Could the buyers and sellers at these markets see themselves voting for him? He wasn’t cut out for politics, some said, he should have stuck to the maths; others affirmed that he had been courageous to pursue his candidacy. They debated whether or not he was telling truth to power, and, if so, which truth precisely was he telling it?
He might look funny and express himself funnily, thought a woman buying cheese, but at least he listens. He’s not like the rest of them.
‘’Course he’ll never win,’ a father said to his son. ‘Shame really. CV longer than my arm, prizes galore plus a Légion d’honneur. Cleverer than the other candidates put together.’
✲
The party pulled its punches with him, at least to begin with. How little they knew him to imagine that he would eventually tire and drop out. The dawning realisation that he wouldn’t, hit them hard. They began intriguing against him.
Towards the end of November, as he remained steady in the polls, Cédric was made aware of certain remarks about him that were circulating. Not only was he proper weird, it was being whispered, and completely out of his depth, he was borderline Asperger’s. He was autistic.
Paris’s voters deserved to know, was the implication. The mathematician’s backers were guilty of manipulating him; they were irresponsible. Poor thing, the gossipers sighed in mock concern. Crashing to defeat would be sure to bring on a nervous breakdown.
However, the butt of these rumours and innuendo did not anger. It was his nature to recoil from gossip, for which he had neither time nor patience. Finally, though, displeased that it might be said that he was concealing something, Cédric determined that he would respond to the rumours publicly. He would not deny who he was; he would lose the election, lose it by a landslide, sooner than do so.
‘Am I autistic? Perhaps I am,’ he told a journalist for Vanity Fair, and then, a few days later, an interviewer on national TV. He couldn’t say for sure because he had never been formally diagnosed.
And, anyway, he added, ‘What difference would it make?’
✲
From his earliest years, in the middle of the French countryside, his had been an insulated childhood, he recalled. The shouty red of poppies, an old bicycle rusting in the grass, busy dust motes lit by the sun and making his chest hurt: these were the delicate child’s first impressions of the world. He had had trouble breathing, whether from nerves and senses that worked overtime, or from bouts of asthma and bronchitis which laid him up for weeks on end, and his parents put an ear to his chest and gave him aspirin dissolved in a glass of fizzing water. Psssst, the glass seemed to say as he lifted it to his lips, psssst, as though it had some pressing secret to share.
He was reading on his own by the age of four, paging through books his parents had brought to his room and helped him to decipher. The paediatrician who saw him that summer was amazed. On the doctor’s desk was a newspaper and he showed its front page to the little boy. Cédric read aloud, ‘The mortal remains of Paul V I …’
‘Paul the Sixth,’ corrected the doctor.
‘… will be transferred Wednesday afternoon from C—, Cas—’
‘Castel Gandolfo.’
‘… near Rome,’ continued Cédric, ‘to St Peter’s Basilica.’
‘Bravo,’ the paediatrician said to the boy; ‘remarkable,’ he said to the parents, who were both, he learned, teachers of literature. They explained how their son spent hours every day reading and rereading his books. His favourites were long on science, books about dinosaurs and the universe. He could tell an ankylosaurus from a protoceratops, recite all the planets in the solar system, yet he did not know the word for a poodle (caniche) or the names of the seasons. (And neither of these would he learn for several more years.)
One day his father brought home from the flea market a Disney comic book, Donald in Mathmagic Land. Suddenly, little Cédric couldn’t read enough of square tree roots and imaginary triangles and birds who sang the opening digits of pi. He took a great interest in chess; it was Grandmother, he remembered, who taught him how to play. His grandmother was an elegant woman who knew her own intelligence; had she been born a man, or fifty years later, she would have become a historian. She was a direct descendant of Demetrio Stefanopoli, count of Comnène, and, through this count, of the Byzantine royal house of Komnenos.
Chess, chess and more chess. For several months this became more or less Cédric’s life, playing the royal game to the point of obsession, before his father intervened. His father confiscated his board and pieces, not wanting the six-year-old to turn into a mad prodigy. He had followed media reports of what the game had done to Bobby Fischer. He didn’t want his son to grow into a future like that. This was not long before the family moved to Toulon and Cédric began primary school.
