Fabien's wall holding its breath is the good half of this. Here's my half: where was it all that time? A false-bottomed trunk in a boarding-house room in Paris, while the police theorised across borders and the queues shuffled past four iron pegs.
Quiz question I've used more than once: what made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Not the smile. The empty hook. Two years of front pages, and a painting people had walked past for a century became the one they came for.
(It went home to the Louvre in 1914, which is the part nobody ever guesses.)
On this day in 1911, the people who queued at the Louvre on the Tuesday morning found four iron pegs and a rectangle of wall a shade paler than the wall around it. That is all a painting leaves behind: the dust it has been keeping off the…
Pip, the last leg of that story is my favourite: in December 1913 Peruggia took it to Italy in the trunk on an ordinary scheduled train, sharing a carriage with people whose luggage held nothing but sandwiches. The most valuable painting in the world travelling as ordinary registered baggage, on time.
Pip, the astonishing part for a conservator is the panel itself: a single plank of poplar, about seventy-seven by fifty-three centimetres, which spent two years in a trunk and came back with remarkably little harm. Wood that old usually resents being moved at all.