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+{"text":"\n\n_This book is dedicated to Gary Gregor whose knowledge about Edgar Evans and whose enthusiasm for the work has been a constant source of encouragement_\n\n_Front cover photograph_ : Edgar Evans dressed for exploration. (Courtesy of Scott Polar Research Institute \u2013 SPRI)\n\n## Contents\n\n_Acknowledgements_\n\n_Introduction_\n\n 1 The Gower Peninsula: Early Life\n\n 2 The Boy Sailor: Naval Training\n\n 3 The _Discovery_ Expedition\n\n 4 From England to South Africa\n\n 5 The Southern Ocean to Antarctica\n\n 6 Early Months in Antarctica: February to September 1902\n\n 7 The Antarctic Spring: September to October 1902\n\n 8 The Antarctic Summer: October 1902 to January 1903\n\n 9 The End of the _Discovery_ Expedition, 1903\u201304\n\n10 Return from Antarctica, then Home Again, 1904\u201310\n\n11 _Terra Nova_\n\n12 The First Western Party\n\n13 The Winter Months, 1911\n\n14 The Polar Assault\n\n15 The Aftermath\n\n16 Why Did Edgar Die First?\n\n Epilogue\n\n## Acknowledgements\n\nDr David Wilson, the great-nephew of Dr Edward Wilson, Scott's confidant and friend, has been a remarkable source of friendship, encouragement and advice throughout the work. My colleagues, Dr John Millard, Dr Howell Lloyd and Dr Aileen Adams, have diligently read the work and offered helpful comments, as has Mrs Jackie McDowell.\n\nProfessor Stuart Malin has patiently guided me through the intricacies of longitude and latitude. Lieutenant Commander Brian Witts, Curator of HMS _Excellent_ Museum, Portsmouth, assisted me with details of the field gun run competition at Olympia. I am greatly indebted to these colleagues and friends. I accept responsibility for any misunderstandings or omissions.\n\nThe assistance of the staff at the Scott Polar Research Institute, The Naval Museum at Portsmouth and the Swansea Library has been greatly appreciated; all have been unfailingly courteous, helpful and enthusiastic.\n\nAlison Stockton and James Oram, a Classics Undergraduate at Durham University, have patiently proofread the work and I am grateful for their help.\n\nI have to thank Professor Julian Dowdeswell, Director of the Scott Polar Institute, for permission to publish extracts from those manuscripts over which the Institute has rights, also the Debenham, Shackleton, Skelton and Scott families for kind permission to quote from family papers. The Auckland Institute and Museum of New Zealand have allowed me to quote from Charles Ford's journals as have the Dundee Art Galleries and Museums in relation to James Duncan's papers. Mr John Evans, Edgar's grandson, has allowed me to quote from Edgar's sledging journal. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders; any omissions or mistakes will be inserted into subsequent editions of this work.\n\nFinally, my thanks must go to my husband, Dr David Williams, whose assistance and help made this work possible.\n\n## Introduction\n\nSaturday 17 February 1912, Antarctica.\n\nA man crawls helplessly on the icy snow, his clothes are torn open, his skis are off, his gloves and boots lie discarded on the snow, bandages trail from his frostbitten fingers.\n\nHe dimly sees four images coming towards him, but in his confusion he cannot work out what is happening. When his companions arrive he can hardly speak. He can barely stand and after a hopeless attempt at walking he falls back onto the snow. Three of his exhausted rescuers plod back wearily to the camp for a sledge.\n\nThey lay him on the sledge and struggle to pull him over the snowy waste. On the way he loses consciousness. He is never to be aware of his surroundings again. In the tent, as his companions watch, his breathing becomes irregular and shallow; he dies quietly at 10 p.m.1\n\nSo ended the life of Edgar Evans, the 'Welsh Giant' from Middleton in South Wales, a man who contributed hugely to Antarctic exploration, a Petty Officer who had built a relationship with his leader, Robert Falcon Scott, that transcended the barriers of class, rank and education. Theirs was a loyalty that had been built over long periods of interdependence as they endured the horrors of prolonged man-hauling at sub-zero temperatures in Antarctica.\n\nScott wrote that Edgar was a 'giant worker with a truly remarkable head piece',2 that Edgar was 'hard and sound' on a trek and had an 'inexhaustible supply of anecdotes'.3 He chose Edgar as one of the five to go to the Pole.\n\nEdgar died on the return, overcome by circumstances so awful that his four companions were soon to join him in icy tombs in Antarctica.\n\nThis is Edgar Evans' story.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Ed. King, H.G.R., Edward Wilson _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic 1910\u20131912_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 243.\n\n2 Ed. Jones, M. _Robert Falcon Scott Journals Scott's Last Expedition_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 369.\n\n3 Ibid., p. 303.\n\n## 1\n\n## The Gower Peninsula: Early Life\n\nEdgar Evans came from the Gower Peninsula in South Wales. Jutting into the Bristol Channel and open to the Atlantic gales, Gower is a place of outstanding natural beauty, a location that attracts visitors to its shores year after year. It boasts other famous attractions: in one of its coastal caves, the Paviland Cave, the oldest human skeleton in the British Isles was discovered \u2013 the 'Red Lady of Paviland'1 (actually male remains) is tens of thousands of years old.\n\nIt would have been a remarkable astrologer who foretold fame for Edgar Evans when he was born on 7 March 1876 in Middleton Hall Cottage, Middleton \u2013 a village in Rhossili and one of the remote parishes on the peninsula. Edgar's mother, Sarah, had moved to Middleton Cottage, her sister's home, for her confinement.\n\nThis was a modest family. Their roots were firmly in Gower. Evans' paternal grandfather, Thomas, and three previous generations of his family, came from the peninsula. Thomas was employed in a local limestone quarry (limestone was shipped across the Bristol Channel to fertilise the fields of north Devon). Thomas' son, Charles (1839\u20131907), the father of Edgar Evans, was one of the famous 'Cape Horners', hardy seamen who sailed from Europe around Cape Horn to the west coast of America, a journey that could last six months.\n\nThe 'Cape Horn' trade grew because Swansea was then the world centre for smelting copper, essential in industry, construction and ship-building (the copper covering on ships' hulls prevented the wood from rotting and made the vessels faster).\n\nThere were copper works in Swansea from as early as 1717. Approximately 2 tons of coal was necessary to smelt 1 ton of copper, and since South Wales was rich in coal, copper was brought to Swansea rather than coal being taken to the copper sources. When British ore was worked out, copper mines further afield were sought and Cuba and South American countries, particularly Chile, were used. These voyages to South America, in coal-carrying sailing ships, were hazardous undertakings. Life at sea was brutal and unforgiving. Off the Horn, with 'winds at full-gale strength, waves as high as the maintops, sometimes hail and then snow coming down thick, clouds so low they enfold the mastheads, spume and sky indistinguishable',2 forward progress was often impossible, some days the ship was set back by miles. Sometimes the voyage lasted four months, often much longer and many men died on the 'widow-making' passage. Added to the physical horrors of the crossing was the ever-lurking possibility of spontaneous combustion of the coal, likely to be disastrous in wooden ships and more probable if the coal was damp. After managing to survive the voyage, the sailors still had to contend with the perils of disease in South American ports. And then, having endured all that, the sailors faced the daunting prospect of the return journey. Years later, one of Edgar's companions in the Antarctic wrote that only those who had had the experience could realise what it meant: handling frozen sails in the dark, short handed... and 'so cold that the chocks (fittings for securing the ropes) have to be thawed with hot water before a rope will run through them'.3\n\nBut Charles Evans pursued this trade until he was in his mid-30s, well after the time he married and had children. In 1862, when he was 23, Charles, described as 'Mariner, son of Thomas Evans, Quarryman', married Sarah Beynon in St Mary's church, in the village of Rhossili. Rhossili is one of the many villages dotted over Gower. It had 294 residents4 and was connected to its closest neighbour by just a muddy lane. Sarah was a local girl, the daughter of William Beynon, the licensee of the Ship Inn in Middleton, and his wife, Ann. She was 22 at the time of her marriage and her family had held the licence for the Ship Inn for most of the nineteenth century.\n\nThe ceremony was performed by the Reverend John Ponsonby Lucas BA, MA, an Oxford graduate, who ministered to several of the local villages. St Mary's, with its beautiful Norman doorway, remains an active, functioning church. For many years a plaque in the aisle wall has proudly commemorated the life of Charles and Sarah's famous son, Edgar.\n\nAs was usual in Victorian households, the couple produced a large family \u2013 there were eight known children. Birth control was unknown in working class communities in the late 1800s, and a high birth rate was a type of insurance policy against an unsupported old age. Four of the children are listed in the 1871 census: Charles, 7; John, 4 (both described as scholars); Mary-Ann, 2; and Annie Jane aged 1. The gap of three years between Charles and John suggests an infant death. In 1874, another son, Arthur, was born, followed, in 1876, by Edgar. A seventh child, George, was born in 1878 and a sister, Eliza Jane, in 1879. In fact Sarah Evans gave birth to more than the eight children; in 1913, after Edgar's death, she was interviewed by a local reporter, and exhibiting stoicism difficult to imagine nowadays, she said that she had buried nine of her twelve children, three having died from consumption.5\n\nMrs Sarah Evans registered the birth of her fourth son in the sub-district of Gower Western on 13 April 1876. The 7 March was recorded as the birth date and Mrs Evans, unable to write (as was common, even six years after compulsory education was introduced),6 recorded her mark with a cross.\n\nInterestingly, when Edgar entered the navy in April 1891, his Certificate of Service states that his date of birth was 9 March. Probably, once the error was officially recorded, the Boy, 2nd Class, then aged 15 years and 37 (or 39) days, thought it more prudent to go along with the official record than to challenge it, and he never corrected the date, although he is likely to have been aware of his registered birth date. Years later, in 1911, he wrote in his diary on 9 March, when he was on a sortie, that it was the 'first time he has spent his birthday sledging'.7\n\nEdgar was born into a small, tight-knit community. In the pre-First World War era, many people stayed within a few miles of their birthplace for the whole of their lives, and there was a huge interconnection of families through marriage. Sarah Evans had family links with many people in her village as well as brothers and sisters, some of whom were still living at the Ship Inn. So Edgar was born into a ready-made network of uncles, aunts, grandparents and cousins, as well as the immediate family crowded into his family's cottage, which housed up to four of his older brothers and sisters as well as the babies, George and Eliza Jane. In addition, his father added to the crush on his intermittent visits home.\n\nHe learnt to speak in English as Welsh was hardly ever heard on that part of the peninsula. There must have been some incomers in Gower over the years because the villagers spoke in the 'Gower Dialect'. This dialect, now virtually forgotten, had evolved through the influence of settlers from south-west England.\n\nAs a little lad he kept well out of the way of the local dignitaries; when the doctor visited on horseback or, occasionally, driving his horse and trap which carried the brightly coloured bottles of medicine that could be prescribed for virtually every ailment (since many of the residents could not read they were thought to be particularly impressed by the colours), Edgar took care to avoid him. Likewise, the Rector was an important local man. The Evans family were definitely 'Church' rather than 'Chapel' (the place of worship for the local Methodists). It is surprising nowadays to read of the chasm that existed between the two in some parts of the country (reminiscent of the Catholic\/Protestant divide in Northern Ireland), but in Gower the division was only a pale and peaceful reflection of those clashes. When the Reverend John Ponsonby Lucas had married Edgar's parents, he gave a girl a lift in his pony and trap, a journey of about an hour, but he was forbidden to speak to her because he was of the established Church whilst she was a Nonconformist.\n\nBy the 1881 census the family had moved to Pitton, the next small hamlet east of Rhossili. As was usual, only the people actually in the house on the day the census was recorded were counted, and Mrs Evans, 'Mariners Wife', registered her four younger children, now including Edgar, aged 5, as 'scholar' at the village school at Middleton. Forster's Elementary Education Act of 1870 had stipulated that all children between the ages of 5 and 12 were obliged to attend school. The thrust behind this act was the fear that Britain's status in the world could be threatened by the lack of an efficient national education system. It was a move by no means universally welcomed; there were fears that education would make members of the labouring classes, such as the Evans family, 'think' and so become dissatisfied with their lot. The Church also had doubts; its support for the biblical story of creation (which implies, amongst other things, that we are born to the station that we are meant to remain in) resulted in reservations. Also, the Church was already the recipient of state money for educating the poor and was reluctant to relinquish this. But once the Act was law, children were educated perforce. Edgar would be at Standard 1. He learnt his letters from an elementary reading book by copying a line of writing, in 'good, round, upward writing', and later wrote a few common words from dictation. He did simple addition and subtraction (of not more than four figures), as well as learning his multiplication tables (up to 6). Strict instruction was given on how to hold a pen \u2013 in the right hand with the thumb nearly underneath and three fingers flat out on the top; if his teacher saw him with one of his fingers bent he would have been rewarded by a rap on the knuckles.8 Edgar certainly benefited from the education he was given before he left school at the age of 12. His writing in later years was clear and his prose concise. The only thing that seems to have escaped his attention is punctuation; sentences flow effortlessly and sometimes confusingly, one into another.\n\nIn 1883, when his father Charles was 44, the family moved their home again. By now Charles had left long-haul shipping and was employed on a boat _The Sunlight_ , which was involved in local coastal work based in Swansea, so the Evans family moved to the town. Swansea was important; it was part of the nation's 'workshop of the world' and also known as 'Copperopolis' because of the prominence of the copper trade. The family moved to Hoskin's Place, Swansea. They would have lived in one of the thousands of identical 'two up, two down' little terraced houses, with a communal back yard and 'privy'. It is not clear just how many of the family made the move to Swansea; only the four youngest are recorded as being in the house on the 1881 census, but it is unlikely that Edgar's 13-year-old sister Mary Anne or 11-year-old Annie would have left home by 1883, so it is probable that seven or eight Evans members (at least) shared the overcrowded facilities. Life was not easy. When coal could be afforded, the downstairs room was warmed by a coal fire, which was an integral part of an iron oven. Food was scarce: homemade bread and pies, meat once a week if possible, and potatoes. Water was heated by the stove and a tin bath (decorously concealed behind a clotheshorse decked with washing for privacy), was used for the weekly or fortnightly baths. Three or four members of the family used the same water.\n\nWith its population of over 50,000, busy streets, horse traffic, pollution from the copper works and noise, the town must have come as a shock to the country children; a huge contrast to sparsely populated Rhossili. Young Edgar was enrolled at St Helen's School, Vincent Street, Swansea and remained there until he was 13. The school had just been enlarged when 7-year-old Edgar enrolled as a pupil and, with its 250 pupils, it too must have seemed huge. The life of the school and the education it offered is described by N.L. Thomas in a centenary booklet, _A Hundred Years in School, St Helen's 1874\u20131974_ ,9 which shows how very fortunate Edgar and his fellow pupils were to fall under the influence of an enlightened, humane headmaster, Mr Lewis Schleswick. This was an opportunity certainly not enjoyed by all Victorian children. Mr Schleswick's service was stretched; he had a small staff, certified assistants, uncertified assistants and pupil teachers10 and, to keep the teaching standards as high as possible, he taught the pupil teachers each morning before school began. The school remains. It is proud of its famous old boy and has Edgar's picture prominently displayed.\n\nAs the school year progressed, Edgar, no doubt with the other pupils, was tempted by those infrequent but exciting diversions which lightened the drab routine of the Victorian school room, and often (as the daily school roll recorded) cut school attendance dramatically. Many of the children had to work for their parents before and after school. By a young age they were accustomed to a life of repetitive monotony and any glamorous excitement must have been a glorious break. Such delights were visits by circuses to the St Helen's area, the occasional fair, regattas at Mumbles and Swansea, Saint Patrick's Day11 celebrations (when school attendance was noticeably small) and, on occasion, processions. Once, after a Sunday school outing, over one hundred boys were absent. The reason given by the miscreants, according to Mr Schleswick, was that they were too tired to get to school.12 Occasionally, however, absences were official. When General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, visited Swansea in 1883, the school was given a half-day holiday and when there was a large public procession in relation to the Blue Ribbon Movement,13 the boys were allowed time off to watch it. The headmaster wrote that not only the pupils but also the pupil teachers were given an official day's holiday as a reward for their 'unremitting zeal and energy'.14\n\nAttendance could fall for more serious reasons. Mr Schleswick recorded that the summer of 1885 was exceptionally hot and it was difficult to keep the boys at their work as they were in a 'state of exhaustion'. The area around St Helen's was overcrowded, poor and susceptible to disease. Typhoid fever, that curse of unsanitary water supplies, attacked the school in 1896 'in spite of the drains being regularly disinfected by the Urban Sanitary Authority'. When Mr Schleswick inspected the drinking-water cistern, he found that it was filled with a deposit, to the depth of an inch and had a dirty filter.15 Other infectious diseases extracted a heavy toll: an outbreak of measles would close the school for three weeks,16 scarlet fever, that harbinger of rheumatic fever, sinus and ear infections, also visited regularly. Boys from houses where infection lurked were sent home to reduce the risk of cross contamination in this pre-antibiotic era, but death was a common caller. In 1887, there was a drought which had an impact both by causing dehydration and because the boys drank infected water. On this occasion wily local entrepreneurs profited by collecting barrels of water from springs in the countryside and transporting and selling the water to whichever urbanite could afford to buy it.\n\nThe end of the school day was the signal for those boys, who did not have to work for their parents, to escape to freedom. They made their own entertainment; since there were no cars or buses, but only slowly moving horse drawn vehicles, they could play on the street: trundling hoops, whipping tops or just standing in the middle of the street and gossiping. St Helen's was close to Swansea Bay, famous for oysters, but probably of more interest to the boys as a glorious beach playground for football and swimming. Sundays were rest days. Edgar went with his family to Sunday school during the day and church in the evening. They all wore their 'Sunday best' clothes for the church visit.\n\nSoon after his tenth birthday Edgar became a 'half timer'. This exploitative use of cheap child labour meant that school time was cut, so that Edgar spent half the day at school, half at work. For his work he earned about a shilling (approximately \u00a35 in current value) a week. He was relatively lucky. Fourteen years previously he could have been working as a 'half timer' from the age of 8.17 So Edgar's total education was five years full-time (from 5 to 10), thereafter three years of half-time education. Nothing highlights the difference between the privileged and working classes of Victorian England better than their educational opportunities. By the time he was 10, Edgar, an intelligent child, would have been competent in the basic subjects: able to read, write to dictation and do arithmetic. Later he would have been introduced to a smattering of more interesting topics: geometry and geography.18 He would have been used to the idea of homework or 'home lessons'. He would have sung \u2013 the Welsh are natural singers \u2013 and St Helen's had a tradition for music and singing and the pupils were examined on their prowess.19 But his formal education was virtually at its end. By contrast, Dr Edward Wilson, who served with Edgar on both Scott's expeditions as an officer and who came from a privileged background, was (although an average student) immersed in Latin, Greek, English, arithmetic and spelling by the age of 10.20 And Wilson's education would continue for many more years. Education for the upper classes provided shibboleths to enter into a society that was virtually closed for people of Edgar's education. His was the class that sailed the ships, worked the mines, smelted the ore and so underpinned for Britain those social and economic foundations that maintained her pre-eminence in the world. But the country was (in the main) proud of the Empire and proud to serve Queen and Country, and Edgar would have imbibed this pride.\n\nFrom 1886, Edgar worked as a telegraph messenger boy in Swansea's head post office. He carried his bag around Swansea delivering telegrams. His hours were long and tiring, and a fellow pupil from the 1880s recalls working till 10.30 at night.21 After Edgar's death, his photograph, taken after his first Antarctic sortie, was displayed in the Swansea Head Post Office for many years. The photograph shows a good-looking young man. He was described as having blue eyes and a 'fresh' complexion.22 He was clean-shaven with brown hair, a straight nose, a strong jaw and a generous mouth.\n\nThe Head Post Master of 1886 decreed that messenger boys began their day with musket-duty and Edgar, between the ages of 10 to 13, was drilled and marched in procession, carrying his musket on his shoulders. A big event of 1887 was the visit of W.E. Gladstone23 (Victoria's former Prime Minister) to Swansea to open a local Public Free Library. By now the boys were sufficiently drilled to march in procession to the library. How much they appreciated Gladstone's speech on Irish Home Rule is not recorded.\n\nBehind the post office was the North Dock. Here ships from exotic destinations would tie up and the boys were sometimes allowed on board. They would badger the sailors with questions, their imagination soaring along with stories of lands and adventures far, far beyond the confines of Swansea. Edgar had never been out of Gower. These visiting seamen and his father's stories nurtured his determination to see the world, to become a sailor. In his early teenage years he decided that he would join the Navy as soon as they would have him.\n\nHowever, he had to curb his impatience for a few years. In the meantime his mother took him to visit her family in Middleton. The journey was a step back in time for the newly sophisticated urbanite. To get there they had to travel by road to Pitton Cross and then brave the rigours of a high-banked, muddy, narrow lane, just wide enough for a horse and cart. But the Gower Coast had attractions other than family visits for a young boy. It was littered with wrecks: schooners, paddle ships, barques, oyster boats and ketches.24 Over fifty vessels \u2013 from a French vessel in 1557, to the Norwegian Barque _Helvetia_ in 1887 \u2013 were known to have foundered in its treacherous waters. Edgar was 11 when the _Helvetia_ ran aground in the southern part of the bay. He was enthralled at the story of her battle against the elements. On this occasion there were no fatalities, but her cargo of timber floated onto the beach and every available man, boy, horse and cart spent days loading the wood. _Helvetia_ 's bare wooden ribs can be clearly seen today, sticking out of the sand in Rhossili Bay.\n\nWhen he was 13, half-time work finished and Edgar left school for full-time employment in the Castle Hotel. Many of the captains of those copper ore barques berthed at North Dock actually frequented the hotel25 and their stories must have strengthened Edgar's resolve to join the Navy. He read the _Boys' Own Paper_ (a relentless recruiting agent for the Navy), too.26 By now he was so keen to see the world that he actually tried to join up when he was 14. He was refused but returned to the Castle Hotel announcing, 'I am coming back to you for another year and then I am going to join the Navy.'27\n\nHis parents were dismayed. Sarah Evans had known the hardship of bringing up (and probably already burying) her children with a husband away for months at a time. Charles Evans also tried to dissuade his son; he had had to have a leg amputated after it was damaged in an accident on his ship. But Edgar was determined. As soon as he could, at the age of 15, he applied to join the Navy.\n\nThe die was cast.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Investigated in 1823 by the Reverend William Buckland (1784\u20131856), Professor of Geology at Oxford, an eminent palaeontologist, who, because he was a Creationist and thought that no human remains could be older than the Biblical Great Flood, hugely underestimated the age of his find.\n\n2 Lundy, D., _The Way Of A Ship_ , Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, p. 15.\n\n3 Wild, J.R.F., Letter to Mrs Bostock. SPRI MS 1078\/3\/1; D.\n\n4 Lee, S., _The Population of Rhossili_ Gower, IV. Swansea, 1951, p. 27.\n\n5 _South Wales Daily Post_ , Tuesday 18 February: 'Consumption' is tuberculosis, then endemic and causing death in over half its victims.\n\n6 Forster's Education Act. Drafted by William Forster, a Liberal Member of Parliament and introduced on 17 February 1870. The act provided elementary education for children aged 5\u201312. Parents were still expected to pay fees, though if they were poor, the board of each school would pay.\n\n7 _Edgar Evans' Journal, 27\/1\/11\u201312\/3\/11_ , SPRI: Ms 1487: BJ 9\/3\/11.\n\n8 Thomas, N.L., _A Hundred Years in School, St Helen's, 1874\u20131974_ , Souvenir Centenary Booklet, held at Swansea Library, 1974, p. 22.\n\n9 Thomas, N.L., _A Hundred Years in School, St Helen's 1874\u20131974_ , Souvenir Centenary Booklet, held at Swansea Library, 1974.\n\n10 Pupil Teachers. Students who also taught.\n\n11 The Patron Saint of Ireland.\n\n12 Thomas, N.L., _A Hundred Years in School, St Helens 1874\u20131974_ , Souvenir Centenary Booklet, held at Swansea Library, 1974, p. 2.\n\n13 A Temperance Union.\n\n14 Thomas, N.L., _A Hundred Years in School, St Helen's 1874\u20131974_ , Souvenir Centenary Booklet, held at Swansea Library, 1974, p. 15.\n\n15 Ibid., p. 17.\n\n16 Ibid., p. 15.\n\n17 Factory Act of 1874.\n\n18 Thomas, N.L., _A Hundred Years in School_ , St Helen's 1874\u20131974, Souvenir Centenary Booklet, 1974, held at Swansea Library, p. 22.\n\n19 Ibid., p. 19.\n\n20 Williams, I., _With Scott in the Antarctic Edward Wilson, Explorer, Naturalist, Artist_ , The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2009, p. 25.\n\n21 Thomas, N.L., _A Hundred Years in School, St Helen's 1874\u20131974_ , Souvenir Centenary Booklet, held at Swansea Library, 1974. p. 22.\n\n22 The National Archives, Service Certificate (No.160225) Ref. ADM 188\/235.\n\n23 William Ewart Gladstone (1809\u20131898). Liberal politician and repeatedly Victoria's Prime Minister. At the time of his visit to Swansea he was out of office, but was later to serve his final, fourth term.\n\n24 _Gower, The Treacherous Coast_. Map based on the original idea and research by Mike Downie. \u00a9 Mike Downie, 1985.\n\n25 A three-masted ship.\n\n26 Winton, J., _Hurrah For The Life Of A Sailor, Life on the lower deck of the Victorian Navy_ , Michael Joseph Limited, London, 1977, p. 288.\n\n27 Gregor, G.C., _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer, Edgar Evans, 1876\u20131912_. Swansea City Council, Swansea, 1995, p. 9.\n\n## 2\n\n## The Boy Sailor: Naval Training\n\nHe did not have to wait long. The 5 April 1891, soon after his 15th birthday, saw Edgar attending his medical examination. Rules for medical fitness to enter the navy were laxer than today. A boy had to be without a physical deformity and to be able to speak clearly; he had to have good eyesight, colour vision and good hearing in both ears. There should be no obvious signs of injury to the head and he should not be of 'weak intellect'.1 Boys who could read and write clearly were favoured.2\n\nThe navy wanted boys with 'good heart and lungs' and without any hernias or 'tendency thereto'. There should be no disease or malformation of the genital organs.3\n\nOf particular interest to Edgar were the regulations concerning teeth. These stipulated that boys below the age of 17 could have _seven_ defective (decayed) teeth. Entrants over 17 could have _ten_ problematic teeth, the only proviso being that all ages had to have four sound, opposing molars (two in each jaw) and the same number of incisors similarly placed.4 Dental hygiene was little practised in the 1890s and tooth decay was commonplace. Young people in the United Kingdom frequently had all their teeth removed as a 21st birthday present (an option clearly not open to would-be sailors), to avoid the infection, pain and expense of dental work. Edgar had eight decayed teeth.5 He presumably had to have these (or at least some of them) attended to before he was finally accepted after a special application.6\n\nHis career began on the training establishment for Royal Navy Boy Seamen, HMS _Impregnable_ , on the 15 April 1891 for three days.7 After this Edgar Evans, Boy 2nd Class, official number 160225, was transferred to the wooden training ship HMS _Ganges_.8 Edgar's Certificate of Service continued until 17 February 1912, when, as Chief Petty Officer, he was discharged, 'lost in British Antarctic Expedition'.9 Roland Huntford denigrates Edgar Evans in his book _Scott and Amundsen_ , by writing that over the years he turned into a 'beery womaniser', exposed to the risk of venereal disease.10 This might imply absences during his training, but Edgar's naval Certificate of Service records no evidence of this, rather a seamless progress through the ranks.11 His 'Character and Efficiency' throughout this time is described as being 'Very Good', except for 1897 and 1899 when it was 'Good'.12\n\nEdgar started his new life at a time when Britain's commercial and imperial power was at its zenith and the navy an important guardian of that power. But as there had been no major sea battle since the Battle of Trafalgar, Britain faced no obvious rivals and the service was perceived to be stagnating and becoming hidebound by tradition.13 It was also becoming a subject for national debate. The Naval Defence Act (1889) authorised the expenditure of \u00a321,000,000 on the navy and the building of seventy-two new warships. The navy was to be on a scale 'at least equal to the naval strength of any other two countries'.14\n\nThe navy was becoming fashionable, too. The Royal Naval Exhibition of 1891 was hugely popular; visited by over 2.5 million people, it aimed to draw attention to important aspects of naval life and history. Attractions in the exhibition included a life-size model of the lower deck of HMS _Victory_ at Trafalgar (showing the death of Nelson), an area for field gun drill and manoeuvres, a lake with two miniature battleships fighting out naval engagements, a 167ft model of the Eddystone lighthouse,15 relics from Arctic expeditions and a fleet of fifty model silver ships.16 In 1893 the Navy Records Society was first published. This publication featured historical documents that illustrated the prestigious history of the Royal Navy and in 1894 the Navy League17 was established. This aimed to underline Britain's status as a world peace power, to promote public awareness of the country's dependence on the sea and to emphasize the fact that a powerful navy was necessary to maintain that power. The League stated that the primary aim of national policy was the command of the sea.18\n\nBluejackets (enlisted men with Edgar amongst them) were becoming the sentimentalised nation's darlings and nautical dramas, such as _Black Eyed Susan, True Blue and HMS Pinafore_ , became popular.19 Even Edgar, a 15-year-old 'boy', could share in this nationalistic pride. Indeed, in the popular imagination the British 'tar' was the envy of the world. Led properly, 'he would go anywhere, do anything and do it with a will'.20 When Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee Naval Review took place in 1887, the _Daily Telegraph_ wrote that the people loved their navy and believed in it.\n\nThe reality of training was very different from this imperialistic, jingoistic attitude. Many a fond hope for adventure and excitement must have been irredeemably crushed within hours of entering the service. _Ganges_ , which Edgar joined in 1891 with his parents' consent, was an old hulk in Falmouth, Cornwall, which served as a training establishment for Boy Cadets. Later, at 18, he signed for a further twelve years (in his case from 9 March 1894 to 9 March 1906) and then at the age of 30 he signed on for a further ten years. This second signing was essential because twenty-two years actual service (gaps due to illness or for other reasons were not counted) was the minimum required for a sailor to be eligible for a pension.21\n\nReading the accounts of life on the _Ganges_ as recorded in extracts from the _Falmouth Packet Newspaper 1866\u20131899_ , and reading personal accounts of the life endured by the Boys, is like looking through the two ends of a telescope. Both are undoubtedly true, but the training, aimed at toughening the boys, was harsh and often cruel. It must have often seemed overwhelming to the 15-year-old boy, now classified as Boy 2nd Class, and to the thousands of other Boys who went through the system.\n\nThere was no soft introduction. From the moment he was on board Edgar was caught up in the everyday routine. First he was told how and where to sling his hammock, then issued with his kit (for which he had an allowance: \u00a36 in 1891, lesser amounts in 1893 and 1906).22 His civilian clothes were sold and he was introduced to the overcrowded, under-ventilated, unsanitary ship that was to be his base for the next year. The kit issued was quite extensive; over sixty items are listed in the _Navy List_ for 1891, including jacket, jerseys, trousers, hats and caps, boots, bed and covers, a knife and two lanyards (ropes worn around the neck for securing whistles or knives). Intriguingly, two 'cholera belts' are listed; these are bands of flannel, sometimes with strips of copper in them, to be worn around the waist and thought to increase 'bodily resistance'.23 It is not clear whether these were issued routinely against the possible perils of the training ships or held back for use in the east.\n\nThe Boys all had a 'Housewife' containing needles, buttons, thread and cotton, so that they could keep their kit in the condition demanded by the service.\n\nIn their day-to-day existence the Boys were entirely at the mercy of their Instructors. Lionel Yexley, a Boy on HMS _Impregnable_ just a few years before Edgar joined HMS _Ganges_ , recorded an existence that would have been similar to Edgar's experience. The day began at 5.30 a.m. when, wakened by the shrill notes of the Bosun's pipes and with his hammock safely slung and his kit in place, he was given a ship's biscuit, plus a basin of hot cocoa with a little sugar. These biscuits were staple naval diet; they were routinely and famously full of weevils \u2013 little beetles, which swarmed out and floated in the cocoa when the biscuit was dunked in it. Breakfast came only after the Boys had worked for several hours scrubbing the decks. For this activity they had to pull their trousers above their knees and were not allowed to wear shoes or socks, even on the coldest days.24 Breakfast was a hulk of bread with a scraping of butter or dripping (on another ship, HMS _Vincent_ , at about this time, no Boy was allowed his bread ration until he had collected two hundred cockroaches to exchange for the food). The meal was followed by sail drill and mast and yard drill, considered important in spite of the fact that there were few sail-driven war ships by the 1890s, although, as it happens, this training was to be of particular relevance to Edgar. He was instructed in all aspects of sail maintenance: shortening and setting, loosing and furling sails. Later he would learn about the rigging, climb the mast and gain knowledge of the hull.\n\nAfter this came the prayers, read by the Captain or Chaplain, followed by gunnery training, with the Instructors concentrating on muzzle loading cannons similar to those used at Trafalgar.25 The Boys still had Cutlass drill.26\n\nAt 11.30 a.m. the instruction finished and the Boys fell in to witness the daily punishments. Flogging was abolished in Britain in 1891, partially due to the long-term efforts of a man with indirect connections to Edgar, Sir Clements Markham, 'father' of Scott's first Antarctic expedition, but the cane, the birch and the rope's-end (the stonnicky), were feared symbols of discipline. 'Miscreants' were whipped with a cane bound at both ends with waxed twine to prevent splitting. They were punished for offences that seem minor today: no chinstrap sewn on the cap, a button off the trousers or being 'slack' at falling in. For this ordeal, hammocks were lashed into a cross shape, the Boy to be caned had his shirt drawn up around his waist, leaving only his duck (heavy cotton) trousers to protect his buttocks from the vicious cane. Usually the punishment was six to nine cuts and the weals took about ten days to heal. Serious offences (theft or desertion) were punished by the birch, up to twenty-four strokes being permitted.27 This was an appalling punishment. In 1892 on the training ship HMS _Boscawen_ in Portland, the birch was pickled in brine; this made it tougher, so that it caused more tearing and laceration of the skin (on this ship, the Corporals apparently took it in turns to administer alternate strokes, laughing as they did so).\n\nAfter this terrifying experience, those with any appetite had their dinner. The Boys prepared this themselves and took it to the overworked galley cooks to be put in the oven. They ate meat and potatoes with occasional helpings of cabbage or doughboys.\n\nThe final meal of the day was at 3.30 p.m., thus giving a literal interpretation to the word 'breakfast' the following morning. Tea consisted of bread and treacle (the treacle often being taken by the strongest bully, it was considered that actually getting hold of the food was a wonderful way of encouraging initiative), washed down by tea.\n\nEven this meagre provision of foodstuffs depended on the weather being good enough for the supply boat to get to _Ganges_. If the weather was bad, the diet reverted to salt beef, canned pork and the weevily ship's biscuit. Although officially vegetables were provided every day, the food given to the Boys seems like a subsistence allowance and it is difficult to see how some of them did not succumb to deficiency diseases such as scurvy. However there was probably was no evidence of full-blown nutritional disorders; those who survived the system and wrote their memoirs do not record deficiency illnesses. No questions were asked in Parliament about malnourished Boys.\n\nThe afternoon was spent in further instruction; tying knots and splicing, more sail and arms drill, boat handling. There was also a little instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, religious instruction and also naval history, though Edgar's formal education had been virtually completed by the time he entered the service. After 4 p.m. there was recreation: drill, dumb bells, Indian clubs, football on the shore in the summer (though the time available was limited in Edgar's time as British Summertime was not introduced until many years later). When he went back on board _Ganges_ he had to mend his own clothes and then he could pass the evening with draughts, ludo (a board game with dice) and reading. Remarkably Edgar remained a keen reader \u2013 his schoolmaster at St Helen's had done well.\n\nLife on _Ganges_ was endured without heating and with candles and oil lamps to light the evening hours. The Boys had a bath each week. _Ganges_ had six baths; everyone went through them in turn with no change in the cold water and the Boys had to wash their clothes in the same water too, which quickly became black from their dirt and from the dye in blue serge uniforms. After the bath the Boys were lined up for inspection by their instructor. They were only too keen to look clean; the instructor was aided in his inspection by his stonnicky, the fearsome symbol of authority.\n\nIt was considered that sailors should be able to swim. Though this is entirely reasonable, the methods employed seem horrendous to the modern reader. A sort of bathing tray was lowered by the side of the ship, a large crate with the boards at the bottom set apart so that water got in. Barnacles (small organisms with sharp shells) were put on the bottom, so that once a Boy was in the water he was committed to try and swim if he wanted to avoid his feet being cut by the barnacles. In this respect Edgar was lucky; he was used to the sea whereas many unlucky Boys came from the countryside and had never been in water. Indeed, the authorities felt very strongly about swimming; in one training ship those Boys who still could not swim after thirteen months were flogged. A Parliamentary Question revealed that, after this, only six unfortunates still failed the test.28\n\nIt was not all repetitive training. There were other activities. Efforts were obviously made to enliven the Boy's lives; for example singing was thought to be good for the boys and Edgar was a tuneful singer. It was written that 'the songs of home never sounded sweeter than when heard far away from home'29 and the Chief Instructor for Singing (under the School Board for London) visited Boys' training ships to recommend a suitable selection of songs; _A Life on the Ocean Wave, Britannia, the Pride of the Oceans_ or _We'll soon sight the Isle of Wight my Boys_ were popular. In 1890 the Bandmaster of _Ganges_ edited the _Royal Naval Song Book_ , a collection of fifty national melodies and a naval song book has been in print ever since. In the _Falmouth Packet_ , newspaper reports on _Ganges_ ' activities, singing and recitations are mentioned frequently. Also there were concerts. Remarkably, Offenbach's one-act operetta, _The Two blind Men (Les deux Aveugles_ ), was performed (in English)30 and theatricals and lantern slides were put on, in addition to cricket matches, boat races, football matches and sports days (the name of 'Evans' appears in the report on the prize-giving of 27 May 1893 as coming second in the sack race,31 but he did not shine athletically when he was training on _Ganges_ ). The Boys could have breaks from the ship, if they had anywhere to go to: half days on Sundays and, if their parents could afford it, two weeks in the summer and four weeks at Christmas.