The Fractalist Read online

  Léon and I were Szolem’s guests there for a month in the summer of 1937, when the house was brand-new, then again in 1938 and 1939. Our first visit remains especially vivid because sweet Aunt Gladys had to teach proper French table manners to her nephews.

  When the war started, Szolem, insisting on being treated like Everyman, refused a desk job appropriate to his Collège de France professorship and was instead drafted as a private in an antiaircraft unit. He, Aunt Gladys, and their son, Jacques, moved to Tulle—close to the Eyrolles and where there was a high school. Shortly after, Léon and I joined them. Just before Paris fell in June 1940, my parents joined us—with slim savings, as Father’s business partner had fled with the cash box and the bank balance.

  Pierre and Louise Eyrolle provided a shield for us, which we learned about later. Deep local roots gave them privileged access to the local elite, including a powerful political boss whom I never met. The unsinkable Henri Queuille (1884–1970) seemed to have been a minister in every prewar French cabinet; but in 1943, when German occupation had extended to Vichy, he could no longer help. He managed a brief comeback as prime minister after 1945, when English speakers called him Kelly—pretty close.

  The Eyrolles always remained our close friends. Over fifty years later, in 1992, I was the guest of honor at a centennial related to the lycée in Tulle. Yvonne “Nini” Eyrolle Péchadre, a retired teacher, was the last of the clan. Aliette and I—together with Léon and his wife, Nicole—paid an emotional visit to the Eyrolle house. It sat on a steep hill with endless staircases and several garden terraces (now connected by a bridge to a new apartment house with an elevator). Through this grand old lady, we thanked again—and for the last time—all the Eyrolles for their active friendship and bravery. Eternal thanks.

  During the fall of France in June 1940, Szolem saw little action and was demobilized in Tulle. Soon after that, he moved with his family to the Rice Institute—now University—in Houston, Texas. Earlier, after getting his Ph.D., he had spent a year at Rice, and they invited him back.

  The agent of his departure was the remarkable Louis Rapkine (1904–48). He had worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, so he knew the French scene very well. But he was Canadian by birth and hence could travel freely. He had watched as liberals, Jews, and their spouses were expelled from Germany by Hitler and networks were established to provide new lives in the West. Almost single-handedly—though assisted financially by a Rothschild—he helped many of those who had suddenly become threatened in France. This even included Jacques Hadamard. Almost all returned by 1948, and the renewal of French science was greatly aided by the persistence and ingenuity of this suddenly privileged foreigner.

  When Szolem and his family came to say good-bye before leaving for Houston, everyone wondered silently whether it was not really an adieu.

  Life in Tulle

  Dirt-cheap lodging was found on the top floor of a small tenement on flat land down the river near the armory. Welfare for refugees provided basic furniture. Léon and I slept in the packed kitchen/dining room heated by the Franklin stove that served to prepare food. Our parents’ room was heated by an open door and cooled by three walls made of plastered straw exposed to the hill-country elements. In winter, it displayed ice stalactites. There was a Turkish toilet on the ground floor, one cold-water tap in the front room, and—needless to say—no bathroom.

  We settled there into a life of the most extreme parsimony, managing with a level of ingenuity that my brilliant and resilient parents—rich in experience from previous catastrophes—could contrive when forced into inactivity. Mother regained reflexes acquired during earlier periods of great scarcity. She deprived herself to let her sons grow and became uncharacteristically gaunt.

  Paper was unbelievably scarce and never thrown away if it could be reused. Cigarettes and alcohol were tightly rationed and were bartered for more essential provisions like bread and cooking oil. So I didn’t smoke and learned about wine only later in life. Knowing some farmers added to our food supply. Paid entertainment was out of the question. I often walked by the sole cinema in town but never saw its inside. A radio set would hog electricity—a wasteful luxury. Travel was restricted to matters of life and death.

