Letter from Paris: The Buried Fortress

In transit to Amsterdam, I have only one day in Paris, so I decide to revisit my favorite spot in the city: the dark underbelly of the Louvre.

Early in the morning, before the hordes begin to queue up at the Pyramid, I take the Metro to Palais du Louvre, cross the Rue de Rivoli, and enter the main courtyard, Cour Napoleon. The courtyard makes me think of a giant glass box near-buried in the ground at a tilt, one of its corners jutting out – I.M. Pei’s Pyramid. I take the winding stairwell down into the Gallerie. Apart from the museum entrance and the claustrophobic rows of stationery shops, you will notice here and there warmly lit stretches of a rustic stone wall. This is what I've come to see.

The Louvre of today is only the latest in many incarnations. Like a chamaleon sitting atop its shed skin, the present-day palace rests directly on an ancient precursor: a medieval fortress whose lower half can be seen practically intact in the museum’s basement. There is an excellent likeness of the whole fortress, only a thumb in height, among the illuminations in the famous “Book of Hours of the Duc de Berry” (Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry), comissioned in the early 15th century and now at the museum in Chantilly. One of the October calendar pages (folio 1, verso 10) shows a pastoral scene outside the fortress walls: a grumpy serf sows seeds that he carries bunched in his apron, another tills the land with the help of a horse, while two women in tunics pitch hay into a row of mounds. In the background you see a rectangular fortress with crenelated towers and duncecap rooftops, set by a river (the Seine) against a cobalt-blue sky. Behind the fortress rise towers of the Conciergerie and of the Sainte Chapelle in nearby Ile de la Cité; presumably, Notre Dame was not yet built up high enough to be visible from here.

The illumination from the Book of Hours shows that the fortress walls were thick, with tiny windows dotting the top half, and a pair of long-necked gargoyles jutting out in each direction. The Louvre commissioned a two-meter tall model based on this Duc de Berry illumination and set it by the excavated remains. But the real treat in the Louvre basement is the fortress itself, or rather the bottom half that is still there. In the 1980s, the city decided to excavate the Cour Carree – the smaller, square courtyard to the east of Cour Napoleon. For two years, the area was off-limits to visitors while archaeologists tore up the flagstones to unearth the Louvre’s past. In this 1984 New York Times piece, Richard Bernstein describes the findings of the dig, which included not only the fortress but also tons of everyday objects that had been cast into the moat (a mix between defensive feature and urban landfill) and preserved there after François I had the moat filled in. I follow the wooden platform in the basement; it takes me along the old moat, past the pillars that once held up the drawbridge, and on through the main gate of the fortress. Inside I circumvent the old donjon, or central tower. These structures have lost their heads -- they are interrupted halfway by the high ceiling, with rows of track lighting -- yet the colossal stone walls are still awe-inspiring.

This was the main find of the archaeological dig -- the giant square fortress, surrounded by massive towers. The fortress had been established at the end of the 12th century, when King Philippe Auguste (the medieval king of France, who later joined the crusades) set up a defensive stronghold at the eastern edge of Paris to guard the region against English invaders. At that time, the king was itinerant, and the Louvre was only one among his many kingly depots. Only during the Renaissance did the enclosure gain prominence as a royal residence. Over the course of the next few hundred years, different rulers of France tried (mostly unsuccessfully) to carry out Henri IV’s “grande dessein”— a grand plan to link the fortress (transformed into a palace in the 1600s) to the large palace that Catherine de Medici built on the Tuileries site. Napoleon Bonaparte finally carried out the plan. You can trace this entire history in the "Histoire du Louvre" exhibit, also in the basement and organized around a series of delightful maquettes showing the ever-changing Louvre and its environs.

The exhibit also shows the origins of the building's function as a museum. In 1800, the French rulers filled the palace with booty looted by the armies in what is now Belgium, Italy and Germany, establishing the Museum. Part of this original collection was used as restitution granted to allies in 1815, but the holdings continued to grow. The building's main symbolism thus once again shifted, from defensive stronghold to seat of political power to cultural hub. And in the meantime, Paris grew. In the Book of Hours painting, the fortress is Paris, and everything outside the walls turns abruptly pastoral, a sort of medieval suburb. By the 1700s, the busy city extended far from the Seine in all directions, and the Louvre was only one among many palaces, the power of an increasingly complex kingdom dissipated among several buildings.

I stop for coffee at the Carousel's sad little food court, and from my table overlooking the shops I can still see the sturdy stone wall of the old fortress, lit from below for drama. As I wait for my espresso to cool, it occurs to me that my little table can't be far from the spot where the surly serf was tossing seeds from his apron back in fourteen-something. I wonder what he was thinking of as he went about his business.