by Reif Larsen
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
When he was thirteen, having outgrown his tutor’s expertise, and being well enough to weather the dangers of the outside world, he requested admission to the Collège Lanessan, in Saigon. Eugenia remained reluctant; she worried not just for her son’s fragile health but about exposing him to Saigon’s colonial aristocracy. Yet André supported the idea: it was evident that in this new world born from the ashes of the Great War, the successful businessman had to possess not just local wisdom but worldly knowledge—mondanités, as the French say. Perhaps he saw a lack of mondanités as one of his own shortcomings—André much preferred to stay at home, tending the books rather than searching out inspiration in some remote corner of the globe. He knew such complacency soon would not be enough: the owner of a plantation in Indochina now needed to understand the shifting markets in Europe just as well as the flooding cycle of the Mekong. Morse’s telegraph, Marconi’s radio, and now the proliferation of Bell’s telephones—which had just begun appearing in the more stylish salons of Saigon—these were all contributing to a swiftly shrinking globe. André was a child of the last century, but his son was coming of age in a new age.
When Jean-Baptiste was fourteen, he made his first journey to Europe. He and Eugenia—who also had never ventured out of the colonies—traveled by steamship to visit Monsieur Pascal Vernon, a distant uncle in Paris. On the occasions when her son was either unable or unwilling to act as her interpreter, Eugenia communicated by using a little writing pad that hung around her neck. Although slightly involved, such a method of communication seemed to curry her favor wherever they went. Tofte-Jebsen claimed that the pad from that trip remained intact many years later, providing a kind of oratory receipt of their travels: “Allons nous asseoir près de la fenêtre?” . . . “Cette crème brûlée est passée” . . . “Pardon, mais que cet homme est bête.”6
Jean-Baptiste’s intoxication with La Ville Lumière was evident in his short (but precise) journal entries. After managing to skip the lines at Notre Dame due to his mother’s “déficience,” he called the famous cathedral “splendide” and “comme un cauchemar plaisant.” He wondered about the similarities of the gargoyles to “les démons d’Angkor.” They also managed to jump the queue at La Tour Eiffel, which he labeled “majestueuse, mais incomplète.” Yet his real attention was drawn back again and again to the nature that cushioned the more famous aspects of the urban landscape. He filled an entire sketchbook with renderings of the city’s trees in autumn—the chestnuts of Montmartre, the long rows of London planes lining the Champs-Élysées, the distinguished canopy of a weeping willow guarding a curve of the Seine like a great Chinese firework frozen in mid-explosion. He came to realize, even before he could articulate the thought, that a place was defined by the manner in which it came up for air.
Tofte-Jebsen lingers (96) on an account of a strange episode that occurred the day before they were to head back home. For the first time since her enforced oral schooling, Eugenia encountered another deaf person, at the Marché aux Fleurs et aux Oiseaux at the Île de la Cité. The woman was a Parisian, out on a Sunday to buy daffodils for her apartment. At first excited for such a meeting, Eugenia animatedly began to sign a barrage of questions and comments, only to be met by confusion. Soon the pad was brought out and it was determined that the woman could decipher only one in three of Eugenia’s signs. The reasons were manifold: L’Épée’s dictionary, from which she had taught herself sign, turned out to be very much out of date, long ago cast away for the more modern and practical LSF (la Langue des Signes Française). She herself had greatly manipulated L’Épée’s turgid system to make it more streamlined, largely abandoning his strict adhesion to oral grammar. On top of this, her own realization of each of L’Épée’s signs, taken from two-dimensional, static diagrams, was a singular interpretation. She had taught herself in isolation, with no one to learn from or to converse with. She had thus invented her own dialect, a dialect so particular as to be incomprehensible to all others. Her language was uniquely her own, an island of marooned expression.
This discovery sent Eugenia into a deep depression, which lasted the entire journey back to Indochina. Not only was she an outcast from the society of the hearing; she was an outcast from her own kind. She vowed never again to venture abroad. La Seule Vérité became her only domain.
