Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #23*: Sacré-Cœur? Sa·cré bleu!

The hot-to-trot abbess and King Henry IV, the sleepiest cultural institution in the world, and more tales of adventure on the Paris Metro.

AS I WANDERED AROUND, UNDERGROUND, IN PARIS, I curated a list of cherished Metro stops. 

The Louvre-Rivoli stop was nearby on the #1 line, just east of the The World’s Most Exhausting Museum. It now displays antiquities that can be a quick alternative to the overbearing collection of objets upstairs. Can anybody stand being in that maze of hallways and immortal (dead) artwork for more than 45 minutes? Even the Mona Lisa is sick of it. Her smile isn’t enigmatic, it’s drowsy. 

On my first visit to the Louvre, I gasped at the Nike of Samothrace—Art History 101, Live!—then plunged forward aimlessly in search of other famous friends. In my enthusiasm, I feigned directedness, with no actual destination in mind. And like any late-20th-century war, I had no exit strategy. 

This was a decade before I.M. Pei’s pyramid provided a whimsical distraction from the art, so there was almost nothing to do in the museum except, you know, watch the antiquities get even older. I was soon lost in the marble f…