Every once in a while, a story comes along formed by a perfect synergy of comprehensible crime and real-time intrigue. These moments are like precious stones, and the internet goes berserk for them. One such tale began on Sunday, when robbers smashed a Seine-adjacent gallery window of the Louvre and made off with eight pieces of historically priceless jewelry. There’s been a panoply of reactions to this incident. I overheard a woman on the street in New York talking about the robbery in the context of Kim Kardashian, who was held at gunpoint in a private residence in Paris in 2016 and had $10 million worth of valuables stolen. The woman decided that France — as in France — is an unsafe place for jewelry. I also spotted several high-quality online jokes, such as “I hope this email finds you on a ladder propped against the side of the Louvre” and a video of a cat in a burglar costume strolling in front of the museum’s iconic pyramid.
Americans have a longstanding emotional connection with France (we were unified in our grief over the burning of Notre-Dame) but there’s something different in the air now: a pro-heist frisson. It’s not that people are salivating at the idea of criminality, but some are agnostic about — nay, amused by — the robbery. Part of this is because fires aren’t funny and heists kind of are. They are painted as sexy, madcap or soulful in pop culture (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” even “The Goldfinch”). There are also more serious discussions about colonial extraction and security failures. But a big reason this robbery lights up our imaginations is because of its size. To learn of this crime is to have a handle on it. It shares a mental shape with the Luigi Mangione case, only in that all of us had an instant grasp of the salient details and there was a national manhunt there, too. Followed by a deluge of opinions.
In some ways, it’s a relief to read about quantifiable damage. Devastating as the situation may be, it’s a release valve from the America we’re living in. We’re being robbed in unwieldy ways on a daily basis, as our country’s cultural values are demonstrably diminished. It’s hard to comprehend the full extent of the plundering the Trump administration is doing in plain sight: the endless conflicts of interest; the gleeful dismantling of the federal government. A museum robbery stands in quaint contrast to all that. Say what you will about the thieves, but they are not destabilizing the global economy or dismantling women’s health care. These masked perpetrators rode off with jewelry, not with people.
I have spent an outsize portion of my life researching and imagining the fate of stolen jewelry. Ten years ago I published a novel about a missing 19th-century French necklace. Four years later I was burglarized and relieved of what little jewelry I owned. Apparently, it takes the same amount of time to rob a residential building in Manhattan as it takes to rob the most famous museum in the world: seven minutes. I incorporated my own experience of burglary into a memoir, published last year. Two books and one felony does not a gemologist make. But I probably have more photographs of jewelry, mine and dead people’s, on my laptop than a normal person.
I’m wondering the same thing about France’s crown jewels as everyone else: Where are they? They’re not in my apartment, I can and should tell you that. I am dubious of the theory that they’re being taken apart with a pair of pliers. Even the smallest stones are akin to little license plates, cut with dated technology and often bearing unique characteristics that would make them difficult to fence. This is not just about sentimental transference; it’s also about wondering if the price of precious metals is really high enough to shove the emeralds under a mattress and melt the rest. Or to use the gems as guitar picks and hope no one notices.
Then there’s the not unlikely black-market possibility, a future in which some parvenue wears Napoleon’s bride’s jewels while gazing at her pilfered Vermeer. This is a scenario somewhere in between a commodity crime and another American blockbuster festish: espionage. Perhaps the pieces will wind up dangled, if you will, before the French government, left in a monitored mailbox in exchange for the codes. For all the flights of fancy this story provides, real criminal masterminds are few and far between. Yes, these people managed to flee the scene, but they also tried to set fire to their vehicle and dropped a crown on the way out. So perhaps this cinematic crime will meet a quotidian end. Either way, it’s cheerier to imagine the eight pieces of jewelry holding their breath under water, ready to pop up somewhere unexpected and resurface whole.
Twenty-four hours after the burglary, demolition began on the East Wing of the White House. So that America might have what it needs most right now: a gilded ballroom. There are myriad memes about this digestible story, too. If the 21st century has proved anything, it’s that the human imagination is not limited as much as it is siloed. We choose the stories that either shut us down or ignite us. Often, the simpler a news story, the more likely we are to engage with it. We love getting something (faux expertise) for nothing (a few headlines and a video clip).
The Trump administration promptly accused assorted leftists, architectural historians among them, of “clutching their pearls” over the destruction of part of the White House, suggesting the outrage is manufactured. But when any country’s history, with all its messiness, is casually and callously dismissed in favor of instant gratification, when greed trumps human achievement, the ensuing upset is not a partisan issue; it’s a human one. We can have our fun and make our jokes and spout our theories. As a treat. But in the face of widespread thievery, all of us should be clutching our pearls. Or at least the ones we have left.
Sloane Crosley is the author of seven books, most recently the memoir “Grief Is for People” and the novel “Cult Classic.”
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