‘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.
