Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with the most famous painting in France under his coat.
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## The Empty Wall
Louis Béroud did not arrive at the Louvre on the morning of August 22 to look at an empty wall. He arrived expecting to work. His genre as a painter included the practice of rendering famous artworks in their museum settings, and he had been using the Mona Lisa as the visual anchor of a piece he was developing. When he found the hooks without a painting, the initially routine response — it must be with the photographer — was reasonable. Photography of works for publication purposes was standard.
The delay between Béroud’s first inquiry and the official recognition of a theft took most of the day. Guards checked. Staff checked. The photography team checked. By afternoon, the circle of inquiry had extended to everyone who might have moved the painting for any official purpose. When no such purpose could be identified, the director of security, Monsieur Paupardin, confirmed what Béroud had already begun to suspect: the painting was not in the museum.
The Louvre’s director, Théophile Homolle, was in Mexico at the time. He was summoned back. The museum was closed. French police prefect Louis Lépine was notified. A formal investigation began.
The museum remained closed for a full week. When it reopened on August 29, 1911, something unexpected and revealing happened: crowds poured in to look at the empty wall.
This detail has been analyzed repeatedly in accounts of the theft because it says something specific about how the public processed the loss. The empty hooks in the Salon Carré became a destination. People came from across Paris and from outside the city to stand in front of the space where the painting had been. Some left flowers. The writer Franz Kafka, who was visiting Paris at the time and recorded his impressions in his diary, noted the excited atmosphere at the Louvre during this period. The cultural weight of an absence was, in some ways, as powerful as the cultural weight of a presence.