Painting seduced and trapped thief

The Rembrandt Child with a Soap Bubble. Photo / AP

Young Frenchman kept $6.5m Rembrandt under his bed for 15 years while secret gnawed at his conscience.

Neither his wife nor his children knew of the terrible secret eating away at the Frenchman who stole a Rembrandt and kept it hidden in his bedroom for 15 years.

But when Patrick Vialaneix turned up at a police station to confess his secret, he surely knew his life was about to unravel spectacularly. Far from freeing himself from the pernicious influence of Child with a Soap Bubble, Vialaneix is embroiled in a legal web that could take years to resolve.

Vialaneix was arrested last week not for the 1999 theft from a museum in Draguignan, but for alleged involvement in an attempt to sell the 4 million ($6.4 million) work this year.

The unemployed technician first saw the painting at the age of 13 when his mother took him to the museum. The visit led to an obsession with the haunting oil painting of a teenage boy with long brown locks, wearing a gold necklace and holding a soap bubble in his left hand. "Something happened between me and the child. It was like a mirror," he told Le Monde in an interview between his confession last March and his arrest 10 days ago. Over the following years, he would travel from his home in nearby Saint-Raphael to stand and stare at the melancholy painting. He read up on the life of the 17th-century Dutch master.

Vialaneix confesses to developing a burning desire to possess Child with a Soap Bubble in 1999. He was then aged 28 and working as an alarm systems technician. His museum visits now had a second purpose - to study the security system.

He decided to strike on the eve of the Bastille Day holiday. He says he hid in a cupboard and waited for museum staff to leave. He knew from previous visits that the movement detector allowed him only two seconds to cross the room where the painting was displayed. The alarm went off the second he unhooked it from the wall. He ran out, put the Rembrandt in a rubbish bag on the back seat of his car, and drove home. "I had a smile on my face like I never had before. When I got home, there was a moment of euphoria. I let out a big shout. I took photos. I felt like a superman," he told Le Monde.

Vialaneix wrapped up the 50 x 60cm painting and hid it under his bed. "I was both its guardian and its hostage," he said.

A few months later he met Christine, whom he later married. Vialaneix moved to various towns in southern France, each time because he thought each house too damp or too dry or at risk from fire and thus a danger to the boy he had secretly adopted. Once the home was burgled but thieves took only a hi-fi system.

When he was alone in the house, Vialaneix would contemplate the painting's dark earth tones and golden highlights. "I may sound like a fool, but I would speak to it," he said. He even thought he looked like the child in the picture. He told his wife the painting was a portrait of his own late father.

But last year Vialaneix became seriously ill and decided he finally had to rid himself of the painting. A childhood friend put him in touch with an insurance agent, who allegedly said he could help him return the Rembrandt to the museum and get a share of the possible reward. A rendezvous was arranged for March 14 this year in Nice, where Vialaneix accepted a cheque for 40,000, handed over Child with a Soap Bubble, and returned home, a free man at last. Five days later he learnt in press reports that two men had been arrested as they tried to sell it. He told his wife the truth.

"When he walked into my office he had a suitcase with him, ready to be sent to jail," his lawyer, Franck Dupouy, said.

At the police station in Marmande, Vialaneix handed over the uncashed cheque for 40,000 and took several hours to convince the gendarmes that he was not making the story up. They told him that because the theft was 15 years ago they could not press charges. But the police investigating the attempted sale suspect he may have conspired with the others to sell a stolen work of art. His lawyer, who says his client has only ever had one minor conviction, insists that police are simply trying to get him by another method.

Vialaneix told Le Monde that when he finally handed over the painting, he felt empty inside. "I had lost something precious. I had also lost 15 years."

He may well lose another decade to the Child with a Soap Bubble. If convicted, he faces a maximum jail sentence of 10 years. Telegraph Group Ltd