H.J. Gaudreau - Betrayal in the Louvre by H.J. Gaudreau Page A

Paris is a world renowned treasure.  The building itself was once the home of the French royal family.  That was before Louis XIV decided he wanted to be away from the commoners in Paris and moved 18 miles away to the Château de Versailles.
    The Louvre Museum contains nearly 35,000 objects from prehistory to the 19 th century and covers an area of 652,000 square feet making it truly one of the largest museums in the world.  Its historians and restoration specialists are among the elite in the world.  Eight and a half million people visit this world treasure each year. 
    Running such a complex and well-respected institution requires the many specialized departments one would find associated with any large office building.  There is house keeping, food services, security, building maintenance and the rest of the routine functions.  And, as with any leading museum, there are the expected research and technical departments such as art preservation, authentication, research and display staffs. 
    For many, the Art Acquisition Department is the premier department in the hierarchy of the institution.  Headed by Professor Andre Rioux, it is this department that identifies and purchases art works for the museum’s vast collections.  Art Acquisition, in turn, is comprised of three branches: Frankish Art, Modern Art and the crème de la crème , the French Historical Art branch. 
    For reasons no one specifically remembers, within the French Historical Art branch a smaller sub branch, known as the Art Recovery section, is located.  Little known outside the tight knit community of the stratospheric art world, the Art Recovery section’s personnel are some of the best detectives in the world.  This specialized group is charged with hunting artwork lost during the Nazi occupation, recovering works lost due to museum thievery and identifying art fraud.
    The deputy director of the Art Acquisition Department was a Monsieur Paul Marcil.   As a child Marcil had loved the stories told by his father of the once great empire that was France.  He reveled in the medieval grandeur of the many kingdoms of the Franks and celebrated the unification of France by Charlemagne.  His boyhood was built upon medieval knights.  He dreamed of adventure, treasure and heroic battles while on crusade. 
    Life didn’t turn out exactly as the boy envisioned.  His father’s history lessons and a failed attempt at law school, a failure not wholly without cause due to his father’s royalist political teachings, led to five years in the French Foreign Legion.  His membership in that organization stemming from his birth in Algeria just before the end of French colonial rule. 
    Marcil believed the country’s leaders had failed to stop or even control Arab immigration and the creeping takeover of his country.  Burqas in a French bistro or bakery were one thing, seeing minarets desecrate the famous Paris skyline was simply too much.  He left the Legion after the minimum five years and wandered from job to job, city to city and thus across France.  He was lost. 
    It was his interest in the past that led Marcil to a seemingly odd choice of university studies.  He selected the study of art and art history at the Université de Paris.  Here, the hardened, bitter ex-soldier found comfort in the majestic art of the Ancien Régime .  He reveled in the glory that was then, took comfort in the power of early France and came to hate the Revolution and the emperor it spawned.  He saw Napoleon as a disaster, a man who had failed to maintain the glory of what had been and what had been won.  His worst offense being his defeat at Waterloo, making a return to the monarchy impossible.  Napoleon had suffered a righteous death on a forgotten rock in the middle of the South Atlantic.
    It was also here that the old associates and comrades of his grandfather and his father found him.  He was perfectly educated for the job they had in mind.  It didn’t take