[“High places” are always the first cemeteries and holy sites—as at Montmartre and elsewhere. But the nearest rising ground to Old Paris is the slight elevation just S. of Cluny, now crowned by the colossal dome of the Panthéon. In Frankish times, this hill lay quite outside the city; but on its summit (just behind his Palace of Les Thermes), Clovis, after his conversion by Ste. Geneviève, is said to have erected a church to St. Peter and St. Paul. Here =Ste. Geneviève= herself was buried in 512; and the chapel raised over her tomb grew into a church—the favourite place of pilgrimage for the inhabitants of Paris. The actual body of the patron saint was enclosed, in 550, in a magnificent shrine, executed by St. Éloy, the holy blacksmith. Throughout the Middle Ages this church and tomb of Ste. Geneviève, which occupied the site of the existing Panthéon, nearby, were the objects of the greatest devotion. St. Denis was the saint of the kings and nobles; but Ste. Geneviève was, and still remains, the saint of the people, and especially of the women. Miracles were constantly performed at her shrine, and her aid was implored at all moments of national danger or misfortune. A great (Augustin) abbey grew up in time behind the church, and was dedicated in honour of the holy shepherdess. The wall of Philippe Auguste bent abruptly southward in order to include her shrine and this powerful abbey. In the twelfth century, when the old church of St. Stephen (in French, St. Étienne), on the site of Notre-Dame, was pulled down in order to make room for the existing cathedral, the relics of St. Stephen contained in it were transferred to a new edifice—=St. Étienne-du-Mont=—which was erected by the monks, close to the Abbey of Ste. Geneviève, as a parish church for their servants and dependents. In the sixteenth century this second church of St. Stephen was pulled down, with the exception of its tower, which is still standing. The existing church of St. Étienne was then begun on the same site in the Gothic style, and slowly completed with extensive Rennaissance alterations.