As visitors, hostesses regularly inviting various parties interested in the arts, copyists, subjects of works of art, collectors, women are omnipresent in the French museums of the 19th century. And yet there has not been much research concerning them. This paper, which deconstructs a certain number of presuppositions, takes a look at the space they are given in the Louvre during the century that saw them as a matter of fact win a public space of their own. How were women in museums looked upon ? Are women really without expertise, critical vision and artistic knowledge ? Are museums for them purely the space for casual strolling for strolling’s sake –flânerie–, networking, or the visual consumption of objects ? Current discourse will be challenged by a number of concrete cases, which, however atypical, allow for the renewal of models of femininity and the rethinking of the relations between the sexes, because of their intellectual ambition and their understanding of museums. The dialogue between reality and fiction leads to questioning flânerie, copy and consumption as so many active concepts enabling interactions between museums and women.