Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  Night like liquid velvet settled over the mansard roofs, innocent, if a night is ever innocent. A night is young but never innocent, and as Sunday merged with Monday and the city awakened to a new day, the game that would stun Paris and astound the world was afoot.

  No one would notice for more than twenty-four hours.

  3

  THE FIRST GULP or Tuesday, August 22, was as unsurprising as a glass oivin ordinaire. Water carts washed the cobbled streets. Workers in blue overalls swept the quais with faggot brooms. Under the girders and skylights at Les Halles, what Emile Zola called the belly of Paris, horses and workers performed the morning ballet, mongers shouting their products and prices through the central market. The bells of nearby St-Eustache tolled.

  Louis Béroud followed the narrow Seine channel along Quai Saint-Michel. At the point where the Boulevard Saint-Michel disgorged, he crossed and continued along the Quai des Grands Augustins, perhaps stopping to look at the steeple of Sainte-Chapelle rising out of the cluster of government buildings that comprise the judicial heart of Paris, housing courtrooms, jail cells, and the office of the chief of the Paris police. Béroud may have stood once in the upper chapel, with sunlight fiery through the finest glass in Paris, and thought of God. The river was languid, the water level so low that the color had concentrated to a murky ocher. He decided not to cross at Pont Neuf, still called the “new bridge” though now it was the oldest in Paris, and he continued on to the Pont des Arts.

  Paris saunters through history in the present tense, neither extolling its past nor rushing to embrace its future. If the analogy were extended to other capitals, Athens would exist in the past perfect, Rome in the past imperfect, New York in the future imperative. Perhaps because Paris was never the seat of empire, never the center of the world like Athens and Rome, its past is not preserved as a glorious ruin but incorporated into the present. At the same time, a bedrock conservatism prevents the avant-garde from being quickly accepted and instantly absorbed. New York, where nothing remains new for long, is a work in progress, a process as much as a place. There the new is seized and swallowed whole. But Paris responds to change with the caginess of a concierge, acutely curious yet deeply suspicious.

  Louis Béroud belonged to a formal world that was passing with the Belle Époque. He was a fine-looking man in his mid-fifties, with strong, regular features and an abundance of white wavy hair. Béroud dressed conservatively in a black frock coat and striped trousers. His ideas were as traditional as his dress.

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were as many “isms” in painting as there were in politics. Impressionism, as shocking as a glimpse of stocking not so long ago, now appeared tame enough for the parlor wall, and one artistic “ism” eclipsed the next in a dizzying rush to modernity—fauvism, symbolism, primitivism, and now cubism. (Surrealism and Dadaism would come later, like exclamation points after the folly of a war to end all war.)

  To Béroud, the new painting by whatever name was a calculated attempt to destroy five centuries of art. He had earned a respectable following with a series of paintings using the various museum galleries as backgrounds, and he knew its labyrinth of rooms and galleries better than many of the curators and custodians.

  The Louvre encouraged amateur painters, allowing them to copy the masters and store their easels and paint boxes overnight in the numerous nooks and closets recessed in the wall paneling. There was one stipulation: No canvas could be the same size as the original. It was a modest and mostly ineffectual effort to prevent forgery, which was endemic throughout Europe. Collecting had become a favorite sport of American tycoons, and the market for authentic art and artful frauds was reaching extraordinary heights.

  This morning, Béroud intended to use his brush like an epee to vent his displeasure at a new museum policy. In an effort to adapt to modern times, the Louvre was introducing a number of innovations, and Béroud belonged to a vocal group that opposed them. One egregiously offensive “improvement” was the decision to place the most valuable paintings in three-dimensional protective frames. The first to suffer the indignity was Mona Lisa.

  An Ingres had been slashed a few years before, and the director of national museums, Jean Théophile Homolle, had ordered the glass frames to shield the art from vandals and visitors. His motive may have been laudable, but a purist like Béroud was appalled. The glass box desecrated the communion of art and art lover. The glass was an intrusion that altered the light, created an unnatural reflection, and distorted the aesthetic experience.

