire world, in no small part because Jim Morrison's buried there.
Yeah, I mean a ton of famous people who will go over in a minute. But have you ever been there?
No? Never have?
Oh, okay, I have a couple of times. Both my trips to Paris, my buddy Brett and I walked around and went to Jim Morrison's grave as well. Quite a few others did not leave any trinkets or anything, but there were quite a few trinkets and marijuana cigarettes, jazz cigarettes and all sorts of stuff like that, and a bunch of hippies. But it's just a beautiful, beautiful stroll because it's a beautiful cemetery.
Yeah, apparently it is the cemetery that kicked off the gardener landscape cemetery craze, where they went from the old medieval churchyards where they literally buried people on top of other people for centuries to building a cemetery that's super spread out, that's laid out with like nice shrubs and trees and flowers and winding paths and places to sit. Even like it was a radical departure from what people had been doing in Europe all the way up to that time. And it was I think first built in
eighteen oh four by Napoleon correct. I mean he built it himself in.
His spare time. He got a shovel, that's true. Should thank our old friends at how stuffworks dot com and Nathan Chandler for some of this and then some other websites we went to. But we Yeah, Napoleon eighteen o four, he said, you know what, let's let's build this thing. It's it's going to be beautiful. It's going to be vast. The pads are even going to have little street signs on them. It's going to feel like a little miniature city, and that's kind of what feels like when you're walking around.
It's the largest one in Paris, I say, obviously, but if you've never been there, then you may not understand. When you're in there, you realize just how big it is. But it's more than one hundred acres large and has over a million interments.
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. That's per a guy named Keith Egener who's a professor at the University of Oregon who how stuff works talk to about it. He just happens to be an expert in cemeteries, including pair Lach's Cemetery. And one of the things that that I think you kind of hit on that's worth saying is it has a kind of like feel to it, so much so that like the place is segregated essentially into neighborhoods.
It is, and segregated by religion too. I don't know if this is something they still do. It seems like an outdated thing, but maybe they still do it because of history.
Well, I have a feeling you get in where you fit in in Pariloches because the cemeteries in Paris are so full. Yeah, I saw that there's about five thousand requests to be buried in any of Paris's fourteen city cemeteries.
Oh wow, but only one hundred and.
Fifty plots available per year among all fourteen, not just Pariloches, but Parloches is probably in demand more than any other. The problem is is that means that the price of those plots has risen commensurate to that demand, and Paris is very frequently chastised for basically making it seem like it only wants the wealthiest citizens buried in its cemeteries.
I wonder if it's a case where you can just out bid for these or what that process is like, or if it's like, sorry, you know, you know that you're on a list and you can't buy your way up that list.
Or you go to the trouble of poisoning your direct competitor and didn't think it through because now he got the plot because he died before you did.
That wouldn't be too hard in Paris, because you just throw it in a croissant. Yeah, someone will eat it.
So who are the people that are buried there? Chuck, give us a few names.
Well, how about a cliffhanger. We'll take a sort of an early break here, because you know everyone's dying to know. And we'll talk about some of those names right after this. All right, everyone, if you've been there, then you know you can see Jim Morrison, the graves that I went to. How about this, I'll read the ones that I went to and then you can fill in the rest. But I stopped by Oscar Wilde's grave, very nice. I stopped by Chopin. I love Chopin is in Frederick, I like,
I mean, oh sure, let me see what other ones? Oh? I went by Edith Piaff's grave, and I think there was one more on this list, Proust Marcel Proust, yep. I went by that one. I don't think I saw any. I mean, I may have walked by and not realized in my early twenties. Who is a door Duncan was or something? But those are the ones that I made a point to go see.
Is a door Duncan was a famous writer? She held Paris Salon's eves Montan eve Montane is there. He's an actor. Marcel Marceau, the famous mime, is buried there. In his head sown is a three dimensional bust of him. Locked in a permanent scream of terror.
Of course silent. Of course I've seen that one too. Actually, that sounds.
Familiar Marcel Marceau's Yeah, I just made that up. Though he's not really screaming on his headstone.
Oh he's not. Okay, then I didn't see it. What have I seen like that though? Or did I just have like an implanted memory.
