Sully · level -1

Let the thickness of the surviving stonework register for a moment. The moat and round keep belong to a fortress built for royal defence, long before the Louvre became the palace visible above. Their mass gives the earlier building a physical presence that a date alone cannot convey. On Sully’s lower level, remains, models and archaeological finds offer different ways to understand that past. A model helps you grasp a whole building; a surviving wall makes its size immediate. In the Saint-Louis rooms, even a small excavated coin can shift your attention toward the people whose ordinary traces remained in the ground. The excavations of the 1980s brought such objects into view alongside the architecture. Give those changes of scale some time: a stretch of masonry, the curve of the keep, something small enough to have been carried. They belong to different kinds of evidence. The Sphinx is also associated with this museum level, within the ancient Egyptian collection. Its presence belongs to the Louvre’s later life as a museum, separate from the medieval fortress whose foundations you are exploring.