Vanished Smile

by R. A. Scotti

  3

  ONCE THE FEAR WAS VOICED, sentiment deepened that such a vanishing act could only have been conjured by an American collector with the bravura, the wealth, the sense of entitlement, and the near-religious conviction that everything had a price.

  The New York Times was soon reporting: “The belief is very general that the Florentine masterpiece is now in America. So certain is the press that la Joconde has gone to America, that articles are appearing … discussing the steps the French government would have to take to regain the national treasure if it had been smuggled across the ocean to America.”

  When Parisians said “Cherchez I'Américain”—Find the American—J. P. Morgan was the American they thought of first. If anyone had the aura of droit du seigneur to claim Mona Lisa for himself, it was Morgan. He was the gold standard of American millionaires. In the East Room of his mansion on Madison Avenue in New York (now the Morgan Library), a sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry hangs over the fireplace. The tapestry is called The Triumph of Avarice.

  Morgan's own triumphs were legendary. Unlike most American tycoons, he did not have a Horatio Alger biography. Born to wealth and educated in Europe, Morgan had inherited millions, which he multiplied many times until he had more money than the U.S. Mint. Morgan was a one-man Federal Reserve before there was a Fed. When a national depression loomed, he bailed out the government, staving off a financial collapse. Ten years later, he did it again, and he still had ample funds to indulge his passion for collecting. Everything about him was impressive—his ambition, his art, his fortune, his physical size, his enormous eggplant nose (he suffered from a condition called rhinophyma), even the black cigars he chomped.

  In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, making money was an open game with few rules, and there was no income tax to cut into fortunes. For every J. P. Morgan or Andréw Mellon, raised in wealth and well educated, there were two or more self-made millionaires. H. E. Huntington started as a logroller. P. A. B. Widener was a butcher from Philadelphia. Samuel H. Kress made his fortune in the five-and-dime. Frick and Carnegie were coal men. The diffident bachelor Benjamin Altman parlayed a pushcart into a fashionable Fifth Avenue emporium. Each had his eccentricities. Altman never liked to buy a painting unless he could pronounce the artist's name. He had a weakness for Renaissance madonnas.

  The art of Europe offered a coveted cachet of class, conferring instant pedigree and prestige on men who had none. Flattered to be taken as gentlemen to the manner born, they were easy prey for duplicitous dealers and cagy con men peddling both stolen works and “genuine fakes.”∗7 The Americans might be tough-nosed businessmen at home, but when they stepped off the gangplank in Cherbourg or Genoa, there were many waiting to take them by the hand and lead them down the proverbial garden path. James H. O'Brien, a businessman who was in Paris when Mona Lisa vanished, told The Washington Post: “Europeans look on Americans as good things.… They can spot Americans the moment they see them, and there's no use trying to masquerade. They go after you when you land and there is no escape.”

  The Americans, so clever at making money, were easily gulled to part with it. For the relatively modest sum of one million dollars, a Baltimore magnate named Henry Walters came home with an entire collection, including, he believed, eight Raphaels and half a dozen Titians that were purportedly the family heirlooms of the considerably less than noble Don Marcello Mazzarenti. Then there was the entertaining Guglielmo Kopp who, after much haggling, accepted $20,000 ($500,000 today) for Trajan's Column from an American railroad tycoon. Boasting that he had wrangled a bargain price, the American went home to the heartland to await delivery.

  Unlike many who didn't know a da Vinci from a David, J. P. Morgan was an astute collector, but even he suffered an occasional fleecing. He was once persuaded to put a sizable down payment on the bronze doors of Bologna's Duomo di San Pietro, which has no bronze doors.

  Morgan was vacationing in Italy when Mona Lisa disappeared, and there were persistent rumors that the thief had brought the painting to him. He had recently been caught with a stolen art treasure, the Cope of Ascoli, in his collection. A magnificent gold and silk vestment once worn by Pope Nicholas IV, the cope had been lifted from a cathedral in Italy. When its provenance was disclosed, Morgan donated the vestment to the Italian government. Parisians wanted him to do no less for Mona Lisa. Morgan had dealt with art thieves once. Why not again?

