The Louvre Heist: The Somber Rubbing Shoulders With The Absurd

On October 19^th, the news of the Louvre Heist hit. Eight crown jewels were stolen from the room that,  since 1887, has housed what is left of the French crown jewels.. These jewels are symbols of the French state and the history of the country, described as priceless and irreplaceable. It was, like much of the news these days, upsetting to read about, until some of the details came out and then, it became a story juxtaposing the grave with the absurd.

The first hint of this came in the details of how the heist was committed; the four thieves used a ladder and  escaped on scooters after spending less than eight minutes robbing the Louvre. Let's face it, it looks like a few friends wanting to avoid the holiday rush and deciding to pick up a few gifts by robbing the national museum of France that is, by the way, the most visited museum in the world. The ladders and scooters are hardly the stuff of a carefully planned modern heist one would expect. Add to this the comment by Lynda Albertson, chief of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art (ARCA), an organisation that examines and tracks trends in museum security including theft and vandalism, saying the Louvre’s architecture was not built “to address modern security needs, rigorous conservation controls, or the massive crowds it now attracts.”

The problem with that statement is that there were no crowds at the time and ladders are hardly modern security threats. Yes, the internet was abuzz with questions because seriously,  at a minimum one should protect the world's most famous museums and its priceless and precious works from being accessed by a something as simple as a ladder. 

While about 100 high powered detectives investigated the jewelry robbery, the news focused on this man and the internet initially identified as one of the investigators, "This is, by all accounts, genuinely the detective tasked with cracking the Louvre heist. God I love the French," writer David Patrikarakos said. 

It was only later that it was clarified that this gentleman was not a fabulously dressed detective but, rather, a passerby who was at the right place, at the right time and exuded enough je ne sais quoi to capture the imagination of the world. 

Then, Cosmopolitan put out an article discussing the suspects, replete with photos,"It is so French of them to both be this hot," activist and actor Jameela Jamil said in response to the two mugshots, with someone else commenting: "Why do they look like Calvin Klein models?"

However, the article informed the panting hordes that, "Hot as they may be, however, the Louvre heist mugshot men don't actually have anything to do with the jewel heist – as we've discovered..."

Of course, one can't help but picture Parisians following these guys around Paris and not just for being hot. Ditto for the man initially identified as a detective. 

After the modern heist that didn't use modern tools, a detective who only looks like a detective but is not one and suspects who are just two random hot guys who didn't rob the Louvre, surely we should be done with the hilarious part of this sad story.

Yet, we are not.

Even the high tech security of the Louvre is hilarious. Did someone ask a small child to make up a password?  Apparently so because, "one of the museum’s key passwords was simply “LOUVRE.” To add the absurd onto the ridiculous, the French Culture Minister Rachida Dati decided to respond to this with the understatement of the year by finally admitting, “Security failures did indeed occur.”

There is so little news to chuckle about these days. Most of the news has us diving under the covers of our newly made beds, in hopes of ignoring the world for a few moments. Despite the gravity of the theft, for the first time in a long time I found myself enjoying reading the news to follow the unexpected and hilarious twists and turns. That said, this theft is a grave and serious matter. I will continue to follow the story in hopes that the crown jewels are found intact and returned soon. While not so secretly hoping for a new funny twist, most of all, I'm hoping a mystery writer somewhere is inspired by all this and is making this dapper gentleman  the main character of a brilliant new novel. I would buy that book in a heartbeat. 

And on it goes...

Today, November 9th on APNews:

 "When 15-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux realized an Associated Press photo of him at the Louvre on the day of the crown jewels heist had drawn millions of views, his first instinct was not to rush online and unmask himself. 

Quite the opposite. A fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot who lives with his parents and grandfather in Rambouillet, 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Paris, Pedro decided to play along with the world’s suspense.

Pedro began dressing this way less than a year ago, inspired by 20th-century history and black-and-white images of suited statesmen and fictional detectives. 

“I like to be chic,” he said. “I go to school like this.” 

 He loves Poirot — “very elegant” — and likes the idea that an unusual crime calls for someone who looks unusual. “When something unusual happens, you don’t imagine a normal detective,” he said. “You imagine someone different.”

