But to return to the Church of Sainte-Geneviève, which, though by its site one of the very oldest in Paris, dates, by its structure, only from the eighteenth century. In 1754 Louis XV., finding himself seriously ill, vowed “that if, through the intercession of Sainte-Geneviève, he recovered, he would raise to her honour a new and sumptuous temple.” Restored to health he showed himself ready to keep his word. The architect employed to plan the structure was Soufflot, a man imbued with memories of Rome, where he had passed several years of his life. On the 6th of September, 1764, the first stone of the new church was laid by Louis XV. The construction had advanced far, and the dome had already been commenced, when Soufflot perceived with horror that the massive edifice threatened collapse, ugly cracks showing themselves here and there in the masonry. In despair, full of self-distrust, and harassed by the raillery of his critics, Soufflot died in 1720, without seeing the completion of his work. Rondelet, who took his place, substituted for the graceful but fragile pilasters and columns of his predecessor, heavy masonry supports devoid of beauty, but at least capable of keeping the roof aloft. For the pursuance of his undertaking, however, he required money, and the want of it more than once suspended or retarded his operations. Until 1789 the building went on with exasperating slowness. Then, however, it received an unexpected impetus. Mirabeau had just died. The Constituent Assembly wished to give the great orator a tomb worthy of him, and at the same time to create a monument in which might be brought together the tombs of all those great citizens who had deserved well of their country: to create a Westminster Abbey. This monument already existed; for it was precisely a sort of Panthéon that Soufflot, never suspecting to what purpose his edifice would be turned, had constructed. “In a civic transport,” says M. E. Quinet, “the Constituent Assembly baptised with the name of Panthéon a monument which now for the first time seemed to receive a soul. The church soon became a temple of Renown – a place where the People gather to pronounce their judgment on the dead. This is why that colonnade bears its splendours so high aloft; why the cupola lifts itself up as though it were a crown on the head of Paris. Here occurs the apotheosis, not of a shepherdess – Sainte-Geneviève, that is to say – but of France, of the country, in the form of illustrious men who have gone to breathe the air of another shore. What had been blamed as superfluous luxury for the prophetess of Nanterre was assuredly necessary for the glorification of glorious men. How could the columns be high enough, the capitals proud enough, the wreaths rich enough to celebrate those to whom their terrestrial country owed terrestrial honours? The defects which had been found in the church became so many beauties in the Panthéon.”

The assembly voted the following decree: “Art. I. The new edifice of Sainte-Geneviève shall be used for the reception of the ashes of the great men belonging to the period of French liberty. Art. II. The legislative body shall alone decide to whom this honour is to be awarded. Art. III. Honoré Riquetti Mirabeau is judged worthy to receive such honour. Art. IV. The legislature shall not, in the future, have power to decree this honour to any of its members who may die; that is a question which shall be decided by the succeeding magistracy. Art. V. Any exceptions which may be made in favour of great men who died before the Revolution, shall be decided only by the legislative body. Art. VI. The directory of the department of the Seine shall with promptitude put the edifice of Sainte-Geneviève into a condition to fulfil its new functions, and shall cause to be engraved over the pediment these words, ‘To the great men of a grateful country.’ Art. VII. Until the new church of Sainte-Geneviève is finished the body of Riquetti Mirabeau shall repose beside the ashes of Descartes, in the vault of the old church.”

The remains of Voltaire were transported to the Panthéon soon after those of Mirabeau, and with a pomp no less magnificent. On the 30th of May, 1791, Gossin, deputy for Bar-le-Duc, addressed the Tribune in an enthusiastic outburst thus: “It was on the 30th of May that the honours of sepulture were refused to Voltaire, and it is on the same day that the national gratitude must acquit itself of its duty of reverence towards one who has prepared men for toleration and liberty.” The procession which accompanied the relics of Voltaire on their conveyance to the Panthéon was imposing in the extreme. Representatives of numerous corporations and professions attended to do homage to his memory, and at one point in the cortège eight women dressed in white, and carrying a statue of Liberty which appeared to be pointing to a complete edition of Voltaire’s works, were borne along in a gilded car. Finally came the sarcophagus, drawn by twelve white horses. After halts innumerable the solemn procession drew up before the Panthéon to the flare of torches.

