One of the most unpleasant features of the Third Republic is its ghoulish tendency to disturb the dead. Not content with: opening the coflins of Voltaire and Rousseau' and unearthing Turgot, sundry zealous, deputies, with antiquarian tastes, propose to transfer the remains of Balzac, Renan, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Edgar Guinct, and a few other celebrities to the Pantheon, to make that building a sort of Republican and secular Westminster Abbey. The notion seems to be a mixture of centralisation gone mad and unholy curiosity. A committee of the Chamber of Deputies has been appointed to select the great men who may be thought worthy of a place in the Pantheon and to make arrangements with any of natives who may be entitled to have voice in the matter. The descendants of Lamartine have already refused their consent, bat, it is to be feared that the illustrious dead who have no descendants to' protect their bones will not escape the Pantheon.
19th May.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.