The Louvre is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but - ok, I’ll stop. It’s a vast, vast art museum, and unless you had several days and the constitution of several oxen, you couldn’t see all of it. Before plunging in, I went up to the Palais Royal and popped into Serge Lutens to try the second two perfumes. Just as I was feeling unreasonably depressed about not having found a piece of (affordable) art I definitely wanted to take away from Paris, I happened to glance at the window of an antiquarian book and print seller, and my eye fell on what appeared to be the unbound pages of an old book, all illustrated with scenes of Italian life. The topmost sheet was a drawing of two masked figures, a man in a bauta and a woman in a moretta, on the doorstep of a house, about to be admitted to a party, I supposed. I can see Stu smiling wryly as I type this. I have a bit of an obsession with Venetian masked figures, especially the sinister, unisex Bauta with its ghostly mask, black hood and tricorne. The shop wasn’t open yet, so, making a note to come back, I went back to the Louvre and entered via the controversial glass pyramid in the immense courtyard. I neither liked nor disliked the pyramid. It was just…there.

Waiting in the ticket queue, I heard a young American voice say loudly that she was only there to see the Mona Lisa. This reminded me of the Vatican Musuem, where Stu and I witnessed an exhausted tourist, gasping with fatigue, gaze around at the small room we were in, containing Raphael’s The School of Athens, and moan, “Is this the Sistine Chapel? Oh, no, we’re not there yet…” I wasn’t about to judge the Mona Lisa seeker too harshly, as my current crush on Watteau meant that my own heart was firmly set on 18th century French painting, and I marched rather quickly through the Baroque rooms to get there, only to find that that section is closed on Thursdays. So I’ll have to go back.

Of course, there was still plenty to ohh and ahh over. I did go and see the Mona Lisa, of course. Not surprisingly, she looks very much as she does in all the pictures, but it was still great to see the real painting. What struck me is that she’s really rather plain; it’s her expression alone that makes her face compelling. Despite the large sign saying no photography allowed, people were still snapping away - because, of course, it’s so terribly hard to find images of the Mona Lisa - while a harassed security guard tried to make them stop.

I was really delighted to find The Virgin of the Rocks (one of the two almost identical paintings) here. I knew there was one in London, but I always thought the other one was in Italy. The angel on the right (in both paintings) has a face I could look at all day.

It was no good viewing all those huge Gericaults and Delacroixs in the one big huge red room. I felt as if I was between caught a brass band and a heavy metal concert. I was very happy to discover Louise Moillon, who is considered by some critics to be the greatest French still life painter of the 17th century. Her works are calm, orderly, rich and luminous; the technique is extraordinarily fine, and the textures and colours of fruit, in particular, are rendered with acute observation and almost erotic voluptuousness. These pictures admit you to a world of sensuous and thoughtful repose - and make you think about all the women of talent whose gender prevented them from achieving their potential. I sometimes wonder what kind of art our galleries would be full of if women had participated in art-making to the same extent as men and had influenced male artists through the ages. Would these salons look very different, or not? We’ll never know.

I was also taken by this quirky painting, Les Funerailles des l’Amours, showing the funeral procession of a cupid with a rather jolly cortege:

I also liked this strange painting of snakes and butterflies by Otto Marseus van Schrieck (any relation to the Shrieks of Ambergris, I wonder?), who, according to his entry in the Louvre database, specialised in strange, disquieting studies of animals and insects in woodland undergrowth. Good on him.
Havin Venetians on my mind, I went looking for paintings of them, and found a handful, including Tiepolo’s The Charlatan, or The Puller of Teeth, depicting a fake dentist wowing the crowd, or at least mildly amusing them. Tiepolo painted this subject at least once again. A detail with a bauta:

I went back to the Palais Royal to see about the pictures in the bookshop. Although the shop was supposed to be open, the gnome-like elderly proprietor was sitting at a desk discussing something with a woman and told me to come back in an hour. Of course, monsieur; I’ve got nothing better to do than wait around in the cold for you to feel like selling me something. Looking for a warm place, I chose the Belle Epoque patessirie Au Panetier on the Place des Petits Peres:

With decor like that, I expected it to be expensive - but it wasn’t, and my hot chocolate came with a bite-sized chunk of delicious moist chocolate cake. I went to a supermarket, then back to the shop, which by then was open. The gnome greeted me with a somewhat guarded air. He claimed not to speak English. I did my best to communicate my interest in the illustrations. He told me they were 18th century, 60 in all, for E2400. Well, I only wanted one, not 60, which by my calculations would be E40 - or a bit more, given that I’d be buying it sans bulk discount. But no, he wouldn’t break up the collection, it had to be all of them or none. Suddenly revealing the ability to speak some English after all, he said they were rare and the price wasn’t expensive - which may have been true, but it was useless information to me. I hope he finds someone who wants the whole lot, and that he lets them into his shop.

In the evening I talked with Adri, who turns out to be from Morocco. He waxes lyrical about Marrakech, which we never got to when we went there. (Fed up with the whole country, we retreated to Gibraltar and then to England.) But I’d like to try the Moroccan adventure again. He gets me to deal with an English-speaking customer on the phone, and we chat a bit. He’s been very good to me, even giving me free breakfast one morning. He complains about the guy who mans the desk in the mornings (a stickler for rules who hates the guests using the microwave etc., as I found out a couple of days ago.) As ever, Joe is around: