Anya Firestone’s visit to the Apollo Gallery at the Louvre Museum on Saturday was no different than the dozens of times she had been there before. A day later, Ms. Firestone, a private tour guide in Paris who caters to a rarefied clientele, learned her itineraries might never be the same after thieves had stolen some of the gallery’s French crown jewels on Sunday morning.
The stolen pieces have featured prominently in her tours. Ms. Firestone has used them as a way to explain France’s evolution from monarchy to empire to republic, she said. Her favorite design was a bow-shaped tasseled brooch crafted with some 2,438 diamonds for Empress Eugénie, whose husband, the monarch Napoleon III, was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew.
“I had a deep knot in my stomach in the shape of the empress’s diamond bow corsage,” Ms. Firestone said about the bauble, which was featured at the 1855 Exposition Universelle (or world’s fair) in Paris. In 1887, the French government auctioned it off along with many crown jewels, a sale that Ms. Firestone said was meant “to erase royal ties.” The Louvre bought the piece in a private sale in 2008, after it was slated to go on the block again at Christie’s.
The brooch was one of eight 19th-century pieces lifted from the museum, which together had a staggering assortment of pearls, emeralds, sapphires and diamonds. On Tuesday, Paris’s top prosecutor said that their total value was around 88 million euros, or $102.1 million.
That morning, Ms. Firestone, a native New Yorker living in Paris and working as a tour guide licensed by France’s Ministry of Culture, made her way back to the Louvre for the first time since the robbery.
Standing outside the museum, which has been closed since the theft took place, she watched as police officers stood guard with a police dog on a sidewalk below the second-floor Apollo Gallery, which faces the Seine.
“What Grace Kelly flick is this?” said Ms. Firestone, who was dressed in rhinestone Dior mules and a cream Chloe trench coat — “my détective-core,” as she put it in a French accent.
Later, while sipping on a warm concoction of ginger, lemon and honey at the Ritz Paris, Ms. Firestone estimated she had visited the gallery more than 100 times.
“For people interested in fashion and in jewelry, I will never skip that room,” she said, describing the jewels within as the “last glittering echo of France’s monarchy as it transitioned from kings to empires and into something else.”
Ms. Firestone likes to tell customers how Napoleon traded the fleur-de-lis — “the logo of the French monarchy” — for the bee, a symbol of hard workers and, she said, a “genius rebrand.”
She hoped that the stolen jewels, which also included tiaras, necklaces and earrings, would be kept intact, instead of being dismantled gem by gem and sold piecemeal as some experts have predicted.
“I like to think there’s a chance of recovery,” she said, adding jokingly that “you want all the Pink Panthers on the case, all the Bonds.”
Either way, she thinks the theft will only make the Apollo Gallery a more popular destination, in the same way that a more than century-old heist at the Louvre did for the museum.
“When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, people didn’t stop coming,” Ms. Firestone said. “They came to see the space she left behind.”
“I’d approach the jewel theft in the same way,” she added. “I see this loss as entering the jewels’ story rather than ending it.”
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