A Wanderer in Paris

by E. V. Lucas

The life of St. Geneviève, as told in The Golden Legend, is rather a series of facile miracles than a human document, as we say. She was born in the fifth century at Nanterre, and early became a protégée of St. Germain, who vowed her to chastity and holiness, from which she never departed. Her calling, like that of her new companion on the canon, St. Joan, was that of shepherdess, and one of Puvis de Chavannes' most charming frescoes in the Panthéon represents her as a shadowy slip of a girl kneeling to a crucifix while her sheep graze about her. I reproduce it [opposite the next page]. Her mother, who had, like most mothers, a desire that her daughter should marry and have children, once so far lost her temper as to strike Geneviève on the cheek; for which offence she became blind. (A very comfortable corner of heaven is, one feels, the due of the mothers of saints.) She remained blind for a long time, until remembering that St. Germain had promised for her daughter miraculous gifts, she sent for Geneviève and was magnanimously cured. After the death of her parent, Geneviève moved to Paris, and there she lived with an old woman, dividing the neighbourhood into believers and unbelievers in her sanctity, as is ever the way with saints. Here the Devil persecuted and attacked her with much persistence and ingenuity, but wholly without effect.

During her long life she made Paris her principal home, and on more than one occasion saved it: hence her importance not only to the Parisians, who set her above St. Denis (whom she reverenced), but to this book. Her power of prayer was gigantic; she literally prayed Attila the Hun out of his siege of Paris, and later, when Childeric was the besieger and Paris was starving, she brought victuals into the city by boat in a miraculous way: another scene chosen by Puvis de Chavannes in his Panthéon series. Childeric, however, conquered, in spite of Geneviève, but he treated her with respect and made it easy for her to approach Clovis and Clotilde and convert them to Christianity—hence the convent of St. Geneviève, which Clovis founded, remains of which are still to be seen by the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont, in the two streets named after those early Christians—the Rue Clovis and the Rue Clotilde. Christianity had been introduced into Paris by Saint Denis, Geneviève's hero, in the third century; but then came a reaction and the new faith lost ground. It was St. Geneviève's conversion of Clovis that re-established it on a much firmer basis, for he made it the national religion.

STE. GENEVIÈVE
PUVIS DE CHAVANNES
(Panthéon)

"This holy maid," says Caxton, "did great penance in tormenting her body all her life, and became lean for to give good example. For sith she was of the age of fifteen years, unto fifty, she fasted every day save Sunday and Thursday. In her refection she had nothing but barley bread, and sometime beans, the which, sodden after fourteen days or three weeks, she ate for all delices. Always she was in prayers in wakings and in penances, she drank never wine ne other liquor, that might make her drunk, in all her life. When she had lived and used this life fifty years, the bishops that were that time, saw and beheld that she was over feeble by abstinence as for her age, and warned her to increase a little her fare. The holy woman durst not gainsay them, for our Lord saith of the prelates: Who heareth you heareth me, and who despiseth you despiseth me, and so she began by obedience to eat with her bread, fish and milk, and how well that, she so did, she beheld the heaven and wept, whereof it is to believe that she saw appertly our Lord Jesus Christ after the promise of the gospel that saith that, Blessed be they that be clean of heart for they shall see God; she had her heart and body pure and clean."

Caxton also tells quaintly the story of one of the first miracles performed by Geneviève's tomb: "Another man came thither that gladly wrought on the Sunday, wherefor our Lord punished him, for his hands were so benumbed and lame that he might not work on other days. He repented him and confessed his sin, and came to the tomb of the said virgin, and there honoured and prayed devoutly, and on the morn he returned all whole, praising and thanking our Lord, that by the worthy merits and prayers of the holy virgin, grant and give us pardon, grace, and joy perdurable."

To St. Geneviève's tomb we shall come on leaving the Panthéon, but here after so much about her adventures when alive I might say something about her adventures when dead. She was buried in 511 in the Abbey church of the Holy Apostles, on the site of which the Panthéon stands. Driven out by the Normans, the monks removed the saint's body and carried it away in a box; and thereafter her remains were destined to rove, for when the monks returned to the Abbey they did not again place them in the tomb but kept them in a casket for use in processions whenever Paris was in trouble and needed supernatural help. Meanwhile her tomb, although empty, continued to work miracles also.

Early in the seventeenth century her bones were restored to her tomb, which was made more splendid, and there they remained until the Revolution. The Revolutionists, having no use for saints, opened Geneviève's tomb, burned its contents on the Place de Grève, and melted the gold of the canopy into money. They also desecrated the church of St. Etienne-du-Mont (which we are about to visit) and made it a Temple of Theophilanthropy. A few years later the stone coffer was removed to St. Etienne-du-Mont, where it now is, gorgeously covered with Gothic splendours; but as to how minute are the fragments of the saint that it contains which must have been overlooked by the incendiary Revolutionaries, I cannot say. They are sufficient, however, still to cure the halt and the lame and enable them to leave their crutches behind.

The Panthéon is a vast and dreary building, sadly in need of a little music and incense to humanise it. The frescoes are interesting—those of Puvis de Chavannes in particular, although a trifle too wan—but one cannot shake off depression and chill. The Joan of Arc paintings by Lenepveu are the least satisfactory, the Maid of this artist carrying no conviction with her. But when it comes to that, it is difficult to say which of the Parisian Maids of art is satisfactory: certainly not the audacious golden Amazon of Frémiet in the Place de Rivoli. Dubois' figure opposite St. Augustin's is more earnest and spiritual, but it does not quite realise one's wishes. I think that I like best the Joan in the Boulevard Saint-Marcel, behind the Jardin des Plantes.