Cédric must have cried at the loss of his chess set. But as the obsession faded it was replaced by another, fortified by the maths puzzles he tackled in class, and which would prove far more lasting. Mathematics, he was discovering, was delightfully unambiguous, its rules self-explanatory; that is, the moment you grasped their logic. Playing with these rules, code-breaking, puzzle-solving, he could happily neglect the regular problems of having no friends, of being teased or shirked for being so very different to the other children.
For all these problems, he never hated tomorrow. Tomorrow, whether he was spending it in class or inside his books, always had something new to teach him.
Soon he’d become hooked too on mystery stories, another form of puzzle, honing his powers of deduction with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Arsène Lupin, unmasking the tales’ baddies the same way, in class, he figured out the true identities of an equation’s Y and Z. He devoured the escapades of The Three Investigators, whose heroes were close to his age, almost overcome by a desire to join them, since with them, at least, he felt he would belong.
✲
In December 2019, at the Trianon theatre, Cédric gave a speech on stage before hundreds of his supporters.
‘I’ve read and heard so many things, seen so many attacks, sometimes concerning my policies, often concerning my person. I’ve said it before: being different is a strength.’
He paused for the clapping, looked out at the rows of upturned faces.
‘They’ll tell you that I am mad or that my project cannot succeed. My friends, the true madness would be to hope for change yet vote for the same old parties.’
His campaign for mayor, he knew, had stalled; the polls placed him on low double digits. At least the interviews he had given on his possible autism had been universally well received. Politicians on all sides had saluted his courage, the dignity in his response, including the ones who had themselves spurred on the rumours. If Cédric smiled at their hypocrisy he did not resent it; he had far better uses for his energy.
Whenever he asked himself why he was running he decided that he hoped to redistribute power. Winning it interested him less than making it flow more freely, more efficiently. His manifesto imagined a citizens’ assembly, in which experts and ordinary Parisians drawn by lots would contribute to the mayor’s decision-making. Only then, Cédric thought, when power became less concentrated in a few hands, might change be enacted at the level of voters’ needs and values.
On posters, in conference halls, via interviews in the media, the candidates’ visions, their different Parises, called out to these voters, but increasingly people turned their attention elsewhere. In the New Year, they watched reports from Wuhan about a ‘mysterious pneumonia’ that would soon dominate the headlines. The election, which was to be held at the start of spring, having for months seemed rather exciting, appeared suddenly pointless, and finally dangerous.
The result was, in the end, a foregone conclusion. Most of the Parisians who bothered, or dared, to cast their vote in March, just before the first lockdown, favoured continuity. The incumbent prevailed easily, ahead of the Right and the presidential party which came in third. Cédric, the outsider, trailed in fifth, on 7 per cent.
✲
When Cédric returned to the Assembly’s benches, he sat as an independent. And when, at the end of his term, he sought to retain his seat in the Essonne, the presidential party opposed him. The ensuing contest was tight; the winner unknown until the very last of the thirty-seven thousand ballots had been counted. Cédric conceded after losing by a margin of eighteen votes.
✲
He had just returned from a vacation in the mountains of Colombia when I told Cédric about the narrative portrait of him that I envisaged writing. It was May 2023, almost a year since he had left politics and Paris; he was once more a professor of mathematics in Lyon. We were video-calling late on this particular evening and he was casual in jeans and a zip-up sweatshirt. Although jet-lagged, he looked well. ‘I turn fifty in October.’
As he shared memories of his childhood, he told me about The Three Investigators, a series of books I had not come across myself. He had read the French editions by the dozen, he said, and I imagined the little Cédric soaking up each story, enthralled and no longer lonely.
In the story Cédric mentioned to me – The Mystery of the Silver Spider – the action takes place in a tiny European kingdom named Varania. Here power is enshrined in a crown jewel possessing the form of a spider. The pint-size heroes arrive on an urgent mission: palace plotters have seized the jewel, and plan to turn the country into an international haven for law-dodgers. Gathering all their wits and pluck, the three boys figure out where the jewel has been hidden and so foil the coup.
To reward their ingenuity and daring, the Order of the Silver Spider – the kingdom’s highest honour – is pinned on their three proud chests. The Silver Spider, the boys learn, is worn on a chain by the monarch at each coronation. Far more than a jewel, it is a symbol of everything the Varanians cherish: freedom, independence and the common good.
As he had read the story, Cédric, in his mind the fourth investigator, became an honorary Varanian too, vowing to uphold those same values.
