Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas Grave

A few minutes from Wilde's sphinx, in division 94 of Père Lachaise, a simple headstone reads GERTRUDE STEIN. Walk behind it and you find the second name: ALICE B. TOKLAS. Stein and Toklas were partners for nearly forty years — hosts of the rue de Fleurus salon where Picasso, Matisse and Hemingway learned what modern meant, and authors between them of one of the most public private marriages of the twentieth century, decades before any law would call it that. Stein died in 1946; Toklas lived another twenty-one years, guarding the legacy, and was buried beside her in 1967. The placement of her name on the reverse of the stone was her own wish — in her partner's shadow, as she chose in life. Visiting: same hours as the cemetery (free, ~8am-6pm). Visitors leave pebbles in the Jewish tradition. Together with Wilde's tomb, it makes Père Lachaise the essential queer-history stop in Paris — an hour among the two most eloquent graves in the canon.