Bernard Palissy’s furnace

Bernard Palissy’s furnace

Tuileries

The Louvre contains many strange nooks and crannies, but this one attains a height of oddity, unknown to the public and even to initiates. I was lucky enough to enter it. In the mid-1980s, at the beginning of the works for the Grand Louvre and the construction of an underground passageway for the avenue Général-Lemonnier, which traverses the Tuileries Gardens and connects the Pont Royal to the rue de Rivoli, archeologists found several furnaces not far from the former Château des Tuileries, near the Pavillon de Flore, including the furnace of Bernard Palissy, Catherine de Medicis’ protégé, and a quantity of plaster casts (seashells, lizards, frogs) that served to decorate his ceramics. No one knew what to do with Palissy’s cumbersome furnace, which was taken apart and reassembled in the concrete basement constructed under the Carrousel Garden and devoted to museum logistics. There the furnace still stands today, occupying the entire breadth and a good part of the depth of a storage space for the museum’s unused furniture: tables and desk chairs, metal filing cabinets and Empire sofas gathering dust. Who has seen Palissy’ furnace? Who even knows it exists? We emerged into the open air through a narrow passageway that runs along the Pavillon du Flore, fascinated by this discovery.