Today was grey and cool, appropriate conditions for a visit to le Cimetière de Passy, a small (4.3 acre) but popular cemetery in the 16th. Established in 1820, it is the final resting place for a number of the well known. Visiting it bought to mind the Recoleta Cemetary in Buenos Aires, a similar city of the dead, whose most famous inhabitant is Evita Peron.
We whittled down the cemetery's notables to a short list of those we recognized, then set out to find them. We were not completely successful. Marcel Renault appears to have driven off and Claude Debussy must be playing elsewhere. But we did find realist and impressionist painter Édouard Manet, uncle of Julie Manet whose works are currently on exhibit at the Musée Marmottan Monet. We found Hubert de Givenchy under a fashionable slab of black marble. Bao Dai, the last emperor of Vietnam, apparently got his wish. And we found Jacques Guerlain, whose Shalimar was the perfume my father bought for my dear mother every year for her birthday.
