Humans have strange relationships with statues. There’s the statue of Juliet in Verona, which was removed and placed in a museum in 2014 after showing signs of damage thanks to tourists rubbing the statue’s breasts for luck in love. Meanwhile, in New York, some visitors to Wall Street like to rub the balls of the charging bull statue, also for luck.


Basically, we’re a superstitious species, and sometimes, statues bear the brunt of our superstition.


That’s the case for the statue of Victor Noir, a French journalist who was killed by a cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1870 and became a symbol of opposition to the imperial regime. But that’s not what visitors to his tomb in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris care about; they’re far more interested in the bronze depiction of his apparently sizable penis.



For years, women have visited the cemetery, which is also the final resting place of other greats like Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison, to kiss Noir’s statue and rub his bronze penis in the hopes it will improve their fertility and their sex lives. Not only should visitors hoping to get pregnant kiss the statue and rub his penis, but they should also drop a flower in his hat. In addition, you can rub different feet for different results — the right foot if you only want one child, or the left if you want twins. Women who have successfully had children after performing these rituals have been known to return to the cemetery to leave gifts and photos of their little miracles by Noir’s grave.


It’s such a treasured pastime that in 2004, after city authorities erected (pun unavoidable) protective fencing around the tomb, young women stormed the cemetery with megaphones, arguing for their right to molest the statue and crying, “Lift the barriers! Victor, we want your body!”


Fortunately for those young women, the barriers were removed, and now visitors to the cemetery, including famous names like Dita von Teese, are able to kiss and caress the statue to their hearts’ content. We can all only dream of this kind of posthumous legacy.