Meeting Oscar Wilde’s Grandson, Merlin Holland

May 15, 2022 by Carolyn Campbell

Photos by Fritz Holden, Reed Hutchinson and Carolyn Campbell

On April 28, 2022 I had the pleasure of attending a lecture at UCLA’s William Andrews Clark Library given by Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, titled “Confounding the Critics, Surviving the Scandal: The Remarkable Reputation of Oscar Wilde.” I had met Merlin years before my bestselling book, City of Immortals: Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, was published. I was thrilled this time to gift him with a copy.

Following the lecture, we had a delightful conversation. I then walked through the Clark Library to view several items on display from the unparalleled Wilde collection, including a copy of De Profundis, plus personal correspondence from Wilde to his first and last lovers, Robert Ross and Lord Alfred Douglas, respectively.

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May 21 Marks the 215th Anniversary of Père-Lachaise Cemetery

May 17, 2019 by Carolyn Campbell

The cemetery’s main entrance in 1817

I am in a celebratory mood. There are many significant City of Immortals benchmarks this month. First and foremost is the 215th anniversary of the founding of Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, which occurred on May 21, 1804. It all began with the eighteenth-century Parisian engineers who had overlooked one major question in their urban design scheme—what to do with the ever-increasing population of the dead? In 1799 a competition was announced under direction from Napolèon to create new cemeteries on the outskirts of Paris.

The winner of the largest commission, the cimetière de l’Est (located at Mont-Louis in the east), was architect, urban planner, and landscape designer Alexandre-Thèodore Brongniart—the first architect ever to receive such an unprecedented project.

Brongniart’s designs for the cemetery’s original 16 acres

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New Bas-Relief Sculpture Discovery

February 13, 2019 by Carolyn Campbell

In all the decades I have been visiting Père-Lachaise seeing this memorial in the public park, Square Samuel de Champlain during my visit in December was a first for me. Due to heavy rain and the fear by the administrators of falling tree branches, I was asked to quickly exit the Porte Gambetta entrance of the cemetery, so I decided to take a leisurely stroll down to Boulevard Ménilmontant.

Midway down a steep incline in the park, I was startled by a dramatic and moving sculpture by Paul Moreau-Vauthier (1871 – 1936) who is buried in Division 14. The sculpture depicts the final moments of one-hundred and forty-seven fédérés, combatants of the Paris Commune who were lined up against the Mur des Fédérés (the real wall is in Division 76 – designated with a large plaque) and summarily executed, and whose bodies were dumped into a mass grave directly in front of the wall. In this artwork, a robed female figure with arms outstretched is surrounded by the ghost-like figures of the fallen Communards.

The Association of the Friends of the Paris Commune has long explained that the much-photographed bas-relief sculpture is not the famous Communards’ Wall – nor is it accepted as a symbol of remembrance for the Commune members who fell.

In consulting a colleague and fellow taphophile Steve Soper, he thought that the idea was to include this sculpture in Division 76 but too many political issues were at stake so it was eventually placed outside and out of the way — where it could do little harm to any one group or organization.