Travelers' Tales Paris (12 page)

She turned on me a weary, faintly superior and terminally sophisticated face: “Just think about it another little moment, Monsieur White.”

More and more landlords are deciding to eliminate the concierge. The escalating cost of construction provides an excellent argument for the termination of an ongoing contract. Selling the ground floor apartment to finance renovation makes perfect sense—on paper. Won't a maintenance crew be more efficient in keeping the building clean? Why not install a row of mailboxes, instead of having letters hand-delivered? And a
digicode?
Is it really necessary to pay a concierge to keep watch when modernization
has transformed the apartment building into a fortress with locks and security systems?

The concierge appears to be an anachronism as we approach the 21st century. Well, perhaps. But, she remains that extra dimension that makes urban life more pleasant. It is the concierge who gives each building its soul. Once she is eliminated, the human factor will be lost forever.

—Alexandra Grabbe,
French Graffiti

HELEN DUDAR

T
HE WIDOW LADY FROM
T
ROY
, N
EW
Y
ORK, WAS OFFENDED, INDEED
seriously shocked. For some months of 1830–31, Emma Willard was in residence in Paris. She had, of course, toured the Louvre Museum—or perhaps only as much of it as a virtuous person could endure. As her journal would report, the place was an offense against decency, its walls crowded with works more suitable to dens of iniquity than to a public collection of art. Now, Emma Willard was an early feminist, a pioneer educator of women; don't even ask how she could have known anything about the decor of iniquitous dens. It is likely that she was shaken by images of naked creatures celebrating a few of life's pleasures. Even more offensive was the cavalier way in which sacred and profane works were allowed to mingle. In Mrs. Willard's eyes, the morality of all Paris was imperiled.

Sixteen decades later, the relentlessly modernized Louvre is not so much a shock as a bombardment of surprises. One recent season, a devotee of vintage monster films could take in King Kong and Godzilla in a single sitting or spend an entire day listening to expert discussions of the iconoclastic American architect Frank Gehry, perhaps hoping for a gorilla to appear. In the fairly new,
immense underground-entrance space below I. M. Pei's celebrated glass pyramid, dedicated shoppers roamed through boutiques crammed with expensive knickknackery and shawls priced at $300. There were not only cafés for light bites but a gourmet restaurant where, at last, a finicky diner could encounter what national standards currently consider a “correct meal;” there were concerts and art lectures and a post office handy for mailing souvenir cards; there were stacks of videocassettes on Louvre masterworks turned out with Hollywoodian finesse by a new department of cultural affairs.

And borrowing a leaf from enterprising American museums, the Louvre was now available for private parties. On Tuesdays, when the museum is closed, the same subterranean entrance area known as the Cour Napoleon, which displays no art that might be endangered by revelers, may be rented for dinners for a maximum of 1,000 persons. The price: $50,000 to $100,000.

If there is any trauma in the renewal of this storied institution, it is to be suffered in its acreage—miles of hard flooring to be traversed by a serious visitor bent on exploring riches beyond the
Mona Lisa
and the
Winged Victory
. Ten years into what has, without exaggeration, been called the Grand Louvre project—at a cost that has so far scaled the $1 billion mark—the place is bigger than ever and still growing.

In November of 1993 the museum at last became the sole occupant of the rambling old palace it calls home. It occupied and opened the Richelieu Wing, the long arm of the building on the north side of the grounds. A
shabby warren of offices that housed the French Ministry of Finance for more than a century had been gutted and transformed into an elegant sprawl of spaces for art—more than 100 rooms. With the 39 others opened last year in another wing, the museum has doubled its exhibition space.

And there is still more. Inaugurated simultaneously with the Richelieu was an immense underground facility wearing the imposing title of the Carrousel du Louvre. For years now, at the western end of the museum grounds, workmen have been burrowing under the gardens known as the Carrousel. The place was a mess, a perpetual chaos of noise and dirt and disorder, embellished with hopeful signs promising an up-to-date array of amenities. The completed space has its own access to a Métro station and several museum necessities—a laboratory, an amphitheater—but its main purpose was to alleviate burdensome traffic problems.

Until this year, the busy thoroughfare along the Seine River on the south side of the Louvre has been cluttered with parked and double-parked tour buses, the vehicles that shepherd fully one-third of the daily visitors to the museum. Now, at last, underground parking space has been provided for 80 buses and 600 cars. And significantly, there is also space for 60 new shops. Because neither the city nor the state would come up with sufficient funds to pay for a parking installation, rent money from the boutiques, when they are fully leased, will eventually cover the high cost of building underground.

