climate would be better for their daughter’s advanced tuberculosis. When Elizabeth died on 8 October 1736, her corpse represented a familiar problem for English subjects dying abroad.Where was she to be buried? As a Protestant, Elizabeth was ‘denied a grave’ within the local Roman Catholic cemetery. Although records indicate that Elizabeth was eventually buried, without incident, at a Protestant graveyard in Lyons, the fictional Narcissa suffers a more Gothic fate. The narrator breaks into an existing grave and places her there, ‘more like her Murderer, than Friend’. 16
Young was not alone in his relish of the macabre. In The Grave (1743), Robert Blair dwelt on ‘the mansions of the dead’, where, ‘In grim array the grisly spectres rise, grin horrible, and obstinately sullen, pass and repass, hushed as the foot of night.’ 17
Wren’s proposals for suburban cemeteries may have been rejected by the Corporation of London but, towards the end of the eighteenth century, planners in other capitals came to appreciate the hygienic and aesthetic possibilities of interring the dead on the outskirts of the city. Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, founded by Napoleon in 1804, offered a magnificent example. Napoleon was the first leader to address the problems of the Paris cemeteries. Previously, burial had taken place in parish churchyards but, as the population soared, these had become full to overflowing and constituted a health hazard. The chief cemetery, Les Saint-Innocents, near Les Halles, was destroyed, and the bones transported to the catacombs, a series of deserted quarries underneath Paris.
The land, purchased by the urban planner Nicholas Frochot on Napoleon’s orders in 1803, was originally a hill of the Champ l’Evêque, where a rich merchant built a house in 1430. Subsequently, Louis XIV named it after his confessor and the land was given to the Jesuits, who converted it into a hospice. The Jesuits sold the land in 1763 to pay off debts. Frochot’s coup was to persuade the authorities to rebury the remains of Molière, La Fontaine, Abélard and Héloïse in the new cemetery–which soon led to Père Lachaise being the ultimate burial place for the rich and famous. As the social commentator Laman Blanchard observed in 1842, the Parisian man of wealth possessed a town house, a country house, a box at the Opera and a tomb in Père Lachaise.
Architect Théodore Brongniart, who also designed the Paris Stock Exchange, sought to emulate English garden designers such as Capability Brown, whose naturalistic landscapes were actually highly contrived: small hills were constructed, lakes sunk, trees planted at strategic locations. Although the style borrows from the English tradition, the result is quintessentially French. Père Lachaise is laid out like Central Paris itself, all avenues and boulevards rotating like spokes off a wheel from a series of significant architectural features, such as the massive rotunda to Casimir Perier (a disgraced politician) and the Bartholomé war memorial. The influences are formal and Classical, and the French culture of presentation is manifest. Along the Avenue de la Chapelle the majestic horse-chestnut trees are systematically pollarded to geometric exactitude. With its great and good, its eccentrics and mavericks, its war memorials and its important bourgeoisie, Père Lachaise is more like a small town than a garden. The little mausolea, with their narrow windows trimmed by ornamental grilles and their forbidding panelled doors, resemble apartment houses, inspiring one small child, when visiting, to ask his parents: ‘Who lives here?’ There are no weeds, or trailing growths of wild flowers and the planting is rigorous and schematic, more haute couture than the natural look.
In Edinburgh, Scottish architects also attempted to solve the problem of what to do with the dead. Carlton Hill Cemetery, which dates back to 1792, is situated on a hill 100 metres high, with panoramic
Young was not alone in his relish of the macabre. In The Grave (1743), Robert Blair dwelt on ‘the mansions of the dead’, where, ‘In grim array the grisly spectres rise, grin horrible, and obstinately sullen, pass and repass, hushed as the foot of night.’ 17
Wren’s proposals for suburban cemeteries may have been rejected by the Corporation of London but, towards the end of the eighteenth century, planners in other capitals came to appreciate the hygienic and aesthetic possibilities of interring the dead on the outskirts of the city. Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, founded by Napoleon in 1804, offered a magnificent example. Napoleon was the first leader to address the problems of the Paris cemeteries. Previously, burial had taken place in parish churchyards but, as the population soared, these had become full to overflowing and constituted a health hazard. The chief cemetery, Les Saint-Innocents, near Les Halles, was destroyed, and the bones transported to the catacombs, a series of deserted quarries underneath Paris.
The land, purchased by the urban planner Nicholas Frochot on Napoleon’s orders in 1803, was originally a hill of the Champ l’Evêque, where a rich merchant built a house in 1430. Subsequently, Louis XIV named it after his confessor and the land was given to the Jesuits, who converted it into a hospice. The Jesuits sold the land in 1763 to pay off debts. Frochot’s coup was to persuade the authorities to rebury the remains of Molière, La Fontaine, Abélard and Héloïse in the new cemetery–which soon led to Père Lachaise being the ultimate burial place for the rich and famous. As the social commentator Laman Blanchard observed in 1842, the Parisian man of wealth possessed a town house, a country house, a box at the Opera and a tomb in Père Lachaise.
Architect Théodore Brongniart, who also designed the Paris Stock Exchange, sought to emulate English garden designers such as Capability Brown, whose naturalistic landscapes were actually highly contrived: small hills were constructed, lakes sunk, trees planted at strategic locations. Although the style borrows from the English tradition, the result is quintessentially French. Père Lachaise is laid out like Central Paris itself, all avenues and boulevards rotating like spokes off a wheel from a series of significant architectural features, such as the massive rotunda to Casimir Perier (a disgraced politician) and the Bartholomé war memorial. The influences are formal and Classical, and the French culture of presentation is manifest. Along the Avenue de la Chapelle the majestic horse-chestnut trees are systematically pollarded to geometric exactitude. With its great and good, its eccentrics and mavericks, its war memorials and its important bourgeoisie, Père Lachaise is more like a small town than a garden. The little mausolea, with their narrow windows trimmed by ornamental grilles and their forbidding panelled doors, resemble apartment houses, inspiring one small child, when visiting, to ask his parents: ‘Who lives here?’ There are no weeds, or trailing growths of wild flowers and the planting is rigorous and schematic, more haute couture than the natural look.
In Edinburgh, Scottish architects also attempted to solve the problem of what to do with the dead. Carlton Hill Cemetery, which dates back to 1792, is situated on a hill 100 metres high, with panoramic
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