OSCAR WILDE’S TOMB, DEFACED WITH LIPSTICKED KISSES AND GRAFFITI.
All right, stop fooling about: which of you has Oscar Wilde’s testicles?
Wilde’s buried in Paris’s Père-Lachaise cemetery, under the massive figure of a sphinx in Aztec style, chiseled in 1914 by Jacob Epstein from twenty tons of Derbyshire granite. Traditionally a sphinx has the head of a man but the body of a lion, which Epstein took as a hint to gave his figure genitals of proportions appropriate to a king of beasts. In 1961, two ladies – British, naturally - took a chisel to them, since when their whereabouts have been unknown.
These days, a thick sheet of perspex prevents admirers from getting too close to the Wilde memorial, whether to deface it or add lipsticked kisses. The whereabouts of its missing appendages remain a mystery, but current curator Benoit Gallot denies they are kept in his office, where successive occupants of his job have used them as a paper-weight. The rumor, he insists, is complete and utter balls.
Oscar’s lost gonads are just one of the attractions that lure three million people a year to Paris’s largest – 106 acres – boneyard, built on land acquired from François d'Aix de la Chaize, aka Père - ie, Father – Lachaise, confessor to Louis XIV. Many come to gawp at the memorial to rock star Jim Morrison, leading light of The Doors: so many, in fact, that it’s now fenced off from fans eager to deface it or deposit flowers, incense, bad poetry and the occasional joint.
Despite Andrew Marvell’s contention that “The grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace,” many of Père-Lachaise’s monuments have erotic overtones. More testicular legends lurk around the lavish tomb in which the famous lovers Heloise and Abelard are supposed, erroneously, to be buried. Abelard, you may remember, was castrated by the guardian of his student and lover Heloise. It’s customary in some circles to place some token on a grave to signify your visit. Most people choose a pebble. Comedian Bill Murray left a pair of walnuts.
There are even more visitors, most of them feminine, to the memorial for Victor Noir. An obscure journalist, he was only 21 in 1870 when an assassin cut him down in the full flower of - if the life-sized bronze figure sprawled across his tomb is anatomically accurate - a well-endowed manhood. There’s a tradition that, if a woman squats to kiss his lips and, straddling his hips, rubs herself against the highest point of this effigy, a well-filled pair of trousers, she will become pregnant, win a lover, or simply enjoy a pleasurable quatre d’heure. Whatever their reasons, generations of visitors have polished that point to a gleam.
Benoît Gallot laments the decline in such ostentatious memorials. “Vanity has been consigned to the cupboard and sobriety is now the fashion,” he writes in his recent book La Vie Secrète d’un Cimetière. “As the curator of a cemetery known for its exceptional monuments, I consider this ‘funerary timidity’ to be rather regrettable. Père-Lachaise would not be this remarkable place if megalomania had not one day pushed the most fortunate to have tombs built in the image of their bloated pride.” It’s possible, of course, that he’s prejudiced, belonging as he does to a family of memorial stonemasons.
Under Gallot, Père -Lachaise has taken on new life as a tourist attraction, popular even with ecologists, who see it as a sanctuary for feral cats, foxes, bats and, no doubt, in season, the occasional werewolf. Since its gardeners use no pesticides, all kinds of wildflowers and plants flourish there. How long before some enterprising dope-head remembers the story in Claude Farrere’s Fumée d’Opium, about the old soldier who, pining for the opium he learned to enjoy while posted to France’s asian colonies, becomes the watchman in an overgrown cemetery where he can manufacture his own from the poppies that flourish there?
While friends are communing with the spirit of M. Noir or musing over the fate of Oscar’s attachments, I like to visit the tomb of Fernand Arbelot. Born in 1880, Arbelot died in 1942 after an apparently unremarkable life as head of a Paris bank. It paid well, however, since he could afford to commission Adolphe Wansart to create the life-sized bronze figure that adorns his tomb. He’s shown lying on his back and holding before him the image of…who? A wife? A lover? Man or woman? The sex isn’t clear, and, now, never will be. What does the figure celebrate? Love lost? Love that endures? Not love at all, but something more abstract, and less finite? Torment or consolation? Whichever it may be, it will be before his eyes for eternity. Envy him his eternal and ageless enigma.