Let's begin at the end: Graveyard Tourism.

The problem with people is that they die.

Even famous people- important artists and that- whether gradually or suddenly, will eventually cease to exist.

Not entirely so in Paris, however. Here, it is not enough to occupy your public in your lifetime; a cultural icon who dies in Paris is not yet done.

The two biggest cemetries in Paris, Père Lachaise and Montparnasse are something of a gathering for the well-cultured icon. Oscar Wilde, Jean Paul Satre, Jim Morrisson, Charles Baudelaire- they're all here, between the aristocratic families ensconced beneath structures better described as chapels than tombs, and the great figures besides whom stone Jesuses are set, weeping concrete tears for eternity.

...Jim Morrisson, doing his thing

There is no better place to celebrity-stalk than a Parisian graveyard, trust me. THEY CAN'T GET AWAY. And though traditionally sad places, given a treasure map on entry with a key showing an A-Z of the civilizing elite, there's something celebratory about the atmosphere in a Paris cemetery.

Of course, there are many bodies here who were grandparents, mothers, even sons and daughters, and there is a sadness, and certainly a guilt-lined befuddlement at the sort of Madame Tussaud's-esque pleasure where all history is for a glorious moment standing alongside you- as it was for Keanu Reeves in his career high, the Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. But there's also a wild display of arrogance and a profusion of nauseously extravagent tombs (think Louis XIV and what he had his interior designers do in Versailles) to keep you occupied between Chopin in M9 and Piaf in N5.

And then there's those graves which are just brilliant. Take Bird Man in Montparnasse:

Are you a 'goth' in need of a sympathetic shoulder? I recently saw a large be-pierced gathering clad in leather and blackness (one sporting a gimp mask- and why not- it was the weekend after all) hanging out in Père Lachaise. (No Photo.)

My advice is to take a camera, a hamper, a bunch of used metro tickets*, and a group of like-minded friends, and enjoy the great Parisian pleasure that is the open-air museum of the enlightened deceased. It's so nearly wrong; it's utterly right.

Surprise yourself, with Graveyard Tourism.

"Totally bodacious, dude." -K. Reeves

*There is a tradition of laying used metro tickets on Serge Gainsbourg's grave in Montparnasse, in reference to his song Le poinçonneur des Lilas. This has, by accident, inexplicably spread also to the joint grave of Jean Paul Satre and Simone de Beauvoir.