In Chap­ter 38 of The Art Thief, the nar­ra­tive takes a deep dive into the trou­bled life of Stéphane Bre­itwieser, now 44 years old, fol­low­ing his final prison sen­tence. Despite being freed, his life remains deeply entan­gled in the con­se­quences of his past. With a crim­i­nal record that looms large and a bank account hold­ing only five euros, Bre­itwieser finds him­self trapped in finan­cial insta­bil­i­ty. His moth­er pro­vides the nec­es­sary sup­port, cov­er­ing his rent and some­times offer­ing food, while Sten­gel, his part­ner, also shoul­ders much of the house­hold respon­si­bil­i­ties. How­ev­er, the shad­ows of past grief linger, as Sten­gel is also pro­cess­ing the recent death of her own moth­er. This sets a scene of dual sor­row, where both char­ac­ters are left to nav­i­gate per­son­al loss while strug­gling to rebuild what lit­tle they can from the wreck­age of their pre­vi­ous lives.

Despite his emo­tion­al and finan­cial strug­gles, Bre­itwieser longs for soli­tude and a fresh start. He dreams of escap­ing to nature, where he can find peace through sim­ple plea­sures like hik­ing, far away from the tur­moil of his past life. He has a mod­est apart­ment where he keeps a repro­duc­tion of Sibylle of Cleves, his favorite art­work, which serves as a con­stant reminder of the orig­i­nal piece that was trag­i­cal­ly destroyed in a fire years ago. His con­nec­tion to the art world is min­i­mal now, with his pri­ma­ry focus being the search for his lost stolen pieces. These paint­ings, rough­ly 80 in total, were tak­en dur­ing his thiev­ing spree, but they have remained elu­sive ever since a dis­as­trous event that destroyed many of them. Despite his obses­sion with find­ing these pieces, Bre­itwieser is acute­ly aware of the secre­cy his moth­er holds regard­ing their loca­tion, which only adds to his sense of frus­tra­tion and long­ing.

The fol­low­ing year finds Bre­itwieser increas­ing­ly stag­nant, feel­ing as though he is stuck in a life he can­not escape. Despite his pre­vi­ous desire to leave his past behind, he even­tu­al­ly returns to his old ways. This time, his thefts tar­get local muse­ums in Alsace, where items are swift­ly stolen and sold online through var­i­ous alias­es to keep his iden­ti­ty hid­den. How­ev­er, his renewed crim­i­nal activ­i­ties don’t go unno­ticed. In Feb­ru­ary 2019, law enforce­ment catch­es wind of his actions, lead­ing to a police raid that threat­ens to undo what­ev­er frag­ile life he has been attempt­ing to build. The law has grown stricter, with harsh­er penal­ties now in place for art theft. Bre­itwieser real­izes that his future is slip­ping away, and the prospect of free­dom seems less like­ly with each pass­ing day. As if to under­line this real­i­ty, he vis­its a Cata­lan exhi­bi­tion, where a recre­at­ed ver­sion of Adam and Eve takes him down mem­o­ry lane. This piece, which he had once stolen, now stands as a painful reminder of his past. Dri­ven by a deep sense of nos­tal­gia, Bre­itwieser dis­guis­es him­self and makes the jour­ney to Antwerp to revis­it the Rubens House. The vis­it floods him with emo­tions, as he stands before the art­work he once took, now dis­tant from the per­son he was then. The scene is intense­ly emo­tion­al as tears begin to roll down his cheeks, and Bre­itwieser is struck by a crush­ing realization—his dreams of a life sur­round­ed by beau­ty and art are now shat­tered, leav­ing only a hol­low echo of what could have been. In a final act of defi­ance, Bre­itwieser steals a book­let depict­ing Adam and Eve, his last con­nec­tion to his past exploits. This final theft encap­su­lates the inter­nal con­flict rag­ing with­in him, a thief who once thrived in the art world now reduced to mere rem­nants of his for­mer self. His com­plex emo­tion­al jour­ney between desires for beau­ty, art, and the despair of his own fail­ures high­lights the trag­ic con­se­quences of his obses­sion and the pro­found iso­la­tion he now faces.