LOUVRE MUSEUM

Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 May 1938, Page 8

LOUVRE MUSEUM

REVENUE FOR PAST YEAR The Louvre museum is the biggest money-maker among the museums of Paris. Figures just made public show that paid entrances in 1937 produced £9,000, received from 537,895 visitors. Altogether, the museums of France brought in revenue in 1937 amounting to £67,000. Versailles, near Paris, with its huge historic chateau, fountains, park, lake, and make-believe village where Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette pretended to be just plain farmers, took £15,162. At the Paris exhibition, the Eiffel Tower was among the most visited, with 810,185 passing the turnstiles, but the biggest attraction of all was the Palace of Discovery, visited by 2,239,300 people. The Palace of Discovery remains open to visitors, and looks like becoming a permanent museum of Palace of Discovery, visited by 2,293,also built for the exhibition.

In the provinces, some of the biggest money makers in 1937 among museums and monuments were Mont St Michel, the fortress cathedral built on a rock off the point where Normandy and Brittany meet, the Caste of Haut Keoningsbourg. in Alsace, and the ever-po-pular chateux of the Loire, with thai of Azay-le-Rideau leading. The Chateau d’lf, .popularised by Alexandre Dumas in “The Count of Monte Cristo,” with its ancient state prison, on an island just outside Marseilles, had 65.981 visitors during' 1937.