Brave Genius Page 14

  Our provinces belong to us! Our land belongs to us! Our men belong to us! Those who take our provinces, who eat the wheat of our lands, who hold our men prisoner, they are the enemy!

  France expects nothing of the enemy, except this: that he leaves! That he leaves defeated! The enemy entered into our country by force of arms. One day, the force of arms will chase him from our lands. He who laughs last, laughs best!

  This is what all French people wish to show the enemy in observing the hour of hope.

  The call was repeated on New Year’s Day up until 2:45 p.m. on the BBC. The authorities attempted to counter it by luring shoppers outside with sugar and potatoes—made specially available without a ration ticket. They were ignored. That afternoon, in Paris, Lyon, Marseille—across all of France—the streets were largely empty.

  A DANGEROUS GAME

  For Nordmann, however, the hour of hope morphed into days of panic. Mistakes had been made; he was a wanted man.

  In the preceding days, Nordmann had met a number of young aviators associated with an aero club in Aubervilliers, a northeastern suburb of Paris. The men were hoping to find a way to England to join the Free French. One of their group had previously met Nordmann and introduced him to the others. While Nordmann explained that passage to England was not possible at the time, he and the fliers discussed how de Gaulle’s cause could be advanced by the dissemination of favorable propaganda.

  Three of the fliers went to Nordmann’s home on the boulevard Arago one night, where he gave them several copies of the first issue of Résistance to distribute. The fliers then proposed that they could print and distribute additional copies. Since the number of copies of the first issues had been limited to a few hundred, Nordmann found their proposal attractive. He visited the aero club to verify that the group had the equipment and supplies to do so. Nordmann gave one of the members, nineteen-year-old Albert Comba, a list of more than twenty names and addresses to which to deliver the copies.

  On Sunday evening, December 29, the group printed another four hundred copies. Unfortunately, they were not careful enough about disguising their activity. The noise of their Roneograph and the coming and going of the fliers at the club attracted the curiosity of a neighbor whose home overlooked the club’s courtyard. He approached the group to find out what they were doing. The man asked for copies of the newspaper. Thinking he was sympathetic, the fliers gave him two.

  However, the neighbor promptly tipped off the police, receiving in return some gasoline. The police decided to conduct an immediate search of the aero club that Monday. They quickly found the Roneograph hidden under sheet metal, with traces of black ink still on it. They also found the names and addresses of the club members and went straight to Comba’s home to search it. There they found a suitcase with thirteen envelopes containing about twenty issues each of Résistance. They tracked down Comba at work and arrested him. The other fliers were also promptly picked up and arrested. Under intense questioning, the men divulged that they had become involved in printing the newspaper through contact with Nordmann and Weil-Curiel.

  Comba was desperate to minimize the damage. The police had not found the list of names in his wallet, which was at home. Between interrogations, he convinced a guard to go to his home, find the list, and destroy it. One of the other fliers also persuaded the guard to telephone Nordmann to tip him off that the Aubervilliers group had been discovered. The guard did phone Nordmann, but when he went to Comba’s and took the wallet, he did not destroy the list. When the interrogations resumed, Comba admitted under pressure that the guard had the wallet, which the guard then turned over with the list of names.

  List of names obtained by interrogation of Albert Comba by Paris police, December 30, 1940. Jacques Monod is noted to receive twenty copies of the illegal newspaper Résistance. (Dossier BA 2443, Archives de la Préfecture de Police in Paris)

  On the list were twenty-two names, most with addresses, followed by the number of copies they were to receive (anywhere from five to one hundred). The names on the list included lawyers and physicians, and the fifteenth entry read:

  Jacques MONOD Laboratoire de Zoologie-Sorbonne Faculté des Sciences, de préférence entre 14 heures et 15 heures …….… 20 [underscore in original]

  The next day, New Year’s Eve, the police organized searches of each address on the list. They contacted the Sorbonne and learned that Monod resided at 26 rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Three inspectors went first to the apartment building, where the concierge directed them to the fifth-floor apartment. Neither Jacques nor Odette was home; their housekeeper answered the door. The three men searched the apartment for copies of the illegal newspaper or any other incriminating materials. They found no copies of Résistance or, they reported to their superiors, any other evidence that “Mr. Monod is involved or was involved in any political activity whatsoever.”

