Stopping one morning to contemplate the exquisite economy of the Pythagorean Theorem, he challenged himself to discover every day a new proof to demonstrate it. He gave up after a few months (following seventy-six demonstrations) not for want of inspiration but because he was convinced that he could go on like that for years, and that more complex problems – though some of them, such as Fermat’s Last Theorem, were similar – required his attention.
He was twenty years old when he met the woman who was destined to become his wife at the home of a family friend, where she was spending the summer in order to perfect her English. While the guests were soberly pacing the lawns and talking about politics and horse races (the gentlemen) and the latest styles in hats (the ladies), Edward left the manicured gardens and ventured into the woods next to the property where the atmosphere was cool and dim. He walked aimlessly for a while, thinking distractedly about the best way to estimate the number of branches on a tree and then the number of leaves, when he discovered a clearing where a shape was stretched out on the ground.
Wearing a delicate blouse of ecru silk and a skirt of the same fabric, cinched at the waist with a periwinkle sash, with her parasol at her side, she was lying full length in the grass, her ear pinned to the ground. Edward approached cautiously and inquired politely:
“Excuse me, but are you all right?”
The young girl – for she was one, with eyes as blue as the sky, raspberry lips, teeth like pearls – looked at him sharply, and with a finger on her lips to warn him not to make a sound whispered:
“Very well, thank you. I’m listening.”
“And what do you hear?” he asked, his heart beating, murmuring as well.
“I’m fairly certain it’s an F sharp,” she replied calmly, in the prettiest voice in the world.
They smiled. From that moment, in the too rare sunlight of the English countryside, he knew that he loved and would love Garance (for that was her name) until the day he died.
THOUGH GEORGE AND THERESA LOVE HAD hoped their youngest son would make a more brilliant marriage than the one he was entering – rapturously, so it seemed – with this young Frenchwoman with the lilting accent, who seemed to prefer by far the piano over her domestic responsibilities, they did not oppose it. They were aware that Edward too was an imperfect choice and were, in truth, surprised that he was actually considering marrying at all. They had always feared he would end his days alone, surrounded by collections of minerals, odd optical instruments, even animals mounted on walls. They were therefore more than delighted to see him land a most respectable position at King’s College, and to find a small house not far from the University of London and settle there with his young wife, who did not seem at all discouraged by the prospect of such an austere existence.
On the contrary, Garance was enchanted.
They were married on a sunny day in autumn. Seeing her advancing towards him, all blonde and rosy pink in her gown of forget-me-not blue, Edward felt that the planets and stars, whose secrets his young wife swore she could hear, were striking up a celestial nuptial march just for them. Indeed, that evening they escaped from their guests through a secret door and found themselves alone on the grounds of the manor with only trees as their silent witnesses. Looking up, they discovered that the sky was shot through with shimmering colours, as if a magician were taking silk handkerchiefs one by one out of the dark sleeve of the night. Veils of lilac, mint, fuchsia, and vermilion sparkled, luminescent, like marionettes whose strings had been pulled from very high.
“Those clouds are from Mount Pelée,” Edward announced. “They’ve travelled across half the planet and are now over Europe.” Then, more pragmatically: “It’s sulphur that gives them those colours.”
Garance nodded, but she wasn’t fooled: she knew for certain that it was heaven’s gift on their wedding night.
They rented a pretty two-storey townhouse in Pimlico, with high ceilings and pale wood floors, where daylight came in through broad windows. Garance couldn’t wait to set up her piano, a bulky instrument assembled by Nicolas Blanchet himself, which had stood up remarkably well during the crossing of the English Channel. As if he’d wanted a companion for the colossus filling his parlour, Edward bought his bride a harp that quickly found its place in the middle of the room. Sometimes, during the first months, he would enter the parlour in the small hours when the room was filling with the early light of dawn and catch sight of the massive silhouette from the corner of his eye. The curve of the harp’s frame, echoed by the rounded shape of the piano lid, gave him the impression that he was disturbing a secret meeting between a diplodocus and some fabulous dragon.
The other rooms were furnished with odds and ends, old things brought down from the attic of the Love home where they’d been gathering dust for generations and that Garance enjoyed bringing back to life the way one cultivates a garden. She had spread on the floor two kilims unearthed at some second-hand store; they were threadbare but she swore that the faded colours created richer, deeper shades than the Turkish rugs that were the latest thing. In front of the windows she arranged bushy ferns that traced bright shadows on the white walls, and in the bedroom set two potted orchids side by side. At night, their two flowers, bulbous, ample and velvety, spotted with pinks and purple, mingled their heady perfumes.
