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Imagine: Four men pull up to the Louvre Museum with two scooters and a ladder. They slice through the window into a glittering, gilded gallery and snatch France’s priceless crown jewels. They’re gone in less than seven minutes.

This isn’t “Ocean’s Eleven.” It’s an October morning in Paris.

After a year of grisly assassinations and murder-filled headlines, last week’s Louvre heist restored a sense of whimsy to crime. It feels like a mystery novel brought to life — an impossible-sounding scheme, a successful getaway, and a baffled country.

The thieves arrived at the Louvre at 9:30 in the morning, in broad daylight, just as the museum opened. They rode a truck-mounted elevator to a window of the Galerie d’Apollon and fled on a pair of scooters.

For a few hours, it even looked like the case would get its own Sherlock Holmes, when an image of a young man standing outside the Louvre in a trench coat and a fedora went viral. Seemingly oblivious to the internet’s whimsical interpretation of the spectacle, The New York Times dashed everyone’s hopes — assuring the public that the young man was just a random passerby and not a modern-day Hercule Poirot.

Still, the crime is objectively hilarious. Robbing the Louvre should be impossible in 2025. Between advanced security cameras and laser grids, classic art heists simply don’t happen, abandoned to the 20th century or George Clooney movies.

Except they do, and it’s the Louvre’s own fault. As more information emerged about the robbery, it became less of an impressive feat by the thieves and more of an indictment of the museum’s poor security.

There was one security camera on the side where the thieves parked, and it was pointed away from the building. Outdated interior alarms and cameras slowed response times. Unarmed security guards rushed visitors out of the building instead of locking it down or confronting the thieves. The cases holding the crown jewels had been replaced years ago and no longer triggered an automatic safe when disturbed. Worse, the museum never bothered insuring the crown jewels and won’t be compensated.

Even more embarrassing, the Louvre heist was no locked-room, Agatha Christie puzzle.  The thieves pulled off a smash-and-grab, one of the simplest burglaries in the history of crime, and one considered too unrealistic for a detective novel.

The Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, called it a “terrible failure,” and she’s right — but she could have avoided it. Staff have reportedly been warning about security weaknesses for years, but the museum ignored concerns over outdated alarm systems and cameras. A current economic and political crisis is complicating plans to overhaul the overcrowded and understaffed building.

Meanwhile, art heists are back, and reading about the Louvre thieves is just as fun as watching Brad Pitt sneak into a casino vault.

Still, the fun nature of the crime shouldn’t downplay its tragedy. The crown jewels — some belonging to wives of the Napoleonic dynasty — are worth $102 million and possess priceless historical value.

At the same time, one could argue that if you murder your monarch, you lose the right to your crown jewels. Or maybe this is how the French celebrate No Kings Day.

The Louvre was last robbed in 1998, when a thief stole a small, 19th-century landscape by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot in broad daylight, and it was never recovered. Luckily, the French police seem less baffled this time around. They arrested two men Oct. 25, almost a week after the theft, and are analyzing 150 DNA samples left at the scene. The suspects “partially admitted” their role in the theft, but the jewels remain missing.

Even the arrests add to the mystery. One official says a private collector may have hired the thieves to steal the jewels; meanwhile, detectives — the non-fedora-wearing kind — are rushing to find them before they’re irreparably damaged or cut and melted down into sellable pieces.

There’s still a chance France surrenders to the thieves — the international embarrassment hasn’t stopped them before. But the rest of us should enjoy the mystery. It’s not every day you can see the jewels and steal them, too.

Catherine Maxwell is a senior studying history.