There is no progress without pain. In the quiet of cramped curatorial offices—17th-century rooms equipped with up-to-date computers—staff people sit worrying about the kind of unwelcome visitors this new shoppers' paradise is apt to attract. Not far from the Louvre is a similar underground mall, the Forum des Halles, which replaced the legendary wholesale food markets of Paris. It seems to house a floating population of
voyous
, young and vaguely menacing layabouts from the suburbs who spend hours just hanging around.

In its long, checkered history, the Louvre has survived worse, including the demanding tastes of twenty monarchs, most of whom
lived elsewhere; the dictates of at least fifteen architects who built, tore down and rebuilt segments of the palace for eight centuries; a few revolutions; several names, one of which was Palace of the People; serious fires; the untidy housekeeping of artists allowed to work there; and the greed of the Nazi invaders. In World War II, the Louvre's cherished contents were packed up and trucked to hiding places in
châteaux
scattered throughout the countryside.

The inauguration of two new major installations was timed to coincide with a significant anniversary—the bicentennial of the birth of the Louvre as a public institution. It formally opened November 18, 1793, at the end of the French Revolution, as the Central Museum of the Arts, with a collection of 538 works, most of them acquired by generations of French royalty. These were augmented by art that had lately been confiscated from cathedrals and the great homes of members of the nobility who had either fled or been parted from their heads. For a long time, the premises were primarily devoted to a small army of copyists—spiritual ancestors of the needy artists who today can still be found turning out clumsy replicas of great paintings. In the early years they were the only people allowed in daily; the general public could visit every ten days. Not long after the opening, the name was changed to the Napoleon Museum; the collection had been brilliantly enlarged by a conqueror who knew a thing or two about looting.

Neither the name nor Napoleon's booty would survive Waterloo. In an effort to savor all the stolen art before it was retrieved by the prior owners, in the summer of 1815 an English miniaturist named Andrew Robertson scooped up his spare cash and rushed to Paris. As he recounted in his journal, Robertson haunted the museum, hoping to see everything before the Italians, Prussians, Austrians, Spanish, and Dutch, in turn, arrived and packed up their national treasures. To the French, their claims were a cultural insult. As one outraged Parisian insisted to the visiting artist, “France was the garden and cradle of the arts—the only place where these things ought to be....” Actually, the repatriation efforts were not entirely completed. The Italians accepted a boring Charles Lebrun and left behind a first-rate Veronese; they took
back inlaid marble tables and did not bother with so-called primitive works, which tastemakers of the period rejected as “barbarous.” Over time, bequests, purchases, and astute explorations would fill empty spaces and crowd basement storage rooms. The
Vénus de Milo
, found by French archaeologists digging around the Mediterranean basin, arrived in 1821. For much of the 19th century, the French burrowed through ancient sites in the Middle East, shipping home masterworks of great pre-Islamic civilizations. The result is perhaps the largest and most diverse assemblage of art in the world.

Housing the works and showing them in improved surroundings proved to be a major priority for the President, François Mitterrand; the Grand Louvre project was the subject of his first press conference on taking office in 1981. It is invariably perceived as part of Mitterrand's “edifice complex”—he launched a good number of building projects. On the other hand, the professionals who occupy the Louvre had been wringing their hands over space problems for half a century. As the museum's director, Michel Laclotte, puts it, “It was a dream for generations, from the 1930s on, to have the Richelieu”—the wing occupied until now by the Ministry of Finance.

It would take some time to persuade the ministry to relocate to new headquarters on the edge of Paris. For one two-year period, while the bureaucrats managed to delay their departure, construction work could be pursued only during the night hours, at great expense and inconvenience.

As urgently needed as the Richelieu Wing was a central reception area. There were a half-dozen ways into the Louvre but no suitable gathering place for the large classes of chattering children and the big tour groups shepherded into the museum all day long; there was no auditorium for film, lecture and music programs; and there were hardly any of the merchandising facilities that today's museums thrive on. To find a workable solution and to oversee the platoon of architects who would eventually take on assignments for parts of the huge project, Mitterrand chose I. M. Pei, one of America's most distinguished architects, whose best-known design
was probably the masterly East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Great space for new facilities was to be found only underground. For a time it looked as if nothing at all would rise on the surface of the court, but Pei felt that a marker of some kind was needed, a structure that could also bring daylight into the installation. He thought of domes, he toyed with cubes; he chose a pyramid, a 71-foot-high structure made with panes of clear glass that would reflect the ornate facades surrounding it and the ever-changing sky above. To say that the reaction was hostile scarcely describes the explosion of abuse that greeted his design. “Fit only for Disneyland!” and “The Luna Park of the Louvre!” the critics cried.