\n\nThis was the life that Edgar entered to. It is no wonder that years later he said that although he practically ran away to join the navy, he was sorry he had done so for the first two years were so arduous, despite getting used to it after that.32 He was on _Ganges_ for twelve months. By 1892, newly promoted to Boy 1st Class on 21 April, he would have enough practical knowledge to be sent to sailing brigs which cruised along the south coast of England and down to Spain for six weeks. His thin uniform offered poor protection against the conditions at sea. He had not yet reached his full height of 5ft 10in, and at 5ft 6in33 he probably would have just been able to stand upright between the decks.\n\nIn spite of the modernisation to be introduced by that naval innovator, Admiral Sir Jackie Fisher,34 for the likes of Edgar the discipline and routine remained horribly traditional. One contemporary, a lad named Fred Parsons, who was 15 in 1893 when Edgar was 17, described how he and his mates were fed with pork from a cask stamped 1805 and how, when he cried out when a marine stepped on his bare toe, he was disciplined to six cuts of the cane, for 'talking rather than hoisting'. He wrote that the cane was not struck straight down, but rotated in a half circle so that the exposed flesh was struck as the cane travelled upwards, which was more painful. Fred wrote that he held out till the third stroke when he let out a scream that brought the upper deck to a standstill.35\n\nIn January 1893 Edgar was transferred to HMS _Trafalgar_ , a battleship of 11,940 tons, carrying twenty-nine guns of various descriptions and six torpedo tubes. _Trafalgar_ was the second flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet and based in Malta. At 17 Edgar was at last beginning to see the world. A brief spell on HMS _Cruiser_36 was followed by a return to _Trafalgar_ where, in March 1894, he was promoted to Ordinary Seaman. This is the lowest rank in the navy and marks the beginning of his official naval career. He was 18 (and now described in official records as having 'a device' on his right forearm and a stabbed heart on his left forearm).37\n\nThe next stage up the promotion ladder from Ordinary Seaman is Able Seaman and Edgar, having presented himself to _Trafalgar_ 's Captain for an examination of his skills in seamanship, sail reefing, knotting and his familiarity and ability to work on any part of the ship, was duly promoted in July 1895. He remained on _Trafalgar_ for a further ten months, until May 1896, when he was transferred back to shore barracks in Portsmouth, firstly at HMS _Vivid. Vivid_ was a new establishment, thought by some in the naval hierarchy to be so expensively and lavishly built that it was a complete waste of money (it had gas lighting, electric bells, good washing facilities and an immense drill hall where Edgar exercised). Edgar then had a barrack transfer to HMS _Victory_ , whose most famous engagement, he learnt, had been the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.\n\nIn September 1896 he was transferred to HMS _Excellent_ , another shore establishment and the Royal Naval Gunnery School at Whale Island, where he was taught the principles and practice of firing and maintaining naval guns. Whale Island still values its connection with Edgar. An accommodation block for Warrant Officers and Senior Ratings was named after him in the 1960s, the first ever to be named after a Petty Officer (rather than an Admiral). The buildings were replaced in the 1990s; Edgar's name was honoured by a plaque commemorating his service. He remained at the shore base _Excellent_ and another 'stone frigate' HMS _Vernon_ until May 1898. _Vernon_ was the home of the Royal Navy's torpedo branch, based independently but near to HMS _Excellent_. In his three months at _Vernon_ , Edgar learnt about torpedoes and the art and purpose of firing these missiles from battleships. So by the time of his next posting, Able Seaman Edgar Evans had received training in gunnery and torpedoes.\n\nUpward progression was continued when Edgar became a Leading Seaman. The Queen's Regulations and Admiralty instructions state that 'Men who are thorough seamen, good helms-men, able to assist in repairing sails and practical riggers capable of doing duty in any part of the Ship, may be examined for the rating of Leading Seamen. If found qualified, the Captain may rate them as such, as vacancies occur for that description of men in the complement'.38 Edgar passed this milestone in June 1898 when he was on the shore establishment HMS _Pembroke_. The only blemish in his exemplary record occurred during a three-month stint on HMS _The Duke of Wellington_ , a gun ship, from 1 April to 26 June 1899. He was demoted back to Able Seaman by his Captain for twenty days (6\u201326 June) and for a further three days when he was transferred to the battleship HMS _Majestic_.39 After this he is re-registered as Leading Seaman again. As the time is of short duration, the misdemeanour must have been a minor one.\n\n_Majestic_ was awe-inspiring. She was the largest battleship in existence. She had forty-four guns of different sizes, five torpedo tubes and a crew of 700 and led the Channel and Atlantic Fleet. The Commander of the Fleet was Vice Admiral, Prince Louis of Battenberg, GCB, GCVO, KCMG, PC,40 probably called something less respectful by the lower deck. The torpedo officer on this tremendous warship was the man who was to shape Edgar's destiny, Lieutenant Robert Falcon Scott. Edgar's basic training in gunnery and torpedo work immediately put him into contact with Scott as he served on _Majestic_ in the Channel Fleet for the next two years.\n\nWhen Scott was given command of the British Antarctic Expedition and of _Discovery_ , the Admiralty gave permission for naval men to apply to join the expedition, which aimed to penetrate the unknown mysteries of the Antarctic and amass as much scientific and geographic information as possible, about that part of Antarctica that had been seen in the 1840s by James Clark Ross. Scott always felt that he wanted a Royal Naval crew; men in the Merchant Navy were less drilled in the rigid hierarchy of command than the Royal Navy. He knew that there would be volunteers and when Edgar, as well as Petty Officer David Silver Allan and Stoker Arthur Lester Quartley from _Majestic_ , volunteered, all three were appointed. Edgar's long association with Scott and the Antarctic had begun.\n\nScott knew that the bluejackets would bring the sense of naval discipline with which he was familiar. In fact, as _Discovery_ was not in government employment, her crew was not legally subject to the Naval Discipline Act, but they signed on voluntarily under Scott's command. Everyone on board must have been aware of the real position and the men, as well as the officers, deserve credit for observing this 'fiction'.\n\nEdgar had one more step up the promotion ladder before he sailed in _Discovery_ ; he was promoted to Petty Officer 2nd Class on 18 November 1900. (Later, on Scott's recommendation on 2 April 1904, he was promoted to Petty Officer 1st Class and allowed to qualify as a gunner. To complete this advance he had to pass a further 'Education Certificate' in 1908).41 Petty Officers were, and are, the Sergeants of the navy. They are in charge of the seamen and the daily working routine of the ship. They are selected from Leading Seamen, preference being given to those who had signed on for continuous service (as Edgar had done), and they may have special skills (for example a stoker or carpenter). Edgar was classified as a Seaman Petty Officer, Gunnery Class. For his promotion Edgar had to take the examination laid down by the Admiralty; he had to show knowledge of the King's Regulations, he had to have an understanding of the principles of seamanship and be considered capable of enforcing regulations on board.\n\nEdgar's service record shows a man of ability, intelligence and determination. Scott valued him from the start. He valued Edgar's intelligence, physical strength and practical ability, but also his kind spirit and good nature.42 Edgar repaid him with a loyalty that lasted to their deaths on the ill-fated return from the South Pole in 1912.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 The Queen's Regulations and Admiralty Instruction for the Government of Her Majesty's Naval Service. Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, Regulation 1153: 1899, p. 514.\n\n2 Ibid., 1861, Chapter 1X, Para.2.\n\n3 Ibid., Regulation 1154, section 6, p. 514.\n\n4 Ibid., Regulation 1154, section h, p. 516.\n\n5 Gregor, G.C. _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer, Edgar Evans, 1876\u20131912_ , Swansea City Council, 1995, p.11.\n\n6 _Cambria Daily Leader_ , 13 February 1913.\n\n7 HMS _Impregnable_ was a training establishment started in Davenport in 1862. As ships were added to the establishment each was renamed _Impregnable_. The ship in Edgar's day had been previously named HMS _Howe_.\n\n8 _Ganges_ was commissioned in 1821. She had seen a good deal of action and was the last sailing ship to sail as a Flagship.\n\n9 The National Archives, Service Record (No. 160225), Ref. ADM188\/235.\n\n10 Huntford, R., _Scott and Amundsen_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, Sydney, Auckland, Toronto, 1979, p. 328.\n\n11 Edgar was kept on the ledger of HMS _President_ when he was on Scott's second expedition of 1910\u201312. National Archives, Service Record (No. 160225), Ref. ADM 188\/235.\n\n12 Certificate of Service. D.N.A. 3A\/S.R. Official number. 160225. Portsmouth Division.\n\n13 Carew, A., _The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy 1900_ \u2013 _1939,_ Manchester University Press, 1981, p. xiv.\n\n14 Winton, J., _Hurrah For The Life Of A Sailor, Life on the lower deck of the Victorian Navy_ , Michael Joseph, London, 1977, p. 287.\n\n15 Eddystone Lighthouse. Lighthouse built to protect mariners from the treacherous Eddystone rocks in Cornwall. This was the fourth lighthouse here. It was designed by James Douglas in 1880.\n\n16 Winton, J., _Hurrah For The Life Of A Sailor, Life on the lower deck of the Victorian Navy_ , Michael Joseph, London, 1977, p. 292.\n\n17 The Navy League was established in 1894.\n\n18 Winton, J., _Hurrah For The Life Of A Sailor, Life on the lower deck of the Victorian Navy_ , Michael Joseph, London, 1977, p. 287.\n\n19 Ibid., p. 288.\n\n20 Ibid., p. 301.\n\n21 Carew, A., _The Lower Deck of the Royal Navy 1900\u20131939,_ Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1981, p. xvii.\n\n22 The National Archives, Service Record (No. 160225), Ref. ADM188\/235.\n\n23 _Navy List, corrected to March 1891_ , Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London, 1891, p. 576.\n\n24 Boys only wore shoes and socks with their best uniform or when they were ashore or visiting the sickbay. Summers, D.L., _One hundred years of training Boys for the Royal Navy_. HMS _Ganges_ , Shotty Gate, Suffolk, 1966, p. 34.\n\n25 Ibid., p. 35.\n\n26 Phillipson, D., _Band of Brothers: Boy Seamen in the Royal Navy 1800_ \u2013 _1956_ , Sutton Publishing, Gloucestershire, 1966, p. 18.\n\n27 Summers, D.L., _One hundred years of training Boys for the Royal Navy_. HMS _Ganges_ , Shotty Gate, Suffolk, 1966, p. 35.\n\n28 Ibid., p.40.\n\n29 Winton, J., _Hurrah For The Life Of A Sailor, Life on the lower deck of the Victorian Navy_ , Michael Joseph Limited, London, 1977, p. 297.\n\n30 HMS _Ganges_ , Mylor. Extracts from the Falmouth Packet Newspaper, 1866\u20131899. Compiled by Harwood, B. HMS Ganges Association, Cornwall Division. 05\/03\/1891.\n\n31 Ibid., 27\/05\/1893.\n\n32 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 15.\n\n33 The National Archives, Service Record (No. 160225), Ref.ADM188\/235.\n\n34 Admiral Sir Jackie Fisher. When Edgar entered the navy Fisher was in charge of the Portsmouth Naval Dockyard.\n\n35 Winton, J., _Hurrah For The Life Of A Sailor, Life on the lower deck of the Victorian Navy_ , Michael Joseph, London, 1977, p. 297.\n\n36 HMS _Cruiser_ was an Osprey-class sloop that Edgar served on from May until August 1893.\n\n37 The National Archives, Service Record (No. 160225), Ref. ADM188\/235.\n\n38 _Queen's Regulations and Admiralty Instructions 1861_ Chapter V11. Regulation 13.\n\n39 The National Archives, Service Record (No. 160225), Ref. ADM188\/235.\n\n40 Louis of Battenberg, GCB (Knight Grand Cross); GCVO (Grand Cross of the Victorian Order); KCMG (Knight Commander of St Michael and St George); PC (Privy Councellor); (1854\u20131921), Ist Marquess of Milford Haven and Grandfather of Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth the Second.\n\n41 The National Archives, Education Certificate number 1025\/08.\n\n42 Bernacchi, L., Saga, London, p. 96.\n\n## 3\n\n## The _Discovery_ Expedition\n\nMuch has been written about the Scott's journeys in the early 1900s yet relatively little about the contribution of the seamen to their achievements. Yet the expeditions' successes self-evidently depended on the men's huge contributions, amongst which Edgar Evans' input can be ranked with the highest.\n\nEdgar was following Scott, his commander, rather than a geographical target when he joined the British National Antarctic Expedition, the _Discovery_ expedition. Other destinations would have been as acceptable. Almost certainly he knew where the Antarctic was \u2013 that large white mass on the bottom of the globe \u2013 but if he knew little more than this, he was on par with the majority of British citizens. Antarctica had been described by Captain James Cook, on his second voyage of 1772\u201375, as lands doomed by nature to everlasting frigidness, never to feel the warmth of the sun's rays and the land mass had been identified by subsequent explorers. It had been visited briefly by a number of expeditions: the Norwegian Borchgrevink claimed to have planted the first footstep on its icy surface when he leapt out of his rowing boat in 1895. Later, in 1899, he led an expedition, funded by the British newspaper magnate George Newnes, which landed and overwintered on Cape Adare. But sorties to the interior had been limited to a short trip on the Barrier; no expedition had penetrated into the heart of Antarctica. Its geography was obscure; was it the mythical seventh continent, or a series of islands? Was the South Pole on land or water? Edgar would probably have read about previous expeditions and would have known about these uncertainties; he would also have heard that more was known about the moon than about Antarctica.\n\nBut 1901 was planned as the year for exploration and discovery in Antarctica. There was to be scientific cooperation between nations: Great Britain, Germany, Scotland and Sweden planned explorations and aimed to pool their scientific findings. Of these expeditions _Discovery_ was the most successful in making inroads into Antarctica, but the continent would take decades more to reveal her secrets.\n\nToday we know that Antarctica is a continent; the coldest, windiest and most remote place on earth, it occupies a tenth of the world's landmass and is covered by an icecap that (as Scott's team discovered), flows slowly towards the surrounding oceans. It has very little rain (less than the Sahara Desert) and has few indigenous inhabitants, though visited regularly by varieties of penguins, seals, birds and whales. These facts would, of course, have become of interest to Edgar and his fellow crew-members, but in a peripheral way. Their focus was more immediate and practical: to obey orders, to maintain discipline, to be cheerful, and to rise to any crisis that might befall the ship or the expedition.\n\nIn Britain, plans for the expedition aroused national interest. Apart from grants from the government and The Royal Geographical Society (including a huge private donation from one of its Fellows), large and small donations were received from all over the country. Thousands applied to become part of the voyage; there were 3,000 applications from the navy alone1 and Edgar was elated to be part of the patriotic voyage. When, on Tuesday 6 August at 11.30 a.m. precisely, _Discovery_ slipped her moorings and sailed for Madeira, the young Edgar was an obscure, 25-year-old Petty Officer (2nd Class). By the time _Discovery_ returned to England three years later, he had become a national hero, a local lad made good, written about glowingly in the South Wales newspapers,2 a modest young man who had sailed to South Africa, New Zealand and Antarctica and remained on the Antarctic continent for over two years, enduring the worst conditions that it could throw at him. By 1904, he had contributed to seven sledge journeys totalling 174 days (a record only beaten by Scott) and experienced the horrors of man-hauling at sub-zero temperatures. He had become a man of new knowledge and experience.\n\nHowever, in August 1901, none of the crew could be certain that _Discovery_ would even reach Antarctica (in 1897 the Belgian vessel _Belgica_ had been trapped in Antarctic ice for thirteen months). They did know, however, that in _Discovery_ they had a ship that had been especially built for the Antarctic conditions. The ship was the brainchild of one man, Sir Clements Markham (1830\u20131916), who for years had pursued his vision of Antarctic exploration with determination, tenacity and astuteness. By 1900 Sir Clements had managed to get enough support from the government and other sources to commission his purpose-designed, 1,600-ton _Discovery_ \u2013 a coal-fired ship, rigged as a barque.3 Her name was deliberately chosen to 'continue the spirit of maritime enterprise' which Sir Clements felt had always been a distinguishing feature of the British nation.4 She was painted black, her profile lightened by yellow masts and funnel and white boats painted with a 'D' in black and gold. She was constructed of wood (which would flex when ice pressed against it); her bow was essentially 11ft of oak with sheathing of ironbark, which allowed her to function as an icebreaker, and along her sides were two outer layers of wood, about 26in thick, to protect from glancing ice blows. Water could be drained from the engine to prevent freezing, and both rudder and the screw could be detached and brought into the ship if need be in icy conditions, as was done later in the voyage.\n\nOne reason that the expedition finally received government subsidies related to the need to advance work on terrestrial magnetism. The Magnetic Pole is not in a static position \u2013 it moves each year \u2013 yet an accurate assessment of its position was needed to calculate longitude. In the early 1900s movement of the Magnetic Pole caused significant problems (and therefore concerns for commercial shipping) in the Southern Ocean. Ships sometimes went miles out of their optimal routes and one of _Discovery_ 's briefs was to investigate the location of the Magnetic Pole. Edgar was well aware of this difficulty; his father's Cape Horn voyages via the Southern Ocean to South America had all too much experience of the problem. So _Discovery_ was equipped with a magnetic observatory, and to ensure accurate recordings no iron or steel was allowed within 30ft (fore, aft, either side, above and below) of the magnetic instruments. Inside the 30ft radius, copper was used and, instead of wire in the rigging, ropes were made of hemp and in the cabins the beds were made of rolled brass with wooden battens. Officers within the circle were threatened with having to shave with brass razors. The zoological and biological laboratories on either side of the meteorological observatory were not allowed any iron tools or even steel-wire bottlebrushes.\n\nIn 1900 Robert Falcon Scott, then a relatively unknown Lieutenant, was appointed to lead the British National Antarctic Expedition. There was never any question that Scott's expedition was to have scientific as well as exploratory ambitions; the support of the Royal Geographic Society and the Royal Society (who were interested in the behaviour of tides, currents, glaciers and southern weather), had been an important factor in Sir Clements Markham obtaining government finance. The expedition was instructed to investigate whether or not an Antarctic Continent actually existed, thereafter to investigate the position of the South Magnetic Pole, record those problematic southern winds and currents and study the geography, meteorology and physics of the region. A determination to claim as much land as possible for Great Britain would have been heartily endorsed by Edgar and his comrades.\n\nScott knew that bluejackets5 would bring naval discipline to the venture. In total, thirty-two personnel were appointed to _Discovery_ from the Royal Navy and two from the Royal Naval Reserve: Officers, an Officer\/Engineer, a Bosun, Petty Officers, Able Seamen, Royal Marines, Stokers, a Steward and a Carpenter.6 Edgar, as well as David Silver Allan (Petty Officer), Arthur Lester Quartley (a Leading Stoker) and James Dellbridge, the 2nd engineer, had served with Scott on _Majestic_ and were quickly appointed when they volunteered. Although _Discovery_ was run as if she sailed under the Naval Discipline Act, she was not in fact in Government employment. This was not a problem for Edgar; his appointment was a simple continuation of his naval appointment (as was the case for the other naval men, a substantial form of government support). During the _Discovery_ expedition his records show he was on the pay roll of HMS _President_ , seconded to the National Antarctic Expedition. All the crew signed voluntarily under Scott's command. Scott wrote that the success of the expedition was not due to a single individual, but to the loyal cooperation of all the members. He paid tribute to the petty officers and men who had worked so cheerfully and loyally for the general good.\n\n_Discovery_ was launched in Dundee on 3 June 1901. The imagination of the nation was caught as she progressed around the coast towards the East India Dock in London, her progress cheered by thousands on land. Edgar joined his ship on 27 July 1901. He was immediately precipitated into the bustle and hustle of preparing the ship and storing the huge amount of provisions and equipment needed for at least a year in Antarctica. The work of the crew was interrupted and constantly delayed by dignitaries and members of the public eager to inspect the ship. Finally, the Bishop of London came on board to address and bless the officers and men. The Bishop spoke of the difficulties and dangers of the voyage but also impressed with his comments concerning the need to remember that God was with them always. Quoting from the psalms, he stated the necessity of good comradeship and sympathy for each other \u2013 'Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.'\n\n_Discovery_ sailed from London to Cowes in the Isle of Wight, an event of sufficient importance to be reported in _The Times_.7 Cowes was to be her final port of call in Britain before she sailed away for three years.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Wild, R.F.J., Notes related to the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u201304, SPRI, MS 944\/3: D.\n\n2 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 20 September 1904.\n\n3 Three masts: two square-rigged masts, the third, (the aft 'mizzen' mast), rigged fore and aft.\n\n4 Skelton, J.V., & Wilson, D.M. _Discovery Illustrated_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, 2001, p. 10.\n\n5 Seamen in the British Navy.\n\n6 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 18.\n\n7 _Times_ , Thursday, 1 August 1901, p. 6. Issue 36522.\n\n## 4\n\n## From England to South Africa\n\nIn Cowes, the newly crowned King Edward VII and his beautiful queen, Alexandra, came on board to inspect the ship and her complement. Edward's sister, Empress Frederick, had just died,1 but he managed to speak well and impressed the lower deck with his comments. The King said that he was glad of the opportunity of saying goodbye to an expedition that was (for once), bound on peaceful aims for the increase of scientific knowledge. Seaman Thomas Williamson wrote that the King said 'we were a fine lot of fellows and before going he wished us God speed, a pleasant voyage and a safe return. We manned the rigging when he left, the Captain calling for three cheers for His Majesty which was heartily responded to'.2 The men were, for the most part, patriotically enthusiastic about the venture. Marine Gilbert Scott said that the expedition was 'to remove any lack of the unknown from the map of the world and to press forward the frontiers of human knowledge a little further'.3\n\nAlthough Edgar's local newspapers4 do not report on _Discovery_ 's departure, it was a national event. Government and official donations were complemented by small gifts and contributions from schools and individuals throughout the country. There were fundraising events and dinners. Williamson included a ditty in his diary, written for a dinner in a London club and sung to the strains of _Auld Lang Syne_ , which went:\n\nTo night, my brother Savages we bid a warm adieu\n\nTo Captain Scott and all the lot of his good ship's gallant crew\n\nThey sail, as sailors sailed of yore, like Britain's brave and bold\n\nFor a British crew is as stout and true as in the days of old\n\nSo here's to Scott and all his lot\n\nWith all his might and main\n\nAnd we'll meet them in the Savage Club\n\nWhen they come home again\n\nIt continues in typical populist fashion:\n\nThey sail to find the Southern Pole and bring it safely home.5\n\nThe 6 August 1901 was a brilliant sunny day when Edgar left England. Thousands cheered and waved from the shore. Hundreds, on little boats, shouted and tooted. Bands blared. The noise and the sight of yacht racing at Cowes faded gradually into the distance as _Discovery_ slowly sailed away.\n\nScott's planned route was from England to Madeira, then Cape Town and afterwards to Melbourne, Lyttelton and Antarctica. In the event several problems were to slow _Discovery_ 's progress; it was obvious from early in the voyage that her speed was slower than expected, the sail area was small \u2013 'it would take nearly a gale of wind to produce a respectable speed'6 \u2013 and she was a glutton for consuming coal. In spite of continual attempts at repair en route, she also leaked throughout the voyage (probably due to unequal contraction of poorly seasoned oak in the main frames which shrunk and bent the rivet-like bolts7 and, conversely, widening of the planking in the ship's sides close to the scorching engine room). In addition, she was 'a poor sailer', she had difficulty tacking into the wind and 'sagged leeward' (away from the wind).8 These problems meant that Scott could not keep to his schedule.\n\nFrom the start _Discovery_ was run on the naval 'tier system' with a line of command from Officers (including scientists), Warrant Officers, Petty Officers (POs) and Ratings. Sir Clements Markham lists three Warrant Officers and six Petty Officers, including Edgar, in the ship's complement.9 Each rank had its own quarters. POs were berthed in a separate, starboard-side area and had their own Mess. The Ratings lived and ate in their own quarters (which, being relatively near the stove, had an advantage in that it was warm in winter).10 They slept on hammocks that were stowed away during the day; they used their lockers as seats and slung their tables between the beams when they did not need them. Plans of _Discovery_ show six mess tables and total accommodation for forty-five crew (more than eventually sailed, which was thirty-five).11 The average age of the Petty Officers was 27 (Edgar was 25); the crew members' 23.12\n\nAt sea, a routine was quickly established on naval lines with watches of four hours. In between duties Edgar read, mended his kit, got to know his new shipmates and slept. As a Petty Officer of the watch he gave orders to the seamen for the smooth running of the ship. When he was on watch he instructed the bluejackets to climb the rigging and climb out on the yards to unfurl and furl the sails. The diaries are full of details of working on the topsail yards, shortening cables, cleaning, painting, pumping out the main hold and clearing up in general.\n\nThroughout the week duties followed the same routine, but on Saturdays the ship was given a thorough cleaning. This was for medical reasons as well as naval standards. In 1901, the cause of scurvy, the dreaded disease that had caused so many deaths in previous years, was still unknown. The value of citrus fruit juice, which had provided protection to earlier travellers, had become questioned as an effective defence,13 and one of the many theories as to scurvy's cause was that it was exacerbated by dark, damp conditions; Scott was determined to attend to every precaution that might keep this horror from his ship. On Sunday, Scott did a full inspection of the men and the ship. A religious service followed, Scott reading the prayers; the men, with _Discovery_ 's First Lieutenant Charles Royds (1876\u20131931) accompanying them on the piano, sang heartily. Scott used the time after the service to address the crew on specific problems or general matters, and, after this, the crew were (officially) at leisure.\n\nOn the first part of the voyage _Discovery_ proved to be a 'remarkably comfortable ship'.14 Scott described the voyage as 'most delightful'15 and the officers were very satisfied with the morale and general bonhomie \u2013 a satisfaction that persisted throughout the voyage. As in many organisations, however, the views of the 'managers' were not automatically reflected by those in the lower echelons. Some of the crew were unhappy with their conditions and grumbles surfaced early. After only twodays at sea, Thomas Williamson complained that he had 'six hours sleep in twenty-four hours of hard work'16 and that the routine consisted of 'all day at work and keeping watch at night'. Later, he complained that the officers must have thought that the sailors were 'automobiles or traction engines, which only needed to be oiled to keep on the go, rather than human beings'.17 But although Williamson commented freely in his logbook, his observations are by no means all negative. He liked the ship and thought she sailed well; he appreciated the novelty, the interest and (sometimes) the beauty of the places he was visiting. His day's log entry frequently ends with 'All's well'.\n\nAnother Able Seaman, Frank Wild (later to become a well-known Antarctic hero when he was on Shackleton's famous expeditions), also recorded his reservations. Wild wrote that the voyage from England was neither eventful nor happy because the crew were worked very hard, day and night, and often unnecessarily so. He wrote, puzzlingly, since he himself was a naval seaman, that this way of working was the naval way and 'as the Captain and most of the officers were naval men they could not get out of these ways'. Only when _Discovery_ reached Antarctica did things 'work round to a reasonable state', and they had 'occasional glimpses of sunshine through the clouds of discontent'.18\n\nDifferences between ranks permeated many aspects of life on board. Although the same food was provided for officers and men, the men served themselves, whilst the officers were served at a table in the mess refined by oak furniture, linen on the table, silver cutlery and monogrammed china. Marine Gilbert Scott, one of the stewards, has left an account of his duties in the wardroom; he found the hours long and weary. There were differences in some supplies for officers and crew; for example, jam, marmalade, tea, coffee, tobacco and alcohol.19 In relation to tobacco, _Discovery_ carried 1,800 pounds, 1 and a half pounds per officer per month, 1 pound per man (the men smoked Navy Leaf, stronger tobacco than that smoked by the officers, and they rolled the leaf tobacco into 'pricks' with spun yarn, the traditional naval way).20 In relation to alcohol, the provision was different too; the 30 gallons of brandy, 60 of port and 36 of sherry were presumably for officer consumption, as were the 28 cases of champagne (listed under 'medical comforts'). Cases of these had been brought on board _Discovery_ from the king's yacht when Edward inspected the ship and had, most conveniently, been forgotten. The 800 gallons of rum were provided for the crew. Ratings were issued with grog each day \u2013 grog being a 'tot' of rum (an eighth of a pint), diluted with water, and the rum was a potent mixture of Demerara, Trinidad and other rums.21 The addition of water made it virtually undrinkable after an hour, but Dr Wilson wrote that somehow the tots were occasionally saved and drunk in bulk, causing a comfortable fuddledness. Non-drinking seamen, such as William Lashly, a Leading Stoker, could opt for lime juice but probably rarely did. Lashly claimed his ration, which he either distributed to friends22 or, more likely, traded for benefits such as a change of duties.\n\nBut the most important divides between men and their officers, present not only in the navy but in virtually every section of Victorian society, were education and pay. This combination of relative disadvantages created an almost impassable chasm for a man such as Edgar to cross. For most of the crew, their formal education had finished in their early teens. In relation to pay, there was little hope of Edgar ever achieving the remuneration received by the officers. In this instance, in comparison to Scott's annual pay of \u00a3865 (expedition pay \u00a3500, plus \u00a3365 naval pay),23 Edgar received a total annual pay of \u00a382 4 _s_ (\u00a341 and 1 _s_ from the expedition and \u00a341 3 _s_ from the navy).24 Seamen received just over \u00a35525 (for comparison, General Labourers received \u00a362, Porters \u00a389, Surgeons and Medical Officers \u00a3475).26 One man who did cross the divide was Able Seaman Frank Wild, who years after Scott's expedition and after heroic expeditions with Ernest Shackleton in the Antarctic, rejoined the naval forces in 1916, and in 1917 was given a commission as Temporary Lieutenant Royal Naval Voluntary Reserve (RNVR) and sent to the North Russian Front.27 Another seaman, Garrett, became a Lieutenant in the RNVR.28\n\nHowever, some links did exist. In the Victorian era, literature and poetry were important interests. There were hundreds of books on _Discovery_ ; publishers had given volumes, a 'well wisher' had given fifty novels and some authors had given copies of their works. There were also quantities of magazines,29 and Edgar and his companions had ample opportunities to read the authors and poets. Edgar was well read and Scott found him superior to the other seamen in this respect. Edgar had firm opinions on the works he read; he did not like Kipling's poems and Dickens did not appeal, but he greatly liked Dumas (whose name he anglicised to Dumm-ass), because the works had 'more plot'.30 Also, when they were on later expeditions, there was no differentiation between men and officers as they struggled equally in their quest to explore new ground. In one of the longest sorties of the _Discovery_ expedition, Scott spent sixty-six days in close proximity and complete equality with Evans and William Lashly, as they battled against Antarctica's awesome conditions. Scott felt he got to know his co-explorers well and had nothing but praise for them. Edgar, for his part, developed a deep loyalty to Scott that lasted until their deaths in 1912.\n\nAlthough on HMS _Majestic_ Edgar had served with Scott, he had to get to know the officers and scientists who would be making the long journey with him. He felt that the officers would be of importance to him, the scientists less so. Alongside Commander Scott, there were seven officers (plus the two doctors), who all took on specialist work in addition to their naval duties. The hierarchy was as follows: Second in Command was Albert Armitage, a veteran of polar work who had already been in the Arctic for three years. Armitage was Scott's navigator and ice master. The First Lieutenant was Charles Royds, who was in charge of the day-to-day running of the ship, allocating officers and men to the duties of the watch. His specialist area was meteorological observations and he had had training in magnetism. Royds had good contact with the men and was credited with achieving much of the relative harmony that existed on _Discovery_. He was a talented piano player and organised concerts for the men's entertainment. The Second Lieutenant was Michael Barne, a shipmate of Scott's on _Majestic_. He helped with magnetic observations and was in charge of the deep-sea sounding apparatus. The Third Lieutenant was a man later to become famous in the annals of Antarctic history \u2013 Ernest Shackleton. For the _Discovery_ expedition he was trained up in seawater density and salinity studies. Reginald Skelton, an ex-shipmate of Scott's from his _Majestic_ days, was the Engineer. Doctor Reginald Koettlitz, 6ft tall with a droopy moustache, who had already survived winters in the Arctic, took on the role of botanist. Dr Koettlitz had his problems with Edgar; although Edgar was always respectful in the presence of officers, his language, when he was working, was colourful. When Koettlitz heard some of Edgar's more florid expressions he reported him to Scott for bad language. Dr Koettlitz's junior was the recently qualified Edward Wilson, who was the zoologist and artist. The geologist was Hartley Travers Ferrar, aged 22 and also recently qualified.\n\nAmong the lower deck, Edgar's new colleagues were four Warrant Officers. The Boatswain (Bosun) was Thomas Alfred Feather, aged 31, who was in charge of seamen's duties. Scott was full of praise for his Bosun, writing that no rope or sail was lost on the three-year voyage under Feather's expert supervision.31 The other Warrant Officers were James Dellbridge (29), the 2nd engineer who came from _Majestic_ ; Fred Dailey (28), the carpenter who possessed an 'eye' for defects,32 and Charles Reginald Ford (23), the ships steward, whose duties were to keep an exact account of the stores. Feather's deputy was David Silver Allan from _Majestic_ , a Scotsman aged 31, who, with Thomas Kennar (25) and William MacFarlane (27), carried out the duties of Quartermaster \u2013 which means they had some responsibility for navigation and signals. Other POs for _Discovery'_ s journey to Antarctica were William Smythe (24), Jacob Cross (26) and William Lashly (33), the Acting Chief Stoker (re-rated by Scott as Chief Stoker). An American, Stoker Arthur Lester Quartley was described by Dr Wilson as 'quite the finest figure of a man I have ever set eyes on, standing just over six feet and a perfect giant in strength and sinew'.33\n\nEdgar himself was tall and big for a Welshman. He was nearly 6ft and weighed 12 stone 10lbs. He was strong, competitive and in 'hard condition'. Along with Cross, Kennar, MacFarlane and Smythe he was appointed as a supernumerary rating for the thirty-one-strong shore party.34 The shore explorations were to include a balloon ascent. Lashly and Engineer Skelton had been sent to the Army Balloon Factory at Aldershot to be given instruction on balloon ascents, one of Scott's more unusual briefs for the Antarctic.\n\nEight days out of England the ship approached Madeira, and Seaman Williamson wrote that the scientists were hard at work doing their depth soundings (difficulties were encountered with the apparatus which frequently broke). In Funchal, Madeira's capital, _Discovery_ 's crew took on 54 tons of coal. Coal was already being consumed more quickly than expected and this was to remain a concern throughout the voyage.\n\nAll the men took their turn with coaling \u2013 a filthy, backbreaking task. All the ventilators and any cracks had to be papered over before work began, otherwise the coal dust got everywhere, being most particularly unwelcome in the living quarters. In Madeira, a new worry relating to the ship's construction at Dundee surfaced, one that concerned Edgar. Various metal attachments for the sails had broken, and although these could obviously be repaired, the defect clearly made the crew anxious about the ship's performance in a severe gale.35 Gilbert Scott, the Marine, wrote that some of the men got drunk and started rowing and fighting, 'which was caused by the same thing that causes most of the trouble'.36\n\nOfficial plans for cooperation between _Discovery_ and other European explorations are underlined by the fact that at the same time that _Discovery_ was in Madeira, the German ship _Gauss_ was departing from Germany for Cape Town and the Antarctic. In the case of _Gauss_ , plans for collaboration were not as comprehensive as was hoped; she became trapped in the Antarctic ice.37\n\n_Discovery_ left Madeira bound for Cape Town with a stop planned in South Trinidad, a small island in the Atlantic. A few days out and Skelton's grumbling tooth abscess gave him so much pain that extraction became essential. As a sensible precaution Scott had arranged dental treatment for all the crew before _Discovery_ sailed, an attention that Skelton had presumably missed. This was much in the way that prophylactic appendectomies may be performed nowadays on men and women who will be cut off from medical attention for months. In the check-up over ninety teeth were removed, and nearly 200 fillings put in (at a cost of just over \u00a362).\n\nEdgar's teeth remained far from perfect; he had two extractions and three fillings38 (one unfortunate had ten fillings and five extractions).39 In fact, very little dental trouble was recorded on the expedition and the doctors must have reflected with relief on Scott's forethought.\n\nHowever, a problem was discovered when it was found that a serious new leak had developed.40 Black, stinking, slimy water had seeped into the hold and covered and rotted the bottom layer of provisions. All hands were called on to help. They were not pleased, and were particularly furious with the men who had stowed the hold in London. One hand wrote, 'and by all the saints above, the man or rather the men who were responsible for the leakage ought to be strung up, for the greater part of the provisions are in a dilapidated state and those at the bottom are utterly destroyed'.41 It was very hot (140\u00b0F in the engine room), but the gruelling work went on round the clock under a relentless tropical sun. Tins of cheddar cheese had gone putrid, eggs in unsoldered tins had gone rotten, and sugar had fermented. The holds had to be cleared and disinfected and the provisions stored above until a new platform was built in the hold.\n\nEdgar was involved in this unenviable task, made particularly obnoxious by a stench that was so awful that they could only go on with the work when a ventilation hole had been made. In spite of repeated attempts to solve the problem of leaks the problem continued to plague _Discovery_ as she sailed south, but this occasion gave the most trouble.\n\n_Discovery_ headed west to take advantage of the winds and currents sailing almost as far as South America before heading south-east towards Cape Town. On 31 August she 'crossed the line', the equator, a milestone associated with a rather violent initiation for those crew members crossing the equator for the first time42 \u2013 although Williamson described it as 'good sport'43 and likewise Lashly as a 'very good afternoon's sport'.44 It may have been good sport to the onlookers, but hardly for the initiates. The oldest seaman (in this case PO David Allan, Bosun Feather's deputy), was 'Neptune' who 'visited' the ship. Initiates were introduced into his court 'in the most thorough manner'. The ritual could be humiliating and probably settled a few scores.