This tomb in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, was commissioned from Marochetti by Felice di S. Tommaso (1810-1843) a Piedmontese gothic novelist and historian of the House of Savoy. It commemorates his father, Alessandro Carrone, Marchese di S. Tommaso, who died in 1816 at the age of thirty seven. Alessandro had been the envoy of the Piedmontese court to the Low Countries, and then became Master of Requests in the Council of State of Napoleon. He was also a scholar of Latin literature. (Ignazio Cantù, L'Italia Scientifica Contemporanea, Milan, 1844, p.117)     He would have been an acquaintance of Marochetti's father, and of the exiled Italian historian, Carlo Botta, who the sculptor described as a second father to him. The tomb was erected in 1834, when Marochetti had already received important commissions from the French state and from Carl Alberto of Savoy. It consists of a tall pedestal, whose upper third consists of a more ornamented cubic feature, with, at it corners, barley sugar columnettes similar to those found on Early Christian sarcophagi. On the front, between the columnettes are the arms of the Marchese. The plain surface on the plinth below bears the epitaph: "Tacete e rispettate/ D'un giusto posa qui la mortal salma/ Di Dio in grembo l'alma" (Silence and reverence: the mortal remains of a just man lie here/ His soul in the bosom of God). Carlo Botta provided Marochetti with these lines, which had come into his head, he told him, between his pear and his cheese course, at dinner. (see Caroline Hedengren-Dillon, work cited below). At the top of the memorial kneels an angel in a flowing robe, crowned with cypress and flowers associated with sleep. This angel holds a finger to its lips, and with the other hand, extended to the front, commands silence. Its wings, we learn from contemporary descriptions, were not the feathered wings of a bird, but the wings of an "angel of death" or an "angel of sleep".

The tomb inspired a lengthy appreciation in an article written for the newspaper La Quotidienne (5 Dec. 1834), by someone signing themselves HHH. This author had visited Marochetti's studio and had seen the models for the high altar of La Madeleine. These and other works had persuaded him that Marochetti would not produce sculpture for the gallery, but that he was an imaginative and thoughtful artist, from whom great public monuments might be expected. The tomb of the Marchese di S. Tommaso departed from the habitual styles of Père Lachaise monuments, which tended to be more Greek, Roman or Egyptian than Christian. He described the base as "entirely antique, but simple and severe from an ornamental point of view, like those first Christian basilicas, still stamped with antique genius, but adapted to Christian thinking". The article particularly extols the Christian significance of the angel, described as "the living shadow of the divinity".

The tomb is made from a perishable kind of sandstone. At the time Marco Calderini wrote his monograph on the artist (M.Calderini, Carlo Marochetti, Turin, 1928), it was in a very weathered condition, and since being cleaned by the Ville de Paris in 2009, the angel has become a formless lump. However, Marochetti exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, what appears to be an identical figure, to which he gave the title of the Angel of Sleep. The wood engraving of this, included in the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, clearly shows the angel's bat-like, featherless wings. (see entry)

The theme of Silence was taken up in 1842-43 by Auguste Préault in his famous roundel for the tomb of Jacob Roblès, in the Jewish section of Père Lachaise. However, despite the assertioin of HHH that Marochetti's angel is a Christian image, its gestures recall the entirely pagan Amour menaçant of Etienne-Maurice Falconet.

(for a very thorough account of this tomb, see Caroline Hedengren-Dillon, 'Les monuments funéraires de Carlo Marochetti dans les cimetières parisiens: une découverte au Père Lachaise', Tribune de l'art, 2013, online)