Well played, Pedro. Well played. 

l'Art du Crime

The Art of Crime is another show I’ve discovered, streaming on MHz, and I like it, but…

It’s funny what pulls you in, and what waves you off.

Very often, you find a book series, or TV, to be an acquired taste. I wasn’t drawn in right away, for example, by Jackie Winspear’s Maisie Dobbs books. I loved her memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, but it took me a couple of books to warm up to Maisie. (Once I was sold, I was sold.)

I’ve tried to read James Benn’s Billy Boyle series – I read two start to finish, and cracked the spine on a couple more, hoping my first impression was wrong – but I’m sorry, they leave me cold as a mackerel. (This is a private opinion, obviously; your math may differ.) 

A show it took me the entire first season to even tolerate was Brokenwood, and well you might ask why I bothered, but something kept pulling me back, and I’m glad it did: I think I had to get over my aggravation with DI Mike Shepherd, who just seemed like one of those guys you’d go out of your way to avoid in the workplace.

 A classic example of this is Death in Paradise, which is hands down the most annoying show on television. They had the inimitable Ben Miller for the first season, and he’s the reason I watched Primeval (along with Doug Henshall), but then they cast the utterly execrable Kris Marshall, and almost killed the show. Seriously, if not for the supporting characters and the Caribbean landscapes, I would have given up.

Speaking of, although I’m nuts about Deadly Tropics (which is a terrible and uninviting title), but like the cast more than the scripts, I’m crazy about the local scenery of Martinique. Here’s another one. I was on the fence about Signora Volpe, even if the hot ex-spy and her hot Italian love interest give it romantic appeal, what convinced me were the fabulous Umbrian backdrops. Which, circling back, is a big selling point of The Art of Crime.

It’s shot in Paris. Ça suffit. Some of the surrounding countryside ain’t too shabby, either. But mostly, it’s in the city itself, and often some unrecognizable alley, off the beaten path. It’s not always the Champs Elysées, although you get a lot of I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre. I think they shoot inside the Louvre, too, but staircases and hallways, not the galleries, apparently. I’m not actually sure. They obviously got permission to shoot interiors at the Musée d’Orsay, once famously a train station, serving the southwest of France. And certainly other locations I don’t recognize. This is a big plus for me,

I have to admit, and not just in this show. I love the genuinely terrible Armin Mueller-Stahl policier variously titled Midnight Cop, or Killing Blue, because they shot it in Berlin and never showed a single familiar landmark, like the Brandenburg Gate or the Memorial Church. The Art of Crime opened an episode at the Temple de la Sybille, an architectural folly on top of an artificial waterfall in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, sixty-one acres of manicured grounds in the Nineteenth that I’m embarrassed to say I never heard of, or visited. And it’s clearly as famous to Parisians as the Bois de Boulogne. That’s exactly my point. When somebody who knows a place intimately uses the landscape as character, you see it with a fresh eye.

I don’t mean to damn The Art of Crime with faint praise. It’s got a cool premise, not necessarily art theft, but art adjacent crime. This is the French OCBC, not a fictional crew, that investigates cultural property trafficking – smuggling, counterfeits, money laundering – and our entrée is to team a streetwise plainclothes cop with an artwise academic. They expend a little too much nervous energy at the beginning, rubbing each other the wrong way, but you let it go. (It’s like Jonathan Frakes; you don’t take Riker seriously until he grows his beard.)

 The obligatory exasperated senior officer, on the other hand, is a much better character in this show, not a wet blanket but a full narrative partner. There’s also the trope where the art expert explains herself to her psychiatrist, not to mention explaining herself to imaginary artists, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hieronymus Bosch, da Vinci. The only superfluous character is the art expert’s dad, an unnecessary aggravation.

I should be clear, that I in fact find it quite charming, in spite of the occasional too-cutesiness.

You realize they established certain dynamics, but after the shakedown cruise, they didn’t throw the excess cargo overboard. Somebody on the team was too proprietary. Be that as it may. I’ve finished Season Three (out of an existing eight, but only two episodes a season), and I’ll finish them.

I think, as I’ve said before, that there’s a different rhythm to European cop shows. It’s an enlivening change of pace.