The Hidden Staircase

The Hidden Staircase

Apparently only the fire department has a complete knowledge of all the staircases in the Louvre. I’d like to see an article in Nature or Science comparing the hippocampus size of Louvre firefighters and London taxi drivers back when it used to take them four or five years to master the Knowledge, as their license is known (before Waze and Uber). I like this narrow spiral staircase that, in a southeast corner of the Sully wing, rises from the Egyptian antiquities to the nineteenth-century French painters, a strange short-circuit through floors and millennia. I never miss the occasion to take these discreet stairs where I feel at home because, first, they are modestly situated at the exact opposite of the velvety (and dusty) appartements of Napoleon III and, second, they lead on from the majestic Escalier du Midi that runs from the ground floor to the second floor at the corner of the colonnade. My spiral staircase (known as the “Escalier du Chien” in memory of the Egyptian dog that was once exhibited at its base) looks like a set of backstairs where one might expect to find obscene graffiti. Best of all, it opens directly onto Hubert Robert’s Grande Galerie in Ruins (Sully, room 932). One thus enters behind-the-scenes of the palace. But today, Monday, my staircase is closed.