  The press pursued him more relentlessly than the police were pursuing any other suspect. The Cope of Ascoli notwithstanding, Morgan resented the intimations that he would traffic in stolen goods and rebuffed the reporters. “I have not been offered Mona Lisa,” he insisted, “and I regret it. Had it been offered, I should have bought it and given it back to France.”

  I

  Sunday, August 27

  MONA LISA HAD BEEN MISSING for less than a week, but the pressure to break the case and recover the painting was relentless. Everyone even tangentially involved tried to escape responsibility by pinning the blame on someone else. Police charged inept museum management. Museum administrators blamed government lassitude. The Ministry of Beaux Arts concluded its administrative inquest with a sharply worded criticism of the security at the national museums. The government needed a scapegoat, and the director of the Louvre was the obvious choice.

  Jean Théophile Homolle, director of all the national museums of France, was a courtly man with a considerable reputation as an archaeologist and scholar. His specific area of expertise was ancient Greece, and in profile, his sharp, clean features resembled an Arcadian marble. But even if his head had been chiseled by Phidias, it would have rolled given the virulent climate in Paris.

  Homolle had led the first archaeological dig at Delphi, and if he had been in Paris at the time of the theft, in all likelihood, one of the gossip sheets would have pictured him consulting the oracle for clues. But in the summer of 1911, he had traveled to the Yucatan Peninsula, where archaeologists were beginning to uncover the civilization of the Maya—a world reclaimed by the jungles long before Cortés reached Mexico. Homolle dug through the lost empire without any idea that his own world was disintegrating. One of the last to learn that Mona Lisa was missing, he was the first to pay for her disappearance.

  In 1911, the perception of distance and time was changing. Horseless carriages and bicycles rolled down the grand boulevards of Paris. The first metro rumbled underground. A national railway network carried the Paris dailies to the provinces and brought the bumpkins to the big city. The Continental Train Bleu picked up English travelers in Calais and sped them to Paris, then on to Berlin and St. Petersburg. The eleven years from 1900 to 1911 saw the first flying machines, the first bus (called an autostage), the first moving pictures, and the first newsreel. A monoplane crossed the Channel successfully from Dover to Calais, and a balloonist tried unsuccessfully to cross the Atlantic.

  Although telegraph, cable, and telephone were shrinking the gap between the time news was made and disseminated, the Yucatan jungle was beyond their reach. The urgent message dispatched by the minister of Beaux Arts to the director of the Louvre had to be relayed from Paris to New York to Havana to Veracruz, then by mule through the jungle to the base camp, and from there carried along narrow footpaths to the site of the dig. Homolle set out immediately on the arduous overland trek. The director and his team hacked their way through the overgrown forests down the steep, stony mountain. Monkeys cackled like a Greek chorus in the branches overhead.

  Paris had its own outraged chorus of politicians, press, and public decrying the oversight at the Louvre. Although the porous security had been an open secret for years, the museum had either remained silent on the subject or had come up with bizarre solutions—such as training the old guards in judo or arming them like gendarmes with pistols, nightsticks, and whistles. Steps were finally being taken to address the problem. The protective glass, much criticized, was one step, and additional security precautions, including a personal guard for Mona Lisa, were
planned. Before leaving on vacation, Homolle had assured a skeptical press, with uncharacteristic bravura, that the Louvre was now secure. “You might as well pretend that one could steal the towers of the cathedral of Notre-Dame,” he had boasted.

  In the avant-guerre years, hyperbole would come back to haunt those who employed it. The Titanic was unsinkable, and the Louvre was impenetrable.

  The Paris-Journal ran a photograph of Notre-Dame with one tower missing below the headline: COULD THIS HAPPEN TOO? Le Figaro deplored the lax security and denounced a government that “cannot guard the museum. Everything yet known about the theft shows a lamentable carelessness and extraordinary forgetfulness in the most elementary duties.”

