PARIS.- King Dagobert’s bronze throne. Charlemagne’s ivory chess pieces. Mozart’s handwritten score of “Don Giovanni.” A 16th-century globe — the first to use the word “America.”
In a library? Yes, but not just any library. These works belong to the National Library of France. After 12 years and 261 million euros (more than $256 million) of renovations, the country’s national library in the heart of Paris has reopened and is showing off more than 900 of its treasures.
Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne officially inaugurated the site at a Champagne-filled cocktail party in September attended by much of Paris’ intellectual ruling class. “Vive the Bibliothèque Nationale de France! Vive la république! Vive la France!” she exclaimed in a speech to the ministers, museum directors, writers, artists and others.
The cultural elite here is not given to displays of emotion; even smiling can be difficult for some of them. But upon seeing the array of beloved works up close and personal, they gushed.
“Formidable! Crazy! Crazy,” said Jérôme Clément, the founder of Arté, a European TV channel focused on culture. “‘The Charterhouse of Parma’ by Stendhal, Pascal’s ‘Pensées,’ and did you see the Montaigne?”
“To discover the Notre-Dame manuscript of Victor Hugo for the first time — what pleasure!” said Marie-Claude Char, the former press director at the French publishing house Gallimard and widow of poet René Char, as she toured the manuscript-filled Mazarin Gallery.
In a nearby gallery, Christophe Leribault, president of the Musée d’Orsay, used his iPhone to zoom in on Louis XIV-era cameos. “The presentation — absolutely marvelous,” he said.
Adrien Goetz, one of France’s leading art historians and editor of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie magazine, stared at the ancient black Michaux stone from Babylon, the first object inscribed entirely in cuneiform to arrive in Europe. He was eager to show it to whoever came by. “I have worked in the library for years when the halls were dark, dusty, sad and sinister,” he said. “There is a feeling of the marvelous now.”
France has had a national library since the 16th century, and the main part of this site, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France Richelieu, 624,307 square feet near the Stock Exchange and the Louvre, dates from the 18th. When the library expanded in 1998 with the opening of the François-Mitterrand site on the other side of the Seine, Richelieu was reserved for specialized departments: manuscripts, prints and photographs, antiquities, performing arts, music, maps, and 600,000 coins and medals.
In total, the Richelieu site holds 22 million objects and documents (of 40 million total in the library’s collections) dating from antiquity to the present day. The prints and photographs collection alone numbers 15 million.
The renovation is a triumph of light, opening up storage rooms that had been invisible, creating new walkways connecting the spaces, installing large glass doors and windows.
“We are proving that the National Library is not a dead space,” said Laurence Engel, president of the library. “It’s a place of surprises, of discovery, of dreams.”
The upper floor has become a museum reached by a monumental steel and aluminum staircase that serves as the backbone of the site. Ancient sculptures sit in glass cases so that you can see them from every angle, mixed in with backlit translucent medals and plates, jewelry, sculptures, photographs, books and prints. The site contains the second largest collection of ancient Greek vases after the Louvre, and some of the rarest coins in France. There are also costumes, and of course, the Mazarin Gallery’s manuscripts, which will be rotated every four months to avoid damage from exposure to light.
The Mazarin Gallery is the most striking space in the museum, almost 150 feet long, and created 40 years before the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles (1684). Its 17th-century ceiling, covered with paintings, was inspired by Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.”
How can you not get excited when you see the original handwritten pages of the steamy memoirs of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the 18th-century gambler, swindler, diplomat, lawyer, soldier, pleasure seeker and serial seducer? Or a page from Marcel Proust’s seven-volume opus, “In Search of Lost Time,” whose words — scratched out and written over — bear witness to his hesitations, uncertainty and pursuit of excellence?
The other manuscripts range from the 13th-century lavishly illustrated book known as the “Psalter of Saint Louis” all the way to “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. Scores by Stravinsky, original prints from Rembrandt to Picasso, drawings by French artist Sonia Delaunay, photographs from Nadar and Robert Capa, an engraving by Matisse, one of the library’s two Gutenberg Bibles, a map of Paris published just before the 1789 revolution — all are here. Interactive digital screens tell some of their stories.
The ground floor remains what it always was: a library. The Salle Ovale, an architectural jewel inaugurated in 1936, was long reserved for scholars and students, and now has been redesigned as a public reading room open to all, for the first time without any sign-up or fee. (Access to the museum upstairs is 10 euros.) It offers seating at tables for 160, a child-friendly area with comfortable couches and chairs, and access to interactive screens and 20,000 open-access works (including 9,000 comic books).
Its enormous scale, with a nearly 60-foot-high glass roof, 16 round decorative windows, mosaics and miles of bookshelves, makes it one of the most beautiful rooms for reflection in Paris.
Next door is the Salle Labrouste, decorated in metal, glass and leafy murals, with a soaring ceiling inspired by Byzantine cupolas. It is dedicated to the National Institute for the History of Art, Paris’ go-to library for art researchers.
There are now two entrances, at 58, rue Richelieu (for groups), and 5, rue Vivienne (for individuals). A garden on the Rue Vivienne side has been planted with species reminiscent of the book: paper mulberry, paper birch, Chinese palm.
A small cafe, run by Rose Bakery, has opened on the ground floor, along with a bookstore and auditorium. A rehearsal room and five specialized reading rooms are tucked away on an upper floor.
The library is particularly proud of the financial support of its American donors, which contributed a third of the private donations. The largest American gift (1.2 million euros) came from Mark Pigott, a businessman and philanthropist; other donors include the Leon Levy Foundation and the French Heritage Society.
“The United States is one of the rare places where we do not have to explain who we are or what we do,” said Kara Lennon-Casanova, who oversees fundraising. “Libraries were always among the few free places in the country.”
There is so much splendor in the renovated spaces that sometimes forgotten is a statue by Jean-Antoine Houdon of the 18th-century Enlightenment writer and philosopher Voltaire. It sits in the Salon d’honneur inside the Rue Richelieu entrance. Little known is that the statue is also a reliquary, because in its base Voltaire’s heart is kept.
His official tomb is in the Panthéon, but it is here that the French state decided to put the heart of the man who wrote an estimated 15 million words — books, pamphlets, letters, plays and poems in the years before the revolution. “It’s a unique object, a curiosity,” Engel said. “It proves that a library is not just a place of the printed word.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
