Montparnasse cemetery and the catacombs
France > Paris > Southern > Montparnasse > Cemetery & catacombs

Cimetière Montparnasse

To the east of the station, the daily food market on boulevard Edgar-Quinet provides the cafés in the surrounding streets with their down-to-earth clientele, in marked contrast to the renowned establishments a stone's throw away on boulevard du Montparnasse. On Sundays (10am–dusk), over a hundred craftworkers take over the market; photographers jostle with potters, clothes designers with painters, and it's a great place to browse away the day.

Just to the south is the main entrance to Montparnasse cemetery (mid-March to Oct Mon–Fri 8am–6pm, Sat 8.30am–6pm, Sun 9am–6pm; Nov–mid-March closes 5.30pm; M° Raspail/Gaîté/Edgar Quinet), a gloomy city of the dead with ranks of miniature temples, dreary and bizarre, and plenty of illustrious names, from Baudelaire to Beckett, Gainsbourg to Saint-Saëns – you can pick up a leaflet and map from the guardhouse by each entrance. The joint grave of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir lies immediately right of the entrance on boulevard Edgar-Quinet. Sartre lived out the last few decades of his life just a few metres away on boulevard Raspail. Down avenue de l'Ouest, which follows the western wall of the cemetery, you'll find the tombs of Baudelaire (who has a more impressive cenotaph by rue Émile-Richard, on avenue Transversale); the sculptor Zadkine; and the Fascist Pierre Laval, a member of Pétain's government, who, after the war, was executed for treason, not long after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. As an antidote, you can pay homage to Proudhon, the anarchist who coined the phrase "Property is theft!"; he lies in Division 1, by the Carrefour du Rond-Point. In the southwest corner of the cemetery is an old windmill, one of the seventeenth-century taverns frequented by the carousing, versifying students who are supposed to have given the Montparnasse district its name. Right in the northern corner is a tomb with a sculpture by Brancusi – The Kiss – which makes a far sadder statement than the dramatic and passionate scenes of grief adorning so many of the graves here. And, for seekers of the bizarre, by the wall along avenue du Boulevard (parallel to boulevard Raspail) you can see the inventor of a safe gas lamp, Charles Pigeon, in bed next to his sleeping wife, reading a book by the light of his invention.

If you want to spend more time among the dead, you can also descend into the catacombs (Tues 11am–4pm, Wed–Sun 9am–4pm; €5; M° Denfert-Rochereau) in nearby place Denfert-Rochereau, formerly place d'Enfer, or "Hell Square". Originally quarries, they were stacked with millions of bones cleared from the old charnel houses and cemeteries between 1785 and 1871, a municipal solution to the lack of space in the city's graveyards. It's estimated that the remains of six million Parisians are interred here – more than double the population of the modern city not counting the suburbs. Lining the passageway, the long thigh bones are stacked end-on, forming a wall to keep in the smaller bones, which can just be seen heaped higgledy-piggledy behind. These high femoral walls are further inset with skulls and plaques carrying macabre quotations such as "happy is he who always has the hour of his death in front of his eyes, and readies himself every day to die". Older children often love the whole experience, though there are a good couple of kilometres to walk, and it can quickly become claustrophobic in the extreme, not to mention cold and gungy underfoot. Spare a thought for the uniformed guardians, placed here to obstruct trophy-hunters and to prevent local youths of a Gothic bent slyly losing themselves and regrouping for midnight parties.

As well as interesting architecture around the cemetery, there are quiet little streets to the south, between avenue du Maine and place Denfert-Rochereau, plus clothes and craft shops and a busy food market on rue Daguerre. Before and during the war, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir kept separate rooms in the hotel at no. 24 rue Cels; a plaque gives a quote from each on the subject of their togetherness.