The Crimes of Paris
Page 35
“Chaudron almost died of joy and pride when he learned the prices his work had brought,” Valfierno said. “He… -retired to a country place near Paris and only occasionally does a piece of work for some really great worker in the field of fake-art salesmanship.” 12
Perugia was paid well for his part in the scheme — “enough to take care of him for the rest of his days if he had taken his good fortune with ordinary intelligence.” However, he squandered the money on the Riviera, possibly in casinos, and then, knowing where the real Mona Lisa was hidden, stole it a second time. The story that he carried it around in his trunk for two years was false. “The poor fool had some nutty notion of selling it,” Valfierno told Decker. “He had never realized that selling it, in the first place, was the real achievement, requiring an organization and a finesse that was a million miles beyond his capabilities.” 13
What about the copies? Decker wanted to know. Someday, speculated Valfierno, all of them would reappear. “Without those, there are already thirty Mona Lisas in the world. That in the Prado Museum is, if anything, superior to the one in the Louvre. Every now and then a new one pops up. I merely added to the gross total.” 14
Perhaps significantly, Decker chose not to publish this sensational story in one of the Hearst publications, even though he was still a Hearst employee. His boss, William Randolph Hearst, was a wealthy man who voraciously collected art — just the sort of person to whom Valfierno might have sold one of the fake Mona Lisas. Hearst Castle, his fabled California estate, was donated to the state of California in 1957, and a curator there in 2005 reported that “there is not — and was not — a copy of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa at Hearst Castle,” although it was impossible to tell if one might have been part of “his larger collection located at various other venues, past and present.” 15
The Decker account is the sole source for the existence of Valfierno and this version of the theft of the Mona Lisa. There is no external confirmation for it. Yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing about the case. True or false? That mystery has yet to be solved.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We want to express our appreciation and thanks to Lyn Nosker and Ellen Hoobler, for their work translating certain books and documents for us. Our thanks also to Dick Nosker, for explaining scientific concepts to us, and to Yohann Thibaudault, for his assiduous research in the Paris Préfecture de Police Museum.
Clearly, we have drawn on the works of many authors, whom we have listed in our bibliography. We owe a particular debt, however, to Dr. Benjamin F. Martin of Louisiana State University and Dr. Edward Berenson of UCLA, whose works have informed our writing of chapter 9; and to Richard Parry, whose comprehensive book on the Bonnot Gang provided the basis of our research for chapter 7.
Our thanks to the staffs of the New York Public Library, the Avery Library, and the Butler Library of Columbia University.
We owe more than we can adequately express to our editor, Geoff Shandler, who initially conceptualized this book and provided many insights and suggestions, and to his assistant, Junie Dahn, who as always was the god in the details.
Finally, our gratitude to our agent, Al Zuckerman, whose support for our work has been unwavering.
NOTES
THEFT
1. There were an estimated 275,000 works in the museum’s possession, not all of which were on display.
2. It began as a fortress constructed by Philip Augustus around the year 1190, but many alterations and additions had been made since then.
3. Lawrence Jeppson, The Fabulous Frauds: Fascinating Tales of Great Art Forgeries (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), 44.
CHAPTER ONE: THE CITY OF LIGHT
1. Vincent Cronin, Paris on the Eve: 1900–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 36.
2. Ibid., 35.
3. Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981), 158.
4. Theodore Dreiser, “Paris,” Century Magazine 86, no. 6 (October 1913): 910–11.
5. Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 1.
6. Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 91.
7. Joshua Zeitz, Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 129.
8. Theodore Zeldin, France, 1848–1945: Taste and Corruption (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 23.
9. Nigel Gosling, The Adventurous World of Paris, 1900–1914 (New York: Morrow, 1978), 18.
10. Zeldin, France, 358.
11. Mary Ellen Jordan Haight, Paris Portraits, Renoir to Chanel: Walks on the Right Bank (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991), 108.
12. Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Misia: The Life of Misia Sert (New York: Knopf, 1980), 41.
13. Ibid., 42.
14. Johannes Willms, Paris: Capital of Europe; From the Revolution to the Belle Epoque, trans. Eveline L. Kanes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1997), 335–36.
15. Frankfort Sommerville, The Spirit of Paris (London: Black, 1913), 62.
16. Ellen Williams, Picasso’s Paris: Walking Tours of the Artist’s Life in the City (New York: Little Bookroom, 1999), 56.
