The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (10 page)

The audience for fine art had previously been restricted exclusively to those who were able to travel to museums to view the works on display, and to the even fewer people who could afford to buy such works. But after about 1840, technological developments, such as photography and new printing techniques, made it possible to mass-produce reproductions of fine art. Critics who had previously confined themselves merely to describing and evaluating works of art expanded their role. For now that anyone could view fine art for themselves, critics needed to justify their superior position by taking on the role of popular interpreter.

Nevertheless, literary artists popularized
Mona Lisa
before the art critics did. The Irish poet Thomas Moore wrote of “Mona Lisa, on whose eyes / A painter for whole years might gaze.”
⁴⁷
The Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, popular French novelists of the mid-nineteenth century, described a hero’s mistress: “All women are enigmas, but she is the most mysterious of them all… and wears, like an enchanted mask, the smile full of night of the Gioconda.”
⁴⁸

Théophile Gautier (1811–72), a prolific French author of novels, poems, travel books, and criticism, waxed ecstatic over the portrait of Mona Lisa. In a review of an 1855 play titled
La Joconde
(though the subject matter did not concern the real-life Mona Lisa), he began, “
La Joconde!
This name makes me think immediately of this sphinx of beauty who smiles so mysteriously in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, and who seems to pose a yet unresolved riddle to the admiring centuries.”
⁴⁹
A dozen years later, writing a guide to the Louvre, he recalled those words and added, “I have seen her frequently, since then, this adorable Joconde. She is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. She has the serene countenance of a woman sure that she will remain beautiful for ever and certain to be greater than the ideal of poets and artists.”
⁵⁰

Shortly afterward, in an essay published in November 1869, a thirty-year-old English critic, Walter Pater, offered his own paean to the
Mona Lisa.
“
La Gioconda
is, in the truest sense, Leonardo’s masterpiece,” Pater wrote. Expanding on Gautier’s observations, he noted “the unfathomable smile, always with a touch of something sinister in it, which plays over all Leonardo’s work.… From childhood we see this image defining itself on the fabric of his dreams; and but for express historical testimony, we might fancy that this was but his ideal lady embodied and beheld at last.”
⁵¹
It was a thought later taken up by a certain Viennese physician.

vii

Only a year before the
Mona Lisa
was stolen, Sigmund Freud, one of the founders of the new science of psychology, wrote a small book titled
Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood.
In his notebooks, Leonardo had described a recurrent dream that he had, and dreams were to Freud significant indicators of the psyche. Like the scientists who were finding a new physical world — atoms, X-rays, quanta — previously hidden from view, so Freud sought to uncover secrets of the mind below the level of consciousness.

Leonardo had been born in Vinci, a small town near Florence, in 1452, the illegitimate son of a woman named Caterina; his father was Piero da Vinci, a notary who worked for the Signoria of Florence. Though Piero married another woman in the year of Leonardo’s birth, he acknowledged the boy as his son and later brought him into his household. Leonardo’s earliest years, however, were spent with Caterina.

Freud, like Pater, found the enigmatic smile not only in the
Mona Lisa
but in other paintings by Leonardo, notably
St. John the Baptist
and
Virgin and Child with St. Anne.
The smile, Freud wrote, “has produced the most powerful and confusing effect on whoever looks at it.”
⁵²
He felt that it held special meaning for the artist, because he used it several times, and surmised that when he first encountered it on the face of Lisa, the model for
Mona Lisa,
“it awoke something in him which had for long lain dormant in his mind — probably an old memory.” It was, Freud concluded, “the smile of bliss and rapture which had once played on his mother’s lips as she fondled him.”
⁵³
The recurring dream Leonardo described was of the tail of a bird striking his mouth over and over. That image, Freud suggested, may well have been caused by the memory of his mother kissing him.

