The Crimes of Paris Read online

  Copyright © 2009 by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First eBook Edition: April 2009

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  The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05253-5

  CONTENTS

  Copyright Page

  Theft

  CHAPTER ONE

  The City of Light

  CHAPTER TWO

  Searching for a Woman

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sympathy for the Devil

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Science vs. Crime

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Man Who Measured People

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Suspects

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Motor Bandits

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Thief

  CHAPTER NINE

  Cherchez la Femme

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Greatest Crime

  AFTERWORD

  The Mastermind

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Authors

  THEFT

  It was a Monday and the Louvre was closed. As was standard practice at the museum on that day of the week, only maintenance workers, cleaning staff, curators, and a few other employees roamed the cavernous halls of the building that was once the home of France’s kings but since the Revolution had been devoted to housing the nation’s art treasures.

  Acquired through conquest, wealth, good taste, and plunder, those holdings were splendid and vast — so much so that the Louvre could lay claim to being the greatest repository of art in the world. With some fifty acres of gallery space, the collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or even, some thought, in a lifetime. 1 Most guidebooks, therefore, advised tourists not to miss the Salon Carré (Square Room). In that single room could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, three by Titian, two by Raphael, two by Correggio, one by Giorgione, three by Veronese, one by Tintoretto, and — representing non-Italians — one each by Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velázquez.

  A stunning display, certainly. But even in that collection of masterpieces, one painting stood out from the rest. That very morning — August 21, 1911 — as the museum’s maintenance director, a man named Picquet, passed through the Salon Carré on his rounds, he pointed out Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, telling a co-worker that it was the most valuable object in the museum. “They say it is worth a million and a half,” Picquet remarked, glancing at his watch as he left the room. The time was 7:20 A.M.

  Shortly after Picquet departed the Salon Carré, a door to a storage closet opened and a man (or men, for it was never proved whether the thief worked alone) emerged. He had been in there since the previous day — Sunday, the museum’s busiest, as that was the only day most Parisians had off from work. Just before closing time, the thief had slipped inside the little closet so that he could emerge in the morning without the need to identify himself to a guard at the entrance.

  There were many such small rooms and hidden alcoves within the seven-hundred-year-old 2 building; museum officials later confessed that no one knew how many. This particular one was normally used for storing the easels, canvases, and supplies of artists who were engaged in copying the works of Old Masters — a training exercise for those who wished to improve their technique. The only firm antiforgery requirement the museum placed on such students was that the reproductions could not be the same size as the originals.

  Emerging from the closet, the intruder might have been mistaken for one of these copyists, for he wore a white artist’s smock. However, his garment had another purpose on this particular day: the museum’s maintenance staff also wore such smocks, apparently a practice intended to demonstrate that they were on a higher plane than “ordinary” workers, and if anyone noticed the thief, he would likely be taken for another of the regular museum employees.

  As he entered the Salon Carré, he headed straight for his intended target: the Mona Lisa. Only four sturdy hooks held it there, no more securely than if it were a framed print in the house of a bourgeois Parisian. Later, museum officials said that the paintings were fastened to the wall in this way to make it easy for guards to remove them in case of fire.

  Even so, lifting down the Mona Lisa and carrying it into a nearby enclosed stairwell was no easy job. The painting itself weighs approximately eighteen pounds, for Leonardo painted it not on canvas but on three slabs of wood. A few months earlier, the museum’s directors had taken steps to physically protect the Mona Lisa by reinforcing it with a massive wooden brace and placing it inside a glass-fronted box, adding 150 pounds to the weight. The decorative Renaissance frame contributed perhaps 30 additional pounds, bringing the total to nearly 200 pounds.

  Once safely out of sight behind the closed door of the stairwell, the thief quickly stripped the painting of all its protective “garments” — the brace, the glass case, and the frame. Since the Mona Lisa’s close-grained wood, an inch and a half thick, made it impossible to roll up, the thief slipped the work underneath his smock. Measuring approximately thirty by twenty-one inches, the painting was small enough to avoid detection.

  Though evidently familiar with the layout of the museum, the thief had made one mistake in his planning. The enclosed stairway led down to the first floor of the museum, but at the bottom was a locked door. The thief had obtained a key, but now it failed to work. Desperately, he used a screwdriver to remove the doorknob — but then heard footsteps coming from above.

  Down the stairs came one of the Louvre’s plumbers, a man named Sauvet. Later, Sauvet — the only man to witness the thief inside the museum — testified that he saw one man (only one), dressed as a museum employee. The man complained that the doorknob was missing. Helpfully, Sauvet unlocked the door with his own key and even produced a pliers to turn the mechanism to open the door. The plumber suggested that they leave it open in case anyone else should use the staircase. The thief agreed and went on about his business.

  The door opened onto a courtyard, the Cour du Sphinx. From there the thief crossed through another gallery and into the Cour Visconti and then — probably trying not to appear in a hurry — headed toward the main entrance of the museum. Few guards were on duty that day, because it was felt they were only necessary when the public was admitted. However, there was one assigned to that entrance, the last barrier between the thief and the city. As luck would have it, he had left his post to get a bucket of water to clean the vestibule. He never saw the thief, or thieves, leave the building.

  One person outside did: a passerby who noticed a man on the sidewalk carrying a package wrapped in white cloth (the smock that he had used to impersonate a workman). The witness recalled seeing the man throw a shiny metal object into the ditch along the edge of the street. The passerby glanced at it. It was a doorknob.

  Inside the museum, all was serene and would remain so for quite some time. At 8:35 A.M. Picquet passed through the Salon Carré again and noted that the painting was gone. He thought little of it at the time, for the museum’s photographers freely removed objects without notice and took them to a
studio elsewhere in the building. Indeed, Picquet even remarked to his workers, “I guess the authorities have removed it because they thought we would steal it!” 3 His quip seemed less humorous later.

