Stealing Mona Lisa Excerpted from The Crimes of Paris: A True
Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection, by Dorothy and Thomas
Hoobler, to be published this month by Little, Brown and
Company; © 2009 by the authors. 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 for
centuries 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 50 acres of gallery space, the
collection was too immense for visitors to view in a day or
even, some thought, in a lifetime. In the Salon Carré—the
“square room”—alone could be seen two paintings by Leonardo da
Vinci, three by Titian, two by Raphael, two by Corre