Description
ISBN: 9781778401589
Format: With dust jacket
Year: 2025
Publisher: Greystone Books
Description:
From the head curator of the most famous cemetery in the world a moving and 'enchanting' (Guardian) story about a place where joy, grief, and wild nature converge in unexpected and inspiring ways.
'Not only is this a book that answers, fact for fact, everything you ever wanted to know about Pere-Lachaise but were afraid to ask, it is also a portrait of a person who truly loves his work.' The New York Times
For Benot Gallot, Pere Lachaise is best explored without a guide: You're guaranteed to lose your way. You'll feel as though you've stepped out of time, out of Paris, and into another place entirely. In his debut memoir, Gallot, head curator of Pere Lachaise and son of a grave stonemason, pulls back the curtains on his otherworldly workplace a cemetery crammed with tourists in the high season and mourners year round, but also a natural paradise, where foxes roam, birds flit between trees, and wildflowers and moss encroach onto tombstones.
In elegant, engrossing chapters, Gallot reveals the secret world of Pere Lachaise its Napoleonic origins, its unusual graves and monuments alongside touching stories from his working life in the cemetery. Born into a family of undertakers, Gallot was named curator of Pere-Lachaise in his early-thirties, inheriting the complex job of managing over 100 acres of green space, overseeing 70,000 graves, and arranging burials and cremations, all while contending with millions of tourists plus film crews, birdwatchers, ghost hunters, and the occasional nude performance artist. Gallot, who also lives on the cemetery grounds with his