The Gilded Seal (52 page)
“Is this where it ends too? For you and me?”
Tom reached for her hand and went to say something, but
was cut off by a sudden shout from across the courtyard.
“Felix?” Archie bellowed.
They looked up and saw Archie, Dominique and Dumas
heading toward them.
“I should go.” Jennifer backed away, her tone suddenly
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t w i n i n g
changing. “Green’s flying home today and wants me to go
with him.”
“Stay,” he urged her. “I’ll show you the real Paris. Just the
two of us. We can start all over again.”
“I’d love to think you meant that.”
“Of course I mean it,” he insisted.
“I know you
think
you mean it.” She lowered her head with
a sigh. “It’s not your fault. It’s just the way you’ve always
needed to be to survive. Never getting too close to anyone,
never opening yourself up in case it makes you vulnerable.
You heard what Milo said about Eva. He was talking about
you too.”
“People change, Jen.”
“Some do, some don’t. Some want to and can’t, and all that
happens is that others get hurt along the way. I don’t want
that to be me.” She hesitated and then leaned forward and
pressed her lips to his cheek. “Take care, Tom.”
With a sad, almost resigned smile, she turned and headed
toward the Rue de Rivoli as Archie and the others reached
Tom.
“What did you say?” Archie frowned at her retreating
back.
“It’s what I didn’t say,” Tom sighed, her words still echo-
ing in his head as he sat down on the side of the fountain’s
triangular basin. “Anyway, the good news is I think I may
have got J-P his old job back. Provided he stays on the
wagon.”
“Bugger,” Archie sighed. “I was going to suggest a cele-
bratory piss- up, but it sounds like you’re off the sauce, J-P.
Unlucky, mate. You’ll have to watch.”
“As long as I don’t have to watch you try to Tango, I don’t
care,” Dominique chided him, with a playful slap across the
arm. “It’s never a pretty sight.”
“What do you mean, I’m a brilliant dancer,” Archie pro-
tested. “In fact the more I drink, the better I get. Watch this.”
He tried to spin on his heels, but lost his footing and nearly
toppled into the fountain.
Their laughter evaporated in the rainbow-flecked spray of
t h e g i l d e d s e a l
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the fountains behind them. Tom glanced up and saw that Jen-
nifer had almost reached the street. She paused and he stood
up, thinking for a second that she might look back. But with
a small shake of her head, she continued out of the courtyard.
Then she was gone.
This questionable notoriety, at once comic
and tragic, concerns an object that no longer
has anything to do with Leonardo da
V
She is rather caught up in the
inci . . .
insatiable production line of the media,
whose lies assault celebrities, those
figures destined for mass consumption.
She is therefore detached from all historical
and human reality . . . But the strangest
fiction of all is that Mona Lisa does not exist.
André de Chastel
SUB- LEVEL THREE, PALAIS DU LOUVRE,
1ST ARRONDISSEMENT, PARIS
13th November— 6:32 a.m.
The corridor stretched before them, the unpainted con-
crete walls closing in slightly as if they were being gen-
tly squeezed, before vanishing into darkness. Every so often,
a new section would blink and stutter into life, the lighting
triggered by their passing under a sensor. Then the neon
tubes would hum lustily, the dull beat of their footsteps and
occasional piano play of loose change or keys creating its own
strange music, the horizon stretching endlessly in front of
them.
The guard stationed outside the vault saw them coming
and had time to smooth his hair down and rearrange his
uniform.
“Today’s the big day then, is it, sir?” the guard called as
the two men approached him.
“It certainly is,” Fabius nodded with a smile. “The press
briefing’s at nine and we want to make sure she looks beauti-
ful for all her guests.”
The guard placed his key in one of the locks and Fabius
did the same in the other. The door opened with a gasp as the
airtight seal was released. The two men stepped inside and
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t w i n i n g
waited for the door to slam shut behind them before turning
the light on.
A single bulb fizzed on, its light trained on the painting
fixed to the wall beneath it, the rest of the room swathed in
darkness.
“So that’s
La Joconde
?” Fabius breathed. “Not bad, given
what it’s been through.”
“She looks beautiful,” the other man cooed. “I think the
Louvre’s work on this is unsurpassed.”
“The problem is, they all look beautiful.”
Fabius flicked a series of switches. Four lights fl ickered
on, each one bathing another section of the wall in their cool
glow. And under each light, was another
Mona Lisa
.
“The problem is that we’ve no idea which one is the origi-
nal
Léonard
any more.” The man shook his head and gazed
at the five identical paintings staring back at him.
“It’s whichever one you say it is,” Fabius replied tersely.
“You’re the Museum Director now. That makes you St. Peter
at the gates of heaven. You decide who comes upstairs and
who stays down here in purgatory. You decide what people
believe. Reality is nothing more than perception.”
With a resigned shrug, the curator raised his arm, took a
deep breath and then began to recite.
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe . . .”
N O T E F R O M T H E A U T H O R
The
Mona Lisa
is probably the world’s most famous paint-
ing. Widely considered to be da Vinci’s masterpiece,
La
Joconde
, as the French call her, has been on permanent dis-
play in the Louvre since the Revolution, apart from 1800–
1804 when the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte insisted on
hanging her on his bedroom wall in the Tuileries Palace.
