Free Gregory Curtis by Disarmed: The Story of the Venus De Milo Page A

as much as fifteen francs a day, but a general laborer earned only three francs. Women and children who worked received much less. A family of four needed about six francs a day to live, so the families of average laborers were condemned to hopeless poverty. Even among better-paid workers, illness or injuries that reduced the number of days worked could send a family from comfort to poverty in short order. About half the people in Paris were paupers.
    Presiding over all this was the improbable figure of Louis XVIII. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, Louis had been no one’s first choice to assume control of France, but he was after all the rightful heir to the throne. He weighed more than 350pounds. For most of his reign he could move about only in a wheelchair. As a young man he had married the ugliest noblewoman in Europe. Her eyebrows grew up her forehead, and she refused to bathe. Fat as he was and awful as she was, they had no children. She died during their exile, so Louis was now a widower without an heir. It seemed impossible that the blubbery and diffident king would marry now and produce children. He was infatuated with thecomtesse du Cayla, but his sex life with her was limited to taking snuff from between her breasts. When she was on her way to see the king, the royal guards, though continuing to stand motionless while staring straight ahead, would commence a chorus of sniffing.
    During his years in exile Louis had perfected a withering stare, but he was only passably intelligent and seemed hardly up to the task at hand. Nevertheless, he surprised everyone by outmaneuvering any threats to his power and by ruling on the whole sensibly and fairly. In particular he prevented the reactionary nobility, who had returned to France lusting for revenge, from instituting a new era of executions and persecution.
    Although the laws stiffened and loosened from time to time, the censorship by which Napoleon had stifled free expression was relaxed during theRestoration. The arts, which had languished during the empire, returned with almost explosive force. In 1820 Lamartine published
Méditations poétique
, the first work of French romantic poetry, and it became a sensation. Even the king read it. A new generation of artists, writers, and musicians was about to appear: Hugo, Delacroix, Berlioz, Balzac,Stendhal, Dumas, among many others. One reason the Venus de Milo became so famous so quickly is that she arrived in France at the precise moment when theneoclassicism of the past gave way to theromanticism of the future. Since the neoclassicists, like Winckelmann, believed in imitating classical art, and since the romantics, also like Winckelmann, believed that great art was the result of personal and political freedom, each side could embrace the Venus de Milo in its fight against the other.
The looted masterpieces
    O NCE IN Paris, the Venus de Milo would be placed in the Louvre, the former palace that had been transformed into an art museum, although in 1821 it looked radically different than it does now. It was just half the present size, consisting only of the Cour Carrée (the Sully Wing today) and the long building that runs west from the Cour Carrée for almost a quarter mile along the right bank of the Seine (the Denon Wing today). Both the Cour Carrée and the long gallery had a dilapidated, abandoned air that Napoleon’s efforts at reconstruction had failed to dissipate.
    TheArc de Triomphe du Carrousel was there, too, standing in front of theTuileries Palace, which burned to the ground in 1871. The Tuileries began at the end of the long gallery and ran perpendicular from the Seine to the present Rue de Rivoli. The palace had been Napoleon’s residence in Paris, just as now it was Louis XVIII’s. But when the king happened to gaze out his window toward the spot whereI. M. Pei’s glass pyramid now stands, an area that today is an immense open plaza, he saw nothing but a maze of sagging, dispirited tenements