For artistic, romantic and historical associations, few places rival the haunting beauty of Père Lachaise cemetery in north-eastern Paris, which celebrated its bicentenary in the year just ended. This outdoor Pantheon's permanent guests includes the crème de la crème of European painters, musicians, and poets and writers such as Proust and Oscar Wilde. It is also the place where the 147 surviving Communards, including women and children, were shot in 1871.
The 44 hectare cemetery, which is also the largest park in Paris, got off to a slow start in the summer of 1804. But celebrity guests soon stimulated business. La Fontaine and Molière were reinterred there, and the arrival of Peter Abelard and Heloise consolidated the cachet. Soon everyone who was anyone booked space. "I seldom go out, but when I feel myself flagging, I go and cheer myself up in Père Lachaise," said Balzac, whose own grave is now a major attraction for many of the 2 million annual visitors.
Between Pompeiian walkways, the history both of Paris and of European culture can be traced through those who slumber amid Père Lachaise's greenery and birdsong. The planner of modern Paris, Baron Haussmann, shares space with the engineer Ferdinand de Lesseps and the car designer Ettore Bugatti. Visitors daily pay homage to Bizet, Daudet, Isadora Duncan and stone-canopied Sarah Bernhardt.
Chopin's mourning muse has reputedly never been without fresh flowers since the composer's burial in 1849. Ironically, she is the work of George Sand's son-in-law, Clesinger, over whom Chopin and Sand quarreled bitterly.
The array of artists charts the development of modern painting. Corot, Daumier and Delacroix jostle with Doré, Ingres, the impressionist Pisarro, the pointillist Seurat and the neo-impressionist Paul Signac.
Théodore Géricault concentrates with paint palette in hand, while the archetypal romantic genius, Modigliani, is reunited forever with his girlfriend Jeanne Hérbuterne, who commited suicide after the artist's death from meningitis in 1920. As with Brendan Behan, the ultimate Bohemian was saluted on his final journey by the police whom he had so often confronted.
Louis David, who sketched Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine, lies close to the machine's inventor, the paradoxically humane Dr Joseph Guillotine. The ghosts of Picasso and Braque hover around the inscribed stele to cubism's early champion, Apollinaire, who coined the word "surrealist". Nearby is his mistress, Marie Laurencin, who designed sets for Diaghilev and, in an uncharacteristically modest tomb, the intrepid Americans Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, who bought Laurencin's first picture and who numbered Picasso, Hemingway and Joyce among their acquaintances. When Gertrude was dying, she asked; "What is the answer?" Then she sat up and enquired: "But what is the question?"
Close to the Communards' mass grave lies their executioner, Adolphe Thiers, and the hapless Marshal Ney who, after a meteoric career, was shot for treason in 1815. Journalists double-checked their copy in the time of Napoleon III: a life-size sculpture, complete with fallen top hat, marks the grave of Victor Noir, who was shot by the emperor's cousin whom he had allegedly maligned in print. Popularity ratings soared for President Felix Faure, after he exited more ecstatically in the arms of his mistress. His bronze monument features the reclining president turning, as if seeking his companion.
Among the stirring funerary sculpture are the white stone figure of a breast-feeding mother, Maroun-Khadra, and the shrouded wife of the revolutionary, François Raspail, who reaches up to the bars of his prison cell. The Pioneer balloonists Sivel and Croce-Spinelli, who perished together over India, lie eternally hand-in-hand. Irish motoring enthusiasts may like to see the tomb of Baron de Rothschild, a visitor to the 1903 Gordon Bennett race. Just opposite, a pensive Jacob Roblès enjoins silence with one finger pressed against his lips. The poet Rodenbach bursts from his tomb and proffers a rose to startled visitors.
The cemetery is a Who's Who of French literature. Balzac's leonine likeness surveys such diverse fellow scribes as de Musset, René de Gourmont, Jules Romains, the Surrealists Radiguet and Paul Éluard - and Colette, who was refused a Catholic burial in 1954. Like Synge in Mount Jerome, Marcel Proust is buried in a conventional family grave. Music is richly represented by such composers as Cherubini, Dukas, Erlanger, Poulenc and Bizet, who died at the age of 36 without knowing how Carmen would delight the world. Singers include Adelina Patti and, under a stone as black as the dress she habitually wore, the "Little Sparrow", Edith Piaf. There too is rock singer Jim Morrisson whose fans have a propensity for graffiti.
Père Lachaise includes two larger-than-life Irishmen. Ernest Archdeacon abandoned law to pursue his interests in ballooning and Esperanto. He set aeronautical records and welcomed Charles Lindberg to Paris in 1926.
And one of the most popular attractions is Oscar Wilde, who rests under a huge Egyptian Art Deco-style monument by Jacob Epstein. Its unveiling was prohibited by the authorities until Oscar's private parts were covered; both fig leaf and contents have long since disappeared.