Les Invalides, as it is widely known, is an outstanding monumental baroque ensemble designed by architect Libéral Bruant in the 1670s at the behest of Louis XIV's minister of finance, the incorruptible Colbert, to house wounded soldiers. Along the facade are eerie dormer windows shaped like 17th-century armor. Although no more than a handful of old soldiers live at the Invalides today, the military link remains in the form of the Musée de l'Armée, one of the world's foremost military museums, with a vast collection of arms, armor, uniforms, banners, and military pictures down through the ages.

The 17th-century Église St-Louis des Invalides, the Invalides' original church, was the site of the first performance of Berlioz's Requiem, in 1837. The most impressive dome in Paris, based on that of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, towers over Jules Hardouin-Mansart's church, the Église du Dôme, built onto the end of Église St-Louis but blocked off from it in 1793 -- no great pity, perhaps, as the two buildings are vastly different in style and scale. Fittingly, for this military complex, Napoléon's Tomb is found here -- his remains are kept in a series of no fewer than six coffins, one inside the next, within a bombastic memorial of red porphyry, ringed by low reliefs and a dozen statues symbolizing his campaigns. COST: EUR7. Métro: La Tour-Maubourg.