Musée du Louvre

One of the special events that Martha had booked for us during our time in Paris was a guided tour of the Louvre Museum, the first of many adventures on this our third full day in Paris.  We had scheduled a taxi to arrive at our hotel at 9:00 a.m. and take us to the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, a monumental arch with a horse-drawn chariot on top, situated across the road from the courtyard of the Louvre, just south of the Jardin du Tuileries.

The extensive buildings all around made it clear that one could spend a lifetime touring this place, but at least we would have half a day with a professional guide.  In the courtyard we saw the famous Louvre Pyramid, a large glass and metal structure designed by the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, which serves as the main entrance.  The Pyramid was controversial at the time it was erected, but is now a landmark of Paris, the centerpiece of a renovation called the Grand Louvre project begun in 1981.  It consists of 70 triangles and 603 diamond-shaped glass pieces installed, one by one, on a structure made of 190,000 pounds of steel and 210,000 pounds of aluminum.

 

 

Lines were already forming in the courtyard, tourists who would stand for two or three hours in the sun waiting for admission.  So I was glad that our tour promised to give us “skip-the-line” access and an English-speaking guide.  We descended nearby steps into the entrance below where an inverted pyramid admitted light from above - both beautiful and impressively functional!

Our guide for the tour was Natalie, a poised, mature, elegant-looking woman who seemed to be familiar with every single object in the museum.

She must surely hold a doctorate in art history, I realized, as she took us through room after room of art that was absolutely jaw-dropping, explaining in details its origin and significance.

We went into one gallery after another, so splendid that it is difficult to describe within the humble confines of this blog.  It was as if my eyes were at a memorable feast, and by the end of three hours I could not hold another bite of beauty.

“There is so much to choose to show you,” Natalie said at one point, “So I will choose this room!”  We entered a long gallery which was lined on both sides with four-meter high paintings, which I learned was called the Rubens Room, or the Galerie Médicis.  It contains the complete series of paintings of the life of Marie de’ Medici by Peter Paul Rubens, one of the greatest painters of his time.  She was the widow of King Henri IV and the mother of King Louis XIII, and each painting represented episodes of the queen’s life.  One by one, Natalie took us around the room, pointing out historical and symbolic features in the paintings that would have completely escaped us had we, like some of the tourists we saw, been on our own, wandering aimlessly from room to room.  At one point some members of our tour group sat on benches in the middle of the gallery to rest (we had ascended and descended many stairs!), and clearly annoyed, Natalie gestured to them to get up and said, “We are here to see great art, not to relax!”

 
We also saw two very famous classical Greek sculptures, the Venus de Milo and the winged Victory of Samothrace, or the Nike of Samothrace.  Crowds had begun to increase by this time, and it was difficult to make our way around these rooms.

Finally we reached the room to which most visitors of the Louvre are drawn, the famous painting of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.  “Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance,” Wikipedia says, “It has been described as ‘the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, and the most parodied work of art in the world.’”  At the far end of a line zig-zagging back and forth before us hung what seemed to be a very small painting, permitting the patient visitor only a few seconds to take a photo, often a “selfie.”

I would never belittle a painting that is clearly a masterpiece, but there is no doubt that there is a lot of hype about what is one of many, many masterpieces hanging in this museum.  I have read about the mysteries surrounding the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, such as the way the background on either side doesn’t seem to match up, and why she is wearing no wedding ring.  But it is that enigmatic smile, of course, which causes the most speculation.  Is she sharing a private joke with the painter?  Is she sneering?  I like to think that she is looking ahead into the future, and is amused at these long, long lines of visitors coming to see her.

We gratefully thanked Natalie after the tour and made our way back to the Jardin du Tuileries, this time having lunch at another outdoor café – smoked salmon and emmental cheese quiche and a welcome bière pression. (They do have some surprisingly good beers in France, although we had yet to discover any IPAs so far).  Realizing how close we were to the Left Bank (La Rive Gauche) and the Latin quarter, home of the original Shakespeare and Company bookstore and inspiration for our local bookseller in Highlands (see yesterday’s post), we had planned to cross the Seine and explore the area.  The book store is a famous one, opened in 1951 on the site of Sylvia Beach’s bookstore of the same name, famous for publishing Joyce’s Ulysses and as a hangout for Americans of the Beat Generation.  There were long, long lines waiting for admission to the little store, which we finally located deep in the maze of tiny streets in that part of Paris

My book of poetry, Bells in the Night, was published last year, and our own local Shakespeare and Company had graciously hosted a book signing there.  Thinking of that event, I had brought a copy with me, and Martha took this photo of me outside the store.  I had wanted to go in the store and hide it on a shelf somewhere, but I was not willing to wait in line for an hour to do so.  There used to be a tradition where so-called “tumbleweeds,” vagabonds traveling to the book store, could sleep there at no cost provided they agreed to volunteer there and to read a book every day.   But today the store was too crowded for that blissful time when Allen Ginsberg and Ernest Hemingway graced its narrow aisles.

We spent some time in the area, walking the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter with its many shops.  It was here that I found something I had been looking for, a hat – a French hat, I told myself, although not a beret (to which I am philosophically opposed) – which I wore for the rest of our time in France.

We participated in another tradition in Paris on this day, too, crossing the famous Pont des Arts bridge across the Seine, where generations of couples have shared a tradition of attaching “love locks” to the bridge and tossing the key in the river below in symbolic acts of affection.  Alas, the City of Paris started removing padlocks from the bridge in 2015 due to concerns about the weight (there were literally tons of locks attached to it).  

Still, visitors manage to find a way, hanging them on temporary cables which I suppose are removed from time to time, or high on the ornamental street lights on the bridge.  We had brought a lock for this purpose and there it hangs to this day, the key thrown into the waters of the Seine.

It had been a long day, and we took a taxi back to our hotel.  Because of Bastille Day, Que pour les Gourmands was not open, but we found a little patisserie up the street in the opposite direction, Le Grenier a Pain Tocqueville, where we bought two delicious, braided baguettes, one containing mozzarella and tomato and another olives, and brought them back to the hotel.  We had discovered that the courtyard in the hotel was very, very quiet, since it was totally enclosed, and we had it to ourselves at that time of day, a welcome moment of tranquility and silence after the hustle and bustle of the crowds at the Louvre and in the Latin Quarter.