17. Samuel L. Bensusan, Souvenir of Paris (London: Jack, 1911), 51–52.
18. Its name came from the lavender and white lilacs that grew outside.
19. Patrice Higonnet, Paris: Capital of the World, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2002), 68.
20. Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 80.
21. Charles Douglas, Artist Quarter: Reminiscences of Montmartre and Montparnasse in the First Two Decades of the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1941), 140.
22. Gino Severini, The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Se-verini, trans. Jennifer Franchina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 25.
23. Christopher Green, Art in France, 1900–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 150.
24. Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 275.
25. Jules Bertaut, Paris, 1870–1935, trans. R. Millar (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), 186.
26. Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 284.
27. Ibid., 285.
28. Quinn, Marie Curie, 137.
29. Cronin, Paris on the Eve, 20.
30. William Fleming, Art and Ideas, 6th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 403.
31. Bergson’s wife was a cousin of Proust’s.
32. Bernice Rose, “Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism” (notes for exhibition at Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York City, 2007).
33. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Vintage, 1981), 119–25.
34. Fleming, Art and Ideas, 400.
35. The Bourbon monarchy; the First Republic established by the Revolution; the Directory; the First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte; the restoration of the monarchy in 1815; the 1830 revolution that gave France a constitutional monarchy under the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe; the short-lived Second Republic in 1848; and the Second Empire under Napoleon III.
36. Alexander Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives during the Fin-de-Siècle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 41–42.
37. Jay Robert Nash, Encyclopedia of World Crime: Criminal Justice, Criminology, and Law Enforcement (Wilmette, IL: CrimeBooks, 1990), 633.
38. Richard D. Sonn, “Marginality and Transgression: Anarchy’s Subversive Allure,” in Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, ed. Gabriel P. Weisber (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 130.
39. Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 199.
40. Martin P. Johnson, The Dreyfus Affair: Honour and Politics in the Belle Époque (Basin
gstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1999), 6.
41. Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Braziller, 1986), 68.
42. Ibid.
43. Ann-Louise Shapiro, Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2.
44. Sanche de Gramont, The French: Portrait of a People (New York: Putnam’s, 1969), 390.
45. The French pronounce the term apache as “ah POSH.”
46. Daniel Gerould, Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore (New York: Blast Books, 1992), 179.
47. Mel Gordon, The Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror, rev. ed. (New York: De Capo Press, 1997), 22.
48. Agnes Peirron, “House of Horrors,” http://www.GrandGuignol.com/history.htm.
49. John Ashbery, “Introduction of Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas,” in Selected Prose, ed. Eugene Richie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 185.
50. Ibid.
CHAPTER TWO: SEARCHING FOR A WOMAN
1. Jürgen Thorwald, The Century of the Detective, trans by Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1965), 85.
2. Seymour Reit, The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa (New York: Summit Books, 1981), 78.
3. Francis Steegmuller, Apollinaire: Poet among the Painters (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963), 188–89.
4. Milton Esterow, The Art Stealers (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 107.
5. The French version of La Gioconda, an Italian name for the Mona Lisa, referring to the fact that the subject of the painting is thought to be the wife of Francesco del Giocondo.
6. Molly Nesbit, “The Rat’s Ass,” October 56 (Spring 1991): 13–14.
7. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 188.
8. Aaron Freundschuh, “Crime Stories in the Historical Landscape: Narrating the Theft of the Mona Lisa,” Urban History 33, no. 2 (2006): 281.
9. E. E. Richards, The Louvre (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1912), 96.
10. Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1911.
11. About twice the annual wage of a skilled worker at the time.
12. Esterow, Art Stealers, 101.
13. Donald Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon (San Diego: Harcourt, 2001), 174.
14. Freundschuh, “Crime Stories,” 286.
15. Barbara Gardner Conklin, Robert Gardner, and Dennis Shortelle, Encyclopedia of Forensic Science: A Compendium of Detective Fact and Fiction (Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2002), 282–83.
16. Esterow, Art Stealers, 117.
17. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 187–88.
18. Freundschuh, “Crime Stories,” 287.
19. Ibid., 285.
20. “A Hint to Mr. Morgan,” New York Times, January 18, 1912.
21. Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1911.
22. New York Times, March 3, 1912.
23. Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa: What Art Stops Us from Seeing (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 66.
24. Max Brod, ed., The Diaries of Franz Kafka, vol. 2, 1914–1923, trans. Martin Greenberg with the cooperation of Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1949), 276.
25. Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa, 179.
26. Nesbit, “Rat’s Ass,” 7.
27. Ibid., 7.
28. Théophile Homolle, director of the national museums, had been fired shortly after the theft.
29. Contemporary photographs show four hooks at the space on the wall where the painting had hung.
30. Hanns Zischler, Kafka Goes to the Movies, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 49–51.
31. Esterow, Art Stealers, 102.
32. New York Times, October 1, 1911.
33. Ibid.
34. Esterow, Art Stealers, 108.
35. New York Times, October 1, 1911.
36. Ibid.
37. Mona is a diminutive of Madonna, used as a term of respect for a married woman.
38. The sitter in the Mona Lisa appears to have no eyebrows.
39. Renaud Temperini, Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre (Paris: Éditions Scala, 2003), 56.
40. Roy McMullen, Mona Lisa: The Picture and the Myth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 116.
41. Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa, 39.
42. Temperini, Leonardo da Vinci, 56.
43. Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa, 26.
44. Ibid., 27.
45. Ibid., 61.
46. Ibid., 54.
47. Ibid., 89.
48. Ibid., 95.
49. Ibid., 110.
50. Ibid., 111.
51. Walter Pater, “Leonardo da Vinci,” in Three Major Texts, ed. William E. Buckley (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 149.
52. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, trans. Alan Tyson (New York: Norton, 1964), 65.
53. Ibid., 69.
54. Freud presumes that Leonardo, as a homosexual, had an unhappy erotic life. No one seriously argues this today.
55. Ibid., 77.
56. Sassoon, Becoming Mona Lisa, 108.
57. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 188.
58. Boston Daily Globe, September 10, 1911.
59. Freundschuh, “Crime Stories,” 287.
60. Pater, “Leonardo da Vinci,” 150.
CHAPTER THREE: SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
1. Steegmuller, Apollinaire, 182 (see chap. 2, n. 3).
2. R. D. Collins, The Origins of Detective Fiction: A Brief History of Crime and Mystery Books,http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/historydf.htm.
3. François-Eugène Vidocq, Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003), 1.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 7.
6. Ibid., 57.
7. Ibid., 192.
8. Ibid., 185.
9. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel; A History, 2nd ed. (London: Pan Books, 1992), 37.
10. Joseph Geringer, Vidocq: Convict Turned Detective Magnifique: Police Spy,http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/cops_others/vidocq/3.html.
11. The brand was “TF,” for travaux forcés, forced work.
12. Geringer, Vidocq,http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/cops_-others/vidocq/4.html.
13. Vidocq, Memoirs, 204.
14. Ibid., 368.
15. Alfred Morain, The Underworld of Paris: Secrets of the Sûreté (London: Jarrolds, 1929), 233–34.
16. Vidocq, Memoirs, xiii.
17. Geringer, Vidocq,http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/cops_-others/vidocq/7.html.
18. Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1994), 39.
19. Ibid., 90.
20. Edward Berenson, The Trial of Madame Caillaux (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 216.
21. According to Poe’s biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn, Poe took the name of his fictional detective from Marie Dupin, the heroine of a story that appeared in a collection titled “Unpublished Passages in the Life of Vidocq, the French Minister of Police.” Published in the magazine Burton’s from September to December 1838 and signed J. M. B., these stories capitalized on Vidocq’s fame and portrayed him in action capturing criminals. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 310–11.
22. A. E. Murch, The Development of the Detective Novel (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1968), 68.
23. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe, 430.
24. Symons, Bloody Murder, 46.
25. Keith Parkins, Edgar Allan Poe,http://www.huerka.clara.net/art/poe.htm.
26. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Scribner’s, 1959), 12.
27. Ibid.
28. Parkins, Edgar Allan Poe, 4.
29. New York Times, December 13, 1991.
30. Parkins, Edgar Allan Poe, 2–3.
31. LeRoy Lad Panek, An Introduction to the Detective Story (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State Univ
ersity Popular Press, 1987), 71.
32. Janet Pate, The Book of Sleuths (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1977), 18.
33. Ibid.
34. Henry Douglas Thomson, Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story (1931; repr., New York: Dover, 1978), 96.
35. Ibid., 101.
36. Ibid., 102.
37. Gaboriau, Émile, Monsieur Lecoq, ed. and intro. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1975), v.