Freud thought that Leonardo was a homosexual, though the only proof for this is that the artist never married and was once accused in court of practicing sodomy, a charge he was cleared of. Couching his argument in genteel terms, Freud said that at the time Leonardo encountered his mother’s smile on the face of the real-life Mona Lisa, he

had for long been under the dominance of an inhibition which forbade him ever again to desire such caresses from the lips of women. But he had become a painter, and therefore he strove to reproduce the smile with his brush, giving it to all his pictures.… The figures [in the pictures, including Leda, John the Baptist, and Bacchus, as well as Mona Lisa]… gaze in mysterious triumph, as if they knew of a great achievement of happiness, about which silence must be kept. The familiar smile of fascination leads one to guess that it is a secret of love. It is possible that in these figures Leonardo has denied the unhappiness of his erotic life
⁵⁴
and has triumphed over it in his art, by representing the wishes of the boy, infatuated with his mother, as fulfilled in this blissful union of the male and female natures.
⁵⁵

Perhaps following Freud’s lead, others began to speculate that love must hold the secret behind the theft. Just as Napoleon had hung the painting in his bedroom, so perhaps now someone had felt such desire for the portrait that he had stolen it. Indeed, Leonardo himself had told the story of such a man, who conceived a carnal love for one of the artist’s other works: “Such is the power of a painting over a man’s mind that he may be enchanted and enraptured by a painting that does not represent any living woman,” Leonardo wrote. “It previously happened to me that I made a picture representing a holy subject, which was bought by someone who loved it and who wished to remove the attributes of divinity in order that he might kiss it without guilt. But finally his conscience overcame his sighs and lust, and he was forced to banish it from his house.”
⁵⁶

Contributing to the speculation along these lines was the fact that shortly before the theft, the Louvre had received a postcard addressed to the
Mona Lisa.
It was a “red-hot love declaration, peppered with ‘I love you’s’ and ‘I adore you’s.’”
⁵⁷
It raised the possibility that the theft had been the work of an erotomaniac, someone obsessed enough with the subject of the painting that he might steal it. The employees of the Louvre now recalled that a young man, blond with blue eyes, would come almost every day to stand enraptured in front of the
Mona Lisa
as if he could not drag himself away. Clearly, this person should be high on the list of suspects. But no one knew his name.

The editor of
Le Temps
found this idea appealing enough to ask Dr. Georges Dumas, professor of experimental psychology at the Sorbonne, to write about the psychology of the thief. Dumas eagerly responded to the suggestion. “As to the mentality of such a thief,” he wrote, “one will find it described in medical works, where such lunatics are called fetishists, who tremble in the presence of beauty and become obsessed by it, often showing much ingenuity and energy in obtaining symbols of such beauty. Such a person would have carried
Mona Lisa
to his rooms trembling with joy, gloating over the possession like a miser, perhaps in frenzy injuring the picture. When at last his insane passion spends its force he may return the picture to the Louvre.”
⁵⁸
However, Dumas added ominously, there was the possibility that the thief would take pleasure in “mutilating, stabbing, and defiling” it.

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

T
he 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 were often those on the wrong side of the law.

i

Crime in France had a long literary tradition, both in fiction and in fact — beginning with Vidocq, the real-life Frenchman who was the inspiration for countless crime stories (including those written by the American Edgar Allan Poe). Vidocq had been a legendary criminal before he became a policeman — and some thought he continued to cross the line throughout his career.

He liked to suddenly reveal himself to people who had not seen through his current disguise, announcing, “I am Vidocq, and I arrest you.”
²
Even today, his towering figure (contemporaries claimed he could appear tall or short, as suited his purposes) stands at the beginning of the history of modern criminology as well as the beginning of the detective story.

Much of what is known about Vidocq comes from his
Memoirs,
which were written with the assistance of Honoré de Balzac, one of France’s great novelists, and even the
Memoirs
are apparently as much a product of imagination as of memory. Fact or fiction? Vidocq blurred the line.

