Paris is well-noted for its cemeteries, the many important being Pere Lachaise, where tourists look for out the mausoleum of Oscar Wilde. But we live next to other great 19th Century burial ground in Montparnasse - and when we go there we always take my phone.
It is humorous how we admire a graveyard.
You would regard we would find speculation of all that separate into its elements and mankind to be off-putting, but we do not. Or at least we do not.
Over the final 10 years we have turn an backer of the pathways and sculptures and chapels and memorials of my local, Montparnasse cemetery.
By right away we know all the important graves - Serge Gainsbourg, the thespian and poet, his chunk covered with flowering plants and metro tickets left by fans in anxiety to one of his best-known songs.
Tombs re-used
Near the northern gate, the common mausoleum of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir , with always a square or two of folded paper. Words of faithfulness from a few aspiring admirer, frequently in Japanese for a few reason.
Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant , the photographer Man Ray and the chess grandmaster Alekhine , Samuel Beckett , Susan Sontag , Jean Seberg ...
It is really regimented, in a way that authorized things so frequently are in France.
The ground is widely separated into 30 "divisions" and there are uniformed attendants who blow whistles and dispatch everybody out at shutting time.
Lines of watering cans demonstrate to the fact that this is really ample a (excuse the pun) "living" cemetery, with 1,000 new burials every year, as aged deserted tombs are emptied and re-used. So ample is to divine hope, everywhere engraved - "plot postulated in perpetuity".
Anyway, it is a poetic calm place, all the more acquire for being at the heart of a active metropolis. And right away we have detected a new reason to revisit - the smartphone.
By that we mean, the probability offering by any internet-capable hand-held device to offer up the many unusual form of instant, captivating data about people - deceased people - who we would instead completely ignore.
Ghosts of the past
Thanks to technology, these unknown ghosts are getting a new luck at "perpetuity".
The other day we transfered a mausoleum graced with a elementary French tricolour. A soldier, deceased in 1914, name of Marie-Joseph Bridoux.
Never listened of him?
No-one has. But it turns out, interjection to a rapid internet search, that he was the initial French broad to die fighting the Germans in World War we , only a few weeks after its outbreak.
Not only that, we pick up that his son Eugene was after that fight apportion in the pro-German Vichy supervision in World War II, and that his grandson, moreover called Eugene, was a Sturmbannfuhrer in the French section of the Waffen-SS.
There, in a singular family, is a peek of how what began as nationalism was remade between the wars into demoralisation and betrayal.
A partial travel away, coincidentally, we come upon the mausoleum of the woman they used to call Madame la Marechale. Nothing to spot it out, but this is the spouse of the Vichy personality Philippe Petain .
He was a scandalous philanderer as a younger man, and she, moreover truly intimately forward, went by the splendid name of Nini Hardon. She was constant to him to the end.
Click on a couple to the French national repository and you can see footage of her, a rsther than serious lady, tweedy but still busty, on vacation her ashamed husband in jail on the Ile d'Yeu. She died in 1962.
Stumbling by a lost corner, we find a tiny blackened tombstone temperament the family name of France's important ex-prime apportion Dominique de Villepin, and on the really same tombstone the name of Britain's important ex-prime apportion Blair.
It turns out, we uncover on a ancestry website, that the de Villepin family, hazily aristocratic, is descended in one bend from the Scottish Barons Blair of Balthayock in Perthshire. Any relation?
' The Kiss '
Over here, a stylised sculpture, a brick of mill fashioned to act for two people embracing. Below it a tombstone and dark in ivy an old, aged sketch of a young woman. The essay on the mill is Cyrillic and roughly worn-out away, but a rapid looking tells the story.
This is the grave of one Tania Rachevskaia , a Russian radical who committed self-murder for admire in 1908.
The cut with a chisel is "The Kiss" by her buddy the Romanian Constantin Brancusi , himself buried in other section in the cemetery. Apparently, the cut with a chisel is really important - and, oh yes, only right away do we spot the safety cameras.
Here is a human called Charles Cros , long-forgotten, but he once invented something called the paleophone. It was precisely the same as the gramophone, but the year was 1877 and Thomas Edison had only taken out the patent.
And over here a newish tomb, someone called Maurice Kriegel-Valrimont.
He was one of the French Resistance group who took the give up of the German armed forces in Paris in Aug 1944. Come to regard of it, we interviewed him on the 60th jubilee and wrote it up is to BBC News website.
Ah yes, here it is on my phone. Marvellous saying your aged things again.
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