Original subtitles

(riveting music)

- [Narrator] Paris, a city of legend and romance.

And at its heart, a museum with secrets, dark and strange.

Tales of murder and conspiracy,

a lady who vanishes,

the cunning lies of an emperor,

and the greatest survival story ever told,

(tense music)

(angry mob chatters)

secrets hidden in plain sight inside the Louvre.

(riveting music)

(electricity crackles)

Paris is an ancient city,

witness to revolution, celebration, and war.

At its center stands the Louvre.

Once a royal palace

and now one of the world's greatest museums.

The Louvre is home to most famous painting in human history,

the Mona Lisa.

Her enigmatic smile is said to conceal many secrets.

One of them is how she became so famous.

For years, she was just one

among many masterpieces at the Louvre.

But then, on a summer day in 1911, the lady vanished.

- This was the greatest art theft ever committed.

You know, it was unprecedented.

It made worldwide headlines.

Now, the Mona Lisa had been a famous painting,

but it's not the Mona Lisa that we know today,

it's not the icon that you see

on coffee mugs and T-shirts

and then being sold at souvenir stands.

The Mona Lisa was not that well-known.

(intriguing music)

- [Narrator] Today, eight million visitors a year

are drawn here by her fame and mystery.

But in 1911, she caught the eye of one man

who had his own more secret motives.

- Vincenzo Peruggia, he was one of the guys

that was brought to the Louvre

to put the masterpieces under glass.

As he was walking around,

he would notice all this great Italian artwork

and he kind of wondered,

where did it come from?

He heard some stories, he read some things,

and he put two and two together

and kinda got five out of it (laughs).

He got into his head that he was gonna return

a masterpiece to Italy,

where he thought up along

and the one that he chose was the Mona Lisa.

(suspenseful music)

If you've seen any of these great heist movies,

it's carefully planned by a small gang.

They plot everything out,

they've got their escape route planned.

Peruggia, as far as I can tell, didn't do any of that.

- [Narrator] Peruggia simply waited for a Monday

when the Louvre was closed to the public,

then entered with all the other workers.

He went to the Salon Carre,

the guard was outside taking a cigarette break.

Peruggia took the Mona Lisa off the wall

and carried it to a service staircase

where took apart the frame he'd helped to build.

He tried to get out a locked door

by taking the doorknob off but it didn't work.

So he turned around, walked back through the Louvre,

and left through the same door he'd come in.

- So Peruggia comes out of the door

and nobody's seen him so far.

And he's gonna go up this way,

up the (speaking in foreign language),

and is moving rather fast

because it's Monday and he's gotta get to work.

Plus, he wants to get away from here as soon as possible.

Then he remembers he's got something in his pocket,

he's got the doorknob.

He doesn't mind stealing the Mona Lisa from Louvre.

He doesn't wanna get accused of taking their doorknob.

So he flings it over here.

(upbeat music)

And as he's doing that,

a guy across the street sees him.

- [Narrator] Joe Medeiros is the former head writer

for the Jay Leno show.

The theft of the Mona Lisa fascinates him so much

that he spent years working on a film about Peruggia.

- So Peruggia's apartment is

about two miles away from the Louvre,

so how does he get there?

He takes the bus.

I find it kind of amazing that nobody ever saw him

riding the bus with the painting.

I mean, look at the size of this thing.

You know, how do you (laughs),

how do you sit on a bus very inconspicuously

with something this big?

I feel like, like a ventriloquist.

How are you today?

Oh, I'm fine, just here riding a bus,

having a good time, bonjour.

- [Narrator] When this robbery was detected,

Louvre officials were humiliated

and police were baffled.

Fortunately, Paris was then home

to the man known as the world's greatest detective,

Alphonse Bertillon, a pioneer of forensic science,

the world's first CSI investigator.

(reserved music)

Some of his methods would prove faulty

but other innovations, like the mug shot,

are still in use today.

Museum officials were confident that with Bertillon's help,

police would catch the thief.

(tense music)

They had two clues.

Police had found the missing doorknob

and interviewed the eye witness

who say Peruggia throw it away.

Unfortunately, his description was completely wrong.

Then detectives found a thumb print

of the glass of the abandoned frame.

The museum had actually fingerprinted everyone

who worked at the Louvre, including Peruggia,

but the filing system only allowed them

to sort the prints by the right hand,

and the thumb print on the glass was from the left.

