The Pantheon has the most magnificent situation and, except the new church of the Sacre Coeur, is the most dominant building in Paris. Its dome is seen from nearly every eminence commanding the city, and 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. Swept and garnished, it has no warmth of historical or religious associations; 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 has grasped the limitation of mural art, has painted with restraint and noble simplicity incidents in the story of St. Genevieve. Jean Paul Laurens is responsible for a splendid but incongruous representation of the death of St. Genevieve. 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 to the Salon at Paris, but lacking in harmony and in inspiration. The angel appearing to Jeanne d'Arc seems to have been modelled from a _figurante_ at the opera. The visitor who has perused the opening chapters of this book will have no difficulty in following the subjects depicted on the walls. A more ambitious scheme of decoration was abruptly closed by the Coup d'Etat of Napoleon III.: Chenavard, who had been commissioned, in 1848, to decorate the interior by a series of forty cartoons, illustrating the "History of Man from his first sorrows to the French Revolution," found his gigantic project made abortive by the Prince President's treachery.