At midnight, Julien returned to the Louvre alone. He still had a uniform, and the guard at the staff entrance owed him a favour. Once inside, he made his way to the security archive and retrieved the original footage of C-17 from the night he found the casket.
The footage showed the door opening on its own at 01:47. A man in a black coat entered, placed the casket on the shelf, and left. The camera captured his face.
It was not Henri Vasseur.
It was the museum’s director of digital collections, a quiet woman named Florence Mirabeau.