PARIS, June 4: Citizens of a sleepy French village took up arms on Monday against designs to dig up their greatest son Alexandre Dumas — author of the immortal classic “The Three Musketeers” — and transfer him to the company of the illustrious dead of the Paris Pantheon.

The 19th century author penned some of the world’s most popular romances, including “The Count of Monte Cristo.”

The mayor of his birthplace Villers-Cotterets, northeast of Paris, challenged a decree by President Jacques Chirac that Dumas’ remains be removed from the local churchyard to a new resting place in the Pantheon between fellow-novelist Emile Zola and poet Victor Hugo.

The Pantheon, a magnificent neo-classical edifice on Paris’ left bank, is the last resting place of the greatest of France’s great.

Most recent admissions have been the scientists Pierre and Marie Curie in 1995, and the writer and former culture minister Andre Malraux in 1996.

Mayor Renaud Belliere has asked the State council, France’s highest administrative tribunal, to suspend the presidential decree. A ruling was expected this week.

Attorney Arnaud Lyon-Caen, acting for the local community, recalled the novelist’s own last wish that he “return to future night in the same place where I emerged from life past.”

Dumas, who died in 1870, rhapsodised on the graveyard of his home town as “more like a charming flower pasture for children to romp in than a funeral field...”

“That rules out the idea that he ever wished to be buried in the sinister, glacial crypt of the Pantheon,” said Lyon-Caen, who is invoking an 1887 French law giving citizens the right to choose where they wish to be buried.

But the reburial would mark the bicentenary of Duma’s birth in 1802 and it appears government in Paris has its mind equally firmly made up.

The culture ministry argues that it matters not a whit where the great man lies: his association with his home town would suffice to ensure it everlasting fame.-AFP