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.
As I turned through the clippings, going back twenty years, I made an interesting discovery. Starting in 1948, I found that a major news story about a child prodigy came up once every two years. The last celebrity had been Bobby Silverberg, a fifteen-year-old from Tampa, Florida. The photographs in the Look, Paris-Match and Oggi profiles might have been taken of Georges Duval. Apart from the American setting, every ingredient was the same: the press conference, TV cameras, presiding officials, the high-school principal, doting mother — and the young genius himself, this time with a crew-cut and nothing to hide that high bony skull. There were two college degrees already passed, postgraduate fellowships offered by MIT, Princeton and CalTech.
And then what?
‘That was nearly three years ago,’ I said to Judy Walsh, my secretary. ‘What’s he doing now?’
She flicked through the index cards, then shook her head. ‘Nothing. I suppose he’s taking another degree at a university somewhere.’
‘He’s already got two degrees. By now he should have come up with a faster-than-light drive or a method of synthesizing life.’
‘He’s only seventeen. Wait until he’s a little older.’
‘Older? You’ve given me an idea. Let’s go back to the beginning — 1948.’
Judy handed me the bundle of clippings. Life magazine had picked up the story of Gunther Bergman, the first postwar prodigy, a seventeenyear-old Swedish youth whose pale, over-large eyes stared out from the photographs. An unusual feature was the presence at the graduation ceremony at Uppsala University of three representatives from the Nobel Foundation. Perhaps because he was older than Silverberg and Georges Duval, his intellectual achievements seemed prodigious. The degree he was collecting was his third; already he had done original research in radioastronomy, helping to identify the unusual radio-sources that a decade later were termed ‘quasars’.
‘A spectacular career in astronomy seems guaranteed. It should be easy to track him down. He’ll be, what?, thirtyseven now, professor at least, well on his way to a Nobel Prize.’
We searched through the professional directories, telephoned Greenwich Observatory and the London Secretariat of the World Astronomical Federation.
No one had heard of Gunther Bergman.
‘Right, where is he?’ I asked Judy when we had exhausted all lines of inquiry. ‘For heaven’s sake, it’s twenty years; he should be world-famous by now.’
‘Perhaps he’s dead.’
‘That’s possible.’ I gazed down pensively at Judy’s quizzical face. ‘Put in a call to the Nobel Foundation. In fact, clear your desk and get all the international directories we can up here. We’re going to make the Comsats sing.’
Three weeks later, when I carried my bulky briefcase into Charles Whitehead’s office, there was an electric spring in my step.
Charles eyed me warily over his glasses. ‘James, I hear you’ve been hard on the trail of our missing geniuses. What have you got?’
‘A new programme.’
‘New? We’ve already got Georges Duval listed in Radio Times.’
