The Montmartre cemetery is not a magnificent or heroic place like Père Lachaise. It would be unreasonable to ask so much of it. But it is still a fine cemetery. It has kept faith with what Montmartre used to be, with what it hoped to remain.

~Daniel Halévy, Pays Parisiens

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.

~John Milton, Paradise Lost

No Angels in Montmartre

There aren't any angels in the Montmartre Cemetery, Étienne thought as he made his way back to the entrance, just past Émile Zola's original gravesite. No angels in his life, either. He had developed a kind of dependence on angels, although the only ones he had ever encountered were statues made of granite or marble, reliefs in limestone, ceramic figurines and paintings on wood, walls and canvas.

Cemeteries were a major attraction for him in Paris and this was his first opportunity to spend time walking through the Cimetière de Montmartre on avenue Rachel under rue Caulaincourt in a space hollowed out by an eighteenth-century gypsum quarry where the term "plaster of Paris" originated and where bodies of people killed during the French Revolution were dumped in mass graves. The cemetery was just off of the Boulevard de Clichy near sex shops and porn theatres and only about a block-and-a-half from the Moulin Rouge cabaret, another Paris landmark that had always lacked for angels.

As he looked back at Zola's grave, Étienne noticed a pretty redheaded woman who stood reverently beside the sepulcher. She wore a long coat and a beret and seemed vaguely familiar, but he could not place her. After all, he didn't know any women in Paris. In her right hand she held a book, which she kissed and then placed on the flower bed at the base of Zola's grave. She turned and looked at Étienne, smiled and left the cemetery.

Her offering to Zola was curious, Étienne thought, but certainly benign compared to, say, the admirers of Irish writer Oscar Wilde who for decades had left kisses in red lipstick all over Wilde's grave in Père Lachaise cemetery. The lipstick corroded the stone so the grave had to be cordoned off from the public.

It reminded him that at Père Lachaise he could find angels everywhere. And angels showed up all over Paris in the architecture of churches, public buildings and ancient private residences. For some time it had comforted him to think there might be a real guardian angel out there looking over him. It was a superstitious thought, but a persistent one, so he found it a little depressing, perhaps an omen, not to have seen any angel statues or reliefs in the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Étienne had gone there on an overcast October morning, the kind of low-hanging-sky day Parisians call la grisaille, to visit Zola's first grave site with its dramatic copper bust of the author, now weathered with big swaths of blue-green and gray-green patina, in the center of a decorated granite frame and resting atop a carved pedestal on the granite gravestone. While he was there he also paid homage to Marie-Henri Beyle, better known by his pen name Stendhal, who wrote Le Rouge et le Noir in 1830, and to the Goncourt brothers, whose Journals des Goncourt described Parisian society in the late nineteenth-century.

Zola was buried at Montmartre in 1902 on an elevated section of the graveyard but in 1908 his remains were moved to the Panthéon in the Latin Quarter, so he could rest in a crypt with two other French literary giants and national heroes: Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas. Great drama surrounded both the 1902 burial at Montmartre and the 1908 re-interment at the Panthéon. As he looked at the Montmartre memorial Étienne tried to imagine the mob violence that occurred there the day Zola was laid to rest.

It was Zola's moral courage that caused such rage to be played out at his burial. The frankness and realism of his novels had always provoked judicial and religious reactions and he was under surveillance by the Paris police for many years, but he had never been an overtly political activist. However, the dignified bourgeois of Médan found it necessary to abandon the security of his successful literary life, "le grand calme de ma solitude," because of a political injustice he could not ignore. Zola became a passionate defender of a French artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus, a Jew, who was falsely accused and convicted of high treason in a secret military court martial in January 1895. Dreyfus was charged with passing new French artillery information to the Germans. But when evidence of the actual traitor was given to French Army officials, a long-term cover-up ensued. In 1898 Zola published an open letter titled J'accuse in the newspaper L'Aurore that denounced the French government as anti-Semitic and further charged that Dreyfus had been unlawfully jailed.

Because of Zola's efforts and the advocacy of other supporters, Captain Dreyfus was finally exonerated in 1906 and reinstated in the Army, but the decade-long case fueled the bigotry of French anti-Semites who insisted Dreyfus was guilty. In the meantime, Zola died at age 62 on the evening of September 29, 1902, asphyxiated by carbon monoxide fumes from a bedroom stove at his house on rue de Bruxelles, not far from the cemetery. The chimney was discovered to have been blocked, which led many to believe Zola had been murdered.

Dreyfus attended the Montmartre burial. The anti-Semitic press incited a riot at the ceremony and mounted troops had to charge the mob to disperse it. Dreyfus was surrounded by friends and escaped unhurt. When the government approved the transfer of Zola's remains to the Panthéon six years later right-wing extremists reacted with outrage again. Dreyfus attended the Panthéon ceremony with his wife and children amid angry demonstrators. An extremist journalist fired a shot at Dreyfus that hit his right arm. The journalist was later acquitted because the court said his attack was not pre-meditated.

Zola's selfless courage in the Dreyfus Affair, in addition to his literary genius, were the reasons Étienne counted the author as one of his all-time heroes. So before he left the cemetery he couldn't help going back to the memorial to look at the book left by the appealing red-head with porcelain-like skin who obviously shared his admiration for Zola. It was a copy of Le docteur Pascal, Zola's 1893 novel that explored the tension between science and faith, a book Étienne had recently read.

Étienne looked for a name in the volume because he always signed and dated his own books, but she had not inscribed a name or message. Then he opened it to the pages where the young woman had inserted a bookmark. Highlighted in yellow was this passage:

"He swore that he would yet love, that he would live a new life, that he would drain the cup of every passion that he had not yet tasted, before he should be an old man."

He put the book back down by Zola's flower bed and was surprised to see a small gardenia blossoming there despite the already cold temperatures of October. As he left the cemetery he thought about the woman and wondered if the highlighted prose was meant as a message for him. The passage was a vow he could relate to and one he had highlighted himself when he read Le docteur Pascal. But he shook off the feeling. Walking through cemeteries...