Roundtable Extra: “Saving Mona Lisa” by Gerri Chanel

“Saving Mona Lisa: The Battle to Protect the Louvre and its Treasures During World War II” by Gerri Chanel details one of the most fascinating chapters of art history. Chanel is a prize-winning freelance journalist. She lived in France for five years, where she began the research for Saving Mona Lisa. She now divides her time between Paris, New York, and Toronto.

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

On June 11, a strange, thick cloud of black soot hung low over the city of Paris, cloaking a brilliant blue sky. Some thought it was an enemy tactic to mask their entrance into the city; others thought city authorities had set off a smoke screen to assist residents in fleeing unseen. Still others thought the French government had arranged it so that they could flee unseen themselves. In fact, it was smoke from fires French authorities had ignited the previous day to eliminate suburban petroleum depots so they would not fall into enemy hands. Agnès Humbert, an art historian at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, made her way through the soot that day to the Louvre, where Jacques Jaujard, the then-acting director of the Musées Nationaux, had convened staff from the Paris-area museums under his command to accompany a last convoy heading to the Loire with additional books from museum libraries, archival material and other items, plus the personal effects of the staff. In spite of the soot, Humbert said, Paris had never looked more beautiful. She wrote of the morning in her journal:

The Cour du Carrousel looks as if it is ready for a flower show. I gaze at it from the office of the Director of the Musées Nationaux, where we have all gathered, suitcases in hand. We talk in low voices, as though in the presence of death. M. Jaujard moves from one group to another, so calm and controlled. I hear him say: ‘I would like my Jewish colleagues to leave first.’ The trucks are in the courtyard. We take our places in them, invited to do so by our director with the same unruffled cordiality, the same attentiveness to every detail, the same encouraging smile for each of us as he hands us our evacuation orders . . . .With our spirits lifted and our minds almost at peace, we leave Paris for the château de Chambord.

The vehicles headed off towards the Loire as the soot was carried away by a strong wind, leaving a brilliantly sunny day behind. The same day, the second convoy of artworks left the Loire for Loc-Dieu with five trucks jammed with art, plus two escort vehicles and a truck with extra gas.

In the early morning of June 14, a third convoy left the Loire. The museum administration thought it would likely be the last one they could get out, since they had just received word that the Loire bridges would soon be blown in order to slow down the Germans. The convoy included five trucks, one with extra fuel and the others loaded with artwork, including a scenery trailer carrying the Wedding Feast at Cana and the three large rolled paintings depicting Napoleon. Cana had been quickly and clumsily rolled and, in the desperate rush to get the convoy on the road with the enemy only thirty miles away, some of the artworks had been loaded with no wrapping at all. Also among the treasures aboard was da Vinci’s fragile chalk-on-paper sketch of Isabella d’Este, which like the Mona Lisa traveled in its own private case. Custody of the work was assigned to the best driver of the convoy, Madame Eugny, with instructions not to leave Isabella alone day or night.

The convoy took almost twelve hours just to cover the 125 miles to its overnight stop at Chambord since the roads had become so crammed with refugees that they were practically impassable. Perhaps 6 to 10 million people from Belgium, the Netherlands and northern France had fled their homes, including almost half the population of Paris and its surrounding suburbs. And they were jamming the same routes as the trucks. The worst of the crowds were on the roads leading south from the Loire, jammed with “slow moving cars, vans, lorries and horse-drawn carts piled up with furniture, mattresses, agricultural tools, pets, birdcages . . . . The roadsides were strewn with the corpses of horses or with cars abandoned for lack of petrol.” The writer and pilot Saint Exupéry wrote that from the air the roads were so thick with the slow-motion crowds they looked like syrup, and that it looked as if a “great boot had smashed into an anthill in the north and the ants were on the move.” At times, low-flying Italian planes and German Stuka dive-bombers emptied machine guns into the fleeing populace.

Progress was further slowed due to chains that police had stretched across certain roads to impede the enemy. The smaller trucks of the convoy could fit below the chains, but not the scenery trailer. Then a tire on the heavily loaded trailer fell into a roadside ditch; it was simply a matter of luck that two powerful trucks soon came along and got the 40-foot-long vehicle and its priceless cargo back on the road.