With no visitors, Louvre gets a rare chance to rejuvenate
The 518-year-old Mona Lisa has seen many things in her life on a wall, but rarely this: Almost four months with no Louvre visitors.
As she stares out through bulletproof glass into the silent Salle des Etats, in what was once the world’s most-visited museum, her celebrated smile could almost denote relief. A bit further on, the white marble Venus de Milo is for once free of her girdle of picture-snapping visitors.
It’s uncertain when the Paris museum will reopen, after being closed on October 30 in line with the French government’s virus containment measures. But those lucky enough to get a rare private look at collections covering 9,000 years of human history — with plenty of space to breathe — are lucky.
That’s sorely lacking in a museum that’s blighted by its own success: Before the pandemic, staff walked out complaining they couldn’t handle the overcrowding, with up to 30,000-40,000 visitors a day.
The forced closure has also granted museum officials a golden opportunity to carry out long-overdue refurbishments that were simply not possible with nearly 10 million visitors a year.
Unlike the first lockdown, which brought all Louvre activities to a halt, the second has seen some 250 of the museum employees remain fully operational.
An army of curators, restorers and workers are cleaning sculptures, reordering artifacts, checking inventories, reorganizing entrances and conducting restorations, including in the Egyptian Wing and the Grande Galerie, the museum’s largest hall that is being fully renovated.
“We’re taking advantage of the museum’s closure to carry out a
number of major works, speed up maintenance operations and start repair works that are difficult to schedule when the museum is operating normally,” said Laurent le Guedart, the Louvre’s Architectural Heritage and Gardens Director, from inside the Grande Galerie.
As le Guedart spoke, restorers were standing atop scaffolds taking scientific probes of the walls in preparation for a planned restoration, travelling back to the 18th century through layer after layer of paint.
Around the corner the sound of carpenters taking up floorboards was faintly audible. They were putting in the cables for a new security system.
Previously, these jobs could only be done on a Tuesday, the Louvre’s only closed day in the week. Now hammers are tapping, machines drilling and brushes scrubbing to a full week schedule, slowed down slightly by social distancing measures.
In total, 10 large-scale projects that were on hold since last March are under way — and progressing fast.
This includes works in the Etruscan and Italian Halls, and the gilded Salon Carre. A major restoration of the ancient Egyptian tomb chapel of Akhethotep from 2400BC is also underway.
“When the museum reopens, everything will be perfect for its visitors — this Sleeping Beauty will have had the time to powder her nose,” said Elisabeth AntoineKonig, Artifacts Department Curator. “Visitors will be happy to see again these now well-lit rooms with polished floors and remodeled display cases.”
Initially, only visitors with pre-booked reservations will be granted entry in line with virus safety precautions.
Those who cannot wait are still able to see the Louvre’s treasure trove of art in virtual tours online.
Agatha Christie’s first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (1920), introduces her iconic Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and features her famous quip: “Poison is a woman’s weapon.”
Of course, poison — sometimes referred to as Inheritor’s Powder — is not gender specific. Rather, poison can simply be the preferred means of murder for clever criminals. Those who, as sociologist and author Tanya Bretherton points out: “… believed the perfect murder was possible if it could be made to look like something else entirely and no one even realized that a crime had been committed.”
The title of Bretherton’s fourth book, “The Husband Poisoner: Suburban Women Who Killed in Post-World War II Sydney” (2021), suggests a work focused on damaged, disgruntled or daring wives in the early 1950s who were looking for the perfect solution to an immediate problem. But she goes further to look at how other family members were targeted. She gives some clues to explain why seemingly ordinary women decided to try their hand at murder.
In a novel, writers usually ensure death by foul means is quickly established and everyone is a suspect. In real life, the poisoner’s goal for such a scheme is to make sure the idea of murder is never considered, death is something that is, well, just unfortunate. Nobody is a suspect.
Poison is available to men
and women, as the poisoner and the poisoned. This is a fact showcased when Emily Inglethorp, mistress of Agatha Christie’s Styles Court, unknowingly consumes strychnine. Yet, there is an unsettling number of examples of fictional and real-life female villains dispensing with people as easily as they might deal with a bug. This has long generated anxiety around woman who might poison her husband instead of going through a messy divorce.
Some of this anxiousness is because there is a very specific type of malevolence present when one person decides to poison another.
Poison requires planning — the methodical undertaking of procurement, delivery and the hiding of evidence. A show of grief or shock is helpful, but there is plenty of time for that. Poison is often slow.
Bretherton is an excellent storyteller. Indeed, this book reads like good crime fiction with dialogue deployed to push the stories forward. From Yvonne Fletcher’s disposal of two husbands to Caroline Grills and her four victims, the women are vivid. You can see their desperation, their motivation, their living conditions, their terrible taste in fashion and their wickedness.
These women also have something crucial in common: they chose thallium. Discovered in the mid-1800s, thallium — a colorless, odorless tasteless metal — is highly toxic and indiscriminate when it comes to killing insects, rats and people.
Another thing these women share is a strange mix of cowardice and bravado. Sure, poison might circumvent an ugly confrontation, but it is a brutal way to kill somebody. To sit and watch, and to wait it out. Bretherton does not hold back in describing how the victims suffered.
Bretherton’s interest in the social context of crime is clear, as is her understanding of social change in Australia across the 20th century. The time frame for this work showcases a world that was changing rapidly, but one in which progress on women’s rights was painfully slow. This was a period that pre-dated no-fault divorce and saw women’s minimum wages set at only 75 percent of men’s wages.
It was also a time when rats presented a serious public health issue in Sydney, and so rat poison was easy to buy. For some, these conditions would inspire murderous plans. Although there were several high profile cases and prosecutions in the 1950s, we may never know how many people fell victim to rat poison.
The Sydney crime wave also inspired the 2011 television movie Recipe for Murder.
Bretherton sets this work apart from most other true crime texts through her integration of recipes. Poison is not easily administered in neat doses via a teaspoon. It needs a vehicle.
In exploring how women served up thallium in beverages and meals, she reinforces the subterfuge required to poison somebody by including recipes from a family cookbook compiled by her own mother. If you enjoy a good, homemade split-pea soup, then it is possible you might have a slightly uncomfortable moment the next time that dish is served.
This is one of the great fears of poison that Bretherton makes plain — it is so very domestic. All the killer really needs to do is concentrate on staying calm and pretending everything is normal. Set the table. Put out a potato and bacon pie. Ask, “Another cup of tea, dear?”