Kathmandu, Oct. 27 -- The robbery at the Louvre has done what no marketing campaign ever could: It has catapulted France's dusty Crown Jewels - long admired at home, little known abroad - to global fame.

One week on, and the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage.

Yet the crime is also a paradox. Some say it will make celebrities of the very jewels it sought to erase - much as the Mona Lisa's turn-of-the-20th-century theft transformed the then little-known Renaissance portrait into the world's most famous artwork.

In 1911, a museum handyman lifted the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece off its hook. The loss went unnoticed for more than a day; newspapers turned it into a global mystery, and crowds came to stare at t...