Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

What surprises does Montparnasse Cemetery throw up to the tourist? As one of three major cemeteries built in the early nineteenth century in the outer zones of Paris, interred here are many French names from that time onwards - Bernard Lacoste, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and many others.

Yet foreign names and sometimes foreign lettering decorate the tombstones that we stumble across when we visit Montparnasse cemetery.

What is Alexander Alekhine, Russian-born world chess champion doing here? Born into a wealthy family in Moscow in 1892, Alekhine represented France in chess and eventually settled in Paris. Here he was able to take a stand against Bolshevism as might befit someone from an old Russian family. Becoming a French citizen in 1925, he also studied at the Sorbonne, writing a thesis on the Chinese prison system. He was world chess champion from 1927-1935 and again from 1937-1946. Dying in Portugal in 1946, his body was eventually transferred to Montparnasse Cemetery ten years later.

Rubbing shoulders with Alekhine is Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett whose connections with France started early. Born in 1906, he studied French, Italian and English at Trinity College, Dublin, and afterwards taught English at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. After the 1940 occupation by Germany, he joined the French Resistance and was decorated for his services, which he dismissed as "boy scout stuff". Beckett's best-known work of literature and his first long work written in French is "Waiting for Godot" which was a success in Paris when it was premiered in 1953. He and his wife both died in 1989 and they are buried in Montparnasse Cemetery under a simple gravestone of granite, in line with his instructions that it should be "any colour, so long as it's grey".

The list of creative types buried here goes on. Elsewhere in the cemetery are statues carved by the Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, for the graves of fellow artists. A graduate from the Bucharest School of Fine Arts, Brancusi was active in Paris in a community of artists and thinkers after travelling there in 1903. A pupil of Rodin, his style of sculpture was abstract and his circle of friends included Picasso, Duchamp, Rousseau and Leger. He became a French citizen in 1952 and died at the ripe old age of 81 in 1957 leaving 1200 photographs and 215 sculptures. He is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.