Wild rumors began to circulate.

Was the theft the work of an international crime ring?

Was it a plot by the Germans?

Investigators followed a lead to an unscrupulous Spaniard

by the name of Pablo Picasso.

It was revealed much later

that Picasso had a couple of stolen statuettes

from the Louvre hidden in his sock drawer

but not the Mona Lisa.

(gentle music)

- [Narrator] Today, the Mona Lisa is protected

by three layers of bulletproof glass.

The mysterious Italian lady is

the most carefully guarded artwork in the world.

(upbeat music)

- So Peruggia lived on Rue l'Hopital St.Louis.

This whole area was filled

with Italian immigrants from northern Italy.

They were brick layers,

they were plasterers,

like Peruggia, they were house painters.

His apartment is right over there.

So you know, over the course of two years

in this incredible manhunt,

Peruggia basically sat on it in his apartment.

He takes the painting and he puts it in the closet.

- [Narrator] Two years after the theft of the Mona Lisa,

there's a break in the case.

In Florence, Italy, an art dealer receives a letter

mysteriously signed Leonardo from a man

who wants to return the Mona Lisa to Italy.

The art dealer arranges to meet Leonardo at his apartment.

The man is actually Peruggia.

- Peruggia drags out the trunk,

opens the trunk, and they're watching him take out,

you know, his painting tools, old pants, shoes,

his workman smock, his mandolin.

And they're looking at each other going

what have we gotten ourselves into?

This guy has, has got nothing here.

So until he takes out the false bottom,

unwraps the Mona Lisa,

and hands them what looks like

a genuine Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.

So Vincenzo Peruggia is sitting

in his hotel room waiting to be compensated

for bringing the Mona Lisa to Italy

because he thinks he has done

a good and noble, patriotic act.

There's a, there's a-- (knocking on door)

there's knock on his door.

He opens it and who's there,

but the Carbonari.

They arrest him.

They take him to jail.

They fingerprint him.

They photograph him.

They question him.

And he's going, "What's going on?

"I'm a hero here."

- [Narrator] Shortly after his arrest,

a psychiatrist examines Peruggia

and deems him mentally deficient.

He is soon released, a free man.

(reserved music)

Peruggia faded into obscurity

but because of his notorious crime,

the Mona Lisa's fame grew.

Before returning to France,

she made a triumphant tour of Italy,

cementing the celebrity she enjoys to this day.

Peruggia's failed attempt to repatriate an Italian painting

transformed the Mona Lisa from an ordinary woman

into an international superstar.

(dramatic music)

Next, an emperor rewrites his own history.

And the art of propaganda is born.

(riveting music)

(gentle music)

The Louvre is filled with monumental artworks

depicting epic moments of history

but not all are what they seem.

This canvas records the coronation of Napoleon.

It is a painting full of lies.

- Jacques-Louis David was the official painter

of the new empire of Napoleon,

so this painting has also a role of political propaganda.

And we are not on time of Facebook or YouTube,

so you could cheat easily on history and that's what he did.

- [Narrator] From the beginning of his rise to power,

Napoleon was a master of controlling his public image.

In December of 1804, when he set out

towards Notre Dame Cathedral to become emperor,

he was determined to create

the greatest piece of political theater ever seen.

- Napoleon and his wife Josephine

left the royal palace at 10 o'clock in the morning

and took about two hours to go to Notre Dame

and the procession passed just here on this place,

the (speaking in foreign language) we say.

- [Narrator] France is no longer ruled by an emperor,

but if it were, the heir to the throne

would now be Charles Napoleon,

the descendant of Napoleon's youngest brother.

- In the carriage, Napoleon was with his two brothers.

And Napoleon told Joseph,

"What would our father think if he would see us today?"

The Bonaparte family came from a very small city

and in fact, today, he's going to be crowned as an emperor

of the western part of Europe.

Crazy history, you know.

And he realized how crazy it was.

- [Narrator] It was only 12 years

since the French had declared the end of the monarchy

and chopped off the head of their king.

Napoleon realized the people were going to need

to be convinced before they accept him as emperor.

That's why the artist David was commissioned

to attend the ceremony at Notre Dame Cathedral,

pencil in hand, to record it

and alter it to Napoleon's satisfaction.

First, a few minor touch-ups.

Napoleon is shown taller than he really was.

