Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  ∗1 1760, Johann Winckelmann.

  ∗2 Roy McMullen suggests the latter in his book Mona Lisa: The Picture and the Myth.

  THE HUNT

  EXCELSIOR NEWSPAPER, AUGUST 23, 1911

  On August 23,1911, Mona Lisa's disappearance was a front-page story

  in every Paris newspaper. Under the headline, LE LOUVRE A PERDU LA

  “JOCONDE” (The Louvre Has Lost Mona Lisa), the illustrated paper

  Excelsior published a photomontage. Surrounding Mona Lisa and

  the Louvre are (top to bottom, left to right) the museum director

  Jean Théophile Homolle, and the Sûreté chief Octave Hamard; two

  views of a scaffold on the side of the Louvre, considered a possible

  escape route for the thieves; police converging on the museum;

  and Prefect Louis Lépine inside.

  I

  Wednesday, August 23

  FOR ONCE, THE FAMOUSLY BLASé Parisians were nonplussed. Who could believe that a thief could lift Mona Lisa off the wall and waltz unnoticed out of the Louvre with the celebrated lady in his arms? Front-page stories in the Paris dailies echoed their shock. “The disappearance of la Joconde by Leonardo da Vinci surpasses the imagination,” Le Figaro wrote.

  “For many, the Mona Lisa is the Louvre,” the Paris-Journal echoed. “In the eyes of the public, even the uneducated, the Mona Lisa occupies a privileged position that is not to be accounted for by its value alone.”

  The story traveled around the world as swiftly as telegraph and cable could carry it. On front pages in every major city, the dateline was Paris.

  “The entire world sat back aghast,” The New York Times reported. “Nothing like the theft of the Mona Lisa had ever been perpetrated before in the world's history.”

  In Milan, the La Corriere delta Sera ran an illustration of two thieves removing Mona Lisa with the headline:

  COME SIA STATO POSSIBILE L'IMPOSSIBILE

  HOW THE IMPOSSIBLE BECAME POSSIBLE

  Rome wondered:

  DOVE VA LA GIOCONDA DI LEONARDO?∗1

  WHERE HAS MONA LISA gone?

  The London Times reported in thoroughly British understatement:

  WHAT IS PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS

  PICTURE IN THE LOUVRE

  HAS BEEN SELECTED FOR ABSTRACTION

  2

  Mona Lisa had been spirited away, leaving no forwarding address. Prefect Lépine called in the one person he believed could illuminate her mystifying vanishing act. Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Department of Judicial Identity of the Paris Prefecture, was the closest thing France had to the internationally popular Baker Street Regular, and Bertillon had the advantage of being real.

  Immaculate in dress and imperious in manner, Alphonse Bertillon seemed as out of place at most crime scenes as the Virgin Mary at the Folies-Bergère, but he was in his element at the Louvre. He arrived with a magnifying glass, dusting powder, and a trail of assistants carrying bulky cameras and precisely constructed wooden boxes that held ink bottles and glass plates, the tools of his trade. Waving aside the gendarmes blocking entry to the museum, he proceeded directly to the stairwell where the frames had been found. Bits of discolored paper, remnants of the packing that had been stuffed between the frame and the painting to secure it, littered the floor.

  With a white linen handkerchief in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, Bertillon approached the empty frames as cautiously as a lion trainer who understands the imperfect line between the tame and the feral. The handkerchief prevented his own prints from compromising his investigation. The magnifying glass allowed him to examine each frame centimeter by centimeter.

  Bertillon had introduced a revolutionary form of criminal examination called forensic detection. His father had been a pioneering anthropologist, and from his earliest years, Bertillon had displayed a keen interest in social adaptation. He believed that each person has a unique physiological profile. Using the color of the eyes, hair, and skin, and eleven bodily measurements, he devised a system to identify criminals. To complete the portrait, he photographed each suspect in full face and in profile, creating the first mug shots. Photography was an innovation in crime work. There was no infrared or ultraviolet photography then, and Bertillon experimented with color-sensitive plates and blinding ribbons of magnesium to illuminate crime scenes.

