TOWNANDCOUNTRYMAG.COM | SEPTEMBER 2019 127
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he story was a story for about five minutes. It was another
internet flash, this time about a painting stolen by the
Nazis and returned to the rightful heirs—a headline
clicked on in midafternoon, shared, forgotten.
I even forget where I saw it. Perhaps a wire report,
perhaps a French news site.
And yet here I am, one week later, standing in a forest before a
concrete monument. It is five feet tall and nearly as wide, pocked
and discolored from years of weather, a block standing in the grass
among stubby trees next to a highway about an hour outside Paris.
On the monument a man’s face—the face of the man from whom
the painting was stolen—is shown in profile, his eyes fixed in the
distance, the lapels of his coat casting shadows in relief.
The words below the face tell anyone driving by this forest or
biking along its punishing trails that he was killed on the 7th of
July, 1944. “Est mort assassiné par les ennemis de la France.”