Edward’s first experiences of teaching – which were also, incidentally, his last – were disappointing. On the morning of his inaugural class he arrived an hour early, arranged around him the volumes, scribblers, textbooks, even the globe he’d brought, and took a close look at the vast amphitheatre soon to be filled with his students. The tiers were arranged in a semicircle, climbing steeply from the teaching platform; a row of windows opening on his right provided a glimpse of tree branches, as the classroom was located on the second floor of a three-storey grey stone pavilion. Once he’d completed a quick examination of the premises, Edward went back to a particularly thorny question that had been bothering him for days and had even wakened him several times in the night. Each time he woke thinking the solution was near, practically within reach, but each time, when sleep drifted away, it had escaped him. He began to jot things in one of his notepads, turning the pages as soon as they were full without rereading them. When he ran out of space, he finally picked up a piece of chalk to continue the demonstration on the board, covering with formulas the words Augustus Edward Love, Natural Philosophy, which he’d written there for his students. Those students were starting to arrive in small groups, taking their places, opening their exercise books and waiting for nine o’clock.
Nine o’clock sounded and nothing happened. Engrossed in his demonstration, Edward, who had shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, went on filling the boards with marks, some as incomprehensible to his first-year students as the alphabet of a foreign language. Two or three, full of goodwill, did their best to transcribe what they saw before their eyes but gave up after just a few minutes. They opened newspapers, began Latin translations, and at ten o’clock the sixty or so young men silently left the classroom while Edward, who still hadn’t turned around, went on writing, wrapped now in a cloud of chalk dust.
The head of the mathematics department came and took him to the teachers’ lounge, a room with massive leather armchairs and sofas and subdued lighting. It was dominated by a huge stone fireplace that had on its chimney, engraved in block letters, the words: PROVE EVERYTHING, a motto that seemed aimed at him specifically. He wavered for a moment under that burden, seated across from the department head who asked for black tea, then set out to explain in a kind, fatherly tone tinged with impatience, that Edward must undertake to address himself to his pupils and to explain mathematical and philosophical notions to them in such a way that they would understand them and could pass their examinations. He pronounced certain words slowly, articulating them as if Edward were hard of hearing or simple-minded. Mortified, the young teacher assented. The second class was slightly less disastrous. Only twenty-three of the young men who�
�d appeared the week before returned that Tuesday morning, most of them looking sullen. With nearly two dozen pairs of eyes focused on him, Edward started the roll call and limp hands went up as he read out the names on his list. He marked an X next to the absent, noticing without realizing it that 62.666 percent of his students were missing.
Those seated in front of him, wearing the regulation grey jacket and trousers, white shirt, and bowtie, seemed resigned.
“Welcome to this class in natural philosophy, where we shall study in particular the relations between nature and mathematics,” said Edward without taking a breath. From the tiers of seats, no reaction. Next came a lengthy explanation in which he did his best to present in simple terms the necessary relationship joining mathematics to the natural world from which it stemmed and that it could at the same time depict, model, and explain. A young man in the front row yawned. Those sitting by the windows were looking outside, where squirrels chased each other in the branches of the oak trees. The rest were staring blankly at him.
“Very well,” he concluded. “First and foremost, an exercise that will allow me to assess your knowledge and your skills.” Quickly, he wrote an equation, a sublime variation on the Pythagorean Theorem. As a child and an adolescent, he had spent hours admiring its simple harmony and exploring its seemingly endless ramifications.
an + bn = cn
“Some of you may be familiar with Fermat’s Last Theorem …” he ventured. If that was so no one breathed a word. A tall, thin student in the back row was staring at the door with a kind of desperation, as if cursing the moment he’d come through it. “It couldn’t be simpler,” Edward went on, speaking to his chalk. “This equation is true if n equals 1 or 2. For any other whole number other than zero, it is false. If you would, gentlemen, figure a way to prove it.”
It was of course impossible, at least in so short a time; generations of mathematicians and scholars of all kinds had done their best to find a way to demonstrate the theorem for which Fermat had jotted hastily in his copy of Arithmetica that there existed a simple proof which he could not set out in detail because the narrow margins of the book were too small to contain it. Edward himself had tried for nights at a time but had come up with nothing satisfactory. What was surprising, now that he thought about it, was that no one had ever thought of challenging Fermat’s claim. Maybe he tended to embroider the truth. Or he’d wanted to play a trick on someone, or else had been quite simply wrong. Be that as it may, Edward was curious to see what the twenty-three students in front of him would do with it during the hour granted them.
At the end of the class, all placed the fruit of their labour on his desk, some handing him thick bundles, others a single sheet. The results varied: an unsettling number of students maintained, in a manner more or less woolly but some apparently sincere, that they’d been able to resolve the enigma (one punctuated his demonstration with a triumphant QED); others admitted defeat after mere minutes and had been content to spend the rest of the hour doodling (among them was one who had handed in a rather accomplished drawing of a squirrel eating a hazelnut); three had submitted a perfectly blank sheet; and surprisingly, two had been able to prove how the equation was false when n equalled 2.
