The Medusa Amulet: A Novel of Suspense and Adventure by Robert Masello

Author:Robert Masello [Masello, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780440423119
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-26T05:00:00+00:00

It had been several years since David had last been in the Louvre, but he hadn’t forgotten how vast it was. When he’d been a student, traveling on his Fulbright, it had been an easy way to spend an entire day, simply wandering from one gallery or exhibition to another. You could do it for months and still find something new to see each time.

But today, there was no time to waste. He had an appointment in twenty minutes with the Louvre’s Director of Decorative Arts—a close personal friend, thank God, of Dr. Armbruster at the Newberry. He’d put in a call to her office the night before, while it was still day in Chicago, and Dr. Armbruster had assured him she would pave the way. “If anyone knows where this Medusa might be, it will be Genevieve Solange. Go and see her, and good luck!”

In the meantime, he had an entire exhibition hall to check out.

Although the museum was thronged as usual, he and Olivia cut through the crowd like a pair of barracudas, climbing up the broad central stairs and heading for one of the most popular sites in the entire Louvre—the opulently decorated Gallery of Apollo, where the crown jewels of France were displayed.

Or what remained of them.

Over the centuries, what had once been a magnificent collection had been decimated by thefts, national fire sales, dismantlings, recuttings, and sheer disorganization, reflecting the turbulent history of France itself. Starting with the French Revolution in 1789, the crown jewels had been a bone of contention fought over by Royalists and revolutionaries, aristocrats and Communards, pretenders, conspirators, and kings. Even the imperial crowns, used in coronation ceremonies at Notre Dame de Reims ever since the cathedral had been completed in the late thirteenth century, had had their precious gems removed and replaced with colored glass. It was almost as if the nation feared that the royal jewels held some mystical power, that if they were allowed to remain intact, the monarchy—which had once been so ruthlessly expunged on the scaffold of the guillotine—might rise from the dead to reclaim them.

But if La Medusa—bequeathed to the French royal family—still existed, this might be its home.

David and Olivia split up on entering, in order to study the remaining trove that had been assembled around the room—and it was still enough to dazzle the eye and the mind. There was the golden, laurel-leaf crown commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte, and from the Second Empire the glittering tiara of the Empress Eugenie. There were diamond and sapphire parures worn by Marie Amalie, wife of Louis Philippe, the last king of France, and an emerald-encrusted tiara for the Duchesse d’Angoulème, the only child of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to survive the bloodbath of the Revolution. (The heir apparent, little Louis-Charles, had died at only ten under the less-than-tender care of the National Assembly.) There were several of the world’s most famous and priceless diamonds, including the shield-shaped Sancy, the peach-colored Hortensia, and the much-storied Regent,

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