The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (8 page)

The situation is one of carelessness, negligence, indifference.

The Louvre is less well protected than a Spanish museum.
¹⁷

That last statement was a low blow indeed, although it would soon become clear to the authorities that Apollinaire knew far more about the Louvre’s security arrangements than he let on.

There were numerous false trails and hoaxes in connection with the case. A fourteen-year-old prostitute, Germaine Terclavers, already in custody, startled the police by claiming that her pimp and his gang had stolen the painting and that it was stored in Belleville, the apaches’ home base. She claimed that she had seen the painting herself and that the gang planned to ship it to the United States on an ocean liner.

Germaine had recently been arrested and sentenced by a judge to four years in a reform school, and she hoped to get a pardon by revealing what she knew. The police were able to find her nineteen-year-old boyfriend and pimp, named Georges. They placed him under arrest for carrying an illegal weapon — an all-purpose charge that the police routinely used to take into custody almost anyone they suspected of larger crimes. Georges turned out to be a feared gang leader, but whether he was skillful enough to carry off the
Mona Lisa
theft remained in doubt.

When questioned, Germaine provided more details, naming other gang members who she said had planned the crime for weeks. She had overheard them talking about a
gardien
(museum attendant), the Louvre, and
La Joconde.
According to her, she was even asked to serve as a lookout but turned the offer down. As she expanded her story, the police became more interested. She claimed that Georges had not come home the night before the Monday morning of the heist; when he returned late on Monday, he refused to say where he had been. Later, he bragged that he and his gang had committed a crime that had turned the city upside down.

“I remember,” Germaine said of her boyfriend, “that each day he read
Le Journal,
anxiously following developments in the investigation and constantly telling me that the gang ‘were going to get pinched.’ ”
¹⁸
Her denunciations were never corroborated, and the police could not tell whether Georges was simply trying to impress her or if there was some truth in the tale. In any event, Georges enlisted in the army to escape the charge of illegal gun possession, and Germaine was sent off to reform school, never again to receive as much attention as she had gained from her accusation.

Significantly, Germaine knew what buttons to push to gain credibility, for the theory that a rich American was the mastermind behind the theft was widespread. Countless letters poured into the Sûreté suggesting this scenario — often naming candidates for the “mastermind” behind the job. Since the earliest days of the Third Republic, Parisians had resented the increasing American population (sometimes called an invasion) in their city. Moneyed expatriates settled mainly in the eighth and ninth arrondissements, which became known as
la colonie américaine.
One 1905 visitor noticed that advertisements for American goods “hung everywhere.”
¹⁹
Rumors spread that Americans were rapidly buying up buildings around the place de l’Opéra. Only half-jokingly, the story made the rounds that an American millionaire had offered to buy the Arc de Triomphe.

Responding to a tip, Prefect of Police Lépine authorized a plan to have a French police officer pose as an American millionaire to negotiate the purchase of the
Mona Lisa
from a ring of art thieves who claimed it was in their possession. The supposed thieves turned out to be poseurs who wanted the money but had no painting. Yet speculation about American involvement continued. The favorite candidate for the rich American mastermind was J. Pierpont Morgan, known for his avid, if not avaricious, collecting habits, which frequently took him through Europe on buying sprees. When Morgan arrived the following spring in the spa town of Aix-les-Bains for his annual visit and the
Mona Lisa
had still not been found, Paris newspapers reported that two mysterious men had come to offer to sell him the
Mona Lisa.
Morgan indignantly denied the account, and when a French reporter came to interview him, the American wore in his buttonhole the rosette that marked him as a commander of the Legion of Honor — France’s highest decoration. He had recently been awarded it, causing some French newspapers to speculate that he had earned the decoration by offering “a million dollars and no questions asked” for the return of the
Mona Lisa
to the Louvre.
²⁰

Morgan’s offer proved to be only rumor, and public sentiment turned against him, even in Italy. When Morgan and his sister prepared to leave Florence in April 1912, word spread that a painting was among the things they were taking with them. Hundreds of angry Florentines gathered at the railway station to block their departure. The financier had in fact purchased a painting while in Florence, but it was not the
Mona Lisa.
Even so, the crowd at the station had assumed that the stolen masterpiece had somehow returned to the place where Leonardo had begun to paint it (a suspicion that later proved prescient). Morgan had to strike about him with his heavy cane to fend off the mob and make a passage to board the train.

Though the best-known American collector, Morgan was far from the only one, and art-loving Europeans feared that American money would take many of their treasures overseas. (The fact that many of the works in European museums had been plundered from other countries in the first place was irrelevant.) Accusations of American involvement in the theft were so prevalent that the American railroad magnate H. R. Huntington felt compelled to issue a denial: “I have not seen the picture and have not been tempted,” he told a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times.
“Besides, I don’t believe that I would care to be in the position of dealing for stolen goods. I don’t for the life of me see how they got away with it, assuming, of course, that it was really stolen.”
²¹

Was
it really stolen? As time went by without a ransom demand, that question increasingly circulated through Paris. Suspicion began to fall on the photographers who were licensed to work in the museum. According to the magazine
Gil Blas,
those photographers had carte blanche to remove “any picture desired every Monday without any special authorization, and to remove it to the roof [where the sunlight was suitable for photographs] or any other suitable position for work.”
²²
According to this theory, a photographer had accidentally damaged the painting, and to cover up the careless way it had been handled, the museum had blamed its disappearance on thieves. Supposedly, a team of restorers was working to repair the painting, and when they finished, its “recovery” would be announced.

iii

After two weeks of investigation, the Louvre was once again opened to the public, and an even greater number of visitors than usual came to gape at the four hooks on the wall that marked the place where
La Joconde
used to hang. The crowds “didn’t look at the other pictures,” one reporter noted. “They contemplated at length the dusty space where the divine
Mona Lisa
had smiled.… And feverishly they took notes. It was even more interesting for them than if La Joconde had been in its place.”
²³
A tourist, the aspiring writer Franz Kafka, visiting the Louvre on a trip to Paris in late 1911, noted in his diary the “crowd in the Salon Carré, the excitement and the knots of people, as if the Mona Lisa had just been stolen.”
²⁴
People began to place bouquets of flowers on the floor at the spot where the painting had once hung.

