World Notes France

The Marmottan Museum, a three-story town house in Paris' tony 16th arrondissement, shares the elegant Rue Louis-Boilly with embassies and mansions. The neighborhood's air of tranquillity was shattered one morning last week when five armed robbers invaded the museum, held some 40 tourists and eight guards at gunpoint, and made off with nine paintings valued at more than $10 million. Included in the haul was Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise, a 19th century masterpiece from which the Impressionist school takes its name.

The thieves will not be able to ransom the pictures to an insurance company, the frequent fate of stolen art treasures, because the Marmottan could not afford the enormous insurance premiums on its permanent collection. Police doubt that the intention is to sell the purloined paintings to a collector, because their fame makes them, as a French journalist put it, "about as negotiable as the Eiffel Tower." One possibility is that the robbers are terrorists who hope to exchange the pictures for a captured colleague. Said Police Superintendent Thierry Boulogne, who is involved in the case: "No one hypothesis is being excluded. Everything is possible."