A jewel heist at the most famous museum in the world?

This week, eight pieces of the French crown jewels were indeed taken from the Louvre.

But this was not the first daring theft of priceless artifacts from Paris's historic institution,

and the gilded gentleman is on the case, with this intriguing story of the very first robbery at the Louvre.

Who stole the Mona Lisa in the year 1911?

Enjoy.

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, discussed, and viewed painting in the world. 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 Bellepoc, 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

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