In contrast to his mother, Jean-Baptiste could not be contained. After that first taste of Paris, he traveled abroad every summer, initially with Uncle Pascal and then on his own, visiting much of Europe, including those English foothills that he had so often dreamed about. His travels then took him farther afield: to North America, where he visited New York City, Niagara Falls, and the Grand Canyon; to Brazil, where he floated the Amazon and saw a vast array of flora, winged fauna, and flesh-eating fish; and to India, where he fell ill in Calcutta, remaining bedridden for three weeks, suffering from feverish flashbacks to his immobile childhood and the stale, molding odor of his tutor’s breath as he (or she) read to him from Plato’s Republic.
André, at first supportive of his son’s boundless interest in the world, soon grew worried that he might one day leave and never return. It was his hope that Jean-Baptiste would absorb a certain degree of mondanités but then eventually grow tired of such adventures and settle down to the more mundane task of managing the planation. André therefore tolerated his son’s sojourns as long as he attended to his schooling and was home every Christmas.
The schooling, of course, was not a problem—Jean-Baptiste was a naturally brilliant student. When he turned seventeen, he was one of two dozen in the colony offered a place at the Sorbonne.
Once back in the heart of Paris, Jean-Baptiste quickly dropped the course in economics that he had qualified for and instead took up philosophy, specializing in metaphysics, while also making the occasional informal foray into medicinal botany during his free time. He would spend his afternoons in the botanical gardens, splayed out on a bench reading Kant and a young German philosopher named Martin Heidegger.
When his head grew too full with questions of phenomenological hermeneutics, he would stroll through Jardin des Plantes and sketch the curated flora from far-flung lands, including those from his own. The plants’ structural certainty soothed him in the face of great doubt. On each of his annual returns to Indochina, he would bring back a new specimen for the gardens of La Seule Vérité. Eugenia became his horticultural partner in crime, and together they cultivated a collection of more than two hundred exotic plants that rivaled the great botanical gardens of Saigon. Her surreal chromatic paintings of the flowers hung throughout the house, presenting the unsuspecting visitor with a mildly hallucinogenic experience.
In 1931, Jean-Baptiste helped design the Indochina Pavilion at the Colonial Exposition in the Bois de Vincennes. A reconstruction of Angkor Wat’s central tower complex was built next to a Laotian fishing village and an exact copy of La Seule Vérité’s rubber-processing hall, where the latex was squeezed into sheets and then hung to dry. Jean-Baptiste oversaw its re-creation. Forty full-grown hevea trees were shipped in from Brazil and planted in their orderly rows. At first they would not bleed, so a mixture of goat’s milk fortified with flour was concocted to mimic the appearance of fresh latex.7
Fig. 4.3. Pavillon de l’Indochine à L’Exposition Coloniale Internationale de 1931, Bois de Vincennes, Paris
From Tofte-Jebsen, B., Jeg er Raksmey, p. 98
The organizers of the exhibition asked Jean-Baptiste to give several on-site lectures about the biological wonders of Southeast Asia, and it was during one of these lectures, which was halted prematurely by a rare tro
pical downpour, that he sought shelter beneath the Angkor Wat simulacrum with a pretty woman who shyly introduced herself as Leila Cousaine. She was from Normandy. She was in town with her parents for their annual shopping excursion, and a friend had told her about the wonders of the exposition, which she had decided to reconnoiter for herself. She admitted her admiration for his talk and said she had always dreamed of traveling the world but lacked the valor and constitution to do so. Jean-Baptiste noticed immediately that the color of her eyes did not match—her left was a luminous shade of aquamarine and her right was a reddish flint tone that had a way of catching the light at certain angles. He wanted to ask her about this particularity but instead made a hasty and embarrassed dinner invitation for the following evening, which she accepted on the condition that her father gave his consent.
