PARIS — The doors of the world’s grandest museum had been opened to the public for just 30 minutes when two burglars were lifted up onto a second-floor balcony on the building’s south side.
Their faces concealed, they rode a monte-meubles, a truck-mounted electric ladder that is a common sight on the streets of Paris, where it is used to ferry bulky furniture through the windows of apartments.
Once there, they used grinders to break a window, setting off the security alarms, and burst inside the gilded Galerie d’Apollon of the Louvre Museum, where a prized collection of royal jewels and crown diamonds is held in a succession of cases.
There they smashed two cases, sounding more alarms, and snatched eight precious objects, including a royal sapphire necklace, a royal emerald necklace and its matching earrings, and a diadem worn by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III, France’s 19th-century ruler.
The burglars went back down the ladder to a road shouldering the Seine and made their getaway with two waiting members of their team on motor scooters.
In all, it took no more than seven minutes.
It was the most brazen — and possibly the most costly — theft ever staged at the Louvre, which houses the country’s most prized art collections. French politicians publicly mourned the loss and railed against those they deemed responsible, loudly demanding to know how such a thing could happen at the world’s most famous museum at 9:30 on a Sunday morning.
“It seems like a scenario out of a film or a television series,” said Ariel Weil, the mayor of central Paris, where the Louvre is located.
President Emmanuel Macron said in a message on social media that the theft was “an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our History.”
Then he made a vow: “We will recover the works, and the perpetrators will be brought to justice. Everything is being done, everywhere, to achieve this.”
The Paris prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation.
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The authorities said investigators were poring through evidence that included objects abandoned by the thieves and security camera footage.
No one was hurt, the French Ministry of Culture said, though the Paris prosecutor’s office said the staff had been threatened by the thieves.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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