The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1885-06-06 00:00:00

The BURIAL PLACE of VICTOR HUM

The Pantheon, as the church dedicated to St.
Genevieve has for some time been called, in which
Victor Hugo's remains have been interred, has gone
through so many vicissitudes and has been the scene
of so many stirring events that a brief review of them
will not be without interest at the present time. The
idea of building this church suggested itself to
Louis XV. after his recovery from the fever wbich
overtook him while he was at Metz, "La Bien-Aline,"
as he was then called, attributing his recovery to the
intercession of St. Genevieve, the patron saint of
Paris, who, according to early tradition, saved the
city from famine, and afterwards from being sacked
by King Clovis. Tradition also tells how the con-
stancy and fervour of St. Genevieve and her sisters in
religion averted the march of Attila and his Huns
upon the city, and this legend has ever since the fifth
century of the Christian era been firmly established
in France. For centuries St. Genevieve had been
worshipped in an abbey which occupied the
site of what is now the Pantheon, and it
was here that Louis XV. determined to build his
church. Many designs were submitted to the King,
who eventually selected that of Souillot, whose idea
was to reproduce, but, of course, upon a smaller scale,
St. Peter's of Rome.
The King laid the foundation-stone amid great
pomp on the 6th of September, 1764, but he did not
live to see his work completed, as the grief which he
felt at the report put in circulation to the effect that
the columns which support the cupola were sinking
was so great that he died in 1781. Although com-
pleted soon afterwards, it had not been consecrated
for public worship at the time of the Revolution, the
parish church then, as now, being St. Etienne du
Mont, and the National Assembly determined, upon
the death of Mirabeau' to make it a receptacle of
the ashes of illustrious Frenchmen. The proposal
that Mirabeau should be the first to receive the
honours of burial there, that, with the exception of a
few men like Descartes, Voltaire, and Rousseau,
none who had lived before the Revolution should be
received within its walls, and that over the main
entrance should be engraved the words "Aux
Grands Hommes, la Petrie Reconnaissante," was sup-
ported by Barnave and Robespierre and voted by
acclamation, and though the denominations ot
Mausoleum, Cenotaph, and Portico of Great Men
were also suggested as alternatives for that of the
Pantheon, this latter was adopted, and has ever since
been used, even when the building has reverted to its
original destination as a church dedicated to St.
Genevieve. The decoration of the building was
altered, the bas-reliefs of the peristyle which repre-
sented the life of St. Genevieve being replaced by
other bas-reliefs representing contemporary subjects,
such as the institution of the jury, public education,
the empire of the law, &c., while Moitte, the sculptor,
carved over the main door an allegorical design in
which the Country, accompanied by Virtue and
Reason, was represented kneeling before an altar
covered with wreaths.
While these alterations-were in progress, Mirabeau's
body was deposited in the old church of St. Etienne
du Mont, beside that of Descartes, and soon after it
had been conveyed in pomp to the Pantheon the re-
mains of Voltaire and Rousseau were also moved
there. But Mirabeau was not destined to rest there
long,. for three years afterwards the Convention de-
cided, upon the proposal of Marie-Joseph Chenier,
speaking on behalf of the Committee of Public In-
struction, that his body should be expelled, upon the
ground that he had carried on intrigues with Louis
1 XVI. and the Court. lathe inflated language of the
I day, Marie-Joseph Chenier said it was resolved to
"inspire mercenary men whose conscience is to be
bought with a price with salutary terror,' and ac-
cordingly Mirabeau's body was removed, and that of
Marat substituted for it. What became of thagreat
orator's remains has never been clearly ascertained,
though at one time it was thought that they had been
discovered at Clamart. a village in the outskirts of
Paris.
Marat's tenancy of the Pantheon was still briefer
than that of Mirabeau, for four months after be had
been interred there the populace came and threw his
remains into the sewer; and, curiously enough,
Victor Hugo himself relates in "Los Miserables "
how the shroud in which Marat was buried came to
be discovered in the main sewer in the year 1805. It
was of very fine linen, and in one corner were a
marquis's coronet and the name " Laubespine." This
shroud was, as a matter of fact, a sheet belonging to
a lady who was very attached to Marat when he was
veterinary surgeon to the Comte d'Artois. After
Charlotte Corday had killed him, this was the only
piece of fine linen found in his rooms, 83 it was used
as a winding-sheet. Voltaire—for whose funeral car
Marie Antoinette had lent two of her horses—Rous-
seau, and one or two others, were more fortunate
than Marat, and when Bonaparte determined to con-
vert the building into a church, as he did in 1806,
reserving to himself the right of burying any of his
great dignitaries there, he did not interfere with the
coffins which had already been placed in the crypt.
But the Borbons were less tolerant, and one of the
first acts of Louis XVIII., when he returned
to France, was to allow the most bigoted of
his supporters to violate the tombs cf Voltaire and
Rousseau. The crypt was invaded by night, the
bones collected in a bag, and buried secretly in some
unknown spot outside Paris. The Legitimists seemed
to have been rather ashamed of this afterwards, for
they placed both coffins under the staircase of the
peristyle, so as to induce the belief that they were
still intact. This was an illusion favoured
or shared in by Louis Philippe's Government, and
the truth did not come out till 20 years ago, and
then in a very curious way: Voltaire's heart was
in the possession, as it always had been, of the
Villette family the last heir to whom bequeathed
it to the present - Bishop of Moulins. He, not
caring to retain such a. profane object, offered it
to the French Academy, Which also refused it, and
it was then made over Co a member of the Tillette
family, who was on the point of selling it to an Eng-
lish collector of curiosities. But he thought better of
it and gave it to the late Emperor to be placed in the
coffin with the rest of the body. The coffin was
accordingly opened by Monsignor De.rboy, Archbishop
of Paris, in 1864, and then the murder was out.
Rousseau's coffin was also opened, and that, too, was
found to be empty, but the guardian of the crypt still
informs visitors that they have before them the
, remains of these two illustrious men, and when M.
Jules Clariete, the well-known writer pointed out to
him during an inspection of the crypt that this was a
mistake, he took him on one side and whispered,
"Do not say a word; if this was known the English
would not come and see the place."
After having been a church for 25 years, a third
change took place in 1831, for King Louis Philippe,
at the suggestion of M. Guizot, once more converted
it into a "Pantheon," replacing the inscription over
the main entrance which Louis XVIII. had had re-
moved, and engraving upon the inner walls the names
of all the men killed during the Revolution of July.
A grand ceremony was held upon the occasion, and,
in the presence of the King and of all the great
officers of State, Nourret sang an ode composed ex-
pressly for the occasion by Victor Hugo:
These inscriptions have shared the fatality which
seems to attach to nearly everything connected with
the Pantheon, and they were removed by order of
Napoleon 111., who, in 1850, when only President of
the Republic, had the church consecrated once more
and restored it to the clergy. But he did not remove
the inscription over the main entrance, though the
frescoes on the walls representing battle-pieces were
painted out. A few notabilities were buried in the
crypt, but it may be said that the only person of great
celebrity interred there at the present time is. Marshal
Lannes. The French Government, however, talk of
placing the bodies of Thiers and Gambetta besides
those of the illustrious poet.
It would be presumptuous to offer an opinion as to
whether the building which commands so magnificent
a prospect of the whole capital, and the dome of
which is even more conspicuous from a distance than
that of the Invalides or than the Are de Triomphe,
has attained its definite destination, seeing that in the
space of less than than a century it has undergone no
fewer than six changes.