Trapped, COVID-ridden, on the grounds of the Louvre

It’s July 2022, and I’m in Paris for the weekend with some friends. It’s my first time. The city is beautiful, isn’t it? Old, magnificent, and grimy.

I’d already been in Europe for a couple of months on a research exchange to Marburg in the German state of Hesse. Marburg is no Paris, but it’s still beautiful and charming by my impoverished North American standards: a castle on a hill, with the old city cobbling its way down the sides, and growing more modern as it wends into the surrounding valleys. In 2022 the citizens were celebrating the 800th anniversary of the first documented reference to Marburg’s city status, as a proxy for its founding¹. There’s a döner kebab restaurant across from St. Elizabeth’s Church, the most significant church in the city; a path leads behind the restaurant and up onto the next hill over. Continue for 10 minutes and you’ll find a small obelisk commemorating a nature walk taken by the local Crown Princess on 13 May, 1814.

On Saturday in Paris we left our hostel to explore the city a bit. I’ve never seen so many bollards in my life. A manifestation of French restraint.

We climbed Montmartre to the famous Sacré-Cœur Basilica. It’s an imposing building, though having been completed during WWI, it’s surprisingly young by the standards of Parisian landmarks. We also visited the slightly older Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe.

I also learned that the City of Paris, like all great institutions, is interested in putting a stop to rats.

I drank a little too much wine that night, so I wasn’t feeling great on Sunday. Our train back to Frankfurt would depart late in the afternoon. We decided to go to the Louvre for half a day. First, we deposited our bags in a café across the street, which stored them for a small fee. Then we proceeded to the main entrance at the glass pyramid. It’s surrounded by pools infested with the strangest and most incompetent pigeons I’ve ever met in my life. Beady-eyed and aimless. I did not see them anywhere else in Paris. Perhaps they are an emanation of the Louvre itself?

Then we were inside. I’d already been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC before, and the experience was kind of similar. Endless halls.

I like fine art, but also I find it stupefying to peruse paintings one-after-the-other for hours. Besides, there wasn’t nearly enough time to see everything. So I mostly stuck to the antiquities.

With each exhibit, I felt worse and worse. At first I thought it must be the sleep deprivation from the hangover, catching up with me. As we finished up in the museum and headed out into the Tuileries to sit down for a drink, I started to think I might be getting sick. I drank an expensive sparkling water (the French seem to be less savvy in the carbonation department than the Germans) and settled into a mild delirium.

After some time, we noticed it was getting busy. Okay; that’s not unexpected on a beautifully sunny Sunday afternoon.

After some more time, we noticed it was getting really busy. Well, we had to catch our train soon anyway, so we headed back in the direction of the café to grab our luggage. The crowds became thicker and thicker along the way. Then, we ran into the barrier: we couldn’t cross the street that runs through the central courtyard of the Louvre. There were barricades on either side, lined with people and police officers.

Did you know that on the final day of competition, the Tour de France enters Paris? We didn’t. The cyclists pass through the courtyard of the Louvre. Everyone was there to see it happen. Suddenly we were frantic to find a way around. We walked back up the grounds a bit to another potential exit; no luck. We tried to use the subway station – which has entrances on both sides of the street – as a shortcut, but it had been closed for security reasons a moment before. Désolé, monsieur. We finally crossed to the river side of the grounds and tried to find a way to loop around to the café. No avail; it was decidedly on the wrong side of the path of the cyclists, and we would not be able to get around without taking a massive detour that would certainly see us miss our train anyway.

So we missed our train, at the cost of several hundred dollars. I suffered one more night in Paris, feeling increasingly sick. We travelled back to Germany the next day. In my misery I felt pretty awful about taking the train and exposing, maybe infecting other people, but I did not have the money or the agency to choose differently. Thankfully, everyone on the train was still masking at the time.

I did a COVID test once I got back to Marburg. It was my first time testing positive or showing symptoms; somehow I’d managed to miss the four big waves that had happened between 2020 and early 2022. My throat dissolved into a single large and painful ulcer. When the fever broke, I spent time watching the first three seasons of Succession, and slowly got back to work.

After a week and a half, I finally tested negative and emerged from my Airbnb to blink, disoriented, in the sunlight. I walked to the döner place, and up the hill behind where, like that princess had done two centuries earlier, I soaked in the simple beauty of nature.