“Bien sûr,” Éliane replied. “And I have another friend who is a painter and who owns a gallery.”
“Please ask him to come too.”
Before she could ask any more, Monsieur Jaujard moved over to one of the bénévoles in the gallery and had a similarly short conversation.
Éliane sat down in her chair. The Louvre would be closed for three days. It was unheard of.
The ferocious tangle of horses in the painting beyond quivered, as if ready to charge through the foyer. A group of people entering the museum spoke in strong voices about the Boche, and Hitler.
It would be impossible to fortify the museum properly in just three days. What, then, did Monsieur Jaujard intend to do?
When Éliane, Xavier, and Luc arrived at the Louvre the next day, it was to find at least two hundred people—students, Louvre employees, the women who ordinarily worked at the Grands Magasins du Louvre, men from the department store La Samaritaine—gathered there.
“We are moving the artworks to keep them safe. One well-aimed bomb and…” Monsieur Jaujard didn’t finish his sentence before a shudder crested through the crowd. “But it’s not just bombs that frighten me.”
His voice echoed solemnly through the museum. “Adolf Hitler is waging a war against civilization. At a rally in Munich, he spat as he said that he would lead an unrelenting war of extermination against the last elements which have displaced our Art. He has shown, in Germany and Austria and Czechoslovakia, that he will destroy all paintings he thinks degenerate—all of our great Impressionists and Cubists. He’s shown that he will steal for himself anything that meets his supremely narrow definition of ‘Art’—our Rubens, our Titians, our Mona Lisa. I pray that he will never enter the Louvre. But if he does, he will find little of value left here to destroy.”
Éliane looked up at Xavier as everyone around them cheered. She couldn’t cheer. Not because she didn’t agree with Monsieur Jaujard. But because she had never imagined things were so desperate. Irreplaceable paintings were never moved unless catastrophe was foreseen. Now she truly understood the intent of the German–Soviet nonaggression pact: the Nazis were coming for France.
They were coming for Angélique and Jacqueline and Ginette and Yolande. For this museum and all of its art, for that great intangible treasure that could make one weep or turn away or suddenly grasp the concept of wonder. Éliane had seen it happen, had borne witness to the altered visage of a Louvre patron when an artwork reached out and stroked its hand down the back of a neck and the viewer shivered, astonished—and was never the same again.
Would any of them ever be the same after this?
It began. The men carried wood, cotton batting, sandbags, cylinders—every conceivable packing and protective material—into the main gallery. Monsieur Jaujard supervised the removal of the Louvre’s stained-glass windows. Some of the students from the École removed paintings from the walls. Xavier was asked to help code crates to keep their contents secret—MN for Musées Nationaux, followed by letters denoting which department the artwork belonged to, and then a work’s individual number. Secretaries rattled out, in quadruplicate, lists to match numbers with paintings. The sound of nails being hammered into crates thudded insistently on.
Luc, who had a painter’s sensibility and could therefore be trusted with such delicate work, was to remove the largest paintings from their frames, roll them carefully around cardboard tubes and insert them into cylinders.
Monsieur Jaujard gave Éliane a list of artworks and sheets of colored disks. “You are to place the yellow disks on the crates holding most of the works. The green dots are for the major pieces. Two red dots for those we could never imagine losing. And three red dots for the one painting in all the world that must be saved,” he finished.
“La Joconde.”
“Oui.”
After she had affixed dots to cases containing the French crown jewels, Egyptian antiquities thousands of years old and an oak column with the massive Wedding Feast at Cana rolled inside, Éliane was one of the few people present when the Mona Lisa was taken off the wall. She saw it tucked into a red velvet–lined poplar crate, onto which she placed three red disks. She was also present when Monsieur Jaujard wrote a note to Pierre Schommer who would be receiving this unusual cargo at the Château de Chambord, designated temporary triage center for centuries of priceless art.
La Joconde’s crate, unlike the others, bore only the letters MN. In Monsieur Jaujard’s letter, he asked Schommer, on receipt, to add the letters LPO in red to complete the code. Only the crate marked thus would contain the real Mona Lisa.
I will remember that, Éliane told herself. One day, it might be important.
At nightfall, she watched as the Mona Lisa escaped with the first convoy of trucks. She felt Luc slip in beside her, watching too. “I can’t go and serve wine to father’s friends now,” she said, even though she knew her father would punish her for missing her shift at the brasserie.
“No,” Luc agreed, uncharacteristically serious. “You can’t.”
As they walked back inside, they surveyed the near-empty palace. White rectangles of unfaded paint now adorned the walls rather than baroque artworks, plinths stood purposeless and the grand galleries echoed with shouts as if it were a railway station rather than a place of contemplation and beauty. She tried to picture a world without Paris as its soul; tried to imagine Paris without the Palais du Louvre at its center; the museum without works of art in her heart. It was impossible.
She thought she saw Luc blink, as did she, but then he walked off into the dust that glistened in the air like tears.
Near dawn, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, almost six meters tall and made of one hundred and eighteen pieces of marble, was moved from her home atop the Daru staircase. She shone that morning, alabaster wings extended, a goddess reminding them that battles could be won and that humans didn’t just wage war; they made things of magnificence too.
Ropes attached to a wooden frame surrounding the statue were hoisted, pulleys turned inch by inch, and Victory rose into the air. She was set down upon a ramp built over the staircase and, once aboard, thirty tons of statue descended.
Some people turned their heads away and covered their eyes. Éliane barely breathed. Xavier stood beside her and, for the whole time—long and slow and endless—it took to move Victory down fifty-three steps, she could feel his heart racing. The gasps of the crowd magnified every teeter, every totter.
Victory could not fall.
Something touched her hand. Xavier’s fingers intertwined with hers. She held on.
Just three more steps. Two. The very last step.
Finally, the statue was safe at the bottom of the staircase. She had not broken into a thousand pieces.
The collective sigh of those gathered to watch was the sweetest sound, like a hymn, picked up by the stone walls of the empty room, singing on and on.
“I want to believe it’s a promise,” Éliane said to Xavier, nodding at the exultant goddess. “That war won’t come, and nobody will die.”
“I want that too.” He hadn’t let go of her hand.
But, around them, it looked as if the war had already begun: sandbags were piled up against the statues too large to move, pieces of wood lay strewn about like the debris of an explosion and people marched past with grim faces.