They dined at an art deco brasserie in Montparnasse. The meal was halting and awkward—Jean-Baptiste oscillated between lecturing her on plant species and asking questions that came off as impertinent. After a while, he fell into a kind of half silence marked by inappropriate humming. Leila, clearly intimidated by her partner, spent most of the meal with eyes downcast, answering his queries without enthusiasm. Toward the end, as they waited for a pair of crèmes brûlées that couldn’t come fast enough, Jean-Baptiste, thinking nothing could make the evening go worse, mustered up the nerve to ask her his original question, albeit without asking a question at all.
“Your eyes,” he said.
“My eyes?” she said, glancing up at him, briefly revealing the pair of mismatched wonders before maneuvering her gaze once again to the hem of the tablecloth.
“They are . . .” He drifted. “I’ve never seen them before.”
“Of course you haven’t seen them before. We’ve never met before yesterday, Monsieur de Broglie.”
“Yes,” he said, embarrassed. “I suppose we haven’t. But your eyes are different. That is, they are different from each other.”
“My mother says they make me look wolfish.”
“Wolfish? Heavens, no. They’re beautiful,” he said. “Truly. I could live a thousand years and never see something so beautiful.”
She blushed and flashed him a cautious smile, her first true smile of the evening.
“The Cambodians believe the eyes never change,” he said. “You can go through an infinite number of reincarnations, but your eyes will always remain the same. It’s how we recognize our friends and enemies across time. So perhaps you came from two different people. Or one person and one wolf.”
She laughed, miming a snarl and raising a mock paw. The moment vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
“Will you ever go back?” she asked, recovering. “Back to Indochina, I mean.”
“Of course,” he said, still staring at her lips. “It’s my home. My father and mother are still there. They expect me to come back.”
“Yes, but how do you know it’s your home? You seem so at ease here.”
“I feel at ease here.”
“Then your home is where you were born?”
He shook his head. “Your home is where you will be buried.”
“That’s a little morbid, isn’t it? I mean, for me, a home is where I shall want to live.”
He straightened his napkin. “Forgive me.”
“For what?”
“I’m not used to a lady’s company. I grew up under isolated circumstances. You must have thought me a worldly gentleman, only to be sorely disappointed when you met the insensitive impostor before you.”
“On the contrary,” she said. “But then you must find me so boring. ‘Une petite nonne normande,’ as my sister says.”
“Not at all,” he said quickly. “It’s not every day that you meet a wolf.”
That night—in the transience of that snarl, in the delicate collision of their words—a mutual acknowledgment of need was established. Not quite love, but something more useful, which would eventually grow into a kind of interdependence. On paper, such a thing was not all that different from love.
Leila came to tolerate Jean-Baptiste’s habit of leaving a conversation in midsentence to examine leaf structure and, as it turned out, such tolerance was just enough. They were married in 1933, in the gardens of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, in front of her family and a small collection of scientists and acquaintances from the colonies. Eugenia and André elected not to make the trip.8
During those fleeting years in Paris, as fascism began to rear its ugly head to the east, Jean-Baptiste lived a charmed life of fitful ideas. He started and did not finish a thesis on Heidegger (Dasein, Terreur, et le Regret du Colonialisme) and then started and did not finish a thesis on epiphytic orchid propagation. Everything was captivating from a distance, but as soon as he got too close to a topic, his interest began to wane. He enjoyed dropping in at the laboratories of the Polytechnique and listening to lectures on physics and astronomy by the visiting scholars, because most of what they said he could only marginally understand, and this kept him hungry.
One of these lectures was given in the dead of winter by Georges Lemaître, a bespectacled, portly priest from Belgium who was the first person to propose that the universe was expanding, much to the twin annoyance of the Catholics and Einstein, who both claimed that Lemaître was meddling in territory beyond his comprehension.
