“But we must!” the curator said. “A deranged man once tossed acid in her face! Another threw a rock! Imagine, to do such vile things.”

I nodded and inched closer. The woman before me seemed more than a painting, beautiful, pensive, practically breathing. If it was one of Chaudron’s forgeries, it was a brilliant one.

I asked if he could turn on the lights, but Gingembre told me to wait until my eyes adjusted, that the natural light would be better, and he was right, even if his tone was condescending. After a minute, I began to see the subtleties in the painted flesh and the soft folds of the drapery more clearly.

Then we started bantering, or rather competing over who knew more facts about the painting—the sitter’s name, the fact that the picture had likely been cut down, how the colors darkened and oxidized, that Mona Lisa once had eyebrows, which had faded over time, that Leonardo had worked on it for years and kept it with him until his death.

“Her smile is a kind of reference to her name, Giocondo, which means ‘happy’ in Italian,” Gingembre said, his tight lips ticking a split-second smile. “And you know it was not such a famous painting until the mid-nineteenth century when the symbolist painters began to extol its virtue.”

I could not resist adding, “And the 1911 theft helped to raise its status too. Let’s not forget that.”

The curator sniffed. “Perhaps, but to have the painting stolen, and have it gone for two years!”

“I’m sure the painting was greatly missed.”

“No one is more aware of the painting’s power to attract crowds than myself! The Louvre has the highest attendance of any museum in the world. Last year, we had over ten million visitors, and every one of them came to this very spot to gaze upon Leonardo’s wondrous painting.”

I said I was impressed, and I was.

He told me they’d just cleaned and painted the gallery for the five-hundred-year anniversary celebration of Leonardo’s death. It gave me an opening, and I asked when the painting itself had last been cleaned.

“The painting is checked for signs of deterioration often,” he said, “but when cleaning an old painting, there is always danger one may strip away the good with the bad, so it is kept to a minimum.”

“Was there any repainting after the acid attack?” I asked.

He flinched. “Yes, but nothing one can detect with the naked eye.”

“Where, exactly?”

“I have no idea. That would have been done long before my time at the Louvre.”

I did not believe him. Surely, the curator of Renaissance painting would know exactly which parts of the museum’s most famous painting had been retouched and where. I pushed further, asking whether there had been any repainting after the 1911 theft.

“Some scratches were filled in with watercolor,” he said with an exasperated sigh. “But that too was a long time ago, so I could not tell you where.”