Vanished Smile (4 page)

“La Joconde
is gone. That is all I can say,” Bénédite told the
Times’
man. “So far we have not the slightest clue as to the perpetrator of the crime. How he or they came or left the premises is as yet a mystery. Why the theft was committed is also a mystery to me, as I consider the picture valueless in the hands of a private individual.”

Paul Leprieur, the curator of paintings and drawings, went further. He was certain the painting had been stolen by someone who intended to return a good copy later, and he warned the thieves not to attempt such a fraud: “I have studied the
picture for years, mounted and unmounted, know every minor detail of it, and would recognize a copy, however perfect, after five minutes' observation.”

Prefect Lépine was clearly annoyed by the curators’ loose talk. His men had found the frames, and he was confident they would soon find the painting. Until then he wanted to keep the public and the politicians calm. “The thieves—I am inclined to think there is more than one—got away with it, all right,” he told the press. While conceding that there were a number of plausible motives, he said, “the more serious possibility is that
La Joconde
was stolen to blackmail the government.”

If Mona Lisa were being held for ransom, Lépine expected a demand would be made within forty-eight hours.

EXCELSIOR
NEWSPAPER, AUGUST 23, 1911
On August 23,1911, Mona Lisa's disappearance was a front-page story
in every Paris newspaper. Under the headline,
LE LOUVRE A PERDU LA
“JOCONDE”
(The Louvre Has Lost Mona Lisa), the illustrated paper
Excelsior
published a photomontage. Surrounding Mona Lisa and
the Louvre are (top to bottom, left to right) the museum director
Jean Théophile Homolle, and the Sûreté chief Octave Hamard; two
views of a scaffold on the side of the Louvre, considered a possible
escape route for the thieves; police converging on the museum;
and Prefect Louis Lépine inside.

Wednesday, August 23

FOR ONCE, THE FAMOUSLY BLASé
Parisians were nonplussed. Who could believe that a thief could lift Mona Lisa off the wall and waltz unnoticed out of the Louvre with the celebrated lady in his arms? Front-page stories in the Paris dailies echoed their shock. “The disappearance of
la Joconde
by Leonardo da Vinci surpasses the imagination,”
Le Figaro
wrote.

“For many, the Mona Lisa is the Louvre,” the
Paris-Journal
echoed. “In the eyes of the public, even the uneducated, the Mona Lisa occupies a privileged position that is not to be accounted for by its value alone.”

The story traveled around the world as swiftly as telegraph and cable could carry it. On front pages in every major city, the dateline was Paris.

“The entire world sat back aghast,”
The New York Times
reported. “Nothing like the theft of the Mona Lisa had ever been perpetrated before in the world's history.”

In Milan, the
La Corriere delta Sera
ran an illustration of two thieves removing Mona Lisa with the headline:

Mona Lisa had been spirited away, leaving no forwarding address. Prefect Lépine called in the one person he believed could illuminate her mystifying vanishing act. Alphonse Bertillon, chief of the Department of Judicial Identity of the Paris Prefecture, was the closest thing France had to the internationally popular Baker Street Regular, and Bertillon had the advantage of being real.

Immaculate in dress and imperious in manner, Alphonse Bertillon seemed as out of place at most crime scenes as the Virgin Mary at the Folies-Bergère, but he was in his element at the Louvre. He arrived with a magnifying glass, dusting powder, and a trail of assistants carrying bulky cameras and precisely constructed wooden boxes that held ink bottles and glass plates, the tools of his trade. Waving aside the gendarmes blocking entry to the museum, he proceeded directly to the stairwell where the frames had been found. Bits of discolored
paper, remnants of the packing that had been stuffed between the frame and the painting to secure it, littered the floor.

With a white linen handkerchief in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other, Bertillon approached the empty frames as cautiously as a lion trainer who understands the imperfect line between the tame and the feral. The handkerchief prevented his own prints from compromising his investigation. The magnifying glass allowed him to examine each frame centimeter by centimeter.

Bertillon had introduced a revolutionary form of criminal examination called forensic detection. His father had been a pioneering anthropologist, and from his earliest years, Bertillon had displayed a keen interest in social adaptation. He believed that each person has a unique physiological profile. Using the color of the eyes, hair, and skin, and eleven bodily measurements, he devised a system to identify criminals. To complete the portrait, he photographed each suspect in full face and in profile, creating the first mug shots. Photography was an innovation in crime work. There was no infrared or ultraviolet photography then, and Bertillon experimented with color-sensitive plates and blinding ribbons of magnesium to illuminate crime scenes.

The Bertillon System of anthropometry appealed more to artists than to his colleagues. One of those intrigued was the young Spaniard Pablo Picasso, who was disrupting art circles in Paris with his cubist canvases. For local police departments, taking intricate skeletal measurements was laborious work, and around the same time that Bertillon was developing his criminal profile, a Scottish surgeon named Henry Faulds was trying to convince Scotland Yard that the whorls on the tips of the fingers were unique to each person. Fingerprinting proved a much handier tool for police, and it quickly overshadowed the Bertillon System.