  The Bertillon System of anthropometry appealed more to artists than to his colleagues. One of those intrigued was the young Spaniard Pablo Picasso, who was disrupting art circles in Paris with his cubist canvases. For local police departments, taking intricate skeletal measurements was laborious work, and around the same time that Bertillon was developing his criminal profile, a Scottish surgeon named Henry Faulds was trying to convince Scotland Yard that the whorls on the tips of the fingers were unique to each person. Fingerprinting proved a much handier tool for police, and it quickly overshadowed the Bertillon System.

  Although he only grudgingly accepted fingerprinting as a vital detection aid, Bertillon became a master at lifting prints. He was the first detective to win a murder conviction on the evidence of fingerprints alone, and his talent for detection became legendary. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes is described as the “second highest expert in Europe,” after the French savant.

  Bertillon approached a crime scene like a surgeon preparing to operate. In the minutiae that others overlooked, he often found a revealing clue. Crowded into the narrow Louvre stairwell, he conducted a slow, meticulous examination of Mona Lisa's empty frames. Halfway up the glass on the left side of the box frame, he found a smudge. From a custom-built case containing instruments of varying sizes, compositions, and thicknesses, Bertillon selected a soft camel-hair brush. Dusting the frame with finely ground graphite, he lifted a perfect thumbprint. The Mona Lisa thief had left his calling card.

  3

  THE HUNT WAS ON. Political powers, museum administrators, and police brass rushed back to Paris from their August vacations and converged on the museum.

  Behind the locked doors of the Louvre, a judicial inquest convened to interrogate witnesses, hear evidence, and issue arrest warrants. The presiding judge was Magistrate Henri Drioux, a solid cube of a man with a bald head, a pince-nez on a black cord, and a reputation for intimidating witnesses.

  At the same time, Minister of Beaux Arts Théodore Steeg and his deputy, Henri Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, opened an administrative inquiry to explore how such a shocking incident could happen in the most august museum in France. Dujardin, an injudicious man, blustered that delinquent guards, conservators, or other responsible officials would receive no mercy.

  Museum curators, led by Paul Leprieur, began compiling a dossier on Mona Lisa. Like a missing-persons report, the file contained the most recent series of photographs and a detailed description of her appearance, condition, and history. If and when she returned, the information could be compared with the recovered painting to determine authenticity.

  In the Salon Carré, Prefect Lépine ordered Mona Lisa stolen again. Like a leading lady's understudy, another painting was fitted into her frames, and the theft was reenacted twice. The first time, gendarmes committed the crime. They struggled for more than five minutes to remove the painting from the double frames. The second time, experienced Louvre workers posed as the thieves and performed the same feat in moments.

  The exercise suggested that someone skilled in museum work had separated Mona Lisa from her frames. The crime had been planned with precision and executed with skill. The thief—or thieves—had understood the internal operations of the Louvre, studied the layout of the museum, and laid out a clear strategy. They knew that the staircase where the frames were found, which was usually restricted, was accessible on Mondays. They also knew that the number of attendants would be at its lowest.

  Suspicion pointed to an inside job. Prefect Lépine requested a complete list of everyone who had access to the museum between Sunday evening and Tuesday morning. No one was
presumed innocent. Each custodian, curator, cleaner, workman, and photographer would be fingerprinted and interrogated.

  4

  THE FIRST TO FACE Judge Drioux in the judicial inquest was the guard Desornais, who should have been watching over Mona Lisa on Monday. He confessed reluctantly and with profuse apologies that Mona Lisa was alone from eight to ten o'clock Monday morning. Because the museum was closed to the public, only ten guards were on duty, and he had been covering the Grande Galerie, the Galerie d'Apollon, and the Salon Carré alone when he was called away to help move some paintings in another part of the museum. For those two hours on Monday morning, the entire area was unattended.

  The next guard called was Paupardin, who had been on duty both Sunday and Tuesday. The old guard was still shaken, and he cradled his head in his hands. If he were able to see into the future, he would have paid closer attention, but a summer Sunday in the Louvre—who could remember?

