Rain yesterday. From the top floor of the Louvre, its Cour Carré:

Inside the Louvre, one of the collections I concentrated on was the ancient Middle East.

In about 713 BC, a Mesopotamian king, Sargon II, built a walled city and citadel/palace in a place now known as Khorsabad (present-day Iraq). It was the fourth capital of the ancient kingdom of Assyria. The site was discovered by the French in the 1840s, and archaeologists (French and, later, American) found some beautiful – and big! – things. Transported back to the Louvre (except for one shipload of artifacts, lost in a shipwreck), they are now in three or four large marble rooms with very tall ceilings. Here are close-up pictures of pictures of small portions of a monumental wall depicting the felling and shipment of cedar from Lebanon.

After a very satisfying lunch at the bar of Willi’s Wine Bar – close enough to make it a good place for lunch on Louvre days – it was raining in ernest. I walked back to the museum through the Palais Royal, always beautiful, its arcades giving shelter from the wet:

<;;;a

I was entertained by these French high-schoolers having fun in the decorated courtyard of the Palais Royal, by the new adjunct to the Comédie Française theatre:

After my post-lunch time at the Louvre, the sun came out, everything glistened, and I couldn’t resist a long walk along the streets and quais of the Île de la Cité and the Île St-Louis. Including the flower market on the former.

All of the above is true, the way it really is. But so is this:

I wondered if these possessions are ever disturbed – or taken – when their owner goes off on an errand. If not, why not? In a city with a huge pick-pocketing problem, and where graffiti are ubiquitous, are his possessions respected? It seemed so.