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🗓️ 2 June 2021
⏱️ 13 minutes
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0:00.0 | Every year, more than 3 million people visit the Peralashese Cemetery in Paris. |
0:09.1 | It's home to hundreds of thousands of tombs, and you can buy a map directing you to all |
0:13.7 | the graves of the cemetery's most famous residents, folks like the singer Jim Morrison, |
0:19.7 | and writers like Oscar Wilde and Proust. |
0:22.5 | But among that list of celebrities and historical figures is a name that pretty much no one will |
0:27.7 | recognize, but whose tomb attracts a lot of visitors, and a very certain kind of visitor, |
0:35.2 | with a very certain kind of need. |
0:37.9 | It's the tomb of Victor Noir. |
0:42.3 | Victor Noir was a journalist in Paris in the 1800s, and he didn't publish anything especially |
0:48.1 | remarkable during a short lifetime, and he probably would have been forgotten to history |
0:52.2 | if it weren't for the fact that he was shot and killed by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, the |
0:57.3 | nephew of Napoleon. |
1:00.3 | That act triggered a wave of protests, and led to the commissioning of a statue by the |
1:05.0 | acclaimed sculptor Jules de lau. |
1:07.3 | But even that isn't really why people are visiting his grave today. |
1:13.0 | They visit for more personal reasons, and they aren't there for Victor, exactly. |
1:19.0 | The statue that covers Victor Noir's grave depicts him laying down as if he had just |
1:24.3 | been shot, and that alone is kind of jarring, but then you notice a couple of other things. |
1:30.8 | First, the crotch of this statue has a bulge to it. |
1:38.4 | And second, the bulge is very, very shiny. |
1:48.1 | Though the statue is largely dark and discolored, that particular part has been polished by |
1:54.1 | the hands of countless women over the decades. |
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