Montparnasse Cemetery is the setting for Fanny Price’s burial and a stark image of the poverty, shame, and mortality surrounding her death. Philip Carey follows the hearse there after spending three days handling the paperwork and arrangements; the ceremony’s cold gray morning and the crowded monuments leave him with an impression of sordidness that persists after he leaves.

The Burial of Fanny Price

After Fanny Price’s suicide, Philip and Albert Price must navigate the practical arrangements for burying her. Albert knows no French, so Philip handles the process: papers must be obtained in one place and signed in another, and officials must be visited. The work occupies him from morning to night for three days, ending with their journey behind the hearse to Montparnasse Cemetery.

The funeral is short, and only a handful of people from the studio attend: Mrs. Otter, Ruth Chalice, Lawson, Clutton, and Flanagan. The narrator notes the painful contrast that they had all disliked Fanny while she was alive. Albert wants the burial done decently but sees no reason to waste money, making the ceremony’s limits part of its circumstances rather than a matter of choice or display.

Monuments and the Scene of Death

The cemetery is crowded with monuments, ranging from poor and simple to vulgar, pretentious, and ugly. Faced with that indiscriminate display, Philip shudders at the ceremony’s sordidness. The description gives no consoling meaning to the graveyard’s mixture of memorials: the tombstones register differences in money and taste, but they stand together around a burial that is both necessary and painfully spare.

Aftermath in Philip’s Experience

After the burial, Albert invites Philip to lunch. Philip loathes him and is exhausted; he has not been sleeping well, haunted by recurring dreams of Fanny in her torn brown dress, hanging from a nail in the ceiling. The cemetery therefore marks not an end to Philip’s encounter with her death, but a point from which its image continues into his private life.

That afternoon Philip cannot work. He crosses the river by bus to look at pictures at Durand-Ruel’s, then walks along the cold, wind-swept boulevard. Remembering the cemetery’s white tombstones, he feels lonely and homesick and longs for company. Montparnasse Cemetery thus links the public fact of burial to the continuing inward effects of grief: Philip leaves the graves, but not the death that has taken shape in his thoughts.