Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie Read Free Book Online Page A

their eyes on the museum’s badly displayed and unloved treasures (most of them looted in the days of earlier French kings and emperors), here were smiling hordes stuffed with exotic delicacies from the merry-go-round of Louvre restaurants, casting beatific glances at skillfully lit artworks before loading up on reproductions, CDs, designer sportswear, computers, and gadgets.
    Pei’s entrance was conceived to simplify the Louvre’s labyrinth. Experts claim it takes less time than ever to reach the Mona Lisa (still the goal of ninety percent of visitors). Persnickety regulars at first grumbled about a crass Grand Louvre for beginners, and militated for a reopening of doors in the museum’s many wings. But they soon learned to slip in through the Pavillon de Flore, via whatever temporary exhibition is being mounted there, skipping the subterranean feeding frenzy.
    Early on boosters said the pyramid would blend into the cityscape. They were right. As Pei predicted, the glass panes reflect changeable skies. They also collect soot, despite frequent scrubbings. Cosmetic concerns aside, I saw nary a grimace now as I shuffled with thousands from sculpture courts (where cars once parked) through restored Renaissance rooms and lavish Second Empire salons (formerly the Finance Minister’s office), to excavated medieval bastions. Back outside, I took a table at Café Marly and watched visitors dance in feathery water sprays or soak their feet in the fountains flanking the pyramid. Attendance has risen from 2.5 million in the early 1980s to nearly 9 million today. What better sign of approval might a monarch desire?
    Laid out in 1670 by Louis XIV’s royal architect Le Nôtre, the so-called Triumphal Way runs west from the Louvre’s Cour Carrée through the glass eye of the pyramid and nearby Carrousel Arch, across the Tuileries and up the Champs-Élysées, under the Arc de Triomphe, straight across town to La Défense, crowned by Mitterrand’s Grande Arche. My subway train covered the distance in twenty minutes. Even though from La Défense’s highest point I couldn’t see back into central Paris, I knew the Triumphal Way, alias the “Power Axis,” was there, also extending east from the Louvre to the Bastille.
    Unexpectedly the Grande Arche is the sole Mitterrand project to have garnered near total support at the time of building. It actually improves La Défense, a paragon of architectural mediocrity bristling with mirrored-glass skyscrapers and studded with concrete apartment bunkers. The absence of cars, and recent landscaping, are the saving graces of this Moscow-meets-Manhattan satellite city.
    As I queued under the Grande Arche in the windy vortex comically termed a “piazza,” then rode to the roof in a glass-bubble elevator, I recalled watching back in the late ’80s as the viewing deck was poured into place at a height of more than 300 feet (100 meters). Building the arch required much engineering wizardry. The vistas from on high aren’t nearly as spectacular as those you see from the Eiffel Tower, but if you’re into cannon-shot perspectives you won’t be disappointed.
    Arch designer Johan Otto von Spreckelsen adroitly poised his bauble 6.30 degrees askew, mirroring the skew of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée without blocking the Power Axis. In theory a superhuman bowler could roll a ball through the arch’s wind-tunnel piazza to the grubby panes of Pei’s pyramid. At a distance of twenty-some years this sounds like manual self-pleasuring, but it long preoccupied Tonton’s planners.
    A nitpicker might carp about the arch’s smog-stained Carrara cladding, the threadbare carpets inside, or the prison-camp aesthetics of the rooftop terrace. Even arch devotees cannot help noting that the suspended canvas windbreaks called “Nuages” look less like the hovering clouds Von Spreckelsen had envisioned than a tattered and stained Bedouin tent. They simply don’t work. Wind or not, the arch is standing up to time’s