Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [2]
Beroud noticed at once that the centerpiece of his intended work was missing. He complained to a guard, who shrugged. Like Picquet the day before, he assumed the Mona Lisa had been removed to the photographer’s studio. Beroud persisted. His time was valuable. No one had scheduled a removal of the painting. How long would it take before it was returned?
To stop Beroud’s badgering, the guard finally went to see the photographer, who denied having anything to do with the painting. Perhaps it had been taken by a curator for cleaning? No. Finally, the guard thought it wise to inform a superior. A search began and soon became increasingly frantic. The director of the museum was on vacation, so the unthinkable news filtered up to the acting head, Georges Bénédite: Elle est partie! She’s gone.
1
THE CITY OF LIGHT
On April 14, 1900, French president Émile-François Loubet opened the Paris Exposition Universelle, whose goal was to “reflect the bright genius of France, and show our fair country to be, today as yesterday, in the very vanguard of Progress.” 1 Spread across the city, from the place de la Concorde to the Eiffel Tower, was a fantastic array of Swiss villages, Hungarian Gypsy caravans, mosques and minarets and Arab towns, as well as reproductions of the great Basilica of San Marco in Venice, a temple at Angkor Wat, and the Imperial Palaces in Peking. The expo contained displays from fifty-eight countries in 210 pavilions covering 350 acres. From April to November of that centennial year, Paris welcomed fifty million visitors from all over the world.
The star of the event was electricity, newly harnessed by science. Every evening, with a flick of a switch in the Palace of Electricity, light from fifty-seven hundred incandescent bulbs flooded the pavilions, inspiring the nickname Ville Lumière, “City of Light,” for Paris. Electricity also powered a train that circled the fair and a trottoir roulant (moving sidewalk) that allowed people to glide to the galleries. This newly harnessed invisible force propelled a giant Ferris wheel, carrying forty cars and twenty-four hundred people at full capacity, modeled after the original that had appeared at the Chicago World’s Fair ten years earlier. The fair was seen as a herald of the exciting and unparalleled new gifts that science would bring to the modern age.
A visitor, Pierre Laborde, a university student from Bordeaux, wrote: “You could say I’ve touched with my finger this delicious century that’s just begun. I’ve danced all the dances of the world from the Pont des Invalides to the Pont de l’Alma, and travelled by ‘moving carpet’ from a Venetian palazzo to Washington’s Capital, from an Elizabethan manor to a Byzantine church.… I’ve seen moving photographs and electrified dancing: cinematography and Loie Fuller [a red-headed American dancer who used electric lights to make her costumes glow and attempted to buy radium as a decoration because she had heard it glowed in the dark].… Life on a screen [the movies]… isn’t yet art, but it will be. And on a glass floor when the lights change color a woman becomes a flower, a butterfly, a storm, a flame from a brazier.” 2 The fair was an affirmation of the new century’s glowing promise, transformed by an energy that no one could see but all could experience.
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The years in Paris from 1900 to the beginning of the First World War are often called the Belle Époque, the “beautiful time.” It was the height of a great civilization, confident, prosperous, cultured, and creative. Paris was not only the seat of the nation’s government but also the cultural focus of France — and, many felt, of the world. Within