Inefficiency, mismanagement and three-hour coffee breaks<注1> are ruining the Louvre experience for millions of visitors, according to an annual report by France's government auditors. The famed museum, home of the Mona Lisa, does not know how many paintings it has, how many staff it employs, or how much time they spend on the job, the report says. It blames the mess on the fact that two-thirds of the 1,800 staff are civil servants. The 6m people who visited the museum in 2000, most of them foreign tourists, had first to overcome“very worrying deficiencies”at the ticket and information counters, the report says, noting that the staff routinely take coffee breaks totalling between 2 and 3 hours a day. Visitors are unlikely to see the whole museum, not just because it is so enormous, but because it is never fully open. Up to 25% of the exhibition rooms were closed to the public in 2000 because of a shortage of security staff. Those security staff that are on duty are more of a liability than an asset, the report says: a security guard was sacked when a Corot<注2> painting was stolen in 1998, but it took him more than two years to return his keys and move out of the rent-free flat the museum had given him. Nor, if a work does get stolen, is the Louvre necessarily likely to know about it. It has still not got around to<注3> making a complete inventory of them.

　　根据法国官方审计员的年度报告，效率低下、管理不善和长达3小时的工间休息正在破坏数百万游客游览卢浮宫的美好体验。报告中说，这个拥有《蒙娜丽莎》的著名博物馆不知道自己藏画的数量、员工的数目以及他们的实际工作时间。报告认为这种混乱状况应归咎于卢浮宫的1800名工作人员中有2/3是公务员。报告说，2000年的600万卢浮宫游客——其中大多数来自外国——首先必须克服票务和问讯处的“非常让人担心的低效率”，而博物馆员工每天仍习以为常地享受累计达2至3小时的工间休息。游客们不大可能看到博物馆的全貌，不只是因为它规模庞大，也因为它从未全部开放过。由于缺少保安人员，在2000年该馆多达1/4的展室未向公众开放。而那些上着班的保安员与其说是有用还不如说是累赘，报告中说：1998年，一幅柯罗的画失窃，一名保安因此被解雇，但是两年多以后他才归还钥匙并搬出博物馆提供给他的免租金公寓。而且，就算真的有画被偷了，卢浮宫方面也不一定能知道。它还没顾上给藏画编一份完整的清单。

　　Remarks：“非常让人担心的低效率”却仍然遏制不了人们趋之若鹜的热情，这倒是艺术之永恒魅力的一个佐证。