One Reaction Fits All, or Wow!

On Monday, I went to the Louvre for the first time. I wrote an entry the evening before, only half jokingly describing the mental and physical preparations I was undertaking in order to make the trip. I didn't mention, in that entry, that I had also recruited an ally to accompany me. I met Isabelle, a French statistician in her early 30's, on Craigslist Paris for a language exchange. Our first meeting was at a bar to watch Obama's inauguration, and it was Isabelle who took the photo of me standing outside Harry's Bar afterwards. We hit it off, and her strong command of English was enough to compensate for my fumbling attempts at full sentences in French, so we agreed to meet again.

Isabelle herself is not from Paris, so her outsider status here in the capital might be part of the reason we get along so easily. The small handful of people I'm befriending here are also outsiders; first, a friend's sister from Montreal, and next, the couple from whom I am renting my apartment. Vincent is French, but from the south, and Saskia, who emigrated here from Germany about 20 years ago. It seems Paris may be a bit like San Francisco in this regard. Many of the locals here, after a one minute exploration of their origins, are in fact not "true" locals. But back to Isabelle, who is from a small village in the extreme southwest of France in the region of Pau, which spoken aloud, sounds a bit like the word we associate with stinky, as in Pepe Le. Having lived in Paris for a full eight years, and never having been to the Louvre, I considered Isabelle a perfect second, and invited her to break the invisible boundaries surrounding us both by going with me to the Louvre. Bless her heart, she assented, and we made a plan to meet Monday at the absurdly late hour of 1 PM by the Pyramid. I had seen photos of the glass pyramid outside the west entrance of the Louvre before, so felt fairly confident that this meeting place would work.

What I had not anticipated was the Metro system being built so cleverly, so that when you exit the Metro for the Louvre, you in fact exit into a large underground shopping complex that leads directly into the Museum itself. At one point in this complex, you can stand directly underneath the glass pyramid and look up. I had a slight panic, because Isabelle and I hadn't actually specified whether we were meeting by the part of the pyramid that was outdoors, or by the part that was indoors! I went with my gut and figured we were meeting outside. Now that that was decided, I next had to wander around to find an exit that would actually get me outside. Are new places/tourist areas/foreign countries always this confusing, or am I just out of practice?

Well, I made it above ground, and had another one of those moments where a dumb gleeful smile burst across my face and I just stood there for a second muttering, "Wow!" to myself. My first view of the Palais du Louvre. Immense, gorgeous, sprawling, magnificent, and clearly of a historical time and place that the 21st-century layperson, and an American at that, would find difficult to conceive.

I won't trace through the few hours of exploring that we did inside the Louvre, but let me just say that the portion that I saw was amazing. I felt sorry for Isabelle having to listen to me say, "Wow" or "Oh my God" so many times. We primarily saw French and Italian paintings, and then stumbled through a number of other sections, primarily Greek, Etruscan, Roman and Near Eastern Antiquities, trying to reach the two Egyptian sections, which we never did reach.

The Venus di Milo and the Nike of Samothrace, whose name may not be as familiar but whose image most certainly is, were two of my favorites. Stunning. And I will add my vote to the chorus of others who say that the Mona Lisa is not nearly as impressive as all the hype would suggest. This may partially be due to the fact that it is the only piece in the entire museum which you can not get near enough to appreciate up close, unlike DaVinici's other gorgeous paintings. The few Picassos I saw felt sorely out of place in a welcome way, which gave me a greater appreciation for how far this man went and went again beyond the bounds of tradition. There were also two rooms filled with sketches by Picasso, Kandinsky, Cezanne and Klee, as well as handwritten scores by Wagner and Stravinski, all pulled together and arranged under the title Oeuvre: Fragments, by French composer and conducter Pierre Boulez. Aside from the precariously shifting floorboards in the rooms, which I don't think were part of the piece, this exhibit was a fascinating insert into the whole of the Louvre, recalling to mind the many-staged processes of creation that lie unseen behind finished works. This room to me felt like someone snapping their fingers to startle you awake, and so, though I do doubt the unstable floorboards were intentional, they actually made perfect sense.

All in all, an excellent introduction to the Louvre!