We weren’t prepared with a list.
Walking across a bridge near the end of our six-hour walking tour, we gazed down on the old sunken quarry ground where the cemetery is located. It looked so interesting, we did the second best thing and stopped "to see who was there."

With no particular goals in mind, we enjoyed the solitude away from the throngs of tourists we had jabbed elbows with on the Butte. Here, flowers were pretty, so much more exciting than your usual cemetery decor: vines of wisteria and lilac wanting to bloom on trellises arching over imaginary "dooryard gates." We admired elaborate artwork and whimsical architecture in this Parisian "City for the Dead." Brick "streets" and surprisingly "cute" and enticing "houses" deserve the label "art."

Luck found the greatest, but just one.
We were tired after our day in Montmartre, so we didn’t intend to walk the entire grounds searching for the rich and famous, but I couldn’t resist climbing a set of hidden stone stairs to another level that looked especially "mysterious." There from a distance I beheld Emile Zola--or so I thought until I got home and found my list, which records that he was moved in 1908 to the Pantheon. His statuary is still here in Montmartre, and from pictures I’ve seen, it’s an uncanny likeness to behold in a graveyard!

Don’t miss Offenbach.
"This is great," I exclaimed, not knowing what I was missing. Disappointment didn’t rear its head until I got home and saw the list. "I should have known," I chastised myself, "that Offenbach would be there!" This close to the cabaret scene, one might expect to find the composer of Orphee aux Enfers or Orpheus in the Underworld, the original Can-can music. I also missed Nijinsky, the ballet master; Heinrich Heine, the poet; Stendhal, author of The Red and the Black; Berlioz, the composer; Alexander Dumas; and Edgar Degas. I spent a little time looking for Maurice Utrillo, not knowing he is in nearby St. Vincent’s.

Greatness in Montmartre.
Finding only one artist moved to the Pantheon (now Dumas is there), I was satisfied that I had found the most recognizable greatness in Montmartre! Zola’s derogatory comments and novel The Masterpiece (1886) about bohemian life set him apart from (and above) other artists. Then in his newspaper column J’accuse, he accused the French government of anti-semitism in the "Dreyfus affair" and eventually got an innocent man imprisoned for treason set free. His works reveal a man of courage determined to speak truth. Next trip to Paris, I'll visit the Pantheon--with my list!

The Montmartre Cemetery too has its share of celebrity residents, many of them artists such as Zola, Stendahl, Dumas, Berlioz. I like those of Najinksy (Division 22/#31) and the tragic chanteuse Dalida (Division 18/#7). However, it's the non-celebrity tombs that you may find the most tragic and touching.

Some the of the most beautiful sculptures are on the tombs of men. Life-sized grief stricken widows, many of them young, carved from granite or marble are usually on top of or next to the these graves. My personal favorite is a weathered bronze of a grieving girl on top of the tomb (around division 22). Perhaps most haunting of all are the oldest untended graves, with little or no engraving left on the headstones to identify the family name or occupant. Who still cares for these? Who remembers them?

The hours of the cemetery are 9 am - 5 pm.