A modern steeple lifts a stately spire between the church-porch and the adjoining Mayor’s Court. The little old belfry is thrown into background and shadow, as if it sought to slink out of sight and history. We paused beneath it, within the church upon the very spot pressed by the ringer’s feet that awful night. The sacristan stared when we asked what had become of the bell, and why it had not been preserved as a historical relic.
“There is a carillon (chime) in the new steeple. Fine bells, large and musical. Unfortunately, they do not at present play.”
The ceiling of the church is disproportionately low; the windows, splendid with painted glass, light the interior inadequately, even in fine weather. As we paced the aisles the settling of the clouds without was marked by denser shades in the chapels and chancel, blotting out figures and colors in frescoes and paintings, and making ghostly the trio of sculptured angels about the cross rising above the holy-water basin—or bénitier. Fountains of holy-water at each corner of the Place would not be amiss.
The Parisian Panthéon has had a hard struggle for a name. First, it was the Church of Ste. Géneviève, the patron saint of Paris, erected soon after her martyrdom, A.D. 500. The present building, finished in 1790, bore the same title until in 1791, the Convention, in abolishing Religion at large, called it “the Panthéon” and dedicated it to “the great men of a grateful country.” This dedication, erased thirty years afterward, was in 1830, again set upon the façade, and remains there, malgré the decree of Church and State, giving back to it the original name.
Under the impression that Ste. Géneviève was buried in the chapel named for her and the church decorated with scenes from her life, I accosted a gentlemanly priest and asked permission on behalf of a namesake of the girl-saint to lay a rosary entrusted to me, upon her tomb. He heard me kindly, took the chaplet and proceeded to inform me that Ste. Géneviève was burned (brûlée), but that “we have here in her shrine, her hand, miraculously preserved, and her ashes.”
“That must do, I suppose,” said I, as deputy for American Géneviève. The chaplet was laid within the shrine, blessed, crossed and returned to me. I had no misgivings until our third visit to Paris, when, going into St. Étienne du Mont, situated also in the Place du Panthéon, I discovered that Ste. Géneviève had not been burned; had been buried, primarily, in the Panthéon, then removed to St. Étienne du Mont, and had now rested for a thousand years or so, in a tomb grated over to preserve it from being destroyed by the kisses and touches of the faithful. I bought another rosary; the priest undid a little door on the top of the grating, passed the beads through and rubbed them upon the sacred sarcophagus. Novices are liable to such errors and consequent discomfiture.
The Panthéon, imposing in architecture and gorgeous in adornment, assumed to us, through a series of disappointments, the character of a vast receiving-vault. The crypt is massive and spacious, supported by enormous pillars of masonry, and remarkable for a tremendous echo, whereby the clapping of the guide’s hands is magnified and multiplied into a prolonged and deafening cannonade, rolling and bursting through the dark vaults, as if all the sons of thunder once interred (but not staying) here were comparing experiences above their vacated tombs, and suiting actions to words in fighting their battles over again.
Mirabeau’s remains were taken from this crypt for re-interment in Père Lachaise. Marat—the Abimelech of the Jacobin fraternity—was torn from his tomb, tied up in a sack like offal, and thrown into a sewer. There is here a wooden sarcophagus, cheap and pretentious, inscribed with the name of Rousseau and the epitaph—“Here rests the man of Nature and of Truth.” The door is ajar—a hand and wrist thrust forth, upbear a flaming torch—an audacious conception, that startled us when we came unexpectedly upon it.
“A sputtering flambeau in this day and generation,” said Caput.
The guide, not understanding one English word, hastened to inform us that the tomb was empty.