Paris in a heat wave … go to the Louvre

It would have been pretty embarrassing to go to Paris and not go to the Louvre, especially when our apartment is right across the street from the gargantuan museum. Our balcony overlooks the east end of it and we’ve spent a lot of time watching other people go in, come out, and mill around. Not to belabour the point, but this is a pretty sensational location. Except of course, after 1 p.m. during a heat wave when this lovely un-airconditioned apartment begins to feel like the inside of a hair dryer, and it’s time to stop looking at the museum from the balcony and actually go inside.

Paris is hot! hot! hot!

I tried to get in using my press card instead of buying a ticket. I’d used it successfully at the Musee D’Orsay on Thursday, and I’ve used it before at the Louvre, though I knew that they liked to give you a hard time. Perseverance, I told myself, is key.

“Non, non, non, non, non,” said the woman at the ticket counter, looking at me as if I was gripping a dead rat between my teeth (which I wasn’t).

“Why not?”

“It’s not an International Press Card.”

“We don’t have those in Canada.”

“Non, non, non.”

I went to the information desk. “I’d like to use my press card to get in,” I said. “I have a TMAC card and an SATW card.”

“Okay,” says the man. “Go and show it at the entrance.”

I go to the entrance of the Denton wing. “Non, sorry. International Press Cards only,” says the woman.

“But they told me it was okay at the information desk.”

She sends me back to the info desk, where they look at my card for awhile, call someone then send me up to the Sully wing and tell me to ask for the manager. I wait a long time for the manager. He looks at my card.

“You need an International Press Card.”

“Read this!” I say, pointing to my Society of American Travel Writers card. “It says Canada, USA and Mexico – that’s international.”

“No it’s not, it doesn’t say Europe.”

“I don’t write in Europe,” I point out, not that I write in Mexico either, but why quibble?

“I really would like to help you,” he said. “But I can’t.”

“Monsieur,” I say, not even getting mad, because by now I’ve met half the staff at the Louvre and have enjoyed seeing how far I could go in my quest to persevere. “I have waited in the ticket line, at the entrance to the Denon wing, at Information twice and now, you are saying I must go back and start again? Plus I must pay?”

He shrugs helplessly. He really did want to help – and though it would have been more helpful if he’d just shunted me through the entrance – he said, “I can at least take you to the front of the line so you can buy a ticket.”

“Deal,” I said.

“It’s really a problem, this press card business,” he said as we took the escalators down.

“For me, not you,” I said.

“No, for us too,” he replied, and I suppose since I had used up quite a bit of staff time, and had given him the unpleasant task of saying no when he would have preferred to say yes, it was indeed a problem for the both of us.

Finally an hour later I am inside the Denon wing and find that Mark has rented a headphone set. Let me just say right now that there is no way that one person in a pair can rent a headset and the other go without. The one without – that would be me – must stand around tapping their feet while the other listens to entertaining stories about the masterpiece you are staring at blankly.

“Why didn’t you rent me one?” I whined.

“I didn’t think you’d want one.”

Mark, bless his heart, thinks I know everything about art and would never stoop to such a basic educational device as a headset. (He knows better now). I may know a Rembrant from a Da Vinci and I can spot a Uccello a mile away (I love Uccello, he paints velvety horses in battle and uses perfect perspective at a time when perspective was still a fairly new innovation in art) but I do not know all 35,000 paintings in the Louvre.

So, if our relationship was to last, I had to go out – out!- and wait in another line to get a headset and then another line to get back into the Denon wing. My day at the Louvre was quickly losing its lustre. Mark, who had been lurking around in the sculpture room waiting for me was faring no better than I.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, when I finally made it back with my headset.

“I would just like to look at some paintings!”

So that’s what we did. I loved the headset, which told great info about the paintings, and I loved it even more when it was interesting information I could listen to from the comfort of a padded bench in front of the painting because my legs were already tired from all the pre-entrance lineups. Thus, I now know more about Cimabue that I ever hoped to - since I listened to all the information about him twice.

Mark fell in love with the war room (what else?) and went back and forth from the Géricault Raft of the Medusa and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People in great excitement. Me? I got to see Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano, a Giotto, and Saint Sebastien getting shot up with arrows by Mantegna. What could be better? And of course we found room 29 with Mona Lisa and an endless swelling of crowds.

Mona who?

Oh, and then I’m looking at Tintoretto’s sketch for Paradise when I look over and see some chirpy American girl trying to pick Mark up!

“Ooh, look, I just took your photograph in front of that painting,” she said.

By the time I got over there, she was gone.

‘That woman just tried to pick you up!”

“Is that what she was doing? I thought she was trying to sell me a photo,” he said.

Can we sit down now?

Then we had a lunch break on an picturesque stone terrace overlooking the Pyramid entrance and met a couple from New York on their 25th anniversary. I should have stopped there, but it’s hard not to keep going at the Louvre. There is always one more masterpiece to seek out, so even though my feet were aching, we headed to the Sully wing to see the Vermeers.

Go soak your feet!

So, like most people I left the Louvre happy but with glazed eyes, burning thighs and hot sweaty feet only to go out into the sun and see that the crowd of art lovers have discovered the perfect reviving post-museum activity – soaking their feet in the fountain. What else could I do but join in? When in Rome, I mean Paris, do as the tourists do …. and above all, persevere.