Playing Attendant

Playing Attendant

That day, I had forgotten to take off my “author-in-residence” card that gives me access to the Louvre. Usually, I slip it in my pocket to walk around incognito. No sooner had I reached the Denon staircase (Denon, room 404), the old entrance of my childhood, than a young woman asked me where the bathroom was. In this part of the museum, I didn’t know what to tell her, but I decided to keep my badge on to experience for an afternoon the life of a museum guard. I won’t tell you how many times people asked me where the bathrooms were, a crucial question. People asked me for directions to the Venus de Milo when we were on the second floor of the Richelieu wing or, still worse, the Arts of Africa when we were in the Cour Khorsabad. What a feat to explain how to get to the west wing of the Cour Carée, pass through the Grande Galerie, go all the way to the far end of the Pavillon des Sessions, and then find the stairway that leads down to the Porte des Lions!  My tourists must have got lost twenty times along the way. The oddest question came from two kids I ran into in the Galerie Campana with their class: “What’s the height of room 660?” Room 660? Only professionals talk like that! I consulted my precious Pocket Directory to the Rooms of the Museum. Room 660 is the Salle des Sept Cheminées, from which the kids had just emerged. “Fourteen meters,” I ventured. They wrote it down in their notebooks. There is now a secondary school in France where people believe that the Salle des Sept Cheminées has a fourteen-meter-high ceiling. That’s what’s known as fake news. Next time, I’ll take off my badge.