Au Louvre

Au Louvre

I have accepted to be writer-in-residence at the Louvre. For a whole year, I will spend as much time here as possible. It’s a childhood dream. I won’t sleep here, though I wouldn’t mind being locked inside for an entire night. I’d walk the halls until morning, lose my way, perhaps forever. What’s a museum without its visitors, when all the works are set free? A long time ago, I wrote a story about a library where, at night, when the readers had left, the books came down from their shelves and played hide-and-seek. The inspiration for the story had come, long before the digital age, from the book-request cards at the Bibliothèque Nationale that sometimes returned to you with this phrase checked-off in red pencil: “Item Missing.” The Louvre that I have in my mind is the one I knew when I was ten years old, the small Louvre. The first rooms I ever lingered in were those of the Egyptian antiquities, because of my sixth-grade class curriculum (Sully, room 338). I would visit them with my mother or my eldest sister. I used to imagine that the mummies came out of their sarcophaguses while we slept.