  The inspectors then proceeded to Monod’s third-floor laboratory at the Sorbonne in order to inform him of the search that they had just conducted and to ask him to make some declarations concerning the matter in which he had been implicated. They were informed that Monod had left and that it was not known when he would return.

  The searches of the other people named on the list also generally produced nothing, except a couple of instances in which the newspapers had been received but had either been returned or remained unopened. Two addressees had also received urgent messages advising them to destroy the newspapers.

  The first stage of the investigation complete, the fliers were moved to prison, warrants were issued for Nordmann and Weil-Curiel, and the subsequent investigation was turned over to the Germans on January 6.

  Nordmann was terrified. He asked Vildé to find him a place to hide and an escape route out of Paris. Vildé asked another member of the network, the wealthy and beautiful Countess Elisabeth de la Bourdonnaye, known as Dexia to her friends, to take Nordmann in while preparations were being made. She readily agreed, and without asking his name, gave him a bedroom in her home in Paris and brought him his meals. Nordmann realized the danger in which he was placing the countess, and he thanked her profusely. Dexia was well aware of the risks of harboring a fugitive, so she was vigilant. When she saw German police in the courtyard the next morning, she alerted Nordmann, who snuck out by the front door and did not return until after nightfall.

  Concerned that Nordmann was endangering Dexia, Vildé arranged for Nordmann to travel to the unoccupied zone with another member of the group, Albert Gaveau. On January 13, Gaveau and Nordmann went to the Montparnasse station and boarded a train for Douarnenez, the location of another safe house. At the Versailles-Chantiers station, the plainclothes members of the German secret police (Geheime Feldpolizei) boarded the train, just after Gaveau had gone off to the bathroom. They grabbed Nordmann, but Gaveau got away.

  The prisoner was transferred to a car and driven back toward Paris. As the car slowed near an intersection, Nordmann jumped out and tried to run away. One of the policemen opened fire, hitting Nordmann in the leg and knocking him to the ground. The lawyer was recaptured, bandaged, and taken to Santé Prison.

  Gaveau, it would turn out, was working for the Germans. Nordmann was carrying a list of sympathizers that Weil-Curiel had given to him. The Gestapo had most of the names of the Musée network.

  EARLY ONE MORNING, Monod was in his laboratory at the Sorbonne, setting up an experiment on bacteria, when the Gestapo burst into the building, blocked the stairwells, and hustled upstairs to find him.

  As the agents began to question him, Monod noticed their discomfort at being in the lab. He recalled later, “The police networks—including the Gestapo—detested laboratories … They were afraid of radioactivity, they were afraid of microbes, of viruses, and they hated working there.” Their fears worked to Monod’s benefit, for they did not search his lab carefully enough. Behind his laboratory notebooks and pipettes, there were several incriminating papers. After further questioning, Monod was released.

  OTHERS IN THE
Musée group were not nearly so fortunate. On February 8, Albert Jubineau was arrested by the Germans. On February 10, Lewitsky and Oddon were arrested by the Gestapo at their apartment, while Alice Simmonet, another member of the group, was arrested with her husband at a restaurant. On February 11, René Creston surrendered when German agents came looking for him and others at the Musée de l’Homme. Vildé and Dexia eluded capture for another month; Agnès Humbert was arrested two months later. Cassou and Aveline escaped to the South of France, and Rivet to South America, but altogether seventeen members of the Musée network were arrested. The first significant resistance network in the occupied zone had been crushed in a matter of just a few months.

