Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [20]
It was personal too. Le Figaro’s editor wrote, “Since it has disappeared, perhaps forever, one must speak of this familiar face, whose memory will pursue us, filling us with regret in the same way that we speak of a person who died in a stupid accident and for whom one must write an obituary.” 4 Less seriously, the Revue des Deux Mondes wrote that the meaning of the famous smile was now clear: Mona Lisa had been thinking of the fuss her disappearance would create. Outside the Louvre, vendors sold postcards on this theme, with cartoon images of the woman in the painting “escaping” from the museum, often with a taunt at her “captors,” the guards.
Someone who signed himself or herself as “Mona Lisa” expanded on this idea, writing a letter to L’Autorité that explained she had “divorced” the museum because she didn’t like the way she was talked about: “They’ve bored me stiff with this ‘famous smile!’… You do not know women or you do not know them well. If I smiled with an ‘enigmatic’ air it was certainly not for the ridiculous reasons attributed to me by the gentlemen of the literature.… This smile marked my lassitude, my scorn for all the skunks who paraded endlessly before me, and my infinite desire to carry out my abduction.
“I said to myself: what a face those officials will make when tomorrow the news will spread through all of Paris: La Joconde5 has spent the night elsewhere!” 6
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Since there were few real developments in the case, reporters were free to print rumors and sheer speculation about who had perpetrated the crime. All that restrained them were the limits of their imaginations. Among the more creative guesses was that of the Paris-Journal, which reported that a professional clairvoyant, Mme. Albane de Siva, after “ascertaining at the Central Astronomical Office the position of the planets at the time of the theft,” deduced that the picture was still hidden somewhere in the Louvre, and that the thief was “a young man with thick hair, a long neck and a hoarse voice, who had a passion for rejuvenating old things.” 7
Meanwhile, right-wing and monarchist publications alleged that the theft was only the latest manifestation of a crime wave that revealed “the extraordinary state of anarchy” 8 that characterized the government of the Third Republic, which, not by coincidence, was at that time led by Premier Joseph Caillaux, a member of the Radical-Socialist Party. The fact that Caillaux was currently negotiating with Germany over the two countries’ rival claims in Morocco led to a darker accusation: that the Germans had taken the painting and were holding it hostage to secure favorable terms in the final settlement. On the other hand, there were also some who saw the theft as “a political plot to injure the prestige of the Republic and murmur that the [supporters of the monarchy] could say if they would, where the Joconde is.” 9
In the days immediately following the theft, anyone carrying a package received attention. Two German artists, suspicious apparently because they were German and possessed paints and brushes, were reported to the police and questioned. A man running for a train — the 7:47 express for Bordeaux — while carrying a package covered by a horse blanket caused police to telephone the stationmaster at Bordeaux, asking him to search the train. When a shabbily