Bourgeois Paris may well have shuddered at the mention of Belleville. Even today when inner cities are being upgraded many still perceive Belleville as unappetising and remote. Not so the dead: From the start, those very proper Parisians, who when still alive had taken up residence on the opposite side of the city and would have never set foot in these accursed parts, were ready to pay astronomical prices for a share in the most prestigious cemetery in Paris, le Père Lachaise, a spectacular necropolis, basically constituting the only museum the 20th arrondissement has to show for itself. Here the last two centuries of the history of France and Paris are on display and the ghosts of Tout-Paris enjoy the setting of the largest garden in the capital — 44 hectares — rising above the world of the living to the west, on a lofty hill and that much closer to heaven...

In order to make a commercial success of the venture, the 19th-century bourgeoisie had to be persuaded to allow their remains to be transferred to the eastern edge of Paris — not yet the place of evil reputation it would become later but certainly remote. The Prefect of the Seine Frochot resorted to an astute promotional campaign which, by playing on human vanity, naturally worked: by putting up for sale in perpetuity land grant property, he was sure to arouse interest among self-engrossed Parisians, and by setting prices so high that only the upper crust could afford them, he made the new cemetery both desirable and fashionable. And when Frochot further transferred to this site the remains of glorious past celebrities — notably those of the medieval lovers Peter Abélard and Héloise and those mistaken for La Fontaine and Molière's — everyone was taken in by it, including Frochot himself, who rests in division no. 19, Brogniart, the architect of the new cemetery and of the Paris stock exchange, and Godde who built the cemetery gate. Jacques Baron, the previous owner of the grounds, paid a very high price to rest here: After having been squeezed out of his grounds for a pittance by the hard-bitten Frochot, the poor man was made to pay 300 times the amount for his own little plot of 5 square yards! Balzac, who had buried here his characters, was brought here in his turn, despite his biting account of the place and its clients:

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