His period of celebrity — if that is the right word for the attention he received in December 1913 and through the June 1914 trial — was brief and not entirely comfortable for him. He had hoped to be received as a patriot. He was received as a criminal with a sympathetic motive. The distinction mattered to him, and the trial’s conclusion — a sentence rather than an acquittal — confirmed that Italian law did not share his self-assessment.
After his release from prison and his service in the Italian military during the First World War, he returned to France. He worked, married, ran a paint shop in Haute-Savoie according to some accounts, and eventually settled in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. The specific details of his postwar life are not well documented. He does not appear to have written a memoir or given interviews that produced a detailed account of his perspective on the case in his later years.
He died on October 8, 1925 — his forty-fourth birthday — of a heart attack. The coincidence of the date — born and died on October 8 — is the kind of biographical detail that writers about his life have noted as somehow fitting, though it fits nothing except the mathematics of a birthday.
He was buried in the Condé Cemetery in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés. His grave has been a minor site of interest for people who seek out the locations associated with unusual historical episodes. It has no monument and nothing about it marks the person buried there as the man who hid the Mona Lisa in a trunk.