Leonardo’s masterpiece had been famous before among well-educated people, but the publicity surrounding its disappearance made it a subject of popular culture. Songwriters in the cabarets of Montmartre always made use of current topics, and the theft of a painting of a beautiful woman was a godsend. One song, “L’as-tu vue? la Joconde!!” (“Have you seen her? the Gioconda!!”) had a stanza making fun of the guards (“It couldn’t be stolen, we guard her all the time, except on Mondays”) and had La Joconde herself complaining that she left because she didn’t want to be constantly stared at.
²⁵
Another cabaret revue was said to have featured a line of topless Joconde girls. The respected journal
La Comoedia Illustré
photographed twelve well-known actresses in the clothing and pose of Mona Lisa and published them under the heading
Les sourires qui nous restent!
(“The smiles that we still have”).
²⁶
One cabaret used a reproduction of
La Joconde
on a poster, with the caption, “I smiled at the Louvre. Now I am merry at the Moulin de la Chanson.”
²⁷
The Zig-Zag cigarette paper company proclaimed that Mona Lisa had left the Louvre because she was anxious to have a smoke. High Life Tailor ran an ad claiming that the undersecretary of state of beaux-arts, hoping to avoid public execution for his failure of duty, had implored the tailor company to send over a photograph of their suits to hang in the Salon Carré in place of the lost painting. Even a corset maker portrayed its newest garment on a figure of the Mona Lisa, who at last was revealed to have perfect hips.

Inevitably the French movie industry also began to capitalize on the furor over the theft. The Pathé company, which had filmed a series of adventures about the detective Nick Winter (a knockoff of the popular American fictional detective Nick Carter), released
Nick Winter et le vol de la Joconde
(
Nick Winter and the Theft of the Mona Lisa
) in the fall of 1911. Franz Kafka and his friend Max Brod were among those who went to see it at the grand Omnia Pathé theater. Brod summarized the plot of the five-minute film, which turned the event into slapstick:

The picture opened with the presentation of M. Croumolle (everyone knows that it means “Homolle”
²⁸
and no one protests against the perfidious way they are going after the gray-haired Delphi scholar). Croumolle is lying in bed, his stocking cap pulled down over his ears, and is startled out of sleep by a telegram: “
Mona Lisa
Stolen.” Croumolle — the Delphi scholar if you please, but I am not protesting, I was laughing so hard — dresses himself with clownlike agility, now he puts both feet into one leg of his pants; now one foot into two socks. In the end, he runs into the street with his suspenders trailing.… The [next part of] the story is set in the hall of the Louvre, everything excellently imitated, the paintings and, in the middle, the three nails
²⁹
on which the
Mona Lisa
hung. Horror; summoning of a comical detective; a shoe button of Croumolle’s as red herring; the detective as shoeshine boy; chase through the cafés of Paris; passers-by forced to have their shoes shined; arrest of the unfortunate Croumolle, for the button that was found at the scene of the crime naturally matches his shoe buttons. And now the final gag — while everyone is running through the hall at the Louvre and acting sensational, the thief sneaks in, the
Mona Lisa
under his arm, hangs her back where she belongs, and takes Velázquez’s
Princess
instead. No one notices him. Suddenly someone sees the
Mona Lisa;
general astonishment, and a note in one corner of the rediscovered painting that says, “Pardon me, I am nearsighted. I actually wanted to have the painting next to it.”
³⁰

iv

What everyone wanted to know — and speculated on endlessly — was where the thief could have gone with what was probably the most recognizable artwork in the world. Other than the fingerprint, the only clue was the doorknob, now recovered by the police from the gutter outside the museum. The plumber who had opened the stairway door for the man who dropped it there was set to work looking at hundreds of photographs of museum employees, past and present. Every sighting of the painting or rumor about its whereabouts had to be checked out — and they came in from places as distant as Italy, Germany, Britain, Poland, Russia, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, and Japan.
³¹

As time went on without a solution to the case, many concluded that a gang of professional thieves had been at work. The only previous art theft comparable to this one had been the abduction of Gainsborough’s
Duchess of Devonshire
from a London gallery in 1876. The man who carried out that heist was Adam Worth, a German-born American whose international career as a thief earned him the nickname the Napoleon of Crime. Said to have been the inspiration for Professor Moriarty, the archcriminal of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Worth had stolen the Gainsborough from a London gallery and had tried to obtain a ransom for its return. When that plan fell through, he took the work back to the United States, where it hung in Worth’s Chicago house for the next quarter century. Some have suggested that Worth valued it as a trophy, even an object of desire, too much to accept any ransom for it. The Gainsborough did not surface until 1901, after further negotiations with the original owner through a friend of Worth’s, a Chicago gambler named Pat Sheedy, who announced a year later that Worth had died and was buried under an alias in a London cemetery.