On 6th September 1764, the crypt of the new St. Genevieve being completed, the Well-Beloved laid the first stone of the church. Scarcely was the scaffolding removed after thirteen years of constructive labour, and the expenditure of sixteen millions of livres, when it became necessary to call in Soufflot’s pupil Rondelet, to shore up the walls and strengthen the columns which had proved too weak to sustain the weight of the huge cupola. Before the temple was consecrated the Revolutionists came, and noting its monumental aspect used it with admirable fitness as a Panthéon Français for the remains of their heroes; the dome designed to cover the relics of St. Genevieve soared over the ashes of Voltaire, Mirabeau, Rousseau and Marat. Thrice has this unlucky fane been the prize of Christian and Revolutionary reactionaries. In 1806 Napoleon I. restored it to Christian worship, and in 1822 the famous inscription—“Aux grands Hommes la Patrie reconnaissante” (“A grateful country to her great men”)—was removed by Louis XVIII., and replaced by a dedication to God and St. Genevieve; in 1830 Louis Philippe, the citizen king, transferred it to secular and monumental uses, and restored the former inscription; in 1851 the perjured Prince-President Napoleon, while the streets of Paris were yet red with the blood of his victims, again surrendered it to the Catholic Church; in 1885 it was reconverted to a national Walhalla for the reception of Victor Hugo’s remains.
The Pantheon has the most magnificent situation and, except the new church of the Sacré Cœur, is the most dominant building in Paris. Its dome, seen from nearly every eminence commanding the city, has a certain stately, almost noble, aspect; but the spacious interior, despite the efforts of the artists of the third Republic, is chilling to the spectator. It has few historical or religious associations, and it is devoid of human sentiment. The choice of painters to decorate the interior was an amazing act of official insensibility. The most discordant artistic temperaments were let loose on the devoted building. Puvis de Chavannes, the only painter among them who grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the life of St. Genevieve, and Jean Paul Laurens is responsible for a splendid but incongruous representation of her death. A St. Denis, scenes in the lives of Clovis, Charlemagne, St. Louis, and Jeanne d’Arc, by Bonnat, Blanc, Levy, Cabanel and Lenepveu, are all excellent work of the kind so familiar to visitors at the Salon, but are lacking in harmony and in inspiration. The angel appearing to Jeanne d’Arc seems to have been modelled from a figurante at the opera.