Tutankhamania

Paris has Pharaonic fever--all because of 45 objects from the tomb of Egypt's boy king, Tutankhamen (circa 1358 B.C.), which recently began a four-month stay at the Petit Palais. The event is hardly news: King Tut's tomb was discovered in 1922. But ever since the exhibition opened, Parisians waiting to get in have jammed the Avenue Churchill with serpentine lines five bodies thick.

Such official visitors as 91-year-old Konrad Adenauer have had to wait until 10 p.m. for private tours. French newspapers and magazines are filled with articles on "The Short and Pathetic Life of a Persecuted Monarch" and "Was King Tut Really a Woman?" L'Express depicted De Gaulle as a Pharaoh, and even fashion has been afflicted. Two top hairdressers, Alexandre and Carita, have created Egyptian coiffures and appropriate makeup--blue or black lines outlining lips and nostrils, plus eyeliner extending halfway round to a lady's ears.

Mask & Marsh. Although Tut's burial effects have traveled before (34 objects toured the U.S. in 1961-62), their Parisian trip was arranged with unprecedented showmanship by that esthetic Barnum. Culture Minister Andre Malraux. After first viewing a roomful of statuary entitled "The Theban Cradle of the Child King," the visitor accompanies the boy on his twilight journey from death and burial to resurrection and fusion with Osiris, god of the dead. In a dimly lit Salle Royale hung with blue velvet, glows the gold funeral chair, with its big-horned sacred cows for armrests, that was made to carry Tut on his postmortal trip. The room also glows with gold objects that surrounded him in life: his gold armchair trimmed with ebony and ivory, his royal scepters, glittering earrings and necklaces.

The "funeral chamber" is hung with orange velvet to emphasize the soft transparency of huge alabaster jars. A small rotunda with illuminated parchments re-creates the atmosphere of paintings on tomb walls. The primeval marshes where, according to Egyptian belief, the world began and the dead person's metamorphosis took place, are evoked by a wall of papyrus, which in turn gives way to the dramatic climax of the show: the great funeral mask with its blaze of gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian and turquoise. Altogether, it is small wonder that in the first 20 days, some 180,000 Frenchmen have fought their way through the lines--ironically, ignoring the nearby Louvre's permanent display of 4,000 Egyptian objects, which attract no more than a few dozen foreign tourists a day.

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