This creative narrative reimagines Napoleon Bonaparte's relationship with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, tracing the emperor's attempt to claim the painting from the Louvre for his private chambers. Through late-night conversations with the portrait, Napoleon projects his own genius and authority onto the enigmatic woman, seeking to unlock secrets he believes the painting withholds. The story explores themes of power, obsession, and the limits of human understanding, ultimately concluding that some mysteries resist even the most determined interpretation. The narrative uses the famous painting as a lens to examine Napoleon's character and his inability to control or fully comprehend what he possesses.
The coachman sped the horses only as fast as he dared along the way to the Tuileries Palace, and sometimes even slower than that. The attendant within his coach had told him exactly what the valuable bundle he carried contained and for whom it was intended. Though the coachman had heard of the Emperor's democratic leanings, he had heard far more about his infamous temper. Regardless of what else life held in store for him in the changing world of the new French Empire, this coachman was determined that it would not fall on him to enrage Napoleon Bonaparte and art lovers the world over by damaging one of the greatest masterpieces of painting the world had ever seen—even he knew the invaluable status of the Mona Lisa.
Luckily for both the art world and the coachman, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece of the enigmatic smiling woman arrived at Napoleon's new residence unharmed from its former home at the Louvre museum. The transfer represented yet another instance of the appropriation of the symbols of the aristocracy by the common man. This stance was, admittedly, somewhat harder to justify in these circumstances than in other instances, but it was nonetheless the reasoning given by the Emperor himself as the painting was carefully unloaded from the coach. A team of servants conveyed the oil-on-wood masterpiece—still carefully covered in layers of cloth to protect its centuries-old surface—into the palace to its intended place of honor in Napoleon's own bedroom.
"Art like this was meant for the people," Napoleon announced to no one in particular as the coachman whipped his horses into a canter, rounding the corner outside the palace gates. "This remarkable woman was not meant to suffocate in a museum, in the halls of the rich, but to enjoy all of the passions of life!"
Secretly, however, Napoleon had far more selfish reasons for having this painting "appropriated" and brought to his palace. The servants—those brave enough to speak at all—talked behind their hands about the strange proclivities of their new master and leader. Their irreverent eyebrow waggles suggested a prurience that was not any real part of Napoleon's obsession with the painting. Of his obsession there could be no doubt; he found the woman in the painting captivating, intriguing, capable of revealing all of the secrets of womanhood and possibly even of mankind. Yet her silent smile continued to taunt him.
The Emperor began to spend his sleepless nights—of which he had been visited many times before—sitting at the foot of his bed and conversing with the painting on the wall opposite in tones too quiet for the gossiping servants to overhear. He addressed her simply as "Madam," refusing to grant ownership of the face he addressed to the wife of the merchant it was rumored had modeled for the painting. He queried her as to the secrets she so impishly withheld, speaking as though the portrait held consciousness and volition.
"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 eyes, 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. This constancy of expression, which had captivated viewers for centuries, now became a source of profound frustration for the man who believed his intellect and authority could compel revelation from all things.
"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. 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 and through. Now tell me what you're hiding! What's behind those eyes and that damned, perfect smile?"
"The painting refuses to yield its mysteries"
"The Mona Lisa departs the palace in defeat"
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