Besides the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum's pyramid had also caused enormous controversy. At the time, public opinion generally held that placing a pyramid in front of a European-style royal palace was utterly incongruous, practically a desecration of aesthetics.
Yet under the French Prime Minister's insistence, this avant-garde structure brimming with modern style was completed. For its first few years, it was still scorned by Parisians, but ten years later, much like the Eiffel Tower's reversal of fortune, the Louvre Museum pyramid transformed from an ugly duckling into a white swan.
It was said that the Chinese-American architect had not initially borrowed the form of an Egyptian pyramid. It was merely an ordinary geometric shape, one that could reflect Paris's ever-changing sky while also providing light for the underground facilities.
Yet Pomona thought the pyramid was simply a masterpiece.
When Napoleon marched into Egypt, he brought a great many French scholars with him. It could be said that they took away every Egyptian artifact they could carry; the British had merely picked up a bargain when they took the Rosetta Stone.
The Egyptian Gallery had therefore become the Louvre Museum's largest collection of "Eastern civilization." Like a transparent Shadow, it had become part of the Louvre Museum, and even of Western civilization.
On the Louvre Museum's Dendera Zodiac, Cancer was represented by a scarab beetle. French perfume was indeed famous, but the problem was that it was inseparably tied to the dreadful hygiene conditions of the Middle Ages.
Every country had dark chapters in its history that it was ashamed to mention. That incongruous pyramid was precisely there to remind the French of that, though the designer had not intended it that way at first.
Unless the French returned the artifacts they had stolen from Egypt, the glass pyramid would