  The demise of the Musée network, the arrest of his friend Nordmann, and the visit he received from the authorities underscored crucial lessons for Monod: resistance was a very dangerous business, and much greater care would be essential to preserving the secrecy and security of any group.

  CHAPTER 9

  WAITING AND WORKING

  The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.

  —STENDHAL, The Life of Haydn

  THE LIBERATION THAT DE GAULLE PROMISED AND THE VICTORY that Churchill had pledged to share with France were at best faraway dreams in early 1941. The Free French had rallied or taken some territories, and the British had gallantly defended their homeland, but the Allies (which included Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) did not have the men or materiel to contemplate the retaking of metropolitan France. The United States continued to maintain its official nonintervention policy, enforced by the Neutrality Acts of 1939 and earlier years, and the Soviet Union remained bound to its nonaggression pact with Germany.

  Those contemplating resistance and all of those hoping for the liberation of France faced, therefore, a long, indefinite wait until some distant time when the Allies might gather enough strength to attempt to dislodge the Germans. For Camus, that meant returning to his writing and making a living. For Monod, that meant finally finishing his doctorate and hopefully finding some worthwhile problem to pursue after that.

  ADAPTATION

  Ever since his demobilization, and despite the Nordmann debacle and the interruption from the Gestapo, Monod had been trying to get his experiments and his degree back on track. Throughout the fall of 1940, Monod filled the pages of his notebooks with measurements of how bacteria grew when fed various sugars. Day after day in his lab at the Sorbonne, he made up media with different kinds and amounts of sugars, then inoculated the flasks with bacteria. He took measurements of the density of the bacteria at different points in time and plotted their growth on little squares of blue graph paper. The experiments were tedious and repetitive, and the bacteria did not always cooperate. On one page of his notebook, after observing that his cultures contained giant clumps rather than a fine slurry of bacteria, Monod scrawled, “Nécessité absolue Trouver origine de cet emmerdement.” [Absolute necessity to find the origin of this pain in the ass.]

  The bacteria typically showed an exponential growth rate when fed a single sugar, such as glucose, as its sole energy source. That is, after some time lag, the bacteria divided continuously until the sugar was exhausted. Monod found that, in general, the density the bacteria achieved depended upon the amount of sugar provided. That was not surprising, as the relationship had been observed before with various crude nutrient broths. Monod’s incremental contribution was to perform the experiments with precisely defined nutrients.

  Monod then had the very simple idea to test how bacteria behaved when fed two sugars at once. He wondered, for example, whether they would grow better or faster on two different sources of energy than on just one.

  Monod’s “double-growth” curve. Graphs from Monod’s research notebook (winter 1940) on which he plotted growth over time. On the left, bacteria grew exponentially in the presence of two particular sugars. On the right, bacteria grown in the presence of two different sugars grew exponentially for a time, then paused (arrow) before resuming growth. Monod’s pursuit of this puzzling phenomenon would lead to a Nobel Prize twenty-five years later. (Archives of the Pasteur Institute)

  The answer was not so simple. While the bacteria grew similarly when fed glucose and some sugars, Monod measured a puzzling response to certain other combinations. Specifically, instead of one growth phase, the bacteria exhibited two phases: they first grew exponentially, then stopped growing for a period of time before again resuming exponential growth. Monod was stumped. Why did the bacteria pause if they were able to utilize both sugars?

  Baffled by this peculiar behavior, Monod went to consult André Lwoff at the Pasteur Institute. Monod had first encountered Lwoff a decade earlier at the Station Biologique at Roscoff, where Lwoff had introduced the young zoology student to the powers of microbiology. Lwoff was now head of the Microbiology Department, and Monod respected his vast knowledge. He showed Lwoff his biphasic growth curves. “What could that mean?” Monod asked.

  Lwoff hesitated, then said, “That could have something to do with enzyme adaptation.”

  “Enzyme adaptation? Never heard of it!” Monod replied.

