The painting passed through French royal palaces — Fontainebleau, Versailles — and was eventually moved to Napoleon’s apartments in the Tuileries Palace. It was Napoleon’s decoration of his private rooms with this and other Louvre works — borrowing from the public museum for his personal use — that generated the confusion Peruggia later drew on. Napoleon had moved the painting from the Louvre to his private rooms; Peruggia interpreted this, through some combination of historical ignorance and motivated reasoning, as the beginning of a French possessory claim that had no legitimate basis. In fact, by the time Napoleon moved the painting, France had been its legal owner for over three hundred years.
The painting was returned from Napoleon’s apartments to the Louvre around 1800, where it remained until August 21, 1911.
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## The Apollinaire Case: What It Revealed About Modernism’s Underside
The arrest of Guillaume Apollinaire in September 1911 was brief in terms of its legal consequences but significant in terms of what it revealed about the social world of Parisian modernism in the early twentieth century.
Apollinaire was at the center of the Parisian avant-garde in a way that is difficult to fully convey in retrospect. He was not simply a poet who happened to know painters; he was an active critical advocate, a theorist, a connector of artistic ideas and personalities. He had written the first major critical text defending Cubism. He was Pablo Picasso’s friend and intellectual companion. He knew Braque, Matisse, Derain, and virtually every other significant figure in the Parisian art world of the period. His arrest — however short-lived — cast a shadow over this world in ways that were both practical and symbolic.