"Ardent in her faith and in her charity, Genevieve, whom the greatest perils could not swerve from her duty, brings sustenance to Paris, besieged and threatened with famine." "Genevieve, sustained by her pious solicitude, keeps watch over sleeping Paris." These noble paintings were the last productions of the great artist. A sort of premonition told him that the end was near, in spite of his robust health. "How I shall devote myself to the Panthéon," he wrote, "when I am finished with the Hôtel de Ville! I intend it to be a sort of last will and testament." In these last paintings, Saint Genevieve is no longer a child. Having attained womanhood, her saintliness is such that, from all sides, people come to take shelter behind her veil, like children around their mother, as soon as danger is announced. For the purpose of portraying this hieratic and inspired figure, Puvis de Chavannes found the ideal model close at hand, in the noble woman who had associated her entire life with his. _Genevieve bringing sustenance to Paris_ is the artist's wife who, already mortally ill, inflicted upon herself the most cruel suffering, in order to pose in her husband's studio. The disease which was killing her was known only to herself, and she had the heroism to conceal it up to the supreme hour when, conquered at last, she was stricken down. In painting the pensive and dolorous attitude of _Genevieve watching over sleeping Paris_, the poor artist never once suspected that he was tracing for the last time the portrait of her who had been the consolation and the joy of his whole existence. The unfortunate woman lacked the strength to play her rôle to the end; she was forced to take to her bed. The artist, no less heroic than she, feeling that his own life was slipping away with hers, yet wishing to complete this last work,--his testament--transported his easel beside the dying woman's bed, and there finished the sketches for his picture. In the intervals of time between the paintings executed for the Panthéon, Puvis de Chavannes produced certain other large compositions in no wise inferior either in importance or in merit, notably, in 1883, a large painting for the Palace of Arts, at Lyons. The municipal government of that city, wishing to have the main staircase of the palace decorated, entrusted the execution to the great artist who was at the same time a compatriot. He felt a very special joy in accepting this commission, for he had always retained a vivid memory of the city of his birth. He endowed it with three pictures of a very high order, one of which, _The Sacred Wood, dear to the Arts and the Muses_, is considered by many to be the artist's masterpiece.