  Even when there was no networking to do, Father moved from shop to shop, hunting for bargains and unrationed food. He fixed all kinds of stuff—like broken bicycles with no gearbox. I long kept a chair he found on the street and repaired and a knife for which he replaced a broken handle. He was extremely skilled with his hands and the tools he scrounged. Watching and helping him taught me to be handy as well. He read voraciously, always taking notes. Mindful of what fate might bring next, he used battered old books to learn to write English (“just in case”); a few of his numerous workbooks miraculously survived in a leather briefcase I found years later.

  At rare intervals, the occupying German army allowed small shipments from Paris to Tulle. Our intermediary was Marie Bart, a lady who had helped raise Aunt Gladys. A heavy suitcase she managed to get through seemed valuable, but it was my collection of travel brochures. Another suitcase, filled with fine china—a wedding gift to my parents that had somehow made it through several moves—opened when Mlle Bart took it on the metro, and the well-traveled china splintered into rubble. Mother just shrugged. A few pieces survived, which I still have.

  Another remaining item was a thousand-dollar bill. Distant U.S. relatives—who could hardly afford it, bless their hearts—had sent it as insurance in case of emergency or a prolonged war. We had feared that the bill was a fake, but it turned out to be real. During the postwar mess, it remained as insurance, but in 1947 it switched from saving lives to saving a penniless student. I inherited it, put it into a savings bank, and later put it to good use, thankful that fate had never forced a test.

  Lycée Edmond Perrier and Mlle Tronchon

  Shortly before we arrived, the locally financed Collège de Tulle had become the nationally financed Lycée Edmond Perrier, named for an alumnus and noted naturalist. I recall its buildings looking rather elegant—as confirmed on a later visit. It is located on a hill reached either by a meandering road or by those endless Tulle staircases that winter covered with treacherous ice—no salt was used.

  The old staff was upgraded by attrition, but was far below the standards of the Lycée Rollin in Paris. The best teachers had been part of the staff of a major lycée expelled from Alsace, which Hitler had incorporated into the Reich.

  The physics program was dull—with a negative effect on physics research in France. My education in physics came mostly from books on “how things work.” My gift for mathematics was noticed. I found it easy, but it did not become essential to me until a later self-discovery. I was far more fascinated by history—learned equally from books and newspapers.

  My unforgettable first French teacher, M. Rouger, was outmatched by my last—Mademoiselle Marie-Thérèse Tronchon (1907–97). She guided me through French literature to a breadth and depth well beyond any high school program. She also taught me how to write—including eighteenth-century pastiche, a skill that fell victim to the adage “Use it or lose it.” Professional scientific writing can afford to be poorly written—scientific communication is by nature overwhelmingly verbal, and the audience is well defined. But I wanted to write for an audience that was mixed and not known in advance, so writing skills mattered. For a long period of time, I thought I was writing English, but I was really writing translated French. Mlle Tronchon mentioned casually one day that the English teacher knew little English, but she knew it well and would make her bottomless personal library available to me.

  Formal and Informal Libraries

  More important to me than school was the public library, which occupied the top floor of a cheap walk-up apartment building. Its sole librarian was kind and helpful—yet preached the German cause to anybody who would listen. The collection came from a variety of sources. One day, someone from high authority stopped by. Even though the war was raging, he
would drop in every so often to inspect a private reserve of books listed on some special register—probably inherited from a church or abbey. Those books had been protected from damage by readers, but not from a leaking roof—official reports were submitted, but the books were not saved.

  The Benoit Serres Catholic Bookstore near the church also served as my informal lending library. I trained myself to read a paperback without breaking its spine, leaving smudges, or otherwise revealing that it was no longer new. Ostensibly, I was buying books, being disappointed, and exchanging them. The owner knew me well (everybody did in Tulle), saw what was happening, but never said enough is enough. A good man.

  Several out-of-date math books came into my hands from persons who had saved them from their student years and even their parents’ student years. Invariably, they included masses of illustrations of shapes that later books omitted as a matter of principle. From these outdated books, I built in my mind a zoo of shapes that was to help immensely during the winter of 1944, when I was preparing for the very difficult mathematics exams at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon.