I don't know. I think maybe you did pick up one of those jazz cigarettes from Morrison's grave and walked around with it.
I've held it all this time. It's vintage.
Another person there is Moliere, who was a very famous actor from the seventeenth century, very beloved actor in the seventeenth century, and he was one of the people who kicked off the Perilochet Cemetery because at first it was such a radical departure from the type of burials that people were used to in Paris that it was not immediately popular. The other problem is that when it was built, it was built at the edge of Paris, so it's kind of hard to get to. So to get people interested,
they actually found Moliere's remains. Allegedly it made a big deal out of burying him there to just kind of get some attention for it.
Yeah, because I think your choices before then you mentioned those churchyards, and they always had well not always, but even back then they had burial space issues because at those churchyards they were just burying people on top of one another, and they wouldn't necessarily bury your family together. And it just seems like burial has always been a problem in Paris for one reason or another. I guess space for sure.
Well, one of the other reasons that it's so tight right now is because in the churchyards they just bury people on top of people. We were saying. But in Parloches and the other city cemeteries that followed, you could buy a plot for eternity essentially, why they started to run out of plots.
That makes sense. Here's a couple more names. Gertrud Stein. We didn't mention gertrud Stein. How could we not? Or Sarah Bernhardt. Yeah, it's another big one. Who is George Sarah Sarah?
He was an Impressionist painter along with the.
Delac Oh, okay, yeah, he's.
Also buried there. And I misspoke. I said Isidore Duncan was held the Paris salons and it was an author and art collector. That was Gertrude's Gertrude Stein Isidore Duncan was a beloved dancer in.
Paris, m and that was it was that after I know they were both after the break. I just wonder how many people just said, I'm done with this show.
So the name itself, though, pear Lachaise comes from King Louis the fourteenth Confessor.
Right, that's right, father, Oh boy, you need to take this one, father Francois.
And now you die de la chaise.
That's die d ai exit. That's how that's pronounced die. Ok.
So his name father is pair is father like as in a priest also is a dad, but in French and Lachaise means the chair, so his name is pair the chair.
It's pretty good.
I think I'm the first person in history to turn that up.
To make that joke.
Well, yeah, but it's a research based joke.
Yeah, sure, like all of our jokes. Sure, it's a big tourist attraction. Now, like I said, obviously, you know a lot of people go because it's it's not only a place where you can go see Oscar Wilde and kirchard Stein and pay your respects at their headstones. But it is a as all urban cemeteries are. It's it's a bit of a respite. It's a bit of a break from the hustle and bustle to stroll around this shady, beautiful park almost with dead bodies all over the place.
Wow, that's amazing, because yeah, I think how many people visit a year? Do?
They say about four million people every year? That is a lot. I mean, there's it's definitely, I mean it's large, but it's not like you're going to stroll for three hundred feet without seeing another person. People all over.
Yeah, So if you wanted to get there, you would go to sixteen Rue de Repos, which means repose, which means rest. It's very appropriate name for a city cemetery street that it's on, right, And one other thing about it that really stuck out to meet Chuck was that they also buried eb Lard and Heloise, who were definitely worth looking into and I think we should actually do
a short stuff on them. But they were one of the most famous couples of the medieval era, maybe of all time, like a real life Romeo and Juliet, right and quite the same, but was still very tragic, but they wrote letters to one another. I feel like we've talked about them before. They wrote letters to one another that were preserved, and these love letters are just so amazing that people still read them today.
And that was another case of they were kind of putting that out there too, like, oh, they're buried here as well, to try and pump up interest.
Right exactly. They brought them together in the afterlife by reburying them together in a specially designed crypt.
That's really nice. I would say that, I know we did Hollywood Forever or did we do the other one in la.
We didn't do.
Oh yeah, we did both.
I don't think so. No, I said we didn't. Okay, just for us lawn, Yeah, that's my understanding.
All right, Well, all of these We have Oakland Cemetery here in Atlanta, which is very nice as well, and all of these places are great, but none of them hold a candle to that little cemetery in Woodstock, New York where you can go see Levon Helm and Rick Danko's gravestones from the band. Okay, fair enough, my favorite cemetery.
I've got nothing to top that. So I think that short.
Stuff is out.
Stuff.
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