  Béroud arrived at the museum that August morning to register his displeasure. His idea was to paint a scene of a man shaving in the new glass that protected Mona Lisa, or perhaps a young girl using the glass as a mirror to do her hair.∗2 Walking up the main staircase, he crossed into the Grande Galerie, exchanging pleasantries with the guards. Beneath a coffered ceiling, the broad hall extends more than twelve hundred feet, the length of four football fields. A stroll from end to end was both a gambol through the history of art and a walking tour of Europe from Holland to Italy.

  At the Italian end of the gallery, Béroud turned into the Salon Carré, a gracious square gallery with a rare collection of paintings and a romantic history. Here, smiled on by the painted lady he called variously Madame Lisa and the Sphinx of the Occident, Napoleon had married Marie-Therese of Austria to secure an heir and an alliance. After the ceremony, he crossed the gardens to the Tuileries Palace and settled the two women in his bedroom—his new bride and his Madame Lisa.

  The Louvre owned the richest collection of sixteenth-century masterworks outside of Italy, and many of them were displayed in the Salon Carré—Titian's Entombment of Christ, Rembrandt's Supper at Emmaus, Correggio's Betrothal of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Raphael's Holy Family, Veronese's panoramic fresco The Wedding Feast at Cana, and Leonardo da Vinci's la Joconde.

  On this Tuesday morning, her place on the wall was empty. All that remained were four iron hooks and a rectangular shape several shades deeper than the surrounding area—a ghostly image marking the space that Mona Lisa had filled. Except for a brief sojourn in Brest, where she was sent for safekeeping during the Franco-Prussian War, she had hung in the Louvre since Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena.

  Béroud was disappointed to find her absent. Setting down his easel and paint box, he called to the guard:

  Brigadier Paupardin, where is Mona Lisa?

  Being photographed, I suppose.

  Paupardin displayed no concern. The institution of a photographic studio in the Louvre was another innovation of Director Homolle, and a project to photograph the entire collection was under way. Paintings were regularly taken off to be copied. In case of damage, loss, or future restoration, the museum would have an accurate record of the original work.

  The camera was becoming an indispensable instrument in the creation, conservation, and reproduction of art, and Director Homolle was so enthusiastic about the new medium that he allowed the photographers unlimited access. Any contract photographer or curator could saunter into a gallery and remove a painting from the wall without making a formal request, obtaining permission, or informing the guard. Because the paintings were simply hung on hooks—not even the most priceless masterpieces were wired or bolted—anyone could take them down and carry them off.

  Béroud responded to Paupardin with a raised eyebrow and a shrug. So many changes and so few to his liking. Still, he accepted the inevitable with good humor.

  Of course, Paupardin, when women are not with their lovers, they are apt to be with their photographers.

  Depositing his easel and paints, Béroud left the museum. When he returned around eleven o'clock, the wall was still bare. Annoyed that his day was being wasted, he confronted the guard again.

  Brigadier Paupardin, how long does a woman need to have her picture taken? The day is wasted. Do me a favor. Find out when she will return.

  The guard sauntered off, pleased to have an excuse to leave his post and sneak an ex
tra Gauloise. Since he was in no hurry to accomplish his mission, probably fifteen or so minutes elapsed before he eventually reached the studio and asked when Mona Lisa would be returning to the gallery. The photographers answered his question with stares as vacant as the Salon Carré wall. Mona Lisa was not sitting for her portrait.

  Paupardin repeated his question more forcefully, as if it had been ignored the first time.

  Mona Lisa, la Joconde …?

  No. We just told you. She is not here. No one has touched her.

  The photographers suggested that he check other rooms: The painting might have been moved to a different gallery. Paupardin brushed them off. The Louvre collection was not a deck of cards, constantly being shuffled, and Mona Lisa was its prized possession. In all his years of employment, she had occupied the same wall space.

