Las Meninas The Secret and the Mysteries of the Meninsby JEAN-MARC DOUAYThat evening at the Prado Museum, icy weather had forced visitors to return home before closing time. Except in the Velázquez room, where a bohemian-looking couple had just entered and surprised the guard who, believing himself to be alone, was in full questioning in front of the Meninas painting. "What could Velázquez be painting in the painting in the painting? . This enigma had obsessed him for so long, and in all likelihood it would remain so. It had been so for several centuries because no one had solved this mystery. The little we knew about it came from a distant biographer whose interpretation was brought up to date in the sixties by the philosopher Michel Foucault and then definitively refuted by the art historian Daniel Arasse who ended up concluding in his eponymous book "On n'y voit rien". So the enigma had a bright future ahead of it, probably as long as the masterpiece existed, yes, but... that evening after closing, the curator was horrified to discover that the work had just been vandalized in a very strange way. All the characters have disappeared from the composition as well as the mysterious painting. The next day the case made the headlines around the world. A long police investigation begins, which leads the cops from Madrid to Sanlucar de Barrameda to an island from another time, that of Spain's Golden Age. Will we ever know what Velázquez painted?..That evening, at the Prado Museum, the freezing weather had forced visitors to go home before closing. Except in the Velázquez room, where a bohemian-looking couple had just entered and surprised the guard in full reflection in front of the painting of Meninas. "What could Velázquez have been painting in the painting? After closing, the curator discovers the painting vandalized in a very strange way, all the characters and the mysterious painting are erased... Will we ever know what Velázquez was painting? BIOGRAPHY JEAN-MARC DOUAYAt thirty, I had lost almost everything, my hands, my face, my painting, my work, the child and the woman I loved. With time, painting gave me back a taste for life and my job as an architect brought me back to life. If I don't paint anymore or almost today, my look remains that of a painter, intimately convinced that life is the work not to be missed. This is why I am still fascinated by Velázquez's painting of the Meninas after having been obsessed by its enigma. Wanting to understand it is like opening a kind of Pandora's box, but what a joy to discover the genius of a painter. This research work was finished in 1998, and at the time I didn't know what to do with it, just the intimate conviction that I had discovered something exceptional that justified a deposit with a bailiff, a gesture that hardly resembled me. Not being from the seraglio of art, I decided to write a detective novel with everything I had understood, but it remains reassuring.