Paris: The Novel

his brother died and he had to return home to run the estate, because it was his duty. Since you’re the only son, and there’s no one else to carry on the line, that’s rather your position, too. As you’ll be running the estate, it wouldn’t be a bad thing for you to study law.”
    Yet the law didn’t seem a very exciting profession. As the descendant ofcrusading knights, and even the hero Roland, the boy couldn’t help feeling that fate must have some nobler destiny in store for him.
    “What about the army?” he’d several times asked his father. But for some reason his father had seemed reluctant to encourage that ambition.
    “I was in the army, of course,” he’d say, “until I resigned my commission. But I don’t want it for you.” He never explained why.
    Nor was Father Xavier explicit.
    “Do you wish to serve God?” he gently inquired.
    “Yes, Father.” He truly did. Indeed, if ambition was not a sin of pride, he hoped he might do some great thing for the world, in the Lord’s service.
    “Then you have nothing to worry about,” the priest assured him. “If you commit yourself to God, then He will show you the way.” He smiled. “I know that you desire to do good in the world, Roland, and it does you credit. How pleased your mother would be.”
    “Sometimes I dream of her,” the boy confessed. “Perhaps she will show me the way.”
    “Perhaps. But be careful,” Father Xavier counseled. “It is not for you to choose how God conveys His wishes. He will decide the means, and it may be something quite unexpected.”

    Once his school friends had parted from him in the street, Roland unconsciously picked up his pace. He wasn’t going on this mission because he wanted to, and he hoped to get it over with as quickly as possible.
    After all, he was going to see a horror.
    Roland was a conscientious pupil. It didn’t come naturally, because he often didn’t want to work. It was only because of his mother, really, that he forced himself to do it. “Promise me, Roland, that you will try your best at school.” It was almost the last thing she’d ever said to him. And to his credit, he had always kept his promise. Other boys in the class might be cleverer, but by working hard, he usually managed to get grades that were only a little behind the leaders.
    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 theChamp 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