I’ll come right out with it: we didn’t see the Mona Lisa.
It was our second time to the Louvre that day. The first time we arrived (confident, Paris Museum Pass in-hand), we were turned away, instructed by the guard to register for a timed entry later that afternoon. Evidently, timing wasn’t on our side the rest of the day, either. We meandered to the Passage des Panoramas, a shopping arcade that could have passed for a human greenhouse – long stretches of narrow walkways, covered with glass roofs and buttressed with wrought iron. Inside were dozens of tiny boutiques – tea shops, vintage comic bookstores, bistros set on train cars – and nearly all closed.
After conceding and having lunch at a food court on the top floor of the Galeries Lafayette—a department store about as charming as the Macy’s in Herald Square—it was time to go back to the Louvre. To no one’s surprise, it was mobbed. We ambled from room to room, barely able to buffer ourselves from the crush of people around us, trying in vain to catch a glimpse of Venus de Milo, Coronation of Napoleon, the Winged Victory of Samothrace.
The Mona Lisa, we learned, had recently been moved. The entire western wing of the museum was essentially one giant queue to see her – a line that trailed three levels of stairs and wrapped twice around the sun-drenched lobby. Guards handed out umbrellas for people to use while they stood and waited in the heat. Incredulous, we double-backed down through the catacombs – the underground lair that still housed the original stone from the 12th-century castle-turned-palace – and made our way up through another exhibition hall, only to be cut off by yet more guards.
Courtney bemoaned the last time she’d gone to the Louvre, when the Mona Lisa was still housed in the Italian Paintings gallery. Now, not only could we not see her, but we’d be missing out on a third of the museum, too. For Courtney, everything felt worse since the last time she’d been there – more crowds, more noise, more expensive tickets. Notre Dame, just across the water, had been burned and remained off-limits. But isn’t it easy to feel nostalgic for what’s passed? The memory of something in our minds is always better than the way it actually was.
Lucky for me, I didn’t have any previous memories of the Louvre, or Notre Dame, or of Paris at all. After dinner, we walked along the Seine. We followed the narrow walkways underneath the humped pedestrian bridges, passed railings knotted with lovers’ metal locks, and climbed down onto the cobblestone paths. Groups of teens giggled loudly, dangling their legs above the murky water. Couples sat on checkered blankets with a bottle of wine squeezed between them. Courtney stopped me as we rounded an old fountain, its spout coiled with a stone snake.
“Isn’t this romantic?” she asked. And it was, though Courtney was rarely one for theatrics. I was convinced she’d said it for my benefit, having doubtless witnessed some better version of it before. I nodded and held out my hand, and she wrapped hers in it.
Behind us, there was a rustle, and when we turned to look, we saw a man peeing into the bushes. It may not have been perfect, but dammit, at least it was ours.