  Baccalaureate High School Examination

  The baccalaureate marks the end of college, but what is college? England and the United States settled on the age bracket of eighteen to twenty-two years; France settled on twelve to eighteen. In my time, there was a written and oral exam, plus a qualifying exam in French at the end of the junior year. The French bac was nominally the entrance examination to the open-admission university system. Hence, it was somewhat formal and was chaired by a professor from the region’s university. In my case, this meant the University of Clermont-Ferrand, and the professor who came to chair the ordeal had been Szolem’s colleague. Only later did I realize that he was a noted partisan of the Vichy regime—he could have easily denounced me but did nothing of the kind.

  The committee also weighed the evaluations of the junior- and senior-year teachers. The philosophy teacher disliked my constant objections, but the key teachers were very positive. The principal’s comments for the junior year were, “Bound to pass brilliantly, an exceptionally gifted and hardworking student,” and for the senior year, “An exceptional candidate. Bound to pass brilliantly.”

  To build up suspense before announcing the results, the chairman fidgeted with his papers, then read the list backward, so my name was called last. I had a summa—reportedly the first in the school’s history. Léon had come to witness the occasion and to provide moral support. We rushed home with the news. My parents saw us out the window, and from the third-floor landing Father called, “How did it go?” “Mention très bien.” Like an echo, he responded, “Très bien.”

  I had performed as expected. We had no party. Nothing was said. I recall vividly a pang of regret; we all understood perfectly what it meant, but my heart ached. I never saw my parents celebrate. They may have never done so, or forgotten how—certainly they did not teach me anything along those lines.

  I have no doubt that Father went around quietly making sure that every person who could possibly matter knew that I was very special. He had fallen into the habit of repeating to everyone a statement of the mathematician Henri Poincaré to the effect that in most fields a person can be trained to become an expert, but mathematicians must be born. Times were tough, and this was not a matter of bragging, but of survival. The chronicles of the war in Eastern Europe included a growing number of stories in which a would-be “butcher” is oversupplied with potential victims and a person perceived to be special is somehow spared. Father must have felt it was very bad to be overly conspicuous, but very good to be seen as rare and special. This attitude, which he probably brought from Warsaw, created in me an elevated level of commitment and ambition.

  One outcome we had desperately hoped would come from this summa was immediate and stark: an increased chance of survival. It was a new ace in hand, and all that mattered was how it was going to help in forsaken little Tulle. Its nearness to the University of Clermont-Ferrand had been, for Szolem, Tulle’s greatest asset, and everybody felt that I could beat the quota system. But it was too far, too dangerous, and too expensive. A classmate who went to Clermont kept me informed. The final examination included two very easy problems, which I saw instantly to be a single problem stated in two different ways. Apparently, few students noticed.

  Lifetime Friendship with Pierre Roubinet

  Pierre Roubinet and I became classmates in Tulle late in 1939. I remember distinctly how we met. The buildings of the Lycée Edmond Perrier had been converted to a field hospital, and our grade was exiled to the site of a recently closed parochial school. On the first day of school, Pierre approached me, an obvious newcomer, and we began chatting. I soon found out that he had come from a Catholic school that could not afford the upper grades and did not fear sending its ambitious graduates to the secular state-run lycée. In one of our first exchanges, we looked up the history of the French Revolution in the textbooks that our two schools used in the previous grade. The accounts seemed to involve two entirely different countries.

  Pierre’s tribe and mine knew each other only by reputation—a pretty dismal one to begin with. But soon after we started chatting, reputations ceased to matter. We became close friends, and still go out of our way to visit each other whenever possible and keep in touch by telephone. Below is a picture of Pierre, on the left, me, and Léon in Tulle.

