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“A one-eyed man is much more incomplete than a blind man, for he knows what it is that's lacking.”
—Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris
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HE HATED GETTING HIS hands dirty. Usually he could avoid it. But these were definitely dirty pictures. It was a good thing she didn’t want her husband to see them.
He wasn’t asking much of Brie. He was the one taking the bigger risk. Yet she had the audacity to try to negotiate and offer him money instead!
But now that was settled.
All this fuss over a single sheet of paper.
It always amazed him what people thought was valuable.
He’d eaten fugu in a small coastal town in Japan. He’d forgotten the name of the town and the restaurant, but remembered every sensation from the meal itself, from the superior stares of his stablemates who didn’t believe he’d join them, to the rich, rubbery texture of the fish. But he knew the flavor wasn’t the point. Russian roulette to prove your strength by risking your life to the poisonous puffer fish.
He’d seen a private collection of stolen Vermeer artwork, which were far too muddy and dark for his taste, not nearly as engaging as Van Meegren’s knock-offs. But again, he understood the value to the man who kept his prized paintings hidden away.
And he’d danced with an heiress who was far more interesting before he’d realized her diamonds and gold were paste and pyrite.
But this was different. In this case, the Victor Hugo illustration was valuable to him.
Victor Hugo was special. He had revived French pride — a false pride, but more power to him. He, too, had a brief fling with law school before abandoning it for art.
Victor was celebrated for being a great French novelist and poet, but he made more drawings than any other type of artistic creation, accumulating a body of several thousand illustrations. It wasn’t surprising to anyone that a gargoyle would be among the drawings.
Many an art historian had mused that if Hugo had devoted himself to the visual arts instead of literary arts, he could have been as celebrated a painter as Van Gogh.
But Victor hadn’t only chosen to focus his time on literary pursuits. For many years, he actively hid his drawings. He didn’t want them overshadowing his literature. Only when he cast his novels aside to focus on political activism did he let himself use drawing as his primary creative outlet.
In spite of his high profile literary success—or perhaps because of it—he found himself in exile from 1848 - 1851. That was when his artwork flourished the most.
Victor kept his creations small, never bigger than the size paper one would use to write a letter, and often as small as a calling card. His preferred medium was a black pen-and-ink wash, occasionally using brown ink, rarely adding additional color, but improvising and using coffee grounds if it was all that was on hand.
Now, a century and a half after Victor Hugo’s death, this style and the secrecy of his artwork was about to make a modern man’s wildest dreams come true. Everything was in place for the theft. All he had to do was wait for the exhibit in the museum down the street from Notre Dame Cathedral to open.