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Sometimes, coming out of the Assembly into the soothing dark of a late spring evening, Cédric thought he would like nothing better in that instant than to take to the city’s streets as in his student days, to walk his thoughts, or else simply to observe the surrounding facades and faces as he strolled. He loved Paris in these hours when the streets seemed to grow wider and the passers-by were often merry. He relived the stirring nights when he and several university classmates had chased each other through these same cobbled streets into the small hours in a version of the game called hare and hounds; the ‘hounds’ pursuing not a trail of chalk or paper but calls made at successive phone booths, each booth approaching the city centre and the students’ dorms.
He remembered those nights with a double nostalgia, when on the trail of a classmate, getting high on the chase and lured by the approaching solution, he’d experienced the same rush he’d felt as an introverted child engrossed in his favourite detective tales, French translations of The Three Investigators. He’d come a long, long way indeed.
Several of these streets were named after mathematicians: Rue Laplace, Rue Sophie-Germain. It occurred to him that perhaps someday in the future his own name would likewise be given to a street here. There was already a theory of curvature named after him – the Lott-Sturm-Villani theory – a recognition of his ever-growing legacy.
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In September 2019, putting an end to a summer of speculation, Cédric made it known that he was running for mayor of Paris. His candidacy was likely doomed from the outset, since he was obliged to go up against his own party.
All summer the government had tried and failed to talk him out of running as an independent. The official candidate – a rather bland apparatchik in a suit, a safe pair of hands – had been selected internally in early July, through the proper channels, a spokesman insisted. It was suggested by some that this decision had come from the top – President Macron had long ago made up his mind. In any event, now was the time to pull together as a party and as a movement, they all said. You owe us your loyalty, they told Cédric, don’t you?
But no, the mathematician did not seem to think in such terms. He hadn’t acquired the politicians’ social codes, or else having done so seemed willing to transgress them when he believed they were unfair.
Cédric had sought the party’s backing for his mayoral run in the beginning, only to finish well and truly stitched up. The party had chosen to disregard all the polls that showed him to be by far the most popular contender with the voters. They had ignored the numerous artists, scientists and public intellectuals who had come out in favour of Cédric’s candidacy. They had gone back on the promise of a new politics which he (and they themselves) had been elected to embody. How then, in all good conscience, could he simply swallow his words and fall in line behind the other man?
The guy’s an idiot, the apparatchik’s team concluded bitterly after months of futile back-and-forth. He’s going to split our vote and gift Paris – a city of two million – to our opponents. No one could say they hadn’t tried to reason with him. To help him digest his disappointment they had made all the right noises about involving him in a manifesto that would be as bold as it would be inclusive. They had alternated between the carrot – Cédric Villani, Minister of Higher Education and Research, how did that sound? – and then the stick: he would risk exclusion from the party if he persevered. When nothing else worked they had asked him to think of his health and his family. Was he really tough enough for such a long and bruising campaign?
He would not be cowed, though. ‘Tough’ was not his conception of a good politician. He knew – for the comments had been leaked to the press – what the party’s candidate thought of him: ‘He won’t see the blows coming, he’ll get taken apart.’ To this provocation, dignified silence had been his sole response. Careless of the threats and warnings, he had continued conferring with potential allies all through the summer months. His eventual campaign launch, from a café-bistro in the fourteenth arrondissement, had attracted photographers and reporters and a scrum of cameramen.
A lyrical, impassioned Cédric addressed the packed room. ‘Building teams to solve complex problems has been my life’s work,’ he noted, ‘even before I entered politics.’ He promised to put technology, science and knowledge at the heart of his campaign. He would fight for a Paris unbeholden to financial speculators; a greener Paris in which it was possible to breathe. A Paris in which distance from the city centre no longer enclaved entire districts.
He would always put Paris before his party, he said.
After ten minutes came the moment everyone who had managed to squeeze inside the café had been waiting for. Cédric’s overexcited voice almost ran away from him as he cried out, ‘I announce to you on this fourth of September that I have decided to run for mayor.’ At these closing words his face, so animated only seconds before, went blank with bewilderment. He gazed in astonishment at the joyous tumult he had just unleashed.
‘Vill-a-ni!’ chanted the crowd. ‘Pa-ris! Vill-a-ni! Pa-ris!’
It was not long past seven o’clock in the evening and every news channel in the country carried the launch live. The candidate’s voice and delivery and the confused look of wonder on his face went instantly viral.
As he stepped aside from the podium, the crowd swirled around him in a confused melee, tugging his sleeves and almost spilling him out into the street. He had made it outside when his spider brooch was swept from his lapel and had to be recovered from beneath the trampling shoes.
The brooches Cédric wore now on the campaign trail were smaller than some of his other spiders, and had less pizzazz than those decorated with brightly coloured beads. On the advice of his team, he also tucked his cravat, often a folded blue one, neatly inside his suit; while some days the cravat vanished altogether, to leave his collar open. In a further concession to respectability, his long hair and old-world beard, the latter cultivated since he had become a deputy, both received a trim. The result of these adjustments was a greater focus (or so it was hoped) on what the candidate said, at the expense of a style which had long made his reputation for eccentricity. It was hoped that when Paris’s voters saw him on TV or in the flesh they would see a plausible future mayor instead of ‘Cédric the Eccentric’ or ‘Spider Man’ as he had occasionally been dubbed.
