One of the `immortal ones' helps enrich the Louvre

English-speaking journalists are received royally in the former apartments of Napoleon III's equerry, for we are part of Mr Pierre Rosenberg's plot to recruit "friends of the Louvre" throughout the world, and to inspire rich companies to give generously to his museum.

The French government provides two-thirds of the Louvre's annual £78 million budget, but it can't be easy finding the other £26 million.

Perhaps that is why the 63-year-old museum director looks like a City of London banker, with his bald pate and unkempt white hair, pin-striped suit, polka-dot tie and famous red wool scarf. Asked why he is never without it, he replies: "Pure affectation". Compared to the crusty aristocrats who ran the Louvre for most of the last two centuries, that passes for a sense of humour.

On Mr Rosenberg's curriculum vitae, the words "de l'Academie francaise" precede mention of his position as director of the Louvre. After all, the world counts only 40 of "the immortal ones", compared to thousands of museum directors. Mr Rosenberg says his admission to the Academie in 1995 showed recognition of art historians.

Each academicien must wear a sword with his dress regalia, so Mr Rosenberg's friends pitched in to buy him one of the swords carried by Napoleon's 50 savants during the 1797-1799 Egyptian expedition. "I like to think that mine belonged to [Dominique] Vivant Denon" who was the Louvre's first director, he says. "When I die, the sword will go to the museum."

The principal function of the Academie Francaise, founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, is to render the French language "pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences". But Mr Rosenberg seems to relish speaking English. In his delightful accent he has lectured at Princeton, Cambridge and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Equally un-French is Mr Rosenberg's willingness to panhandle abroad for his beloved Louvre. "We approached them," he says, unabashedly, when asked how Nippon Television (NTV) came to contribute £3 million, the biggest gift ever by a private company to the arts in France, so that 500 years after she was painted, Leonardo's Mona Lisa will finally have a 200 sq metre room of her own, with natural lighting from both sides.

Too bad about the bulletproof glass in front of her, Mr Rosenberg admits. For the past year a debate has raged over whether the world's favourite painting should receive a facelift, to remove layers of yellow-brown varnish. Mr Rosenberg says No: "If you are ill you need to go to the doctor. The Mona Lisa is not ill. So many mistakes have been made in hasty restorations."

Two-thirds of the Louvre's six million annual visitors are foreign, many of them Japanese. "The Louvre has a prestige in Japan which is completely exaggerated," Mr Rosenberg admits. "For the Japanese we are the museum." He was more than happy to give all NTV employees free entrance to the Louvre in exchange for the Mona Lisa money. The Louvre uses proceeds from its exhibitions in Japan to supplement its meagre fund for acquisitions.

Another hot topic within what Mr Rosenberg calls "the international mafia of museum directors" is the new dominance of architecture. Since the construction of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the I.M. Pei wing of the National Gallery in Washington in the 1970s, he explains, architecture has "breathed new life" into museum-going, at the risk of overpowering the works it is meant to highlight. Frank Gehry's museum in Bilbao may look like a Chernobyl melt-down, but people rush to see it.

Four of the 18 books that Mr Rosenberg has written are about the 17th-century painter Nicolas Poussin, so I am not surprised when he tells me that his favourite painting, the one he goes to see twice a month, is L'Hiver by Poussin. "Because it scares me," he says, with a mischievous smile. "It's a painting that makes you ask yourself questions, that makes you think about death."

After such a description, who could resist searching out the canvas? It is a well-kept secret that the Louvre is open until 10 p.m. every Wednesday.

There were art students sketching Michelangelo's Dying Slave in the Italian sculpture gallery, a few people contemplating the Winged Victory. But it was exhilarating to be alone in room after room of Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities, almost alone in the French painting section.

When I finally found Winter, also called The Flood, it was the most dismal painting I had ever seen. A huge snake slithers down the rocks to the left: a dagger of lightning cuts through the middle. In the foreground blighted humans cling to a floating board, a drowning horse, a sinking boat. One raises his hands to the heavens. It is a scene from Titanic, a doom-laden vision of the end of the world.

What, I wonder, would a man like Mr Rosenberg, decked with every honour the French cultural world has to offer, with a clutch of pretty Renoirs and Monets just a few rooms away, see in such a painting? Or is there a good dose of gloom in the soul of every French man?