The name of Panthéon, sufficiently heathen in character, had not hitherto been applied to the church of Sainte-Geneviève; but it appeared a few days later in a petition demanding the same honours for Rousseau, and signed by poets, artists, and scholars. The Assembly would willingly have acceded, but such was the resistance of the inhabitants of Montmorency, who eagerly requested that the ashes of this great writer might be left in their midst, that it deferred its decision.

On the 21st of January, 1793, the Convention decreed that the body of Lepelletier, deputy of Saint-Fargeau, who had been assassinated for having voted the death of the king, should be translated to the Panthéon. Then Marat, to whom, after the stab of Charlotte Corday, the Convention had already erected a mausoleum on the Place du Carrousel, was judged worthy of the Panthéon. On the 25th of November, 1793, Marie Joseph Chénier, speaking before the Tribune, and armed with documents, proved the transactions which Mirabeau had had with the Court, contrasting therewith the disinterestedness of Marat, whose remains, as he eloquently maintained, should displace at the Panthéon those of Mirabeau, unworthy of such a resting-place. The Convention adopted his propositions in a decree which was not executed until after the fall of Robespierre, on the 22nd of September, 1794. The official programme of the ceremonies, still extant, is interesting enough. After having fixed the order and the route of the cortège the authors of the programme added: “The procession will stop when it arrives on the Place of the Panthéon; a tipstaff of the Convention will advance towards the door of entrance, and there will be read the decree which excludes from the Panthéon the relics of Mirabeau. Thereupon the body of Mirabeau shall be conveyed out of the precincts of the Panthéon, and handed over to the commissary of police for that section. Then the body of Marat shall be placed in triumph on a platform elevated in the Panthéon… All citizens assisting at this ceremony shall be unarmed.” From the last injunction it is evident that the authorities feared the possibility of a riot. Everything, however, passed off quietly. The body of Mirabeau was laid in a corner of the cemetery of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.

At length, on the 19th of October, 1794, the turn of Rousseau came. His body, borne by a deputation of the inhabitants of Ermonville, where he had breathed his last, was received at the Tuileries, where the future arch-chancellor pronounced over it an impressive speech. The remains of the philosopher, enclosed in an urn, were then conveyed to the Panthéon, escorted by the crowd and preceded by an orchestra playing various airs from his own “Devin du Village.”

But the political tide was already on the turn. On the 1st of February, 1795, the bust of Marat, placed in several of the theatres and cafés, was hooted and overthrown. His remains, according to the Abbé de Montgaillard in his history of the Revolution, were snatched from the Panthéon, dragged through the streets by young men, and cast amongst the refuse of the Rue Montmartre – “a tabernacle,” says the abbé, “worthy of such a god.” This account, however, is inaccurate; it was only Marat’s effigy which was thrown into the sewer, his relics were transported to Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.

In the meantime the Panthéon, as a structure, was in a state of neglect. These installations of illustrious men within its walls had taken place more or less hastily, and the works were far indeed from completion. Mercier, in his “Picture of Paris,” thus describes a visit which he paid to the Panthéon in 1795: “I ventured on the staircases of the edifice, across ladders, heaps of cement, hammers, long saws and moving scaffoldings. The least sound reverberated, the least movement seemed to announce the approaching fall of the dome, and for the moment I imagined myself interred in the Panthéon without any pleading or contest. When I quitted the edifice I experienced the pleasure which is felt by sailors and warriors at the end of tempests and combats: that of discovering that I was alive.” By the time the Panthéon had been put into a satisfactory condition the Empire had come into existence, and Napoleon, who had just re-established public worship, wished to present the Republican temple to the clergy, whilst maintaining the purpose for which the Constituent Assembly had designed it. A decree, dated 20th of February, 1806, dedicated the Panthéon to public worship under the name of Church of Sainte-Geneviève, and consecrated it as a sepulchre for citizens who, in the career of arms or in that of the administration or of letters, had rendered eminent services to their country. The remains of thirty-nine persons, not all of them truly illustrious, were deposited in the Panthéon under the Empire; but the fall of the Empire brought about another change. Louis XVIII. suppressed the necropolis, and removed from the pediment the famous legend, “Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante.”

