By now, you’ve seen the news that on October 19, 2025, thieves disguised as a construction crew stole several pieces of the French Crown Jewels.
So today, I thought I’d tell you about the time I was trapped in the Louvre during an art heist. Yes, this a true story.
This week’s heist was the first time the Louvre museum in Paris was robbed since 1998. Back in 1998, a valuable painting by French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was stolen. Here's the thing: I was there.
I was 22 years old and backpacking through Europe. May 3, 1998, was one of the Louvre’s free Sundays. The museum was ridiculously crowded. That's how the thieves got away with it. They pretended to be museum staff. They blocked off a small area and made off with the landscape painting.
French newspaper clipping about the 1998 heist.
Back on that fateful day in 1998, I didn't know what was happening. After it was discovered that the Corot painting was missing from its frame, it was chaos at the museum. Were all ushered into the main hall, underneath the giant pyramid. The press reported that all visitors were searched. But that wasn't true. In the chaos, I and many other museum visitors were never searched.
So many of the visitors were tourists who were going to miss their flights, so average people were showing signs of distress. Pretty soon, the authorities were going to have a riot on their hands. With how many thousands of people were there that day, there was no way the authorities could search everyone.
That stuck with me, and I wondered… Could the thieves have been in the crowd with me—perhaps even pictured in my photographs?
The crowd at the Louvre Museum in Paris during the May 3, 1998 heist of a Corot painting, gathered in the main hall under the pyramid. Photograph by Gigi Pandian.
Closeup of crowd at the Louvre Museum in Paris during the May 3, 1998 heist of a Corot painting, gathered in the main hall under the pyramid. Photograph by Gigi Pandian.
At the time of that art theft, I didn't yet know I'd become a professional writer. But I'd already been inspired by movies like The Goonies and Romancing the Stone, and globe-trotting mystery adventure novels by authors like Elizabeth Peters and Aaron Elkins, so I was fascinated by being trapped in a situation that felt like it was straight out of those movies and books I loved.
When I became a mystery novelist several years later, I knew I'd write an art heist at the Louvre at some point. More than a decade later, I did it.
In my Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mysteries, historian Jaya Jones solves present-day crimes linked to treasures from India’s colonial history. In Quicksand, she finds herself on the wrong side of an art heist at the Louvre, and she must travel across France, from Paris to Mont Saint-Michel, to both redeem herself and find a long-lost treasure.
I write cozy mysteries that have happy endings, so it’s not a spoiler to say that Quicksand ends with a mystery solved and a treasure found.
We don’t yet know how this 2025 theft will play out, but as for that 1998 heist? Twenty-seven years later, the painting has never been recovered.
