Paris in Mourning: The Ghosts of Père Lachaise, Part 2
Season 2 Episode 44
Paris in Mourning, Part Two — and the gate is open again. The Grim returns to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, France for the season two finale, and the dead still have stories left to tell. We walk the haunted avenues of one of the world's most famous cemeteries to meet the figures history left unfinished. We begin with Molière, whose monument may rest over bones that were never truly his. We visit Oscar Wilde, imprisoned and destroyed for loving openly, now the recipient of unending devotion from strangers who cannot stop reaching toward him. We pause at the grave of Sarah Bernhardt, the greatest actress who ever lived, who spent decades sleeping in a coffin and returned to the stage on a prosthetic leg after amputation at seventy-one. We follow Frédéric Chopin to a tomb that holds his body but not his heart, which was smuggled back to Warsaw concealed beneath his sister's clothing. We stand beside Marcel Proust's stark black marble grave, where visitors report sudden floods of their own forgotten memories. We trace the rise and ruin of Georges Méliès, the magician who invented cinema's capacity for wonder and ended up selling candy in a train station, unrecognized in the city where he had once been famous. We visit the shared stone of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and sit with the unresolved questions of how two elderly Jewish women survived Nazi occupation in the French countryside. And we close with the restless dead: a statesman's ghost that tugs at sleeves, a tomb whose stone runs warm in cold weather, and a Russian noblewoman's inheritance that no one has ever been able to claim.
