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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:—
"Templum augustum, ingens, reginâ assurgit in urbe,