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Page 35.
 Hannah and Yves inquired at the information desk in the main building, and were directed to the Louvre administrative offices near the pyramid and the Carrousel.
After an initial greeting with a desk clerk, they were ushered into a comfortable office. A manager named Amélie Tournesol asked them to sit down before her wide desk on which sat semi-orderly stacks of papers and books. Madame Tournesol was small, blonde, and smartly dressed in a dark-blue suit with skirt and navy-blue medium heels. She seemed to have to raise her chin to speak over the edge of her desk. Hannah wished there was a crank of some sort to pump up her chair so Madame Tournesol would seem taller. Anyway, Mme Tournesol projected an air of interest, authority, and curiosity. “Where did you come across that name?” she asked. “I cannot find anything in our current employee or curatorial files. I have a researcher looking into it since you called it to my attention.”
Yves rose respectfully, approached the vast desk, and showed her the brochure.
Madame Tournesol said in a dry humor: “I will need a microscope. I can have one sent up.”
Hannah concurred. “I had to hold it up this way and that way to make out the fine print.”
Madame Tournesol nodded. “I’ve sent someone out to research our older records. Let’s wait a few moments. So in the meantime, tell me about your visit to the Louvre. Are you enjoying it?”
“Of course,” said Yves proudly. “What Parisian would not be proud and happy?”
“D’accord,” said Mme. Tournesol. “And you, mademoiselle, you are Américaine?”
“Oui, Madame,” Hannah answered in her by now passably fluent French.
Mme. Tournesol raised a pleased eyebrow, and they continued a nice conversation for several minutes. In today’s universal world, not surprisingly, Madame Tournesol’s brother was a physician practicing in Boston, Massachusetts, and she had a sister married to a college professor in Berlin.
About ten minutes into all this polite conversation, Mme. Tournesol’s desk phone warbled, and she picked up. It was clearly a conversation continued from a while earlier. She nodded as she exchanged brief phrases with the researcher in the stacks who had called: Içi…oui…alors…
When she was done, she hung up. She folded her hands together over her folded knees and said: “Good news and bad news.” Seeing Yves and Hannah’s expectant faces, she said: “The good news is that we have found records of a Mademoiselle Claudette Vervain, a master’s degree candidate in History at the Sorbonne University here in Paris, what it was at that time. The bad news is that Mlle Vervain was killed in a car crash in 1981, ending her research assistantship here at the Louvre. She was only twenty-eight years of age.” Mme Tournesol’s eyes and features radiated not only sympathy, but genuine sadness.
Hannah’s heart sank. Oh,my,god, more horrible stuff.
“I am sorry,” Mme Tournesol said. “I don’t know much more. My researcher found a clipping from our newspaper Le Figaro at that time, in the obituary section, which someone inserted into Claudette Vervain’s personnel file as they closed it out forever. She was in a car with her fiancé, a Monsieur Arnold Parivel of Brussels, age thirty, who also died instantly. He was driving at very high speed, under the influence of alcohol and cocaine, and crashed into a tree head-first on the Quai Voltaire on the Left Bank as they were coming from a party and going to another.”
“She was studying?” Yves asked, probing for any information that might be extracted from between the lines somehow. Hannah sat with her arm through Yves’ arm, understanding his investigative nature.
Mme Tournesol was entirely sympathetic. “A terrible loss, yes. What makes me sad is that she has nearly been forgotten here at the museum, as well as over at the university. My researcher made some phone calls and this is all the information we have.”
“Was she working on a project here?”
“Yes.” Mme Tournesol sat forward, put some dark-framed reading glasses on her nose, and looked at her computer screen to one side. “This is the information that was just sent to me. Claudette Vervain was working on her Master’s thesis.”
“And that was about?” Yves prodded.
“Leonardo da Vinci. Specifically, the paintings here in the Louvre. First and foremost, not surprisingly, La Joconde, the Smiling Mona Lisa.” She raised her hands and dropped them. “That is all I have, I am sorry. We don’t even have a manuscript from her. She must not have had time to put her notes together for a first draft as required by her faculty advisor at that time. A Professor Alphonse Brouillard, who died a quarter century ago after retiring and moving to his home in Provençe. He died around 1983 or so. All gone. No trace.”
Interview over, Mme Tournesol politely but firmly rose. “I’m sorry I could not be of more assistance.” She shook their hands with her small, firm grip, no nonsense.
Moving on.
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