Simone’s notebooks are sent to her parents, who lug them from one country to another, all through their wartime migrations, from New York to Brazil, then to Switzerland, and then at last back to Paris, where the apartment on rue Auguste-Comte has been stripped of its furniture. All that remains is a large framed wall mirror, so tarnished it barely returns their reflections, not that they’re inclined to look. They ease into the old rooms, now slowly molting a fur of dust and vacancy, everywhere shadows—unexpected traces, seen from the corner of an eye if never dead-on, of the other rooms they’ve taken and left since they departed these, the hotels and apartments and the camp in Morocco where Simone sat all day in that wooden chair.
There’s a trail of dead leaves along a windowsill, a desiccated scrap of orange peel, a smell of kerosene. They heave open the casements, lift the limp clothing from their trunks. They buy beds and tables and lamps. And then, once everything is in order, to the extent that it can be in order, they start on the notebooks: every day Bernard and Selma, not quite ruined, sit across from each other at the wooden dining table and copy their daughter’s thoughts, line by line, from her original notebooks into a series of blank accounting ledgers. Two bent heads, two pairs of eyeglasses. They follow along with their fingers, mouth her words as they write.
Having outlived her, having to swallow daily this fact that won’t stay down, everywhere they go they find the same bleak streets, the same wrecking balls of memory. Maybe they wouldn’t even remember whose idea it was to transcribe the notebooks. They’re so steady in their efforts that for a long time their granddaughter Sylvie, when she comes to visit, concludes that this work of copying is their job. And really she’s right, it is their job, though no one has hired them to do it. They’ve become their daughter’s most diligent students, reading her, glimpsing her between the lines.
(How she went stomping through doorways.)
They keep the original notebooks and the copies in a cabinet in the living room, where other people might keep linens or vases or playing cards.
(A stub of pencil between her lips as she read the newspaper. Or at work in the other room, calling to them that she would come out to eat in just a moment. J’arrive!)
But would you, could anyone, want this? That in the event of your death your parents would slowly, laboriously copy the contents of your notebooks into other notebooks?
(Her face when she listened to music.)
(Her little hands.)
Day after day.
Philolaus of Croton was said to have been the first to reveal in writing the beliefs of the Pythagoreans. He was also said to have conjectured the existence of a planet no one had seen: since the number ten was, in the Pythagorean view, the most perfect number, and only nine heavenly bodies were known (the earth, the moon, the sun, and six planets), he postulated a tenth one, an invisible planet. A counter-earth.
According to one story his work was plagiarized, by none other than Plato. There is also a theory that many of the surviving fragments of his writing may not be his writing but instead a forgery, produced much later by someone familiar with Aristotle’s account of Pythagorean thought.
One way or another, posterity has linked him to stolen ideas.
Counter-children, counter-trees, counter-courtyards, counter-dishes, counter-dogs?
Simone would allude to him repeatedly in her last notebooks, that is to say, she invoked the “Philolaus” who authored the texts, who may or may not have been the true Philolaus. She had a way in the notebooks of cycling through what she knew, returning again and again to certain lodestones of her thinking. Passages from the Bible, from the ancient Greeks, fragments by which she recalled herself.
Sometimes she just wrote the name “Philolaus”—an invocation of the idea (stolen or not) that mathematical truth was, in those ancient times, inseparable from spiritual truth, that mathematics was a bridge to the divine.
“And all things that can be known contain number,” wrote Philolaus, or the imposter writing as Philolaus. “Without this nothing can be thought or known.”
She kept turning over math in her mind. In those late writings there are not only notes on the history of algebra but pages of actual calculations in trigonometry and combinatorics. At the same time, she considered math from the outside, wrote of math as a model of certainty, math as an image of divine things.
She repeated to herself what she’d written privately to her brother—that contemporary mathematicians had roamed too far off course. The reign of algebra, she would say, is like the reign of finance: Just as money has gummed up the relationship between work and its products, so math too has become divorced from the material world. “The relation of the sign to the thing being signified is being destroyed, the game of exchanges between signs is being multiplied of itself and for itself,” she wrote.
Ultimately she wanted to think her way past thinking. For her, the ultimate goal, the thing for which math trains us, is to surpass the part of our brain that does math, to transcend reason, even to transcend time.
“One needs to have traversed the perpetual duration of time within a finite period of time,” she wrote. “In order that this contradiction may be possible it is necessary that the part of the soul which is on the level of time—the part that reasons discursively and measures—should be destroyed.”
