Toxic Lead Levels in Paris’s Palais Garnier Opera Delay Renovation

The discovery of lead during renovation work at Paris’s historic Palais Garnier—opened in 1875 and summoned as inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera (and even more famously for Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical adaptation)—has “throw[n] a tight schedule of venue closures and the projected budget into disarray,” according to a report in Le Figaro.Planned restoration work that was supposed to take two years is now projected for fiv