Mona Lisa Story Napoleon's Grinning Thesis

He addressed her simply as "madam," refusing to grant ownership of the face he addressed to the wife of the Gioconda merchant it was rumored had modeled for the painting, querying her as to the secrets she so impishly withheld.

"I have studied you, I have studied Leonardo your creator and God, and still you only smile, never so much as a whisper stirring your lips," the Emperor muttered quietly, his face cast in the flickering shadows that more brightly illuminated the painting across from him. "Like me, da Vinci was a man who knew his worth at a young age, showed his brilliance time and again in many arenas, like me as well -- surely he did not intend for you to keep his secrets!"

But no matter how earnestly the Emperor pleaded, how harshly he chastised or how desperately he begged, the Mona Lisa only smiled in return. Her eys, it seemed, would follow him no matter where in the room he went, but her mouth never so much as twitched in reply to his questions.

"Who are you? What do you mean? What is the point of your existence! !" he roared in desperation months after having the painting brought to him, and yet he was met again only with those calmly shifting eyes and that placid smile. "No one has truly appreciated you until now -- not those who belittled your magnificence in the years following your creation, who saw you only as a pretty and expensive thing, like some common whore -- and not those who see you as a geometric construction, and not even those who call you another Madonna -- they have not seen you as I see you, for the woman that you are at heart.I see you as you see me, completely, and through. Now tell me what you're hiding! What's behind those eyes and that damned, perfect smile?"

Napoleon and the woman in the painting stared at each other for many long moments, perhaps even hours, before the Emperor finally tore his gaze away one last time. "So be it," he muttered. "I brought you out of the stuffy darkness of the world of wealth to enjoy the life, in the hopes that you would help me to enjoy my own. But if this is how it must be, the so be it."

Another coachman on another evening tore at a breakneck speed away from the gates outside the Tuleries Palace and towards the Louvre museum, an attendant and a carefully wrapped bundle jostling safely, though uncomfortably, in the compartment within. The coachman had no idea what his charge carried, but knew only that the Emperor was in a rage and bid him fly as quickly as he….....