Transcription of Patte’s 1770 Mémoire on the Panthéon’s Stability Together with Rondelet’s Marginalia

Conceived and begun by architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot in 1755, the construction of the Church of Ste. Geneviève (later the Panthéon) in Paris was continued after his death by Jean Baptiste Rondelet. The polemic regarding the Panthéon’s stability that was initiated by Pierre Patte in 1770 was amply commented in the separate chapter in this same volume (p. 127–185). In order to complete the picture of that episode of history, we transcribe here Patte’s “Memoir on the construction of the cupola designed to crown the new church of Sainte Genevieve” (Patte 1770a) from an exemplar found in Ms. BHVP 3459 conserved in the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris (Patte 1770b). As one sees on the title page (Fig. 1), the document contains Patte’s Memoir together with the notes that Rondelet wrote in the margin. Rondelet planned to write an answer to Patte, which he provisionally entitled “Refutation of a Memoir on the construction of the cupola designed to crown the new church of Sainte Genevieve in Paris”, but that answer was never published. In the transcription that follows, Patte’s illustrations, originally published all together on two plates, are reproduced here inserted where they belong and the complete plates are also reproduced, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the article. Patte’s Memoir had some footnotes that I indicate with: Patte’s footnote. Other footnotes are due to Rondelet’s son, they are indicated by (Rondelet fils) and a few editor’s notes of my own have been added where they are helpful. English translations of excerpts from the text and Marginalia, with comments, appear in the previous chapter (Radelet-de Grave 2015).