Although he only grudgingly accepted fingerprinting as a
vital detection aid, Bertillon became a master at lifting prints. He was the first detective to win a murder conviction on the evidence of fingerprints alone, and his talent for detection became legendary. In
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, Sherlock Holmes is described as the “second highest expert in Europe,” after the French savant.

Bertillon approached a crime scene like a surgeon preparing to operate. In the minutiae that others overlooked, he often found a revealing clue. Crowded into the narrow Louvre stairwell, he conducted a slow, meticulous examination of Mona Lisa's empty frames. Halfway up the glass on the left side of the box frame, he found a smudge. From a custom-built case containing instruments of varying sizes, compositions, and thicknesses, Bertillon selected a soft camel-hair brush. Dusting the frame with finely ground graphite, he lifted a perfect thumbprint. The Mona Lisa thief had left his calling card.

THE HUNT WAS ON
. Political powers, museum administrators, and police brass rushed back to Paris from their August vacations and converged on the museum.

Behind the locked doors of the Louvre, a judicial inquest convened to interrogate witnesses, hear evidence, and issue arrest warrants. The presiding judge was Magistrate Henri Drioux, a solid cube of a man with a bald head, a pince-nez on a black cord, and a reputation for intimidating witnesses.

At the same time, Minister of Beaux Arts Théodore Steeg and his deputy, Henri Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, opened an administrative inquiry to explore how such a shocking incident
could happen in the most august museum in France. Dujardin, an injudicious man, blustered that delinquent guards, conservators, or other responsible officials would receive no mercy.

Museum curators, led by Paul Leprieur, began compiling a dossier on Mona Lisa. Like a missing-persons report, the file contained the most recent series of photographs and a detailed description of her appearance, condition, and history. If and when she returned, the information could be compared with the recovered painting to determine authenticity.

In the Salon Carré, Prefect Lépine ordered Mona Lisa stolen again. Like a leading lady's understudy, another painting was fitted into her frames, and the theft was reenacted twice. The first time, gendarmes committed the crime. They struggled for more than five minutes to remove the painting from the double frames. The second time, experienced Louvre workers posed as the thieves and performed the same feat in moments.

The exercise suggested that someone skilled in museum work had separated Mona Lisa from her frames. The crime had been planned with precision and executed with skill. The thief—or thieves—had understood the internal operations of the Louvre, studied the layout of the museum, and laid out a clear strategy. They knew that the staircase where the frames were found, which was usually restricted, was accessible on Mondays. They also knew that the number of attendants would be at its lowest.

Suspicion pointed to an inside job. Prefect Lépine requested a complete list of everyone who had access to the museum between Sunday evening and Tuesday morning. No one was presumed innocent. Each custodian, curator, cleaner, workman, and photographer would be fingerprinted and interrogated.

THE FIRST TO FACE
Judge Drioux in the judicial inquest was the guard Desornais, who should have been watching over Mona Lisa on Monday. He confessed reluctantly and with profuse apologies that Mona Lisa was alone from eight to ten o'clock Monday morning. Because the museum was closed to the public, only ten guards were on duty, and he had been covering the Grande Galerie, the Galerie d'Apollon, and the Salon Carré alone when he was called away to help move some paintings in another part of the museum. For those two hours on Monday morning, the entire area was unattended.

The next guard called was Paupardin, who had been on duty both Sunday and Tuesday. The old guard was still shaken, and he cradled his head in his hands. If he were able to see into the future, he would have paid closer attention, but a summer Sunday in the Louvre—who could remember?

Mon Dieu!
The old guard bristled.
She was there when I left on Sunday night, when the museum closed. That is all I know
.

When Judge Drioux pressed for details, Paupardin could not be certain. It was difficult to recall anything about that day except the oppressive heat that had soaked through his uniform, through his vest, plastering it to his hairy chest.

Magistrate Drioux was known as “the bulldog” because of his tenacious, sometimes fierce questioning and a naturally churlish expression. Although the judge was not as ferocious as his dyspeptic appearance suggested, it was a deception that served him well. Under further probing, Paupardin remembered a group of young men, no more than three, all swarthy—dark hair, olive eyes, olive skin. He described them as
mangeurs
de macaroni
, macaroni eaters, or the shorthand, “macaroni.” Not typical museum visitors, the guard conceded, but well behaved. Orderly. Respectful.

Did one of them carry a package?

Paupardin had a fleeting memory of a flat brown paper parcel tied with string, but the men had not lingered.

Did they leave together? At what time?

Ah, yes, the time
.

The questions continued, the judge pressing, a gendarme scribbling on lined paper, the demand for details becoming harsher. Judge Drioux's voice, coaxing at first, coarsened from smooth sand to gravel.

Paupardin had not paid close enough attention on Sunday to answer the questions fully, and he was growing defensive, fearful that he would be blamed for the loss. Paupardin did not volunteer that he had been less than watchful, dozing on and off for much of the afternoon, made drowsy by the midday cassoulet and the August heat. Nor did he regard it as essential to point out that he did not actually see any of the visitors leave the gallery.