Gregory Curtis (9 page)

Many people were sensible enough to drink only wine, but that was not enough to prevent general devastation from disease. Life expectancy was only thirty-nine. Diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis were rampant, and every few years an epidemic of cholera would sweep through the city.

A skilled worker might earn as much as fifteen francs a day, but a general laborer earned only three francs. Women and children who worked received much less. A family of four needed about six francs a day to live, so the families of average laborers were condemned to hopeless poverty. Even among better-paid workers, illness or injuries that reduced the number of days worked could send a family from comfort to poverty in short order. About half the people in Paris were paupers.

Presiding over all this was the improbable figure of Louis XVIII. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Louis had been no one’s first choice to assume control of France, but he was after all the rightful heir to the throne. He weighed more than 350
pounds. For most of his reign he could move about only in a wheelchair. As a young man he had married the ugliest noblewoman in Europe. Her eyebrows grew up her forehead, and she refused to bathe. Fat as he was and awful as she was, they had no children. She died during their exile, so Louis was now a widower without an heir. It seemed impossible that the blubbery and diffident king would marry now and produce children. He was infatuated with the
comtesse du Cayla, but his sex life with her was limited to taking snuff from between her breasts. When she was on her way to see the king, the royal guards, though continuing to stand motionless while staring straight ahead, would commence a chorus of sniffing.

During his years in exile Louis had perfected a withering stare, but he was only passably intelligent and seemed hardly up to the task at hand. Nevertheless, he surprised everyone by outmaneuvering any threats to his power and by ruling on the whole sensibly and fairly. In particular he prevented the reactionary nobility, who had returned to France lusting for revenge, from instituting a new era of executions and persecution.

Although the laws stiffened and loosened from time to time, the censorship by which Napoleon had stifled free expression was relaxed during the
Restoration. The arts, which had languished during the empire, returned with almost explosive force. In 1820 Lamartine published
Méditations poétique
, the first work of French romantic poetry, and it became a sensation. Even the king read it. A new generation of artists, writers, and musicians was about to appear: Hugo, Delacroix, Berlioz, Balzac,
Stendhal, Dumas, among many others. One reason the Venus de Milo became so famous so quickly is that she arrived in France at the precise moment when the
neoclassicism of the past gave way to the
romanticism of the future. Since the neoclassicists, like Winckelmann, believed in imitating classical art, and since the romantics, also like Winckelmann, believed that great art was the result of personal and political freedom, each side could embrace the Venus de Milo in its fight against the other.

O
NCE IN
Paris, the Venus de Milo would be placed in the Louvre, the former palace that had been transformed into an art museum, although in 1821 it looked radically different than it does now. It was just half the present size, consisting only of the Cour Carrée (the Sully Wing today) and the long building that runs west from the Cour Carrée for almost a quarter mile along the right bank of the Seine (the Denon Wing today). Both the Cour Carrée and the long gallery had a dilapidated, abandoned air that Napoleon’s efforts at reconstruction had failed to dissipate.

The
Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel was there, too, standing in front of the
Tuileries Palace, which burned to the ground in 1871. The Tuileries began at the end of the long gallery and ran perpendicular from the Seine to the present Rue de Rivoli. The palace had been Napoleon’s residence in Paris, just as now it was Louis XVIII’s. But when the king happened to gaze out his window toward the spot where
I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid now stands, an area that today is an immense open plaza, he saw nothing but a maze of sagging, dispirited tenements lining dismal streets thick with mud and putrid refuse. The forlorn souls who lived there were among the most wretched inhabitants of Paris, indeed of all France. Balzac described this “intimate alliance of squalor and splendor” in
Cousin Bette:

Although there had been plans under the ancien régime to transform the Louvre from an abandoned palace to a museum, they never really progressed. Then the Revolution came. The new government seized the property of both the king and the Catholic Church and found itself in possession of many priceless works of art. The Louvre was the natural place to display these treasures. After about a year of feverish renovations, it opened as a public museum on August 10, 1793, a date that was chosen because it was exactly one year after the fall of the monarchy. The paintings all hung in the Grande Galerie, which was lit by windows in the walls. On cloudy days it was too dark to see the paintings properly, while on sunny days it was too bright. And the paintings were hung neither chronologically nor by school but haphazardly high and low on the wall and pressed tightly together in every available space.

The
Terror would begin just weeks later, but outside France the armies of the revolutionary government were having surprising success. French troops had just occupied Belgium, although it would require another six months to secure their hold. During the occupation, there was random pillage of the usual kind, but the
Convention—the revolutionary government dominated by the extremists Danton and Robespierre—authorized systematic theft as well. In June 1794 the revolutionary government proposed “to send secretly after the armies educated citizens who would be charged with recognizing and having carefully transported the masterpieces found in the countries where our armies have penetrated.” Consequently experts in art arrived in the conquered land, bearing lists of the finest works and where to find them. They then went down the lists, looting the property of nobles and churches and sending their booty on to the Louvre. (Experts in books and manuscripts did the same for the national library. Botanists took plants for the former Garden
of the King, now the Museum of Natural History.) These thefts were described as war reparations, the price the conquered land must pay to the French for liberating them from the onerous weight of their kings and nobility.

