What we know so far on yesterday’s audacious Louvre heist. A cup of coffee (here) is deeply, monumentally, aesthetically appreciated.
Just before or around 9:30 a.m. yesterday morning, three men dressed as construction workers climbed an exterior lift parked on the quai and entered the Louvre through a window overlooking the Seine. A dozen quick steps and they were in la Galerie d’Apollon, where France’s crown jewels are on display. Only a few tourists had made it that far into the museum as the men set about the day’s demolition. Security was nowhere to be seen. The only one who saw everything was Delacroix’s Apollo, high overhead on the ceiling.
Relying on their disguises as construction workers, all three (maybe four, no one is sure) wearing hoods, took out their tools – electric and loud – to slice through the glass protecting treasures from the Second Empire belonging to Louis Napoléon III and his Spanish wife, Eugenie. They chose nine of twenty three, including the Imperatrix’s coronation crown. Done within a minute, they turned around and went back the way they came, down the exterior lift before jumping onto high speed scooters, disappearing in the sparse traffic of a quiet Paris morning. One item slipped out of their hands as they made their getaway.
In and out in under seven minutes. A quick day’s work. The irreplaceable jewels are gone for good.
Today’s papers call it the heist of the century.
Around 11 a.m. on Sunday my Montenegrin hotline began to light up.
First Questions First
Did the thieves, whoever they are, see the opportunity of a lifetime when the loading crane was left there over the weekend, or did they bring it themselves ? In the latter case, there must be film of its arrival on the scene, or were surveillance cameras taking it easy on Sunday morning, too ? If the former is true, it shrieks incompetence if not complicity.
As to the window on the second floor which offered them easy access, sources from inside the Louvre confirmed to French TV that the window was broken, its alarms turned off for the last month.
An early tourist filmed the thieves at work, all in construction gear and hoods, as their blades tore through the glass. A shrieking noise that would have got anyone’s attention. Didn’t this set off alarms somewhere in the museum ? Where was security at that hour ? Having an extra coffee before reporting or perhaps praying in Auxerrois for a successful operation ?
We know where the priceless items are headed now: to private collections, to a château in the South or a plane headed to the Mid or Far East. Cambrioleurs get handsomely paid for work like that.
France, and the Louvre itself, has history on these matters. In 1976, the jewelled coronation sword of Charles X was stolen from the same gallery. It has never been recovered and is no longer listed among the Louvre’s possessions.
Théophile Homolle was enjoying a lazy August in the Jura in 1911 when the phone rang. One of his lieutenants passed the news that da Vinci’s Mona Lisa had been stolen. Must be a prank, Homolle thought. The museum’s director laughed and hung up. He was out of work within a month.
We’ve already heard too many times that Dominique Buffin is the first woman to head Louvre security, just like that clueless cadet was the first to head the American Secret Service when Trump was shot. Is life an Employment Olympics ? It must be to the bureaucrats but they’re not doing women any favors using that as a defense.
Will Buffin, like Homolle before her, be out of a job on account of gross incompetence ? What about another appointée, one who knows nothing about culture but is kept in her job as Minister because the French president fears she’ll train her haranguing outbursts on him if she goes ? Will Rachida Dati walk the plank ? The Louvre is part of her remit. Minister of Culture under Presidents Hollande and Macron has become the place to put nobodies if you want to pass the diversity test.
Apart from the tourist’s video, which is now all over the internet, the other witness is a cyclist on the street who saw the getaway. Not much to go on.
Meanwhile churches across France are being defaced when not being burned to the ground, national monuments are begging funds from the public and broken windows at the Louvre can’t be fixed. Delicate subjects all. You can’t blame people for thinking the country is in a tailspin.
The good news is that the thieves dropped Eugenie’s crown on their way down the escape ladder. It was found in the gutter.
What They’re Saying
As news of the heist spread, the conversations heated up. Suddenly I was getting messages and calls. Had I heard ? My Serbian and Montenegrin friends were sure it was the Pink Panthers, a band of ex-Yugoslavian commandos, 800 strong by some accounts, who already lay claim to numerous audacious art heists. Jewels on their way to Ali Baba’s cave by now, they laughed. And something else too. As one acquaintance put it, I can give you my head that employees of the Louvre were involved. I told her to hold onto her head for now. But she’s right, isn’t she ?
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