Vanished Smile (9 page)

The capitals of Europe had long been the exclusive domain of upper-crust visitors, but the faces of the crowds were changing. The Cook's Tour was competing with the Grand Tour. Sorrowful Parisians, rubes from the provinces, and foreigners from many continents congregated outside the museum—émigré artists intent on revolution, unemployed “macaroni” with nothing better to do, Greeks and Turks side by side, eccentric British ladies of an uncertain age and young English lords touring the Continent, Cook's tourists from America seeing Paris for the first time, Negroes from Morocco, and Cossacks from the steppes of Russia, students from the low countries, and American tycoons in the market for prestige and paintings. The
Paris Herald
described it as “an invading crowd. All classes and conditions of men and women mounted the stairway like a crowd hurrying into a big railway station.”

Among those who stood in line to pay their respects were two young Germans, Max Brod and his friend Franz Kafka, both aspiring writers, on summer vacation. They had been to Zurich and Lugano and were ending in Paris. Traveling with little money had given them a bright idea. They would write a series of guidebooks—
On the Cheap in Switzerland, On the Cheap in Paris
. They imagined making their fortunes.

In Paris, they were swept up in the excitement of the lost
Leonardo. She was nowhere in the Louvre, but she was everywhere else, smiling from kiosks, advertisements, and magazine covers. An avant-garde movie short,
Nick Winter et le vol de la Joconde
, spoofed the tumult over the theft. Kafka and Brod went to see the film.

In the five-minute slapstick comedy, the only clue is a shoe button. To follow the lead, Detective Nick Winter disguises himself as a shoeshine boy and forces everyone to submit to a polish. Between the chaos at the Louvre and the frenzied polishing, no one notices when the thief returns with Mona Lisa, then slips away again with a Velasquez. Everyone involved in the case is myopic, including the thief, but he is thoughtful enough to leave a note: “Sorry, blame my poor eyesight. I wanted the picture next to her.”

Mona Lisa's theft has been called the “perfect crime of the Modernist era”
^∗4
because it seemed to mirror the nihilism that would preoccupy the new century. Although the lost painting was a masterpiece of the Renaissance, the blank space conveyed the message of modern art—the void at the heart of Western civilization.

Thousands stood and gazed at nothingness, absorbing absence. They contemplated, in sorrow and seriousness, what was not there. In a way, it should have been a triumph for the young Turks of the new art. Instead, it was almost their downfall.

ON AUGUST
29, the day the museum opened its doors again, a “canary” began to sing. He did not chirp softly into the ear
of Prefect Lépine or Magistrate Drioux but sang loudly and publicly to the editors of the
Paris-Journal
. It was not a random choice. Although several major newspapers were advertising rewards, the
Paris-Journal
offered the most generous money and a promise of anonymity. The
Journal
had an additional advantage: Its arts editor, André Salmon, was a friend of the informer.

As the Louvre reopened, the
Paris-Journal
devoted its front page to a startling confession.

The arresting headline ran with an unusual note from the editors. It identified “The Thief” as “a young man, aged somewhere between twenty and twenty-five, very well mannered, with a certain American chic, whose face and look and behavior bespoke at once a kind heart and a certain lack of scruples.” In exchange for two hundred fifty francs ($1,000), the Thief sold the
Journal
a small statue he had filched from the museum and made a full confession, which the paper played verbatim on page one:

The Thief went on to explain how he had chosen the head of a woman, concealed it under his vest, and walked out. He sold the statue to a Parisian painter-friend for fifty francs ($200), which he lost the same night in a billiard parlor.

THE NEXT DAY
, Wednesday, August 30, the paper reported a second encounter with the Thief. The page-one report read:

The note was signed Baron Ignace d'Ormesan.

At the request of the newspaper, Louvre curator Bénédite examined the statue and confirmed that it was Louvre property. Only the attribution was false. The statue was Iberian, not Phoenician, as the Thief believed. It had been stolen from an exhibit of pre-Christian artifacts in the museum. Bénédite not only validated the statue's authenticity, he admitted that the Thief's story was probably accurate.

The recovered figure went on display in the window of the
Paris-Journal
, and hundreds jammed the newspaper office to view the stolen art.
L'Affaire des Statuettes
was a huge coup
for the paper. In Paris of 1911, there were virtually no subscriptions or home delivery. Since readers bought their newspapers each day from the corner kiosk, the most arresting headline or a continuing story that kept them coming back day after day for the next installment sold the most newspapers.
L'Affaire des Statuettes
had both.

The next day, the
Paris-Journal
flaunted its success with another page-one story:

The
Paris-Journal
printed more papers than ever before, and the press runs sold out as soon as a new edition hit the street. The newspaper played the story to the hilt, jabbing the police and the government. On the road again, his pockets full of francs, the Thief continued his mischief-making, writing to the paper from various towns.

His next dispatch—headlined A
PLEA FROM OUR THIEF TO HIS “COLLEAGUE”
—was a mocking thank-you:

There was a rueful sort of chivalry and irreverent humor in these missives to the
Paris-Journal
, but the French police were not amused. The “baron” reveled in being the center of the biggest story in France and was leaving a trail as deliberately as Hansel and Gretel.

For the first time since Mona Lisa vanished, Parisians had cause to be optimistic. Prefect Lépine believed that the same ring of international art thieves was behind both Louvre thefts—
L'Affaire des Statuette?
, and
L'Affaire de la Joconde
. If he could collar the baron and his colleagues, the hunt would be over and the lost Leonardo would return to the Louvre. The print had barely dried on the morning paper when Lépine's men had compiled a complete dossier on Baron Ignace d'Ormesan.
Le Petit Parisien
reported: “The police now have a real clue to the thief of
la Joconde.”

The notorious Mona Lisa thieves were not the usual suspects.

APOLLINAIRE IN PICASSO'S STUDIO Shortly after moving from
le bateau-lavoir
to a new studio-apartment on Boulevard de Clichy, Picasso photographed Apollinaire there. (Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York. © ARS, New York/Museé Picasso)