\n\nPO David Allan was resplendent in his crown and his oilskins were chalked all over with fish. His 'wife', merchant seaman John Mardon, was wearing a flowered silk outfit; he had pink cheeks, a mass of thin rope twist down his back and a hat with paper roses. The two were accompanied by attendants (tritons): Leading Seaman Arthur Pilbeam, Able Seaman Frank Wild and seven other crew members arrived to sit the initiates on a platform 12ft above a canvas bath, shave their heads roughly, wash their mouths out with soap, and finally to pull the chair from under them so that the victims dropped backwards into the water bath. The officers went first, uninitiated lower-deck men followed. Edgar had not 'crossed the line' and had to endure the ritual. Unfortunately he did not record his feelings or, more probably, his fury. The 'court's' activities were lubricated by two bottles of whisky, which were passed quickly around. The carnival atmosphere soon turned sour. Neptune's queen, Mardon, fell into the sail bath, the entire court became covered in soot, flour and soap, and when the men returned to the mess, aggressive complaining followed against the Officers and Quartermasters with Mardon becoming particularly obnoxious. The next morning one of the stokers collapsed in the boiler room and when Dr Wilson was called to the scene he found that the man's thumb had been bitten right through to the bone in a drunken brawl by his fellow Dundee citizen, James Duncan, seaman.45\n\nNaval Regulations gave clear guidelines to cover excessive drinking and Scott had to respond with formal discipline. He discharged Mardon to be handed over to the authorities at the next port. He also, optimistically, ordered the lower deck to clean up their language. At least some of the lower deck agreed with him; Gilbert Scott thought that some of the men's behaviour was disgraceful.46\n\nDrink was both a regular feature of sailors' routine as well as a curse. Events such as the 'crossing of the line' and shore leave were characterised regularly by drunken bouts, though drunkenness was unusual at sea. Although most sailors drank whenever the opportunity presented itself, and in the later expedition Edgar drew particular attention to himself with his drinking, there is no mention in the _Discovery_ diaries, or in Edgar's naval record of this expedition, that he was prone to noteworthy overindulgence.\n\nLife at sea was not all work. Scott understood the importance of trying to keep the crew entertained. In the early part of the voyage the heat was tropical and as they sailed away from Madeira, the men had time for deck games: boxing, tug-of-war, deck cricket. They sang, accompanied by the mandolin. They played with the animals on board: Scott's Aberdeen Terrier, Scamp; Armitage's dog, Vinca, a Samoyed (whose mother was an Arctic Veteran); and also with the cats and the rabbits. Lectures, such as 'Vegetable and Animal Marine Life' and 'The Causes of Phosphorescence', were organised. The opportunity to look at specimens under the microscope (magnified 500 times) was appreciated. Remarkably, a form of hockey was played on the upper deck; officers against scientists, keenly watched by the crew.\n\nOn 13 September, _Discovery_ stopped at the small, uninhabited island of South Trinidad in the South Atlantic, approximately 500 miles east of Brazil and described by Wild as 'a very pleasant visit'.47 Edgar saw a land covered with yellow-grey craggy rock that rose steeply from the shore to peaks of 1,000ft, covered with fern and scrub. Frigate birds wheeled overhead as some of the crew landed. A bluejacket was assigned to each of the scientists to aid in the collection of specimens. They found a shore alive with crabs, some large and red and green, with eyes that stared bulbously at their visitors; others were pale and globular, like black-eyed apples on legs. The stop was short but important for getting samples of the wildlife to send back to London, and sixteen types of bird were found. Not all the crew landed; Williamson, for example, was detailed to look after the transport boats. He passed the time by fishing, adding sixteen fish and one young shark to the haul of new treasures.\n\nMany different birds followed the ship and Edgar became adroit at identifying them. Catching different types of albatrosses and the Cape pigeons became a popular pastime.\n\nThe run to Cape Town was made by sail as much as possible to reserve the coal supply. With a good wind, reasonable progress was made, though not at the speed that was hoped for (174 nautical miles on 26 September, 180 and 165 on 27th and 28th). _Discovery_ weathered her first gale on 26 September; the topgallant sheet was carried away and the sails had to be furled 'after a hard struggle'.48 The wind continued to blow very heavily till 2 a.m. in the middle watch, when it began to drop, and by 5.30 a.m. it had gone, leaving behind it a big heavy swell which made _Discovery_ roll unmercifully. But Edgar and the whole crew were satisfied with the way their ship had stood up to her first gale, she had proved herself a good sea ship.\n\nApart from battling the difficult conditions, the crew were occupied with preparing for their arrival in South Africa. They painted the ship \u2013 that unending naval duty \u2013 and prepared the coal chutes. Scott told them what he expected in terms of dress and behaviour, and later he met them to help them make their wills. Edgar, dutiful son that he was, left everything to his mother.49\n\nOn the afternoon of the 3 October, _Discovery_ entered Table Bay eight days behind schedule, in spite of the effort of the crew. The remarkable sight of Table Mountain impressed Edgar. The mountain was covered in a cloth of cloud, which moved continuously, so that the mountain tops showed variably in shade and in sunlight. Because of the difficulty in keeping to schedule, Scott decided that he would have to bypass Melbourne, a decision that meant that dogs and supplies waiting in Melbourne had to be transported to New Zealand. These were problems beyond Edgar's sphere as he had more pressing things to think about. Hundreds of visitors came to the ship in spite of the fact that the Boer War between the British and the Dutch settlers was continuing. Although Afrikaner guerrillas were close by and martial law was in place, _Discovery_ and her crew were welcomed with open arms by the British community.\n\nEdgar attended a garden party hosted by the Admiral in Cape Town and a picnic hosted by the Governor.50 He visited a Boer prisoners' camp but, sadly, did not record his thoughts or impressions about the war, which was, by now, in its third year. His Warrant Officer, Ford, and others were hosted at a dinner given by the Chief Warrant and Dockyard Officers of the port. On this occasion Ford gave a speech saying that although doubtless many dangers would be met in the Antarctic, he dreaded more the last half hour knowing that he was about to speak. Ford said that _Discovery_ was manned with volunteers motivated with that love of adventure and carelessness of danger, which was the birthright of every English man,51 a view endorsed by Edgar.\n\nMeanwhile Scott's disciplinary duties continued: Mardon, the merchant seaman who had caused so much trouble 'crossing the line' and the only one of the crew whom Scott thought was completely unsatisfactory, was finally dismissed. But in spite of this warning, drink-related concerns surfaced again. The relaxed discipline in Cape Town meant that alcohol was freely available to the crew and their new friends plied them with drink. This time two other crewmen, Donkeyman52 William Hubert and Stoker William Page, were drunk and incapable. Worse, Page was grossly insubordinate to a superior. The two offenders were paraded before Scott. Such insubordination should have resulted in discharge and naval detention on shore, but at this stage Scott needed his crew. He merely stopped the men's pay, shore leave and rum allowance.\n\nWork continued alongside the social activities. In spite of the numerous visitors on board, which naturally held things up, Edgar was busily involved in supervising the resetting of the rigging and the recaulking of _Discovery_ 's deck and sides above the waterline. A crew member wrote that it 'proved a very painful job but of course it must be done'.53\n\nOther important duties continued: _Discovery_ 's magnetic observatory had to be recalibrated with the Cape Town observatory. This could not be done in the town because of the Cape Town trams, which distorted readings, so the observations were made on a plateau behind the town on the Cape of Good Hope peninsula. Guerrilla activity meant that the work could only be done in the day and the work extended to ten days, rather than the seven that had been planned.54\n\nAfter taking on coal, _Discovery_ sailed to the naval base of Simon's Town on the other side of the Cape on 5 October. As she made the short journey the ship again demonstrated her remarkable ability to roll, sometimes through nearly forty degrees, so that everything not carefully fastened down just flew about. When they arrived in Simon's Town, the crew received the customary friendly welcome; Edgar was allowed ashore in the evening even though he had plenty to do during the day. _Discovery_ was refitted and supplied at no cost to the expedition.\n\nOn Monday 14 October 1901, _Discovery_ left Simon's Town and steamed round the fleet. It was the grandest send-off. Some of the sentiments expressed by the crew as they left South Africa seem dated today. 'The ships in harbour gave us a splendid send off with all good wishes for a successful voyage and a safe return to dear old England'.55 Williamson was positive, too. _Discovery_ received 'three glorious cheers from each of the ships as we steamed past them, I think that this was the best send off ever I saw a ship get'.56\n\n### Notes\n\n1 _South Wales Daily Post_ , Tuesday 6 August 1901, p. 3.\n\n2 Williamson, T.S., _Log_ 1901\u20131904, SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1; BJ, p. 2.\n\n3 Scott, G., _Journal during the British National Antarctic Expedition_ SPRI, MS 1485: D.\n\n4 _Cabbrian, Herald of Wales_ and _South Wales Daily Post_.\n\n5 Williamson, T.S., _Log_ 1901\u20131904, SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1; BJ, p. 4.\n\n6 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 107.\n\n7 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled, Scott's First Expedition and the Quest for the Unknown Continent_ , University Press of Colorado, USA, 2000, p. 94.\n\n8 Markham, C. _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 113.\n\n9 Ibid., p. 66.\n\n10 _Times_ , 20\/03\/1901.\n\n11 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled, Scott's First Expedition and the Quest for the Unknown Continent_ , University Press of Colorado, USA, 2000, p. 378.\n\n12 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 67.\n\n13 Williams, I., _With Scott in the Antarctic, Edward Wilson, Explorer, Naturalist, Artist_ , The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2008, p. 86\n\n14 Markham, C. _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 109.\n\n15 Ibid., p. 106.\n\n16 Williamson, T.S., _Log 1901\u20131904_ , SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1; BJ. p. 3.\n\n17 Ibid., p. 4.\n\n18 Wild, J.R.F., _Letter to Mrs A.C. Bostock_ (his cousin), SPRI, MS 1078\/3\/1; D.\n\n19 Baughman, T.H., _Pilgrims on the Ice, Robert Falcon Scott's First Antarctic Expedition_ , University of Nebraska Press, USA, 1999, p. 77\u201378.\n\n20 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command, Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 37.\n\n21 Pack, J. _Nelson's Blood: The Story of Naval Rum_ , Mason, Havant, Hampshire, 1982, p. 85.\n\n22 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Baylis, London, 1969, p. 37.\n\n23 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 70.\n\n24 Ibid., p. 90.\n\n25 Ibid., p. 93.\n\n26 Williamson, J.G., _The Structure of Pay in Britain 1710\u20131911, Research in Economic History_ , 7, 1982, p. 1\u201354,\n\n27 Afterwards Wild sailed with Shackleton on _Quest_ in 1921 as second-in-command. When Shackleton died in January 1922, Wild took over command.\n\n28 Abbott, G.P., _Letters to Cherry-Garrard_ , SPRI MS 559\/22\/1-3; D, 13\/04\/1916.\n\n29 Armitage, A.B., _Two Years in the Antarctic_ , Paradigm Press, Bungay, Suffolk, 1984, p. 116.\n\n30 Gregor, G.C., _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer, Edgar Evans, 1876\u20131912_. City of Swansea Publication, 1995 (Appendix 3, _The Martyred Hero_. Richards, H.S.) p.96.\n\n31 Scott, R.F., _Voyage of Discovery_ , Vol. 1, London, p. 54.\n\n32 Ibid., p. 54.\n\n33 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic Regions 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 286.\n\n34 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled, Scott's First Expedition and the Quest for the Unknown Continent_ , University Press of Colorado, USA, 2000, Appendix 2.\n\n35 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 106.\n\n36 Scott, G., _Journal during BNA Expedition_ SPRI, MS 1485; D.\n\n37 _Gauss_ was trapped in sea ice for twelve months, many miles from the region the Germans had intended to explore.\n\n38 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 89.\n\n39 Ibid., p. 97.\n\n40 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled, Scott's First Expedition and the Quest for the Unknown Continent_. University Press of Colorado, Colorado, USA, 2000, p. 76.\n\n41 Williamson, T.S., _Log 1901\u20131904_ , SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 8.\n\n42 A traditional 'hazing' ceremony, in which initiates are subjected to a strenuous, humiliating and sometimes, dangerous ritual.\n\n43 Williamson, T.S. _Log 1901\u20131904_ , SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 11.\n\n44 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command, Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 17.\n\n45 Ed. Savours, A., _Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press. London. 1966. p. 73.\n\n46 Scott, G., _Journal during BNA Expedition_ , SPRI, MS 1485; D.\n\n47 Wild, J.R.F., _Letter to Mrs A.C. Bostock_ (his cousin), SPRI, MS 1078\/3\/1; D.\n\n48 Ibid., p. 22.\n\n49 Markham, C., _Antarctic Obsession: The British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Bluntisham Books and the Erskine Press, Norfolk, England, 1986, p. 90.\n\n50 Baughman, T.H., _Pilgrims on the Ice, Robert Falcon Scott's First Antarctic Expedition_ , University of Nebraska Press. USA, 1999, p. 75.\n\n51 Ibid., p. 74.\n\n52 A sailor working in the engine room.\n\n53 Williamson, T.S., _Log 1901\u20131904_ , SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1; BJ. p. 26.\n\n54 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled, Scott's First Expedition and the Quest for the Unknown Continent_ , University Press of Colorado, USA, 2000, p. 83.\n\n55 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 19.\n\n56 Williamson, T.S., _Log 1901\u20131904_ , SPRI, MS 774\/1\/1; BJ. p. 28.\n\n## 5\n\n## The Southern Ocean to Antarctica\n\nWhen _Discovery_ departed from Simon's Town on 14 October 1901, she was twelve days behind schedule, with Scott's route taking him away from the main shipping routes. He needed to investigate the magnetic fields in the area south of 40\u00b0 latitude (his scientists were to record the intensity and dip of the magnetic forces), to comply with an important part of his instructions from the Admiralty. After making the scientific observations, _Discovery_ would make for Lyttelton, New Zealand.\n\n_Discovery_ soon caught a westerly breeze and made way by sail alone. The atmosphere amongst the sailors was cheerful; they caught a good haul of fish in the trawling net but subsequently managed to tangle the net and lose their haul in the process. Edgar enjoyed the evening singsongs.\n\nBut the weather soon deteriorated and the run became cold, rough and wet. From late October to early November _Discovery_ went through a series of storms of wind, snow and hail. These made for unpleasant conditions but impressive daily distances, 'nipping along' through the thousands of miles still to be covered: 207 miles on 22 October and 200 on the 28th, for example. The storms were a real test of the ship's sea worthiness; Gilbert Scott wrote that 'even the most experienced crewmen had never seen the like',1 and the crew agreed that _Discovery_ did well despite waves of 30 to 40ft rising as high as the Upper Topsail.2 The ship lifted over them, though Williamson wrote that she was reeling 'like a drunken man'. He was concerned that she would 'roll her masts out of her'.3 On the 28th a vast wave flooded on board, deluging the forecastle4, mess deck and laboratories. The men had just brought their winter clothes up from the hold. They were soaked through, and the crew had a lively time bailing water out of the wardroom. To make matters worse, the men were wearing sea boots, and Williamson wrote 'it's a wonder to me that some of us did not break our necks, once during the day I thought my checks were in. I was flung from one side of the ship to the other, with such force that I thought I had stove my ribs in... All's well'.5 But this second baptism confirmed to Edgar that he could have confidence in his ship.\n\n_Discovery_ continued south until, on 12 November, she was at a focus of magnetic interest at 52\u00b0S 131\u00b0E. Scott aimed to get even further south, as far as 65\u00b0, so that changes in the magnetic force and dip closer to the Magnetic Pole could be recorded. _Discovery_ was now about 1,000 miles from land and well away from the shipping tracks, so the cry of 'ship afire' on the night of the 14th caused considerable alarm. A sailor's oilskin had been left too close to a lamp; the ship was rolling and a fire started close to some paraffin oil tanks. Tales from his father's 'Cape Horn' years of fires on wooden ships must have come flooding back to Edgar as the alarm was raised. However, the crew were well rehearsed and the fire was put out quickly, but it was a cautionary experience nevertheless.\n\nOn 16 November, Edgar saw his first piece of ice bobbing around on the sea \u2013 only the size of a soup plate, but indisputably ice. Soon the ship was surrounded by bigger pieces succeeded by strange weathered blocks. The crew hooked up some ice to taste. It was fresh.6 Edgar was on deck when _Discovery_ first 'charged' an ice block as she entered the pack (the band of ice that surrounds Antarctica). By the evening she was enclosed by ice. The pack's shrouded grey-white mystery could not fail to impress; shafts of light reflected as a ghostly shimmer, the occasional bird flitted silently through the gloom. But Edgar did not have much time for introspection. As Petty Officer he was busy as he supervised the removal of the topgallant sails at night (to reduce strains on the masts should there be collisions with ice) and their replacement in the morning.\n\n_Discovery_ punched through as far south as 62\u00b0 50'S 139\u00b0E on steam. Then, after the magnetic observations had been made, she had to turn northwards; neither time nor coal reserves permitted further southern ventures. A glass of rum was issued all round; the boundaries of science had been pushed a little further.\n\nOn 22 November the crew sighted Macquarie Island. Here, in only a few hours, more seals, birds and penguins were added to the haul on board. The skins were to be of interest to the Natural History Museum in London, while the flesh was to be eaten. This visit was made lively by an encounter with a very large seal which, reluctant to give up its life for the advancement of scientific knowledge, charged at Skelton's camera and stand while Skelton himself attacked it with the boat's foot spur. The crew had seen penguins on the sail to the island, but here there were thousands of birds: handsome King penguins and smaller, orange-crested Royal penguins.\n\nAs the ship approached New Zealand Scott wrote that no sail, rope yarn or supplies on the deck had been lost (though on the final part of the run, in a 56\u00b0 roll, big waves damaged several cabins and a huge amount of china). Finally, on 28 November, _Discovery_ was off Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch. She had covered over 1,500 miles under a whole variety of conditions: heat, cold and wind. The crew had performed well.\n\nThe New Zealanders were fascinated by their visitors and made a fuss of them. They viewed them as young heroes sailing away to unravel the unsolved mysteries of Antarctica. Thus hundreds of locals turned out to greet them, and the crew were impressed and appreciative, writing that there were always willing hands ready to do the least little thing to make things easier and that the New Zealanders would not be forgotten. One wrote, 'when we are in Antarctica there will be as many thinking of us in New Zealand as at home, perhaps more'.7 Edgar attended a 'smoking concert' in a local Working Mans Club. There were other smoking concerts, on the ships and in Lyttelton. The mayor and people of Christchurch hosted a banquet for the crew,8 and the Sydenham Working Men's Club invited the sailors to dinner. Railway journeys to Christchurch were provided free of charge. Indeed, the time in New Zealand passed quickly.\n\nFor Scott, though, the time was too long. He would have liked to bypass some of the hospitality and sail straight on to the Antarctic, but he had no choice \u2013 he had to remain (for nearly four weeks) because of some possible damage to the hull, which meant that _Discovery_ had to go into dry dock for inspection. Visitors swarmed over the ship. Meanwhile, everything in the hull had to be unloaded, every item in every box recorded, and, after restowing, every box's exact location in the hull accounted. Stores shipped from England, including the unassembled magnetic huts, had to be squeezed in somehow. The Third Officer, Ernest Shackleton, was assigned this unenviable task and needed all the help he could get, but the crew, exhausted by their journey, keen to sample generous local hospitality and allowed to spend their evenings on shore,9 soon reached the stage where many were incapable of doing anything practical. But although Lieutenant Royds wrote that there wasn't a sober man on board by early evening and Engineer Skelton recorded that, 'there has been a great deal of fighting and drunkenness and I hope two of the seamen will be discharged',10 Edgar Evans does not rate a mention in relation to poor behaviour.\n\nBut poor behaviour was rife amongst other members of the crew. An Able Seaman (Baker) struck the Quartermaster Kenner (an arrestable offence), for some unknown reason, and deserted with Seaman Robert Sinclair and one of Edgar's fellow Petty Officers, William Smythe. Royds was sure that all three had deserted permanently but Smythe and Sinclair eventually reappeared; Smythe was reported to the Admiralty to be disrated from Petty Officer to Able Seaman.\n\nApart from these problems, New Zealand was a success for the lower deck. The city of Christchurch was greatly admired; it was beautifully laid out with wide streets and a river running through it, which enabled much boating and fishing. Maori ladies in local costume visited the ship and were given lunch. New Zealand sheep farmers offered as many sheep as the ship could carry (fifty); the farmers drew lots to see which farmer would have the honour of presenting them.11 When questions were asked about the reason for the expedition, the reply was that the question missed an important point \u2013 'how could they expect to know anything of the mighty universe of which the world is but an atom, if they didn't explore to the uttermost recesses of their own little globe?'12\n\nFinally, on 21 December, Julius, Bishop of Christchurch, came on board to bless the explorers. The men in their working clothes sang their final land-based hymn, _O God our help in ages past_ , lustily. The send off was a rousing event; cheer after cheer followed the ship as she sailed, bands played _Say Au Revoir But Not Good-bye_ as _Discovery_ , with her forty-four crew members, made her way to Port Chalmers \u2013 her last port of call before Antarctica. But the happy, noisy, band-blaring atmosphere was instantly destroyed when one of the young seamen, Charles Bonner, who had climbed to the top of the main mast, fell 100ft to his death from the mast truck.13 He seems to have stood up, holding on to just a wind vane, and lost his balance at the first sea swell. There was a 'wild cry' as he hurtled headfirst onto the corner of an iron deckhouse,14 spilling his brains over the deck. Skelton thought he was the worse for liquor when he went up and he hoped the death would be an object lesson to the men who had been drinking too much,15 but records from the crew do not mention alcohol. They were dumbfounded; the accident cast a gloom over the ship's company \u2013 death had visited them in seconds, depriving them of a popular crew member who, they knew, had left a fianc\u00e9e in England. Able Seaman Duncan wrote, 'Every one went about his work silently and quietly; they were afraid that the least sound would disturb the dead... Myself and another of his messmates washed poor Charlie and put a Union Jack over him and put him quietly to rest on the poop ready for internment at Port Chalmers.'16 Bonner was buried with full military honours; his body was carried on a gun carriage.17 Bluejackets from _Ringarooma_ , another British ship in port, formed a funeral escort and firing party.\n\nWhen _Discovery_ sailed into the unknown, weighed down by personnel and scientific equipment, provisions, coal, terrified sheep, snarling dogs and livestock, _Ringarooma_ (whose officers and crew had given a benefit concert for _Discovery_ ) gave the crew three cheers and crewman Williamson wrote that 'as Englishmen and brothers in arms, we could not hold it any longer, so we bucked up in spirit and gave them something of a return. The best possible under the circumstances. Good-bye civilisation.'18\n\nChristmas Day passed without celebration; the crew had no heart for it. Just a religious service as they sailed over the Southern Ocean. New Year's Day also started with melancholy memories of those loved ones 14,000 miles away. A feeling of isolation permeated all ranks. Scott wrote of this, so did Seaman Duncan. But as the day progressed and the crew sailed under clear skies, they were diverted to a degree by a new phenomenon \u2013 icebergs. These came as a revelation to the men, most of whom could never even have imagined such extraordinary icy sculptures. Soon six or more icebergs were in view, each one a miracle of blue and green and white. Some bergs were tabular, flat topped and with perpendicular sides.\n\nOn 3 January 1902, _Discovery_ crossed the Antarctic Circle at 66\u00b0 33'S and was now within the Antarctic Circle, the second major British exploration to be there since Captain James Clark Ross in the 1840s.19 (Bernacchi recorded the custom, which allows seamen to drink a toast with both feet on a table.)20 On that day the ship re-entered the pack ice. This belt of ice, which consists of the sea-ice from previous seasons and which is sprinkled liberally with icebergs, surrounds Antarctica. It is separated from the mainland by a rim of water in the Antarctic summer; in winter the whole sea freezes northwards for hundreds of miles. Edgar had aimed at adventure and excitement when he joined the navy, he must have felt fulfilled as he looked across the remarkable sight; hummocks of ice piled up in endless confusion, the surface white intensified by the greens and blues in the hollows and showing starkly against pools of dark water. The later calm of the sea was a big relief after the blustery Southern Ocean.\n\nTime spent going through the pack was not wasted. As _Discovery_ pushed her way through her crew took every opportunity to catch seals, and soon the upper deck looked more like a butcher's shop than His Majesty's Ship, as gory carcases of sheep and seal meat were hung on the rigging to freeze. Scott was determined that all the crew should eat fresh meat. He hoped this might be an added protection against scurvy, and the liver was often served at breakfast, the meat at dinner. Some thought the meat 'very good, better than beef, especially Bombay beef'21, but Edgar could never get used to it and didn't enjoy it. The biggest seal caught on the pack was a huge crabeater seal that crew members Cross, Heald and Joyce and two officers bagged. It was nearly 8ft and over 1,200lbs. It certainly gave the crew enough food for a few days. Edgar saw Emperor penguins for the first time; the birds looked large, more like small seals, but they were indisputably penguins. One was standing on his hind legs, his characteristic beak and yellow throat clearly visible.\n\n_Discovery_ sailed close to the 170\u00b0E meridian in the direction of the hut where the explorer Borchgrevink had overwintered in 1899. As she battled through the pack the crew 'watered the ship'. They swarmed over the side armed with picks and shovels to cut blocks of snow from the top of the floe.22 The ice was melted in long tanks fitted with steam coils. In this way tons of water could be collected in a few hours.23 In 1901 Scott had no way of knowing how long _Discovery_ would be in the pack (he knew that one expedition had been held in the pack for fifteen months and some of her crew had died before she was released without reaching her objective). In the event, she got through the pack in five days in spite of a few collisions with heavy pieces of ice. The crew picked a path through open patches of water whenever they could find them.\n\nThe 5 January 1902 was celebrated as the Christmas holiday. It was a Sunday and Edgar joined the morning service celebrating with Christmas and New Year hymns. On that day three memorable things happened: firstly, the sun 'forgot to set' (and did not remember how to do so again till shortly before midnight on 15 February, to be followed by long days which gradually grew shorter until 'Old Sol' disappeared on the 24 April for four months).24 Secondly, the skis that were to be used in Antarctica were tried for the first time. In 1901 skis were much longer than those used today and only one 150cm bamboo pole was used as a ski stick. The pole had an iron ferrule and a point at the end. This unwieldy combination must have been difficult to master but Edgar took to it well. He was competitive, athletic and strong, and by the end of the afternoon, in spite of collisions and falls, he felt confident enough to take part in races. Thirdly, the crew saw their first Ad\u00e9lie penguins. These birds, named after the French explorer Dumont d'Urville's wife, are quarrelsome and noisy, but the crew were instantly captivated by the way the Ad\u00e9lies ran eagerly and fearlessly up to them. Later, Dr Edward Wilson was embarrassed to record how a male Ad\u00e9lie made overtures to him by offering him a stone for a nest. In his collection of First World War writings, _Goodbye to All That and Other Great War Writings_ , Robert Graves included the story of how a male Ad\u00e9lie passed Wilson, looked at him admiringly and returned to deposit his gift at Wilson's feet.25\n\nAfter these new experiences, everyone congregated on the mess deck for a sing-along and a barrel of beer, presented before _Discovery_ left England.26 Cards were given to the men by Dr Wilson (a gift from his wife), and he gave the Petty Officers a box of crackers. They also received gifts from Royd's mother. The Mess desk was dressed and Scott wrote that it 'looked very nice'.27 Celebrations ended with the men singing and cheering, and an extra tot of rum was served.\n\nSoon open sea was visible beyond the pack, backed in the distance by the Antarctic mountains \u2013 mountains hitherto unexplored. For the first time Edgar could appreciate the awesome, austere beauty of Antarctica. Early on 8 January, basked in beautiful sunshine and surrounded by calm blue water, _Discovery_ steamed into the open sea. A day later Edgar, with his companions, landed at Cape Adare. Crew member Williamson wrote, 'Soon all was excitement, we lowered the boats and were soon scrambling up the beach where the great man Borchgrevink spent that lonely and tiresome winter.'28 Some local inhabitants were also excited; another colony of Ad\u00e9lie penguins gave the men their close attention. The birds jumped in and out of the water, squawking to their friends and managing to look both earnest and comical. Borchgrevink's hut impressed; Seaman Duncan wrote that it was constructed on a log cabin principle and could be assembled quickly. Duncan thought it was better than the one they had brought.29 Some useful provisions and coal remained from 1899.\n\nThe sun shone all night and the distant mountains gleamed as the crew left a tin cylinder on the Cape's stony shore. This contained records and private letters and was the first in the series of the hopeful paper chase of messages left so that the relief vessel could follow _Discovery_ 's progress. Lashly left a letter for his wife; 'she may get it some day if the postman should happen to come this way'.30\n\n_Discovery_ sailed down the west coast of the Ross Sea looking for likely landing places and winter quarters. All too soon Edgar and his colleagues understood the power of the elements ranged against them. The crew kept a watchful eye on proceedings as the ship escaped from a chain of icebergs, then had to shelter from a raging snowstorm. Williamson later said it was, 'more like two gales lashed together'.31 On the 15 January, once the wind had subsided, men were able to land to leave another of those hopeful messages, marked by a red pole, for the relief ship. These small containers were literally their sole method of communication with the outside world. As she sailed along the coastline _Discovery_ passed close by icebergs and the crew captured a variety of seal that completed their collection of the 'set' of pack-ice seals: Weddell, Crabeater, Ross, Leopard.32\n\nWhen ice blocked further exploration south on 22 January, _Discovery_ turned eastwards, charting the coastline. Amongst the confusion of mountains that they passed, some named, others not, the crew saw the two volcanoes recorded by Ross, Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, at over 100 miles away. Mount Erebus was, and remains, an active volcano (the world's most southern). Mount Terror was thought to be dormant, but the crew decided immediately that during the expedition they would climb it and settle any doubts. _Discovery_ passed Cape Crozier. This cape, home to thousands of Emperor penguins was a place that was to linger permanently in Edgar's mind after he was involved in an abortive expedition to reach it. But now it was merely the recipient of a third record of instructions and letters for the relief ship. This time two red cylinders were placed conspicuously in the centre of the penguin rookery.\n\nFrom Cape Crozier, Edgar had his first view of Ross' famous Barrier, then one of the unsolved mysteries of Antarctica. The Barrier stretched as far as the eye could see in an irregular coastline. The crew were a bit let down \u2013 Gilbert Scott was 'greatly disappointed' at its appearance,33 as they had heard so much about it from Ross' descriptions. Perhaps its contrast with the huge mountains they had just passed made it look smaller than they had thought, a bit like a flat sea broken up by wind furrows.34 _Discovery_ sailed east along the Barrier for seven days. New findings were made; the Barrier is 400 miles long and between 200\u2013400ft high. Soundings were taken along the whole length, and on good days, with the sun shining, it was like a pleasure trip.\n\nBy 28 January the height of the Barrier was getting lower. Sea soundings recorded a depth of around 90 fathoms (at the other end of the Barrier the sea soundings were 640 fathoms) and on the 30th, two high peaks of land were seen. Ross had believed that there was land to the east of the Barrier but had been unable to prove it, so this was a big discovery. Lashly was unmoved, commenting laconically, 'so we have passed the ice barrier at last'.35 But Gilbert Scott wrote that it was the first finding of land in the twentieth century 'which human eye had never seen before'.36 It was named after King Edward VII, _Discovery_ 's patron.\n\nFinding winter quarters was becoming increasingly urgent. It was time to turn back. However, the return was difficult and there was a close shave with icebergs.37 On 1 February it was feared that _Discovery_ would be trapped in rapidly forming ice, as she steamed round and round trying to find an opening. Still, discipline was maintained. Williamson grumbled; 'this monstrous idea of scrubbing decks every morning... in below freezing temperature... it seems as though they cannot forget that navy idea or commandment of thou shalt not miss scrubbing decks no matter under what circumstances, if it did any good I would not mind but as soon as you turn the water on it is frozen and then you have to come along with shovels to pick the ice up'.38\n\nAfter this danger the emphasis to get back to secure winter quarters increased, but on the sail along the Barrier a stop was made to make a balloon ascent. _Discovery_ was secured in a little bay called Balloon Bight (later the Bay of Whales), and this was the furthest south any ship had been; it was also the site from which Roald Amundsen was to make his successful sortie to the Pole in 1911. In 1902 all hands were occupied in filling the balloon with hydrogen. It was hoped that seeing the Antarctic from on high would yield information about her interior. Scott made the first ascent, he forgot the camera so, when Shackleton went up next, he became the first aerial photographer of the Antarctic. None of the hands were invited to ascend, not even those who had undergone special training in Aldershot. In the event the only finding was a view of miles and miles of snow, and the realisation that ballooning in Antarctica, in inexperienced hands, is a very chancy business.\n\nBy 8 February _Discovery_ had reached the top of McMurdo Sound.39 Scott decided to make his winter base in the shallow bay close to a tongue of land jutting out from the slopes of Mount Erebus (which steamed intermittently throughout the expedition). It was relatively close to the Barrier and gave access to the interior. The crew blasted the ice away with gun-cotton to get as far inland as possible and the ship was snug in snow and ice from 12\u201330ft deep. Here they landed. The shore party, with Edgar as Petty Officer, landed to erect a hut on a rocky promontory looking across to Mount Erebus \u2013 the base was known as 'Hut Point'. Edgar must have been relieved. Along with many of the crew he must have wondered if he would ever get this far.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Scott, G., _Journal during the BNA Expedition_ , SPRI. MS 1485: D.\n\n2 Duncan, J., _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904, 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02_. SPRI MS.1415; D, p. 3.\n\n3 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 47. p. 31.\n\n4 Forecastle. The space at the front of the ship below the main deck where the crew's quarters were.\n\n5 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 31.\n\n6 Sea ice loses its salinity after about three years.\n\n7 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 47.\n\n8 Scott, G., _Journal during BNA Expedition_ SPRI MS 1485: D.\n\n9 Ibid.\n\n10 Skelton, R., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p. 31.\n\n11 James Duncan. _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904, 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02_. SPRI MS.1415; D, p. 3.\n\n12 Baughman, T.H., _Pilgrims on the Ice_ , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1999, p. 85.\n\n13 A truck \u2013 a guide for ship's ropes in the form of a disk with holes, fitted to the top of the mast.\n\n14 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , John Murray, London, 1929, p.84.\n\n15 Skelton, R., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p. 33.\n\n16 James Duncan. _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition_ , 19011904. 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02. SPRI MS.1415; D .\n\n17 Ibid.\n\n18 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 51.\n\n19 Borchgrevink's British Antarctic Expedition of 1898\u20131890, which sailed in _Southern Cross_ was British, but in name only. Only three of the thirty-one men on board were not Norwegian.\n\n20 Bernacchi, L.C., _Saga of the Discovery_ , Blackie, London, 1938, p. 23.\n\n21 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 21.\n\n22 Scott, R.F. _The Voyage of the Discovery_ , John Murray, London, 1929, p. 94.\n\n23 Ibid., p. 95.\n\n24 Wild, J.R.F., _Letters to Mrs Bostock_ , SPRI MS 1078\/3\/1: D, p. 3.\n\n25 Robert Graves, _Goodbye to All That and Other Great War writings_ , Carcanet, London, Postscript, p. 280.\n\n26 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 55.\n\n27 Scott, G. _Journal during BNA Expedition_ SPRI MS 1485: D.\n\n28 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 59.\n\n29 James Duncan, _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02. SPRI MS.1415; D.\n\n30 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 21.\n\n31 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ, p. 63.\n\n32 Skelton, R., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p. 43.\n\n33 Scott, G., _Journal during BNA Expedition_ SPRI MS 1485: D\n\n34 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 105.\n\n35 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command, Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969. p. 24.\n\n36 Scott, G., _Journal during BNA Expedition_ SPRI MS 1485: D.\n\n37 Ibid.\n\n38 Williamson, T.S., _Logs 1901\u20131904_ , MS, 774\/1\/1: BJ. p. 79.\n\n39 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_. Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 112.\n\n## 6\n\n## Early Months in Antarctica: February to September 1902\n\nWork started on Hut Point immediately. Speed was essential in the construction; the magnetic huts, store huts, kennels, provisions, coal and water all needed to be on land quickly. Scott couldn't be certain that _Discovery_ would not be torn away from her moorings, so any shore party had to be self-sufficient.\n\nIt was a hard job: the supports had to be dug deep into the frozen ground and it was difficult to locate all the pieces for making up the sides.1 When the hut was finished its roof was felted and covered in heavy double wood and, surprisingly, it had a veranda around its walls (the men thought it was better suited to a colonial shooting lodge than a polar base). In fact, the original idea, that it should be the permanent base for the expedition, became unnecessary when _Discovery_ stayed in Antarctica over the winter rather than returning to New Zealand. Thus the men lived on the ship, mainly using the hut for storage, drying clothes and putting on entertainments. Problems with the hut's construction became apparent; when the stove was lit, snow on the roof melted and leaked through, icing up clothes stored there for weeks. Some of the men were not too overwhelmed by Antarctica; Seaman Duncan wrote 'this seems like a dreary place to be spending twelve months in'.2 Ross Island and the hut were to be their base for the next two years. Behind the land rose gradually towards hills of about 500ft. The crew named these 'Arrival Heights' and 'Harbour Heights', and they called the mass of rock north of these hills, which rose over 1000ft above sea level, 'Castle Rock'.