  Mon Dieu! The old guard bristled. She was there when I left on Sunday night, when the museum closed. That is all I know.

  When Judge Drioux pressed for details, Paupardin could not be certain. It was difficult to recall anything about that day except the oppressive heat that had soaked through his uniform, through his vest, plastering it to his hairy chest.

  Magistrate Drioux was known as “the bulldog” because of his tenacious, sometimes fierce questioning and a naturally churlish expression. Although the judge was not as ferocious as his dyspeptic appearance suggested, it was a deception that served him well. Under further probing, Paupardin remembered a group of young men, no more than three, all swarthy—dark hair, olive eyes, olive skin. He described them as mangeurs de macaroni, macaroni eaters, or the shorthand, “macaroni.” Not typical museum visitors, the guard conceded, but well behaved. Orderly. Respectful.

  Did one of them carry a package?

  Paupardin had a fleeting memory of a flat brown paper parcel tied with string, but the men had not lingered.

  Did they leave together? At what time?

  Ah, yes, the time.

  The questions continued, the judge pressing, a gendarme scribbling on lined paper, the demand for details becoming harsher. Judge Drioux's voice, coaxing at first, coarsened from smooth sand to gravel.

  Paupardin had not paid close enough attention on Sunday to answer the questions fully, and he was growing defensive, fearful that he would be blamed for the loss. Paupardin did not volunteer that he had been less than watchful, dozing on and off for much of the afternoon, made drowsy by the midday cassoulet and the August heat. Nor did he regard it as essential to point out that he did not actually see any of the visitors leave the gallery.

  But under intense questioning, Paupardin did recall a visitor who came to call often, as if paying court. The scent of oleander returned to the old guard, and he described in some detail the young man, German or maybe Austrian, as opaquely handsome as a marble statue, always neatly dressed, blond hair combed, slight but well proportioned, quiet, always alone, and always with eyes for only one. No words passed between them, only a bouquet.

  I

  Thursday, August 24

  IN 1793, JUST STEPS FROM THE PLACE where Mona Lisa vanished, beautiful Charlotte Corday was sentenced to death for the assassination of the revolutionary theorist Jean-Paul Marat. Charlotte stabbed Marat in his bathtub and faced the guillotine with no regrets. She accepted her fate with such grace and courage that she captivated a romantic German student in the crowd of onlookers. Meeting her unflinching gray eyes, Adam Lux lost his heart and his head. He published a pamphlet denouncing her execution, and when he was arrested, he demanded to die as she had. He implored the Revolutionary Tribunal to send him to the same guillotine so their blood would mingle. He received his wish.

  When Le Matin, one of the city's largest morning papers, reported that police were searching for a young German whose infatuation may have turned to obsession, Paris had a new Adam Lux. Prefect Lépine confirmed to reporters that the boy had visited Mona Lisa often enough for the guard in the Salon Carré to provide a detailed description. Curator of paintings Paul Leprieur added colorful embellishments. It was true that Mona Lisa often made men do strange things. There were more than one million artworks in the Louvre collection; she alone received her own mail. Mona Lisa received many love letters, and for a time they were so ardent that she was placed under police protection. The year before, a hopeless admirer, facing a lifetime of unrequited love, had shot himself in front of her.

  A young man, and a German, crazed by love. It was the stuff of myth. In the popular press, the calculated crime was rewritten as a tender love affair. As news of the romance spread around the world, Mona Lisa became a passionate participant in her own disappearance. The Chicago Tribune entertained readers with a whimsical report of her elopement:

  So Mona Lisa has another lover! Was it not enough that… innumerable men should have seen in her face the eternal inscrutability of the feminine half of the world?… Her portrait has been stolen, carried boldly from the Salon Carré… she's gone. But may it not be by her own volition?…

  Now, after four and a half centuries, Leonardo's subtle lady wins another lover, and her tantalizing discretion quite forgot, she flees with her wooer. Ten thousand dollars for her reward, cries Paris. Well, there was a Paris once who staked his country on a throw like that, and losing, counted the cost inadequate.… Mona Lisa's innumerable lovers should unite to offer a purse that would bring her straightaway back to the place the world looks upon as her home. No one man should have exclusive right to feed on that mysterious loveliness.

