Notes and Queries volumes and pages

Notes.

THE PANTHEON AT PARIS.

Among the circumstances which have attracted notice in the remarkable events of the present French revolution, the restoration of the Panthéon to its primitive ecclesiastical name and destination has been specially adverted to, and certainly not without reason from its implied—indeed, its obvious purpose,—that of propitiating the feelings and courting the adhesion at least of the agricultural population of the country to the new order of things; for, indifferent as Paris, with other cities, may be to religious sentiments or practice, the unsophisticated inhabitants of the provinces still conscientiously pursue the forms and exercise the duties of their long-established worship. No surer means of obtaining their suffrages could have been adopted by the French President than by gaining the favour of the parish priests, whose influence is necessarily paramount on such occasions over their flocks.

In the accounts which have appeared in our journals of the Pantheon and its varied fate, several errors and deficiencies having struck me, I beg leave briefly to correct and supply both, with your permission, by a general history of the beautiful edifice.

The church dedicated to St. Geneviève, patroness of Paris, originally begun by Clovis, and finished by his widow, St. Clotilda, in the sixth century (see Butler's Lives of Saints, January 3rd, and June 3rd), had fallen into decay, when Louis XV. determined to construct one near it, upon a large and magnificent scale. Designs presented by the eminent architect Soufflot were adopted, and on the 6th of September, 1764, the king, as stated by Galignani and others, laid the first stone. But scarcely had it emerged from the foundation, when the wide-spreading impiety of the age made it probable that it would eventually be diverted to uses wholly at variance with its destined purpose, and so the following lines foretold so long since as 1777; and never has prediction been more literally in many respects, and for a considerable time more completely, fulfilled:—

The French translation thus impressively renders the sense:—

In the original pediment, since altered by the sculptor David (of Angers), a bas-relief represented a cross in the midst of clouds; and on the plinth was the following inscription:—

which, in 1791, when a decree of the National Assembly appropriated this monument of religion to the reception of the remains of illustrious Frenchmen, was changed to—

On the restoration of the Bourbons, and of the edifice to its first purpose, the Latin inscription resumed its place, with the addition of "LUD. XVIII. RESTITUIT," which, however, again gave way to the French epigraph after the revolution of 1830, still probably to be retained, while accompanied with a due reference to the sanctified patroness of the church.

The French inscription was the happy thought of M. Pastoret, one of the few Academicians that embraced at its origin the principles of the Revolution, which he followed through its varying phases, until he attained an advanced age. The first mortuary deposit in the Pantheon was that of Mirabeau, in August, 1791; and, on the 30th May ensuing, the anniversary of the death of Voltaire, "L'Assemblée Nationale déclara cet écrivain le libérateur de la pensée, et digne de recevoir les honneurs décernées aux grands hommes," &c. On the 27th August following, a similar distinction was decreed to J. J. Rousseau; but in January, 1822, the tombs of these apostles of incredulity were removed, until replaced in 1830. In July, 1793, the monster Marat was inhumed there, "amidst the deepest lamentations and mournful expressions of regret for the loss sustained by the country in the death of the most valued of her citizens," whose corpse, however, on the 8th February, 1795, was torn from its cerements and flung, with every mark of ignominy, into the filth of the sewer of Montmartre. In the vicissitudes of popular favour even Mirabeau's effigy was burned in 1793. Such have been the alternations and ever-recurring contests in the feelings and principles of the ascendant parties—

The cost of this beautiful edifice may be estimated at about a million sterling, or, taking into consideration the difference in the value of money at the periods, one-third of what was expended on our cathedral of St. Paul. The architect of this and other noble monuments of art, Jean Germain Soufflot, born in 1704, died in August, 1781, the victim, it is said, of the jealousy of his rival artists, whose malignant attacks on his works and fame made too deep an impression on his sensitive feelings, though supported in this trial of his moral fortitude by his most intimate friend and director, that genuine philanthropist, the father and institutor of the Deaf and dumb,—the Abbé de l'Epée, in whose arms he died. No one it has been observed, was more justly entitled to have the achievement of his genius invoked, as our Wren's has been, and indicated to the inquirer, as the fit repository of his mortal remains. He did not, however, live to contemplate the completed structure. The sculptor David, who has embellished the pediment with numerous statues, is now a refugee in Brussels, possibly the relative, but certainly the political inheritor of his great namesake's ultra-revolutionary sentiments, the eminent painter, I mean, and âme damnée, as he was called, of Robespierre, an exile, too, in Belgium for many years.

The epitaph above referred to of Sir Christopher Wren, under the choir of St. Paul, celebrated as it rightly is, for its appropriate application ("Subtus conditur hujus Ecclesiæ Conditor ... Lector, si monumentum quæris, circumspice"), does not appear, I may add, to have been a primary, or original thought, for it was long preceded by one of somewhat suggestive and similar tenor in the old church of the Jesuits, now in ruins, at Lisbon (St. Jose). "Hoc mausolæo condita est Illustrissima D.D. Philippa D. Comes (Countess) de Linhares—Cujus, si ... pietatem et munificientiam quæris, hoc Templum aspice"—Obiit MDCIII. This date is long anterior to our great architect's birth (1631), and above a century prior to his death in 1723, while, again, the epitaph was not inscribed for several subsequent years.

J. R. (Cork.)

CHURCHILL THE POET.

Mr. Tooke, in the biographical notice prefixed to the new edition, says that Churchill was educated at Westminster school, and at the age of