\n\nScott was aware that the problem of keeping over thirty men occupied might become acute throughout the freezing, dark Antarctic winter, when poor visibility precluded any sorties and when small irritations could easily become magnified. Recreational activities were not neglected. With the continuing light in the Antarctic autumn (February\u2013March), football and hockey were regularly played. Teams were imaginatively varied to cross ranks: married or engaged against singles, older men against the youngsters. Sometimes, Officers against Men (Officers 3, Men 2 on 13 February was a particular highlight). The rules were lax; there was no such thing as 'off-side'. Hockey matches lasted an hour and were played in temperatures of \u221230\u00b0C, or even lower. Improvising, the crew used light sticks and a homemade hardball. This was just as well with men such as Edgar on the attack. Big (just under 12 stone) and athletic, he dashed about, a misty vapour steaming round his head helmet, his stick high in the air, eager to attack the opposition with deadly intent; a fearsome opponent indeed. Skiing was encouraged also whilst the light held: in spite of the cumbersome equipment there was only one serious injury \u2013 a broken leg.\n\nEdgar made himself useful immediately. Scott said he was a man of 'Herculean strength' and 'well muscled'. Equally important in a party isolated from the rest of the world, he had a cheerful nature and was reliable and practical, outgoing and gregarious but not boastful or pushy. On this expedition during the next twenty-three months, he was to take part in some of _Discovery_ 's most important sorties. These would make him a hardened veteran of Polar exploration and one of Scott's most trusted colleagues.\n\nMost of the outings would take him towards, or on to, the Western Mountains, that enormous range of mountains to the west of McMurdo Sound. On three expeditions he was with Scott on journeys (totalling ninety-four days), the last being a stupendous 950 statute mile journey into the mountains. This expedition was a sledging feat that conclusively proved the immensity of the continent. It was a feat equal to the huge journeys of the Arctic explorers half a century earlier.\n\nThe crew understood that Scott retained absolute authority and realised that he was prepared to use this authority. Two days after _Discovery_ berthed he ordered that the cook, Charles Brett, should be put in irons for insubordination. One of the crew, Duncan, simply recorded 'Mr Brett getting troublesome'.3 (Brett refused to report for duty; he was fed up with working in the galley all day.) The lively scene, as Brett fought his captors, before he was finally clapped in irons, was recorded in the diaries. But this was the only time that physical discipline was used on the expedition.\n\nNaval routine continued on land. Whilst the light lasted, the crew worked from 7 a.m. until 8 a.m. when they had breakfast: porridge, followed by curry with rice\/salmon\/mince\/sardines\/rissoles\/cold tongue, washed down with cocoa or coffee.4 Work continued until midday when there was a break for an hour and a half for dinner (soup followed by ham\/beef pie\/seal\/tinned meat with vegetables then a pudding).5 Virtually all the food came from tins. Soon after they arrived the men continued work until 5 p.m., but as the light faded they finished for the day by early afternoon.6 The provision of artificial light was a necessity as there were twenty-four hours of darkness during the Antarctic winter. Scott was very conscious of the necessity for light, both for psychological reasons and for health (darkness was thought to contribute to Polar Madness). An attempt to manufacture a windmill dynamo to produce electricity failed repeatedly (the windmill blades snapped in the wind) so an oxyacetylene lamp was used to give light for about eight hours, otherwise candles (provided or homemade) were used and gave enough light for the men to write up their logs, play cards, draughts or chess. Royds showed magic lantern slides.7\n\nEdgar's first sledging expedition was a catastrophe. It highlighted total British inexperience in coping with Antarctic conditions and was notable for its lack of proper preparation and for its incompetence. It was a hard lesson in survival. On this expedition Edgar was one of the inadvertent but blameless causes of a domino-type series of disasters that left one crewman dead and that could have easily resulted in the deaths of seven other crewmen and the officer in charge of them, Lieutenant Michael Barne. None of the equipment had been tested before the expedition set out. It was to be, as Scott wrote, 'one of our blackest days in the Antarctic'.8\n\nThe sortie was to Cape Crozier, and its practical purpose was to update the messages for the relief ship on the position of _Discovery_ 's winter quarters. When the expedition set out no one understood how weather in Antarctica could change in a very short time from reasonable conditions to howling blizzards. The expedition lasted a memorable fifteen days, from 4\u201319 March (autumn in Antarctica).\n\nThe party was under the command of Lieutenant Charles Royds. There were three other officers, including Lieutenant Barne, and also nine crew members. Scott wrote later that the packed sledges 'presented an appearance of which we should afterwards have been wholly ashamed'.9 The party took two sledges and four tents, with Edgar sharing a tent with Stoker Frank Plumley and Seaman William Heald. They slept in a three-man sleeping bag for extra warmth (but extra discomfort) and quickly understood the horrors of Antarctic journeys in the autumn.\n\nThey took pyramidal tents, big enough for three people to lie down in but for only one person to stand in comfortably. To erect the tent they firstly had to spread and stabilize bamboo poles on the ice and then cover them with the tent cloth: when a high wind was blowing, this would involve a long struggle with flapping canvas and collapsing poles. With the tent erected, snow was piled around its base to stabilize it. Edgar and his companions kept their woollen underwear on throughout the sorties but changed into their reindeer fur suits for sleeping (a prolonged business as the furs got as stiff as boards) and slept on a canvas cloth. Anything they took off had to be put in the shape it needed to be in the following morning, since garments froze (in a few minutes) into whatever shape they were left in. Unlacing the leggings was another ordeal. The men had to use their bare fingers which meant putting their hands back into their mitts every few minutes. One of the most important aspects of the night routine was foot care: frostbite could progress to gangrene so the utmost care had to be taken. The night socks were carried next to their skin during the daytime march; at night the innermost pair of day socks was changed with this pair and in turn put next to the skin. Grass was also used to absorb sweat and was often put next to the skin at night. Long fur boots reaching to the knee were worn with the fur nightwear. When they eventually got into their sleeping bags, they shivered and shook for hours, rime inside the tent from the evening cooking dripping onto their faces. Morning was always a welcome relief.\n\nOn the Cape Crozier Expedition, following three exhausting days and 21 miles progress, the work of finding the trail and keeping to the course was passed from the officers to Able Seaman William Heald and Edgar. But, after a short time, as conditions remained so difficult, the officers changed the plan again, unwisely deciding that those party members with skis \u2013 Royds, Skelton and Koettlitz (who had previous experience of Polar conditions in the Arctic) \u2013 should go on, leaving the inexperienced Barne to lead the nine men home (the Royds trio did not reach Cape Crozier).\n\nOn 9 March, Lieutenant Barne set off to return to the ship. The party made good progress initially, but on the 11th they ran into such atrocious flying drift that they stopped and pitched their tent for protection. Miserably they ate biscuits and solid, cold pemmican (the stove was broken). Two of the seamen, Vince and Hare, had such problems with frozen feet in the leather ski boots that they changed them for fur finnesko.\n\nThey were only about 4 miles from the ship, but the wrong decision was made when the group decided to abandon the tent, let the dogs loose and go on by foot in the direction which they thought led to _Discovery_. This was unwise because blizzards only last for two to three days in Antarctica and they would probably have been safe if they had stuck in their tent. But they had no way of knowing this; they were exhausted, freezing, frightened, hungry and thirsty with no means of heating ice for drinking water. As the wind thundered against the tent, they thought they could be blown away with every gust and they decided that it would be safe to make a dash for the ship, just a few miles away. In fact Lieutenant Barne, in the negligible visibility, miscalculated their position; they were actually close to cliffs on the north side of Ross Island and close to the sea. The group of nine progressed cautiously along a steep icy slope with snow swirling around them. Vince and Hare in finnesko (no grip) slipped and slithered on the icy surface. When Hare decided to return for his boots he disappeared almost immediately. Lieutenant Barne and the remaining eight spread out to try to find him, and as they did so Edgar lost his footing and disappeared down a steep slope. Showing more courage than reason, Barne threw himself down the slope after him. He found himself accelerating down an ever-increasing gradient until he was, miraculously, stopped by the same snow bank that had halted Edgar's descent.\n\nWhen the American seaman Arthur Quartley made the same decision to go down the slope to find Barne and Edgar, he left behind him, on that exposed hillside, six Polar novices in a blizzard that reduced vision to a few feet and with no idea of where they were. As they attempted a diagonal descent down the slope, they too began to slip, Wild said, 'at a fearful rate with no idea where they were going and no hope of stopping'.10 Vince was first, Seaman Wild second, the other three close behind. Suddenly Wild stopped with a jerk on a snow ledge. The men behind all slid down helplessly and landed on his ledge except for George Vince, who was unable to stop, probably because he was in finnesko, who shot on and disappeared. The men could see a ledge 20ft from where they had landed. As they crawled cautiously towards it, the drift lifted and they saw, to their horror, the drop of 90ft into the sea that Vince had spiralled down. Shouting had no effect in that howling hurricane. They had to leave Vince to his dreadful fate.11 The young seaman was to be Scott's only Antarctic fatality on the _Discovery_ expedition.\n\nEdgar, Lieutenant Barne and Arthur Quartley had no hope of getting up the slope to rejoin their companions. They cautiously made their way in what they hoped was the direction of the ship. At one point Barne was just saved from joining Vince in the sea by the quick thinking of Quartley who pulled him back from the edge of the cliff. Barne's compass was not working and the three men walked and crawled along until they finally saw a landmark they knew. Then they progressed more confidently, aided by the blaring of the ship's siren.\n\nWhen they stumbled across a search party, the three were virtually unrecognisable. They could not speak intelligibly (Dr Wilson writes that one of them was talking rubbish),12 and they were all dazed. Barne was so affected by the cold that he could hardly speak at all, intelligibly or otherwise, and the trio had to be identified by Quartley. Edgar's ear was badly frostbitten. It looked like an apple, but he said it felt like a cabbage.13 He had frostbite of his fingers and feet, and his nose was swollen to a prodigious size. He was to continue to have problems with his nose on later expeditions; he would refer to it as his 'Old Blossom'. All three were put in the sick bay and looked after by Dr Wilson. The experience had no long-term physical effect on Edgar, though by now he undoubtedly understood the necessity for thorough preparation.\n\nBut what of Hare, the man who had first left the party to get his ski boots? He had an extraordinary adventure, reappearing uninjured, even without frostbite, after being caught in below-freezing temperatures for two days with no protection. Hare was put in the Magnetic Laboratory at 17\u00b0F and the temperature was gradually raised to freezing point. Remarkably he suffered no long term effects and could only have survived because he stopped near to the shelter of a pile of rocks, pulled his arms into his woollen blouse (under the gabardine wind jacket) and covered the opening to his helmet. He must have been covered in snow, which left enough space for him to breathe, a sort of primitive snow hole.14 When he got back to the ship Scott was so relieved he looked 'as if he thought the dead were walking in'.15\n\nBy 19 March _Discovery_ was firmly frozen into her winter quarters. Good Friday, 28 March, was celebrated with hot cross buns 'or bricks, could hardly tell which'.16 By 3 April the ship was in darkness. Throughout the winter the doctors examined the men carefully with blood tests, chest measurements, waist, biceps, forearm and calf measurements, weight and a record of blowing power.\n\nThere was one further expedition in the autumn of 1902. Edgar was not on it. It was also unsuccessful because the conditions were simply too bad for expedition work. Called the Southern Depot Attempt, the expedition from 31 March to 4 April 1902 was to lay a series of depots to the south in preparation for exploration the following year. The expedition took eighteen dogs and four sledges, but the horrors of sledging in late autumn were again all too apparent. The temperature was between \u221226\u00b0 and \u221240\u00b0F. If the men touched any metal it stung like a hot iron and left a white mark; the dogs would hardly pull; the snow surface was awful and the wind made progress terrible. The trip lasted three days with the men enduring miserable nights. Scott decided to depot the provisions early and turn back. On the way home the dogs pulled for all they were worth.\n\nThe 23 April was the official beginning of the long winter. Although the moon's movements (disappearing and returning every month), the rotation of the stars and the shortening of each day told them that time was actually passing, the sun, a vital force, had disappeared from their lives. On the 25th, the first edition of the _South Polar Times_ was produced \u2013 'The paper is a very good one quite interesting and amusing'.17 Editions were to continue throughout the expedition. A single copy of an alternative paper, _The Blizzard_ , was produced for those submissions not quite up to the standard of the _South Polar Times_. Unfortunately entries were anonymous, and if Edgar made an attempt it is not recorded. Scrap albums were popular, as was making metal models, but it was cold in the workshop and the men had to wear mittens to avoid a skin burn when the cold metal was touched.18 The winter blizzards raged with gusts of over 100 miles an hour.19 However, Edgar never tired of looking at the auroras, those brilliant undulating lights which lit up the pitch-black sky.20\n\nBy mid May, there was only half an hour of twilight in the whole day. A good moon meant that they could get about a bit, and the crew played football by moonlight when they could (though the doctor said it was injurious to health at such low temperatures). They played until 14 June, only a few days before Midwinter's Day.\n\nAs the winter months progressed some resentment creeps into the diaries; things were allegedly 'slack' with the officers who had intended to work wonders to keep the men entertained during the winter, but had not even started when the winter was nearly half gone (only one concert having been performed). The crew wanted the promised classes and information about the scientific work. The Lower Deck felt hard done by.\n\nBut the bleak months passed without any serious problems and the men were soon to hear Scott's plans for the expedition. He may have been aware of the rumbles. On Sunday 22 June, Midwinter's Day, he spoke to the men. He said firstly that he was pleased with the general health of the ship's company and he emphasised how each man must continue to look after his own health so as to be fit for sledging. He went on to say that he wanted all the men to have their chance to take part in expeditions and explained how different parties would go south, west and towards the Magnetic Pole.\n\nMidwinter's Day was indeed a welcome diversion. The mess was beautifully decorated with coloured paper and draped in flags, garlands, wreathes and the men's photographs.21 The stokers had carved an ice block into the shape of a frost king with his crown. More photos were taken. The crew had bloaters (soaked, smoked herrings) for breakfast (they needed a lot of water afterwards), and little toys and puzzles had been sent by Mrs Royds, which helped to pass the time, as did cards from Mrs Wilson. Dinner was real turtle soup; ham, kidney beans, potatoes and plum pudding with brandy sauce washed down with bottles of Bass ale, this showing that the crew were served a good and varied diet. After this largesse and a post prandial nap, there were ices made of condensed milk and chocolate vanilla, cakes and sweets, before the day was rounded off with grog and, finally, a concert in the Royal Terror Theatre. Some of the crew went to the Captain asking for more lubrication. Unsurprisingly, Scott had no difficulty in refusing.22\n\nOn 6 August, the anniversary of _Discovery_ sailing from England, a minstrel show was held in the Royal Terror Theatre (The Hut); the singing was 'very fair indeed',23 and in the later part of the winter months there were lectures on geology, wireless telegraphy (very interesting), 'Sledging To-day', the 'Wonders of the Deep' and magic lantern shows.24 These probably received a varied reception, but in general the bleak months passed without any serious problems. Lashly wrote that he had plenty of work to do, and that everyone was preparing for the sledging journeys and weeks passed very well.25 Alterations and improvements were made to the furs, their sleeping bags and the sledging equipment in general.\n\nOn Friday 22 August 1902, the sun returned at last. Most of the men climbed the hills to get a glimpse of it. Its first appearance for four long months, a brilliant red and the sky all around it, looked, as Williamson said, 'something beautiful.'26 As daylight increased so everyone's mood improved. The sledges and automatic sledgemeters were tested. Edgar became, unsurprisingly, an excellent sledge hauler; he was soon considered one of the best.27\n\n### Notes\n\n1 James Duncan, _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904. 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02_ , SPRI MS.1415; D, p. 45.\n\n2 James Duncan, _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904. 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02_ , SPRI MS.1415; D, 10 February.\n\n3 Ibid.,10 February.\n\n4 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled_ , University Press of Colorado, 2000, p. 154.\n\n5 Ibid., p.154.\n\n6 Williamson, T.S., _Log 13\/07\/01\u201323\/06\/02_ SPRI MS 744\/1\/1: BJ, 22\u201330 April 1902.\n\n7 Ibid., 1 May 1902.\n\n8 Scott, R.F., _The Voyage of the Discovery_ , John Murray, London, 1929, p. 173.\n\n9 Ibid., p. 170.\n\n10 Wild, J.R.F., Letter to Mrs A.C. Bostock (his cousin), SPRI, MS 1078\/3\/1; D\n\n11 Ibid.\n\n12 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 123.\n\n13 Ibid., p. 124.\n\n14 Williams, I., _With Scott in the Antarctic: Edward Wilson, Explorer Naturalist, Artist_ , The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire, England, 2009.\n\n15 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 125.\n\n16 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command, Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 35.\n\n17 Ibid., p. 40.\n\n18 James Duncan, _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904. 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02._ SPRI MS.1415; D, p. 45.\n\n19 Priestley, R., Lecture, _The Psychology of Polar Exploration_ , SPRI, MS 1097\/16\/1; D.\n\n20 Auroras are phenomena related to the sun because of its emission of electric particles. Protons and electrons originating in the sun are caught by the terrestrial magnetic fields. When these electrical particles meet the ionised gases in the higher layers of the atmosphere a light is produced in the sky.\n\n21 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_. Blandford Press, London, 1966, p.155.\n\n22 James Duncan, _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904. 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02_. SPRI MS.1415; D. 23 June.\n\n23 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_. Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 168.\n\n24 James Duncan, _Journal kept during the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901\u20131904. 4\/10\/01\u20138\/11\/02_. SPRI MS.1415; D. 23rd, p. 41.\n\n25 Ibid., p. 42.\n\n26 Williamson, T.S., _Log 13\/07\/01\u201323\/06\/02_ SPRI MS 744\/1\/1: BJ 22 August 1902.\n\n27 Ed. Skelton, J., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p. 109.\n\n## 7\n\n## The Antarctic Spring: September to October 1902\n\nEdgar's first spring expedition was south-west, towards the mountains bordering the west coast of McMurdo Sound, which were such an important feature of _Discovery_ 's exploratory and scientific itinerary. In fact the Western Mountains were to be the main destination for Edgar's expeditions throughout the _Discovery_ expedition. The aim of this first sortie was to find a southerly route into the interior of Victoria Land; in addition the team were to study ice formation and geological features. But the expedition soon ran into trouble. Six men set out \u2013 two officers, Lieutenant Royds and Dr Koettlitz, with four from the lower deck, Edgar, William Lashly, Frank Wild and Arthur Quartley. Quartley and Lashly were Stokers and Wild was an Able Seaman. The four were recognized as an impressive combination. As the party set out with two sledges, one behind the other, Skelton wrote that the four were the 'best possible you could pick out of the ship. I wish I was going with them',1 a comment echoed by the mess deck who already called them the Guarantee Party.\n\nEven with the Guarantee Party, the team soon encountered problems as they aimed towards Black and Brown Islands, two islands engulfed by the great ice Barrier to the east of Mount Discovery and just over 20 miles from Hut Point. Snow ridges split the sledge runners, the light was awful, the temperature dropped to \u221256\u00b0F and they were engulfed in a violent blizzard. Although the party did manage some survey work in the area around the two islands, they found the going terrible. Wild, in particular, was unimpressed: the party, he wrote, 'did little except getting frost bitten and bad tempered and had a miserable time for ten days, for two of which we were confined to the tents whilst a glorious blizzard played Old Harry with things in general'.2\n\nAs the blizzard whirled around them and they started to shut the camp down, Lashly left his sleeping bag beside his tent and went back to collect more gear. He saw his bag being swept away into the swirling whiteness. On this sortie Lashly was sleeping in the officers' tent and had a single sleeping bag. In 1902, opinions varied about the relative benefits of one-man and three-man sleeping bags. Some thought the three-man bag warmer (though more uncomfortable than the single bag). Also, one-man sleeping bags for all would be excessively heavy, so whilst officers and scientists had single bags, the men usually shared a three-man bag. Lashly, since he shared a tent with the officers, had been issued with a single bag, but when it disappeared he had to crowd in with Edgar, Wild, and Quartley. When one of them said 'turn', they all had to turn. Lashly, in a phlegmatic understatement, said that it 'was rather crowded'.3 As the blizzard raged the men had to sit in the tent with their backs against the canvas to stop it tearing to pieces. The following day the bag was still missing and the party decided to retreat \u2013 the men were fed up and frostbitten. They decided that they were every type of fool to have ever come to Antarctica and swore that nothing would bring them back... and yet, the glamour of the vastness of the place, the scenery, the anticipation of finding something new, the satisfaction of winning against nature 'remain with one and call men again and again to, \" _that stark and sullen solitudes, that sentinel, The Pole_ \".'4\n\nBefore Edgar's next sledging party a problem surfaced that was to surprise and worry the entire crew. Second-in-Command Armitage had led an expedition to the interior of the south-western mountains. His party was also searching for a route that would lead into the interior of Antarctica. Six days into his trip and on a glacier high in the mountains, the team were held up by storms and deteriorating health (one man, Ferrar, had aches in his legs, another a troublesome ankle and another sore gums). Armitage suspected scurvy. He left two men behind in the camp and continued to explore the glacier valley before leading the team back to Hut Point. Confirmation of the disease caused considerable anxiety. The belief that scurvy was due to putrefaction in tinned food had been proved wrong and despite all the efforts that had been taken to avoid the problem (cleaning the ship, taking as much exercise as possible,5 providing as much light as could be managed and carefully examining every tin of food before it was eaten for possible contamination)6 scurvy was 'an unwelcome surprise'.7 The advice Scott had been given was wrong.\n\nAs we now know scurvy is a deficiency disease due to a lack of vitamin C. It appears when the vitamin has been absent from the diet for about three months. Vitamin C is mostly present in fruits, green vegetables and potatoes. Although 'vitamins' were an unknown concept in the early 1900s, _Discovery_ in fact carried many tinned vegetables on board: artichokes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, cauliflower, haricots verts, petit pois, tomatoes and many dried and preserved fruits (for example, apples, apricots, peaches, pears, rhubarb).8 According to Hawk and Bergeim's _Practical Physiological Chemistry_ of 1924, some canned vegetables remained rich in vitamin C9 (the canning methods used were apparently less destructive to the vitamin than boiling).10 But even if this is true and the men ingested some vitamin C with the tinned vegetables and fruit, Armitage had only been away from the ship for a short time so the diet clearly provided less than the 125mg now thought to be required in a male smoker (less in the non-smoker).11 When, as a result of this outbreak, fresh, rather than tinned meat was provided, this too was to prove ineffective. Vitamin C is present in offal (liver and kidney), but meat itself has little of the essential vitamin.12 But in 1902 this information was tantalizingly unknown, though the symptoms, of lassitude, fatigue, spongy gums, swollen joints, aching muscles and swollen, red spots (which could later break down and rot), were all familiar. Armitage's party's symptoms were characteristic.\n\nThis diagnosis could clearly have dreadful consequences and radical action was called for. The ship was thoroughly cleaned, the bilges disinfected, overcrowding was reduced by some men sleeping in the hut and exercise was insisted on. Tinned meat was given up except for Tuesdays when the cook, Brett, had a day off ('Scurvy Tuesdays'), otherwise some form of fresh meat or, importantly, liver and kidney, was served daily, plus porridge each morning, 'liberal' jam and extra portions of bottled fruit.13 Since it was thought that the problem was made worse by Brett's cooking, Armitage informed him that his (Brett's) bonus depended on an improvement. Suddenly, palatable, even tasty food appeared; and thereafter the men mostly enjoyed the meals and some thought the seal liver was delicious. An exception was Edgar, who never took to seal meat. But he must have eaten some offal and may have made up his vitamin intake with the tinned foodstuffs. Certainly he never developed scurvy on _Discovery_ , in spite of all his sledging miles.\n\nOn 4 October, Edgar was off again, this time a return to Cape Crozier, the Cape where messages for the relief ship were left. In addition the party aimed to survey the land in general and, if possible, to climb Mount Terror to confirm whether it really was, or was not, an extinct volcano. This was a smaller party than the expedition in March, which had started out with thirteen members. It had two officers and the Guarantee Party, Edgar, Lashly, Quartley and Wild, who all went on skis pulling two sledges. It took a week's hard pulling for them to reach Cape Crozier, but on 11 October, Edgar and Engineer Skelton climbed down to the mail post on Cape Crozier and fixed their tin below the one already there, writing on the binding: 'planted 2.45 PM, 11th October 1902'. Then they both added their signatures.\n\nThe 11 October was productive. The two men were to make an important natural history discovery. They saw Emperor penguins on the shore and noted a track they thought was worth investigating. Emperors were a fascinating mystery in 1902; their life cycle obscure. It was assumed that no animal could possibly have evolved to breed in the caterwauling gloom of Antarctica and that the birds probably migrated north in the winter. When Skelton returned the following day he and his companions saw 300 Emperors squawking together on the sea ice. Skelton was convinced that he had made a significant discovery, but it would take another six days (18 October) before he could prove this, when with Edgar and Quartley he reached the rookery and captured two young birds. Dead chicks of various ages were strewn over the colony. This proved conclusively that Emperors did, indeed, breed in Antarctica.\n\nThose five days delay between the visits to the shore was due to another blizzard. Wild wrote that the wind was 100mph. He said that the weight of snow bent the tent poles alarmingly. It also reduced the space inside the tents so much that the men could not lie straight in their bags; instead they had to take turns to keep the 'doorway' open and they could only cook one hot meal a day and that was with difficulty. Wild wrote that his companions' tent got completely snowed up and had to be dug out, its occupants having existed on biscuits and a little sugar for three days (another version is that they all lived on biscuits and sugar for five days and had nothing to drink in that time).14 But Wild writes that the 'other' tent was revived by brandy and a good hot meal!\n\nWhen the six men reached home base on 24 October, proudly carrying their young birds, all the men were suffering so badly from snow blindness that they did not recognise Dr Wilson who went out to meet them. They recorded their lowest temperature on the sortie had been \u221258.6\u00b0F. Unsurprisingly they had not attempted to climb Mount Terror.\n\nThey had a wonderful meal: seal liver and bacon. On the same night the sun started its 'shameful routine of forgetting to go to bed and staying out all night'.15\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Ed. Skelton. J & Wilson, D., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ Reardon Publishing, 2004, p. 109.\n\n2 Wild, J.R.F., Letter to Mrs Bostock. SPRI MS 1078\/3\/1; D.\n\n3 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command, Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 53.\n\n4 _The Lure of Little Voices_ , by Robert W Service (1874\u20131958) published 1907, Songs of a sourdough, Quotation written by Wilde, J.R.F., in Letter to Mrs Bostock. SPRI MS 1078\/3\/1;\n\n5 Carpenter, K.J., _The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C,_ Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, p. 138.\n\n6 Scott had been strongly advised that the main cause of scurvy was ptomaine poisoning, putrefaction in tins. Dr Wilson's duty every morning was to sniff and taste the contents of all the tins to be eaten that day and discard any that were 'tainted'.\n\n7 Wilson, E.A., _The Medical Aspect of the Discovery's Voyage to the Antarctic_ , British Medical Journal, 1905 2 p. 77\u201380.\n\n8 Information supplied by the Discovery Centre, Dundee, (Julie Millerick).\n\n9 Hawk, P.B.; Bergeim, O., _Practical Physiological Chemistry_ , Blackiston's Son. Philadelphia, 1926, p. 817.\n\n10 Ibid., p. 818.\n\n11 Food and Nutritional Board. Institute of Medicine, Vitamin C, Dietary Reference Intakes, National Academy Press: 2000: 95\u2013185.\n\n12 Personal communication. Professor Jeffrey Wood. Professor of Food and Animal Science, Bristol University, 2006.\n\n13 Armitage, A.B., _Two Years in the Antarctic_ , Paradigm Press, Bungay, Suffolk, 1984, p. 138.\n\n14 Ed. Savers, A., _Diary of the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 205.\n\n15 Ibid.\n\n## 8\n\n## The Antarctic Summer: October 1902 to January 1903\n\nCommanded by Lieutenant Armitage, and with Chief Engineer Skelton and nine lower-deck companions, Edgar was on the Main Western Party from 29 November 1902 to 18 January 1903. The aim of the journey was to get as close as possible to the Magnetic Pole and to make recordings.\n\nIn 1902 the exact location of the South Magnetic Pole had not yet been identified,1 and when the Main Western Party set off Edgar was well aware of the importance of its location to navigation. This related to the fact that magnetic compass readings differed significantly from the true north and by different amounts in different parts of the world. Charts showing magnetic declination, the difference between magnetic north and true north, were first produced in the 1770s. These charts had to be updated regularly (as is still done today), because the magnetic field pattern and the Magnetic Pole position change continuously, whereas the Geographical Pole remains fixed.\n\nHistorically, in spite of the charts, navigation errors had led to calamitous losses. Failure to correct a ship's compass accurately for the magnetic declination could result in the ship navigating a course miles from its intended land destination. This frequently led to disaster. Recordings made at sea were not as accurate as land-based recordings so the _Discovery_ expedition was a unique opportunity to make many land-based recordings close to the Magnetic Pole, so that accurate adjustments could be made to the charts. The work, which was to be coordinated with the German and Swedish records, fulfilled an important part of _Discovery_ 's brief.\n\nIt was a well-manned party: the Main Western Party comprised two officers (Skelton and Armitage), ten men (three from the Guarantee Party, Edgar, Wild and Quartley) and seven others. There was a Supporting Party of nine (two officers, seven men), who were to return after an anticipated three weeks, leaving the Main Western Party to continue. The ten sledges and four teams started off under a cloudless sky, pulling a total of nearly 5,000lbs, which included just under 2.5lbs of food per man per day and 112lbs of seal, mostly liver, which unfortunately had been cooked in fat and then oven dried in order to reduce weight. This reduced its vitamin C content to a minimum, a problem that was completely unsuspected at the time.\n\nOn any expedition enough food has to be carried for safe survival but not an ounce more. The basic sledge ration included: Pemmican, a concentrated rich mixture of fat and protein, soup squares and 'Red Ration' (a mixture of bacon and pea-flour to thicken the food), sugar, Bovril (a beef and yeast extract), rations, small amounts of chocolate, plasmon (a concentrated powder milk preparation), cheese and cocoa. The food was all individually marked; 'R' (Red Ration), 'Choc', etc, and was carried in weekly bags. Edgar shared his bag with Quartley and Horace Buckridge, a laboratory assistant.2 Tea and matches were carried in a tin.\n\nAs they set off, the ship gave three cheers. Photographs were taken. The twenty-one-man party started off in good fettle with sails flying. Armitage's aim was to get to the south side of the Ferrar Glacier, the glacier he had been forced to return from a few months earlier, and thence onto the Polar Plateau. This glacier is enormous, bigger than all the European glaciers,3 and Armitage thought it would be impossible to get straight onto it from the sea ice. He aimed to make the early part of the ascent via another glacier (later named the Blue Glacier) and then cross onto the Ferrar Glacier via a pass running between the two.\n\nThis expedition was to try everyone's stamina, including Edgar's, but his good nature and quick-wittedness survived intact. The teams started well; a stiff wind allowed them to use sails initially, but all too soon the wind dropped. On the hard, irregular sea ice, the teams found that wooden runners pulled badly in comparison to the German Silver (an alloy of copper and nickel) runners and had to be removed. By the end of the first day, 8 miles had been covered. When they camped Edgar did the cooking in his three-man tent; he was always practical and resourceful.\n\nVictoria Land had never been charted, and it was hoped initially that if it was narrow the expedition might even reach as far as its western coast. But the Main Western Party that Edgar was on only had provisions for eight weeks and progress was slow. Reaching the Magnetic Pole quickly became an impossible goal, so repeated magnetic observations became the priority.4 A dipping compass will incline downwards to 90\u00b0 when directly over the Magnetic Pole. On 1 December, Skelton recorded a set of 'dips' of 86\u00b032 (almost 2\u00b0 higher than the recording on the ship),5 i.e. they were closer to the Magnetic Pole.\n\nIt had taken them three days to get off the sea ice and onto the Blue Glacier. Pulling the sledges up the slope was heavy work, but with steady dragging they were 600ft above sea level in a day. But the glacier itself was steep and variably snow-covered or icy. It became so difficult to pull the sledges that the men had to relay; this happens when the surface or the incline makes man-hauling impossible with a full load. The men had to take half a load from the sledge, travel a certain distance, unload it and return with the empty sledge to load the remainder, thereby covering three times the distance they would cover normally. This was a time consuming and exhausting business, made worse on this occasion by their boots continually slipping on the treacherous surface so they had to keep changing from crampons to skis, and back again. But Edgar remained stoic and practical. He had a good memory and an excellent grasp of detail; when the teams stopped to make a camp, Edgar and three others were detailed to make a survey of the terrain before the others climbed out of their pulling gear.6\n\nAfter six hard days the team had climbed 2,480ft and at last the surface levelled out in a big open valley filled with ice and snow. Mountains gleamed in the distance. Armitage's plan was to push through the valley and find a pass through the mountains and towards the Ferrar Glacier. After one more day (6 December) they had reached 3060ft. The scenery was breathtaking.\n\nWhen Armitage skied off to investigate the pass to the Ferrar Glacier, Edgar was reorganising the sledges for the Support Party's departure. Two of his party's 11ft sledges were changed over with two of the Support Party's 9ft sledges, and he unpacked and repacked them. For once he was despondent; the loads the Main Western Party were to pull were too large for the 9ft sledges; the straps wouldn't go around them. Skelton told him he just had to make the best of it.7 They named the site Separation Camp and left a depot of provisions there. The ongoing party separated from the nine men of the support group on 10 December.\n\nArmitage found his Descent Glacier. It looked perilously steep. Its lower reaches out of sight, its upper part a steep icy slope. He, along with Dr Koettlitz, decided that it would be madness to try and get their heavily loaded sledges down that way, so five precious days were wasted in trying to find a better route through the mountains and down to the Ferrar Glacier. In this abortive search the sledges had to be hauled one by one, and Edgar spent two days easing six sledges up a slope by block and tackle over a rise of about 800ft in half a mile.8 When the attempt was abandoned, Edgar and his companion had to lower the sledges down that almost 40\u00b0 slope.9\n\nRather than give up, the team decided finally to try the Descent Glacier. Although it looked impassable from its upper parts, it is known now that the glacier is made up of a series of 'steps', which slope down to the Ferrar Glacier over a distance of approximately 3 miles. The upper step, which is very steep, slopes down for 400 yards and ends in a small shelf. The lower slopes are less extreme. So the glacier is actually a series of decreasing but significant gradients, interspersed with shelves.\n\nThe trial descent, on 16 December, was hair-raising. Edgar, Wild, Armitage and Skelton set off with ice axes, a long rope, and an empty 9ft sledge. They found that the upper slope was initially relatively easy, with no crevasses or ridges, but then it became very steep and dangerous. Edgar, Wild and Skelton put on crampons and tied themselves together to act as an anchor for Armitage (a heavy man), who was attached to the rope and lowered, with the sledge, down the slope. When the rope had been let out to its limit, Armitage secured himself and the sledge with an ice axe and the three went down cautiously to join him. They continued this way for about 700ft. Some of the stretches were very steep and they eventually ended up in a fog of clouds, which blocked out any further vision. But they had shown the initial descent was possible. To climb up the slope to the top again pushed them to their limits.\n\nBut, amazingly, on the very same day, all twelve men got down that fearful descent. The sledges were tied together in pairs; one 11ft\u20137ft pair with Edgar, Quartley and two others, and a 12ft\u20139ft combination. The first four fell and slipped down the slope for yards before bringing the slithering mass to a halt, thus the second group, with Edgar in it, started cautiously. They also lost control and slipped down helplessly onto the ledge (Armitage wrote that the run was more exhilarating than the water-chute at Earl's Court in London).10 The next slope took three hours by which time they were over a third of the way down. A series of less horrendous gradients followed.\n\nThey got down the Descent Glacier in a day and a half. They had conquered the first great obstacle by reaching the Ferrar Glacier.\n\nThe remainder of the exploration of the Ferrar Glacier reads like the trials of Job. The team were trapped by blizzards, sticky snow made pulling awful, freezing fog engulfed them, snow blocked visibility, but still they kept going with stoicism and determination. On Christmas Eve, the men asked Armitage if they could have a holiday over Christmas Day: 'definitely not' was the response. But they were determined to mark the occasion and hid the small gifts they had carried in their kit under the snow. When the wind scattered the snow, exposing the little offerings, Wild wrote they were rewarded by 'a thorough wigging' for carrying extra weight!11\n\nThe Ferrar Glacier continued unendingly. Whenever they thought they had reached the summit they found they were still on another of the series of icefalls. By New Year's Day they only had enough provisions to last a few more days, but at last, on 2 January 1903, a final icefall saw them on the summit, the Polar Plateau. The party was the first to set eyes on that vast ice plain and comprehend the enormity of the Polar Plateau icecap. This was a significant advance in Antarctic exploration.