It was between Christmas and New Year a few years ago. We had driven to Paris for a short break. Not having visited the Louvre during our most recent trips to Paris, reacquainting ourselves with some of the works it houses seemed like a good idea. Like 'my father's house' the Louvre is a museum of many rooms, or galleries.
The evacuation alarm, a false alarm as it turned out, should have alerted us to a conspiracy of fates, the misalignment of celestial bodies, or some such like. La Giaconda wore her teasing smile inscrutably. Venus de Milo appeared disarmingly relaxed. We wandered through galleries, the walls of which were hung with priceless works of art from every age, some grand, some beautiful, and some thinly-disguised pornography.
It was while in a gallery carefully littered with Roman sarcophagi we learned that, although this was the day of late-evening opening, some of the galleries, including the one in which we were standing, would be closing early. Dutifully wending our way back to the elevator we found our route blocked by a locked door preventing entry to a now-closed gallery. Returning to the Roman sarcophagi, we found our route equally blocked by long, graceful flights of stone stairs, down which ambulant people were making their casual retreat. Gripping tightly the handles of Jemima's wheelchair, we asked a gallery attendant for guidance.
Far be it from me to call into question the cognitive intelligence of this, or any other gallery attendant, but it did appear that the man was unable to comprehend our problem. It was as though a cloak of invisibility had been thrown over Jemima and her wheelchair. He insisted on telling us that the gallery was now closed, and that we were make our way out. I think that it was our stubborn persistence that finally induced the puzzled Parisian to summon help - that or his fear that the situation could turn nasty. Slowly, like beads of perspiration on the forehead of the perplexed under pressure, more uniformed attendants began to appear. As the number of gallery attendants increased, over the ensuing half hour, to swell the knot of people in front of a particularly impressive Roman sarcophagus, the conclusion that galleries would have to be re-opened must have dawned. However, being December, dawn came both imperceptibly and late.
It would appear that everyday security arrangements for the Louvre involve the staff being organised into teams. Our problem, and that occupying by now more than a dozen gallery attendants, was that to exit the Roman gallery would involve not simply walking through galleries that had been locked, but passing through territory proprietorially-patrolled during the day by, and doors locked in the evening and unlocked in the morning by, other teams, the team members of which having since gone home for their evening meal, for leisure time devant la television, and anticipating a cup of cocoa to take to bed. To make matters worse, as the clock inexorably ticked ever later, further galleries were being put to bed for the night. Eventually, and it was an hour after the first attendant had puzzled over the issue, a proposed escape route from the labyrinth was mapped out and agreed, and keys were mysteriously acquired in order to unlock doors, to silence alarms and to operate elevators.
Melting into the darkness beyond the first locked door, we were entering a forbidden world. There was, about the experience, something of the passage through Moria by the Fellowship of the Ring. However, our Gandalf was possibly the least favoured of the attendants, and instead of a wooden staff he clutched several huge bunches of keys. We passed through door after door, walking in silence through gallery after gallery, watched by figures, real and imaginary, mundane and malign, from every century since the beginning of art. Masterpieces hung from walls unseen. Tapestries sheltered skulking assasins. Sculptures loomed from the gloom. A minotaur scuffed and scowled in the darkness, wishing to go about his unspeakable business unseen. We scurried past seductions and battles, holy families and still lifes, monarchs and madmen. Corridors, no longer now the arteries of daytime busyness, were subsiding into cold hard-heartedness. Underfoot would change from the softness of carpet to the creak of ancient floorboards to the echo of stone tiles. There was a smell of old wax polish, ancient, dusty furniture, and of resentment for the disturbance.
We arrived at the closed metal doors of an elevator shaft. It was the kind that springs to life only on insertion of a small, flat key. As in the depths of Moria, there was no light, and the hapless attendant could not see to select an appropriate key, of which there were many examples in his temporary possession. A torch would have been useful.
My cellphone has a flip, and it also has a large screen. Suddenly the soft glow of blue light, as though from the vial given to Frodo by Galadriel, was pushing back the orcs and goblins that had been advancing on us from all sides, and allowed the magic key to be identified. A mechanical hiccup was to be heard far off as though from deep underground. Hummings and whirrings approached. A clunk and a pause. Then, as the elevator doors slid open, we found ourselves snatched back to the twentieth century, standing in a pond of electric light.
There are tales of people spending the night, accidentally or otherwise, in the British Museum, although the veracity of these stories has to be in some doubt. It was disturbing to have been regressed through centuries of fantasy and reality as a result of the early closure of some galleries in the Louvre.
Peter.
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