At the third class there were only fourteen students facing Edward. He returned to each of them the exercise from the week before, with annotations and comments. (The student who’d executed the drawing of a squirrel received a mere passing grade for his demonstration but, moved by a need for justice, Edward had given him a “very good” for his sketch.) When he started to explain why none of them – regardless of what they thought – had been able to demonstrate Fermat’s Last Theorem, he suddenly had a brand-new hunch. It was as if he had always considered the problem in the form of a two-dimensional image that had all at once acquired a third one, leaving the page, as it were, and floating in the air. He could now observe the formula from angles whose existence until then he could not even imagine. Leaving his explanations unfinished, he undertook immediately to note on the board whatever came to mind. Stoically, the students took out journals, Latin translations, and drawings of fauna they had observed, and busied themselves with them till the end of the class.
The department head came back a few hours later, in a foul mood. “I thought we’d already discussed this,” he said to Edward, who was gazing, motionless, at the board now entirely covered with formulas, calculations, and notes. “Your task is to prepare the students to pass their exams. Not to make them waste their time on insoluble theorems and then ignore them. I do not care to arrive at this point with my teachers, but things cannot go on like this … Unless we are aware of a profound change in your teaching methods, we will regretfully …” Noticing that Edward wasn’t listening he broke off and looked up at the board where were written the first steps of a demonstration at once simple and subtle and perfectly elegant. For a moment it took his breath away.
Getting his wits back, the department head inhaled deeply and suggested amiably, as if it were what he’d been intending to propose from the outset: “Why not forget about classes for a few months, dear colleague, and devote yourself instead to research, since that seems to suit you better.” Only at that moment did Edward seem to become aware of his presence.
“Excuse me?” he said, blinking.
Edward didn’t give a hoot that Garance had not yet found a servant to fix their meals and clean the parlour, where everything aside from the two instruments was covered with a thin coating of dust. Never would he have considered reproaching her for not seeing to it that curtains were hung at the windows, or not doing the food shopping, nor did he make a fuss over eating cold ham twice a day every day of the week.
The house on Alderney Street was a cheerful shambles where notebooks and scraps of paper darkened with formulas and fragments of musical scores littered armchairs, tables, and counters, along with small stones in various shapes and colours. Edward collected these and presented them to his wife as others would have offered some silly emerald necklace or a dull diamond ring: tourmaline, which when heated became all by itself a magnet; a tiger’s eye with shimmering stripes; two sorts of feldspar, which she liked even more when he told her their names were respectively moonstone and sunstone. Each possessed its own crystalline voice. Of them all, however, her favourite was obsidian. This was a piece of vitrified lava, of a black as dense as the darkness of a hundred nights superimposed in fine layers, mirror smooth, sharp, at once the opposite and the sister of ice. Alone among the stones it was silent, as if the fire that had given birth to the mineral had at the same time snuffed out the breath that lived within.
These stones were to be found on chests of drawers, on carpets, even in their shoes or between their sheets where Garance gathered them. She liked to make them shine brightly in the sunlight and to turn them over and over in her palm until they were exactly the same temperature as her fingers. At the same time, Edward was trying to decipher the musical scores with their scattering of small black marks, just as he used to study the equations of Euler and Gauss. He suspected they described a phenomenon that he had a hunch led if not to the answer, then at least to the question that had been bothering him ever since childhood, even though twenty years later, he still did not know how to name it. Like its occupants, the small house was suspended between heaven and earth, between music and mineral.
GARANCE DETECTED THE SECRET SONG IN ALL things, the intimate, hidden voice; equally alive and inanimate, multiple and singular, infinitely large and ultra small, all in the same way. While she adored music it was not for rest or entertainment or even as a pleasure for the senses, but rather because it offered a respite, substituting a series of predictable, organized sounds for the perpetual flurry she lived in from morning to night, and that followed her into her dreams: the silky swishing of a bird’s wing by which you recognized it as much as by its song; the silent call of the snail; the minuscule rustle of a blade of grass bowing in the wind; the pattering of raindrops, each unique, like snowf
lakes; the tiny sound print of water on earth; the minute crackling of a shoe on the gravel underfoot, that’s due not so much to the pebble rubbing on the sole as to inner tensions that pass through rock and hold it together. All forces similar to those that drove the stars above their heads, the singular song of each reverberating in the night, each echoed by those of all the others, similar too to the muted underground rumbling of the planets.
One day Edward asked her to describe that harmony of the spheres. She replied with a question: “Have you ever heard a whale sing?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” she admitted. “But I’ve heard it described. It’s a strange cry like a combination of many voices, and in it you hear all together water, salt, bones, and flesh, a cry that’s at once a lament, a love song, and an invitation to play.”
“But the whales are alive,” Edward objected. “Heavenly bodies are inanimate.”
“But they still turn, don’t they? They attract and repel one another, they’re born and one day they will die.”
“I meant, they haven’t all been given the gift of life.”
“I know what you meant. But maybe our definition of life is too narrow.”
She thought about that for a moment, then went to the cupboard to fetch eight crystal goblets the elder Mrs. Love had brought them, horrified by the absence of proper stemware in the home of her son and daughter-in-law. She filled each one to a different height and made them chime by striking them gently with her fingernail.
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