La Madeleine

This guide to La Madeleine opens at Frédéric Chopin's funeral in 1849, when three thousand mourners gathered for a requiem the church almost refused to allow, because it needed female voices in a building that had never let a woman sing inside it. It follows the building's identity through eight decades of reinvention, from a planned church for Louis XV to a temple Napoleon declared to his own army's glory, before it was finally consecrated. Look up at the domes, where every bit of light falls from skylights rather than windows.