Cimetière de Montmartre

Fifty stray cats prowl these pathways at dawn, descendants of generations who've made their homes among the tombs where France's most celebrated artists sleep beneath your feet. You're standing at the entrance to Cimetière de Montmartre on Avenue Rachel, but what makes this cemetery truly extraordinary isn't visible from street level... because you're about to descend into an abandoned gypsum quarry that once built half of Paris. When this cemetery opened on January first, 1825, it was literally carved from the bowels of Montmartre hill. Those limestone walls around you? They're the original quarry faces where medieval workers extracted the very stone that became Notre-Dame and the Louvre. But during the Revolution, this hollow became something far more sinister... a mass grave for guillotine victims. As you walk these cobbled paths, you're treading above Charles Henri Sanson, the royal executioner who personally beheaded Louis the Sixteenth and an estimated three thousand others. The bridge rumbling overhead is Rue Caulaincourt, making this the only cemetery in Paris where traffic literally drives over the dead. Look for the melancholy jester statue... it marks where Vaslav Nijinsky rests, forever frozen as Petrushka, the tragic puppet from his most famous ballet. And here's a secret that would make Émile Zola smile: though his body was moved to the Panthéon in 1908, his name still adorns the family tomb, a literary ghost haunting his former resting place among the eight hundred trees that shelter twenty thousand souls in France's third-largest necropolis.