The Mona Lisa Was Stolen

THE PORTRAIT OF MONA LISA WAS STOLEN, THE LADY WITH A PEERLESS SMILE. A crook, perhaps one of those crooks with whom revolutionaries are embarrassed to be confused, dared to put a profaning hand on da Vinci’s painting. In the same way someone would take money from a cash register or take shoes from a cobbler, a thief took the Gioconda and fled for an unknown destination. Unanimous and international desolation.

I’m not terribly sorry about this, though I’m not insensitive to the charm of a work of art. But I’m one of those who didn’t have the time to go see it very often, and I have more compassion for the living Mona Lisas, whose smiles are withered every day by honest, legal, and honorable thieves who no one is searching for in order to punish.

It’s said that it was a great crime to steal this portrait of an enigmatic and beautiful woman. Do people invoke the superior interests of art, of thought, and esthetic humanity? Well, these are good reasons. But there are better ones that apply to a similar and much more urgent case.

In vast Paris there are many multiform prostitutions; there are so many young, beautiful, enigmatic women—since you love the perfidious enigma of the smile—that have this over Mona Lisa, that they are living, beautiful, and healthy flesh. Why don’t the esthetes dedicate a bit of the ardor they put to pampering the Gioconda to saving from the ineluctable gangrenes those that are alive and want to live?

The beautiful girls of the faubourgs, who resignedly follow the road to the red-lit houses, to the hospitals, prisons, and workshops that destroy them, to the boulevards where the rotten brutes wait for them: who cares about them? The cowardly and puerile esthetes prefer enchanting fiction.

They indolently send living beauty to decay. They buy it, sell it, sully it. They want whores, perverse models, creatures of morbid pleasure. And then, satisfied, they prostrate themselves before statues and portraits of women, dream of ideal purity, sing of ideal innocence …

Listen to them moan. A portrait was stolen from them, a portrait! Let them try to count all the men and women whose happiness and beauty were killed by their cretinism.

They would never think of this. It requires true valor and not hope for vain reward to occupy oneself with life. But they take refuge in dreams, precisely because they need the sweetness of factitious lights and not the living light of the sun; because they are too phlegmatic to taste the delights of the real.

What’s more, it is well-bred—elegant—to admire beauty that is painted or carved in marble. In fact, it’s a way of admiring oneself, to feel the flattering approval of the humdrum crowd. The vagabond—that brute—stops before a landscape and knows how to admire the beauty of a farm girl; the velvet-jacketed esthetes, the esthetes of the academies, the salons, and the brasseries can’t share the instinctive admiration of the vagabond. They are too simple and healthy. Give them icons, poisons that make them dream and spiced up pleasures appropriate to their neuroses …

The whole silly world remained stupid before the thief’s act, which was so simple, so fatal.

But today isn’t everything, absolutely everything, merchandise? Dreams are distributed in pill form by discreet pharmacists and in little glasses pretty much everywhere. Realities—tainted, it’s true—are offered to possible purchasers before they’ve even thought to ask for them. What is ordinarily hypocritically stolen from your neighbor while being careful to save appearances, it is only natural that bold men try to steal without putting on airs.

Honest men, you trafficked in love. Despite your money, expect to be frustrated. You have turned art into commerce. Expect men to “sneak off with” your masterpieces.

You will only ever reap what you sow.

What is disconcerting in this adventure is the deflagration of imbecility it has provoked.

As could be expected, no one took the trouble to seek out the original reason for the theft, for all thefts. No one was struck by this flagrant contrast: on one hand the contempt for, the frittering away of, the wasting of life; and on the other the adoration of dead, artificial, and factitious beauty. The journalists who provide the crowd with the bread of the spirit have their minds on other things.

Some have accused Germany of having stolen the Gioconda from us; after the machine gun, what insolence!

Some have cursed the millionaires across the ocean, for whom the theft was most likely carried out.

Others—and they aren’t among the most stupid—have accused the Jews of being the cause of it all. The Jews, the Republic, and particularly Dreyfus are the ones solely responsible for all calamities.

Every paper has found a guilty German, American, or Jew in accordance with his taste. And there are people more stupid still than the scribblers of these papers, the good people who were upset about a painting they don’t even know.

The portrait of Mona Lisa was stolen, the lady with the peerless smile. In truth these hydrocephalics don’t deserve to have it!

(l’anarchie, August 31, 1911)