  The fatal-attraction theory appealed to the French heart and softened the loss. If Mona Lisa was gone, at least she had been stolen for love.

  2

  AS THE INVESTIGATION entered its second day, every clue, however tenuous, was magnified. Every memory, every detail, took on significance and seemed to both freeze and meld, as if distinct art movements had converged on that summer day. The loss of the Renaissance masterpiece was recalled like an Impressionist painting. Parisians strolling along the quai or crossing the Pont des Arts that August Monday described a uniformed guard snoozing in front of the museum in the shade of a red umbrella.

  A department store employee who was walking on the Quai du Louvre about seven-thirty a.m. had a vivid memory of a man with an odd gait and a bulky package under his arm, speeding toward the Pont du Carrousel. He was neither walking nor running but appeared to be moving at more of a canter along the Louvre side of the street. All at once and without slowing his pace, he tossed something small and shiny into the garden along the side of the museum. The witness could not say with certainty if the man continued on or turned to cross the bridge.

  A second witness recalled a man, also carrying a bulky package, sweating profusely and rushing to catch the seven-forty express train for Bordeaux at the Gare d'Orsay The glass-enclosed Beaux Arts terminal (now a museum) was just across the river from the Louvre. The seven-forty made fourteen stops on the nine-hour route from Paris to Bordeaux, and connecting trains could carry the thief out of the country as far as Madrid or Lisbon.

  The two witnesses were painting the same clear picture until they began to describe the suspect. One recalled a trim middle-aged man of medium height, between forty and fifty, without hat or mustache. The other described a tall, heavyset man with a dark mustache, wearing a dark suit and a straw hat, in a state of extreme agitation.

  Elements of each story were quickly corroborated. The Louvre's chief carpenter recalled passing through the Salon Carré with two new assistants at approximately seven o'clock, the start of their Monday shift. He pointed out Mona Lisa to them. When they returned around eight-thirty, she was gone, and he joked to the men, “Mona Lisa has been taken away for fear we would steal her.”

  A museum plumber named Sauve mentioned that a knob had been missing from the stairway door opening into the Cour du Sphinx—the same stairs where the frames were discovered. On Monday morning, Sauve had found a
worker waiting at the foot of the stairs for someone to open the door. Sauve obliged, using his key and a pair of pliers to unlock it, and advised the other man to leave the door ajar so that no one else would be stuck. Police detectives raked through the garden behind the museum and retrieved a small, shiny object. It was a brass doorknob.

  The plumber's behavior aroused suspicion. Sauve had not reported the missing doorknob until considerably later in the day, and he could not describe the other man clearly. The plumber was vague on every point except one: The man worked at the Louvre. He was wearing a white employee smock.

  The brass doorknob raised as many questions as it answered. Why would the thief toss it into the garden where it would be easy to find? If he continued walking along the Quai du Louvre, why didn't he cross the street and drop the knob in the river? If he crossed the bridge, why didn't he drop it over the side? Mixing the descriptions of the two suspects like colors on a palette, Prefect Lépine dispatched an urgent bulletin to Bordeaux, but his direct authority ended at the outskirts of the capital.

  France had two national police forces—the Prefecture de Paris, with jurisdiction over the city and its environs; and the Sûreté Nationale, responsible for maintaining law and order throughout the country. The Sûreté, under the direction of Inspector Octave Hamard, pursued leads and suspects beyond the Paris area. The two agencies were frequently in conflict. Hamard was a blustering man with an ample waist and a more than ample temper who still had the rough edges of a street cop. Lépine was as much a politician as a policeman. There was little rapport between them and little cooperation between the forces. Rivalry was inbred, and detectives from the two agencies guarded information and tried to discredit each other.