By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I trained, before my 2018 trip to France, about how not to be just another ugly American in Paris. For example, I tried to learn more about that cultural Ironman competition called the Louvre, preparing especially for the daunting physical demands of its Mona Lisa mosh pit.
To do so properly, I asked noted Paris street performer and Louvre personal trainer Jean-Claude de le Beret for advice. I reached him in his salle de remise en forme (fitness studio) on the Rue Bonaparte, shortly after he had finished playing the accordion on the Pont Saint-Louis pedestrian bridge behind Notre-Dame.
“Mon dieu, Michel!” he exclaimed in a perfect mix of French and English, “The Musée du Louvre is the world’s largest art museum, with approximately 38,000 objects exhibited over an area of 72,735 square metres (782,910 square feet) and receiving about 30,000 visitors a day and over 10 million each year. C’est formidable!”
Jean-Claude knew, of course, that unlike Beyonce and Jay-Z, I would not have the place to myself (see http://dailygreatest.com/celebritynews/beyonce-jay-z-shut-down-the-louvre-for-the-day/). Thus, he gave me several excellent tips.
He first recommended preparation before arrival. My travel companions were in good shape already. My wife Vicki walks every day, does yoga, and teaches preschool to three year olds (enough said). Her sister Cindy walks her two dogs once, and sometimes twice, every day. My daughter Megan is a professional dancer. I was the one who needed all the help I could get.
Thus, I searched for the longest Utah lines I could find (typically at the liquor store or ice cream shop) and stood in them. The noontime lunch queue in front of Chick-fil-a at the downtown Salt Lake City Creek Mall can get quite wild, so I ordered a spicy chicken sandwich and practiced aggressive movements in the rowdy pickup area. I also walked around my office with my arms straight up in the air, developing muscle memory in case I needed it for any over-the-heads-of-the-crowd photography.
Jean-Claude also warned me, “Do not go into the Louvre without stretching beforehand!” So, just before the big day, carefully avoiding the siren calls of baguettes and macaroons, we walked briskly to Notre-Dame, climbed the hill at Sacre-Coeur in Montmartre, and logged close to twenty thousand steps on Vicki’s Fitbit. On the morning of the Louvre visit, we even visited the Eiffel Tower and climbed 700 stairs to the second level. I felt stretched.
With his keen sense of Parisien logistics, Jean-Claude told me to avoid the Louvre on days when Versailles was closed, because it would be “le embouteillage humain” (human gridlock). Unfortunately, the elegant palace was closed because Versailles workers were on strike on our designated Louvre day, something Louis XIV would never have tolerated back in the day. Bad luck!
Anticipating such a contingency, Jean Claude taught me this phrase, ”Il y a une couille dans le potage” (”there’s a testicle in the soup”), a French idiom akin to the American “Houston, we have a problem.” He said that a “couille” means adjustments must be made.
For us, this meant we could not go straight to the likely-more-crowded-than-usual Mona, but first had to test our dexterity at some of the lesser Louvre mosh pits. Accordingly, our tour guide led us to the headless Winged Victory of Samothrace and the armless Venus de Milo to begin the culture games.
Winged Victory is a second century B.C. Greek marble sculpture of Nike, the goddess of victory. I liked this starting point because I was wearing her company’s shoes. The crowd there was large, and there were stairs to consider too, but after maneuvering through the coagulation of visitors, I was in prime photo-taking territory.
I was, at least, until Helmut arrived. Helmut, as his female companion called him, had a real camera instead of an iPhone. His attitude was larger than mine too. He moved right in front of me as I was looking down to find my camera app.
I had no choice but to smile, nod, and wait. He took six or seven photos, and then moved aside, loudly whispering something to his companion about “einen sieg über” (“a victory over”) the American with the “mobiltelefon.” It was an embarrassing rookie mistake I could not afford to repeat at Mona Lisa.
I fared better at the Venus de Milo, a famous 2,000 year old life size marble statue. I surveilled a nearby tour group from China for about five minutes and noticed they moved in a disciplined straight line behind their leader and then at her signal dispersed, like the rushing river encircles the boulder.
I deftly shadowed the boulder, and was at her right when she approached “Venus” and gave the dispersal sign. On cue, her group moved out of formation, created a protective bubble around me, and gave me a secure front row photo spot. I took several pictures and unintentionally photobombed their selfies. Escaping from the group was tricky, but once done, I took a victory lap and snapped a photo of my protectors from behind the Greek goddess of love.
My growing self-confidence dissipated mere moments later when our tour guide announced it was time to go see “La Joconde,” the Mona Lisa. I took a deep breath as we crossed the Denon alley, between Italian paintings of 1250-1800 and French works from 1780-1850. I softly sang the Nat King Cole song in my head, “Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have loved you…”
I was not ready, however, for what I saw next. It was a swirling, whirling, cavorting, undulating mass of humanity, a potpourri of international touristes, buzzing furiously before a small dark frame hanging alone on a tan-colored wall at the end of the room.
Standing quite far away, in the shadow of the spectacular (and spectacularly overlooked) opposite wall painting called The Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (see: https://www.artbible.info/art/large/707.html), our tour guide tried to provide some historical context for De Vinci’s most famous work. She was bumped and jostled so many times that another fellow and I stood behind her, as human shock absorbers, to deflect the blows so she could talk.
When our tour guide finished, and freed us to go see Mona, I spotted a rare opening in the crowd and tried to gently back into it, casually pretending I was looking at Veronese’s painting on the other side. It was a clever ploy, but three English soccer fans wearing t-shirts with their team’s 2018 World Cup slogan, “Send us Victorious,” cut me off. The slogan worked. Their team made the Cup semifinals and the fans blocked my only clear route to my creme de le Louvre.
I knew then I lacked sufficient life and dismemberment insurance for this sort of thing, and lost my nerve in all the chaos. I hovered on the outer edge of the pit, and realized I was taller than most of the moshers in front of me. I held my phone up high, took several photos, and then used the zoom editing function to obtain what looked like close shot of Mona.
My daughter Megan, however, the one O’Brien who has done extreme sports (think rock climbing), handed me her fanny pack and said with determination, “I’m going in.” The crowd swallowed her immediately. She emerged five minutes later, breathing quickly, red hair tousled, and fair face reddened. “I got it!” she said, proudly showing me an unedited close up photo of Leonardo’s finest.
I asked our tour guide to recommend days when the Mona mosh area is not so crowded. She thought a moment and replied, “There are two or three days in mid-January…”
Our little cultural feat probably paled in comparison to the “six-minute Louvre” immortalized by Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald in 1990: “[I]t was in 1950 that the young Peter Stone went in on a Sunday — a day when you didn’t have to pay — and, while thousands cheered, ran around the Venus de Milo, up past the Winged Victory, down to the Mona Lisa…Peter did it in five minutes and 56 seconds, a record no tourist has ever been able to beat.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1990/09/18/the-tourist-de-france/befbd607-92c7-4877-9fda-bccbaaa1f458/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.62b971daf3be)
To calm us all down after the Mona Mosh, our guide ended the tour in front of a painting by Jacques-Louis David depicting the events at the coronation of Napoleon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coronation_of_Napoleon#/media/File:Jacques-Louis_David_-_The_Coronation_of_Napoleon_(1805-1807).jpg). The massive 1807 canvas shows the coronation of Josephine, after Napoleon had pushed aside the pope and crowned himself emperor. Our guide called this the ultimate act of self-confidence.
I must say, having sweated, survived, and succeeded at the Louvre on a Versailles-is-closed day, I understood just how he felt.
(Editor’s note: Some of the events depicted in this article actually occurred.)
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.