\n\nThey went on for a few miles taking further magnetic readings. But food supplies and illness determined their return. One man had collapsed with breathlessness and chest pains. He may have been suffering from altitude sickness, secondary to the relatively low oxygen levels at high altitude, which can cause problems at a height of 10,000ft. Even today men regularly need to be evacuated down to sea level because of problems at this height. In 1903 others felt unwell too, but there is no record of Edgar suffering.\n\nThe descent meant going down the Ferrar Glacier, ascending the daunting Descent Glacier and returning via the Blue Glacier. As he went down the Blue Glacier, Edgar fell 20ft into a crevasse, the lower parts of which were so deep as to be out of sight. The rope attached to his harness was not thick. He did not panic. Another rope was lowered round him and he was hauled up, though with some difficulty.\n\nThe team got back to the ship on 19 January. They had broken through the Western Mountain chain to the immense Antarctic Plateau, reaching nearly 9,000ft, and in doing so had made important magnetic recordings.\n\nThey had achieved a remarkable exploration: they were to find that others also had achieved remarkable feats. On one of the most important expeditions of the _Discovery_ years, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton had made a pioneering sledge journey, towards the Geographic South Pole. They were away from November 1902 until February 1903. The three hoped to get as close as possible to the Pole. Although they failed to reach it, in fact they did not get off the Barrier, they did reach a notable 82\u00b0 11' S, by far the furthest south achieved, they formed an impression of the nature of the Barrier (one of _Discovery_ 's briefs) and they made a record of the mountains fringing the Barrier on Victoria Land. All three suffered with scurvy, with swollen spongy gums, knees that would not bend and swelling of their legs. Shackleton was the worst afflicted and became very breathless. Much against his will, he was sent home on the relief ship SS _Morning_.12\n\nIndeed, these two expeditions yielded significant new knowledge about the mysteries of Antarctica.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 The location of the South Magnetic Pole was to be found in 1909, by Douglas Mawson, Edgeworth David and Alistair Mackay on Shackleton's _Nimrod_ expedition.\n\n2 Ed. Skelton, J., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p. 136.\n\n3 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Journal_ SPRI, MS 559\/18\/1\u20134; BJ VOL 2, 24\/08\/1911.\n\n4 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled_ , University Press of Colorado, 2000, p. 203\n\n5 Ed. Skelton, J., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p. 138.\n\n6 Ibid., p. 138.\n\n7 Ibid., p. 140.\n\n8 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled_ , University Press of Colorado, 2000, p. 204.\n\n9 Ibid., p. 205.\n\n10 Armitage, A.B., _Two Years in Antarctica_ , Paradigm Press, Bungay, Suffolk, 1984 p. 171.\n\n11 Wild, J.R.F., Notes related to the BNAE, 1901\u20131904, SPRI, MS 944\/3:D\n\n12 Wilson, E.A., _The Medical Aspect of Discovery's voyage to the Antarctic_. British Medical Journal, 1905, 2, p. 77\u201380.\n\n## 9\n\n## The End of the _Discovery_ Expedition, 1903\u201304\n\nEdgar was on three expeditions to the mountains that led to the interior of Antarctica: the Western Depot Party, 9\u201320 September, the Western Attempt, 12\u201321 October, and the Western Summit, 26 October to 24 December 1903.\n\nThe ship's company were now experienced Antarcticans, and the Antarctic winter of March to September had lost its power to frighten or astonish. The men endured the months of freezing darkness and howling blizzards with grim determination. Even the _South Polar Times_ had become a routine. Edgar played cards, wrote letters, looked forward to the return of the sun. The monotony was broken when the King's birthday was celebrated with a sports day, despite, the _South Polar Times_ wrote, 'that ever constant friend the wind, squalling with its constant shrillness'. A large silk Union Jack was hoisted on Hut Point and a Royal Salute fired. Edgar led a tug of war team, generously allowing the opposition to take the best ground (his team lost two to one), but he won the 2 mile flat ski race easily. His team lost the sledge-dragging competition by 20 seconds; here, rival teams on skis, pulled sledges loaded with 900lbs of iron. The day was a big success. It was rounded off by a concert after a magic lantern show, where views of New Zealand and Maoris were shown and Engineer Skelton showed views of the ships in which he had served, followed by a concert.1\n\nScott spent the long winter planning a second sledging campaign. He aimed to have all the sledging parties back by Christmas (the Antarctic summer). He wanted to avoid a further year in Antarctica and needed to have the men free to concentrate on _Discovery_ 's release from her icy manacles. Since Antarctica's low temperatures made major sledging expeditions impractical before October, this only left about ten weeks for exploration before the teams needed to return to base and release _Discovery_ for her return to England.\n\nScott's object was to find a new road to the Ferrar Glacier and lay a depot on it; then he planned to push on from Armitage's furthest west, over the inland Plateau, and, hopefully, find the western shores of Victoria Land.\n\nThe Western Depot Party was important, both for laying a depot for subsequent exploration and for its success in finding a direct route to the Ferrar Glacier. The glacier descends gradually to an inlet called New Harbour; an inlet that Armitage had thought would be impassable for sledges and so had reached the glacier via the Blue Glacier and the awful connection between the two, the Descent Glacier. Scott hoped that a route could be found via New Harbour that would make exploration to the west easier and quicker.\n\nThe inlet of New Harbour was indeed an awesome sight when Edgar and the team first saw it on 14 September. Gigantic ice blocks and high masses of earth and rock debris blocked the entrance. Boulders looking like giant tabletops rested on ice columns. But when Scott, Edgar and Skelton reconnoitred cautiously into the maze they did find a route, which led gradually from the inlet to the lower part of the glacier. As they followed this course the team had to carry their sledges and loads (430lbs of provisions) across the jagged ground until they reached a trail on the north side of the glacier,2 which twisted and turned until it finally arrived on the Ferrar Glacier itself. The glacier looked like 'a smooth polished road \u2013 a ribbon of blue, down the centre of which ran a dark streak caused by a double line of boulders'.3 The team pushed on up its smooth icy surface until they came to an area below Cathedral Rocks4 where, surrounded by glorious pinnacles reaching to over 3,000ft, they established their depot of three weeks provisions for six people, by a big boulder.5 They turned for home on 17 September. Scott's hopes for greater speed had been fulfilled. The 140 miles had been completed in twelve days rather than the twenty-one days that had been allowed,6 and it was possible that it could be done in even quicker time. Armitage's party had taken three weeks to get to the depot spot the previous year.7\n\nThe Western Depot Party was followed about a month later by the Western Attempt, an abortive effort to actually get through the Western Mountains and onto the Plateau. Twelve men in three sledge groups left base on 12 October. Edgar's group was led by Scott and included Engineer Skelton, Boatswain Feather, Stoker Lashly and Able Seaman Handsley. There was a second group, which planned to make a geological survey of the region. A third group of three men was a support group. Scott's party was to be away for nine weeks, the other groups were to return earlier. The four 11ft sledges, carrying 200lbs per man, were cheered off from _Discovery_. The party left with high hopes, but they were to be back at base in nine days.\n\nScott set a cracking pace which Edgar kept up with well. In spite of their heavy loads the party covered the 45 miles to the cape of New Harbour in two days. They called the cape Butter Point because Scott thought this would be the highest point that the group would get fresh meat on their return \u2013 and so left butter there to cook the meat.8\n\nIt was probably on this sortie that Edgar caused Scott an irritation that he told his skiing companions about years later. As the temperature was \u221247\u00b0F, Scott told the party to put on three pairs of socks. Edgar put on two. His feet were soon frostbitten and the party had to stop. Scott asked him, 'How many socks have you got on?' Edgar replied respectfully, 'Locks, sir. How many pairs did you say, sir?' To which Scott replied wearily, 'Why three.' He told Edgar to take his boots off and get the circulation back. Edgar dropped out of sight, but Scott came up to hurry him up. Trying to avoid Scott's observant eye Edgar tried to take his two pairs of socks off as if they were three. He fumbled away but without success. Scott accused him of disobedience. 'Can you count?' 'Yes, sir, fairly well.' 'Did you think you had put three socks on?' 'Well sir, I was a bit sleepy when I put them on.' Finally Edgar had to own up and was told off sternly. When he came to put his boots on they were as stiff as iron and he had to bend them with a geological hammer. The ice at the bottom of the boot was impossible to get out.9\n\nThey continued at such a pace that they reached their depot on 16 October (four days) and camped on the glacier in the valley under Cathedral Rocks. If Edgar, in his imagination, had ever considered Antarctica's majestic, severe beauty, he must have been impressed by the view in front of him that evening. The sunlight pinnacles of Cathedral Rocks showed a rich dark brown; lower down the rock became greyish-black, splashed with lighter areas. There were patches of snow, and here and there a glacier gleamed, sparkling white and contrasting markedly with the bare rock.10 The glacier itself could be seen curving down towards the sea. Beyond this was the sea itself, pearly grey in the distance. There was complete stillness.\n\nContinuing the punishing pace they reached the enormous boulders below the Knobhead Moraine, reaching this landmark in six days rather than the twenty-seven days of the previous year.11 But, at 6,000ft, disaster struck. The German silver covering the wooden sledge runners had split to shreds on two of the four sledges; one was less damaged, the fourth intact. The men knew that without metal protection, the wooden runners underneath would disintegrate on the hard sharp ice. There was nothing for it but to leave the sound sledge and stores and return to base for repairs. Their return was as near to flying as was possible. They covered nearly 90 miles in three days.\n\nThe definitive expedition, the Western Summit, left on 26 October. It was a smaller party than the Western Attempt as there were just nine members: Scott's Advance Party and Ferrar's Geological Party. Again, rapid progress was made. On this run they reached the Knobhead Moraine in three days (rather than six), in spite of the runners still giving problems and having to be repeatedly mended by Lashly, Skelton and Edgar. Unexpectedly they were careless about leaving things outside the tents to dry and on 27 October they only narrowly escaped a serious problem when a sudden blast of wind scattered sleeping bags, socks and finnesko left out on the ground to dry. But at the depot on 1 November, they found 'a loss, the gravity of which could scarcely be exaggerated'.12 The lid of the instrument box had not been fastened securely and had blown open. The wind had whirled away Scott's copy of _Hints to Travellers_.13 This was hugely important. Skelton wrote 'it contains all the data for the skipper to work out his sights for time and position'.14 The explorers had no landmarks to rely on accurately and made observations of the sun to work out their latitude and longitude. Edgar, familiar with his father's stories of the problems of navigation around the Horn, appreciated the importance of the loss all too well.\n\nThe team had intended to work out their latitude by observing the sun's height above the horizon at noon and adding a calculation for the sun's declination.15 This calculation involved the tables in _Hints for Travellers_. The calculation of longitude involved time. We all know that as we travel around the globe the local time changes (for example there are five hours time difference between London and New York). To calculate their longitude, the explorers made a comparison between the time at whatever position they were at \u2013 usually at midday, when the sun was at its highest and, at the exact same moment, the time on their chronometer was standardised to Greenwich Mean Time.16 The difference between the two was used to calculate their longitude position. Since the earth takes twenty-four hours to revolve through 360\u00b0, one hour is one twenty-fourth of that spin, or 15\u00b0, so if, for example, the difference in the readings was three hours, then the explorers were 45\u00b0 away from the north-south meridian, i.e. 45\u00b0 east or west. Logarithmic tables were required here also; at the equator, where the girth of the earth is at its biggest, those fifteen degrees equal 1,000 miles, but as the lines of longitude converge, the distance each degree represents shrinks until it is nothing at the Geographic Pole. If the explorers' course deviated by even a few degrees of longitude, they needed to be able to convert those degrees into miles. This, too, needed the tables in _Hints for Travellers_.\n\nSo the loss was a most serious blow, but Scott could not consider returning again. He thought that he could measure the sun's altitude at noon and use this to work out latitude. He planned to keep the party on a due west course on the ascent. He asked his group if they agreed to go on, and Edgar and his companions agreed, though Skelton wrote 'now we shall never know exactly where we are'.17 They were marching away into the unknown without having any idea of their precise position or how to get back.\n\nThey had food for over six weeks, pulling 230lbs per man.18 They struggled to climb towards the summit, repeatedly needing to repair the metal on the sledges, avoid ice falls and move from hard ice to snow (which made pulling harder but was kinder on the runners). They were frostbitten and engulfed by driving snow and icy blasts of wind sweeping down from the summit. Edgar lost all sensation in one foot, a known precursor of frostbite, which could become gangrenous. Progress was halted whilst his companions rubbed and warmed the injured foot until he could feel it again. The weather deteriorated, and on Wednesday 4 November, at 7,000ft, they were imprisoned by a violent gale and thick suffocating snow for seven days. 'Desolation Camp' was their name for this base. Edgar endured the gale but found inactivity even worse than hauling. Apart from managing to cook two meals a day he spent most of the day in his sleeping bag looking up at the fluttering green canvas, unable to sleep because of the gale. He spent his time reading William le Queux and _The Red Magazine_. Communication between the tents was only possible when there was a lull in the storm. Edgar's usual cheerfulness deserted him and he merely endured.\n\nOn 11 November they escaped. Ferrar's Geological Party split off (Ferrar's group was to make startling and important finds of fossil plant remains that would prove that Antarctica was once a part of a temperate climate, the first confirmatory find of this nature from this part of Antarctica). The remaining nine plodded westwards and upwards. Comments such as 'dragging heavy' and 'surface bad' occur with depressing frequency in the records.\n\nBy 15 November, the twenty-first day out, Skelton wrote that the surface was 'practically on the level all day'.19 On 16 he wrote they were 'on practically level surface at 900 feet'.20 As the vast level snow plain stretched out before them at 8,900ft they could congratulate themselves. They had achieved a remarkable 'first' and they still had five weeks of rations, enough to cover a good many miles over the Plateau before returning. Scott wanted to discover with certainty if the high land was just the plateau of an island (the island of Victoria Land) or part of a vast continent. But plans to locate the Magnetic Pole had been abandoned, despite magnetic records being made regularly.\n\nScott decided to pull the sledges separately; Edgar pulled with Scott and Boatswain Feather (whose back was giving him trouble). Skelton led the other two men. But by the end of the morning's march on the 16th, Skelton's team was three quarters of an hour behind the other team and he wrote on the following day, 'the work was really too hard for us'.21 On the 19th this observation was confirmed; one of the men, Handsley, felt ill, and subsequently collapsed, unable to breathe (and probably not helped by the brandy that was administered).22 Three days later Scott decided to split the party, changing Feather with Stoker Lashly and progressing forward as a threesome, leaving the others to return. It was their twenty-ninth day out; the start of what Scott described as 'three weeks of the hardest physical work that I have ever experienced, and yet three weeks on which I can look with unmixed satisfaction, for I do not think it would have been possible to have accomplished more in the time'.23\n\nLashley, Edgar and Scott shared a single sleeping bag. They endured the hardships, the dangers and the hunger equally. Scott was the leader but always consulted his two companions, whom he grew to like and admire, over big decisions. He always said 'we' not 'I', when referring to the journey. He wrote, 'with these two men behind me, our sledge became a living thing and the days of slow progress were numbered.'24 But in spite of this apparent equality it might be questioned whether Scott, having lost his instruction manual, was not foolhardy to proceed, risking his own and his companions' lives. It would be interesting to know what Edgar and Lashly, who knew the risks, really thought. But being lower deck they would have been unlikely to question their leader.\n\nEverything the three men recorded was new information; the surface of the mostly smooth, though variably broken up by sastrugi, sharp ice edges like waves whipped up by the wind. On this surface their progress resembled a small boat at sea, climbing up a wave and then diving down into the hollow. They recorded that the wind blew from west to east across the Plateau during the winter.\n\nThat wind was terrible. It blew continuously and cut them to pieces. Things were worse in the mornings but got slightly better as they warmed up on the march. Edgar had a deep cut on the side of a fingernail and his finnesko wore out. His face was cracked; his cheeks and lips were sore and raw. Eating was difficult. Laughing, if he had wanted to, was impossible.\n\nThey turned back on 30 November. They had kept going simply because they wanted to last out to the end of the month. They were 300 miles from the ship and had nineteen days' provisions and sixteen days' oil to get them back to their depot where they had cached another ten days' food and oil. Going through the fields of sastrugi was exhausting; they fell often and as they fell the harnesses jerked them. But they found no sign of the west coast of Victoria Land in spite of the fact that, as they reflected, they could have crossed Greenland in many places on a trek of the length they had covered.25 They had shown the immensity of the Plateau and recorded its conditions. Antarctica was clearly not a series of islands but truly continental in size. Man had now penetrated its silent snow-topped plain.\n\nThe month they took to return was grim. The sledge capsized repeatedly, they fell time and again and Scott was worried that they had overestimated their marching abilities. But the phlegmatic characters of his two companions shone throughout. When poor visibility marooned them in their tent at a time when an hour's delay was critical because of their limited food and fuel supplies, it was a blessing to have Edgar stick his head out of the tent and announce in his usual matter-of-fact tone that the sun was now shining;26 the calm, solid reassurance of the British lower deck representatives was a relief to the overwrought mind. Scott thought they were undefeatable and wrote, 'however tiresome our day's march or however gloomy the outlook they always find something to jest about. In the evenings we have long arguments about naval matters and generally agree that we could rule the service a great deal better than any Board of Admiralty. Incidentally I learn a great deal about lower deck life \u2013 more than I could hope to have done under ordinary conditions.'27\n\nBy 6 December, concern about the oil supply got worse. They were getting more and more hungry. They were gaunt. Edgar looked wild with sunken cheeks, frostbitten face and a bulbous frostbitten nose. They were so eager not to miss the smallest scrap of food that they used Shackleton's 'noble game of shut eye' to allocate each man his share;28 one man turned his head when the food was divided and he decided who would eat which portion. They dreamed of food; Edgar's idea of happiness was roast pork, Lashly's apples and vegetables, while Scott thought continuously about bowls of Devonshire cream.\n\nThe snow surface varied but was often abysmal, and on 9 December it was like sand; the sledge felt like a log and they could hardly cover a mile in an hour. Edgar had never done such hard pulling. It took all his energy; for once he could not talk. Skis were hopeless to move the sledge in these conditions. They were worried about food but more worried about oil which was now down to one can, also Scott and Edgar's tobacco supply was at an end (Edgar had been on half a pipe per day). Although they were certain that they were near the edge of the Plateau they were uncertain of their precise location on this never ending plain. Scott suggested that they increased the marches by half an hour each day and he halved the oil allowance, (which meant a cold lunch). Edgar and Lashly would not disagree with a suggestion from Scott and indeed, under the circumstances, there was no alternative. They were travelling by the rule of thumb, but Scott wrote that Edgar's face fell dismally \u2013 he only believed that food was beneficial when it was warm and had 'a chance of sticking to the ribs'.29\n\nOn 10 December they slogged away for five hours, had a cold lunch and started again. But in the afternoon, as he peered through the unending snow, Edgar's sharp eye spotted land. They knew the end of the Plateau was within reach, but where were they precisely? There were innumerable glaciers falling down from the mountains but which was the Ferrar? Time and food made the right choice vital.\n\nOn 13 December Edgar's nose was badly frostbitten. The threesome had to stop to massage it back to life. It had given trouble for weeks and by now looked like a large, swollen potato. He always talked about this member as if it was something that was not actually his, but something he had to look after, 'my poor old nose again; well there, it's chronic'.30 As they held to an easterly direction the land began to slope downwards. They really had no idea where they were.\n\nThe 14 December was a date that Edgar would remember for the rest of his life. They were heading east and, although they were lost, they decided to keep going; a snowstorm was brewing and incarceration in a tent, in a blizzard, might well mean death from starvation. So they advanced into the unknown, steering their sledge through great ice hummocks and crevasses. As they progressed, Scott in front, Edgar and Lashly behind, the slope grew steeper and smoother. Lashly lost his footing, Edgar was pulled over and the three men and the sledge careered into the unknown like an unstoppable express train. The surface became rougher and, as they bounced onwards and downwards, they must have thought that death, or at the very least serious injury, was on its way. But as they eventually came to a halt on hard, rough, windswept snow, amazingly all three were able to struggle to their feet. They had careered down 300ft. The first question Edgar and Lashly asked Scott was if he was all right (sir).\n\nLuck seemed to be with them. As they looked around they recognised their own glacier and other familiar landmarks. In the distance they could see their friend, the volcano Erebus, smoking away. Their food depot was within reach. After all their tribulations they thought they were safe. But malicious fate had not given up yet. Soon after setting off, Edgar and Scott fell into a crevasse. Lashly, left on the surface to mastermind the rescue, used one hand to hang on to the broken sledge, straddling the crevasse and his other to slide skis under the sledge to support it. As Scott and Edgar hung in their traces, surrounded by blue ice walls and with an unfathomable gulf below, Scott asked Edgar how he was doing. The reply, from a man facing death for the second time in a day, was characteristically calm. He was 'good enough'.31\n\nScott had to climb up a rope to escape first. This was hugely difficult. His fingers were frostbitten, his clothes were thick and cumbersome, and he hadn't climbed a rope for years. But he took his gloves off, and in the subzero temperatures he hoisted himself up slowly. A harness was swung down to Edgar and he was hauled up, frostbitten but unbowed, 'Well I'm blowed' was the (unlikely) official report of what he said.32\n\nThat night, black and blue with bruises, frostbitten, sore and exhausted, he mused over his extraordinary day; Scott wrote that Edgar ruminated continually on the day's experience, 'My word but that was a close call. My word, but that WAS a close call'.33\n\nThey picked up supplies from the depots, and on the 16th they were at their old quarters at Knobhead Moraine in the large glacier basin. Instead of rushing back to base Scott decided to investigate the direction of ice streams from the basin. He wanted to follow a glacier tributary that sloped north and then eastwards. The team were about to make one of the great geographical finds of the expedition.\n\nThey negotiated the steep ice slope roped together and continued until they found a shallow frozen lake resting on deep layers of mud; 'what a splendid place for growing spuds'.34 The glacier, it seemed, did not end by pouring icebergs into the sea, as had been assumed. Instead it ended in a lake high in the mountains. The three could not find any moss or lichen, though it is now known that far beneath the icy surface these lakes remain unfrozen and support colonies of bacteria and phytoplankton.35 Microbes, bacteria and pollen have been found in the ice. This was information well beyond the explorers' wildest imagination and would take about another century to be discovered.36\n\nBut there was more. Progressing further down, through the valley of startling beauty and ruggedness, they came across stretches of undulating sand, then areas covered by rocks of different colours and sizes, more sandy stretches and boulder heaps. Extraordinarily there was no snow or ice, though the surface seemed to be the result of ice and water action. As they advanced, Edgar, always mindful of his stomach, asked if there was any point in carrying the lunch any further. The three had their lunch, sitting at a place that gave them memorable views up and down the valley. Except for the mountain summits there was no ice or snow in view. They ran their fingers through the sand and drank from the streams. It was amazing to think that they were less than 100 miles from their terrible experiences on the summit. They saw nothing alive, just the skeleton of a Weddell seal. Scott named this dry area a 'valley of the dead'.37 The trio had discovered one of the extraordinary Dry Valleys of Victoria Land38 \u2013 they were in what was to be later named the Taylor Valley. The find was one of the major geographical discoveries of the entire expedition.\n\nThe trio returned. The Western Summit expedition was now over. Having managed to fry up some meat at Butter Point they got back to _Discovery_ on Christmas Eve 1903. They were very thin and exhausted. The steward made a celebratory meal of steak and tomatoes, after which the three seemed to put on weight with every meal. They could congratulate themselves that they had achieved a remarkable sledging feat of nearly 1,000 miles. They had travelled by far the furthest into Victoria Land.\n\nThese expeditions, which opened up the Western Mountains, made Edgar a true veteran of Antarctic exploration. He was away from the ship for nearly sixty days on sorties that would tax the most experienced modern-day explorer, confirming (if this was needed), his strength, his alert intelligence and his composure.\n\nWhen _Discovery_ returned to England a number of the men were singled out for special mention. One of these was Edgar, who was promoted to PO 1st Class. Another was Stoker Lashly. Scott described them as men of magnificent physique. He wrote that the journey to the interior of Victoria Land reached the limit of possible performance under such awful conditions and that it could not have been accomplished had either man failed in the slightest. Scott recorded that Edgar's and Lashly's determination, courage and patience were often taxed to the utmost yet the two men were always cheerful and respectful. The outings cemented the loyalty and mutual respect between Scott and Edgar.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 _South Polar Times_ , vol. 2, VI, April 1903, p. 28.\n\n2 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , James Murray, London, 1929, p. 563\n\n3 Ibid., p. 563.\n\n4 The four abrupt cliffs surmounted by sharp peaks thought to resemble a cathedral. Named by Armitage in 1902.\n\n5 Ed. Skelton, J., _The Antarctic Journals of Reginald Skelton_ , Reardon Publishing, Cheltenham, England, 2004, p.184.\n\n6 Ibid., p. 184.\n\n7 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , James Murray, London, 1929, p. 564.\n\n8 Ibid., p. 574.\n\n9 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2:BJp, p.78.\n\n10 Ibid., p. 575.\n\n11 Ibid., p. 576.\n\n12 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , James Murray, London, 1929, p. 587.\n\n13 _Hints for Travellers_ , a publication issued by the Royal Geographical Society of London which supplied the data to locate altitude and longitude accurately.\n\n14 Skelton, R., _Sledging Diary_ SPRI MS 342\/2\/6;BJ, 01\/11\/1903\n\n15 The angle between the magnetic north and true north at a particular point on the Earth's surface.\n\n16 Greenwich is at 0\u00b0 longitude. This cut Harrison's Clock.\n\n17 Skelton, R., _Sledging Diary_ , SPRI, MS 342\/2\/6;BJ,01\/11\/1903.\n\n18 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Journals_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 71.\n\n19 Skelton, R., _Sledging Diary_ , SPRI, MS, 342\/2\/4;BJ, 15\/11\/03.\n\n20 Ibid., 16\/11\/1903.\n\n21 Ibid., 17\/11\/1903.\n\n22 Ibid., 20\/11\/1903.\n\n23 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , James Murray, London, 1929, p. 601.\n\n24 Ibid., p 602.\n\n25 Ibid., p. 605.\n\n26 Ibid., p.609.\n\n27 Ibid., p. 609.\n\n28 Devised by Shackleton on the Southern Journey 1902\/03 which was undertaken by Shackleton with Scott and Wilson.\n\n29 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , James Murray, London, 1929, p. 613.\n\n30 Ibid., p. 615.\n\n31 Ibid., p. 621.\n\n32 Ibid., p. 621.\n\n33 Ibid., p 622.\n\n34 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Journals_ , Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 83.\n\n35 Subglacial Lake, a lake under an ice cap or ice sheet. There are over 120 subglacial lakes in Antarctica; Lake Vostok is the largest known at the current time.\n\n36 Small free floating aquatic plants have now been identified.\n\n37 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Voyage of the Discovery_ , James Murray, London, 1929, p. 627.\n\n38 A row of valleys in Victoria Land with low humidity and without ice or snow.\n\n## 10\n\n## Return from Antarctica, then Home Again, 1904\u201310\n\n_Discovery_ was still incarcerated in miles of ice when the explorers returned and open water was yet 20 miles away. Second-in-Command Armitage had ordered highly organised teams to blast and saw through the ice to try and speed up its dissolution. It was hoped that _Discovery_ could escape in January 1904, and 'Saw Camp' was well established by the time Edgar got back to the ship on Christmas Eve. The aim was to saw and blast a path through the ice (in the event a hopeless task, the ice was 7ft thick and any crack froze up almost immediately) and three shifts worked round the clock. When Edgar arrived at 'Saw Camp' with Scott he was happy not to have to joined the band of 'unwashed, unshaven, sleepless, swearing, grumbling, laughing, joking reprobates',1 because Scott, seeing that the attempt was futile, stopped the work. Two days later all hands returned to the ship except for Scott, Dr Wilson, Edgar and Lashly, the cook Charles Clark and Seaman William Heald. They were to kill penguins. It seemed likely that _Discovery_ would remain stuck for another year and her larder needed stocking.\n\nOn 5 January, bewilderment was rife. Not one but two ships came into sight. One was _Morning_ , the relief ship, but Edgar joined in the wild guessing about the second: was it _Gauss_ (the German vessel); a private yacht; a man o' war?2\n\n_Morning_ brought mail with much missed news of the family at home. Edgar had no personal bad news, but _Morning_ carried orders that were dumbfounding to the hard-pressed crew of _Discovery_. Scott was ordered to abandon _Discovery_ if she could not be freed from the ice (the government did not want the expense of yet another rescue attempt on a third year) and to facilitate the repatriation of _Discovery_ 's crew and equipment, the government had sent a whaling ship, the _Terra Nova_ , to accompany _Morning_.\n\nScott read orders to the crew that they could hardly believe. Although the royal societies and the Admiralty were apparently satisfied with the achievements of the expedition, the government had now taken over complete control. This was because the expedition had run out of money; there were no funds for a further year in Antarctica if _Discovery_ could not be extricated from the ice. _Discovery_ was now public property. Scott confirmed that if _Discovery_ could not be freed, she was to be abandoned to the mercies of Antarctica. The men saw that Scott had tears in his eyes and Edgar, deeply loyal to Scott, was outraged. The crew all thought that there had never been orders framed to give an officer less option; they were full of 'you are on no account' and 'you are to distinctly understand'. Scott said that he had not fully taken in the idea of abandoning the ship but he thanked everyone for the way they had stood by him loyally. The men responded with three cheers. Williamson wrote, 'and there's no doubt that he deserves it if ever a man did',3 and Ford agreed, 'I think it is very hard times that he should be given no option at all after proving himself such a capable Polar Commander and it is a pity this work should be spoilt by quarrelling at home'.4\n\nWork to abandon _Discovery_ began on 14 January; supplies and equipment were hauled over the ice to load into the relief ships, a miserable task. The crews met midway to transfer the loads and Edgar's strength was put to good use. But nature is capricious. In 1904, the ice, which had remained solid the previous year, started breaking up. On 3 February 7 miles separated _Discovery_ from _Morning_ and the _Terra Nova_. Hopes for a release started to rise. The men wondered if the ice's break up was helped by the weight of heavy snow that pushed it under water.5 Edgar was involved in further blasting, the idea being to make a crack in the ice between Hut Point and the relief ships and then create a 'lake' that _Discovery_ could escape to. By the 13th, the sea was only 2.5 miles away and on the 14th, the ice finally split as the swell broke up the ice and _Terra Nova_ butted it again and again, her crew using the old whalers dodge of rolling the ship by running backwards and forwards across her deck to widen the crack. Finally _Terra Nova_ sailed through triumphantly with _Morning_ 'following meekly behind'.6 The men hoisted the Union Jack on Hut Point and rushed onto the floe and onto the ships. Scott sent a case of whisky for the two ships.7\n\nBut still nothing was easy. When _Discovery_ finally escaped into the water she was caught immediately by irresistibly strong winds, which pushed her back onto the shoreline at Hut Point where she lay stranded, pounded by wind, waves and tide for over eight hours. Edgar thought that there would be permanent damage to his ship; that having finally escaped the ice the sea would break her up. It must have been awful to see the way her decks buckled under the strain and to see planking from the ship's bottom floating to the surface. As heavy seas broke and washed over the ship, there was frozen ice all over the deck. But when at last the storm subsided and _Discovery_ got off the sandbank, mercifully no permanent damage had been done.\n\nEdgar gave a lingering look to those familiar landmarks that he thought he would never see again: Mount Erebus (still smoking), Castle Rock and Observation Hill. Then _Discovery_ retraced her route up the coast of Victoria Land. The voyage to New Zealand was notable for gales and _Discovery_ 's penchant for heavy rolling, sometimes through 50\u00b0, as she tossed about like a cork. In storms she leaked 'everywhere', the bedding was soaked, the ship was shaken, and, wrote Williamson, the top gallants were left on her until it was too late to take them in and the 'jib blew out of bolt ropes with a loud report'. Several of the men were seasick. They all 'stood by to turn out'.8 In a lull the topgallants were furled. This took two hours work and then the gale returned and continued all day, rolling the ship abominably. The men were utterly fed up, but they were, Williamson wrote, 'doing it for King and Empire and we are taking it joyfully!!... Pumping all day. How we are looking forward to Lyttelton and civilisation again.'9\n\nThey had some days of relative rest in Auckland Islands preparing for the grand arrival. All the ships were freshly painted as _Discovery_ , with _Morning_ and _Terra Nova_ , entered Lyttelton harbour on 1 April, serenaded by the strains of _Home Sweet Home_. No one was sorry to be back in civilisation with hospitable friends. Gifts flowed on board, boxes filled with mutton, potatoes and greens. The ship overflowed with well-wishers. After two months in New Zealand _Discovery_ (with a further twenty sheep on board and gifts from New Zealand farmers), sailed towards South America. She went through the Straits of Magellan10 and called at Chile, Port Stanley in the Falklands and the Azores, where the Prince of Monaco, a distinguished scientist, came on board on 2 September. Passing ships signalled to the crew, congratulating them on their achievements and wishing them a safe return home. The scientific programme continued throughout.\n\nOn 10 September 1904, _Discovery_ docked in Portsmouth. She had been away for thirty-seven months. _The Times_ wrote that there need be no reserve in the welcome extended to the _Discovery_ when she arrived in Portsmouth from an expedition 'full of hazard. The scanty knowledge which we possessed of an area of several million miles, Captain Scott and his companions have succeeded in dispelling our ignorance'.11 The Mayor of Portsmouth welcomed the new knowledge of the character and interior of the continent, the geological collections, the penguins, the meteorology and terrestrial magnetism (the last two of practical importance). There was national unanimity (at least initially) about the value of Polar research to the nation.12 Sir Clements Markham said that the _Discovery_ expedition was 'the best-conducted and most successful expedition that had ever entered the Polar regions, Arctic or Antarctic'.13 The sailors, interviewed by the _Daily News_ , were enthusiastic: they had reached further south than any other expedition, they were glad to be back but 'didn't have a bad time of it' \u2013 they had got their mail every twelve months.14\n\nThe public were fascinated to meet those who had experienced the actuality of this place of mystery. People wanted to shake the heroes' hands; they wanted to hear them speak. There was support for the medals granted to the crew. Edgar, on Scott's recommendation, received the highly prized 'Silver Medal with Clasp' (a duplicate medal was issued to his widow in 1914)15 and a small silver medal for success in an Antarctic sports competition (the ski race). Many years later a posthumous Royal Geographical Medal was added to this distinguished collection.16\n\nHe was given two months leave and was delighted to be home. Friendly and outgoing and with a great supply of new anecdotes, he was happy to return to Swansea, his family and friends. When _Gower Church Magazine_ interviewed him, the reporter wrote that he was, 'robust and courageous to a degree and has during his voyage added much to his previous knowledge and attainments'.17\n\nIn the _South Wales Daily Post_ he reflected on his Western Journey:\n\nIt's an uncanny feeling standing there, surrounded by everlasting snow, gigantic nunataks18 all around you and dead silence, which is almost deafening. Not a sign of life, no birds to speak of, only a melancholy seal to look at, and his blessed hide not worth a cent in the European market. Six of us were chosen to do this trip, which was 300 miles from the ship, and lasted nine weeks and three days: but three went back. We saw absolutely nothing. We were 9,200 feet on the ice cap and away towards the Pole was a range of unclimbable mountains. Nobody knows what lies beyond it.19\n\nHe went to London to be 'Paid Off' from the expedition. The Certificate of Discharge states his date of discharge as 30 September 1904; importantly the certificate grades both his 'Character for Conduct' and 'Character for Ability' as 'Very Good'. He continued in full-time naval employment as a Petty Officer. His Certificate of Service records the date of his promotion to 1st Class Petty Officer as 2 April 1904 (when _Discovery_ was in New Zealand) and this provided a modest financial boost; pay for a 1st Class Petty Officer was \u00a339 10 _s_ 10 _d_.20 Although he had assured the reporter of the _South Wales Daily Post_ that he had no marriage plans, he was in fact going back to Middleton regularly to pursue his friendship with his pretty cousin, Lois Beynon. He had been away from any domestic comfort for three years. Lois was a girl from a similar background (her father William, was Edgar's uncle, his mother's brother), who had been brought up in the public house in Middleton. She was someone who understood him. She was spirited, attractive, and musical. Edgar was a well-known young man, intelligent, good looking, affectionate and musical. A marriage was arranged in a very short time and was solemnised on 13 December 1904, just a little less than fourteen weeks from Edgar's arrival back in England.