Walk with the book
Use the First Promenade map to find the fourteen graves in chapter order, with division numbers, approaches, and coordinates checked in the cemetery.
A companion site for the book
Passages of Père Lachaise
Scenes from the Lives Gathered in Paris’s Great Cemetery
The names are carved in Père Lachaise. The lives happened elsewhere — in a hospital bakehouse, a newspaper office, a balloon above a crowd, and on roads that led as far as Harar and Charleston.
Each chapter follows a passage of a life: true, scene-based stories built from letters, memoirs, newspapers, court and administrative records, and the physical places where these lives moved.
Read by passage, not résumé
These chapters follow a season, a room, a machine, a court case, a journey, or a single evening — not a full cradle-to-grave summary.
Stay close to the record
No private motive or thought has been invented. The aim throughout is simple: facts from sources, atmosphere from context, emotion from structure.
“The name does not explain itself.”
The book begins with the hill itself and moves outward — to hotel rooms, newspaper offices, workshops, theatres, hospitals, restaurants, and roads — before returning the reader to Père Lachaise with a clearer sense of who is buried there.
First Promenade
Start with the map page if you are standing in the cemetery or scanning the QR code from the book.
- 1Oscar Wilde
- 2Auguste Maquet
- 3Jeanne Beaudon (Jane Avril)
- 4Claude Chappe
- 5Antoine-Augustin Parmentier
- 6Théodore Géricault
- 7Gaspard de Prony
- 8Sophie Blanchard
- 9Godefroy Redon de Belleville
- 10Étienne-Gaspard Robertson
- 11Robert du Bourg de Bozas
- 12Marie-Anne Lenormand
- 13Henriette Caillaux
- 14Rachel Félix
A few of the lives gathered here