The Louvre is full

Nowhere is this more evident than in the Louvre's 18th French painting mezzanine.  Only Quentin de la Tour's portrait of Mme. de Pompadour seems appropriately and sensitively mounted in her own little room; smallish perhaps, but not just jammed in higgledy-piggledy like, alas, most of the Watteaus and Nattiers and Fragonards are.  The worst, most crowded-seeming is Hyacinthe Rigaud's splendid state portrait of Louis XIV, which needs, at the least, to be hung in the king's bedroom at Versailles--even in the Salon de la Guerre or the Salon de la Paix--just not where it's now, actually hung in the Louvre, where it seems like it's waiting in some attic for a knock-down clearance sale.   There's something sadistic and disrespectful about its present placement. And yet there is a certain cruel justice in having Perronneau's exquisite portrait of Mme. de Sorquainville ("la Joconde du 18ième") over in one corner of the room just out of sight of le Roi Soleil, with all her merciless, dagger-sharp wit and elegance: She was 58 years old when this portrait was painted. And it gives one goose bumps to think what she might say (or must have said) about the strutting, swaggering be-ermined pomposity of her former sovereign.  Does me anyway.  

Now, do you think that over at Salon Magazine, where they're so concerned with the equal representation of women in television and movies, that they have any notion how of infinitely superior Mme. de Pompadour and Mme. de Sorquainville were to Louis XIV?  Or how perfectly equal they were to one another?