Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited #13: Yann Andréa

Oddly, in spite of going there each year, I'd not before taken a photo of the inscription on the grave of Marguerite Duras/Yann Andréa.

My Marguerite Duras posts:

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Marguerite Duras: La Pute de la côte normande
Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir
Marguerite Duras: Agatha
Marguerite Duras: Emily L.
Marguerite Duras: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
Marguerite Duras: L'Amant | The Lover
Marguerite Duras: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein
Marguerite Duras: L'Amante anglaise
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Marguerite Duras: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras: L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas
Marguerite Duras: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia
Marguerite Duras: Le Marin de Gibraltar | The Sailor from Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras: La Douleur | The War: A Memoir
Yann Andréa: Cet amour-là
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier: Les Parleuses
Marguerite Duras: Savannah Bay
Marguerite Duras: Détruire, dit-elle | Destroy, She Said
Marguerite Duras: L'Amour
Marguerite Duras: Dix heures et demie du soir en été
Marguerite Duras: Le Square | The Square
Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents
Marguerite Duras: Le Shaga
Marguerite Duras: Oui, peut-être
Marguerite Duras: Des journées entières dans les arbres
Marguerite Duras: Suzanna Andler
Marguerite Duras: Le Vice-Consul | The Vice Consul
Marguerite Duras: Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle
Marguerite Duras: La Vie tranquille

Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited #11: Jules Hetzel

The publisher, writer and translator into English, Pierre-Jules Hetzel (1814–86), wrote as P.J. Stahl, which explains the second name on his tomb. He wrote an enormous number of books.

Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited #9: Le Moulin

I don't know why I've not included this before. The original moulin de la charité was constructed in 1661 and made flour. There were about thirty windmills in the area in the eighteenth century, although they were demolished during the building of the Boulevard Montparnasse. With the French revolution this remaining windmill became a guinguette, and when the cemetery was built in 1894 it became the cemetery warden's house, and lost its sails in 1850, long before its classification as a historic monument in 1931. Today gravediggers keep their equipment in it. The Tour Montparnasse is in the background to the right of the windmill.

Cimetière du Montparnasse revisited: #1: Jean Fougère and Paule Fougère

Jean Fougère (1914–2005) was a novelist, short story writer and non-fiction writer. His writing ias noted for its humour, its psychology and its satire, and he won several literary prizes. He is buried here with his wife Paule Fougère, who was a chemist and a writer who also won several literary prizes.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #17: Serge Reggiani

Serge Reggiani (1922–2004) first made his name as an actor, and it wasn't until he was forty-two that he turned to singing. Nevertheless, he is now considered as one of France's greatest singers. In the 1990s he published two autobiographical works. Having missed this grave and strayed into the eight division, a cemetery workers' van pulled up alongside of us and asked if we were looking for Reggiani. Yes. 'Over there, where the people are.' Yep, just as it's marked on the map.

Paris 2017: Simone de Beauvoir, Montparnasse, Paris

'SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

1908 – 1986

AUTEUR DU DEUXIÈME SEXE

ÉCRIVAIN, PHILOSOPHE

VÉCUT DANS CETTE MAISON

DE 1955 À 1986'

11 rue Victor Schoelcher.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #15: César Baldacchini

The impressive grave of the sculptor César Baldacchini (1921–98), better known simply as César, whose thumb sculpture I photographed in Marseille:

There's also a sculpture of his thumb at La Défense, but I've yet to show that.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #12: Helen Hessel

Helen Hessel (1886–1982) was born in Berlin, where she died, although she was a journalist who made her career in France. She married Franz Hessel, and her relationship with her husband and Henri-Pierre Roché (1879–1959) was fictionalised by Roché in his novel Jules et Jim (1953), which was adapted to film by François Truffaut in 1962.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #11: Pierre Albert-Birot

Pierre Albert-Birot (1876–1967) was mainly an avant-garde poet, although he was also a writer of non-fiction, a playwright, sculptor and painter. His most noted poetical works are Grabinoulor (1921), La Joie des sept couleurs (1919) and Poèmes à l'autre Moi (1927). As a sculptor, he is most known for the statue La Veuve in the cemetery in Issy-les-Moulineaux.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #10: Jean Itard

Jean Itard (1774–1838) was a doctor who is now largely known for his work in child psychiatry, more specifically for attentions to Victor de l'Aveyron, a relationship made famous by Truffaut's film L'enfant sauvage (1970). But he wrote many articles on other subjects, such as deafness and dumbness, and stuttering. The anchor on his tomb could represent hope or stability, or both.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #9: Jean Dutourd

Jean Dutourd (1920–2011) was a novelist, non-fiction writer and a member of the Académie française (incidentally replaced by Michael Edwards). His influences include Saint-Simon, Stendhal and Jean Giono, and his principal works are the novels Au bon beurre (1952) (set in the Occupation) and Les Horreurs de l'amour (1963).