The last illustrious men admitted to the honours of the temple supposed to have been erected to them by a “grateful country” were Victor Hugo, the great Carnot, the deputy Baudin, killed on a barricade during the coup d’état of 1851, General Marceau, and La Tour d’Auvergne, “the first grenadier of France,” whose name, by order of Napoleon, used to be pronounced at every roll-call of his regiment, when this answer was solemnly given: “Mort sur le champ de bataille.”

The large open space to which the Panthéon gives its name – Place du Panthéon – was the scene of terrible conflicts between the troops and the insurgents during the Revolution of February, 1848, and again during the unsuccessful insurrection of June in the same year, when troops and national guards all took part against the workmen set free to starve or fight by the closing of the national workshops which, for financial reasons, could no longer be carried on, and against the social democrats who placed themselves at their head. On the northern side of the Place stands the Sainte-Geneviève Library, which, like all the Paris libraries, is open to all comers.

A foreigner who happened to visit the Quartier Latin, and observed the students strolling, lounging, or driving off to the theatre or a ball, might fancy that they led an easy and idle life, but he would be mistaken. These youths, ardent pleasure-seekers as they are, give three-fourths of their time to severe study. Earlier in the day a visitor to the Rue Saint-Jacques might have seen them waiting impatiently for the classes to begin at the College of France; might have seen them issue thence, full of enthusiasm for the great thinkers of their time, and wend their way to this or that public institution affording facilities for private study. A proportion of them would be found to resort to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, where a noble collection of books ranged on shelves adorned with delicate sculptures may well conduce to the tranquil exercise of the mind.

The first library of Sainte-Geneviève, which was founded as a private institution in 1624, and became national property in 1790, occupied in the buildings of the old abbey of the same name a habitation which had to be abandoned some forty years ago, because the building began everywhere to crumble and threaten collapse. The new library was finished and inaugurated in 1850; and although the external architecture is somewhat plain and heavy, the interior is highly artistic, with many a mural painting by master hands. Formerly this library possessed a very curious collection of crayon sketches, portraits of personages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which were transferred by an imperial decree to the library of the Rue de Richelieu. It can support this loss, however, rich as it is in quaint and valuable specimens of art. For its manuscripts, with certain exceptions, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève is not remarkable; though it boasts a particularly fine collection of old printed books, with bindings sumptuous and fantastic enough to turn the head of a bibliophile.

Dependent on the church of Sainte-Geneviève, which it was destined to survive, is the church of St. Stephen-of-the-Mount. Among the wonders of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont is the tomb of Sainte Geneviève, whose relics, patroness saint of Paris as she was, were burnt in 1793 by the Paris Commune in the Place de Grève. During the fête of Sainte Geneviève, from the 3rd to the 11th of January, the church is crowded with pilgrims from the Paris suburbs to the number, it is calculated, of more than one hundred thousand. In the chapel immediately facing the altar stands a monument which contains the heart of Monseigneur Sibour, Archbishop of Paris, assassinated on the 3rd of January, 1857, in this very church, when he was opening the nine days’ service in honour of Sainte Geneviève, by a priest whom he had interdicted. The predecessor of Monseigneur Sibour, Monseigneur Affre, was shot dead by the insurgents of June, 1848, when exhorting them from a barricade to cease fighting. His successor, Monseigneur Darboy, was put to death with the other hostages whom the Paris Commune in 1871 had taken with the view of securing for the Communards made prisoners by the troops the character of prisoners of war.