Summary

Typically, on the Mondays following a weekend theft, Anne-Catherine will go to work, and Stéphane goes to one of the Strasbourg Museum Library, the local library in Mulhouse, or the University of Basel library in Switzerland. He reads about art and art history, often in both French and German. This is what he does with his time when he is unemployed. He files and records each piece he and Anne-Catherine steal, collecting information on them in a filing cabinet in the attic, producing his own little art library.

After stealing the Adam and Eve sculpture, Stéphane reads for days about its maker, Georg Petel, an orphan born in Bavaria. Petel was so talented that the German royal family invited him to serve as a court artist, but he declined, preferring instead the freedom to pursue his own interests and projects. He...