But for these – rather modest – adjustments to his clothes and hair Cédric did not change. He never had any bad words for anyone. Not even for the party’s designated candidate, who could be snide and abrasive and with whom no reconciliation proved possible. ‘My door is always open,’ the apparatchik said coldly when reporters broached Cédric’s independent run. ‘I offer him the hand of friendship.’
The pudgy man’s hands were one reason why Cédric felt no animosity towards him. The fingernails, Cédric had noticed when the men met behind closed doors to air their differences, though clean and pink were thoroughly chewed.
Cédric recognised the nervous habit from his own boyhood, except that the object of Cédric’s chewing had been a sweater he wore in primary school. His sweater had been the record of his mute perplexity during lessons: hole after hole in the wool where he’d gathered up the collar between his teeth and nibbled anxiously. The confusing shifts between subjects, the pressure to keep up and still, the unspoken rules that no teacher cared to explain and that could land you in the naughty corner – all these served to deepen his already shy and solitary nature. As the other children spoke and sang in class, the wool’s ticklish taste in his mouth had been strangely comforting. He’d let countless right answers go unpronounced that way, his arm too rigid with nerves to raise it, the distance between his brain and tongue seeming infinitely long.
Cédric’s private talks with his rival were as short as each man’s team had expected. Far longer, if no more satisfying, were some of the brainstorming sessions at his campaign HQ. It was a feature of politics he didn’t relish, the exhaustive discussions of tactics with his advisors; everyone’s energies, he could not help thinking, would be so much better spent developing policy instead of trying to get one over on the other parties. Moreover, these conclaves had an unpleasant tendency to drag.
Back when Cédric had directed the capital’s mathematics research institute there had been plenty such powwows in his office. But he had never permitted them to overrun. A small sandglass flipped at each turn encouraged the participants to cut to the chase. From time to time, whenever he listened with one ear, he found his mind drawn to the constant motion of the whispery sand, the grains’ obedient journeys, so unlike the freewheeling molecules in a gas.
The polls were rather promising. They showed Cédric and the party’s nominee in a statistical tie – each on 15–17 per cent – within a few points of the sitting mayor, Anne Hidalgo, who was on 24 per cent. Crunching these numbers, Cédric’s team felt confident that the mayor’s lead over him could be closed.
‘Voters like you,’ they told Cédric. ‘They like you very much. But we have to bear in mind that popularity doesn’t always translate into votes. So we have to get you out there, show that you understand people’s everyday issues. Campaign stops in schools and shops and hospitals are all well and good, but we also need you hitting the pavement.’
Cédric nodded in assent. An open-air market was chosen to take him to one morning the following week. Those who flanked him, ready to hand out campaign leaflets, felt on edge; in such a setting anything could happen. What if their candidate made a fool of himself? It was one thing knowing how to give a good speech or lecture, quite another to talk to the average voter in the street.
Some of the buyers in the market pulled back when they saw Cédric approach, not wanting to feel dull in the face of his brilliance. They were men and women who had left school without academic qualifications, unable to make head or tail of algebra and geometry and all the rest of that airy-fairy business, and the feeling of shame or inferiority clung to them even after all these years.
But when they heard their aspiring mayor respond warmly to a fishmonger’s bonjour, all nerves went from them. He did not sound or look one bit like a politician, he had that much going for him. And he didn’t sound like a mathematician either, they thought, not that they knew what a mathematician sounded like.
‘How old is he?’ an onlooker asked her friend. ‘He has such a young face.’
The other woman googled him on her phone. ‘Forty-six.’
‘No! Where do you get that from?’
‘Wikipedia.’
‘Ah, well, if Wikipedia says so,’ snorted the woman.
But it was true. And the woman was quite right – the candidate did not look his age.
Other phones climbed out of pockets, filmed the scene, inched closer. And alongside them, shoppers with their baskets and grocery bags, curious tourists, the murmur of a small crowd.
Cédric posed for picture takers, let them snap away. They photographed his good side, his bad side. They photographed him reaching over a fruit stall; meeting a vigorous handshake; listening to someone’s overlong question. They photographed the suit and the spider and the concentration that was written in capital letters on his face.
The long question concerned housing. ‘Rent’s crazy here,’ the middle-aged man complained. Cédric nodded; he did not interrupt. And when at last the questioner relented, he replied thoughtfully. He insulted nobody’s intelligence. He did not pretend to have all the answers. He addressed the have-nots just as he did the haves.
People at other markets, on other mornings, brought all sorts of questions to him, on low salaries and dirty pavements, street muggings and trains that never arrived on time, and not one did he duck. His gaze, as he spoke, could be disconcerting – so intense and direct.
He was being himself, transparent and candid to a fault. And that was perhaps the problem. Many voters, though they told themselves otherwise, did not expect candour in their candidates. They did not want to hear things told straight. They wanted things told slant, the better to conform to their desires and preconceptions. A good politician should be all things to everyone – that was the gist of what they thought.