  The best scholar doesn't always make the best administrator, and Director Homolle was far from blameless. The Louvre lacked the simplest precautions against theft, adopted decades earlier by other major museums. By 1853 the Uffizi Gallery was using safety hooks that locked the paintings in place, but not the Louvre. In an interview with the London Times, the British art critic M. H. Spielmann described a visit to Mona Lisa with Director Homolle as his guide:

  He accompanied me most obligingly into the gallery, and we stood before the little picture. The light was bad so that it was difficult to see it. To my astonishment, my courteous host lightly lifted the work from the wall and held it for me to examine. I expressed my surprise, and asked if he had no fear of theft, adding that in London all our small pictures were firmly screwed into the walls.

  No, he explained, the Louvre was not built for a picture gallery; it was not fire-proof … He lived in daily fear of fire, and regarded free and loose hanging as a precaution made necessary in the circumstances. ∗8

  More shocking than the casual security was the lack of any coherent system of accountability. No one guarded the paintings taken to the photo studios or supervised the photographers. Even more incredibly, the Louvre required no authorization to take a painting from a gallery. In Britain and Germany, if a painting were removed, a notice was posted in the empty space explaining why the work was missing and when it would return. According to Homolle's policy or lack of one, a photographer could move any painting to the museum studio and keep it indefinitely without a word to anyone.

  After eight years as director of the national museums of France, Homolle was tried in the press. The Revue Bleue charged “anarchy at the Louvre.” The international press echoed the criticism, reporting that “chaos reigned supreme.” “The Director on account of political trammels could not direct, the trustees neglected their trust, and a totally inadequate number of ill-paid, unruly and shiftless custodians were entirely incompetent to watch over the priceless treasures entrusted to them.”†

  Homolle was figuratively dragged from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde; it remained only for the guillotine blade to fall. Four days later, on August 31, in a special meeting of the cabinet of government ministers, he would be denounced as “a savant devoid of administrative ability” and indicted for failing to safeguard the national treasure. Homolle would be fired, and the ministers would appoint as interim director Eugene M. Pujalet, inspector general of administrative services.

  Though far from blameless, Homolle was not the source of the trouble. The Louvre's problems were systemic. The museum had become a dumping ground, staffed with inept cronies and hangers-on. Politicians used museum positions for patronage jobs. Given the sensationalism of the case, politics inevitably intruded. The ultranationalist newspaper Action Frangaise stoked the anti-Semitism that had been stirred by the Dreyfus Affair, the case against Alfred Dreyfus, an army captain and a Jew falsely charged with treason and imprisoned on Devil's Island:

  The Republic of the Jews has transformed the museum into a bazaar. Homolle, who has been sacked, was in their pockets. The regime is the cause of the loss of the Joconde, gloriously acquired by our kings, and part of our national heritage since Francois I.

  Italy joined the war of words, expressing umbrage that a beautiful, innocent Italian woman had been left unprotected by France. With great fanfare, the Italian ambassador Tommaso Tittoni, who was also president of the Society of Italian Artists in Paris, led a pilgrimage to Leonardo's burial spot at Amboise in the Loire valley. Speaking with passion and eloquence, the ambassador pronounced, “Leonardo da Vinci belongs to Italy by birth, to France by his mortal remains, to the world by art.”

  I

  Monday, August 28

  THE SEARCH OF THE LOUVRE WAS COMPLETE. The initial flurry of success had raised hopes, but the investigation had not advanced materially since then.

  While Lépine's men had been scouring the museum, in one of the world's first forensic crime laboratories—a cramped space in the eaves of the Palais de Justice on lie de la Cite—Alphonse Bertillon had spent the week meticulously comparing fingerprints with the impression he had lifted from Mona Lisa's box frame. In an adjoining room, the plumber Sauve had been sweating through piles of mug shots, trying to find the face on the stairs. Neither search was successful. Sauve had not paid close enough attention to the man to make an identification. Bertillon had compared the fingerprints of more than two hundred Louvre employees, from curators to custodians, and had found no match.

