Louvre Robbed, the 2026 Color of the Year, and Yet More Yattering About Race

Fleeting as it is, October’s packed with art news.

Ostie de sacrament, which, I learned while dating a guy from Montreal in the 1990s, means, literally, “sacramental host,” but our translation would be WTF, and WTF indeed. The Louvre has been robbed. On October 19, a Sunday, at 9:30 in the morning, thieves stole jewelry with French royal connections, all Napoleonic, using a truck-mounted mechanical lift to reach a second-floor window of the Gallery of Apollo, a little-visited space facing the Seine. Four minutes later and, poof — or I guess the French would say, “Et hop, disparu!” — the crooks and what the Louvre says are $100 million in baubles were gone. Among them are an emerald-and-diamond necklace made for Empress Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, as a wedding present in 1810, and high-end bling made for Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s consort, and Queen Marie Amélie, wife of Louis Philippe I.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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Fleeting as it is, October’s packed with art news.

Ostie de sacrament, which, I learned while dating a guy from Montreal in the 1990s, means, literally, “sacramental host,” but our translation would be WTF, and WTF indeed. The Louvre has been robbed. On October 19, a Sunday, at 9:30 in the morning, thieves stole jewelry with French royal connections, all Napoleonic, using a truck-mounted mechanical lift to reach a second-floor window of the Gallery of Apollo, a little-visited space facing the Seine. Four minutes later and, poof — or I guess the French would say, “Et hop, disparu!” — the crooks and what the Louvre says are $100 million in baubles were gone. Among them are an emerald-and-diamond necklace made for Empress Marie Louise, Napoleon’s second wife, as a wedding present in 1810, and high-end bling made for Empress Eugénie, Napoleon III’s consort, and Queen Marie Amélie, wife of Louis Philippe I.