The pope, in David's original drawings,

was shown with his hands folded in his lap,

but when Napoleon saw it he said,

"I didn't bring the pope all the way from Rome

"to have him sit there and do nothing."

So the hands were repainted

to show him giving a sign of blessing.

- An interesting detail is also a thing

that you can't see because the school

of the neo-classical academical painting is

that you have to first copy a model to make it all naked

and once you have the person all naked,

then you add the clothes.

We have, from the pope sketches,

where he's sitting all naked in the chair,

so there's something quite unusual

to see the pope all naked.

- [Narrator] David made significant changes.

Here, Napoleon's mother, Madame Letizia,

gazes benevolently on the royal couple below.

But, in fact, she wasn't there at all.

She refused to come.

- Letizia wasn't there 'cause she didn't approve

the marriage with Josephine.

She was a very jealous mother.

She was a kind of very Mediterranean mother,

so she didn't approve this marriage.

And even the sisters of Napoleon were

in the kind of competition with Josephine.

They fighted before the coronation

about carrying the very long coat of Josephine.

And then Napoleon decide that they had to do it anyway

and it was done (laughs).

- [Narrator] The image of Empress Josephine was altered too.

She was just over 40,

but is portrayed as a radiantly beautiful young woman.

There is no hint in the painting of her anger

at recently catching Napoleon in another woman's bedroom

or is his threats of divorce.

As they had not been married in the Catholic church,

divorce was possible, but Josephine knew

a thing or two of her own about manipulation.

- She decided in the night before the coronation

to take appointment with the pope.

The pope just didn't know that she wasn't married

at the church with Napoleon.

(slow organ music)

- [Narrator] The pope refused

to participate in the coronation

unless they were married in the Catholic church.

Napoleon had no choice but to accept a rushed marriage

the night before the coronation.

The finished painting depicts the moment

when Napoleon steps forward to crown his wife as empress,

but the original version showed

the first part of the ceremony

where he defiantly placed the crown on his own head.

- He put the crown out of the hand

of the pope to crown himself.

This is very famous episode

of the consecration of Napoleon.

And if you look just behind the head of Napoleon,

you can see the first version shimmering

through the painting.

- [Narrator] Why was this change made?

Some say the artist preferred it this way.

The Napoleon's memoirs revealed

that the painter was convinced

to make the change by Josephine.

The new empress was aging

and unable to produce an heir

and in a few short years,

Napoleon would manage to divorce her.

But in this painting she is young,

she is beautiful,

and she is fixed forever in a moment of triumph,

not his, but hers.

- In one hand, you know,

you have the very official ceremony in that coronation

and painting of David.

When you look behind,

you can see all the jealousy

between the different people there,

the everyday comedy of the life.

(dramatic music)

(horse neighs)

- [Narrator] Next, what happens when a king

plays dangerous games?

(riveting music)

(reserved music)

On the second floor of the Louvre stands

a masterpiece of metalwork.

It is knows as the armor

of the 16th century French king, Henry II.

And if you think it looks brand new,

there's a good explanation for that.

Henry Never wore it.

The reason why is a museum secret.

(gripping music)

Henry owned many suits of armor

that he wore not only in battle

but for protection during one

of his favorite pursuits, jousting.

As he prepared to face an opponent on the 30th of June 1559,

no one expected that a freak accident would change history.

(flesh squelches)

- One of the splinters from the lance would have entered

the orbit or eye socket like this.

They didn't penetrate the bone of the skull.

What they did was because they were so filthy,

a jousting lance would be full of horse feces

and various other stuff from the ground.

It introduced a lot of foreign,

very dirty material into the soft tissues of the orbit

producing an infection in the eye socket.

(slow dramatic music)

- [Narrator] Henry II had just turned 40

and still took pride in his athleticism.

He wasn't considered especially bright,

but he was tall and handsome,

and looked good in his suit of armor.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Two horses, each weighting a thousand pounds,

rushed towards each other 20 miles per hour.

Each rider is wearing 80 pounds of armor

and carries a 14-foot lance.

It's not a sport for the timid.

- [Narrator] With splinters of a shattered lance

driven deep into his eye socket,

the king was rushed back to his palace.

There, in agony, he was attended by two doctors

who are considered pioneers of modern medicine,

Ambroise Pare, the father of surgery,

and Andreas Vesalius, whose works on anatomy

became essential tools of medicine for hundreds of years.

