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Ile St-Louis. This tiny island is devoid of both traffic and things to do other than slurping a fine ice cream or doing some limited window-shopping but it's a good place to walk through en route to somewhere more interesting, from the Latin Quarter across to Marais, for example, or a longer walk or even rent a Velib bike and head east of the Bastille (good eating and drinking but little else) to Cimetiere du Père Lachaise (or take a metro the the station of the same name) and visit some of the dear departed, such as...
...Jim Morrison's pathetic and disappointing grave, his heirs - who are probably rolling in royalties - should be ashamed.
Jim Morrison, aka 'the Lizard King' (as well as James Douglas Morrison) was lead singer of the Doors band, dying - as they do in the rock music business with regularity - of a drug overdose in Paris in 1971.
But the huge cemetery is peaceful and, naturally, dead quiet. Other celebrities buried in Père Lachaise cemetery are Chopin the composer and Edith Piaf the French singer, though we failed to find her resting place in spite of precise directions from the cemetery's own map. Fans of the literati could also take a walk in Montparnasse Cemetery to hunt for the graves of writers and philosophers such as Marcel Proust, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Baudelaire and Guy de Maupassant.
Oscar Wilde's grave. Next, Alexandre III Bridge, Grand Palais, Petit Palais. Oscar Wilde's grave sports a very dramatic and unusual Art Nouveau headstone by Jacob Epstein, covered in sloppy kisses from admirers, as well as scrawled favoured witticisms. On his deathbed in a Paris hotel room in 1900 Wilde said, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."
Near Père Lachaise: not a lot to interest a tourist.
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