light, and it is quite impossible to be a 'famed forger' if none of your forgeries is discovered. Decker's entire 1932 article may be a work of fiction that, much like forgeries in the art world, has fooled many who have read it. Later life According to Valfierno's account, the mysterious Chaudron retired to the countryside only months after the theft and the completion of the forgeries. He is said to have continued to produce forgeries of other artists' work , but never to the same scale as his work related to the Mona Lisa theft. Again, no works by Chaudron, forged or otherwise, have ever been located. As Valfierno's account was only released in 1932 (some years after the supposed death of Chaudron), there was no arrest or trail of the mysterious forger and his role in the theft was effectively unknown during his lifetime, only being revealed in the 1932 article. Yves Chaudron was most likely a creation of Karl Decker that fit well into a story of a criminal mastermind and his associates, that readers of the article assumed was genuine. His name still pops up in lists of the top forgers of the 20th century, despite there being no forged works of art found that can be attributed to anyone named Chaudron. See also Art forgery Mona Lisa The Louvre Leonardo da Vinci City of Death (a Doctor Who story about creating six Mona Lisa copies, then stealing the original in order to sell the copies to six buyers) References Art forgers 20th-century French criminals Mona Lisa Year of birth missing Year of death missing