- These were men of science,

these were observers, these were people

who actually wrote down their findings for posterity

and now we can, hundreds of years later, we can talk

about Henry (speaking in foreign language) injuries,

and try to put together the facts

and figure out what happened.

Well, the shard went into the eye,

but probably didn't penetrate the orbits,

so it probably went in a couple of centimeters.

Can we lay in a shard, can we lay in--

- That's what I'm gonna put now.

- [Narrator] Using new visualization software

to display the king's wound as described by his physicians,

brain surgeon Dr. Mark Bernstein

and researcher Fabio Ayres piece together

the precise nature of the king's accident.

- Hold it like that.

Look, and then that's the target and make an entry point.

And drop the pencil into the straight line.

- [Fabio] Oh, what happened here?

- [Mark] There, that's better.

That's where the end--

- [Fabio] Ah, that's where the end point was.

- That's sort of where it ended.

When the splinters went in

and one of them is represented here by this green line.

They probably, immediately blinded his eye

and you can see here as I peel back the scalp,

one of the splinters shown by the green line lies

within the eye socket.

Now, when Henry received the trauma to his right eye,

there was an acceleration this way

and then and acceleration backwards

and the brain would have swirled forward.

This is a common mechanism of brain injury

that likely produced a bruise

at the backside of the brain here.

Ultimately, as the eyeball became more and more infected,

the bacteria spread back into the brain

and set up shop.

So that would've produced a mass lesion

which pushed on the brain.

And any pressure that goes uncontrolled

inside the skull leads to death.

(dreary music)

- [Narrator] The king's doctors tried

to understand his wound by experimenting

on the heads of decapitated criminals.

Growing desperate, they considered cutting open

the king's skull to relieve the pressure.

A procedure called trepanation.

- Given the level of knowledge at that time,

the only thing they could've done

would have been to do a trepanation

and get extremely lucky and put it over the puss.

There would have been no way of localizing it.

Nowadays, we have CAT scans, we have MRIs.

We can find out where things are exactly in the brain.

They had no such access to imaging.

But if they'd done a trepanation

and they put it right on top of the puss,

he might have done better.

(somber music)

- [Narrator] After 11 days of torment.

Henry II succumbs to his injury.

In his gallery in the Louvre, his body lay in state,

his death mask remains in a room nearby.

It's said that Henry died

as this suit of armor was nearing completion

and that's why he never wore it.

He never got the chance.

Henry's untimely death plunged France

into a period of bloody internal conflict.

His death also spelled the end

of his favorite extreme sport.

Jousting was replaced by a safer game of skill

where riders aimed lances at wooden rings.

(whimsical music)

Overtime, such games transformed

into mechanical rides on horses made of wood.

The carousel was born.

So every time you see a child on a merry-go-round,

remember that their innocent joy began

with the death of a king.

(tense music)

Next, a true story of survival,

and the survivor guilt of a nation.

(riveting music)

(tense music)

At the Louvre, every work of art tells a story.

Some are stories of hope, some of despair.

(menacing music)

One canvas tells a true story of a naval tragedy.

These are the survivors of an unspeakable ordeal.

147 people set adrift on a hostile sea.

When rescue finally came, there were just 15 survivors.

What happened?

- The captain was a man who hadn't been to sea for 25 years.

And this man was in command

over a crew who had served Napoleon,

who had fought against the British

and had been continually to sea in the previous two decades.

This created a kind of charged atmosphere

from the moment that the expedition sets sail.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] The French ship Medusa set sail in 1816

to reclaim the colony of Senegal.

But off the coast of Africa,

the captain's incompetence lead to his vessel

coming too close to shifting sand bags

where it ran aground.

- The commander, promised, standing

before the white Bourbon flag,

that everybody would be saved.

They made this pledge,

and then promptly seated themselves

in the nice longboat, the skiff.

And the other people, the rabble, as it were,

they were consigned to the raft.

- [Narrator] The raft the crew constructed was large,

almost the size of a tennis court,

but under the weight of 147 people,

it barely floated at all.

- The plan was that the boats would form

a kind of convoy linked together by ropes

and they would row the raft to shore.

But in the kind of disorganization of evacuation,

one of the officers got a hatchet

and he started to hack at the rope

that was pulling the Medusa.

(tongue clicks)

The raft of the Medusa was abandoned

without any navigational equipment,

without the rudder on stormy seas.

- [Narrator] Theodore Gericault was a young artist looking

for a way to make his mark.

