See that golden dome? That's the Dome des Invalides — a hundred and seven meters tall, covered in twelve kilograms of gold leaf, and the tallest church building in Paris. Twelve kilograms sounds modest until you realize that's five hundred and fifty thousand individual gold leaves, each one pressed on by hand with a polecat hairbrush. The dome has been regilded five times since the sixteen nineties, and the amount of gold up there is worth roughly the same as a very nice apartment in the seventh arrondissement. France spent a fortune making a roof shiny. I respect it enormously.
This whole complex was built by Louis the Fourteenth in the sixteen seventies as a home for wounded soldiers — veterans of his many wars who had been begging on the streets of Paris. At its peak, four thousand veterans lived here. The stairs inside are unusually smooth and shallow, designed so that men with wooden legs could navigate without falling.
But you're not here for the stairs. You're here for the man
in the basement.
Napoleon Bonaparte is buried under that dome in a massive red stone sarcophagus — nearly five meters long, four meters high, about the size of a small car. It sits in a circular open crypt six meters deep, and here's the part nobody tells you: you look DOWN at it. You stand at a marble balustrade above and peer into the pit. Look up and you see a painted golden heaven on the dom
