Vanished Smile Read Free Page A

responds to change with the caginess of a concierge, acutely curious yet deeply suspicious.
    Louis Béroud belonged to a formal world that was passing with the Belle Époque. He was a fine-looking man in his mid-fifties, with strong, regular features and an abundance of white wavy hair. Béroud dressed conservatively in a black frock coat and striped trousers. His ideas were as traditional as his dress.
    In the first decade of the twentieth century, there were as many “isms” in painting as there were in politics. Impressionism, as shocking as a glimpse of stocking not so long ago, now appeared tame enough for the parlor wall, and one artistic “ism” eclipsed the next in a dizzying rush to modernity—fauvism, symbolism, primitivism, and now cubism. (Surrealism and Dadaism would come later, like exclamation points after the folly of a war to end all war.)
    To Béroud, the new painting by whatever name was a calculated attempt to destroy five centuries of art. He had earned a respectable following with a series of paintings using the various museum galleries as backgrounds, and he knew its labyrinth of rooms and galleries better than many of the curators and custodians.
    The Louvre encouraged amateur painters, allowing them to copy the masters and store their easels and paint boxes overnight in the numerous nooks and closets recessed in the wall paneling. There was one stipulation: No canvas could be the same size as the original. It was a modest and mostly ineffectual effort to prevent forgery, which was endemic throughout Europe. Collecting had become a favorite sport of American tycoons, and the market for authentic art and artful frauds was reaching extraordinary heights.
    This morning, Béroud intended to use his brush like an epee to vent his displeasure at a new museum policy. In an effort to adapt to modern times, the Louvre was introducing a number of innovations, and Béroud belonged to a vocal group that opposed them. One egregiously offensive “improvement” was the decision to place the most valuable paintings in three-dimensional protective frames. The first to suffer the indignity was Mona Lisa.
    An Ingres had been slashed a few years before, and the director of national museums, Jean Théophile Homolle, had ordered the glass frames to shield the art from vandals and visitors. His motive may have been laudable, but a purist like Béroud was appalled. The glass box desecrated the communion of art and art lover. The glass was an intrusion that altered the light, created an unnatural reflection, and distorted the aesthetic experience.
    Béroud arrived at the museum that August morning to register his displeasure. His idea was to paint a scene of a man shaving in the new glass that protected Mona Lisa, or perhaps a young girl using the glass as a mirror to do her hair. ∗2 Walking up the main staircase, he crossed into the Grande Galerie, exchanging pleasantries with the guards. Beneath a coffered ceiling, the broad hall extends more than twelve hundred feet, the length of four football fields. A stroll from end to end was both a gambol through the history of art and a walking tour of Europe from Holland to Italy.
    At the Italian end of the gallery, Béroud turned into the Salon Carré, a gracious square gallery with a rare collection of paintings and a romantic history. Here, smiled on by the painted lady he called variously Madame Lisa and the Sphinx of the Occident, Napoleon had married Marie-Therese ofAustria to secure an heir and an alliance. After the ceremony, he crossed the gardens to the Tuileries Palace and settled the two women in his bedroom—his new bride and his Madame Lisa.
    The Louvre owned the richest collection of sixteenth-century masterworks outside of Italy, and many of them were displayed in the Salon Carré—Titian's
Entombment of Christ
, Rembrandt's
Supper at Emmaus
, Correggio's
Betrothal of St. Catherine of Alexandria
, Raphael's
Holy Family
, Veronese's panoramic fresco
The