  Lwoff gave Monod a bunch of papers on the phenomenon, a book on microbiology by Émile Duclaux—a close colleague of Louis Pasteur’s and his successor as director of the Institute—and a copy of a PhD thesis by a Finn, Henning Karström, who had coined the name for the observation in 1930. What Duclaux, Karström, and others had noticed was that in various microbes the production of certain enzymes—proteins that carry out chemical reactions in cells—depended upon the nutrients present in the medium. It appeared as if the bacteria or yeast cells “adapted” to the presence of a nutrient by making an enzyme that would then break the nutrient down so that it could be used.

  Lwoff suggested to Monod that his biphasic growth curves were due to the bacteria, after a lull, adapting to the second, less preferred, food—much like Parisians had to do during that hard, cold winter. How the bacteria adapted was a complete mystery, however, as essentially nothing was revealed by the earlier researchers or known in 1941 about how the activities or production of enzymes were controlled. Monod decided on the spot that this would be his quest: he would get to the bottom of enzyme adaptation.

  Excited by his discovery, or rather his rediscovery, of the phenomenon, he dove into the literature Lwoff had given him. Enlightened by previous work, he designed new experiments to determine whether in fact the two growth cycles that he observed and called “double growth” or “diauxy” were in fact a manifestation of enzyme adaptation. He devoted the second half of his thesis to his investigations and possible explanations.

  For the first time Monod was fully engaged, both intellectually and experimentally, in a bona fide scientific mystery. In trying to decipher whether the bacteria were using each sugar successively, he showed a knack for devising simple but revealing experiments. For example, just by changing the ratio of two sugars in the medium, from 1:3 to 1:1 to 3:1, Monod shifted the length of each of the two growth curves proportionally, as would be expected if one sugar were being used at a time.

  Monod’s experiments convinced him that the lag before the start of each growth curve was, in fact, a case of enzyme adaptation—of the necessary enzyme not being active or produced until some time had elapsed. But he perceived that there also must have been another mechanism at work, because he needed to explain why one sugar was not used until the other was depleted. He proposed that one sugar must somehow inhibit the use of the other. He then devised a series of tests that confirmed that one group of sugars inhibited adaptation to another set of sugars.

  Monod did not know the mechanisms of enzyme adaptation or inhibition—that would require much more general knowledge about the making of proteins than was available in 1941—but his thesis displayed a striking command of the hypothetico-deductive scientific method: Monod laid out alternative explanations, deduced what should be observed under each explanation, a
nd devised experiments to corroborate or negate each possibility.

  Lwoff was impressed. The Sorbonne was not. After Monod’s PhD ceremony, a member of the jury told Lwoff, “What Monod is doing does not interest the Sorbonne.”

  HAPPINESS IN HELL

  Camus, too, was focusing on finishing and publishing his work—his cycle on the absurd that was now five years in the making—after finally finding his way out of France.

  After a couple of months in Clermont-Ferrand, Camus had moved with Paris-Soir to Lyon. Francine Faure joined him there in November 1940, where she became both his secretary and his second wife. Camus’s divorce from Simone Hie had been finalized, which freed him to make good on his promise to marry Francine. He did so promptly in December. Strained for money, they by necessity had a simple ceremony. The two exchanged brass wedding rings at the town hall, with Camus’s comrade Pascal Pia, who worked as editorial secretary at the paper, as a witness.

  The newspaper was struggling, however, and Camus was let go the same month. With no reason to stay in Lyon, and funds running very low, the newlyweds headed for Oran, Algeria, where they could live rent-free in an apartment owned by Francine’s parents. Francine took up substitute teaching while Camus worked on finishing The Myth of Sisyphus, the third part of his trilogy. After his isolation and all that had transpired in France, Camus was energized by being back in Algeria among friends and familiar places, even though it, too, was governed by Vichy.

  Camus intended for The Myth of Sisyphus to complement and illuminate The Stranger because he could more explicitly address the realm of the absurd in essay form than in fictional narrative. Its jolting opening lines announced his chief concern: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”