A NEUROLOGIST STRIKES A NERVE

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Switzerland has been gripped by the story of a senior consultant with light fingers in his genes. Laura Spinney reports from Lausanne ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2010

For a couple of weeks in 1939, a young artist named Timour Serguei Bogousslavski sat in an upstairs room at the Louvre, sketching. One day a guard went into the room and noticed that he wasn’t there. Also missing was a small, valuable painting by Watteau, “L’Indifférent”. Two months later, flanked by a pair of lawyers, Bogousslavski walked into a magistrate’s office and returned the painting, pointing out where he had retouched it and claiming the reward.

The incident caused a sensation, only to fade away like Watteau’s colours. But the story is now enjoying a revival. Fifteen years after the Louvre theft, Timour Serguei had a son, Julien Bogousslavsky [sic], born in Paris. Growing up, he mixed with his father’s artistic friends, who included Picasso, Cocteau and Léger. He spent hours in his grandmother’s library, poring over rare art books, until Timour moved the family to Switzerland.

There Julien began collecting art books himself. He studied medicine, specialising in neurology and becoming an authority in what was then an arcane field – stroke rehabilitation. In 1999 he took sole charge of the neurology service at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV), a major teaching hospital in Lausanne. By then he had also distinguished himself in military service, reaching the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and become an accomplished pianist. It looked as if he couldn’t put a foot wrong.

Then, in 2006, a suspicious-looking bill came to light in the CHUV accounts department. Like a loose thread in a knitted sweater, it soon exposed a huge hole: SFr5.3m (£3.2m) missing from the hospital budget. A year earlier, Bogousslavsky had been elected treasurer of the World Federation of Neurology, but he hadn’t yet taken up the post. The federation can consider itself lucky.

The Swiss authorities soon made another discovery. Part of Bogousslavsky’s collection, whose catalogue he had published under the name Lukas Jesus von Boilgy, had gone under the hammer at Christie’s in Paris. Among the books sold were a volume of Mallarmé’s poetry illustrated by Matisse, and another of Eluard with drawings by Picasso. The proceeds were frozen and Bogousslavsky went to jail, where he spent two months. He had lost his job at the CHUV, but on his release he went to work at a private clinic in the same canton.

His trial began in Lausanne in January 2010 and gripped the Swiss media. On the first day he admitted his guilt and expressed a desire to make amends. He offered to surrender part of what remains of his precious collection to the cantonal library. Asked if he thought he would offend again, he answered, not unexpectedly, in the negative. His love of old books had led him astray, but from now on the only books he would concern himself with were neurological tomes.

“Do you like the feel of a wad of cash?” the chief judge asked him. He had taken out a lot of the money in notes – money which he had used not just to add to his collection, but to pay household bills and buy a Bentley. The public prosecutor went further, ridiculing the man he referred to as the “prince of professors” who, considering himself above the law, had shown a monumental disdain for the society he served.

On February 19th the judges gave their verdict: a two-year suspended sentence and a fine of SFr180,000 also suspended. Although he has already had to pay back most of the stolen money, and must honour his promise to surrender some books, Bogousslavsky won’t go back behind bars.

As we went to press, he had still to undergo a disciplinary procedure at the cantonal health authority, but he had not lost his job. The Swiss system tends to be readier to compartmentalise misconduct than, say, Britain, with its insistence that doctors show honesty. Bogousslavsky will probably continue to treat patients and to write papers on his pet subject: the relationship between neurological disease and creativity.

Questions are now being asked in Switzerland. What of the patients who didn’t get treated and the researchers whose funds evaporated? Was Bogousslavsky let off lightly because he was a doctor? Because he was rich, or cultivated? And does crime pay?

To find out more, we may have to wait for his memoirs. In 1998 Timour Serguei published an unapologetic account of his life of crime, obscurely entitled “La Morue de Brixton” (The Cod of Brixton). Then again, we may wait in vain. Timour Serguei was familiar with at least half a dozen prisons, including Brixton, and he prefaced his tale with a quote from Jean Genet: “Writing is the last resort when one has lost everything.” If so, the prince of professors may never feel the urge to bare his soul.

(Laura Spinney writes on science for The Economist. Her last article for Intelligent Life was about a war reporter's battle with Huntington's disease.)

Illustration: Martin Hargreaves