20240603; A Day at the Louvre Museum
Breakfast in the Hotel Montfleuri is Quality Inn/Best Western affair with continental breakfast items along with sausage links and scrambled egg omelets. But the French do like their baguettes, and have very fresh baguettes on the buffet which are nice and crispy/crunchy on the crust and soft and fresh on the inside. We made up a pair of cold cut and cheese sandwiches to take with us to the Louvre. When we got to the Louvre Metro station, it was confusing how to get to where we were yesterday because the Metro empties out into a huge underground mall with multiple levels, entries and exits, and it connects directly with the museum’s lobby.
We found what we thought were the right stairs to exit at the Carrousel but a security guard said it was closed and that we would have to go out through a different exit. So we ended up exiting out the side of the museum and then walked around to the rendezvous where we did meet up with our guide. There were about 25 people on the tour, but they did provide VOX receivers which really help out in crowded and noisy environments. However with Janet’s hearing aids and poor general function of the provided cheap ear buds, we did have to struggle a bit to get some noise reducing ear buds that we brought to work for Janet. Ben used his AirPods with a bluetooth transmitter that plugged into the VOX receiver. That worked OK, but for some reason, it dropped Janet’s AirPods periodically so she ended up resorting to hard wired noise reducing ear buds. It turned out that her iPhone kept hijacking the AirPods whenever they were out of transmitter range for the Bluetooth transmitter. At any rate we managed.
The tour guide was knowledgeable about the history of the Louvre and pointed out underground Roman structures in the foundations of the museum building, which was also a royal residence for Louis XIV and Louis XVI. The tour ran met at 9am, but the museum didn’t open until 10am. Our tour group was at the head of a cue for museum entry in a parallel line with individual ticket holders. We all merged together to get through security which involved going through metal detectors and having our bags put through an X-Ray. Liquids and foods were OK to have, but you can’t eat or drink in the galleries. There is a dedicated area for group tours with its own bathrooms and storage lockers. The lockers were free to use, but we didn’t realize that they were located outside the museum exit, and if you exit the museum you CAN NOT RE-ENTER. We made the mistake of putting our water bottles and lunch in the lockers thinking we could retrieve them after the tour, have lunch and then finish touring the museum. So we fasted for the better part of the day. There are NO water fountains in the museum FYI.
The guided tour was an express to see the most popular items including Athena Velletri (1st century copy of a lost Greek Bronze found in Roman ruins in 1787 and displayed in the Louvre since 1803),
Venus de Milo (Ancient Greek marble dating to ~150BC, discovered in 1820 and on display at the Louvre since 1921),
a Hellenistic marble of three nudes depicting beauty, arts and fertility,
one of Hermaphrodite- a copy of which we saw in the Beaux-Arts Museum in Lille,
.jpeg)
.jpeg)
The halls of Louis XIV with cases of treasures including the French Crown Jewels,
The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David which includes a lot of historical inaccuracies that would be fitting for a Trump coronation portrait (including having his wife and Julius Caesar in the audience) and is the largest painting in the Louvre collection,
.jpeg)
Winged Victory (the goddess Nike, headless and missing other parts including her arms),
some Leonardo DaVinci paintings (St John the Baptist, St Anne, Portrait of a Lady of the Court of Milan and of course the Mona Lisa)
That was the end of the 2 hour guided tour which was really only a one hour guided tour since the museum didn’t open until 10am. But it did get us in the door right at 10am instead of having us stand in an hours long line to get in.
After the guided tour ended, we explored the Louvre on our own, using a list of highlights in the museum program as a scavenger hunt of sorts. This worked for the most part because it forces you to see most of the major galleries and walk through nearly all of them, but there were several parts of the museum that were closed either for renovation or because it was Monday. But that kept us plenty busy. The Louvre is HUGE, but we did see lots of galleries that we have never seen before. It seems the British and French were both keen at collecting treasures from all around the world, and between The British Museum and the Louvre, a huge percentage of the world’s cultural heritage now resides in London and Paris but the British were certainly better at plundering treasures from across their imperial empire.
.jpeg)
The museum closes at 6PM but they began chasing people out at 5:30PM and told visitors it closed at 5:45PM. We had covered nearly all of the open galleries, at least those we could find. The museum guide has TERRIBLE maps that are not to scale and don’t even accurately show the relationship between galleries, stairs and elevators. To make matters worse, most of the rooms are NOT labeled with their room numbers. Only about 25% are labeled so it’s hard to tell exactly where in the museum you are, and there are hundreds of rooms on at least 4 different levels. That made navigation a real challenge. Our Apple Watches clocked over 19K steps and 34 flights of stairs climbed today, so no wonder our feet hurt.
We retrieved our checked lunch bag and water bottles on exiting the museum and had a very late lunch in the Garden of the Tuileries. The birds got to enjoy some of the stale bread Janet still had from the Novotel’s breakfast leftover baguettes. We then caught the Metro back to the hotel and called it an early night. At this point, we feel a bit Museum’ed out, so we probably won’t bother with visiting the Musée D’Orsay to see impressionists tomorrow. We may just spend the day feeding pigeons in the park and eating croissants like real Parisians.
