Batignolles Cemetery - the fourth largest in Paris, but not so popular among tourists as Montmartre or Montparnasse. Open it was in 1833 for the new town of Batignolles-Monceau, and then took a few acres. Now there more than 10 acres, on which the 15 thousand graves. Celebrities of the first magnitude buried here is not so much uncomfortable numbering graves, the cemetery is located on the edge - near the ring road Peripherique. 900 trees (chestnut trees, ash trees, maples, sycamores) do not save: the highway runs right over the graves, monuments here in the dust and dirt.

However, Russian tourists Batignolles cemetery can be very interesting - is the Russian emigration to bury their deceased to Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.

On older slabs engraved names: Demidov, Naryshkins-Witte, Trubetskoy, Nelidovo, Obolensky, Volkonskaya Bakhmet'eva. Family grave diplomat George Bakhmet'eva is just under the ring road, grill is always covered with a layer of dust ... Entrepreneur Paul Riabushinskii composers Sergei Lyapunov and Fedor Akimenko, Archimandrite Vladimir (Goethe), a writer and social activist Barbara Ikskul diplomat Michael Geers, artist Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst is also buried here. Right there, in the cemetery of the Batignolles, lay the great Russian singer Fyodor Chaliapin, but in 1984 his remains were moved to Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery. But at the grave of one of the ideologists of Russian liberalism, and the founder of the Cadets Paul Milyukov still lay flowers.

Among the French celebrities resting place here, a lot of names that are unlikely to say something Russian tourist. But the name of Paul Verlaine is known to all. The poet, drunkard, a tramp living in a suburb of Batignolles. It dies hard, in poverty and suffering, almost in a frenzy, but managed to take communion. He was buried in the family vault, as predicted by Verlaine's poem "Batignolles":

Overweight boulder tuff; names - four:
Mother, father and I, and later - the son; contract.
At the cemetery, we rest in the world;
Marble and grass in cramped enclosures.

Tuff five faces in it; rough tomb
The height of the meter, naked; around
Chain stretches - clear border.
A suburb of sleep: if only a faint sound.

From here we have angelic trumpet
Cause in its own time, to finally
Live us to live a life full of worlds
Oh, beloved, son, mother, father!

(Translated by George Shengeli)