PARIS — Poor Claude Monet.

Like white noise, he’s everywhere and invisible, the staple of countless dentists’ offices. Old hat for more than a century now. Is it too late to recapture some of the shock and thrill that caused horrified Parisians in the 1870s to perceive his work as “leprous”?

Amazingly, no, it’s not. The Monet show that just opened here at the Grand Palais is a start. The biggest art spectacle in Europe this fall, with some 160 paintings, it is, believe it or not, the first full-dress overview Paris has staged in decades, the first chance anywhere to see the whole sweep of his work in some time. The French are treating it like a national celebration. President Nicolas Sarkozy contributed a note to the catalog extolling this “unmistakable emblem of the international influence of French culture.” The exhibition would have been a box office smash even if it had corralled fewer of Monet’s benchmarks.

It happens to be ravishing.

Monet the populist decorator of candle-in-Chianti-bottle bistros and college dormitories is modernism’s prettiest painter, a virtuoso of picturesque country scenes and ephemeral weather but not an especially heavyweight thinker or troublemaker. Clichés about him as a wandering minstrel in a white beard trailed like the Pied Piper by children toting his canvases across hill and dale haven’t exactly toughened his reputation, either.

This show, surveying his long career and probing its depths, helps restore something of his original status. He comes across as more than the familiar Impressionist — he comes across as a painter of strange and elusive probity, of memory and reflection, as an artist seeking not just to simulate sun, rain and snow, but states of mind as well. He gave form to “the heavenly pasturage our minds can find in things,” is how Proust once put it.