François-Eugène Vidocq begins the story of his life in typically dramatic fashion:

I was born at Arras, but as my constant disguise, the mobility of my features, and a singular aptness in make-up have caused some doubt about my age, it will not be superfluous to state that I came into the world on the twenty-third of July, 1775, in a house near where Robespierre had been born sixteen years earlier. It was during the night; rain poured down in torrents; thunder rumbled; as a result a relative, who combined the functions of midwife and sibyl, drew the conclusion that my career would be a stormy one. In those days there were still good people who believed in omens, while in these enlightened times men rely on the infallibility of fortune-tellers.
³

Even as a young man, Vidocq stood out from the crowd. Very large and strong, he was the terror of his neighborhood and was continually in fights. “My father’s house was on the Place d’Armes, the customary meeting-place for all the blackguards of the quarter, and here I early exercised my muscles in thrashing regularly my comrades.… All they heard at home were stories of injured ears, black eyes, and torn clothes. By the time I was eight I was the terror of all the dogs, cats, and children of the neighborhood.”
⁴
He earned the name locally of Le Vautrin (the Wild Boar), a name that Balzac later gave to a recurring fictional character based upon Vidocq.

His criminal career began with stealing money from the till of his family’s bakery. Later, after he pawned the family silver, his father insisted that the local authorities jail him — Vidocq’s first experience behind bars. Released after two weeks, he stole his mother’s savings and ran away from home. He had wanted to go to America and start a new life but lost his money to a con man along the way. Undaunted but wiser, he joined a traveling theater troupe and circus. He later recalled, “I went about the job, but I didn’t like it. The grease disgusted me and I wasn’t comfortable with the monkeys, which frightened by an unknown face, made unbelievable efforts to tear out my eyes.”
⁵
Tiring of this adventure, he returned to Arras and begged his mother’s forgiveness, something she could never resist giving him. He and his father were reconciled as well.

The uneventful life of a village soon bored him, and Vidocq joined the army. Here he fought fifteen duels in six months, according to his
Memoirs.
Vidocq saw much of Europe with the French army as it carried the Revolution into neighboring countries, but he learned that his chief loyalty must always be to himself. Frequently he was accused of crimes, ranging from assaulting an officer to forgery. Convicted, he usually managed to escape, mastering an ability to disguise himself — at least once in a nun’s habit. Recapture brought him harsher sentences to the “galleys,” which were prisons for hardened criminals, usually those convicted of capital crimes. But the galleys could not hold him either, and in the confusion of the times, Vidocq usually managed to enlist in another regiment — even serving with privateers and naval forces. It was simple enough to assume another name and hence another identity, for there were no records that could provide definite identification of criminals.

In addition to discarding identities, Vidocq left behind a trail of admiring women wherever he went. One of the conquests he describes in his
Memoirs:

At dark the evening of our departure, I met a woman from Brussels, named Elisa, with whom I had been intimate. She fell on my neck, took me to supper, and, overcoming weak resistance, kept me with her till the next morning. I pretended to Francine [another lover], who had sought me everywhere, that to throw the police off my tracks I had been forced to dash into a house, and I could not get out until daylight. At first she believed me; but chance led her to discover that I had passed the night with a woman.… In her excess of rage she swore that she would have me arrested. Having me put in prison was certainly the safest way to assure herself against my infidelities. As Francine was a woman to do what she said she would, I deemed it prudent to leave her until her anger had cooled.
⁶

Vidocq’s many stints in prison, as well as his frequent escapes, had earned him a reputation among criminals. This helped him to find refuge with lawless elements whenever he was out of prison, but it also meant that his only means of earning a living was through crime. Wishing to turn his life around, he managed to arrange a meeting with a man named Dubois, the
commissaire
of police in Lyons. Vidocq proposed to give him a list of criminals working in the area in return for his freedom. Dubois, who knew of Vidocq’s reputation, was hesitant, fearing a trick. To prove his good faith, Vidocq said he would give the slip to the two gendarmes who were waiting to take him to prison, and voluntarily return to Dubois’s office. Dubois agreed. Not long after Vidocq left, the door opened and he stood there again — without the guards.

Thus began Vidocq’s double career: as criminal and police informer. He was forced to leave Lyons to save his skin when the criminals who were being rounded up suspected he had betrayed them. He returned to Arras, where his mother still lived, but was unable to convince the police there that he had gone straight. His good intentions rebuffed, he returned to crime again and wound up in Paris, where he developed a relationship with a woman named Annette, whom he later married.

