So they're putting a McDonald's underneath the Louvre

A terrible idea.

Everybody says so, and as usual, everybody's wrong.

Oh, it's a terrible idea, alright. Spin it any way you like, the conclusion doesn't change --- this is another nail in the coffin of civility and a humiliation to every right-thinking citizen of France.


Well, have you visited the Louvre lately?

I haven't been in Paris for a few years, but when I'm there, it's my habit to pop in to museums for 20-30 minutes at a time. Why so short a visit? Because I've come to believe your eye (well, mine, anyway) gets dull if you look hard at pictures in quantity. So I go to one room at the Louvre, savor, say, the de la Tours, and leave.

The rooms I go to are almost always empty. Sometimes a painter shares a gallery. Sometimes a scholar. But civilians? Rarely.

Where are the nine million visitors? Jammed in front of a painting they can't really see, the Mona Lisa. Or, because they're infatuated by “The Da Vinci Code”, in the Grande Galerie, where a pivotal murder takes place. Or --- here, I mostly spotted teen-aged boys --- gazing longingly at the nipples on the Venus de Milo.

Tourists, in short. Often in that distinctive tourist outfit: track suits and running shoes. Being moved, herd-like, by tour guides who have much more of Paris to show them today.

Call me a snob --- because on this subject, I am --- but for this crowd, nothing goes better with the Mona Lisa than a Big Mac.

I'm not such a hothouse flower that I can't enter the Louvre because I can't face Mickey D's. I can. I will.

But this slap in the face of artlovers who enjoy lunches at real restaurants with a pichet of wine reminds me that there are other museums I like a bit better than the Louvre --- and that I ought to be spending more time there.

Specifically, the Musée d'Orsay, a relative backwater with just 2.5 million visitors a year.  The D'Orsay features French art made between 1848 and 1914 --- for me, the most glorious of all eras. Its collection couldn't be more complete, coming from the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume and the National Museum of Modern Art, which became the Pompidou and only shows works of artists born after 1870.

Think: Manet, Cézanne, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Van Gogh and Millet. Think a room of Degas pastels. Seurat drawings. A brace of Courbet and Corot. Dejeuner sur l'herbe. The Card Players. Starry Night. That magnificent Caillebotte of bare-chested workers stripping floors.

The D'Orsay was once a train station, and it retains that building's vast central chamber. The exhibition rooms are clean and bright. The view of the Seine and the Right Bank is itself art.

And in addition to a small restaurant, there's a high-ceiling dining room with full meals. The last time I was there, a three-course lunch was about 15 Euros, a child's meal was 7 Euros (about what a combination meal would cost at McDonald's in Paris).

The cuisine was of high quality, the wine commendable, the service attentive --- and there was no crowd. After lunch, I was, to my surprise, in the mood for another half-hour of my favorite pictures.

The D'Orsay? Good times. Our little secret. Don't tell.
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Jesse Kornbluth is editor of HeadButler.com.