The Batignolles cemetery – the fourth largest in Paris, but not so popular among tourists, as Montmartre or Montparnasse. It was discovered in 1833 to a new town Batignolles-Monceau and then took a few acres. Now it is more than 10 hectares, which are located 15 thousand graves. Celebrities of the first magnitude are buried here not so much, the numbering of the graves uncomfortable, cemetery is on the outskirts – near Boulevard périphérique. 900 trees (chestnut, ash, maple, sycamore) 't save: highway passes directly over the graves, the monuments here in dust and dirt.

However, for Russian tourists the Batignolles cemetery can be very interesting – here the Russian emigration buried their deads to Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois.

On older plates are engraved the names: Demidov, Naryshkin-Witte, Trubetskoy, Nelidova, Word, Volkonsky, Bakhmetiev. The family grave diplomat George Bakhmetiev is located just below the circular road grill is always covered with a layer of dust... Entrepreneur Pavel Ryabushinsky, composers Sergei Lyapunov and Fyodor Akimenko, Archimandrite Vladimir (Goethe), writer and public figure of the barbarian Excel, diplomat Mikhail Girs, artists Alexander Benois and Leon Bakst is also buried here. Immediately, at the Batignolles cemetery, lay the great Russian singer Fyodor Chaliapin, but in 1984, his remains were moved to Moscow, the Novodevichy cemetery. But on the grave of one of the ideologists of Russian liberalism and the founder of the cadet party, Pavel Milyukov still lay flowers.

Among French celebrities buried here, many names that it is unlikely that it will say a Russian tourist. But the name of Paul Verlaine is known to all. A poet, a drunkard, a Vagabond lived in the outskirts of Paris. Die hard, in poverty and suffering, almost in madness, but managed to take communion. He was buried in the family vault, as predicted by Verlaine's poem "Batignolles":

Overweight lump of tufa; the names of four:
Mother, father and I, and later the son; in a row.
At the cemetery we're resting in peace;
Marble and grass in the cramped walls.

Tuff, five faces in it; rude tomb
Height of the meter, glabrous; around
Stretches the chain – clear boundary.
And the suburbs asleep: though weak sound.

From here we angelic pipe
Cause in its hour to finally
To live, fully live the life mirovoy,
Oh, beloved, my son, mother, father!

(Translated By George Shengeli)