Just over a year ago, Laurence des Cars, the intellectually brilliant (if famously prickly) former head of the largest and most-visited museum in the world, wrote a somewhat alarming note to her boss, France’s culture minister. Des Cars, who on Tuesday resigned as president of the Louvre, lamented the advanced state of disrepair of the iconic museum’s buildings and galleries. The Louvre was overcrowded, she said. Facilities were substandard, technologies hopelessly outdated. Water was coming through the ceilings. Violent temperature swings were damaging artworks. The museum had reached a “worrying level of obsolescence”. But she had the answer. Barely a week later, the first woman to run France’s most prized cultural institution stood beside Emmanuel Macron in front of its biggest draw, the Mona Lisa, as the French president proudly unveiled Louvre: New Renaissance, their radical, ambitious, €1bn plan for the museum’s renovation. Des Cars’ immediate future, and that of the Louvre, looked assured. Alas, the year ahead had other plans. Rolling staff strikes, a decade-long ticket scam, an avalanche of ageing infrastructure issues and …