The theft of the
Mona Lisa
in 1911 triggered one of the
biggest criminal investigations in French history and was the
first truly global news story. The robbery was masterminded
by Eduardo de Valfierno, a Brazilian conman famous for
selling a gullible businessman the Eiffel Tower for scrap. He
teamed up with Yves Chaudron, a master-forger, who painted
six copies of the
Mona Lisa
, and Vincenzo Peruggia, an Ital-
ian carpenter turned inside man. As soon as news of the theft
broke, de Valfierno sold his six copies to unscrupulous Amer-
ican collectors. Peruggia was left holding the original and
was arrested two years later when he tried to sell it to the
Uffizi, claiming to be trying to rectify the despoiling of Italy
by Napoleon by returning the
Mona Lisa
to her homeland.
The painting was returned to France amidst great national
celebration, although some questioned whether it was indeed
the genuine
Mona Lisa
or one of Chaudron’s elaborate forg-
eries.
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N o t e f r o m t h e au t h o r
The theft of the
Madonna of the Yarnwinder
from Drum-
lanrig Castle in August 2003 remains one of the art world’s
most notorious crimes. The painting, commissioned in 1501
by Florimund Robertet, the Secretary of State for King Louis
XII of France, depicts the infant Christ clutching a cruciform
yarnwinder. He is, however, turned away from his mother, to
indicate that there is nothing she or anyone can do to save
him from his fate. The
Yarnwinder
was one of only a handful
of paintings known to be authentic da Vinci works and had
been in the family collection of the Dukes of Buccleuch
since 1756. Glasgow police recovered the painting in a raid
on a solicitor’s office in October 2007. Four men were ar-
rested in what some have speculated was an abortive attempt
to ransom the painting back to its own ers.
The
Description de L’Egypte
was the result of a unique
collaboration between 167 civilian scholars and scientists,
known popularly as
Les Savants
, who accompanied Napo-
leon’s military expedition to Egypt between 1798 and 1801.
Comprising 23 volumes, and taking almost twenty years to
publish in its entirety, the
Description de l’Egypte
includes
900 plates bound in eleven volumes, nine volumes of text and
three volumes of “grand format,” each measuring three and a
half feet long and over two feet wide. Only one thousand cop-
ies of the original edition were ever published and today
most of these are in museum or library collections.
The Sèvres Egyptian dinner service is the grandest exam-
ple of French porcelain to have survived from the Empire
period. Inspired by Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, it con-
sists of a desert service decorated with different Egyptian
scenes and a twenty- two-foot long centerpiece comprising
temples, obelisks, gateways, seated figures and sacred rams,
all engraved with hieroglyphs. Two almost identical services
were produced. The first was a gift from Napoleon to Tsar
Alexander I of Rus sia, while the second, originally commis-
sioned by the Empress Josephine, was eventually gifted to
the Duke of Wellington by a grateful Louis XVIII. It can still
be seen in the Wellington Museum at Apsley House, Lon-
don.
The Paris Catacombs are a 186-mile-long network of sub-
N o t e f r o m t h e au t h o r
4 0 1
terranean tunnels and rooms located in what
were once
mainly Roman-era limestone quarries. With Napoleon’s ap-
proval, the quarries were converted into a mass tomb near
the end of the eighteenth century as Paris’s cemeteries were
emptied to try and rid the city of disease caused by improper
burials and mass graves. Today, only small parts of the cata-
combs are officially open to the public. However, unoffi cial
(and since 1955 illegal) visits to sites such as the underground
bunker established in the catacombs by the Nazis below the
Lycée Montaigne, a high school in the 6th arrondissement,
can be made through secret entrances reached through sew-
ers, the Metro, and certain manholes. Dedicated catacomb
explorers, known as
cataphiles
, regularly meet and even live
down in the tunnels. In September 2004, the French police
found an underground cinema complete with electricity and
running toilets near the Trocadéro. It is not believed to be the
only one of its type.
Napoleon’s Death Mask, or mold of his face, was made
over forty hours after his death on 5th May 1821. The mask
was cast by the British surgeon Francis Burton of the 66th
Regiment stationed in St. Helena. Burton later gave Dr. Fran-
cesco Antommarchi, Napoleon’s personal physician and close
confidant, a secondary plaster mold from this original cast. It
was from this cast that Antommarchi later made the bronze
and plaster replicas that have survived until today. In 1834,
Antommarchi traveled to the United States, presenting the
city of New Orleans with a bronze copy of the mask after a
brief stay there. Other examples survive in the collection of
the University of North Carolina, and other museums across
North America and Europe. Antommarchi eventually settled
in Cuba, but died of yellow fever only four months after ar-
riving. Several of his personal belongings survive today in the
Napoleonic Museum in Havana, one of the world’s most im-
portant collection of items associated with the Emperor, in-
cluding his personal copy of the Death Mask. Engraved on
its base are the words
“Tête d’Armée”
(Head of the Army),
reportedly Napoleon’s last words.
My thanks to my indefatigable agent, Jonathan Lloyd, and