Montparnasse Cemetery

I did the coolest thing today….

For those of you who don’t know me to well, you can probably have geussed that from this blog, I love the existentalist author Jean-Paul Sartre. Ive already been to his café, the quartier he hung out in, etc. Well today….I visited his grave. I know its morbid, but for someone like me who has a fascination-it was so cool!!! (And I hope my students who have read him with me and who are reading this can understand HOW COOL THIS IS!!)

I just happen to be flipping through my Paris book and found this! So we went. Also in this cemetary was Guy de Maupassant (author), Samuel Beckett (author),  and Charles Baudelaire (french poet of “Les Fleurs du Mal”) amongst many others.

This was very different from the Père Lachaise cemetery for a few reasons: 1. It was laid out much better. Things were much easier to find, not winding, broken roads, smother pavement, etc. Much better upkeep. 2. It was smaller and there for less recognizable names were burried here. My main draw was Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Thats so cool. So we saw the 3 or 4  graves we wanted to, and moved on.

We ended up going to the Place de Vosges where my other favorite French author- Victor Hugo- once lived for 16 years. We got to go into his old house-free of charge, and wander around looking at inspired paintings, pictures form his plays and he living area. We even saw the bed/room in which he died. It was way cool. He wrote most of “Les Misérables” there too.

We then walked around this beautiful park and enjoyed the nice, cool weather It was the day of my favorite French authors!