This Be the Place: A Poet's Grave in Paris

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

A poet’s grave is better than anything in the Louvre. In the dirt, beneath a large book-shaped stone, is a box containing a person who laid bare their heart for whoever cared to pay attention, and whose life was shaped by some of the same strange forces as your own.

Our family is in Paris for the year, thanks to my wife’s fellowship. After bringing our kids to school, she and I often stroll a few miles to her office. From there, I sometimes continue to nearby Montparnasse Cemetery, where many poets rest in peace, including three of my favorites: César Vallejo, Charles Baudelaire, and Robert Desnos—all of whom died younger than I am now. The city’s famous necropolis, Père-Lachaise, is even closer to our apartment, and I also go there often, to pay my regards to Paul Éluard, Gertrude Stein, Oscar Wilde, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Gérard de Nerval (whose small monument I find the most affecting of all). In January, I made my first trip to a third Paris cemetery, Montmartre, to visit one of Nerval’s close friends, the German poet Heinrich Heine. I had recently come across Nerval’s prose versions of Heine’s lyrical verses, and feeling confident in my improving language skills, I added “translate Nerval’s Heine translations” to my years-long might-do list. I also wanted to visit Heine because (like Vallejo, Stein, Wilde, and Paul Celan) he was an émigré poet buried in France who wrote in a language other than French, and his writing offers insights into our own era of conflict, turmoil, and confusion.

Born in 1797 to Jewish parents in Düsseldorf, Heine was a Lutheran (on paper if not in practice) when he died in the French capital in 1856, after a lengthy illness. Idealism and the spirit of the July Revolution pulled him to France, as he was pushed away from Germany by antisemitism, censorship, and nationalism. Although by no means the only émigré writer to stick with his first language and audience while claiming another land as home, Heine created a vital, new manner of being a poète étranger, with a perspective that allowed him to be accurately described as both “the last Romantic” (by himself) and “first modern European” (by Michael Goldfarb). If Paris was, as Walter Benjamin wrote, the “Capital of the 19th Century,” Heine might be thought of as the poet laureate of that century’s upheaval. He was a leading figure of German Romanticism, while also a critic and forecaster of the forces running through it. Though his work inspired a myriad of composers, philosophers, and poets, his significance was marginalized at times by powers who considered his ideas and identity counter to their political projects. His life and work are full of such contradictions.

Heine came to France in 1831, and the following year famously wrote to a friend, “When one fish in the sea asks another how he’s doing, he’s given the reply: ‘I’m like Heine in Paris.’” As with many contemporary poets, he moved frequently, living in at least a dozen apartments during his quarter-century in the city. Between my own place and Montmartre are a few of his addresses, so I decided to stop by them on my walk to the cemetery. I came first to 65 rue du Faubourg-Poissonnière, where Heine and his wife, Crescence Eugénie Mirat, lived for six months in 1846–47. (Poissonnière means fishmonger.) There’s nothing distinguished about the building, which could easily star as itself in a 19th-century period piece. From there I took a left at the next cross street, Rue Bleue, and walked to number 25, where the poet spent a year in 1840–41. At this address there’s now a stunning industrial building that dates to 1911, with a sculpture of a famous person’s head in relief on the façade—not Heine. Finally, I walked back to Faubourg-Poissonnière, to number 72, the poet’s home from 1841–1846. It is the only of the three addresses with a plaque commemorating him. This apartment is also immortalized in Heine’s epic Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen (1844): “‘Oh, if only,’ I sighed, / I were home, / with my / beloved wife in Paris / on Faubourg-Poissonnière!’”

A minute after setting out again, I crossed paths with the great poet Alice Notley, in front of a bookstore, of all places. When she heard where I was going, she told me about a sequence of poems in which Heine and Celan are central figures, titled “The Shattered Crystal,” in Arrondissements (2003) by Douglas Oliver. It is a book designed, Oliver wrote, “to reflect the world at large through the prism of Paris.” Even in a city famous for chance encounters, it felt as though one of poetry’s guiding spirits had something to do with the day’s early luck.