\n\nWelsh interest in the marriage was not only directed towards the now famous Swansea boy but also to Lois. As well as being familiar to patrons of the Ship, Lois was known in Rhossili for her lovely singing voice. Evening entertainment then was often in the form of musical soir\u00e9es and Lois frequently contributed to these; duets (often with the daughter of the Rector who had married Edgar's parents), _Blow Gentle Wind_ , and solos, _O'er Life's Dark Sea_ , were regularly performed and, more cheerfully, Arthur Sullivan's _Three Little Maids_. When she married her explorer on 13 December, 'Rhossili was agog with excitement'.21 Lois was described as the youngest daughter of Mr and Mrs Beynon of the popular Ship Inn. Edgar, as a man who had 'sprung to prominence by reason of the fact that he was one of the crew of _Discovery_ sent out for the purpose of Antarctic exploration'.22\n\nHe described himself modestly, according to the clearly impressed _Gower Church Magazine_ , 'as a simple mariner'.23 The Rector, The Reverend Lewis Hughes, performed the ceremony and the celebrations were noisy. A 'feu de joie', a rifle salute with rifles fired in quick succession so that the sound is continuous, added to the boisterous festivities.24 Lois looked delightful. She wore white silk, trimmed with cream chiffon with a matching picture hat. She carried the ivory-bound prayer book that Edgar had given her and was attended by two bridesmaids whom Edgar presented with dress rings. One of Lois' brothers, Enoch, was best man and the full choir gave vocal support. A wedding breakfast in the Ship Inn followed and the happy pair departed for London, their departure serenaded by coastguards and farmers who vied with each other by firing more gun salutes.25\n\nThe _Gower Church Magazine_ reported inaccurately on Edgar's perilous Western Journey saying that he had been '270 miles further south than all the rest of the crew',26 but enthusiastically describing his modesty; 'like every truly brave man he is far from being boastful and requires considerable persuasion to make himself relate anything about himself'. The article went on to say that Lois' contributions to local concerts were much appreciated 'as evidenced in the numerous and costly wedding presents given her by a large number of friends and relatives... the singing was worthy of the bright occasion, the voices in chanting the special psalm and the two well-known hymns were wonderfully sweet and one could feel that the hearts of all were full... May every blessing follow them in their new home'.27\n\nA few days in London was exciting beyond Lois' wildest imaginings: the noise, the traffic, the people, the entertainment and Edgar; Edgar who was used to large cities, who knew about traffic, omnibuses, theatres, who could navigate confidently through the confusing whirl. Edgar was her hero.\n\nAfter London came Portsmouth, the naval town on the south coast of England. The family were to be here until Edgar left again for the Antarctic. Married life began at 12 Walden Road, in the Tipner district of Portsmouth. Walden Road is a long terrace built over a number of years from the 1890s. Number 12 was an Edwardian house, first listed in the early 1900s. It had a bay window at the front and was 'modern', in that it probably had its own 'privy'.28 There were shops: a fruiterer, a general store, a grocer (3lbs of sugar, just over 5 pence; 1.5lbs butter, 1 shilling 6 pence; a pint of beer, 2 pence; 2oz tobacco, 6 pence) and a confectioner conveniently close, also the local doctors,29 but the change from rural Gower must have been a tremendous challenge for Lois. The only point of similarity was the sea; the dock was only about half a mile away, but for the first time she was away from her family and lifelong friends and thrown into a life of a very different pace. She had to manage long days on her own, to act independently, to cope with pregnancy and to look after babies. The couple had three children: Norman Edgar (18 August 1905) and their daughter Muriel (9 November 1906) were born when the family was at Walden Road. Edgar then moved his family to 52 Chapel Street, in the Portsmouth suburb of Buckland, where their second son, Ralph, was born on 4 December 1908. Both boys were to be baptised at home in Rhossili by the Reverend Lewis Hughes.\n\nEdgar was fully occupied. After postings for a total of nine months on HMS _President_ and HMS _Firequeen_ , Petty Officer 1st Class Edgar Evans was posted to HMS _Excellent_ , the Royal Naval Gunnery School in Portsmouth, on 15 January 1905 to train as a gunnery instructor. Apart from a three-month period in 1906, he remained on _Excellent_ for two years and then stayed in other shore bases in the Portsmouth area until he left for the Antarctic again in 1910, having qualified also as a Torpedo Instructor. He was based at HMS _Barfleur_ from April to July 1906 ( _Barfleur_ was the Flagship of the Rear Admiral of the Portsmouth Division of the Reserve Fleet), _Excellent_ , again, from July 1906 to January 1907 and HMS _Victory_ from February 1907 to April 1910.\n\nIn 1906 the Royal Naval and Military Tournament opened in Olympia in London. This tournament was a national entertainment with competitions, massed bands, musical rides and historic battles, but undoubtedly its centrepiece was the field gun run. This was a competition that had evolved after Royal Naval involvement in the relief of the South African town of Ladysmith30 during the Boer War.31 At that time naval personnel hauled guns from HMS _Powerful_ up to Ladysmith to defend the vulnerable town against the Boer attack. Edgar knew of this notable achievement; he had been in South Africa before the Boer War ended. In 1906, in Olympia, as HMS _Excellent_ 's Gunnery Trainer, he led his eighteen-man gun crew in a display of dismantling and reconstructing the heavy guns as they were hoisted over walls and bridges. This was no easy task. The guns used were 12-pounder 6cwt,32 the weight of the gun barrel was 896lbs, the carriage 350lbs and the wheels 120lbs, so the total weight of the equipment to be taken over the course was approximately 1 ton (1,016kg, over 2,000lbs).\n\nIn the following year, Edgar led his crew to victory in the field gun competition (as apposed to display).33 This took place during each afternoon performance throughout the tournament. It involved two crews vying with each other to initially haul the field gun and its carriage across the arena towards 'a wall', dismantling the gun to get it over the obstacle, reassembling the gun, and then getting it across a 28ft 'chasm'. For this the gun had to be dismantled again, some of the team swinging across the chasm carrying the 120lb wheels, the others sweating to get the carriage and gun barrel over the gap before they swung across themselves. The gun carriage was then put together again and raced towards a gap in the 'enemy wall' \u2013 too narrow for the gun to get through with its wheels on, so they had to be removed and put on again before a stiff contest to get to the enemy line, fire a round of ammunition and repeat the process in reverse to get back to the starting line. The team that crossed the original starting line first was awarded a point, and whichever team achieved the biggest number of points during the entire tournament was deemed victorious. The competition, accompanied by the virtually delirious shouts of support from loyal devotees, was hugely demanding and required relentless rehearsal, and a strong coordinated team. Here Edgar clearly excelled. The Royal Tournament, including the field gun exercise, continued until 1999 when it was axed, but currently there are plans to revive it.\n\nYears later he told another story about the gun run. Whilst the training was in progress he was stationed in Corfu for a short while. With six friends he hired a ramshackle four-wheeled cart for trip into the country. Having somehow deposited the driver, some brilliant 'idjit' thought that it was a good time to carry out a gun run practice. They broke up the cart, reasonably scientifically, into about twenty pieces and then charged back with all the bits. An Officer appeared, 'What is this tomfoolery?', 'Gun Practice, sir, dismounting and retiring with gear.' And then, Edgar concluded to his spellbound audience, 'We couldn't make the bleeding fool see how important it was and he sent us back to the ship without letting us set the gun up again.'34 The driver's reactions are not recorded.\n\nEdgar's five-and-a-half years of married life were full of action and excitement. In relation to the navy, in February 1906, King Edward VII launched HMS _Dreadnought_ in Portsmouth as part of the modernisation reforms instigated by Admiral Sir 'Jacky' Fisher. This was thought to be the most powerful warship in the world, a ship that would make all others obsolete. Later that year there was rioting in Portsmouth Barracks.35 This extraordinary and much publicised event was precipitated when young recruits were kept on the parade ground for an inordinate length of time in appalling weather. They decamped, without permission, to the gymnasium where the Duty Officer (a gunner) dismissed the lesser offenders but kept junior stokers back for a reprimand. Unfortunately he started with a short, curt order of 'on the knee', apparently a common command in the gunnery division and given so that men at the back could hear what was being said. But the order and the way it was given caused indignation amongst the stokers who responded with a resounding 'No'. The stokers' arrest and subsequent disquiet continued for days, with stokers ransacking the canteen before finally mutinying. The gates of the barracks were barred. There was no movement in or out. The event finally culminated in over 200 stokers being arrested and the Duty Officer and Senior Officers being relieved of their commands. After this, 'on the knee' was used for drill only. The mutiny would not have affected Edgar directly (except for him being unable to get into barracks), but the tension, uncertainty and excitement must have been intense and spread throughout the ranks.\n\nBut Portsmouth offered attractions beyond naval and domestic duties. Apart from enjoying a drink in the pubs, for the first time Edgar sampled the novelty of cabaret shows, sometimes going to the 'artistes' door to see and talk to the performers as they left the theatre.36 There were several theatres to choose from: The Hippodrome, The Royal, The People's Palace where performances were often twice nightly (so giving time to be home at a reasonable hour) and presenting 'all the latest novelties from America and the Continent... no expense is spared to present a bright and exhilarating entertainment'.37 There were entertainments on the pier, too, such as marine bands and vocal concerts.38 Lois wrote later that Edgar had been a good husband. But although he was an affectionate husband and father who worked hard, it was difficult to chain him to domesticity exclusively. It was still less than two years after his battles against Antarctica's worst excesses. Gregarious and outgoing, he needed new experiences. The field gun run was only one of these.\n\nHe may have been the father of two other children, twins, born a few months before his daughter Muriel. Beatrice Louise Pharoah was a teacher who, at the time of the twins' birth, lived in Sultan Road, about five roads along from Chapel Street, the Evans' home. Following Beatrice's history through several changes of name and address is a challenge. She was born in 1873, the daughter of a farmer, James Enos Pharoah. Her father died in 1877 and by the 1881 census Beatrice Pharoah is listed as the stepdaughter of Edward James Anderson and his wife Martha (although in fact the actual marriage of Edward and Martha does not appear to have taken place until 1883).39 Beatrice seems to have taken her stepfather's name and the 1891 census lists her as Beatrice Anderson, living with her now widowed mother in 298 Commercial Road, Portsmouth. Ten years later, in the 1901 census, Beatrice, still known as Anderson, was living with her mother in Lake Road, Portsmouth.\n\nBeatrice married Thomas Henry Glazier in 1902 (giving her name as Beatrice Louise Pharoah). Her husband died after just over two years of marriage. She was to marry again. In 1914, after Edgar's death, she married Charles James Amsden, recording Anderson as her father's name.40 When Beatrice's daughter married in 1928, she recorded her maiden name as Amsden, but withheld details regarding her father's name and profession (although her new husband supplied details of his own father).41\n\nBeatrice gave birth to twins, confusingly named Kathleen Lillian42 and Lillian Kathleen,43 on 31 July 1906 at Albert House, Albert Road, Cosham. Beatrice Louise Evans (formally Anderson) is recorded as the mother, the address as 39 Sultan Road. Edgar Evans, Petty Officer RN, is listed as father. This is possibly true. Beatrice was between marriages and Edgar was a virile, active young man. Lois, preoccupied with domestic commitments, her pregnancy and baby Norman, may well have been unable to satisfy him sexually. Whatever the truth Beatrice undoubtedly had a tough time with her twins. Lillian Kathleen (aged seventeen months) died at Sultan Road on the 23 January 1908. The father was registered as Edgar Evans, 1st Class Petty Officer Royal Navy, HMS _Victory_. The certified cause of death was 'Dentition' (presumably problems with teething) and bronchopneumonia.44 Beatrice was with her daughter when she died, but there is no mention of Edgar being present.\n\nIn 1907, the erstwhile Third Officer of _Discovery_ , Ernest Henry Shackleton, returned with his own expedition to Antarctica on _Nimrod_. Shackleton reached to within 97 geographic miles of the South Pole, having ascended onto the plateau via a momentous, 150-mile haul up a glacier, which he called the Beardmore after his principal financial backer. A group from his expedition reached the Magnetic South Pole and he was hailed as a hero. When Scott had first heard of Shackleton's intentions, he was back in the navy and marooned in the Atlantic. He wrote to Shackleton saying that he felt he had 'cut right across my plans' (for a return) and that he had the 'right to my own field of work in the way that Peary claimed Smith's Sound and many African travellers their particular locality'.45 He wrote that foreigners had 'conseeded [sic] that the sphere of the Ross Sea was English', surely therefore 'the English must admit the same argument to apply amongst themselves'.46\n\nWhen Shackleton failed to reach the Pole, Scott wrote that a sportsman is not jealous of his record or slow to praise those who surpass it, but there was surely _Schadenfreude_ behind these comments. Shackleton's failure left the prize open for him. His new expedition, the British Antarctic Expedition, was announced on 13 September 1909, and aroused immense public interest; 8,000 people applied to join. Preference was given to those with Antarctic experience and to members of the Royal Navy. Scott wrote to Edgar in March 1910, saying that he (Scott) had applied for Edgar's services on the proposed expedition and that he expected that Edgar would be appointed in two weeks. He wanted Edgar to be at the ship to help in fitting her out. Edgar decided to accept the offer and started working for the expedition in its headquarters in Victoria Street, London. Funding for the expedition was a huge task. The British Government, weary of requests for polar exploration, initially refused financial support. Also, Lloyd George's 'Peoples Budget' had significantly increased taxation on the wealthy, making them less likely to donate money to philanthropic causes. _Discovery_ , now owned by the Hudson's Bay Company, could not be got for a reasonable price so Scott bought the whaling ship _Terra Nova_ for his expedition paying \u00a312,500. Refitting and a thorough cleaning were needed (her hull was full of seal blubber and the stench was overpowering). Edgar was also fully occupied sorting the gear for the sledges. During the refit he shared lodgings in London near the dock.47 By now he was a big, burly man at 5ft 10in, and nearly 14 stone.48 He certainly made an impact on Griffith Taylor, the geologist of the expedition, when he visited expedition headquarters in 1910. Taylor said that Edgar, who was sorting the gear for the sledges, almost filled the room and that he (Taylor) looked at Edgar with considerable respect. Taylor's friend Charles Wright, a physicist, had just had his application to join the expedition turned down, so Taylor, fired up competitively by the sight of Edgar's sturdy proportions, decided to show that some of the scientists could at least 'walk' up to naval standards. The two walked 50 miles in twenty-four hours from Cambridge, to resubmit the application.49\n\nShould Edgar have accepted Scott's offer and left Lois and their three children? When Admiralty released him from the navy to join _Terra Nova_ , he and his colleagues were taken off the naval payroll, though they kept their place on the promotion list. Edgar's Certificate of Service records that his 'home' base, from 20 April 1910 until 17 February 1912, was HMS _President_ , when it finishes with the words, 'Lost in British Antarctic Expedition'. But the loss of naval pay meant that, unlike his _Discovery_ days, Edgar was dependent on expeditionary funds.\n\nThere were obvious reasons against him going. He knew there was no guarantee that he would ever get back to England, having had all too vivid experiences of the dangers of Antarctica. He knew his wife would need him, having seen his mother bringing up her children single-handedly when his own father was at sea. But the lure of Antarctica remained strong; he was not the only married man or father to go with Scott (who had only recently got married himself). He knew that the _Discovery_ expedition had brought him recognition well beyond the dreams of a lad from Gower, and he knew there would be a Pole attempt and thought he would be chosen for that party. Further recognition and fame beckoned. It was a chance worth taking. In the words of one of the _Terra Nova_ explorers:\n\nI hear the white wastes calling\n\nAcross the restless seas\n\nCivilization's palling\n\nThe wanderer's disease\n\nI wish that I could once again\n\nAround the cooker sit\n\nAnd hearken to its soft refrain\n\nAnd feel so jolly fit50\n\nThe die was cast.\n\nHe certainly did not foresee that Lois was to face difficult financial circumstances. He had signed on for extra years to secure a naval pension. And his family supported him. After he had died his father-in-law (whose loyalty might be expected to be directly focused on his daughter and her struggles and conversely stretched towards his son-in-law) said, 'He was a fine boy. He was a good husband and a good son to his old mother.'51 Indeed, Lois did not falter in her loyalty.\n\nEdgar's father Charles had died in 1907 and before Edgar left, he and Lois returned to Gower. Scott had decided that Cardiff would be the place of departure for the _Terra Nova_. He visited his mother, now living in the village of Pitton with her sister, and then walked 16 miles to visit his older brother, Charles, at Cwm Farm, Sketty. This visit was made memorable to one of his nieces when Edgar swept her up in his arms and promised to visit her again on his return. When he left, Lois and the children stayed on with her sister in Cardiff.52\n\nHe told Lois he would be back with her and the children in a year. But the parting was sad and was to be final. She would never see him again.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Ed. Savours, A., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Discovery Expedition 1901\u20131904_ , Blandford Press, London, 1966, p. 331.\n\n2 Ford, C.E., Journal 10\/12\/03\u201314\/03\/04, SPRI, MS 1174; D, 02\/02\/1904.\n\n3 Williamson, T.S., Journal 1901\u20131904, SPRI, MS, 774\/1\/2; BJ. 10\/01\/1904.\n\n4 Ford, C.E., Journal 10\/12\/03\u201314\/03\/04, SPRI, MS 1174; D, 10\/01\/1904.\n\n5 Ibid., 02\/02\/1904.\n\n6 Ibid., 14\/02\/1904.\n\n7 Williamson, T.S., Journal 1901\u20131904, SPRI, MS, 774\/1\/2;BJ. 13\/02\/1904.\n\n8 Ibid., 07\/03\/1904.\n\n9 Ibid., 07\/03\/1904.\n\n10 Ibid., 02\/07\/1904.\n\n11 _Times_ , Editorial, Saturday 10\/09\/904, Issue 37496, p. 9.\n\n12 Unknown newspaper clipping. SPRI, 24\/04\/1906.\n\n13 Unknown newspaper clipping. SPRI, 12\/09\/1904.\n\n14 Unknown newspaper clipping. SPRI, 12\/09\/1904.\n\n15 Yelverton, D., _Antarctica Unveiled, Scott's First Expedition and the Quest for the Unknown Continent_ , University Press of Colorado, Colorado USA, 2000, Appendix 8.\n\n16 Ibid., Appendix 8. The Royal Geographical Society Medal was awarded in 1913.\n\n17 _Gower Church Magazine_ , January 1905.\n\n18 A mountain or peak sticking up through an ice sheet.\n\n19 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 20 September 1904.\n\n20 Information from Royal Naval Library, Portsmouth.\n\n21 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 14 December 1904.\n\n22 Ibid., 14 December 1904.\n\n23 _Gower Church Magazine_ , January 1905.\n\n24 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 14 December 1904.\n\n25 Ibid., 14 December 1904.\n\n26 _Gower Church Magazine_ , January 1905.\n\n27 Ibid., January 1905.\n\n28 Multimap.com. Postal code PA2 8PJ.\n\n29 Information from the Local History Section of the Portsmouth Library.\n\n30 A town in Natal besieged by the Boers between 2 November 1899 and 28 February 1900. Relieved by Sir Henry Buller. Named after the Spanish wife of the Governor of Cape Town.\n\n31 Boer War, 1899\u20131902.\n\n32 Cwt is a hundredweight, 50.80kg.\n\n33 Personal communication, 2010, Lieutenant Commander Brian Witts, Curator, HMS _Excellent_ Museum, Portsmouth.\n\n34 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp p. 56.\n\n35 04\/11\/1906, the 'On the Knee Mutiny'. The most serious and widely publicised breakdown in naval discipline. It was confined to the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth.\n\n36 John Evans, grandson, personal communication, 2010.\n\n37 _Portsmouth Guide_ , The Hippodrome, Commercial Road, Portsmouth, 1907. (Prices 3 _d_ , 6 _d_ , 1\/-, 1\/6, 2\/6, 10\/6, 15\/-).\n\n38 Ibid., p. 93.\n\n39 Information from the Museums and Records Service, Portsmouth City Council, 2010.\n\n40 Certified Copy of an Entry of Marriage, Registration District Portsmouth, 23 September 1914, TE 159326.\n\n41 Certified Copy of an Entry of Marriage, Registration District Portsmouth, 3 May 1928, TE 159292.\n\n42 Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth, Registration District Fareham, 31 July 1906, No. 269, CJ 735173.\n\n43 Certified Copy of an Entry of Birth, Registration District Fareham, 31 July 1906.\n\n44 Certified Copy of an Entry of Death, Registration District Portsmouth, 23 January 1908. HC 326019.\n\n45 Scott, R.F., _Letter to Ernest Henry Shackleton_ ,18\/02\/1907, SPRI, MS 1456\/23: D.\n\n46 Ibid., Undated letter, but soon after 18\/02\/1907.\n\n47 Cheetham, A.B., _Letter to Mr and Mrs Brewer_ , 14\/02\/1913, SPRI, MS 1365\/1\/1\u20132: D.\n\n48 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp p. 17.\n\n49 Taylor, G., _Letter to H.S. Richards_ 11\/06\/1962, Swansea Museum. Wright was successful.\n\n50 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary, The Barrier Blight by One Who Has Not Had It_ , SPRI. MS 559\/4; BJ.\n\n51 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 11 February 1913.\n\n52 Johnson, A.M., _Scott of the Antarctic and Cardiff_ , The Captain Scott Society, Cardiff, 1995, p. 23.\n\n## 11\n\n## Terra Nova\n\nThe _Terra Nova_ expedition lasted from 1910\u201313. The ship was to return to Cardiff without Edgar Evans and his four companions, Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, 'Birdie' Bowers and 'Titus' Oates. The five men died in Antarctica in 1912.\n\nThe journey to Antarctica was full of incident for Edgar. He came near to dismissal in New Zealand and _Terra Nova_ came near to disaster soon after leaving her last port of call. If Edgar had retired from Antarctic challenges after the _Discovery_ expedition he would have disappeared gently into the quiet backwaters of historical oblivion. But he chose to follow Scott again and so became, after his death, nationally famous and, to an extent, nationally defamed.\n\nHe had an unfortunate start to the expedition. Scott had chosen Cardiff, the capital of Wales, as the point of departure simply because the Welsh had offered generous financial and practical support to the expedition. For their part, the dignitaries in Cardiff were quick to appreciate the publicity and commercial advantages offered to their city by the expedition, Cardiff had only been granted city status by Edward VII in 1905, and national exposure was a bonus. In Cardiff, Scott and his officers were invited by the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce for a farewell banquet at the Royal Hotel (fillets of beef _Terra Nova_ , souffl\u00e9 Captain Scott, South Pole ice pudding).1 The crew were entertained at a nearby hotel (unfortunately no record of that menu remains), and after the meal the men were invited to join the officers. Scott requested that Edgar, the local South Wales hero, who had been lionised in Cardiff,2 should sit between him and the Lord Mayor of Cardiff. No doubt Edgar's glass had been well filled throughout the evening when he rose to his feet to give an impromptu, but effective speech. The event was reported fully by _The Cambrian:_\n\nEdgar Evans' Cardiff Speech\n\nAbertawe Boy who is Southward Bound\n\nBreezy Speech at Cardiff Banquet\n\nCaptain Scott C.V.O and the officers of the British Antarctic Expedition vessel, Terra Nova, were entertained to dinner on Monday evening by the commercial community, the President of the Cardiff Chamber of Commerce in the chair. The crew were also entertained to dinner and \u00a31,000 for the funds of the expedition were collected at the former ceremony, at which an event of special interest to Swansea also occurred, when the Lord Mayor presented to the Expedition a banner emblazoned with the arms of Cardiff.\n\nChief Seaman Edgar Evans of Swansea, one of the biggest and burliest members of the crew, was received with three times three as he rose from his seat between the Lord Mayor and Captain Scott. With the typical modesty of a Jack Tar and an unmistakable West Wales accent, he said;\n\nI think it's out of place for me to sit up here with Captain Scott, but like Lord Charles Beresford, whatever I have to say I'll say it in as few words as possible. (cheers)\n\nEvery man in the ship has confidence in Captain Scott. I know him well and he knows me very well\u2014(laughter)\u2014and I know Lieutenant Evans very well. (cheers)\n\nEvery man in the Expedition is heart and soul in the business, and it has got to be a success this time\u2014 (cheers)\u2014every man will do his best.\n\nAs a representative of Wales I am pleased to meet you all, but whether Wales or Ireland if Captain Scott had only said he was going again I would go too. (cheers) No one else would have induced me to go again, but if there is one man in the world who will bring this to a successful issue, Captain Scott is the man, (renewed cheers)\n\nAs regards the flag, if Captain Scott wants to know the English translation of the Welsh mottoes, here it is: 'Awake, it is day' and 'The Welsh dragon leads the van'.\n\nThe crew appreciate what you have done for them; I hope we shall meet again\u2014and we shall. (Cheers) Of course that depends on Captain Scott bringing back the Pole, (loud laughter). We cannot put it in the museum, but if we do bring it back I hope you will let it go to Swansea. (loud cheers and laughter)\n\nEveryone has great confidence in Captain Scott and Lieut. Evans, and if we do ever come back we hope to meet you again in Cardiff again. (loud cheers)3\n\nIt was a big occasion for Edgar; the dark, oak-panelled room glowed in the candlelight. The great and the good of Cardiff paid him attention, their badges of office shining. His officers, their medals gleaming on their chests, listened. He was bedazzled. He was excited. He was plied with drink. No wonder he got more than well lubricated.\n\nIt took six men to get Edgar back onto the _Terra Nova_.4 He was not aggressive,5 just incapable. His niece said later that he did tend to drink too much on occasions; she thought it was understandable considering his hazardous career.6 He was also, almost certainly, not the only man worse for wear on this occasion. Sixteen months later, Lieutenant Henry Bowers wrote to Kathleen Scott when the British team were leaving for the Pole, saying that he was glad that by then the men would have had a certain amount of experience which would be of help in the approach to the job, with \u2013 in the case of some of them \u2013 'a little less of that spirit that did not do us credit on our departure from Cardiff.'7 Yet this story is repeated whenever Edgar Evans' story is told.\n\nThe dinner was actually a great success financially. The \u00a31,000 collected towards expedition funds was of great importance, because it went some way to relieving Scott of the embarrassment of departing from the United Kingdom still unable to guarantee the wages of some of his officers and men.\n\nThe _Terra Nova_ was the trusty whaling ship, the unexpected relief vessel that had accompanied _Morning_ in Antarctica in 1904. Now she sailed under the white ensign rather than a merchant flag because Scott had been elected as a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron and she was registered as a yacht under Scott's name.8 The expedition was expensive, about \u00a350,000, mainly because of the personnel numbers, sixty-five men, eleven of whom were scientists or doctors. There were three motorised sledges that Scott hoped would be of use in pulling supplies across the Barrier, sixteen Siberian ponies, dogs, equipment and supplies for several years in Antarctica.\n\nAlthough after his death the _Western Mail_ printed a photograph of Edgar and Lois aboard _Terra Nova_ in Cardiff,9 Lois did not go to see Edgar off on 15 June. She had three children under five, the youngest only eighteen months, and she may have thought that the pressure of seeing him off from the dock would be too much. It was probably a wise decision; a truckload of coffins clearly visible to the crew hardly encouraged cheerfulness.10 But his niece, Sarah Evans, travelled from Swansea for the departure which was viewed by thousands. Scott was clearly not fazed about Edgar's performance the night before. Sarah recalled that he called Edgar into his cabin to receive the Mayor of Cardiff's final good wishes and that he (Scott) gave her a sledging biscuit as a memento.11 Edgar was clearly back to his normal self; described as 'burley Chief Seaman', he hoisted Cardiff's flag to the foremast. As the breeze shook out the flag to show its Welsh dragon 'rampant and confident', the crowds 'burst into a mighty roar', particularly when a Welsh leek fastened onto the masthead joined the Cardiff flag.12 Sarah was on a steamer following _Terra Nova_ as, surrounded with tugs and pleasure steamers, the ship started down the Bristol Channel. When the last tugboat departed, Edgar is reported to have said in a 'thunderous' whisper; 'Goodbye we shall always remember you'.13 Members of Edgar's family waved from the Gower cliffs at Rhossili as _Terra Nova_ made her way towards the open sea. They would never see their man again.\n\n_Terra Nova_ followed the same route as _Discovery_ had taken but she did berth in Melbourne rather than bypassing Australia: she sailed via Madeira, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to Antarctica. She left England without her Captain; Scott remained behind to continue fundraising engagements and the journey to South Africa was commanded by _Discovery_ 's Second-in-Command, Lieutenant Edward 'Teddy' Evans. Edgar knew several of the people on board: Chief of Scientific Staff was the erstwhile Junior Doctor and Zoologist on _Discovery_ , Dr Edward Wilson. There were others who had been on that expedition: Petty Officers Thomas Crean, Thomas Williamson and William Heald, and Chief Stoker Lashly. Other crew members had journeyed south before: Lieutenant Evans had been second-in-command of _Morning_ , a trip that irrevocably whetted his appetite for Antarctic exploration. Engineer Bernard Day had been on the _Nimrod_ expedition with Shackleton in 1907. Bosun Alf Cheetham was the veteran of Antarctic travel; he had also been on _Morning_ 's relief trip in 1903 and with _Nimrod_ on Shackleton's 1907\u201309 expedition.14\n\nThe _Terra Nova_ carried an ambitious team. Although the South Pole was high on the list of priorities, Scott was also determined to undertake a big scientific programme that would add academic status to the venture. Edgar's officers, apart from Scott and Lieutenant Evans were: Henry Robertson Bowers, a Lieutenant in the Royal Indian Marines, a man whose beaky nose quickly earned him the nickname 'Birdie'. He was short, 5ft 4in, stocky and full of energy \u2013 'the hardiest traveller that ever undertook a polar journey'. Lieutenant Wilfred Montague Bruce, Royal Naval Reserve and Kathleen Scott's brother, travelled to Vladivostok to meet Cecil Meares, the man appointed to choose the sledge dogs and give Meares assistance in getting the dogs and the ponies, (which Meares also selected), from Russia and across land and sea to join up with _Terra Nova_. Scott was determined to get the best use possible from skis on this expedition, so Tryggve Gran, a Sub-Lieutenant in the Norwegian Navy, was appointed as ski expert. The First Officer was Victor Campbell, 'The Mate' often 'The Wicked Mate'. Stories about him were many; Gran said he never liked being on watch with Campbell because he (Campbell) turned him into a drumstick (a domestic).15 Laurence Titus Oates, a Captain in the Inniskilling Dragoons, was in charge of the ponies. He was destined for Antarctic heroism and contributed \u00a31,000 to Scott's coffers. The Commander was Harry Pennell (Pennylope). He was the navigator and was also in charge of magnetic work. He was considered one of the most competent members of the expedition. Finally there was Lieutenant Rennick, who looked after the hydrographical work and deep-sea sounding.\n\nThe scientific complement was the biggest ever to travel to Antarctica. Dr Wilson's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a biologist. Cherry-Garrard was an immensely wealthy young man who also gave \u00a31,000 to the expedition and who would later write _The Worst Journey in the World_ about his experiences. Many other members of the scientific staff would go on to international fame: Raymond Priestley and Australians Thomas Griffith Taylor and Frank Debenham were the geologists and Canadian Charles Wright the physicist. George Simpson was the meteorologist who was to make pivotal observations and conclusions on wind and weather conditions of Antarctica. Dennis Lillie and Edward Nelson were biologists and there were two surgeons, Edward Atkinson and George Levick.\n\nHerbert Ponting was the famous 'Camera Artist' who photographed the crew, including Edgar. His photographs and film, which were to prove invaluable for advertising and providing funds for the expedition, remain prized collectable items to this day. The motor expert was Bernard Day. He had had experience with the motors used on Shackleton's expedition.\n\nThirty-three of the company were assigned to the shore parties16 and Edgar was in this group. Edgar's letter to his mother in the early part of the voyage said that he was well, that he had seen Sarah and two of her sisters in Cardiff, but that other cousins had not turned up. He asked his mother to write to him in Cape Town. He sent his love to his aunts and uncles 'and anyone that enquires'. He was her 'Ever loving Son'.17\n\nOn board, the men, in cramped accommodation and working conditions, getting to know each other slowly. They worked at the bilge pumps (in spite of all efforts _Terra Nova_ leaked and the men had to spend about half an hour each watch pumping out seawater). Her rolling was enough to make some of the men seasick. Edgar did not start off well with his temporary Captain, Lieutenant Teddy Evans. He had apparently spotted an error over the ordering of some ski bindings, a subject he had good experience in, and he reported this error to Scott. Teddy Evans, who had made the order, was not pleased, particularly when Edgar was put in charge of the ski equipment rather than himself.\n\n'Crossing the line' was on 15 July and Edgar was now experienced at the ritual. He was Neptune. The show began on the 14th, when Neptune's messenger, Triton, arrived to announce that Neptune and his Queen, Amphitrite, would be visiting the ship. Resplendent in his royal robes Edgar appeared, supported by Queen Amphitrite, the strapping Petty Officer Frank Browning. Their followers were the doctor (Seaman James Paton), a barber (Bosun Alfred Cheetham), a barrister (another Petty Officer, George Abbott), all ably helped by Captain Oates and Lieutenant Atkinson as bears. Edgar's friend, Tom Crean, and Petty Officer Thomas Williamson were the policemen.\n\nThe Clerk (Abbott), read Neptune's address to the Ship's company, which showed Edgar's quick wit. After welcoming his audience to Father Neptune's domain and stating that unwilling initiates would be attended to by Neptune's stalwart policemen, the clerk went on to wish the expedition every success. But he commented on the ship's bad leak (perhaps due to cargo shifting so often, or perhaps the tuneless singing of Shanties at the pumps?) and said that it was tough that the stiff breezes he had sent, had veered round so that they travelled straight up the hawse pipes (the area on the ship's bow that the cables go through), causing the sails to have to be furled in the middle watch (the watch between midnight to 4 a.m.). He asked if the ship was towing a sea anchor or whether the rudder was athwartships (lying across) and checking progress, because the ship moved so remarkably slowly. He presumed, 'she would go a long way in a long time'.18\n\nThe actual initiation, which followed Edgar's advice that the 'Main Brace' should be spliced (drink should be issued), was predictably violent. The doctor inevitably 'prescribed' a pill, a gobstopper of soap and tallow, washed down by a mixture of vinegar and cayenne to every initiate. This was followed by lathering from a bucket of whitewash and another of soot, a shave with a 3ft wooden razor and then the drop into the bath 12ft below. The first to go (Nelson) pulled the 'barber' into the bath with him. Others tried to fight Neptune's assistants in spite of the warning they had been given and most were overcome by the 'police' Crean and Williamson. But Gran (Norwegian, so perhaps unfairly included) chucked the 'doctor' over his shoulder into the bath and was 'lathered very gingerly after that'.19 The captain decorated Father Neptune with the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order. The Main Brace was promptly spliced with port wine (drinks all round). A concert followed, but to some of the disappointed crewmen the atmosphere was still 'somewhat dry';20 they wanted more in the alcoholic line.\n\nFollowing _Discovery_ 's trail, _Terra Nova_ called on South Trinidad, one of the fabled Treasure Islands,21 great rocks and corals, many sharks swimming around and with one accessible shore. Edgar recorded the birds again: Terns, Petrels, Gannets. The stretch down to South Africa was helped by strong westerly winds, which allowed _Terra Nova_ to fly along under full sail and arrive on 15 August, (though still fifteen days overdue), in the Naval Base of Simon's Bay. She had travelled over 7,000 miles. In South Africa good will abounded, the locals were as hospitable as ever. The ship was repainted in the dockyard. Other ships sent gifts of bread, eggs, and fresh meat. Edgar had reason to be proud of _Terra Nova_ when she left Simon's Bay after eighteen days with Scott now in command. He wrote to his mother cheerfully, saying that the plans were for them to leave for the ice in December and saying he had received a letter from his brother, Charlie, 'quite a spasm for him wasn't it?' Again he signed himself her 'ever-loving son' and he sent his regards to all the relations.\n\nIllustrating a perennial worry of all expeditions, Stoker Lashly reported problems with his teeth. He asked Dr Atkinson to pull some out and, in a way that makes the modern reader blanch, Drs Atkinson and Wilson attacked the problem. They had six goes at the first tooth, a tooth that remained as tightly in its socket when they gave up as when they started. Then they pulled out three others, breaking two during the process. Afterwards Lashly wanted them to have another go at the first.22\n\nAs they sailed onto Melbourne, the voyage was characterised by the usual delights and discomforts of seaboard life: _Terra Nova_ rolled vigorously, sometimes the lee rail was well under water and the sea flooded along the starboard side and into the laboratory and sleeping quarters. By 2 October, the wind had fallen. The crew postulated that they were travelling in front of a storm system that was moving at about 150 miles a day. They hypothesised that if they had been in a sailing ship without steam, the cyclone would have caught them and they would have been in continually bad weather. The fact that _Terra Nova_ had auxiliary steam meant that they could keep ahead of the storm. They speculated that this could explain the reports of particularly bad weather encountered by sailing ships on that latitude.23 Lieutenant Evans wrote that he and Scott had definitely selected Edgar to be one of the seaman selected for the shore party (with three Irish companions: Robert Forde, Pat Keohane and Tom Crean).24\n\nOn 12 October Melbourne was reached. A telegram was waiting for Scott, one that outraged the loyal Edgar. The telegram read: 'Beg leave to inform you, _Fram_ [Amundsen's ship] proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen.' The race to the Pole was about to begin though the British did not at first appreciate this; their initial reaction was muted, they did not think that Amundsen would go to the same part of Antarctica as themselves. Roald Amundsen, (1872\u20131928), the famous Norwegian explorer, had left Norway with the avowed intent of travelling to the Arctic basin and the North Pole. But this was a ruse and he kept the truth from everyone except his brother. Amundsen needed a coup and his South Pole ambitions were hatched when two American explorers, Frederick Cook and Robert Peary, both claimed independently to have reached the North Pole. Geologist Raymond Priestley later remembered Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole as 'the greatest geographical impertinence that history records'25 (Priestley's opinion was that Amundsen's expedition was to make money). If Scott had known earlier that there would be rivalry in the Antarctic he might well have modified his plans which were not based on speed, but he only fully appreciated the competition risks months later when Amundsens's ship was found by chance, just miles along the Barrier from Scott's base. By contrast, Amundsen, fully aware of Scott's plans, knew that swift progress was essential for the Norwegians to get to the Pole first.\n\nThe British expedition plans continued. The Australian Government contributed \u00a32,500 to the expedition. Marconi, the radio pioneer, offered wireless assistance (refused, because the equipment was too bulky),26 and on 28 October, _Terra Nova_ sailed on to another warm welcome at Lyttelton, the port of Christchurch, New Zealand, nine years after Edgar's visit on _Discovery_.\n\n_Terra Nova_ was in New Zealand for a month. Her persistent leak was attacked again and reduced to a degree that the hand pump could control it in two daily sessions of a quarter of an hour. The stores were unpacked and repacked with 'Birdie' Bowers in capable charge. Each item was marked with a red or green band depending on whether it was designated for Scott's Main Party or an Eastern Party that, it was planned, would investigate the land east of the Barrier. The men practised assembling the prefabricated huts. Their living space on the main deck was horribly overcrowded, but Edgar, as the men's spokesman, requested that their comfort should not be considered. He said that because there was such a need to squeeze in extra supplies, 'they were prepared to pig it anyhow'.27 The ponies and dogs were quarantined on Quail Island before being taken on board. The New Zealand press was enthusiastic, writing that 'Our American cousins have discovered one of the Poles and the record of British exploration will be fittingly crowned if the expedition succeeds in planting the Union Jack on the other'.28\n\nThe sailors enjoyed Christchurch; some of them enjoyed themselves in the traditional naval way; drink and women. On this occasion Edgar definitely disgraced himself by going on a drinking spree. Before the ship departed for Port Chalmers for coaling on 26 November, and after the Bishop of Christchurch had blessed the ship, Edgar, drunk, fell into the harbour whilst getting on board. Although Scott seemed to have taken the Cardiff episode in a matter-of-fact way, this second episode was different. The expedition had been disgraced publicly. He dismissed Edgar.