Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [31]
Dumas, like Professor Reiss, was assuming the role of a criminal profiler, even though such an occupation did not exist at that time. He was making an educated guess, based on the new science of psychology. Fiction writers, who had employed psychology for a much longer time than psychologists, adopted his theory and elaborated on it.
“Le harem des images,” a 1913 short story by the writer Jules Bois, has as its central character John Lewis. Like J. P. Morgan, Lewis is an American millionaire, but one who, unlike Morgan, steals his art treasures instead of purchasing them. (Perhaps, to French readers, stealing them was morally no different from buying them, as long as they ended up in the hands of uncivilized Americans.) In the story, Lewis has created a private museum in his Paris apartment, where he displays for his own enjoyment artistic treasures that he has stolen from European collections. The narrator of the tale lets the reader know that Lewis’s motivation is that he suffers from a sexual compulsion when he is confronted by artistic renditions of female beauty. He has, in other words, created a “harem” of painted and sculpted women who are his sexual captives. Mona Lisa is only his latest, and greatest, possession. Eventually, when he tires of his captives, he returns them.
“Within a few years,” the narrator of “Le harem des images” tells the reader, “Leonardo’s marvel will be returned to the Louvre. Until then, may every Sherlock Holmes exhaust his imagination!” 59
Sherlock Holmes, of course, was a fictional detective, but his combination of intuitive brilliance and scientific precision was indeed what was required, for the search for a solution to the Mona Lisa theft would involve science as much as art. To probe its secrets, the painting had earlier been photographed with magnifying lenses and even X-rayed, revealing that Leonardo had rearranged the position of the hands before settling on the final version. The pattern of craquelure — cracks that had appeared on the surface of the paint over time — had also been photographed. Since this pattern was impossible to duplicate, it was thought to be a guarantee against any copy’s being used to replace the original.
But of course the theft raised issues that were uncanny and immeasurable. It was Pater who came closest to expressing the strange atmosphere that emanates from the figure in the painting:
She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one.… Certainly Lady Lisa might stand as the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern idea. 60
Pater’s essay made him famous and made the Mona Lisa seem more than merely a painting — it was a nearly living thing, eternal and bewitching, and now it was gone.
3
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL
The headline of the newspaper Paris-Journal for Wednesday, August 23, 1911 (the day after the theft of the Mona Lisa was discovered), read
IS ARSÈNE LUPIN ALIVE?
MONA LISA GONE FROM THE LOUVRE! 1
Arsène Lupin was well known to the Paris-Journal’s readers, for he was as famous a fictional character in France as Sherlock Holmes was in England. Lupin, however, was a master thief. In Paris, where many people’s sympathies were with the criminal, not with the police, imaginary heroes