Behind a black wrought-iron fence at Père Lachaise, two tombs sit on raised pillars side by side: Jean de la Fontaine on the left, Molière on the right. There's a catch. The bones beneath them may not be genuine.

Both writers were moved here in 1817, more than 150 years after their deaths, in a deliberate scheme to draw Parisians to a cemetery that was struggling. It worked. The population of the dead peaked at 33,000 by 1830.

Molière's story is particularly rich. He died playing a hypochondriac on stage, collapsing mid-performance as tuberculosis finally won. His widow had to beg Louis XIV for a decent burial and was rebuffed. La Fontaine, meanwhile, is the scourge of every French primary schoolchild, who must memorise his fables, most of them borrowed from Aesop.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours unpack both writers' complicated relationships with power, plagiarism and posterity, placing their tombs in the broader story of Père Lachaise as a stage-managed monument to French cultural glory.