Louvre and Ladybug

One anecdote I forgot to mention about yesterday’s finals. There was one sequence on the Jumbotron that provoked a particularly engaged reaction from the crowd. The first shot started with a close-up of a pair of bare feet resting against a railing, to which the crowd immediately whistled and shouted “Oh la la!” (yes, the French actually use this expression. I found this shocking) and gradually panned out, showing an embarrassed French woman who never thought she’d be singled out of the crowd. The next shot was of a couple—the man, with cloud-gray air, aging well and a woman, dressed fashionably yet conservatively. They did not acknowledge the presence of the surveillance, and the crowd didn’t react as it is quite common for the candid-camera recipient to not notice or not care. But then the man recognized his presence and pointed at the jumbotron, and mouthed, “c’est moi” at the woman, who shrugged. Everyone laughed.

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I had a midterm today, in French. It didn’t go too poorly. Which is nice. It was strange to get back into the grind of studying, like I said earlier.

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Oh, the Louvre. That’s right, that silly old thing.

Because I’m taking a lecture class, it would behoove me to actually, you know, attend lectures. That’s what I did today; I went to a lecture on the History of the Palace of the Louvre. Like many such lectures, it attempts to impress by means of deployment of legions of facts: “Did you know the Louvre has existed since the 2nd century?” etc., etc. (Actually it was presented as a coherent monologue rather than a parade of Snapple-lid questions, but that was the feel)

The process, however, was interesting. First of all, it is clear that the lectures are the reserve of the French—I’m certain I was the only foreigner present—and as such receive special treatment (not that I find this necessarily objectionable; it’s France’s museum after all, and it’s not as if the Louvre stiffs the foreign visitor).

The ticket booth for the lectures was recessed from the rest of the gigantic meeting hall under the glass pyramid, for example. After buying a ticket, I waited “Salle 2,” sitting on a carpet-covered seat-bench. We were given headphones for the lecture, which confused me initially—I had not signed up for an audiotour. But once we commenced on the tour, it became clear why they were given. The lecturer speaks into a microphone, which broadcasts sound into the noise-canceling headphones. It means that the lecturer can be heard without shouting herself hoarse. It sounds as if you’re hearing the background noise through a swimming pool, yet with a bubble of air beside you and someone speaking through it extraordinarily clearly. It was an odd effect.

The visitors took the lecture very seriously. There were five or six children with attendant parents. There was another student-aged person, and the rest of the people were older middle-aged to outright old. One of the children was reading a glossy museum book about an artist who’s featured in the Musée du Luxembourg, and the specific essay he was reading was written by Roland Barthes, the French theorist, of “La Mort d’Auteur” fame (basically—from my secondhand knowledge—a theory attacking the practice of consideration of biographical details of the life of the author, as the author and the text are separate), which, if you’ve followed the parenthetical statement before, is quite the heavy-hitter, in the sense that he will club you into somnolence with his heavy prose. So the fact that this bespectacled seven-year-old was reading a piece by this guy unnerved me.

As for the rest of our lecture-goers, most were merely attentive, yet one came equipped with fold-out chair and miniature notebook, which she used to note such facts as “The hall is 440 meters long” while the student-aged person also used a notebook, for keeping such facts as “The Louvre started in the 2nd century.” I can’t diss the fold-out chair; she was adept at grabbing snatches of seating-time and I envied that.

While on the tour, I was content merely to understand, which was a common characteristic with a sizeable minority of the attendees. The rest questioned knowingly and authoritatively. Even the children asked good questions—one, the Barthes reader, asked and answered so many that the lecturer pulled the classic teacher trick of, “Why don’t we give some other people a chance?”

It was a great tour of the Louvre. We saw the medieval castle portion and the newer, opulent, baroque portion. I wasn’t a fan of the latter: too much allusive self-aggrandizement, at least as the French kings practiced it, which is what’s relevant here.

But the tour was great. As we left the museum proper and returned to the recessed chamber for the visites-conferences (lectures), a woman who had previously been silent started asking questions in monologue form about which books would be best to learn more about the Louvre. And then the lecturer replied with her preferences, to which she asked, “But which is the most clear?” By the time we made it back, she’d practically had a syllabus set for her.

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The end of the tour left me with enough time to explore the parts of the Louvre left untrod by us. That part was the Richelieu wing, which is my favorite part of the museum.

The Richelieu wing is devoted exclusively to old sculptures, which I often find tiresome after a few examples—yes, I acknowledge you, Roman Emperor and Greek God, but you must admit that your portrayals are tediously repetitive. Yet the Richelieu wing breathes new life into the genre merely by displaying them well.

I began the sentence about why the display is so good so many ways: “first,” “most important,” etc., but the attempt to isolate one factor or another, whether as most important or not, bequeaths it with excessive importance. So I think the best thing to do is to try a long sentence, which may be too difficult, but I think is the best way to capture the totality of the experience, as it is too well-planned, too together, to attack it peace-meal, to attempt to divide and conquer. The room is large and airy and gives the impression of openness and soaring because of the skylight; when I visited, golden light was beginning to cede to subdued darkness, and that combined with electric lighting imbued the exhibited sculptures with a soft, complex, real aspect; moreover, the reality of the sculptures was aided by their arrangement—most museums display sculptures in regimental procession, which turns them into objects to be ogled rather than realties to be considered—which is divided amongst tiers of stairs, scattered on each level, interspersed with trees, lending them a real aspect—more than once, I found myself believing their reality, wondering as I followed the eyeline of a statue, “What is he looking at?” (Whew, the end of the sentence, and I’m very unsatisfied—words do not satisfy; only being there can) Then I realized that it was merely a statue and it was not real.

Because it was nearing the end of the day, both literally and for the Louvre, the Richelieu Wing was nearly empty. People lounged and ate, seating at benches or some improvised place. The guards, normally either taciturn alone or chatty together, took time to consider the art themselves. An old French woman randomly started a conversation with me, in a low murmur half-to-herself-and-her-world-of-art and half-to-me, about the art (which is strange yet kind of cool—the French do not start random conversations).

When I left at closing time, exiting the emptying Richelieu wing, I saw that the gathering area under the glass pyramid was still full: there was a line, a big one, waiting for the evening’s activities. I guess the Louvre never empties.

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You know how Americans refer to German as an angry language? I get the feeling that the French have also stereotyped English. We were in an empty room, discussing the artifacts of the medieval Louvre, when an English group comes in, with the lecturer declaiming in an elevated yet controlled tone about said artifacts. The French lecturer abruptly ends her spiel, saying that we should move onto the next room, and that it’s “so noisy in here.” The subtext of her tone was, that English language (I don’t believe the English lecturer was American).

This was a theme for her. She repeatedly apologized at the beginning of the lecture about how crowded the Louvre was, what with the foreign tourists and all. I mean, it was fairly crowded, but does the Louvre ever empty?

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There was a ladybug on my desk just now. It was adjusting its wings because it had flown directly into my desk lamp. I thought it might be hurt. Then it began flying, and I knew it was OK. But it proceeded to use its regained ability to fly directly into the light again. I turned it off, and thought, some insects never learn.


Then I switch to an article in Esquire about the Bush administration thinking about invading Iran, and I think, some insects never learn.