When news of the abandoned raft reached France,

he chose this scandalous subject for his first major work.

It would lead him to the edge of madness.

(gripping music)

- [Narrator] Gericault had a fascination for dark subjects,

wounded soldiers, dead animals, violence and madness.

And he had a dark story of his own,

an incestuous affair with his uncle's young wife

had led him to fill his notebooks with erotic drawings.

She had recently become pregnant with his child.

A scandal was about to break.

He closeted himself in his studio,

shaved his head as if to remove himself from the world,

and began to draw the first sketches

of a story of horror and despair.

(subdued music)

The raft of the Medusa had been set adrift

60 miles out to sea

in one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

At the edge of the Sahara,

the sun sears exposed flesh

and for anyone who should fall into the sea,

sharks are ever circling.

The castaways had nothing but two barrels of wine

and one cask of hard biscuits to keep them alive.

- On the first night there was fairly rough weather.

When they woke up in the morning

they found people squealing

because their legs had been trapped

between the spars and the masts of the raft.

People were already beginning to die.

(thunder crackles)

- [Narrator] On the second night,

they endured a violent storm.

Their growing rage at the commanders who had abandoned them

was turned against each other.

- There was a riot.

Many people we killed.

After the second night, when they woke up,

they found 60 people dead.

(somber music)

It occurred to some people

that this was a potential source of nourishment.

(flesh squelches)

It was a fairly gruesome task to have to eat it raw,

scooped off the body of a dead comrade.

(knife clinks)

So they would take little slices of human flesh

and hang them up on the cordage to sort of wind-dry

and make it easier to eat.

(unsettling music)

- [Narrator] As he tried to paint

this depravity and suffering,

Gericault withdrew from society almost completely

as if he felt the urge to suffer along

with the men on the raft.

Near his studio, there was an insane asylum

where he had painted some of the inmates.

Now he returned on a darker errand.

He convinced the doctors

to give him body parts from the morgue.

He displayed these in his studio trying to recreate

the experience of the lost souls on the raft.

Surrounded by human remains,

he taught himself to paint the colors of rotting flesh.

But strangely, as his first attempts come closer

to the final version,

the horrific elements begin to disappear

until he reaches a final surprising choice.

After his long study of despair,

he chooses to paint a moment of hope,

the moment when, after 13 days,

the survivors spot a sail on the horizon.

- There was tremendous excitement obviously on board.

Everybody summoned up their last little bit of strength

to sort of try and stretch up and wave to the boat.

It didn't see them.

It disappeared.

(dreary music)

It's a moment that's all about hope,

but it's false hope.

It's hope with a spike in it because,

of course, the ship disappears.

And then, two hours later, miraculously,

the frigate reappeared.

(men cheer)

And what's more, this time,

it seems to have sighted them

and it was sailing towards them.

- [Narrator] At its first public exhibition,

the Raft of the Medusa shocked France and the world.

(slow piano music)

The human cost of the captain's incompetence

had been exposed

and the public outcry would bring down the government.

But Gericault didn't live long enough

to see his painting sold.

He was never reunited with the woman he loved.

His only child was raised as an orphan.

The painter who found the story of hope

in a story of despair could not find it for himself.

(riveting music)

(knife clangs) (man groans)

Next, a religious madman

or shadowy conspiracy from 400 years ago?

(riveting music)

(film projector whirs)

(riveting music)

(gun fires)

(crowd screams)

A popular head of state assassinated

at the height of his fame.

A lone assassin and a lingering question,

did he act alone?

Not John F. Kennedy in 1963,

but Henry IV of France 400 years ago.

(intriguing music)

- So the painting is called The Apotheosis of Henry IV.

And well, there are two parts of the painting,

the part on the left is the apotheosis,

and we can see Henry IV, he's the white-bearded man.

At the feet of Henry IV,

you have a snake with an arrow piercing the neck.

The snake represents Ravaillac

who is the man who murdered Henry IV.

- [Narrator] 400 years to the day

since the assassination of Henry IV,

historian Jean-Francois Bege

retraces his final fateful journey.

(tense music)

- [Narrator] Even today, Henry IV is remembered in France

with great affection, perhaps because of his reputation

as (speaking in foreign language), the good king,

the monarch who truly cared

about the poorest of his subjects,

and promised a chicken in every pot.

(crowd applauds)

- It's not only in his history, but his legend as well.

