As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.
The Comsat Angels
When I first heard about the assignment, in the summer of 1968, I did my best to turn it down. Charles Whitehead, producer of BBC TV’s science programme Horizon, asked me to fly over to France with him and record a press conference being held by a fourteen-year-old child prodigy, Georges Duval, who was attracting attention in the Paris newspapers. The film would form part of Horizon’s new series, which I was scripting, ‘The Expanding Mind’, about the role of communications satellites and data-processing devices in the so-called information explosion. What annoyed me was this insertion of irrelevant and sensational material into an otherwise serious programme.
‘Charles, you’ll destroy the whole thing,’ I protested across his desk that morning. ‘These child prodigies are all the same. Either they simply have some freak talent or they’re being manipulated by ambitious parents. Do you honestly believe this boy is a genius?’
‘He might be, James. Who can say?’ Charles waved a plump hand at the contact prints of orbiting satellites pinned to the walls. ‘We’re doing a programme about advanced communications systems — if they have any justification at all, it’s that they bring rare talents like this one to light.’
‘Rubbish — these prodigies have been exposed time and again. They bear the same relation to true genius that a crosschannel swimmer does to a lunar astronaut.’
In the end, despite my protests, Charles won me over, but I was still sceptical when we flew to Orly Airport the next morning. Every two or three years there were reports of some newly discovered child genius. The pattern was always the same: the prodigy had mastered chess at the age of three, Sanskrit and calculus at six, Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity at twelve. The universities and conservatories of America and Europe opened their doors.
For some reason, though, nothing ever came of these precocious talents. Once the parents, or an unscrupulous commercial sponsor, had squeezed the last drop of publicity out of the child, his so-called genius seemed to evaporate and he vanished into oblivion.
‘Do you remember Minou Drouet?’ I asked Charles as we drove from Orly. ‘A child prodigy of a few years back. Cocteau read her poems and said, "Every child is a genius except Minou Drouet."
‘James, relax… Like all scientists, you can’t bear anything that challenges your own prejudices. Let’s wait until we see him. He might surprise us.’
He certainly did, though not as we expected.
Georges Duval lived with his widowed mother in the small town of Montereau, on the Seine thirty miles south of Paris. As we drove across the cobbled square past the faded police prefecture, it seemed an unlikely birthplace for another Darwin, Freud or Curie. However, the Duvals’ house was an expensively built white-walled villa overlooking a placid arm of the river. A well-tended lawn ran down to a vista of swans and water-meadows.
Parked in the drive was the location truck of the film unit we had hired, and next to it a radio van from RadioTelevision-Franaise and a Mercedes with a Paris-Match sticker across the rear window. Sound cables ran across the gravel into a kitchen window. A sharp-faced maid led us without ado towards the press conference. In the lounge, four rows of gilt chairs brought in from the Hotel de Ville faced a mahogany table by the windows. Here a dozen cameramen were photographing Madame Duval, a handsome woman of thirty-five with calm grey eyes, arms circumspectly folded below two strands of pearls. A trio of solemn-faced men in formal suits protected her from the technicians setting up microphones and trailing their cables under the table.
Already, fifteen minutes before Georges Duval appeared, I felt there was something bogus about the atmosphere. The three dark-suited men — the Director of Studies at the Sorbonne, a senior bureaucrat from the French Ministry of Education, and a representative of the Institut Pascal, a centre of advanced study — gave the conference an overstuffed air only slightly eased by the presence of the local mayor, a homely figure in a shiny suit, and the boy’s schoolmaster, a lantern-jawed man hunched around his pipe.
Needless to say, when Georges Duval arrived, he was a total disappointment. Accompanied by a young priest, the family counsellor, he took his seat behind the table, bowing to the three officials and giving his mother a dutiful buss on the cheek. As the lights came on and the cameras began to turn, his eyes stared down at us without embarrassment.
Georges Duval was then fourteen, a slim-shouldered boy small for his age, self-composed in a grey flannel suit. His face was pale and anaemic, hair plastered down to hide his huge bony forehead. He kept his hands in his pockets, concealing his over-large wrists. What struck me immediately was the lack of any emotion or expression on his face, as if he had left his mind in the next room, hard at work on some intricate problem.
Professor Leroux of the Sorbonne opened the press conference. Georges had first come to light when he had taken his mathematics degree at thirteen, the youngest since Descartes. Leroux described Georges’s career: reading at the age of two, by nine he had passed his full matriculation exam — usually taken at fifteen or sixteen. As a vacation hobby he had mastered English and German, by eleven had passed the diploma of the Paris Conservatoire in music theory, by twelve was working for his degree. He had shown a precocious interest in molecular biology, and already corresponded with biochemists at Harvard and Cambridge.
While this familiar catalogue was being unfolded, Georges’s eyes, below that large carapace of a skull, showed not a glimmer of emotion. Now and then he glanced at a balding young man in a soft grey suit sitting by himself in the front row. At the time I thought he was Georges’s elder brother — he had the same high bony temples and closed face. Later, however, I discovered that he had a very different role.
Questions were invited for Georges. These followed the usual pattern — what did he think of Vietnam, the space-race, the psychedelic scene, miniskirts, girls, Brigitte Bardot? In short, not a question of a serious nature. Georges answered in good humour, stating that outside his studies he had no worthwhile opinions. His voice was firm and reasonably modest, but he looked more and more bored by the conference, and as soon as it broke up, he joined the young man in the front row. Together they left the room, the same abstracted look on their faces that one sees in the insane, as if crossing our own universe at a slight angle.
While we made our way out, I talked to the other journalists. Georges’s father had been an assembly worker at the Renault plant in Paris; neither he nor Madame Duval was in the least educated, and the house, into which the widow and son had moved only two months earlier, was paid for by a large research foundation. Evidently there were unseen powers standing guard over Georges Duval. He apparently never played with the boys from the town.
As we drove away, Charles Whitehead said slyly: ‘I notice you didn’t ask any questions yourself.’
‘The whole thing was a complete set-up. We might as well have been interviewing De Gaulle.’
‘Perhaps we were.’
‘You think the General may be behind all this?’
‘It’s possible. Let’s face it, if the boy is outstanding, it makes it more difficult for him to go off and work for Du Pont or IBM.’
‘But is he? He was intelligent, of course, but all the same, I’ll bet you that three years from now no one will even remember him.’
After we returned to London my curiosity came back a little. In the Air France bus to the TV Centre at White City I scanned the children on the pavement. Without a doubt none of them had the maturity and intelligence of Georges Duval. Two mornings later, when I found myself still thinking about Georges, I went up to the research library.