Logic sometimes makes monsters, Poincaré said.
In the final chapter of his memoir, André tells of receiving the cable that announced his sister’s death, a telegram that would forever remain, as he put it, etched in his mind. All he says of his reaction is that it was suppressed.
“How can I describe my grief?” he wrote. “But I did not have the luxury of indulging it; it was up to me to inform my parents, and I did not feel equal to the task.”
It could be an accident of timing that the memoir, though he wrote it late in life, concludes soon after Simone’s death, that the years of his apprenticeship, as he construed it, happened to roughly coincide with the years she was alive. Or not an accident and yet not the sole reason he would’ve bracketed his memories in that way: it was the sum of everything he experienced over the course of the war—prison, the military, emigration, the birth of his first child, and the death of his sister—that caused him to divide his life into before and after.
Still, I wonder whether his very mode of remembering might have altered after he lost her, once his first and best witness was gone. Decades later, responding to an interviewer who asked him why he had confined his autobiography to his first forty years, he said, “I had no story to tell about my life after that.”
No story, even though after that, in 1946, he and Eveline had a second daughter, Nicolette, and after that, in 1949, he published a paper, “Numbers of Solutions of Equations in Finite Fields,” laying out what would become known as the Weil conjectures. Not just an achievement but a landmark, setting a course for algebraic geometry to follow for the rest of the century. (A fresh set of equipment had to be invented in order to verify the conjectures—the proofs were assembled, over time, by Bernard Dwork, then by Alexander Grothendieck, and finally by Pierre Deligne.)
Yet he had nothing more to say about himself and sneered at the “very boring” autobiographies some of his peers had written, which seemed to him mere litanies of their academic appointments and the theorems they’d proved.
Simone was “naturally bright and full of mirth,” André would write, “and she retained her sense of humor even when the world had added on a layer of inexorable sadness.” As adults, he noted, they’d had few serious conversations.
“But if the joys and sorrows of her adolescence were never known to me at all, if her behavior later on often struck me (and probably for good cause) as flying in the face of common sense, still we remained always close enough to one another so that nothing about her really came as a surprise to me—with the sole exception of her death. This I did not expect, for I confess that I had thought her indestructible.”
When does the story of a life end? Simone went on to a posthumous existence that she wouldn’t have anticipated: she became famous, an intellectual celebrity in France and abroad, her work published and translated and admired by the likes of T. S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, Albert Camus, Elizabeth Hardwick, Czesław Miłosz, Susan Sontag, and Iris Murdoch. Having written so relentlessly and died so young, she acquired, after death, the burnish of genius cut short, an Elliott Smith for the Partisan Review set. Her fans were intellectuals unmoored from tradition and shaken by the atrocities of war; maybe she spoke to a desire for some (necessarily cryptic, necessarily tragic) sense of what it all meant, a wish, even as they distanced themselves from the religions of their parents, to conceive of a philosophically respectable spiritual life, to rehabilitate the idea of the soul.
Not everyone was deferential. “The life of this remarkable woman still intrigues me while much of what she writes, naturally, is ridiculous to me,” pronounced Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to a friend who’d sent her a collection of Simone’s writings. “Her life is almost a perfect blending of the Comic and the Terrible, which two things may be opposite sides of the same coin.”
Simone was more often quasi-canonized as a kind of genius or dismissed as a nutjob than she was recognized as something in between, as human. I suppose she herself bears some of the blame for this, determined as she was to detach herself as much as possible from ordinary personhood.
Outside of mathematical circles André was never known in his adopted country. When an English translation of his memoir appeared in 1992, it was reviewed only in scientific publications. As a public matter, his story ended well before his death, while Simone’s demise got the ball rolling. In this century, though, you might say there’s been, if not a reversal, then a leveling: Simone’s fame and influence have dwindled, while her brother’s mathematical discoveries remain in place, struts supporting later advances made by others.
Sylvie Weil also published a memoir, Chez les Weil, about her father and her aunt and her own life in the shadow of all that genius. She writes of meeting a man who’d known Simone in London during the war and who remembered her, in specific and convincing detail, as fragile and tired and shy and isolated—which came as a shock to Sylvie, so different was his description from the aunt whom her father and grandparents had remembered, Simone as indestructible, as a force of nature.
The same man was certain that Simone had known, in 1942, of the deportation of Jews to Nazi camps. What has bewildered and troubled many people, her admirers and critics both, is that she never directly mentioned it, not once in all the reams of writing that spilled out of her before she died.