Paris in the early nineteenth century was not the City of Light it would later become. It was a city of narrow, maze-like streets that were dark and dangerous, twisted alleys and dead ends where bodies were dumped. There were no spacious boulevards or parks with gas lighting. The metropolis was a hotbed of vice and disease. Hordes of people lived in ramshackle ancient buildings; epidemics of cholera periodically swept the city. In this world, the poor were forced to steal for their bread, and street urchins needed sharp wits to survive.

In 1809, during Napoleon’s rule, Vidocq decided once again to make a break with his criminal past. He sent a letter to “Papa” Henry, divisional chief of the Police Prefecture of Paris, offering his services as a spy in the underworld. Henry could see the value such a man would have, and referred the letter to Baron de Pasquier, the prefect of police, who agreed to give him a chance. In his
Memoirs,
Vidocq referred to the two men as “my liberators.”
⁷
For the next two decades, he would employ his talents on the right side of the law.

At first he served as an informant in La Force Prison in Paris. The authorities had spread rumors that Vidocq had committed a particularly heinous crime. This earned him the respect of the other inmates, who “whispered and even said aloud in talking about me, ‘He’s a murderer,’ and as in that place a murderer ordinarily inspires great confidence, I was careful not to refute an error so useful to my projects.”
⁸
Some inmates also recognized Vidocq from having served with him in other prisons and knew that he had escaped, adding to his criminal reputation. Finally, after twenty months, he feared that his cover was blown and he “escaped” once again, this time with the connivance of his jailers.

He returned to Paris, where he lived with his wife in the Marais section. At night he frequented the gaming dens, saloons, and brothels in the most dangerous sections of the city. He listened to the schemes and plots being hatched — sometimes being invited to take part in them — and then reported them to his superiors at the prefecture. “The rogues and thieves whom I daily met there firmly believed me to be one of themselves,” he wrote.
⁹
He did not see himself as a traitor, because he did not believe that he was a criminal — only a person who had taken up crime out of necessity. He further claimed that he never turned in anyone for stealing bread to feed himself or his family.

All the while, Vidocq’s ability to disguise himself continued to improve. His biographer Joseph Geringer wrote, “He played pirates with black-patched eyes, runaway convicts under a month’s chin growth, aged thieves behind gray side whiskers, pickpockets with a limp and a cane and a ragged frock, even persons displaced from their homeland — a scar-faced German swordsman wanted by the Berlin police for killing two men in a duel, the dark Sicilian Gypsy who had killed a wife in Castelvetrano, the British barrister, complete with spectacles, wanted for cutting the throat of a rival attorney in London. With dialect and colloquialism to accompany each caricature, Vidocq carried every animation with aplomb.”
¹⁰
He was so adept at disguise that he was once approached to make a hit on himself.

In real life, changing one’s looks and name to alter one’s history, even when practiced by lesser men than Vidocq, was a perennial problem for police forces. In France, galley “slaves” — those who had been sentenced to forced labor — were branded to prevent them from escaping,
¹¹
a practice that was banned in 1832. Afterward, the police had no real way of knowing whether a suspect was a recidivist, or career criminal, because it was nearly impossible to determine if he had ever been arrested before. Vidocq himself, adept at shifting personae, began to tackle that problem.

ii

The population of Paris grew to more than one million people between 1800 and 1850, making it the largest city on the mainland of Europe. Vidocq recognized that the sheer size of the metropolis caused difficulty for the police, who were poorly organized. At the time, the Prefecture of Paris, still led by the Baron de Pasquier, was composed of the First Division, or Administrative Branch, and the Second Division, or Special Investigative Branch, under “Papa” Henry. The city was divided into several geographic sectors, each under the jurisdiction of a
commissaire
with a small staff. The
commissaires
worked only within their own domains, so criminals who ranged freely over the whole city were hard to track down. Vidocq recognized in this confusion a possible job for himself. He suggested that a small group of crime fighters be formed to operate throughout Paris, to keep the criminal and ex-convict population under surveillance. His group could stop crimes before they occurred, a novel idea for the time.