When the first shipment of art from Brussels arrived in Paris, a delegate to the ruling
Convention announced why it was right to bring these treasures to France: “These immortal works are no longer in a foreign land: they are today deposited in the native land of arts and of genius, in the native land of liberty and of sainted equality, the homeland of the French Republic.” Art could flourish only in France because only France was free—as free as the
ancient Greeks. That made France also the rightful heir of the masterpieces of antiquity. Another speaker a few months later declared, “There is only we who are able to appreciate them [ancient statues] and we who can elevate them in temples worthy of them and their illustrious makers.”

Winckelmann’s work, simplified and politicized, became the bedrock of the Revolution’s thinking about art. In October 1794, as the
Terror faded after the execution of Robespierre three months earlier, the Convention appointed a committee to make a new translation of Winckelmann that could be used as a reference book. The committee reported that this work was “one of the best elementary and classic texts that it is possible to put in the hands of young people in order to introduce them to the knowledge of the beauty of Antiquity and to form the taste of those who hope to become artists.” This new edition of Winckelmann was to be placed in each museum and each important library in the republic.

The Revolution’s taste for antiquity spread across all society. The Convention had set the example when it ordered all its official furniture made from Greek or Roman models. Soon furniture everywhere copied classical Greek forms, especially in the cafés. Stores sold medallions and cameos in the antique style. After the Terror, when life became easier, women began dressing themselves coquettishly as Athenians in robes of linen. The government tried unsuccessfully to replace the usual religious
and civil holidays with Greek festivals. There were classical decorations, high priests, and Greek temples made of cardboard. One official wanted to reinstate the Olympic games. Another wanted gymnastic exercises during the festivals in imitation of the Greeks. Public buildings, scientific discoveries, and the units in the new metric system of weights and measures were all given Greek names. That inspired this verse from a song in a music hall revue declaring that nowadays, in order to understand French well, one should learn Greek:

When Napoleon, only twenty-seven, assumed command of the French army in Italy in 1796, he knew that removing art from any lands he conquered was simply part of his mission, a part he zealously discharged. He sent the works back in large convoys whose arrival in Paris was celebrated with a holiday of parades and celebrations. The first such shipment, which was welcomed to Paris by a huge procession around the Champs de Mars, included the famous four horses of Venice (which Napoleon later installed atop the
Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel); paintings by
Raphael,
Titian, and Veronese; and ancient statues including the
Capitoline Venus and the
Apollo Belvedere. The latter, which Winckelmann had described so passionately, was considered the single greatest work of art to have survived from the antique world.

While Napoleon was in power, he continued this wholesale pillage. But he did not depend on groups of “educated citizens” to find the masterpieces. Instead he appointed an official connoisseur,
Dominique-Vivant Denon, who not only directed the Louvre and other state museums but also rushed into each newly conquered territory, sometimes while the battle was still in the balance, in order to choose which of the available masterpieces to send back to Paris.

Today the Louvre is divided into three wings, one of which is named after Denon. Born Dominique-Vivant de Non, he changed his name during the Revolution to disguise his noble lineage. He was a sensualist, known for his taste for actresses, who really did participate in the sort of group debauches in remote country châteaux that have become a cliché of pornography. He was a dilettante who painted prolifically if forgettably; staged a moderately successful comic play; wrote a sexy little novel, set in a remote château, titled
Point de Lendemain (No Tomorrow)
, which most recently resurfaced as a motif in
Milan Kundera’s novel
Slowness
and has a cult following in France; and published engaging memoirs and travelogues. But most of all he was a connoisseur both of art and of people.

With people his connoisseurship took the form of a charming sycophancy. Denon managed the seemingly impossible by ingratiating himself with—in succession—Louis XV, Louis XVI, Robespierre, and Napoleon. He knew Voltaire, Frederick II, Catherine the Great, Danton, and Talleyrand, the wily diplomat who was brilliant and slippery enough to become minister of foreign affairs for Napoleon and then for Louis XVIII. And he was an intimate friend of Josephine’s long before she married Napoleon.

He first encountered Napoleon at a reception given by Talleyrand. Denon was used to such occasions and quite at ease; Napoleon was still a young officer, gauche and rather timid. Denon kindly offered him a glass of lemonade. They fell into conversation about Italy and the Mediterranean, which Denon knew well, and about Corsica, Napoleon’s birthplace, about which Denon knew nothing, although he knew how to talk as if he did. Napoleon never forgot the agreeable impression Denon made on him.

Under the empire Denon’s official title was general director of museums. In that role he commissioned paintings of the emperor and his victories from leading artists such as
Jacques-Louis David. He also mounted regular exhibits that were generally successful. Primarily, however, he accompanied Napoleon on his campaigns and remained behind after the fighting to select artworks and arrange for them to be carefully packed and sent to Paris. He did not loot indiscriminately. Instead he took only the best and left behind the merely good, often agonizing over the distinction.

The
Musée Napoléon, as the Louvre was called during the Empire, became Denon’s masterpiece. Visitors could not believe what they saw. One recalled that the artworks “are displayed in such profusion that in the midst of so much beauty the eye no longer knows where to rest.” Another kept remarking, “Is this really real?” And everywhere in the crowds were invalids, soldiers in tattered uniforms, and ordinary workers, all with skin weathered by the sun. They mutely pondered this profusion of beauty, none of which had ever before been available for people like them to see.