  His eyes flicked across the studio quickly, then again, slowly scanning the room. His immediate reaction was confusion. Paintings don't step down off museum walls and walk away. Mona Lisa had been hanging in her usual place when he left on Sunday. On Monday, the museum was closed, and yet she was gone—lost or stolen or strayed. How do you mislay Mona Lisa, and worse, how do you explain it? The lethargy that was Paupardin's habitual demeanor lifted. Fear, like a swallow of vinegar, choked him. Leonardo da Vinci's most famous work, worth many more francs than Paupardin could earn if he had several lives, was missing on his watch.

  He felt a lightness in his head. The mix of fear and confusion produces incoherence even in the sharpest minds, and Paupardin's mind was rusty at best. If he had lived a century or so earlier, he would not have been enshrined in the pantheon of Enlightenment philosophers. The old guard tore through the halls, running, lumbering, winded, shouting silently a single word: MERDE! Bursting into the director's office, Paupardin gasped out the stunning news:

  La Joconde, c'est partie!

  Director Homolle was vacationing in Mexico, and acting in his place was the curator of Egyptian antiquities, Georges Bénédite. To Paupardin, now verging on hysteria, the curator's response seemed excruciatingly slow in coming. Bénédite surveyed the flustered old guard with something between vexation and pity.

  Mais oui, Monsieur le Custodien … A long pause separated each word. La Joconde, c'est partie!

  The curator repeated the guard's absurdist message—Mona Lisa has left—as if to say the Eiffel Tower has fallen.

  Mona Lisa had provoked false alarms and public pranks before. Just the previous year, in July 1910, a popular gossip sheet called Le Cri de Paris reported her missing and continued the hoax for weeks, claiming that she had been replaced with a copy. If she was not in her usual place, Bénédite had little doubt that she was not far off. He called in the supervisor of the museum guards, and the three men set off on a search through the picture galleries.

  The skeptical curator visited the Salon Carré, examined the photo studios, and quizzed the staff. More than three hours had passed since Louis Béroud found her missing. If Paupardin was not crazed and the impossible had happened, precious time had been lost. Because phone lines were not secure, Bénédite went in person to the Palais de Justice and informed the chief of the Paris police.

  4

  AT ONE O'CLOCK, Louis Lépine, prefect of the Seine, arrived at the museum with an army of gendarmes. Every exit closed behind him. No one was allowed to enter or exit. A cordon of police encircled the building and took positions on the roof to intercept anyone attempting to skulk away. An additional sixty officers fanned out through the galleries, searching for the missing painting. Excuses were made to keep the public calm. The custodial staff was told that a water main had broken. Patience was urged. But a whisper was passing through the galleries and offices.

  Prefect Lépine was a compact man whose habitual uniform was an old-fashioned morning coat and bowler hat. His size and stature were Napoleonic. His appearance and approach were Freudian. Lépine looked enough like Sigmund Freud to be his identical twin—same thinning white hair, same spectacles, same neatly pointed beard. As the chief of police in Paris, he was a political power, appointed by and accountable only to the president of France. Lépine was not only the top law enforcement officer in the nation's capital, he also controlled the fire department and the transportation systems, and he could call up the armed forces garrisoned in Paris in an emergency.

  He wielded his considerable clout autocratically, which earned him a number of nicknames—the “Pooh Bah of Paris,” the “demi-mayor,” “le petit roi,” and “the little man with the big stick.” The “big stick” referred to the club that his police were ordered to wield freely to maintain order. Lépine brought elements of both Napoleon and Freud to his work. While he was not squeamish about breaking heads, he also introduced psychological methods of crowd control that attracted attention far beyond France.

  While his men swept the galleries, he reviewed the facts with Bénédite. It was not an official interrogation—that would come later. First Lépine wanted to establish a sequence of events. Unless Mona Lisa were found within the next few hours, her disappearance would become a national scandal. The government would have to be alerted—the vacationing museum director, the chief of the national police, the minister of the interior, the minister of fine arts, all the way up to the president of the republic.

