Napoleon's Attic

One of the things I remember from my only previous visit to Paris, as a young teenager was going to the Les Invalides - home of Napoleon's tomb, but also a big military museum. Although the main museum was interesting enough to a boy who played napoleonic wargames, the thing that stuck in my mind were the military models that were used to show the defences of key locations across France. They were all set out up in the attic space of the building, a little neglected compared to the rest of the museum, but fascinatingly intricate. And the memory stayed with me, as I wrote a short piece about it for my writing group, years later (maybe I'll look it out again). Anyway, on a day for visiting a few places, I decided I'd return to Les Invalides and see if the models were still there. Sure enough there were signs to the Musee des Plans-Reliefs - satisfyingly up on the top floor. Up there things had obviously been updated but the models were still there, under the eaves in the roof space, with very few visitors compared with the rest of the complex. There are only a selection on display, and the glass cases are much more modern and coordinated so there is much less of a feel of them having just been dumped up in the attic. I found out more about the collection - the fact it had started in the 17th century, been moved from the Louvre in the 1770s to Les Invalides where it remained in use as a military planning tool until the 1870s. The museum was established in the 1940s but had indeed been renovated in the 1990s.