A Visit to Père LaChaise

[Photo Credit: Extranoise at https://www.flickr.com/photos/10508943@N00/271571409, Père Lachaise Cemetery, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en]

To prepare for the École’s arduous entrance exams, Julia joined the atelier of architect Marcel de Monclos soon after arriving in Paris. Though two of her atelier colleagues were unfriendly, Julia enjoyed the company of the other two: New Yorker Katharine Cotheal Budd (1860-1951) and Lawrence Phillip Ewald (1869-1945) from St. Louis. In July 1896, Julia told her cousin Lucy LeBrun about a drive they took by horse-drawn omnibus to the renowned Père LaChaise Cemetery, designed in 1804 by architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. The trio decided to make the four-mile return trip on foot: “Miss Budd, Mr Ewald and I walked back after riding over to Père Lachaise, – it tired some what, but Notre-Dame and the river, at your leisure, fully paid for it. Nina [Julia’s cousin, Nina Thornton] and I went in the day time once, and have decided we preferred to be buried in American graves.”

                                                                                           [Julia Morgan Papers, Special Collections, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 2-D-17-10.]