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #8: Jean Baudrillard

This year marks the tenth anniversary since the death of Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), who was a sociologist, philosopher and 'disillusionist' noted for his work on the mass media and consumer society, the appropriation of the real world by the virtual. For someone who said the Iraq war didn't happen, it looks from the jungle that is his grave that his funeral never happened. His many works include Le Système des objets : la consommation des signes (1968), La Société de consommation (1970), Enrico Baj (1980), Simulacres et simulation (1981), La Gauche divine (1985), and 'Pataphysique (2000).

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #7: Jacqueline de Romilly

Jacqueline de Romilly (1913–2010) was a philologist and Hellenist who was granted honorary Greek nationality in 1995. She was a member of the Académie française, the first female teacher at the Collège de France, and was known internationally for her works on the language and civilisation of ancient Greece, particularly relating to Thucydide, the subject of her doctoral thesis. Her grave refers to her as Jaqueline David, her maiden name.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #6: Gérard Lauzier

Gérard Lauzier (1932–2008) was a cartoonist, a playwright and a film director. His early cartoons are noted for their satire on certain groups of people, particularly those he regarded as hypocrites and power seekers. He turned to the theatre and cinema in the 1980s, but against all expectation returned to cartoons in the 1990s. His character Michel Choupon, a disillusioned adolescent, is perhaps his most noted creation.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #5: François Caradec

François Caradec (1924–2008) was a member of Oulipo and a writer of biographical works on, for instance, Lautéamont, Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Alphonse Allais (on whom he was an expert), Willy and Jane Avril of Moulin Rouge fame. He was also a cartoonist who specialised in caricatures.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #4: Théodore de Banville

'THÉODORE DE BANVILLE

NÉ LE

14 MARS 1823

MORT LE

13 MARS 1891'

Théodore de Banville was a poet and dramatist most noted for his poetical works Odes funambulesques (1857) and Les Exilés (1867). A friend of Baudelaire, Hugo and Théophile Gautier, he was considered one of the most important writers of his time and he was a precursor of the Parnassian school. There is a bust of him in the Jardin du Luxembourg, also included in this blog.

I am very grateful to Alain Combalot for helping us to find this and a number of other graves here.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #2: Armand Dalian

Armand Dalian (1924–2000) was a 'Bohemian' French Armenian painter who lived and worked in Montparnasse. He didn't belong to any particular artistic movement. He is buried here with his wife Pascale Paulette Morizot, and the reverse of his headstone shows one of his paintings with a verse by Gilles Roca.

Paris 2017: Cimetière du Montparnasse: #1: Paul Bourget

'PAUL
BOURGET
2 SEPTEMBRE
1852
25 DÉCEMBRE
1935'

Paul Bourget was a Catholic convert who wrote novels, short stories, non-fiction, plays and poems. Generally considered as his best work, the novel Le Disciple (1889) is a roman à thèse in which modern science is denounced as a substitute for religion, but without any morality.

Cimetière du Montparnasse (continued) #15: La Séparation du couple, by 'Max'

Finally I leave Le Cimetière du Montparnasse, and the Paris area in general, for this year at least. This is not a tomb but a work of art, a marble sculpture by 'Max', or 'A. de Max', or 'Alix', or whatever: this marble creation is called La Separation du couple and shows just that: a naked man standing crying while his loved one throws him a final goodbye kiss from her closing tomb. Oddly, this work was thought to be unsuitable in its original position in Le jardin du Luxembourg, and it was moved here so as not to offend too many sensibilities.

Cimetière du Montparnasse (continued) #13: Christiane Lesbarre and Robert Sabatier

Robert Sabatier (1923–2012) was a novelist and poet. His most famous work is Les Allumettes suédoises (1969), which is about the trials and tribulations of a child in the 1930s, and sold a vast number of copies. And this was the first of what was to become a mini-series. His wife Christian Lesbarre was (1928–2002), also a novelist, is buried with him.