Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [0]
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Little, Brown and Company
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First eBook Edition: April 2009
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ISBN: 978-0-316-05253-5
CONTENTS
Copyright Page
Theft
CHAPTER ONE
The City of Light
CHAPTER TWO
Searching for a Woman
CHAPTER THREE
Sympathy for the Devil
CHAPTER FOUR
Science vs. Crime
CHAPTER FIVE
The Man Who Measured People
CHAPTER SIX
The Suspects
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Motor Bandits
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Thief
CHAPTER NINE
Cherchez la Femme
CHAPTER TEN
The Greatest Crime
AFTERWORD
The Mastermind
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
About the Authors
THEFT
It was a Monday and the Louvre was closed. As was standard practice at the museum on that day of the week, only maintenance workers, cleaning staff, curators, and a few other employees roamed the cavernous halls of the building that was once the home of France’s kings but since the Revolution had been devoted to housing the nation’s art treasures.
Acquired through conquest, wealth, good taste, and plunder, those holdings were splendid and vast — so much so that the Louvre could lay claim to being the greatest repository of art in the world. With some fifty acres of gallery space, the collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or even, some thought, in a lifetime. 1 Most guidebooks, therefore, advised tourists not to miss the Salon Carré (Square Room). In that single room could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, three by Titian, two by Raphael, two by Correggio, one by Giorgione, three by Veronese, one by Tintoretto, and — representing non-Italians — one each by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez.
A stunning display, certainly. But even in that collection of masterpieces, one painting stood out from the rest. That very morning — August 21, 1911 — as the museum’s maintenance director, a man named Picquet, passed through the Salon Carré on his rounds, he pointed out Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, telling a co-worker that it was the most valuable object in the museum. “They say it is worth a million and a half,” Picquet remarked, glancing at his watch as he left the room. The time was 7:20 A.M.
Shortly after Picquet departed the Salon Carré, a door to a storage closet opened and a man (or men, for it was never proved whether the thief worked alone) emerged. He had been in there since the previous day — Sunday, the museum’s busiest, as that was the only day most Parisians had off from work. Just before closing time, the thief had slipped inside the little closet so that he could emerge in the morning without the need to identify himself to a guard at the entrance.
There were many such small rooms and hidden alcoves within the seven-hundred-year-old 2 building; museum officials later confessed that no one knew how many. This particular one was normally used for storing the easels, canvases, and supplies of artists who were engaged in copying the works of Old Masters — a training exercise for those who wished to improve their technique. The only firm antiforgery requirement the museum placed on such students was that the reproductions could not be the same size as the originals.
Emerging from the closet, the intruder might have been mistaken for one of these copyists, for he wore a white artist’s smock. However, his garment had another purpose on this particular day: the museum’s maintenance staff also wore such smocks, apparently a practice intended to demonstrate that they were on a higher plane than “ordinary” workers, and if anyone