\n\nWhy did Edgar do it? He may simply have wanted the satisfaction of a last, good and prolonged, drinking bout. It may equally have been a guilt reaction. New Zealand was his last link with civilization to be followed by irrevocable separation from his dependent wife and family. He may well have wanted to blot out these and other disagreeable thoughts. Either way dismissal would have been a disaster. He had come off the naval payroll to join _Terra Nova_ , so the loss of expeditionary pay would have been a big financial blow for his family. Probably the financial loss would have not been permanent. Edgar was still officially on the naval list and it is likely that after such an episode, he would have faced disciplinary action in Portsmouth and probably disrated. But he would have been on reduced naval pay and the shame to his family would have been considerable\n\nWhen he was sober Edgar went to Scott, who was still in Lyttelton, to apologise and to ask Scott to reconsider his decision. After initial resistance Scott relented and the two men travelled in the same express train to Port Chalmers, Edgar acting as if nothing had happened.29 Scott's decision annoyed Lieutenant Evans. Teddy, who was still unhappy about Edgar's promotion to ski master.30 Teddy also thought that the reinstatement was bad for discipline. But Scott's loyalty and affection for Edgar was genuine. Edgar was a member of the Guarantee Party. They had covered miles of Antarctic wasteland together and gone through conditions that Lieutenant Evans could only imagine; Edgar had been tried and trusted in the worst Antarctic circumstances. Scott did not want to lose his talisman.\n\n_Terra Nova_ left Lyttelton on 29 November. There was the usual excited send off; special trains were put on so that people could watch the departure \u2013 all the ships in the harbour were decorated. Cherry-Garrard wrote there was 'a general hullabaloo'.31 The ship was dangerously overloaded, her deck like a floating farmyard: there were nineteen ponies, all swaying continuously as the ship lifted up and down (Scott has specified that he wanted white ponies only because on Shackleton's expedition, the dark ponies had died before white ones), thirty-three dogs (presented by schools from all over the country, which barked and snarled and strained at their chains), two cats, two rabbits, a pigeon, squirrels and a guinea pig. In addition the deck groaned with 'thirty tons of coal, 2,500 gallons of petrol, some tons of pony fodder and petroleum'. _Terra Nova_ also carried '162 frozen sheep and three bullocks'.32\n\nIn addition there were three caterpillar-track motor sledges. These were potentially a huge innovation in Antarctica. Shackleton had taken a motorcar on the 1907 expedition and thought that motorised transport was feasible in Antarctica.33 Scott went further; he was the first to pioneer motor sledges in Polar conditions, a possible development that worried Amundsen. There were innumerable sacks of coal and stacks of petrol cases. Mutton from the New Zealand farmers found a place in the icehouse along with three carcasses of beef and boxes of sweetbreads and kidneys.\n\nThe seas through which they passed to reach the pack ice are amongst the stormiest in the world. Dante wrote that those who have committed carnal sin are tossed about ceaselessly by the most furious winds in the second circle of Hell, and this is how it appeared to one of the officers as _Terra Nova_ pitched and plunged about in a force 10 gale for thirty-six hours.34 Edgar understood, all too well, the implications for the overloaded ship. As the waves broke with increasing fury over the deck, the ponies began to fall over, the coal loosened petrol cases and the chained dogs were thrown to and fro by each successive wave.\n\nThe hatches were battened down, but by 4 December the ship had slowly filled with water. The crew tried unsuccessfully to stop the mountainous waves that washed all over the deck by pouring oil overboard. Coal sacks became battering rams and loosened the petrol drums (150 gallons were lost).35 The ship's violent tossing opened the deck seams and allowed coal dust to pour into the bilges (the part of the ship below water level where the sides curve towards the keel) and, in spite of the clean up, the dust mixed with blubber from _Terra Nova_ 's previous occupation as a whaler. Geologist Priestly wrote later that, in addition to the blubber, one of the sailors must have spilt a barrel of oil in the mainhold which also got mixed with the coal and formed into coal balls 'about the size of composition cricket-balls and these had blocked the pipes leading from the pump'.36 Lashly worked for hours, unsuccessfully, to try to clear the pipes. The boiler fires had to be closed down; if water got into contact with the boilerplates the boiler would buckle and become useless for further steaming. The engine driven pump was shut down. The ship was at the mercy of the sea as the men worked on furiously, clinging to the rails and up to their waists in water. Officers, scientists and men formed a chain gang and bailed for their lives for twenty-four hours, as the wind raged up to 72mph. Though the men knew that they were dependent on each ship's plank staying firm, they still sang sea shanties (that helped the rhythm of heavy bucket passing) that could be heard above the roar of the waves. When allowed a rest period, Edgar threw himself into his hammock and slept, oblivious of the pitching and rolling of the tortured ship.\n\nFinally the engineers managed to cut a hole in the bulkhead,37 so that Lieutenants Evans and Bowers could crawl to the hand pumps and pull out those lumps of oily coal dust. Often working under water, the two finally managed to get the hand pumps working. At last the storm subsided, the water level gradually receded, the fires were relit and the ship pumped dry. It had been a near miss. Two ponies and one dog died, tons of coal had been lost overboard along with 100 gallons of petrol.\n\nThe ship reached the pack ice, ominously further north than expected, on 9 December. Although Scott had thought that _Terra Nova_ was large enough to make an attempt at getting through the pack early,38 and though she could and did butt away at the heavy ice, she had nothing of the power of modern icebreakers and eventually took a month to get through. Sometimes progress was limited to one knot at full power, so to conserve coal the fire was put out. But every day spent pushing through ice had an effect on the timetable, 'Truly getting into our winter quarters is no light task; at first the gales and heavy seas and now this continuous fight with the pack ice.'39 By 23 December the coal supply was down to 300 tons.40 The 25 December, in the pack, was altogether too Christmassy for Scott, but the day was celebrated with a church service, Christmas hymns and lusty singing. The Men had mutton for the celebration lunch (they thought that penguin was not good enough for Christmas),41 plus beer and whisky. Crean's rabbit gave birth to seventeen babies.\n\nFinally, on 30 December, _Terra Nova_ escaped from the ice pack. Victoria Land in all its mysterious, pristine, majestic beauty could be seen about 60 miles ahead. Mount Sabine and the Admiralty Range looked glorious. The high snow peaks were lit by the sun and looked as if they lay over the clouds, like a layer of white satin. On New Year's Day the watch sighted Mount Erebus. Scott headed for his intended base camp, Cape Crozier, but found it impossible to land because of a heavy northerly swell, so _Terra Nova_ steamed directly to the Skuary, a rocky cape just north of the ice edge, renamed Cape Evans in honour of Lieutenant Teddy Evans, Scott's second in command. The base was 12 geological miles north of Hut Point,42 meaning that later on in the expedition the men would have an additional 12 miles to sledge. Ice anchors were let down and unloading began.\n\nThe first task was to build the accommodation in which the men would spend the winter. The ship was moored 1.5 miles from the landing place and all the stores had to be ferried by sledge across the pack ice. In the disembarkation one of the motor sledges disappeared through the ice. These expensive experiments had cost \u00a31,000 each; the loss was equivalent to Edgar's wages for thirty years.\n\nEdgar worked tirelessly; he helped unload the ship, build the hut, 10ft above sea level,43 check the sledges and assist Dr Wilson in the bloody occupation of killing and preparing seal carcasses for the larder. Scott thought he was impressively competent. He had no doubt that the (non-motorised) sledges that Edgar had fitted would work well. The hut was triple-walled and heavily insulated, with seaweed quilting on the roof. It was divided by a wall of packing cases, with scientists and officers on one side, men on the other. The arrangement has been criticised, with detractors saying that the division demonstrated Scott's over reliance on naval hierarchy and his discomfort in being with men of a different social class. This view can be challenged. Scott had already shown on the _Discovery_ expedition how he could exist easily with the seamen; in fact one of his attractive characteristics was that he was comfortable with all classes. But what of the sailors? Their whole upbringing and education had schooled them against social integration. Their cultural connections and framework were different. They would have found enforced intimacy with the officers and scientists an unwelcome constraint on their behaviour. They needed a safety valve, a separate unit to let off steam. This was shown later; when Edgar was on a sortie with three officers, he never swore in front of them. But when they returned to base he reverted to his normal vocabulary. When Debenham heard him through the partition he said; 'that sounds like Taff but it can't be \u2013 he never talked like that with us'.44 Edgar would not have wanted to be curbing his tongue full-time.\n\nHe wrote to his mother on 3 January 1911. Headed \"' _Terra Nova_ \" Cape Crozier, Victoria Land', he mentioned the bad weather and the pack ice, but only in passing. He was certainly no moaner. He said he expected to be in Antarctica for about fifteen months. He stamped the letter with an Antarctic stamp, marked 'Victoria Land', a unique curiosity, he thought. He asked his mother to keep it. He mentioned his wife; she probably had a job getting the children back to school. He sent his love to all.\n\nThey had brought a farmyard with them, but now it was even bigger. In addition to the ponies, dogs, rabbits and cats, Skua gulls nested and fought over seals and squawking penguins.45 They all wondered where _Fram_ was. Probably Meares was the only one to voice the horrid suggestion that if Amundsen was on the ice near them, he could go straight for the Pole.46\n\nAfter a week's hard sledging and the cargo over the ice, the equipment and supplies were well stored at Cape Evans. Scott planned a series of sorties before the winter: a depot-laying party in preparation for the attempt on the Pole the following year and two other expeditions \u2013 an Eastern Party that would carry out scientific and surveying work in King Edward VII Land and a Western Party which would carry out a similar mission in South Victoria Land. Edgar was a member of the second party. Scott's depot-laying party was to have far-reaching effects; there was near disaster as some members avoided death by a hair's breadth, and of the eight fittest ponies that had been taken on the trip five died, a misfortune that Scott was ultimately to claim contributed to the deaths of the Polar Party.47\n\nThe plans were in action.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 The oak panelled room where the dinner took place remains today and a seven-course dinner is recreated accurately and enjoyably by the Captain Scott Society of Cardiff on the 13 June every year.\n\n2 Richards, S., _Letter to Mr Pound_ relating his discussion with Sarah Owen (Evans) about Edgar getting tight. 18\/06\/1965, Swansea Museum, Box 210, PO Edgar Evans.\n\n3 _The Cambrian 17_ \/06\/1910.\n\n4 Copy of letter from Stanley Richards dated 18\/06\/1965 concerning his conversation with Edgar's niece, Sarah Owen who recalled Edgar's condition after the reception. Royal Institution Swansea.\n\n5 Richards, S., _Letter to Mr Pound_ relating to Edgar's drunken episode, 10\/06\/1965, Swansea Museum, Box 210, PO Edgar Evans.\n\n6 Ibid.\n\n7 Gwynn, S., _Captain Scott_ , The Golden Hind Series, London, 1930, p. 204.\n\n8 Ibid., p. 165.\n\n9 _Western Mail_ , 12\/02\/1913.\n\n10 Bowers, H.R., _Letter to Edith Bowers 07\/\/06\/1910_ , SPRI, MS 1505: D.\n\n11 Gregor, G., _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer, Edgar Evans, 1876\u20131912_ , Swansea City Council, 1995, p. 33.\n\n12 _The South Wales Times_ , ?\/06\/1910. Newspaper Clipping, SPRI.\n\n13 Ibid.\n\n14 Having served on _Morning_ and _Nimrod_ , Cheetham continued his Antarctic service when he went with Shackleton on _Endurance_ , (1914\u20131916). He was drowned when his ship was torpedoed in 1918.\n\n15 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1\u20134: BJ, 10\/09\/1910.\n\n16 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott, Journals_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, p. 5.\n\n17 Evans, Edward, _Letter to Lois Evans 21\/06\/1910_ , Swansea Museum.\n\n18 Abbott, G.P., _Journal 01\/06\/1910\u201317\/10\/1911_. SPRI, MS 1754\/1D.\n\n19 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1\u20134: BJ, 15\/07\/1910.\n\n20 Abbott, G.P., _Journal 01\/06\/1910_ \u2013 _17\/10\/1911_. SPRI, MS 1754\/1D.\n\n21 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1\u20134: BJ, 26\/07\/1910.\n\n22 Ibid., 30\/08\/1910.\n\n23 Ibid., 10\/10\/1910.\n\n24 Evans, Edward, _Letter to Daniel Radcliffe_ , SPRI, MS 1013\/2\/3.\n\n25 Priestley, R., Lecture; _The Antarctic Past and Present_ , SPRI, MS 1097\/15:D.\n\n26 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1-4:BJ, 26\/07\/1910.\n\n27 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott Journals_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, p. 10.\n\n28 New Zealand _Evening Post_. 10\/06\/1911.\n\n29 Gregor, G., _Swansea's Antarctic Hero Edgar Evans, 1876_ \u2013 _1912_ , Swansea City Council. Swansea. 1995, p. 37.\n\n30 Richards, S., _Letter to Reginald Pound_ , 14\/06\/1965. Edgar Evans Swansea Museum Box 210.\n\n31 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1\u20134:BJ, 29\/11\/1910.\n\n32 Evans, Edward. _Letter to Daniel Radcliffe_ , SPRI, MS 1013\/2\/6.\n\n33 SPRI, Unknown newspaper clipping, 02\/1907. Shackleton was described as FRGS, FRAS and Silver Medallist of the Royal Geographical Society.\n\n34 Cherry-Garrard, A., _The Worst Journey in the World_ , Picador, London, 2001, p. 49.\n\n35 Evans, Edward. _Letter to Daniel Radcliffe_ , SPRI, MS 1013\/2\/6.\n\n36 Priestly, R., _The Polar Expedition As A Psychological Study_ , SPRI, MS 1097\/16.\n\n37 A division that creates watertight compartments in the hull of a ship, so that leaking in one compartment will not flood the whole ship.\n\n38 Unknown newspaper clipping, 28\/08\/1910, SPRI.\n\n39 Scott R.F., _Scott's Last Expedition Vol. 1_ , John Murray, London 1935, p. 29.\n\n40 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1\u20134:BJ, 23\/12\/1910.\n\n41 Ibid. 25\/12\/1910.\n\n42 Hut Point was avoided because of the fear that _Terra Nova_ would be iced in as _Discovery_ had been.\n\n43 Evans Edward, _Letter to Daniel Radcliffe_ , SPRI MS 1013\/2\/4.\n\n44 Debenham, F., _Letter to Stanley Richards_ , 25\/05\/1962 Swansea Museum, box 210 PO Edgar Evans (Red File).\n\n45 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary No. 1_ SPRI MS 559\/18\/1\u20134:BJ 10\/01\/1910.\n\n46 Ibid., 10\/01\/1911.\n\n47 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Last Expedition, Vol.1_ , John Murray. London 1935 p. 472.\n\n## 12\n\n## The First Western Party\n\nThe 1911 autumn sledging trip: 27 January to 15 March. Edgar, with scientists Griffith Taylor, Charles Wright and Frank Debenham, spent over six weeks exploring and studying the geology of the Dry Valleys, the Ferrar Glacier, the Koettlitz Glacier and the Taylor Glacier.\n\nThe Dry Valleys in Victoria Land are one of the few areas in Antarctica where geologists can easily study the rocks because the valleys are perennially free from ice and snow. Scott, Edgar and Lashly were the first to discover these oases and briefly explored them, on their way back from their Western Journey of 1903. The 1911 expedition was to examine them in more detail.\n\nEdgar returned to the area as sledge master and cook of the Western Party. He was particularly suited for the expedition; he had more experience of Antarctic sledging than practically anyone and the three scientists were tyros; they knew they were lucky to have him. Taylor wrote later that Edgar was 'at ease with the officers',1 good in emergencies, unfailingly cheerful, amusing and he kept everyone's spirits up. He was a compulsive, funny, storyteller: he told them how at home he trimmed ducks' bills so that fowls could get a fair amount of food.2 He kept the scientists 'in stitches' with stories about his school; stories, which Debenham thought unexpectedly, were as good as _Stalky and Co._ (a popular book by Kipling about a badly run boarding school). He told them about the _Discovery_ expedition. Once, when he, Dr Koettlitz and Lieutenant Armitage had killed a seal and he was called in for supper, he asked where the sweetbreads were.3 The officers told him they had eaten them; an acquired taste they said, he would not have liked them. When it was his turn to cook, he fried and ate the remaining sweetbreads. When Koettlitz and Armitage enquired where they were he replied, respectfully, that he had eaten them; 'What?' 'Yes, I acquired the taste for them in the night, sir.'4\n\nLater in the expedition he announced his prospective method of proposing to a girl: 'Kin you keep yourself and help me a bit too? If so, then _you're_ the \"pizened critter\" for me.' 'If she doesn't \"bite\" then you're better off without her, if she does then you're richer instead of poorer.'5 He offered to teach the others a one-handed clove hitch and bet them the price of a dinner that they would not be able to do it after he had demonstrated it six times. He exaggerated when he told his companions that he had run away to join the navy at the age of 13. He said that he had been very sorry for it for two years, but had gradually grown to like the service.\n\nHe was a keen reader and his conversation was full of literary allusions. On this expedition the team carried volumes of Browning, Tennyson, a dictionary and novels as well as scientific volumes. Edgar had _The Red Magazine_ (a monthly publication) and a thriller by William Le Queux.6 He liked thrillers. He did not like Kipling whose stories about the navy were, in his opinion, much too concentrated. He extolled the writings of his favourite author Alexandre 'Dummass'. The scientists could not understand whom he meant until he described the plot of _The Three Musketeers_.7\n\nHis practical skills were invaluable. He taught his companions how to sledge and camp; how to put up and take down the tent, how to cook for four men in that tent (ice melted in the stove quicker than snow and so used less fuel), 'the hiss of the primus stove was a particularly welcome sound',8 and how to cobble ski boots (sewing from inside the boot with a sewing awl, a curved implement that could be manoeuvred inside the boot). He could advise them on the first signs of frostbite or scurvy. He was always ready to do the hardest jobs and, importantly, he was tactful and respectful with his advice; he gave the tips without making the novices feel inferior.9 But he was always ready to give his opinion; when they argued about their scientific finds he would break in with the most 'fearful and wonderful suggestions'.10\n\nAfter Edgar had died, Taylor remembered with affection the Canary Island hat (a large floppy creation) that he had worn on sunny days,11 'but it soon turned into the official balaclava'.12 He remembered also the bets that he lost trying to do the one-handed clove hitch. Debenham clearly liked him. In the accounts there is no sense of a class barrier; instead there is a sense that Edgar had qualities that the more educated men admired.\n\n_Terra Nova_ carried both the Western and Eastern Parties to their drop off point. The Western Party was left at Butter Point, across McMurdo Sound, about 30 miles from their base. There were cheers and goodbyes from the whole ship's company as the ship sailed out of sight.\n\nAustralian Griffith Taylor was the principal geologist; he was to investigate the effects of wind, water and ice on the land. His fellow Australian, Frank Debenham, also a geologist, was to help by collecting specimens. Charles Wright was the 'iceologist', the physicist\/glaciologist, who was to examine and photograph ice crystals. The men set out with two sledges, a 12ft and a 9ft, but were able to leave one at a depot, so pulled just one sledge for much of the time.\n\nTheir aim was to make a geological exploration of the region between the Dry Valleys and the Koettlitz Glacier, to find how the land had been affected by glacier movement, wind, frost and water. Taylor, particularly, wanted to ascertain how their findings compared with observations in warmer climates. Their orders were to climb the Ferrar Glacier to the junction with the Dry Valley Glacier, to go down the glacier and investigate the Dry Valleys, then to make a geological exploration of the Koettlitz Glacier, returning via Hut Point (Scott's base of 1902), to Cape Evans. Scott suggested that when they had investigated the Dry Valleys they could move east to get to the Koettlitz either by climbing up that feared 'Descent Pass' that Edgar had navigated with such difficulty in 1902, or, if this proved impossible, return to the sea ice and progress to the east around Butter Point. In the event, the expedition developed the geological discoveries made in _Discovery_ days, made maps of the Lower Ferrar and Dry Valleys and then went on to the Taylor Glacier (named for Griffith Taylor after the expedition), exploring the lower part of that valley. Edgar gave the name 'Wales Glacier' to one of its tributaries.13 They returned via the Koettlitz Glacier and made detailed maps of its tributary valleys.\n\nThe point about this expedition was that its primary focus was scientific. The team could take any time they wanted to examine features of interest.\n\nThe expedition was tough; no dogs could be spared so they man\u2013hauled throughout. Debenham wrote later; 'we got into one or two tight spots on the journey but when we did, he (Edgar) never showed any alarm and usually made a joke in the middle of what looked like being a very risky job'.14 His main problem throughout the expedition was his nose, which regularly got frostbitten. When his sledge-mates told him the trouble was flaring again, he talked about the offending member as if it was a difficult dependent, not directly connected to him and he told his 'old Blossom' off severely. Later in the expedition he also got a frostbitten ear when unbelievably, he was just wearing a tam-o'-shanter (no ear protection). He admitted that the problem was pure carelessness on his part.\n\nThey left the drop off point on 27 February taking provisions for eight weeks. They went off at a cracking pace, not even saying goodbye to those friends who remained on the ship. Taylor had geological hammers, notebooks, binoculars and specimen bags hanging out of every pocket. Edgar was cook for the first week, Debenham, cook's mate, to take over after a week. The pots were aluminium, a good conductor of heat or cold. They had to be careful not to touch the pots with their bare fingers or their skin would stick to the surface. Each man hauled about 270lbs.15 On their first tramp they noted unusual features for Antarctica \u2013 extensive patches of moss.16 By the end of the first day's sledging they were in a wonderful position; they could look up the Ferrar Glacier, where straight lines of dark hills ran upwards on each side of the ice, the mountains behind showed clearly against the western sky. When they looked back they could see the ship, now a tiny speck on the horizon, their last link with (relative) civilisation for two months. When Edgar cooked their first meal they could hardly manage the pemmican, which is often far too rich for the beginning of a sortie. The temperature was 13\u00b0F.17\n\nOn the lower part of the glacier they found, surprisingly, Emperor penguins in their moult phase. By 1911 it was known that the Emperors breed in Antarctica, also that they went through a moulting phase of two or three weeks before they returned to the sea, but it was not known previously that these lordly birds chose the Ferrar Glacier as one of their moulting spots.18 Throughout the moult the Emperors go without food; their old feathers would get waterlogged if they went into the sea and Edgar watched the birds as they wandered around, old patches of feathers hanging from them unattractively, as they bad-temperedly batted each other with their flippers.\n\nHauling was heavy work; the scientists were in a 'somewhat flabby condition'19 and Taylor in his account of the journey gives credit to Edgar for his 'mighty strength' and his care of the sledging equipment.20 After three days, they were well advanced on the glacier, the sledging became 'damnable' as they pulled through snow of up to 10in deep.21 By 31 January they camped below Cathedral Rocks, near where the Ferrar Glacier divides into two. Cathedral Rocks were known to Edgar, but new to the scientists who decided that they were well named. They thought that the high ridges and sharply cut ends looked like the transepts of a cathedral;22 they could also see Descent Pass that Edgar had navigated in 1902. It looked formidable.\n\nFrom their vantage point they could still look back on Ross Island with Mount Erebus still smoking and the sea. The glacier stretched above. Edgar wrote in his journal about how impressed he was with the rugged surroundings. In early February they descended the same steep glacier leading to the Dry Valleys that Edgar had gone down in 1902. But the 1911 expedition went further beyond the glacier and deeper into the valley than they had done in 1902; the men spent a week studying the geology of the valley which is 25 miles long and 4 miles wide, encased by mountains of over 5,000ft and completely free of ice and snow at a latitude of over 77\u00b0S. It was a remarkable and beautiful spot. Thaw streams ran down the glacier, and Edgar wrote that he 'did not expect to see scenery like this'.23 Taylor studied the glacial landscape24 and Edgar became interested in collecting rock samples and later fossils in the moraine rocks (Taylor offered him cash if he found any).25\n\nThe Dry Valleys deserve their name insofar as there is no snow, but there is plenty of water, due to the thaws. After Scott, Edgar and Seaman Lashly had discovered the upper part of the Dry Valleys in 1903 the scientists of 1911 were understandably keen to add useful knowledge about these phenomena. We now know that the dry valleys are a row of valleys in Victoria Land named because of their low humidity and lack of snow and ice cover. The floors of the valleys are covered by grey, loose gravelly material. They were formed when katabatic winds,26 reaching 200mph, swept through, evaporating any moisture in their path. Scott originally named the valley 'Death Valley', because there was nothing obviously alive there, but in fact bacteria proliferate in the summer melt water and provide nutrients for the soil. The Americans in their preparation for the Mars probe used the area, as the conditions are the nearest earth equivalent to that planet.\n\nThe valley's lack of snow meant that they could not use their sledge and they set off for a few days exploration with a tent, sleeping bags and dry provisions; Edgar carried his sleeping bag, the tent, the tent poles and his provisions slung over his shoulder. This was not a problem for him. The others made do, carrying their sleeping bags, collecting bags, camera and biscuits.27 Importantly, at least from Edgar's point of view, they did not take the cooker. The meals were all cold, 'make-believe' meals.28 Each day they had ten biscuits, a stick of chocolate, 2oz cheese and 1.5oz butter.29 Edgar felt the lack of a hot meal keenly and he believed that food could only be of benefit when it was warm; a diet of cheese, biscuits and chocolate was simply not enough. His journal over these days is full of complaints about the unsatisfactory nature of his rations. One day he complained he only had biscuits, butter and icy water for one meal, not even cheese and chocolate. Sucking ice or snow did not help. Their thirst was only quenched for a few minutes. They thought that the biscuits were similar to porridge in that their comforting effect wore off in a short time leaving a horrid vacuum; in addition, Debenham wrote, they were so hard that they sometimes had to be broken up with a hammer.30 But he thought the scenery was lovely.\n\nThe glacier they had descended ended in a drainage lake two miles long surrounded by mountains. The lake was partially frozen; its edge was covered with four inches of smooth, clear ice \u2013 ideal for skating. A rock bar, a 'reigel', projected into it giving the lake an hourglass appearance. Taylor named the 'reigel' and the lake after his friend Professor Bonney of Cambridge. At the far side of Lake Bonney, reached with much slipping and sliding, was an area that Edgar instantly dubbed 'the football fields'. It was full of holes filled up with gravel and sand, obviously the sort of football field he was used to. This was where Scott, Edgar and Lashly had turned back in 1903, after this everything was new. Edgar wrote that now, he had had the satisfaction of seeing the whole of it.31 They found about twenty seal skeletons and wondered how they came to be there. Edgar was amazed that they had managed to climb so far up and thought that they had probably died of starvation, because having got up, they could not get down. The alternative theory, that they had come up purposely to die, did not appeal. The men explored south till they were almost back to the coast again. When Taylor and Edgar climbed a reigel near the end of the valley they could see the sea, just about 13 miles away32 and they travelled further south towards the water, climbing over moraine heaps.33\n\nEdgar described the lower part of the valley; 'the more one sees of this place the more one is impressed with the rugged scenery, there are mountains all around with glaciers coming down the sides of them, then the valley is extremely interesting from a geological point of view there are six inland lakes, of course at present they are frozen over but in summer they are not \u2013they are made from the thaw of the glaciers and melting of snow, some are quite two miles square and there is any quantity of rocks of all descriptions... The last time I was here I only came a third of the way through the Dry Valley now I have the satisfaction of seeing the whole if it'.34\n\nAfter four days the end was in sight and about time too; 'my belly fairly rattles. We hope to get back to Glacier Camp tomorrow, a feed of Pemmican will be very welcome or anything hot in fact. Four days of dry biscuits is enough for a while.'35 He complained that it was the first time that a sledging party had tried to go without hot food in the Antarctic. The venture into the Dry Valleys had been a new departure; explorers did not usually separate themselves from their sledges for more than a few hours.\n\nBy 10 February, they were below Cathedral Rocks again. They could congratulate themselves. They had found a treasure trove of geological and biological specimens in the Dry Valleys. Some of the fossils that Edgar collected contained primitive flora and microorganisms. It was very cold and they celebrated their return to hot food eagerly. They ate, a lot, double hoosh and double cocoa, at last liquid food. This was followed predictably by stomach-ache. Edgar's solution was a 'massage with an ice axe' or 'an operation for appendicitis with the same'.36\n\nOn 11 February, Edgar and Taylor, roped together, went, as instructed by Scott, to explore the possibilities of the Descent Pass, 7 miles away. If they could have negotiated it they would have been saved the journey back to the coast. The going was very heavy. They got into a maze of crevasses. As they progressed there was a noise like an earthquake as they stepped on a crust of snow, this was followed by a peculiar shudder, lasting for seconds. They found that their axes went far too easily through the ice. Suddenly they found they had sunk up to their thighs in the snow. The surface started caving in. They were on the edge of a 'profound' crevasse and retreated cautiously.37 They thought that they could never have got their sledge over the gaping void and prudently decided to go down to Butter Point and along the coast to the Koettlitz Glacier.\n\nThey were soon back from where they started, at the base of the Ferrar, at the junction of glacier and sea ice, though the rapid descent was accompanied by 'plenty of cusses'38 as they fell on the ice and ridges. At the base they could still see their old sledge tracks. The interesting discussions continued: for example, did they get enough sugar? Edgar thought they did not. He wrote that they discussed several things but 'did not settle them'.39 One of these queries was that he did not think that New Harbour was at the mouth of the DryValley. He opined that this was not what he had seen from the mouth of the Dry Valleys the week before. Wright supported his argument. Debenham bet him he was wrong.40 Edgar was incorrect.\n\nAt the base of the glacier the sea ice was on the move. It had gone out 8 miles in the two weeks they had been in the mountains. Killer whales circled in the sea, below cracks in the ice that got bigger as the men looked at them. Debenham wrote that Edgar normally kept his diary with 'much pain and tribulation', but on 13 February he was excited to write about the sea ice moving. It was clear that it would not withstand any weight. They retreated to the fast ice close to the land and then started climbing towards the mountains again. The aim was to get to the Blue Glacier in a couple of days and then onto the Koettlitz Glacier. Progress was slow as they pulled through snow up to their knees on a steep upward slope. Taylor wondered if anyone had ever adopted a worse route with a laden sledge.41 They could only make strides of a few inches and could not get a good pull on the traces. They fell repeatedly and the sledges capsized, altogether an exhausting business. Edgar delivered his strongest curse in the presence of officers: 'May the curse of the seven blind beggars of Egypt be upon you.'42 This was delivered with emphasis at every halt. Their breath froze as soon as it reached the air. They had icicles hanging onto their moustaches and beards that made them look like walruses.\n\nThey did 5 miles in eight hours, climbing 600ft up the long snow slope that runs along the coast from Butter Point to the Blue Glacier. Their footgear gave them trouble. It took much tugging, shoving and chafing to get their feet into boots that were as stiff as iron, then having to do them up with frozen fingers.43 The nails in the soles transmitted the cold into the boots, and Debenham wrote that sometimes they had to hit them with a geological hammer to get them into shape, especially if snow had got in and frozen. Edgar wore puttees to guard against this and found them remarkably successful. Debenham thought that the worst part of the ordeal was when the boot actually thawed; he said that then there was a pitched battle between the owner of the boot and the boot itself as to which gave in to the others temperature. He wrote that he had never guessed that cold feet could give such excruciating pain.44\n\nBetween 17 and 25 February they struggled through truly ter r ible surfaces up the middle of the 'desiccated [Koettlitz] glacier, now weathered into pie-crusts, bastions and pinnacles of every conceivable shape'.45 They reached the north side of the glacier and explored the moraines, hanging valleys and 'ice slabs' in the foothills of Mount Hooker. There was a lake with seals swimming in it. A stream flowed from this lake; over 20 miles long it reached the sea near the Blue Glacier. They named the stream 'Alph', from Coleridge's poem _Kubla Khan_ in which a sacred river runs in a pure stream into the Mediterranean Sea:\n\nWhere Alph, the sacred river ran\n\nThrough caverns measureless to man,\n\nDown to a sunless sea.\n\nThere are repeated comments about card games: 24 February, the two Australians (Debenham and Taylor) versus Canada and Wales (Wright and Edgar). Australia lost handsomely. In March, Edgar won a dinner from Debenham and Wright. He admitted he had lost, at least once, to Taylor (when they were safely back Edgar lost a game of cribbage to Taylor 'to the astonishment of the seamen').46\n\nThe return began on 2 March. Travelling via the north-west side of the Koettlitz, they found, for a change, that the ice was smooth and comparatively easy and assumed they were on the frozen surface of the Alph. This was confirmed when one day water suddenly rose up through the snow flooding the floor of the tent. It seemed that tidal water had come surging into the Alph. On the 9th Edgar wrote that it was the first time he had spent his birthday sledging. He wrote that pulling one of the sledges that day was 'a bugger'; they pulled hard enough to 'break the heart of the sledge, never mind the party pulling'.47 To celebrate he had two cups of tea and an extra biscuit.\n\nThe Western Party reached Hut Point on 14 March, laden with sacks of geological and fossil samples. They had made maps of the Lower Ferrar and Taylor Glacier and explored the lower part of the Dry Valleys for the first time. They had added many new features to the map and named them.48 Scott wrote that the party 'gave Edgar a very high character'.49\n\nSo Edgar ended another exciting and productive Antarctic exploration.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Taylor, G., _Letter to Stanley Richard_ , 11\/06\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 210, (Edgar Evans).\n\n2 Ibid.\n\n3 The pancreas or thymus of a calf, lamb, or other young animal soaked, fried and eaten as food. They were considered a delicacy.\n\n4 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp.\n\n5 Ibid., p. 78.\n\n6 William Le Queux, 02\/17\/1864\u201313\/10\/1927. An Anglo-French journalist and writer who wrote 150 novels dealing with international intrigue, also books warning of Britain's vulnerability to European invasion before the First World War.\n\n7 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 99.\n\n8 Speak, P., _DEB, A Biography of Frank Debenham_ , Polar Publishing, Guildford England, 2008, p. 31.\n\n9 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJ p. 40.\n\n10 Debenham, F., _Letter to Stanley Richard_ , 25\/05\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 210 (Edgar Evans).\n\n11 Taylor, G., _Letter to Stanley Richard_ , 11\/06\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 210 (Edgar Evans).\n\n12 Ibid.\n\n13 Ibid.\n\n14 Debenham, F., _Letter to Stanley Richard_ , 25\/05\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 210 (Edgar Evans).\n\n15 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJ p. 40.\n\n16 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 98.\n\n17 Evans, E., _Journal, 27\/01\/1911\u201312\/05\/1911_ , SPRI, MS 1487: BJ, 27\/01\/1911.\n\n18 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJ p. 45.\n\n19 Ibid., p. 46.\n\n20 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 98.\n\n21 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJ, p. 48.\n\n22 Ibid., p. 49.\n\n23 Ibid., 04\/02\/1911.\n\n24 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 98.\n\n25 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 56.\n\n26 Derived from the Greek 'going down'. They occur when cold dense winds are pulled down by the force of gravity.\n\n27 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 60.\n\n28 Evans, E., _Journal 27\/01\/1911\u201312\/03\/1911_ , SPRI, MS 1487: BJ, 03\/02\/1911.\n\n29 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 57.\n\n30 Ibid., p. 64.\n\n31 Evans, E., _Journal 27\/01\/1911\u201312\/03\/1911_ , SPRI, MS 1487: BJ, 06\/02\/1911.\n\n32 Ibid., 05\/02\/1911.\n\n33 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 SPRI, MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 61.\n\n34 Evans, E., _Journal 27\/01\/1911\u201312\/03\/1911_ , SPRI, MS 1487: BJ, 06\/02\/1911.\n\n35 Ibid., 06\/02\/1911.\n\n36 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 70.\n\n37 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 100.\n\n38 Evans, E., _Journal 27\/01\/1911\u201312\/03\/1911_ , SPRI MS 1487: BJ, 12\/02\/1911.\n\n39 Ibid., 12\/02\/1911.\n\n40 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 77.\n\n41 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 100.\n\n42 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 79.\n\n43 Ibid., p. 78.\n\n44 Ibid., p. 78.\n\n45 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p. 100.\n\n46 Taylor, G., _Letter to Stanley Richard_ , 11\/06\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 210, (Edgar Evans).\n\n47 Evans, E., _Journal 27\/01\/1911\u201312\/03\/1911_ , SPRI MS 1487;BJ, 09\/03\/1911.\n\n48 The naming was difficult to agree on. Years later Debenham wrote that Edgar's suggestions had been too naval and too mess-deck. He (Debenham) decided against female names, but when he named a glacier the Kitticarrara Glacier, this was resented by Edgar who opined that the rule against female names was being broken.\n\n49 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott Journals_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 146.\n\n## 13\n\n## The Winter Months, 1911\n\nAlthough they had reached Hut Point ( _Discovery_ 's headquarters) they were still some 15 miles south of Cape Evans. The home base could not be reached until the sea ice had frozen over sufficiently for safe transport. Hut Point was already crowded; Scott and his party, having returned from laying depots on the Barrier, had been in the hut for two weeks, and the scientific party increased the cramped community to sixteen. There was ominous news for Taylor's party. After _Terra Nova_ had deposited Edgar's group, she had carr ied the Eastern Party to the far end of the Barr ier. Unable to get ashore on King Edward VII Land, she steamed back along the Barrier and into a bay, the Bay of Whales, some 60 miles closer to the Pole than the English base. Here, the crew were astounded to find a ship. It was Amundsen's _Fram_. She was carrying just eight men but over 100 dogs (Amundsen magnanimously offered some dogs to Scott). There was now absolutely no doubt that the Norwegian was single-minded in his determination to get to the Pole first. Lieutenant Evans wrote that he hoped that the 'best man may win'.1\n\nIn the face of this unexpected challenge Scott decided that he would not change his plans; the scientific aims of the expedition could not be sacrificed in order to win a race. But the Pole remained a priority, both in terms of national pride and because the achievement would be sure to attract funds to help the expedition's big financial outlay. Edgar thought Amundsen's change of plan deceitful; he knew, none better, of Scott's months of careful planning and was angry and indignant. The scientists were upset too. But they all understood that in Amundsen they faced formidable competition. He was experienced both in Arctic travel, having navigated through the North-West Passage, and he had been on an expedition to the Antarctic (though not to its interior) in 1897. His display of dog driving was formidable when the British met him in the Bay of Whales. But Amundsen, too, had his worries. He was worried about Scott's motor sledges. He feared they could rob him of success.