Exposition by Nathalie Léger

Author:Nathalie Léger [Léger, Nathalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-948980-04-3
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Leaving the garden for the Louvre courtyard, I spent a long time searching for traces of the vanished palace, this Tuileries, which was the very essence of the Second Empire, its advent and its disappearance. Where was the site, what had occupied the grounds, which structure, how were the structures laid out, from where to where, and how did they open to the garden, which entrance: steps or arcades? My walk was filled with this vague archeological curiosity, which seemed in no hurry to be satisfied. I looked around absentmindedly, uttering hypotheses in passing, an embankment here, that hollow over there, under the terrace along the water, an assemblage of columns, and there, look, maybe that could be … My mind refused to comprehend the evident simplicity of the layout: until its destruction during the Commune, the Tuileries Palace reached precisely to the outer pavilions of the Louvre, the Pavillon de Marsan on the one side and the Pavillon de Flore on the other. I would have preferred a building that had been swallowed up, of which nothing was left, a mere outline, a handful of debris. But no, maps remain, drawings, engravings, big paintings galore at Orsay and in museums in the provinces, and there are also photographs. Hastily leafing through a history of the palace in the stacks of a local library revealed snapshots of the building and even views of the interior, a great many of them. Astonishment. My first impulse: to close it, not to look, not to stare, to be assured of nothing. But I returned to it anyway, I turned a few pages, I went fast (façades too regular, symmetries without elegance, lines, pediments, lawns of dust, tub-shaped shrubberies, and inside: interiors as was proper, grand parquet floors, linked rooms, colonnades, marble and molding, everything is at once tawdry and bleak, everything as if hollowed out for the photograph). I put the book back on the shelves. In an instant, the images have taken away the little existence that this vanished palace once had. I shouldn’t have looked at them.

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