The recent shenanigans at the Cairo Museum ruining King Tutankhamun's mask brought this story to mind:
And I'm suddenly reminded of Edith Wharton's "False Dawn"
"Well, she died intestate, and Netta Kent--Netta Cosby--turned out to be
the next of kin. There wasn't much to be got out of the estate (or so
they thought) and, as the Cosby's are always hard up, the house in Tenth
Street had to be sold, and the pictures were very nearly sent off to the
auction room with all the rest of the stuff. But nobody supposed they
would bring anything, and the auctioneer said that if you tried to sell
pictures with carpets and bedding and kitchen furniture it always
depreciated the whole thing; and so, as the Cosbys had some bare walls to
cover, they sent for the whole lot--there were about thirty--and decided
to have them cleaned and hang them up. 'After all,' Netta said, 'as well
as I can make out through the cobwebs, some of them look like rather
jolly copies of early Italian things.' But as she was short of cash she
decided to clean them at home instead of sending them to an expert; and
one day, while she was operating on this very one before you, with her
sleeves rolled up, the man called, who always DOES call on such
occasions; the man who knows. In the given case, it was a quiet fellow
connected with the Louvre, who'd brought her a letter from Paris, and
whom she'd invited to one of her stupid dinners. He was announced, and
she thought it would be a joke to let him see what she was doing; she has
pretty arms, you may remember. So he was asked into the dining-room,
where he found her with a pail of hot water and soap-suds, and THIS laid
out on the table; and the first thing he did was to grab her pretty arm
so tight that it was black and blue, while he shouted out: 'God in
heaven! Not HOT water!'"
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