But Pere Lachaise is not an art gallery, it is a cemetery, and there is no countryman so great as Shelley or Keats lying here. Here is, for the Englishman, only a great breath-taking town, terrace on terrace of it spread below him and, as he wanders into it on all sides of him.
It has a town's irregularity of layout, the streets and alleys (which again have names as in a town) having sprung up from necessity and expediency. The visitor may wonder why the English telephone kiosk has been adopted as the architectural norm for most of the monuments. Or is it, perhaps, the other way about? Is this, again, the right kind of thought in such a place? Discovering it is not, he will assure himself that he has really come, a little unseriously, to find if some idol is buried here. (There is no lack of great names, from Moliere and La Fontaine to Bernhardt and Rachel.)
But let him not, as is the fashion of the moment, inquire here for the grave of the latest idol, Proust. For he will be disappointed in many ways. He asks at the inquiry office, with great simplicity, "Où est lo tombeau de Marcel Proust, s'il vous plait?" He is asked to repeat this, and, conscious that it has sounded a little primitive and that "tombeau" is perhaps an obsolescent word, substitutes "sépulcre," which a second later he begins to suspect does not exist at all. Then he is asked to spell the name. He does so, and the arden" shakes his head, saying, Proo? I do not think the name exists" "No, Proust" the visitor says with emphasis; whereat the garden replies tolerantly, "Ah, no,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.