Monseigneur Lemaître’s talk at the Polytechnique was on how one might go about calculating the precise age of the universe, an act he did not see as being at odds with his faith. As he put it: “Even God enjoys a birthday party. One common mistake is to attempt to solve scientific problems with religion and religious problems with science. Each must be solved in the state in which it arises.”
Impressed by Jean-Baptiste, who lingered after the lecture and asked several probing questions about measuring stellar luminosity, Lemaître invited him to attend an atomic physics conference in Copenhagen the following week.
Jean-Baptiste took the sleeper up to Denmark, and over the course of four utterly chilly, utterly magical days, he rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest minds of a generation—men like Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli, who were ferociously negotiating the framework of quantum mechanics over stale pints of lager at the Hviids Vinstue, a poorly lit pub that smelled like the bilge of a ship.9
The crew of physicists did not seem to mind that Jean-Baptiste was not a scientist, that he was instead a middling botanist and deficient philosopher who hailed from an Oriental plantation. Such credentials appeared, rather, to gain him credence in their eyes; his place outside of their discipline encouraged them to use him as a confessional booth for their unformed theories. After the day’s formal sessions, he would find himself in intimate interlocution with the men as they strolled through the streets of the city, lit brightly by a constellation of white lanterns, their conversations dancing across a range of quantum theories that would set his head spinning. At the Hviids Vinstue, he was often used as a prop when someone was trying to illustrate a particular point. Sometimes he was an electron, sometimes a quark, sometimes a vast celestial body. They would orbit him in circles, knocking over chairs, spilling beer, laughing at their own audacity, all the while arguing about charge, position, spin. His involvement in these impromptu demonstrations—even simply as a flexible bit of mass—gave him goose bumps. Pauli teasingly referred to him as “Your Highness.” Heisenberg ignored him. Bohr—Bohr was the best of the lot. Bohr knew, in that way that few great men do, exactly how much of the universe could never be understood at all. The limits of the known world did not bother Bohr—instead, he viewed our peaceful coexistence with the unknown as a testament to the capacities of the human mind.
“If you admit you are uncertain,” he said once, “then you are that much closer to certainty.”
Tofte-Jebsen recounts how, on the final evening, the conference members had paid a visit to the university
’s cyclotron, a sleeping giant of a machine that struck Jean-Baptiste as “the altar of the new secular religion” (107). Afterwards, he found himself back at the pub, deep in an argument with Bohr about the nature of free will. The others, exhausted by the week’s negotiations, had already headed home, but Bohr persisted, and Jean-Baptiste got the feeling that it was strictly for his benefit, though he was unsure why such a genius would want to spend any time with a colonial dilettante like himself.
That evening, a pipe had burst in the flat above, and the pub was unusually humid. Every now and then, little drops of condensation would fall upon their heads and into their beer mugs.
“Are you comfortable with complementarity?” Bohr asked him.
“I’m not sure . . .” Jean-Baptiste’s English was excellent, but around Bohr he always felt a bit like a child again.
“Most people aren’t. They don’t want to hear about something being both true and not true at the same time. They don’t want to believe that Schrödinger’s cat can be both dead and alive until the moment they open the box. Most people don’t want to push their minds to accept both possibilities at once. But for me, such concurrence is beautiful—necessary, even. The universe is not based on truth but on possibility.”
Jean-Baptiste took a slow drink from his mug. “But surely there are things that are just true? What about the forces that govern us? Laws? Causality?”
“Causality is a siren. She enchants and she tames,” said Bohr. “Look at Einstein. He’s come undone. He’s trying to explode our framework, and he’s convinced he will, all because he cannot release himself from the temptations of locality. He cannot free himself from If this, then that. Don’t tell me it’s a failure of imagination. Don’t tell me it’s because of the numbers. I’ll tell you what it is: we are confined to consequence. We can survive the now only because we claim to know what comes next. We are terrified of the truth: that by saying If this, we have already destroyed then that.”