It's going into the house of a peasant,

and drinking with him without being recognized,

but loved by the people, and a lot of things.

And he liked life, of course.

He had quite a few mistresses (chuckles).

(subdued music)

- [Narrator] It is said that Henry IV had more mistresses

than all the other kings of France combined.

Many of them had borne him children,

but he needed a wife to have a legal heir.

That queen would be Marie de' Medici.

And in this room at the Louvre,

24 paintings by the great artist Peter Paul Rubens

depict her story.

It was an arranged marriage.

Henry had only seen her portrait.

He didn't even attend the wedding.

It was conducted by proxy.

The new queen was sent to France

to celebrate her wedding night

with a man she had never met,

a man whose other women were all around her.

Soon, factions started to form.

The Protestants around the king

and the Catholics around the queen.

When she was crowned,

the Catholics took one step closer to power.

The very next day, when the king left the Louvre,

a Catholic mystic on a mission from God

would be waiting outside.

(dramatic music)

- [Narrator] The road is blocked

and the carriage is forced to stop.

- [Narrator] The guards leave the carriage to clear the way

and Ravaillac seizes his chance.

- [Narrator] He leaps up onto the carriage wheel

and through the window,

plunges his knife in the king's heart.

(knife clangs) (flesh squelches)

(gun fires)

(flesh squelches)

(gripping music)

(crowd screams)

The king is dead.

Is Francois Ravaillac really a lone madman?

Or is some powerful figure pulling the strings?

(riveting music)

(dramatic music)

May 10th, 1610, the king of France has been murdered

on the streets of Paris.

The assassination looks like the work of a lone assailant.

But there are signs that all is not as it seems.

- [Narrator] In the king's carriage is the Duke of Epernon,

an aristocrat who the king has never trusted.

After the assassination,

he seizes Ravaillac and prevents the angry crowd

from killing him on the spot.

The duke rushes back to the palace and within hours,

instructs the queen to claim the regency.

His moves seem very swift and very well prepared.

- Marie de' Medici is a widow.

That's the reason why she's wearing black.

And the moment her husband was dead,

she sent a representative to the parliament of Paris asking

for the regency of France which is not what you see here.

Where you see here are the people at court

giving the power of France to Marie.

Marie of Medici who commissioned the paintings

wanted her story to be told in one way

and so she twists the history

so she can be seen in a better light.

- [Narrator] Ravaillac was put on trial.

The court didn't believe his story

that he had done it alone.

They were convinced he'd working with somebody

and they meant to find out who.

- In the end they found him obviously guilty

and sentenced him to death.

But before his execution,

they decided that he was to be put to the question,

to be to be tortured.

(menacing music)

They used what is a particularly French torturing

known as the brodequin.

And the brodequin consists of a couple of planks

that are strapped on the outside of the legs,

holding them very tightly together.

And then, wedges, wooden wedges are driven

between the knees between the ankle bones,

between the bones of the feet designed

to obviously break the bones.

- [Narrator] By using the legs of a pig,

we can get some idea of the effect

this device would have had on a human.

- Excruciatingly painful by all accounts,

but the redeeming factor of this particular torture is

that it could be extended almost indefinitely.

At no point during Ravaillac's interrogation or torture,

did he ever indicate that anyone was in any way

even remotely involved in assisting him in this act.

- [Narrator] But a year later,

a source would come forward with an astonishing accusation.

When Ravaillac arrived in Paris,

he had received free room and board at the home

of the mistress of, none other than, the Duke of Epernon.

Ravaillac had never spoken a word of this.

Was it the truth?

We don't know.

- For execution, the actual death sentence,

he was to be drawn and quartered, be torn apart by horses.

(horses neigh)

- [Narrator] "They misled me."

Who did he mean by they?

We will never know because moments after he said it,

he was torn to pieces.

(angry crowd chatters)

(gun fires)

Like the assassin of President Kennedy,

Ravaillac was sent to his grave along with his secrets.

(somber music)

And ever since, the people of France have wondered

what Marie de' Medici knew and when she knew it.

(riveting music)

Every painting, every sculpture,

every work of art in the Louvre has a secret to tell.

That's what draws people here.

For every mystery we reveal, far more remain unspoken

because this museum is the heart of the history of a nation.

From ancient walls of stone

to the pyramid of glass that now stands out front,

every generation for a thousand years has left a mark.

Their stories still linger within its walls.

(riveting music)

(gripping music)