They strolled through an archway of the prisonlike building and came into a cobbled courtyard with a duplicate opening ahead and to the right.
"What's this?" she asked astonished.
"The Louvre."
"From the street it looks like a prison."
"In a sense that part is—it's the Ministry of Finance."
"What's that to do with art?"
"There is a connection—but it's too early in the morning to establish it sensibly."
"What's that off there?" she pointed.
"Notre Dame."
"The hunchback?"
"The same."
"Did you ever paint it?"
"Never—but I've drawn it from every angle."
"Looks more like Balzac's stories than Hugo. As if he were writing now but saw it from way back. You see I've been reading a lot. Paris looks that way to me, though I've hardly seen it. As if every stone has been alive for ages. I want to put my ear against a stone and let it tell me why I do the things I do. I'll bet they know why."
The morning sun shed its veils and danced on the ochre Seine. They walked up the Left Bank and recrossed to the Concorde where he pointed to a first glimpse of the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Elysian Fields.
Then he led her back to the great halls of the Louvre where she told what she liked and did not.
He watched her, smiling, as she examined the Botticellis she resembled and surpassed. She thought them languid, and said she would rather look like Titian's reclining nudes or Delacroix's Odalisques.
"You'd have to fatten up."
She stood a long time before the Du Barry and Louis XV portraits and decided privately she wouldn't want that king to make love to her; no wonder his mistress needed aphrodisiacs.
She pointed to a figure in a black doublet and white ruff under a young long arrogant head. "You'd look good in that costume. He was the man to paint you."
"Veronese," he said, but missed what she said because he made a remarkable discovery about the painting in the detail of the sleeve that had escaped his notice before.
