Church of Saint Mary Magdalene

For 78 years, Paris couldn’t decide what La Madeleine was for. Construction started in 1764 as a parish church, replacing an older one nearby that had grown too small for the neighborhood. The architect died in 1777. His successor tore down what existed and started over, then the Revolution stopped everything before that version got anywhere either. In 1806, Napoleon looked at the half-built shell and saw a temple honoring the Grande Armée, no cross, no bell tower, just Corinthian columns wrapped around the building on all four sides like an ancient Roman idea of glory. That plan died with the empire in 1814. In 1837, someone floated turning the whole thing into Paris’s first railway station. That died too. The church finally opened as a church in 1842, dedicated to Mary Magdalene, having spent nearly eight decades being almost several other things first.

Seven years later, it hosted a funeral that tested exactly how committed it was to being a church. Chopin had requested Mozart’s Requiem, which requires female voices, and La Madeleine did not permit women to sing in its services. The Archbishop of Paris eventually granted a dispensation, on the condition that the female soloists, including Pauline Viardot, perform from behind a black velvet curtain, audible but not visible to the roughly 3,000 mourners in the nave. Chopin got his music. The church kept its rule intact by simply not looking at the people breaking it.

The building that couldn’t settle on a purpose ended up hosting one of the most purpose-built funerals in Parisian history, one written around a single unbending condition. Somewhere in that arrangement is the whole personality of the place: flexible enough to bend, rigid enough to insist the bending happen out of sight.