No trip to Paris would be, of course, complete without a visit to the Great Louvre Museum,

where on view at any given time are nearly 40,000 works of art from prehistory to modern times.

The building itself is a piece of France's great history too, of course.

It was built originally as a medieval fortress in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Over time, it grew and expanded to become by the mid-16th century the primary residence for

the kings of France.

But visitors today, any one of the over 10 million that have visited annually in recent years

or the 30,000 that have queued daily often have one single lady in mind.

It's the one with the most mysterious and enigmatic smile in the world, the Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa is, many say, the most valuable painting in the world.

Some reports have placed its insured value at over $800 million as of 2021.

One could certainly say it's the most copied, parodied, imitated, analyzed, disgust, and viewed painting in the world.

The masterpiece just recently made news again as a visitor attempted a protest by attacking the

painting's protective case. But what few people realize today is that on a warm summer morning

in 1911, the Mona Lisa was also stolen.

Hello, this is Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where every two weeks we look into the worlds both light and dark during New York's

Gilded Age, Paris's Belipoc and the late Victorian and Edwardian eras of England. And for this episode, we are going to

explore a crime. For this tale, let me take you back to a glittering and glamorous world in France.

These were the years of Paris's Belepuc, the years just before and just after the turn of the century in 1900.

The years, when the party was still going on before being silenced by the start of World War I.

But it was a time of glamour and excitement as Paris saw a burst of artistic creativity and

finally now with electricity, the city had become the city

...