  After the frames, the fingerprint, and the doorknob, nothing more was found, not a trace of the picture or the thief, not a single clue. All current and former museum employees, going back five years, were being deposed, but interrogating witnesses was like trawling in the Seine: So much sewerage was dredged up that it was difficult to separate the valuable nuggets from the sludge. Museum workers were reluctant to answer fully and candidly, hampering the investigation. Premature threats of punishment and dismissal had roused a spirit of resistance. They feared recrimination and resented the slur on their integrity. As the attendants grew more defensive, the interrogators grew more impatient.

  2

  A WEEK AFTER locking its doors, the Louvre was preparing to reopen and expose the naked wall to the public. The judicial inquiry would continue, but it was moving to the Palais de Justice. Magistrate Drioux issued an interim report that underscored how little progress had been made. After six days, countless interrogations, depositions, and false leads, he could state only two facts “with certitude”: i) Mona Lisa was no longer in the Louvre; 2) the theft was premeditated and “executed with unequaled audacity.” The judge could say “almost certainly” that the thief had spent the night of Sunday, August 20, concealed in the museum and had left with Mona Lisa through the Porte Visconti. “From that point,” he conceded, “we lose all trace of the thief.… His movements have been a complete mystery.”

  The floundering investigation was a very public embarrassment for the two chief investigators. Alphonse Bertillon and Louis Lépine did not have the rapport of a Holmes and Watson. Their relationship was pragmatic, but they needed each other, and they needed to solve the case.

  Bertillon's motive was personal. He was fifty-eight, although he appeared many years older, and not an easy man to warm to. Aloof and acerbic, too intelligent to suffer fools, he had few equals and fewer friends. It was said that he treated criminals with courtesy and his colleagues with scorn. For Bertillon, L'Affaire de la Joconde was an opportunity to restore his reputation, which had been damaged in the bitter Dreyfus Affair. Bertillon had testified as an expert witness against the captain, swearing under oath that falsified documents were authentic, and he had refused to correct his testimony, even after Dreyfus was retried and proved innocent.

  Lépine's motive was professional. “The most colossal art theft in history” had been committed under his nose, within his jurisdiction. The loss might be blamed on the casual security at the Louvre, but the recovery was his charge. He had promised a speedy return, and so far he had failed to deliver. Although the investigation was still in its first week, the police were allowed no grace period. The clamor for answers was relentless, and the sacrifice of Director Homolle was not enough to silence the critics.

  From the outset, p
roblems had complicated the investigation. Given the Louvre's laissez-faire attitude toward security and record keeping, simply compiling a complete and accurate list of everyone with a Monday pass proved impossible. Even with the reduced staff, as many as eight hundred people could have been working in the museum or wandering through the galleries at any point on the day of the theft. The initial list given to the police contained only two hundred fifty-seven names.

  Even more damaging to the investigation was the late start. By the time the police were alerted, the thieves had made a clean getaway. The Gare d'Orsay was just steps from the Louvre, and the port of Le Havre was within easy reach. With at least a twenty-four-hour head start, Mona Lisa could have crossed the border in any direction before she was missed.

  Prefect Lépine continued to believe that a ring of skilled art thieves was behind the abduction, but he was no closer to flushing out the gang than he was on the first day, and he found the lack of a plausible motive baffling. As he said, “It is generally conceded that even a dull person would realize the impossibility of selling such a famous work.”

  The Paris Herald expressed his frustration:

  Though the police and detectives inquiring into the theft of Mona Lisa continue as active as ever, all the clues followed so far have ended in complete failure, and the whereabouts of the masterpiece remain as deep a mystery as ever.

  ∗1 Mona Lisa is called la Gioconda in Italian as well as la Joconde in French.

  ∗2 Giorgio Vasari.

  ∗3 In the end, the Friends of the Louvre set the reward at twenty-four thousand francs ($96,000).