  Incredibly, all through that day no one thought it alarming that there was an empty space where the Mona Lisa should have been. Not until Tuesday, when the Louvre again opened its doors to the public, did anyone express concern over the fact that the world’s most famous painting was missing from its usual place. Louis Beroud, an artist, set up his easel in the Salon Carré. He was not there to copy a particular work. His intention was to create a genre painting that would show much of the room and the contents of its walls. (Sometimes Beroud’s scenes included attractive young women viewing the museum’s collection. His paintings, and others like them, were popular with foreign visitors who wanted something more than postcards as souvenirs of their trips to Paris.)

  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.

  i

  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 the city were the collected treasures of France — not only in museums, but within institutions of higher education, libraries, and archives. Paris was an international center for the arts of painting, dance, music, theater, and publishing. It had the foremost medical and scientific institutions of the day, and the most modern manufacturing facilities. The face of the future could be seen in Parisian leadership of such brand-new fields as motion pictures, automobile manufacturing, and aviation.

  Visitors and wanderers were an essential component of this success. France’s colonial empire in Asia and Africa (a “civilizing mission,” as the French called it) brought to Paris examples of foreign cultures that understood the world in ways that were different from the European tradition. These in turn stimulated the imagination of the artists and scientists. Among the geniuses who lived in Paris in 1900 were Henri Matisse and Paul Cézanne in art, Claude Debussy in music, Henri Poincaré in mathematics, Marcel Proust in literature, and the Curies, Marie and Pierre, in science. The achievements in painting during the Belle Époque can only be compared with those of Renaissance Florence when Leonardo lived there.

  Among the fifty million visitors to the Paris fair was the nineteen-year-old Spaniard Pablo Ruiz, who visited the Spanish Pavilion (which resembled a Castilian castle) to see his own painting on display. Pablo was entranced with the city, its freedom, its variety, its openness to what was new and different. Like so many others, he would return and forge a new identity for himself. In his youth in Spain, the young man had learned to paint anything he could see; in Paris, he would discover how to paint things that nobody but himself saw. Forging a new identity for himself, he took his mother’s family name: Picasso.

  A city of more than 2.7 million people in 1900, Paris had been the site of a settlement long before the Romans established a fort there around 300 C.E. Yet the twentieth-century city was in many ways quite new, the creation of Baron Georges Haussmann, the first and the most powerful representative of what today are known as city planners. Serving as prefect of the Seine from 1853 to 1870, Haussmann had been entrusted by Napoleon III with the task of modernizing the city, making it grander and more beautiful. He had acted ruthlessly to fulfill his mandate. He demolished much of the ancient center of the city, wiping out whole neighborhoods on the Île de la Cité and the banks of the Seine. Paris also expanded, adding suburbs in places previously occupied by mills, grape arbors, and fields. Haussmann filled such lightly populated areas with housing for workers who had been displaced from the central city.

  Drawing bold lines across the existing map of Paris, Haussmann built wide, straight, tree-lined boulevards that, fortuitously, would eventually carry multiple lanes of traffic by an invention he had not yet seen: the automobile. New bridges across the Seine and the Île de la Cité bound the Left Bank and Right Bank together and further eased traffic circulation. Safe drinking water was carried to the city through aqueducts from as far as one hundred miles away, and the new underground canals of the sewer system were regarded as so extraordinary that they became tourist attractions despite their smell. The wide streets made police surveillance easier as well, and the police force expanded to monitor Paris’s growing population.

  Lining the boulevards were fine theaters, expensive restaurants, shops, cafés, and music halls. Elegant apartments with balconies offered housing to the very rich on broad avenues such as the Champs-Élysées. As dynamos brought electricity to all parts of Paris, it became possible to install electric-powered elevators in buildings, reversing the traditional Parisian order of living. Formerly the poor had to climb stairs to their upper-story apartments; now the rich could ride there in comfort to enjoy
the beautiful views. Construction began on even taller buildings, called à l’américaine after the home of the skyscraper. Some people feared that these new outsize structures would destroy the proportions of the city and even hurt the tourist trade. “When Paris resembles Chicago and New York,” a newspaper editor warned his fellow Parisians, “the American women we want so much to attract, won’t come here anymore.” 3 He needn’t have worried. Paris was a shopper’s mecca. Recently opened were huge department stores called grands magasins, such as Au Bon Marché and Galeries Lafayette, with multistory connected galleries that attracted shoppers from all over the world.

  The American writer Theodore Dreiser was in Paris at the turn of the century and described its mode of life: “He [the Parisian] lives by the way,” he wrote, “out of books, restaurants, theaters, boulevards, and the spectacle of life generally. The Parisians move briskly, and they come out where they can see one another — out into the great wide-sidewalked boulevards and the thousands upon thousands of cafés, and make themselves comfortable and talkative and gay. It is obvious that everybody is having a good time, not merely trying to have it; that they are enjoying the wine-like air, the brasseries, the net-like movements of the cabs, the dancing lights of the roadways, and the flare of the shops. It may be chill or drizzling in Paris, but you scarcely feel it. Rain can scarcely drive the people off the streets… for there are crowds whether it rains or not, and they are not despondent.” 4

  Indeed, after the theft of the Mona Lisa, many people joked that the woman in the painting had gone out for a night on the town. If she had, she would have fit right into the scenes on either bank of the Seine, for the French capital was a magnet for the beautiful, wealthy, talented, and creative the world over. Gertrude Stein, an American who arrived in the city in 1903, wrote, “Paris was where the twentieth century was.” 5