So when, during a history class that morning, the teacher had asked how many boys had been to visit the horror, and he was the only one not to raise his hand, and the teacher had told him to go to see it, he’d decided to go at once. After all, it wasn’t far.

A mile away at the end of the rue de Grenelle lay the great space of the Champ de Mars, with its western sweep down to the river. But Roland had gone only half that way when his object came in sight.

The great military hospital of Les Invalides occupied a huge open space, once known as the Plaine of Grenelle. In the seventeenth century, Louis XIV had built it in a severe, classical style suitable to a military foundation—though in the middle, for magnificence, he’d added a royal chapel with a gilded dome like St. Peter’s, Rome. From the cold, stern facade of Les Invalides, one could gaze over a long parade of iron-clad lawns, and thence across the Seine to the trees of the Champs-Élysées in the distance. It also housed an artillery museum nowadays, but this was not Roland’s object. Entering the first courtyard, he made straight for the central chapel.

And as he gazed upon the horror that lay within, he understood what the teacher had meant when he’d said: “The chapel of the king has been defiled.”

A square church. Four chapels at the corners made a cross between them. Over the center of the cross, a circular dome. A classic pattern for Christian worship, from Orthodox Russia to Catholic Spain.

But there was nothing Christian about the chapel now. Instead of finding a nave beneath the dome, one looked down from a circular gallery into a marble pit. Twelve pillars of victory encircled this pagan crypt, and in its center, upon a massive, green granite pedestal, rested a stupendous sarcophagus of polished red porphyry, bulging with imperial pride.

The tomb of Napoléon, child of the Revolution, conqueror of God’s anointed monarchs, emperor of France. This was the horror that Roland had been sent to see.

“That vulgar tomb,” the teacher had declared, “that infamous, pagan monument. The sepulcher of Napoléon is an insult to Catholic France.”

“And yet, Father,” one of the class had questioned, “isn’t it true that the emperor Napoléon supported the Church?”