  Curator Bénédite had only nine more days as acting director before Homolle returned from vacation, and he wanted them to pass peacefully. Bénédite believed there must be a simple explanation, and he was anxious to keep the incident quiet as long as possible. The facts, as he knew them, were scant. Mona Lisa had been unaccounted for since early morning. Her absence was first noted at nine o'clock, but she could have been missing much longer. No one could vouch for her whereabouts on Monday—twenty-four hours as blank as the wall where she had hung. The thieves—if there were thieves—could be in Belgium, the Black Forest, the Riviera. They could be on the high seas sailing for Buenos Aires or New York.

  Lépine acted swiftly. By order of the prefect of the Seine, the Louvre was closed until further notice, and the borders of France were sealed. Nothing and no one would be allowed in or out without a thorough search. Trains and cars were stopped. Within hours, an international dragnet reached across three continents. Ships arriving and departing from any port in France since Sunday, August 20, would be detained when they reached their next port of call.

  A curious crowd gathered on Rue de Rivoli, wondering why no one was allowed to enter the Louvre. Gendarmes blocked every door, giving nothing away. Inside, the police made their first discovery. Two frames were pushed into a corner of a service stairway a few yards from the Salon Carré. One was a three-dimensional glass box, obviously of recent construction. The other, which appeared to be of great value, was of antique carved wood and bore the label:

  LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519)

  École Florentine

  LA JOCONDE

  (Portrait de Mona Lisa)

  Bénédite identified it as a gift given just a few years before by the Countess de Beam to frame the Leonardo. Both were intact, the wood undamaged, the glass unbroken. By all appearances, Mona Lisa had stepped out of her frames as effortlessly as a woman stepped out of her petticoats.

  5

  ON A MUNDANE MORNING in late summer in the heart of Paris, the impossible had happened. Mona Lisa had vanished. On Sunday evening, August 20, 1911, Leonardo da Vinci's best-known painting, conservatively estimated at five million dollars ($112.5 million today), was hanging in her usual place on the wall of the Salon Carré, between Correggio's Mystical Marriage and Titian's Allegory of Alfonso d'Avalos. On Tuesday morning, when the Louvre reopened to the public, she was gone.

  Within hours after the discovery of her empty frames, the story broke in an extra edition of Le Temps, the major morning newspaper in France. Along the grand boulevards of Paris, newsboys echoed Paupardin's cry: “MonaLisa, c'est partie!”

  Incredulous reporters from local papers and international news services converged on the muse
um. Paris was the hub for news from Europe, Africa, and the Near East, and there was a considerable press contingent. In addition to the numerous local papers, the city had four major news services—Agence Havas, Reuters, the Wolff Agency, and the Associated Press—as well as a number of foreign bureaus. The New York Times had opened a Paris office three years before, and its correspondent, Henri de Blowitz, arrived at the scene at about five-thirty p.m. Many perplexed Americans were still milling outside the gates, and Bénédite and his curators were speculating freely to the press.

  “La Joconde is gone. That is all I can say,” Bénédite told the Times’ man. “So far we have not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator of the crime. How he or they came or left the premises is as yet a mystery. Why the theft was committed is also a mystery to me, as I consider the picture valueless in the hands of a private individual.”

  Paul Leprieur, the curator of paintings and drawings, went further. He was certain the painting had been stolen by someone who intended to return a good copy later, and he warned the thieves not to attempt such a fraud: “I have studied the picture for years, mounted and unmounted, know every minor detail of it, and would recognize a copy, however perfect, after five minutes' observation.”

  Prefect Lépine was clearly annoyed by the curators’ loose talk. His men had found the frames, and he was confident they would soon find the painting. Until then he wanted to keep the public and the politicians calm. “The thieves—I am inclined to think there is more than one—got away with it, all right,” he told the press. While conceding that there were a number of plausible motives, he said, “the more serious possibility is that La Joconde was stolen to blackmail the government.”

  If Mona Lisa were being held for ransom, Lépine expected a demand would be made within forty-eight hours.