Quick! What do you think I was longing to see most in Paris?

Père Lachaise, of course. Oscar Wilde’s grave in particular. I’m so predictable; it’s almost cliché. It’s a truly awe-inspiring site. Even if you’ve been to New Orleans’ Lafayette cemetery, you’ll never see so many shades of grey as those swirling about Père Lachaise on a cloudy afternoon. I kept looking down at my red purse, just to make sure the world hadn’t gone all strange.

Many of the tombs are standing crypts, with ornate doors letting you peak in on elaborate alters with mostly vandalized stained glass detail. Where are the people with the keys to those doors? Do they not come anymore? When a tomb wears enough to break, the keepers just pile the rubble on the tomb’s base, leaving some of them cracked open to the depths.

Oscar’s tomb is covered with lipstick from all the sad girls and boys, littered with graffiti, like “Dandy forever!” On the back of the tomb, commissioned by a rich female admirer of his work, reads:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men
And outcasts always mourn.

It’s part of a stanza from his poem “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” about the grand injustices of man against other men in the name of punishment. There are over 1,000,000 people buried at Père Lachaise. But only just 100,000 marked graves. Mass graves and tombs of soldiers dedicated to various battles, including the siege of Paris, line the perimeter. There’s a passage in the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” that’s profound considering the grand injustices still being commited today against men–all in the name of fear. It reads:

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in goal
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother’s life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.

This too I know–and wise it were
If each could know the same–
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun:
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!

Thus concludes today’s English lesson. Oscar Wilde also authored one of my favorite quotations, “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.” Oh and, “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” And “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Oh and his alleged last words: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Or the other theory:”Ah well, I guess I die beyond my means.”

There’s been no one like him since. Well, maybe Keith Richards, but I don’t think he’s full of as much of les bons mots.