Zara dress (similar)
Jonak babies (similar)
Celine sunglasses
Aurate NY bracelet (c/o)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Location: Palais du Louvre – Paris, France
Paris, May 27, 2023
Dear friends,
This Saturday morning visit to the Louvre brings back memories. There’s very little in Paris that doesn’t, mind you. We have history, this city and me. But this morning specifically, it’s my first visit to the Louvre that’s on my mind.
A school trip to France with a stop in Paris obviously included a visit to the Louvre. This was an educational holiday, after all. Surely, if we were left to wander around in a historic place full of significant works of art, we would learn something. That was the theory, at least. I’m not sure it proved true. But I remember that visit to Paris’ preeminent museum as an unusual one, not like any of my visits since, because I didn’t plan it. On that school trip, a bus shuttled us from place to place, and mostly simply did as our teachers told us as if we were in school. I can’t imagine travelling according to a schedule prepared by anyone else now, but at the time, I knew nothing different. When we arrived at the Louvre, I got off the bus and followed my classmates to the entry point.
As a tour group, we took a side entrance that overlooked what I now know to be Cour Marly. A glass door opened onto an escalator that took us down into the building. My memory of the room at the bottom of the escalator is vague. There were distractions, and we needed to move quickly. Museum staff insisted that I place my backpack and coat in a large bin, along with the backpacks and coats belonging to my classmates. They would store them for us, we were told; we could pick them up when we left. It was surreal – and did not seem secure, even at the time – to watch a man in uniform roll that bin full of backpacks away into a locked room. We got them back, of course. But it’s what I remember; the implication that I was irresponsible, clumsy and untrustworthy around small sculptures.
In retrospect, I understand that perspective. I meant well, but I was clumsy. And as always, I’d overstuffed my backpack with books I’d have no time to read but couldn’t bring myself to leave behind in the hotel room. Just in case.
Thus unburdened, we were given maps and essentially let loose in the museum without future instruction beyond the time we were expected to return. Even as teenagers educated in the Canadian public school system in the nineties, which focused our history and geography lessons almost exclusively on our own country and ignored the history of the world outside of it, we knew what everyone goes to the Louvre to see: the Mona Lisa, the Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
The Winged Victory, positioned at the top of a long flight of stairs, made that visit for me. The sheer size of the winged woman, carved from stone but somehow almost liquid, ready to leap into the air and take flight at any moment, in defiance of physics, bowled me over. After her, it was hard to think of the Mona Lisa as anything but surprisingly small in person. She was immaculate, to be sure, but so unimposing as to almost seem forgettable by comparison. I don’t think we ever found Venus. In spite of the maps our hands, we quickly found ourselves lost, wandering the fortified basements in search of a washroom. We stumbled upon a sphinx, at some point.
And, eventually, at the appointed time, made it back to meet the rest of our group. We’d walked past hundreds of works of art but seen very few of them. If nothing else, I learned that day that I knew very little about navigating the world independently. Someday, I hoped, I could come back to the Louvre on my own. By then, I hoped, I’d know better how to use a map and I could really focus on the art.
That’s probably not the lesson that my teachers had in mind, but it was the one that I took away. And two decades later, while I’m still not much good at map reading, I know the Louvre intimately, so well that I don’t need one. We visit every time we’re in Paris, even if we don’t always go inside. This spot, with its unobstructed view of the palace and the pyramid, is a favourite. Hidden in plain sight, it’s perfect for capturing the majesty of the museum without disruption or distraction. That I would someday be this familiar with the Louvre never crossed my fifteen-year-old mind. If it had, it would have seemed like a distant dream, something nice to imagine but surely unrealistic.
…it’s amazing, the way that, so often, things turn out even better than you could have imagined that they might.
