He pressed Tomic to work at his garage, but Tomic resisted, and eventually “thought about fleeing.” His father soon approached him and declared that painting was a hobby, not a real job. On returning home, Tomic recalled, he told his mother about his transporting experience at the museum, and said that he wanted to paint-“that it was my passion, that other jobs weren’t worth anything, that they were wastes of time.” Fearing his father’s opinion, he entrusted her to “transmit the message” to him. “It’s as if he even came from this place.” It thrilled him to be “within a hand’s reach” of such spellbinding images. “Renoir has a way of seeing life from a magical realm,” Tomic wrote to me. As Tomic saw it, Renoir had used his paintbrush to create a “parallel universe”-an enchanted version of the grim Parisian life he had known. The museum is best known for its Monet murals of water lilies, but Tomic was enraptured by Renoir’s glowing renderings of happy childhoods: kids playing with figurines, practicing the piano, snuggling with mothers. It was the Musée de l’Orangerie, a structure that was built, in 1852, to shelter orange trees, and which now houses Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. One day, when he was sixteen, he was strolling through the Jardin des Tuileries when he noticed people lining up outside what appeared to be a greenhouse. As a teen-ager, he developed a keen interest in drawing, and in his spare time he walked, alone, through the streets of Paris. In his words, his mother and father “lived in the apocalypse,” fighting constantly.ĭespite the turmoil at home, Tomic said, he did well in school, and was a fine athlete. He resented them for uprooting him from Bosnia. He returned to Paris when he was eleven, speaking almost no French and barely knowing his parents. (The older brother of a friend learned of the theft and returned Tomic’s plunder.) Tomic said of his early criminal adventures, “It was intuitive. He stole two books, each of which appeared to be several hundred years old. He broke into a library in Mostar, climbing through a window that was nearly ten feet above street level. They often played along the banks of the Neretva River, and Tomic became adept at scaling Mostar’s stone bridges on reaching the top, he would leap into the water below.Īt the age of ten, Tomic pulled off his first heist. By the age of six, he told me, he had developed what he calls “a devious tendency,” adding, “I was showing some unhealthy intelligence.” He tormented his cousins by putting thorns in their shoes. He was born in Paris in 1968, but the following year his mother became seriously ill, and his father, a car mechanic, sent Vjeran to live with his grandmother, in the Ottoman town of Mostar, in Bosnia. Tomic avoided his family’s apartment, which was a few blocks south of the cemetery, because he had a tense relationship with his parents, both of whom were Bosnian immigrants. In one of twenty letters, written in careful cursive French, that he sent me during the past year and a half, he told me, “Observing them gave me the desire to touch them-to climb up to their peaks.” Tomic and his friends turned the cemetery into a parkour playground, leaping from the roof of one mausoleum to the next, daring one another to take ever-bolder risks. Tomic recalled that in the nineteen-eighties, when he was an adolescent, the cemetery attracted hippie tourists, who flocked to the grave of Jim Morrison, and also drug dealers and gang members. Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, and Oscar Wilde are among those buried there. Père Lachaise, the city’s largest cemetery, is a Gothic maze of tombstones, in the Twentieth Arrondissement, that covers more than a hundred acres.
Long before the burglar Vjeran Tomic became the talk of Paris, he honed his skills in a graveyard.
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