  (Illustration Credit 4.2)

  When we grew up and had families, our friendship extended to Pierre’s wife, Claude, and my wife, Aliette. It was also inherited by his elder son, Martin, and my elder son, Laurent. Sadly, on a bike tour, they stopped for a swim and Laurent watched Martin be killed by a powerboat. Pierre and Claude’s deep and serene Catholicism helped them survive this horror.

  With Pierre and only a few others, I have the uncanny impression of carrying on a long conversation that keeps being interrupted, introducing new issues, and returning to old ones without ever losing an element of strong continuity. My fond hope is that it will continue until we are parted by death.

  Pierre’s parents ran an electrical supply store on the Quai. His father was made a war prisoner in 1940, but he got out and became a leader in the Resistance after we had left Tulle. So did Pierre, and one day after the war I asked him about the fate of the classmate whose sister was the prefecture employee who had deliberately displaced our file. The classmate had been loudly pro-German but seemed too weak to ever become a true villain. Pierre responded that he shared my feeling, and that in 1944 he made a point of arresting that classmate himself. What for? To tell him that he had been despicable but not a criminal. But if brought to court in the heat of the liberation, he would probably be imprisoned, then come back to live in his neighborhood and perpetuate the war hatreds forever. He set that classmate free, urging him to leave France for five years. The advice was followed, the malefactor’s rage subsided over time, and he returned home as a neighbor one could live with. I was deeply impressed by Pierre.

  Half a century later, in 1999, I was invited to address an exclusive scientific meeting in the Vatican and to bring Aliette. Surprised and delighted, we received an audience with Pope John Paul II. First we snaked through the theatrical private apartments, the inner sanctum, enormous rooms with little furniture, splendid paintings by Raphael, and Swiss guards dressed in uniforms designed by Michelangelo. Priests, bishops, and cardinals were all over, ranks being marked by subtle ribbons. All that pomp and circumstance was crying out to be reported to Pierre. Brushing up on the teachings of our French teacher, Mlle Tronchon, I found that my ability to write in eighteenth-century French had sadly decayed, but I did my best.

  A few weeks later, Pierre responded with an unexpected tale. The countryside near Tulle to which he had retired had few inhabitants and a very few overwhelmed country priests, shuttling every Sunday between masses in all-but-deserted churches. Having become their resident lay spiritual leader, Pierre read them my letter, hoping they would be amused. Quite the contrary—they criticized
me for consorting with His Holiness! Pierre defended me as having been merely a witness, not a coconspirator.

  5

  On to Lyon: Tighter Occupation and Self-Discovery, 1943–44

  FROM 1940 TO 1942, life had gotten increasingly difficult. Still, we were not helpless refugees in a hostile land. In its narrow hollow, Tulle was out of the way and unnoticed when the Wehrmacht occupied southern France in 1942. The only nice hotel on the Quai became the seat of a rarely seen Kommandatur. A year went by with nothing worse than alerts that rushed us to safe houses. Léon finished high school. Then, one fateful day in the fall of 1943, our dear friend Monsieur Eyrolle dropped by nearly in tears with the news that his friend—that unsinkable politician Henri Queuille—had lost all influence and was himself threatened. That was the first time I heard who had been our anonymous protector in Tulle.

  Now that we were on our own, life became much more dangerous. To keep body and soul together, most of my Jewish friends shared the risks by staying together. True to our antiherding instinct, our family decided it was best to split up: the boys on their own, and the parents on theirs.

  Toolmaker in Périgueux Has a Very Close Call

  Most fortunately—as happens every so often—an “Angel” appeared from nowhere, who Father could call on for help. On this occasion, we needed fake identification to get out of Tulle. Surely, this intermediary was chosen and paid for by some charity. But such help could not possibly have been given to everybody, and there was no way Father could have paid for it. The intermediary may have been the rabbi of Brive-la-Gaillarde, whom Father lobbied to help his elder son, whom he credited with every imaginable gift. Few aspects of that time give reason for regret, but I forgot the names of the charity and the Angel. I wonder who else received help.