Before long, in the footsteps of Antoine and his friend René, the heroes of François Truffaut’s film The 400 Blows, I found myself crossing Place Lino Ventura—just down the street from Truffaut’s childhood home. The lives of the French New Wave icon and the German Romantic parallel in several surprising ways, and for me the most interesting link is an artistic one. In 1966, Truffaut directed an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction classic Fahrenheit 451, which reads like a novelization of Heine’s most-quoted aphorism, spoken by a character in his early play, Almansor: “That was just a preview, wherever books / Are burned, the burning will end with men.”

Upon arriving at the cemetery, I went directly to Heine’s grave. It doesn’t resemble anything around it. The pale stone monument, designed by Danish sculptor Louis Hasselriis, is immaculately maintained. The poet’s sculpted head gazes down with heavy-lidded eyes, his face still evoking friends’ descriptions of the handsome yet weary, gaunt young man arriving in Paris. Beneath the bust are ornate symbols related to poetry and the hereafter, so vivid they could have been carved recently: a single butterfly, a wreath of roses laid on a harp, pitchers, lilies, a pinecone, palm leaves, an hourglass. It is especially beautiful to encounter on a gray day, and it’s hard to see why Matthew Arnold was inspired to write in “Heine’s Grave”: “Bitter and strange, was the life / Of Heine.” But Arnold visited many years before the current monument was constructed in 1902, and the English Victorian was likely thinking of another, more uncomfortable resting place: Heine spent the final eight years of his life in a “mattress grave” after a spinal ailment left him bedridden, in great pain, and addicted to opium, but undeterred from his writing. Another poem, “At the Grave of Heine” by Olive Tilford Dargan, also notes the suffering of its subject, “Bird, who didst sing / From a bare bough.” And in the closing lines of two versions of Heine poems made by Jerome Rothenberg from Nerval’s translations, we hear the German Romantic himself thinking of ends that could well be his own:

“I lie down on the earth, a miserable castaway, pressing my face still aflame on the watersoaked sand.” (“The Castaway”)

“I looked into that hollow space, and as I did a quake of terror seized me, & I felt myself pulled down into the darkness of the grave” (“The Dream”)

Fittingly, Heine’s poem “Wo” (“Where”) is inscribed on the monument itself. Here, in three rhyming quatrains, the poet asks questions about his own burial (in my prose translation):

Where will the weary traveler be laid to rest? Under palm trees in the South? Beneath lindens near the Rhine? Will I be buried by a stranger, somewhere in the desert? Or will I sleep in sand by a sea? Anyway! I’m surrounded by God’s heaven, there or here, and like lamps for the dead the stars float above me at night.

Thinking of such heaviness concentrated in one life—and having that life represented by this single literary space—made me reappraise my love of poets’ graves and gave rise to many questions. Would it be better if there simply were no cemeteries? Why do many of us decide to leave our remains in a specific place, rather than opting for the freedom of the wind or waves? What is the human meaning of a tombstone anyhow? And if we have the privilege to choose a location, what calculations do we make? Do we want to be somewhere we loved living, or do we think more of whoever might care to visit? Do we negotiate with our beloved? Does it matter if the ground gets very cold or the plot has a beautiful view? Who will our neighbors be? Is it all too much?

It began to drizzle as I set off to search for Théophile Gautier, another friend of Nerval and Heine. Suddenly I heard the voice of a living person, as a kind woman about my parents’ age introduced herself as Claire, offering to take me to the tomb. We doubled back the way I’d come, talking excitedly in a mix of French and Spanish. Soon we found ourselves staring up at a statue of the Muse Calliope, whose presence does nothing to brighten the mood of the tenebrous monument, which on such a gloomy day fit the dark decadence of Gautier’s poems and stories. However, the proximity of the two friends was a joyful thing to think about, and since I have yet to give my own appreciation of Heine’s poems, I’ll let Gautier speak instead, in an excerpt from an elegiac text he wrote for his friend:

When you open a book by Heine, it seems you’re entering one of those gardens he likes to describe; the marble sphinxes by the staircase sharpen their claws on the corner of their pedestals, and look at you with the disturbing intensity of their white eyes ...

My guide led me for a little longer, and we discussed literature and neighborhoods until we stopped to say farewell. She had brought me to see another tombstone, which was glazed with rain in such a way that I had to kneel to read the name obscured by the reflected sky: François Truffaut 1932–1984.