The Louvre Museum’s Apollo Gallery is crammed with so many paintings, sculptures and tapestries that it is hard to think of another thing being squeezed inside it.
But on Wednesday, as the gallery reopened for the first time in more than nine months, it felt strangely empty. The crown jewels that were once the centerpiece of the room were not there.
The room, its walls gilded in gold, had been closed to visitors since burglars burst into it in October, cracking into two display cases with angle grinders and making off with eight precious crown jewels worth more than $100 million.
“It’s the most beautiful room in the Louvre and we’ve been deprived of it since Oct. 19,” said Benjamin Randow, 64, a recently retired civil servant walking down the 201–foot hall soon after the museum opened. Yet, as happy as he was to be back, he said, he found the place disconcertingly barren.
“I am still eagerly looking forward to these display cases being filled with objects again,” said Mr. Randow. “It must not just be a hallway that people walk through.”
That’s sort of what the museum’s new director, Christophe Leribault, wants visitors to do. He wants them to look at the room, empty, as a promenade, which is how it was imagined in what was then a royal palace, not a museum.
The reinforced glass cases that once stretched down the middle of the gilded room, holding the country’s small collection of crown jewels, are gone.
“It will be an opportunity for visitors to better realize that they are inside a palace,” Mr. Leribault told dozens of journalists on Wednesday. “It’s a bit strange to see it empty in this way, but that was actually its function. It was a grand state reception gallery.”
During the 1500s, the hall was an outdoor terrace of the palace. Then, in 1662, King Louis XIV of France decided it should become a gallery dedicated to the god Apollo.
It took more than 170 years for the gallery to be finished.
During the French Revolution in the late 18th century, the palace was converted into a museum. Later, the Apollo room was used to house the few crown jewels left in France. Most had been stolen after the revolution began in 1789 or auctioned off by the French state in a surge of republican fervor in 1887.
The items stolen during the heist in October included a pearl-and-diamond tiara worn by Empress Eugénie and an emerald-and-diamond necklace and matching earrings that Napoleon gave to his second wife as a wedding gift.
The heist heightened scrutiny of the management and security of the world’s biggest and most visited museum, leading to the resignation of its then director, Laurence des Cars, and Mr. Leribault’s appointment as her replacement. The museum installed more security cameras, opened a nearby mobile police station, and recently named a former police chief as its security coordinator.
The second floor window the thieves cut through is now protected by metal bars.
A criminal investigation involving more than 100 police officers resulted in four people being charged with theft by an organized gang, and a fifth with complicity. But the jewels have not been recovered, except an imperial crown that the thieves dropped on the sidewalk outside.
The jewels left untouched by the thieves are no longer on display. The Louvre intends to create a “high security” room for them, Mr. Leribault said.
Several Parisians returning to the room said they were traumatized by the heist.
“It was like a piece of myself was gone,” said Gilda Vallorz, 64, a social outreach worker from Paris who said she visits the Louvre once a week. Even though the jewels were no longer there, she said she felt comfort being back in the room.
“There is a void,” she said of the missing display cases that once held the jewels. “But if you lift your eyes a little and look at everything, it can fill up again.”
Around her, the gallery filled with selfie-snapping tourists and guides holding up flags, their tour groups following behind them like ducklings. Many told the story of the heist as the latest layer of history in a room that dates back more than 400 years.
Allison Gay, a guide, pointed out that most of the other royal jewels had been auctioned off, making the thefts all the more painful. One of the stolen items — a diamond-encrusted bow crafted in 1855 for Empress Eugénie — had only been acquired by the Louvre in 2008, she pointed out.
“It was very sad,” she told the American family she was leading. “Not even 20 years later, it was gone.”
Nearby, Denise Worst wandered around with twin daughters who recently graduated from high school in Connecticut. They had heard all about the robbery, she said, but had no idea it had happened here.
“I didn’t know there was something we should be looking at beside these walls,” said Ms. Worst, 55. “It’s beautiful.”
Giulia Imbert contributed reporting.
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