To Germain Bazin, chief curator of the Louvre, it had been a most unpleasant year. Week after week the press would speak accusingly of the Louvre's "attics," its "cellars" and its "obscure prisons." In these sealed-off rooms, charged the critics, hundreds of masterpieces had lain "buried" to Frenchmen for years. Bazin protested that no museum has room enough to exhibit all its treasures, but there was no silencing the critics. Cried the indignant weekly Arts magazine: "We want to know our national patrimony!"
So emotional did the controversy become that Novelist André Malraux himself, the cultural grand panjandrum of De Gaulle's Fifth...
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