Le Resquilleur du Louvre by Bernard Chenez

“Je cherche un abri d’âme,” says the protagonist of this poignant and thought-provoking book. Homeless, dripping wet, and alone, he uses a stolen pass to gain entrance to the world’s most famous museum. At the sight of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, this “gate-crasher” (one translation for resquilleur) expresses his hope that the Louvre can provide the shelter he is seeking for his soul. If a battered, headless statue, held together with wires and staples, can become the symbol of a glorious institution like the Louvre, he reflects, perhaps it can inspire a person beaten down by life to recover the will to live.

Avoiding the crowds, he finds an out-of-the-way storage room and picks the lock. It becomes his refuge and the base from which he makes forays to different parts of the museum. In deciding to extend his unauthorized visit, he becomes a “squatter,” another translation of resquilleur and the one chosen for the title of the book.

Writing in the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce’s prose poems, author Bernard Chenez sets down the mental wanderings of this solitary man who, his circumstances notwithstanding, offers insightful commentaries on works of art and the daily life of the museum. “À toute vie répond une œuvre d’art,” he writes, giving the reader a glimpse into the world of a great museum, its treasures, its rhythms, its power. Chenez’s wry, sympathetic style is enhanced by sketches that appear at the beginning of each chapter, made on his daily visits to the museum while writing the book. Through the resquilleur, we experience the interior life of this renowned institution—and something of what it would be like to have it all to ourselves.

Bernard Chenez

Bernard Chenez was born in 1946 in Normandy. He worked as a boilermaker in his youth, but after the student-worker riots of May 1968, he decided to pursue his love of drawing. He became a political cartoonist for Le Monde in 1972 and remained at the newspaper for 10 years. In 1984, he moved to L’événement du jeudi, a newly created weekly news magazine, where he worked until 1997. During this time, he made several trips to Japan, publishing his drawings in different Japanese media. He also collaborated on theater productions with Sylvia Monfort, Guy Rétoré, Benno Besson, and Coline Serreau. In 1992, he began drawing sports illustrations for the television network Canal+, moving to France 2 in 2000. He is presently an illustrator for L’Équipe, a sports daily that is the most widely read publication in France. He has published 24 collections of drawings and considers the works of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet to be emotional touchstones. Le Resquilleur du Louvre is his first novel.