Lessons in immortality for prospective vandals

'The trouble is, almost all the people who have taken a short cut to fame by vandalising art have been forgotten'

This year we were on holiday in a little French town which was so little that they didn't sell any British newspapers, and not many French ones either. But I always like to try to keep my hand in with the French language, so I faithfully got the Sud-Ouest every day, and learnt a few new words.

(One was "la canicule". It means a "heatwave".

"We used to think that 'la canicule' meant a paddling pool," said Jane, one of our fellow holiday-makers.

This was odd, I said. A paddling pool is nothing like a heatwave.

"Oh," said Jane, "it was because we got a postcard from our ex-au pair girl, who had gone back to France, got married and had a baby. The postcard showed a baby in a paddling pool, and the handwritten caption was: 'Bebe dans la canicule!' We automatically assumed it meant paddling pool."

Moral: if in doubt, look it up. )

But the thing that has most stuck in my mind, from the Sud-Ouest was their daily feature: On This Day In Earlier Years. Because one day during our holidays they told us that on the same day in August, some 70 years earlier, in the 1930s, a young engineer had taken out a knife and made a slashing attack on a painting by Millet, crying triumphantly as he was led away: "Now my name will always be remembered!".

How sad.

I imagined the poor, underemployed, underestimated engineer plotting his revenge on a society which had ignored his engineering skills and on all the girls who had ignored his manly charms (I think we can assume he also led an unhappy sex life) and finally, reading about all the praise being heaped on the Millet painting, deciding to go down in history linked with Millet himself.

I was so moved that I carefully clipped out the cutting from the Sud-Ouest. Unfortunately, I seem to have mislaid it. So I can't tell you the name of the engineer who thought his name would live for ever.

And, I would hazard a bet, not many of you remember much about Millet's paintings either. I myself have a vague image of mournful peasants, all matronly and about seven foot tall, doing their stuff in the harvest fields, and that's about it. I think the nameless engineer may have been hitching himself to the wrong painter, because Millet's shares are currently at rock bottom. Maybe that's one of the troubles with being a poor engineer; your engineering skills don't equip you with the skill to know which famous painter to slash....

(Incidentally, I did try to find out who the erring engineer was, from the internet, by putting "Millet+vandalism" into the Google search engine, but all I found out was that there are towns in the USA called Millet with vandalism problems, that in some parts of the world the millet harvest is being vandalised by nature, and that some reviewer had applied the term "sexual vandalism" to Catherine Millet's controversial best-selling account of her sex life. Sorry. )

The trouble is that almost all the people who have decided to take a short cut to fame by vandalising works of art have been decisively forgotten. Do you remember the bloke who only a year or two back flew a glider into the grounds of Buckingham Palace? It turned out that he wanted to draw attention to his unpublished novel. As far as I know, it is still unpublished.

Not that flying a glider into the grounds of Buck House is vandalism - more like something to do with the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme - but then art isn't much vandalised these days. And do you know why? It's because art and vandalism have moved closer to each other, and it becomes harder to know if something has actually been vandalised.

And imagine someone trying to vandalise Damien Hurst's shark in the tank. "Man enters Hurst's shark tank and succumbs to formaldehyde poisoning."

Or how would he vandalise a Tracey Emin work of art?

"Man rocks art world by invading Tracey Emin's unmade bed, remaking it with hospital corners and putting pillows straight. Nothing can justify this vandalism, says someone called Saatchi."

A reader writes: Look, is this article going to get anywhere?

Miles Kington writes: No. I just wanted to know if anyone out there knew the name of the forgotten engineer, so I could restore his fame.