\n\nThe sixteen men were in Hut Point for a month waiting for the sea to freeze. Evenings, lit by the dim glow of candles and blubber lamps, were spent in long discussions.2 The hut had a central room, 'Villa Virtue',3 where Dr Wilson, Cherry-Garrard, Lieutenant Bowers, Captain Oates and the dog handler, Meares, slept. The other officers, including Scott, slept in shared accommodation around the hut with the men.4 Hardly a class-conscious division. Seals were killed and the food supplemented by the remains of Shackleton's 1908 visit; his biscuits were thought to be particularly good, especially when they were toasted and smeared with blubber. Debenham was a cook and had a particular talent for making chapatis.\n\nThey left Hut Point on 11 April as a large party. Edgar was with Scott, Lieutenant Evans, 'Birdie' Bowers, Taylor, Wr ight, Debenham, Petty Officer Crean and the Norwegian ski expert, Gran. They took enough food for twenty-four hours. The aim was to keep on land initially and then to go over the sea-ice to Cape Evans. When the group stopped for lunch Edgar and Taylor prospected the ice to make sure it was safe to cross (Taylor had previously fallen through a weak patch). Eventually they all attempted to reach Cape Evans in a night's march. The journey was difficult; they were caught by a blizzard (when they finished their food) and it eventually took them two days to make the journey to Cape Evans. They arrived, ravenous and exhausted, on 13 April.\n\nOn 23 April the sun disappeared. There were a few excitements over the winter months: a bitch had six puppies and killed them all.5 The men played football on the ice when there was still enough light. Edgar was always Captain Oates' first choice for his team: 'Go on Taff, break them up', 'Right-o, sir'. Dr Atkinson left the hut and got lost; his hand got badly frostbitten. Edgar was in charge of a search party and, always in the forefront of activities, was photographed by Ponting bandaging Atkinson's hand.\n\nThere were also lectures. The Men attended the first few, but a lecture on parasitology was too much and Edgar did not attend any after this, so missing Dr Atkinson's lecture on scurvy (which Atkinson interestingly thought was catching and in which he reiterated the theory that the disease was caused by bacterial acid poisoning and correctly stated that eating fresh vegetables was a way to halt it). Edgar also missed Scott's suggestion for building igloos on the Southern Attempt, a suggestion turned down because of the two hours' labour that would be needed after a day's hauling.\n\nMidwinter was celebrated with the hut decorated with flags, an enormous cake, an extravagant meal and alcohol. Edgar, according to Scott, enjoyed himself by 'imparting confidences in heavy whispers'.6\n\nPhotographer Ponting wrote that Edgar was the dominant personality of the mess-deck over the winter months. Ponting said that Edgar's previous Polar experience, his build, his stentorian voice and manner of using it, all compelled 'the respect due to one who would have been conspicuous in any company'. Ponting thought that Edgar was one of Scott's towers of strength; he had heard Scott telling Edgar that he did not know what the expedition would do without him on more than one occasion.7\n\nThe focus of the winter was preparation for the Pole attempt. A first at the Pole would add a huge kudos to the expedition; failure would diminish its achievements. Scott's plans were explained. The sledges were overhauled and Edgar worked hard on them. The dogs and the ponies needed attention; the dogs, in particular, were a source of irritation. As well as providing interest and amusement, they repeatedly escaped their traces and rushed off after seals and penguins, or got their tongues stuck to frozen tins, a problem only remedied by catching the dog and warming the tin.\n\nScott was worried about ski boots and bindings. He knew that the 2lb boots could chafe the men's Achilles tendons. Edgar's practical skills resolved the problem (one which had concerned Amundsen for years). He made a ski shoe with a double sole of sealskin, stiffened with wood, into which the men could fit their soft fur finnesko. The shoe was held in place by a strap and the modification was stronger, allowing more flexibility than the standard boot. He sewed the boots with waxed thread.8 The finnesko\/shoe combination weighed less than a ski boot9 and was an undoubted success.\n\nAnticipation for the Pole attempt was increasing.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Evans, Edward. _Letter to Daniel Radcliffe_ , SPRI, MS1013\/2\/4.\n\n2 Ibid., p. 102.\n\n3 Taylor, G., _Journeyman Taylor, The Education of a Scientist_ , Robert Hale, London, 1958, p.101.\n\n4 Ibid., p. 101.\n\n5 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Journal_ , MS 559\/18\/1\u20134;BJ Vol. 2, 19\/08\/1911.\n\n6 Ibid., p. 232.\n\n7 Ponting, H.G., _The Great White South_ , Duckworth, London, 1932, p. 162.\n\n8 Personal communication. September 2010, Jean Scholar, granddaughter of PO Fred Parsons.\n\n9 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott's Last Expedition_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 239.\n\n## 14\n\n## The Polar Assault\n\nScott took Edgar on one sortie before the assault on the Pole. Along with Edgar, scientist George Simpson and 'Birdie' Bowers, he set out to check the rate of flow of the Ferrar Glacier by recording how far ice stakes, positioned seven months previously, had moved. This was the first observation on the movements of a coastal glacier and they found that the stakes had moved variable distances; between 24 and 32ft. They thought that the Ferrar Glacier was 'lively'. The group were away for thirteen days, on the last day they covered 21 miles, man-hauling into the teeth of a freezing headwind. They 'captured many frostbites'.1 Edgar was 'a treasure'.2\n\nEdgar had been well briefed on Scott's plans for the Polar Assault. There were to be three stages \u2013 the Barrier, the Beardmore Glacier and the Plateau.3 It was planned to get across the Barrier with motorised sledges (which, he hoped might significantly improve progress over the Barrier by comparison with Shackleton), ten horses and the dogs. Scott thought that the ponies would be reliable for the Barrier stage, after which they were to be killed.4 He calculated that each pony could pull 550lbs (perhaps more), between them a total of 5,500lbs. The dogs were to return to base when they had pulled their loads over the Barrier. Scott did not think that animals would be able to survive the Beardmore Glacier's fearsome conditions and crevasses.5 Here he was influenced by Shackleton, who had consulted Frederick Jackson, the leader of the Jackson Harsworth Expedition of 1894\u201397. Jackson had recommended Russian ponies for Polar exploration6 and Shackleton had become critical of dogs.7 Scott himself had seen one dog team disappear down a crevasse in February 1911 and he knew that Shackleton's last pony had fallen into an endless abyss on the Beardmore on the 1908 Pole attempt. The British position was that if the plateau was as bad as Shackleton described, no beast could stand the trials of getting onto it, but that 'man could do what beasts would not'.8\n\nScott's plans were made before he had any idea that Amundsen's presence would make the lack of dogs crucial, but he determined to stick to the plans. He did take dogs, but only thirty-four, compared to Amundsen, who took over a hundred. But by this stage he was realistic about his chances; he had heard how well the Norwegian team controlled their dogs, he knew he would have to start later than his rival because ponies suffered so badly in Antarctic conditions and he wrote that if Amundsen achieved the Pole it would be before the British, because he (Amundsen) could travel fast with dogs and was certain to start early. Scott warned that the British venture might be belittled and he wrote: 'After all it's the work that counts not the applause that follows.'9 But he worried also that Amundsen would get the news back first in 1912.10\n\nScott wrote to Edgar's wife Lois just before the team departed. He said that Edgar had told him a great deal about her and that he could imagine that she and the children wanted to see him come home. He assured Lois that Edgar was very well, very strong and in good condition. He knew the family would be disappointed, but he thought that it was likely that Edgar would stay in the South for an extra year. If so, he asked Lois to remember that Edgar was certain to be in the best of health and that it would be all the better when he did come home. Scott wrote that he hoped that Edgar would get a good billet on his return, which would make it unnecessary for him to leave her again. 'He is such an old friend of mine that no one deserves so well all I can do for him.' She must not be anxious or Worried.11 12\n\nThe attempt was critically dependent on dates. Scott recorded that the distance was 1,530 geographical miles; if they could keep up with Shackleton's daily distances they would return near the end of March, in the early part of winter when temperatures would be very low. In Antarctica there is a 'Coreless Winter'; temperatures drop immediately at the end of summer and remain low till October (lower for longer than the Arctic). Meteorologist George Simpson estimated that the temperatures at the last stage of the Barrier journey would be around \u221220\u00b0F, very challenging, after a long plateau trek, but endurable.13 In the event, at the end of their Barrier journey, the British were to suffer temperatures that were up to \u221220\u00b0F \u2013 colder than the typical horrors.14\n\nEdgar was full of optimism at the start; he thought that the motor sledges had real potential. When he watched the four men, Lieutenant Teddy Evans, Stoker Lashly, Engineer Bernard Day and the Steward Henry Hooper, set off on 24 October with the caterpillar-track sledges he was enthusiastic: 'Lord, Sir, I reckon if them things can go like that you wouldn't want nothing else.'15 The motor sledges pulled at about 1 mile per hour,16 but did not get far; the caterpillar tracks were reasonably successful but the cylinders got too hot, whilst wind on the carburettors made them too cold; one motor failed after 14 miles, the other after 50. Their loads were repacked, 740lbs onto a 10ft sledge, which the four men pulled furiously to a pre-arranged rendezvous. The extra physical work of hauling would take its toll and affect Lieutenant Evans and Lashly later on the attempt at the Pole.\n\nOn the same day (1 November) that the tractors were abandoned the pony caravan set out. There were ten pony leaders in three groups, Edgar was one of them, leading Snatcher, and when the cavalcade halted he shared a tent with Scott, Oates and Dr Wilson.17 As the team got ready to set out Scott again praised Edgar, writing: 'Edgar Evans has proved a useful member of our party; he looks after the sledges and sledge equipment with a care of management and a fertility of resource which is truly astonishing \u2013 on \"track\" he is just as sound and hard as ever and has an inexhaustible supply of anecdotes.'18 Edgar's 'fitness to travel' was self-evident; any suggestion that he was below par seems misplaced. The dog teams with two dog-drivers, Cecil Mears and Dmitri Gerof, had left earlier and when the ponies set out, Edgar's Snatcher romped away, leading the party.19\n\nPonting filmed the pony parties' departure. The weakest went first, followed by the stronger. Some ponies struggled from the start and wide gaps opened between them. They were still in their summer coats and got seriously chilled as they plodded over the featureless, monotonous white surface; the teams saw no sign of land for days, sky and snow merging into a white pall.\n\nAfter five days they were delayed by a blizzard. The ponies suffered particularly badly. Scott had organised for snow walls to be built to protect them from wind and snow, but the fine snow still got in their eyes, noses, ears and under their coats, where it turned to ice. Rugs were little help as they quickly became soaked.20 The ponies' progress was in marked contrast to the dogs, which pulled their loads with little difficulty \u2013 their nictitating membranes protecting their eyes from the snow.21 22 The teams built depots and snow cairns at roughly 70 mile intervals. Each was provisioned with enough fuel and food (buried deeply to prevent fat in the pemmican from deteriorating) for a week, so that the returning parties would be well supplied. Five depots were built on the Barrier: Corner Camp, Bluff, One Ton, Mid, and Southern Depots.\n\nOne Ton Camp was reached on 15 November. Scott had left provisions there earlier in the year and the ponies' loads were lightened by leaving bundles of seal meat for food supplies for the return journey. The party covered about 13 geographical miles a day, but the snow surface was awful. Scott thought that a worse set of conditions for the ponies could not be imagined as their hooves sank deep into the snow; snow-shoes were not worn regularly, and Scott wrote that he wished the animals would wear them.23 On 21 November they caught up with Lieutenant Evans' motor party and camped together. This motor party foursome, having man-hauled, were fit but already ominously hungry.24 It was becoming clear that rations that satisfied men leading ponies (or men sitting on dog sledges), were not enough for those actually pulling the sledges. Hunger was to bedevil man-hauling parties. After a few days on a sortie, men began to feel an overwhelming craving for food that was only eased for a few hours by a meal. Days were occupied with thoughts of food and nights were plagued by food dreams; when they woke the craving was almost unbearable, and every hair-covered morsel was 'watched over with the eager solicitude of a dog for a bone'.25\n\nScott followed Shackleton's daily progress chart. He reasoned that if he could keep going at a pace equal to, or even ahead of Shackleton, he would have a chance of success. The ponies were all to be killed at, or before, the Beardmore Glacier and the meat used to feed both dogs and men. The dogs would return from the Beardmore and after the pony slaughter, the men would start to man-haul. Dog handler Mears eyed the ponies with anticipation, and when Oates shot the first pony (Jehu), on the night of 23 November, Jehu made glorious feeds for four days for twenty dogs.26 Over the next eleven days four more ponies (but not Edgar's Snatcher) were killed. The pony handlers watched Mears suspiciously. They were fond and protective of their charges; they also knew that the longer their particular pony survived, the less time they would have to man-haul. One pony 'cut up well' and the man-hauling team enjoyed a nice piece of undercut27 (the meat was boiled and added to the pemmican). After a delay due to poor conditions the teams pushed on and reached their second depot, Lower Depot.\n\nThe first two of Scott's planned returnees, Hooper and Day (from the motor party), turned back on 24 November. As the fourteen remaining men continued slowly south, they began to see mountains fringing the Barrier in the distance. They progressed in three groups according to speed: man-haulers, ponies, dogs, with Scott always comparing his progress to Shackleton's. But his advance was slower: visibility was poor and they were soon several days behind schedule. By comparison, Amundsen's men either skied beside the sledges or rode on them, covering over 20 miles a day.\n\nWhen, on 29 November, the mists rolled away, the surface continued to be bad and the ponies' hooves sank deeply into the snow. But on that day, in glorious sunshine, they passed the 82\u00b0 21S 'furthest south landmark' of Scott's, Shackleton's and Wilson's 1903 expedition. The huge twin-peaks of Mount Markham, discovered by that party, could be seen in the distance. They could congratulate themselves that in contrast to the fifty-eight days it had taken the three to get there in 1903, the 1911 party reached it in twenty-nine.\n\nIn 1908, Shackleton had found a route from the Barrier onto the plateau via the Beardmore Glacier and Scott aimed at this tributary, the Gateway. This path, leading onto the main glacier, avoided the most awful of the pressure ridges that piled up at the glacier\/Barrier junction. But as the teams approached the Gateway a gale struck and snow piled in drifts, burying the sledges. The men steered by compass in 'simply horrible conditions'.28 Bowers mused about Amundsen; if Amundsen had not had any problems, he should have reached the Pole. But Bowers' opinion was that the Norwegian was a sneaking ruffian: 'Old England may be a long way off, but we will do our best for her honour down here at the limit of our globe.'29\n\nAny hope of immediate British progress was lost when, on 5 December, the gale developed into a howling, white, thick, blizzard, which raged 'such as one might expect to be driven at us by all the powers of darkness'30 and which trapped the men at the bottom of the Beardmore for four days. The peculiar feature of this blizzard was that it was warm, making things even more unpleasant. Streams of water ran down the door flap and into the tent. The men lay in sopping sleeping bags. The temperature was 27\u00b0F.\n\nThe snow is melting and everything's afloat\n\nIf this goes on much longer we shall have to turn the tent upside down and use it as a boat\n\nThey could not see as far as the next tent, let alone the nearby mountains. No one understood what it meant: was it exceptional local circumstances? Scott wrote that no foresight could have prepared for this state of affairs.31 Because of the unanticipated halt, Scott had to break into summit rations, the more generous allowance meant for glacier work: 16oz biscuit (made by Huntley and Palmer), 12oz pemmican, 2oz butter, 0.57oz cocoa, 3oz sugar and 0.86oz tea per day (no oatmeal, which would be too difficult to cook).32\n\nThe delay was serious. It was to make them late on the glacier, late at the Pole and late in the season on the return journey. This was to expose them on their return from the Pole to the lowest Barrier temperatures recorded for over seventy years.33\n\nThose ponies that remained were in a pitiable state; Edgar had to dig Snatcher out of his snowy covering every few hours. But they had to keep the ponies going somehow; they were needed for that last haul onto the glacier as the loads were too heavy for the men to pull. At last the weather improved a little and on 9 December the team started out again. The ponies, stiff from days in the blizzard, floundered on. Sometimes they could only pull for a few yards. Edgar had to flog Snatcher to keep him going. The dogs followed with the remainder of the load. When the ponies had finally got their loads onto the glacier they were shot; in a way it was a relief not to see them suffer any more, but Edgar reluctantly led Snatcher to his execution and the men called the camp, 'Shambles Camp'. By now Amundsen was half way up his glacier.\n\nThe expedition made three depots on the Beardmore Glacier: Lower, Mid and Upper. At the Lower Depot, Mears turned back with his dogs on 11 December. He took letters from all the men; Edgar sent messages to his family.34 The dogs had performed well but there was no more food for them and Scott, still believing that the glacier would be too tough for them, wanted to preserve them in good condition in case they were needed for a possible attempt the following year. Twelve men were now left to man-haul up the awesome 120 mile, crevasse-ridden glacier as it rose from Barrier level to over 9,000ft. They hauled about 200lbs each. Bowers wrote that 'he had never pulled so hard, or so nearly crushed my inside into my backbone by the everlasting jerking with all my strength on the canvas band round my unfortunate tummy'.35 Edgar was the same.\n\nHe pulled with Scott, Edward Wilson and Titus Oates. It could take them eleven jerks to get the 800lb sledges started and then the men had to strain every muscle and fibre to keep the thing moving onwards and upwards. They had to relay on the soft snow of the lower slopes, taking half the load and then going back for the remainder, so doubling the distance covered. As they pulled their legs were buried up to calf level, the sledges were covered in snow and if a sledge stopped, they had to jerk again on their harnesses (often up to fifteen times) to get it going again. Their breath fogged their goggles and snow blindness caused agonies. They stumbled over and into crevasses; the sledges had to be continually turned over to scrape frozen snow off the runners. The surface changed to shiny blue ice with an irregular surface resembling a series of combs. The men ate the pony meat which they thought was beneficial, but they were in fact already suffering from serious malnutrition. Each day their body fat, essential for insulation against the cold, diminished and they were noticeably thinner. Just as important was the loss of muscle bulk which meant pulling became more exhausting. Although they were taking in about 4,500 calories they needed over 7,000 calories to man-haul up the glacier36 so they were already in negative balance. In addition, their diet contained no vitamin C and virtually no other vitamins.\n\nOn 14 December, Dr Wilson wrote that his team, with Scott, Edgar and Oates, were the strongest pullers, although the weights they were pulling were the same as the other two teams. They experimented by changing sledges; Edgar's team still pulled the best.37 This must have influenced Scott when he made his final decision on the men to haul to the Pole.\n\nOn that day, as the British teams struggled up the glacier, Amundsen and his four companions reached the Pole.\n\nBy 17 December the going was better. The British advanced 11 miles, climbing up a series of pressure ridges and tobogganing as fast as possible down the other side. On the 18th they made over 12 miles and on the 19th over 14. They were nearly 6,000ft above the Barrier. They all wore the crampons, and the ski shoes that Edgar had made during the winter which were a great success. Scott was delighted and Edgar very pleased. Scott wrote that the team owed Edgar much.38\n\nBy 21 December they had found a good place for the Upper Glacier Depot at 85\u00b0S, over 6,000ft above the Barrier and close to the steep slope that ascends to the plateau. The march that followed was long and hot, over blue rugged ice with crevasses everywhere. Scott managed to get the party through the crevasses but it took a huge amount of energy to pull the sledges up the steep slopes and to stop them overrunning on downward slopes. But Edgar thought the glaciers and mountains were stupendous. As they pulled, Scott watched the individual performances of the men, and on 21 December, at 85\u00b03', he decided on the Support Party that was to be sent home. This left just eight men to pull two sledges: Scott, Edward Wilson, Edgar and Titus Oates were in one team,'Birdie' Bowers, Stoker Lashly, PO Crean and Lieutenant Teddy Evans in the other. Scott forced a fast pace, marching for over nine hours, and he wrote of the delightful feeling of security he experienced when they finally reached the summit proper on 23 December. Though the surface was covered with sastrugi, the horizon levelled off in every direction and it was a wonderful feeling to have reached a horizontal surface at last. There was a vast silence around them, only broken by the sounds of the sledges. The teams made three depots on the plateau: Three Degrees, One and a Half Degrees and Last Depot.\n\nBut the strain was telling on all the men and must have been particularly bad for Lashly and Lieutenant Evans who, in addition to man-hauling up the Beardmore, had pulled their loaded sledge for 400 miles across almost the whole length of the Barrier. Dehydration was a problem that affected them all. At this altitude (where the oxygen level was lower) to cope with their extreme exertion they had to hyperventilate and needed about 6L of fluid (over 10 pints) each day;39 they were actually taking 6 pints per day. Even the indomitable Bowers wrote on the 23rd that he was getting exhausted and all his muscles 'have had their turn at being stiffened up'.40 Christmas Day was made memorable when, perhaps because of their fatigue, Lieutenant Evans' team nearly came to grief. Lashly fell into deep crevasse and nearly pulled the rest of his crew in with him. Although Scott wrote that even the fall had not disturbed Lashly's equanimity, his (Lashly's) comments were considered afterwards to be unsuitable to record. He was hauled out with difficulty. It was his 44th birthday.\n\nEdgar loved his food, especially a good, hot meal and he appreciated the celebration Christmas food; four courses: pemmican, horse meat flavoured with onion and curry powder and thickened with biscuit, then a sweet arrowroot cocoa and biscuit hoosh, plum pudding, followed by _Captain Scott's Invaluable Assistant: Edgar Evans_ cocoa with raisins. Finally a dessert of caramels and ginger41 enhanced the general sense of well-being.\n\nThe men hoped that the worst was over \u2013 it was not.\n\nOn the last day of the year Edgar had an accident that did much to imperil the whole expedition. Scott had decided to strip down the 12ft sledges, remove the worn runners, put on fresh 10ft runners and so convert the sledges into lighter ones. Edgar, Crean and Lashly did the work in sub-zero temperatures, a task that took them till 11 p.m. Scott wrote (again) that Edgar was the most valuable asset to the party and that to build a sledge under those conditions was a fact worth special record.42 But Edgar cut his hand, it was probably not a big cut and he hid the injury. Certainly Lashly does not mention the incident in his diary. Edgar may have thought that the cut was not serious; in any event he wanted desperately to be in the Pole Party. If his _Discovery_ explorations had brought him fame, how much more would a 'First to the Pole' achieve? He may well have planned to run a pub in South Wales when he left the navy. It was an occupation he was familiar with. His father-in-law had been the long-established licensee of the Ship Inn in Middleton. His wife had been brought up in the pub and Edgar, with his practical mind, his out-going personality and his new fund of Antarctic stories, would have been a natural as a publican. A first to the Pole would have guarenteed the pub's success.\n\nBy 30 December, the expedition finally caught up with the dates in Shackleton's journal. Two important things happened on 31 December: Scott laid the first Polar cache, Three Degree Depot, and he also took the remarkable decision to order the 'other' team, Lieutenants Evans and Bowers, Crean and Lashly, to leave their skis, sticks, ropes and axes at the Depot, possibly to save the 80lbs of weight. This is a decision that has been much cr iticised, as it was eventually to leave 'Birdie' Bowers to march 300 miles to the Pole and back. But for now the four men plodded through the snow whilst their companions continued with skis and sticks for a further three days until the final decision was made. Up to this point it was assumed that Scott had planned for four men to go to the Pole, and probably for days he had decided in favour of his own team of Wilson, Oates and Edgar. But on 3 January, 170 miles from the Pole, he went to Lieutenant Evans, Lashly, Crean and Bowers' tent and announced that he was sure he could reach the Pole if they would give one man up and make the homeward journey shorthanded. Evans said that 'of course we consented'43 and 'Birdie' joined Scott's team. In the event the three who returned were to have huge problems; Lieutenant Evans suffered terribly from scurvy and eventually had to be left with Lashly, whilst Crean made an amazingly brave solo journey to get help for his leader.44 But on that final day of 1911, supplies were redistributed; 'Birdie' transferred his share of the food and, uncomplainingly, trudged to and from the Pole. But it meant that extra time and fuel had to be spent cooking meals for five, a point that Scott had not considered.\n\nOn 8 January Scott reiterated his praise of Edgar saying that it was only at that time that he realised how much was due to Edgar, commenting on the indispensable ski shoes and crampons \u2013 the product of Edgar's manufacture, design and good workmanship. Edgar was also responsible for every sledge fitting, tent, sleeping bag and harness. Scott said there had not been a single expression of dissatisfaction relating to any of them.45\n\nScott, Bowers, Edgar, Wilson and Oates journeyed on, man-hauling on difficult surfaces with minimum temperatures averaging \u221223\u00b0F. They had a month's supply of food for the five men to get to the Pole and back to the last depot. Scott and Wilson pulled in front, Oates and Edgar behind; Bowers, on foot, was between the four. Although the pulling was fear-some they were buoyed up because they thought they were ahead of the Norwegians; on 9 January 1912 they passed Shackleton's furthest south-ernmost point and since they assumed that Amundsen would get onto the Plateau via the Beardmore Glacier and they could see no signs of dogs or sledges, they thought that they were in the lead; 'All is new ahead'.46 But every mile was at a tremendous cost. Scott wrote on 12 January 'With the surface as it is one gets horribly sick of the monotony and can easily imagine oneself getting played out.... It is going to be a close thing'.47 They started to descend to the Pole and made their final depot on 15 January. There was sunshine at last, not a cloud in the sky. 'Only twenty-seven miles from the Pole. We _ought_ to do it now.'48\n\nBut on 16 January 'the worst has happened or nearly the worst'.49 Bowers' sharp eyes detected what he thought was a cairn.50 Half an hour later he made out a black speck, which clearly was not snow. As the five marched towards it, the speck became a black flag fluttering in the wind. They had been beaten. Nearby were sledge tracks and ski tracks and many dog prints in the snow, underlining one of the reasons for Amundsen's success. The disappointment was intense and Scott wrote that they had 'many (bitter) thoughts' and 'much discussion'.51 The prize had been snatched from them, but at least one of the party was glad that they had got there by good British man-haulage.52 Edgar's thoughts are not recorded. The five thought that they had been beaten by two or three weeks and now they had to face the return home. Scott wondered if they had the strength. Bowers wrote to his mother that they were all fit and well and should, with luck, catch the ship in time for the news. He thought that he could not have better companions and that five was a pleasant little crowd when he was so far from home. To his sister, however, 'Birdie' admitted that they were losing strength and that he felt very weary at the end of a long busy march.53\n\nOn the 17th, they marched in the coldest conditions that Wilson could ever remember.54 There was a force five gale and 54\u00b0 of frost. They had, in fact, endured colder temperatures, but now loss of their body fat cruelly reduced their resistance to cold. They made their own exact British calculation for the Pole (about half a mile from Amundsen's flag)55 and 'Birdie' wrote to his mother from 'the apex of the earth'.56 The conditions were so awful that after five hours on the march, Edgar's hands (in spite of double woollen and fur mitts) were so cold that the team stopped and treated themselves to a good 'week-end' lunch with pieces of chocolate. Edgar smoked a cigarette brought by Wilson, a queer taste after weeks without tobacco.\n\nAt the point that the British judged to be the Pole, they flew the Queen Mother's (Queen Alexandra) Union Jack and their own flags and took photos. In these images the men are so engulfed by clothes that it is difficult to comment on their appearance, but Edgar's nose looks white, his face sunken. In the afternoon they passed the Norwegian's most southerly camp 'Polheim' and found a small tent with equipment and a letter for Scott to forward to the Norwegian King Haakon. Then they started north. 'Well we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition with sore feelings and must face our 800 miles of solid dragging \u2013 and goodbye to most of our day-dreams!'57 On the day the British reached the Pole, Amundsen and his companions were only a week away from their quarters in the Bay of Whales having done the journey in ninety-nine days. They had taken fifty-two dogs and killed twenty-four of them in comparison to Scott's lack of dogs on the Plateau.58\n\nIn the weeks between the Norwegian and British arrival at the Pole the Antarctic winter had begun. The temperature was already dropping below zero. The wind blew from the south, whistling around the tent at night.59 Their successful return depended both on speed and their ability to pick up their food cairns, and both these were to cause problems. The return was doomed \u2013 all five men were to die.\n\nThey had to begin by pulling up a rise. The Pole is lower than the highest part of the plateau, which had to be climbed before the descent to the Beardmore Glacier. The return journey began well;60 wind from the south allowed them to use their floor cloth as a makeshift sail to help with the sledge, but as the wind strengthened, the snow blew in drifts and this made it difficult to pick up the tracks from their outward journey and they sometimes had to unharness and search for the tracks. Poor visibility made picking up the cairns difficult too. Edgar's fingertips were badly blistered and the snow surface became like sand. Sledge hauling was exhausting and appallingly monotonous. On 20 January Oates recorded that one of his toes had turned black.\n\nEdgar was deteriorating too. As well as the problems that beset them all \u2013 malnutrition, loss of body fat and muscle (as the heaviest man in the party he was the most affected by the deficiency in calories), dehydration, lack of vitamins, low body temperature and problems with altitude \u2013 he suffered from specific problems; his cut hand (the injury on 31 December) and a postulated brain injury that was caused, it is suggested, by relatively minor falls into crevasses.61\n\nHis hand trauma is well recorded. On 7 January, well before the Pole and seven days after the initial injury, the cut had 'a lot of pus in it'.62 Scott commented on the same day that the cut was nasty and secondary to sledge making.63 On 17 January, as the British team searched for their exact South Pole position, Wilson recorded that they stopped and camped for lunch because of Edgar's cold hands (Oates and Bowers, as well as Edgar, had bad frostbite of their noses and cheeks too).64 On the 23rd Scott wrote that Edgar was far from well; 'There is no doubt that (Edgar) Evans is a good deal run down, his fingers are badly blistered and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent frostbites. He is very much annoyed with himself which is not a good sign.'65 On the 25th, Edgar's fingers and nose were in a bad state (and Oates was suffering from a very cold foot). On 28 January, as they pulled north in the biting wind, Wilson commented again on Edgar's badly blistered fingertips.66 By the end of the month, when they were still 600 miles from base, Edgar's nails were falling off, the fingers were raw and oozing;67 it was agonising for Edgar to remove his mitts and gloves. Scott wrote that Edgar's hands were really bad and to his (Scott's) surprise, he was showing signs of losing heart.68 To this, Scott added that he was disappointed in Edgar.\n\nWilson dressed Edgar's fingers every day with an antiseptic solution, melting snow with a spir it lamp. Although the fingers were still 'quite sweet' (not apparently infected) on 4 February, by the following day they were suppurating and his nose was 'bad and rotten looking'.69 Wilson wrote that Edgar was feeling the cold a lot and always getting frostbitten. He was visibly thinner.\n\nEdgar's 'head injury' is not recorded as a major event. On 4 February, Wilson wrote that Scott and Edgar had fallen in a crevasse to their waists70; Scott wrote that it was the second fall for Edgar.71\n\nThe return was a race between the season, the conditions, the men's fitness and their food supplies. By 31 January they reached Three Degree depot, the last depot on the plateau, 180 miles from the Pole. They picked up Bowers' skis, a week's food supply and a note from Lieutenant Evans before progressing north, where the Beardmore, with its chaos of crevasses, awaited them. They reached the rim of the plateau on 4 February. Not only did Edgar fall into a glacier that day, but Scott described him as becoming rather dull and incapable.72 From the rim of the plateau they could see those rocks, which were the upper markers of the Beardmore Glacier. It was a relief to see rocky outcrops after days and days of featureless whiteness. The party's initial progress down the glacier was adequate, but after three days spent threading their way through crevasse fields to finally reach the Upper Glacier Depot, Edgar deteriorated significantly. Daily distances were halved. He was now incapable of helping with the camp work and was holding the party up. His hands were festering, his nose looked awful, he became withdrawn and unlike himself, and was feeling the cold terribly (in spite of the fact that they were now taking extra food, seven days rations in six days).73 Oates, too, was deteriorating, his toes were black and his nose and cheeks were 'dead yellow'.74\n\nIn spite of these anxieties Wilson took some time on 7 February to collect rock and fossil specimens. On the 8th, they spent half a day collecting more. Wilson was a passionate investigator. The Polar expedition gave a unique opportunity for study of the Beardmore Glacier and collection from this fascinating area had always been part of the scientific programme. Also Scott may have thought that to give Edgar (and Oates) a rest would be beneficial. In the event, the specimens that were collected were later found to have embedded fern-like fossil leaves and stems of Glosopteris, a plant that flourishes in warm temperate climates. These would give incontestable proof of profound changes in the earth's climate and show that Antarctica had once formed part of a great, warm, southern continent.\n\nOn 11 February, in hazy and distorting light, they got lost in a maze of ridges, getting more and more despondent. Food became the dominant anxiety. Could they find the next depot? Breakfast was one biscuit, then they had a single meal left.To their exquisite relief they stumbled on their depot, but, because they were not covering the necessary daily distances to get them safely to the next depot, they had to reduce their rations making three meals of pemmican stretch to four. When they left the mid-glacier depot on 13 February they had only enough food for just over three days. On the 14th, Scott wrote that Edgar showed them a huge blister on his foot; this delayed the march whilst his crampons were adjusted. Scott felt that Edgar was getting worse continually. His slowness added to the over-whelming anxieties about food, now reduced to an evening meal of biscuit with a thin hoosh of pemmican. By 15 February they were approximately 18 miles from the Lower Glacier Depot.\n\nEdgar collapsed on 16 February. He was giddy and could not even walk beside the sledge. The party camped, but by this time they had only enough food for a day, so no further delay could be considered. The 17 February started without a premonition of its eventual tragic outcome, although by now Edgar was a shambling caricature of his former self. His foot worked out of his ski shoe (the shoe that he had manufactured) and he stayed behind to readjust the shoe. The remainder of the party went on, but when they saw he was not coming behind them, they stopped and cooked a meal. When still he did not arrive, they went back to look for him and found he had collapsed again, his clothes were dishevelled and he was crawling over the snow. He talked slowly and said, when asked what had happened, that he did not know, but he thought he must have fainted. When he tried to walk, he collapsed again. Oates stayed with him whilst Wilson, Scott and Bowers went back for the sledge. He lapsed into unconsciousness and died two hours after reaching the tent. His companions made a prayer over his body, covered it and left it to be engulfed by snow. At the time of his death he had been 109 days on a diet low in all vitamins and wholly lacking in vitamin C. He died three weeks before news of Amundsen's victory was blazoned around the world.\n\nHis companions obviously went over the events. But this was no time for prolonged reflection; they were in a stark struggle for survival themselves. They decided, however, that he had begun to get weak before the Pole and that the downward path was caused by his fingers, his falls and his loss of confidence in himself.\n\nThey left the foot of the glacier on 19 February. Bowers' diary finished on the 25th, Wilson's, with no warning, on the 27th. At the Southern Barrier depot there was no paraffin.75 In the Middle Barrier depot, oil was short again. On 16 or 17 March (Scott had lost track of dates), Scott said that Oates had announced that he could not continue. He had gan-grene (needing treatment by amputation), his leg was unbearably painful, his hands were frostbitten and he could not feed himself. Months before, at Cape Evans, Oates had said that it would be a sick man's duty to eliminate himself. Now he held out until he could see that there was no possibility of surviving, and then he ended his life by crawling out of the tent to die on the snow in the freezing temperatures.Wilson had a supply of opium and morphine and Scott had ordered him to hand these out. Whether Oates could have taken the tablets before crawling out of the tent is debatable, his hands were so bad that Wilson was feeding him. It seems reasonable to surmise, however, that if he had come to his decision earlier, the remaining three might have been able to progress faster.\n\nScott,Wilson and Bowers made their final camp 11 miles south of One Ton Depot. There they per ished slowly. On 18 November 1912, eight months later, a search party found the tent along with their bodies and graphic accounts of their doomed return.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott Journals_ , Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 287.\n\n2 Ibid., p. 287.\n\n3 Scott, R.F., _Preliminary lecture on Southern Journey_ , 1911, SPRI, MS 1453\/28: D.\n\n4 Scott, R.F., _Preliminary lecture on Southern Journey_ , 1911, SPRI, MS 1453\/28: D.\n\n5 _Scott's Last Expedition The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 196.\n\n6 Riffenburg, B., _Nimrod_ , Bloomsbury, London, 2004, p. 120.\n\n7 Fisher, M & J., _Shackleton and the Antarctic_ , Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1958, p. 107.\n\n8 Bowers, H., _Journals Relating to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910\u20131912_ MS 1505\/3\/5\/9; BJ.\n\n9 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott, Journals_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 302.\n\n10 Wilson, E.A., _Letter to Mr and Mrs Reginald Smith_ , SPRI, MS.599\/142\/9\/D.\n\n11 _Evening Post_ , Vol. LXXXV, Issue 38, 14\/02\/1913.\n\n12 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 13\/02\/1913.\n\n13 Soloman, S., _The Coldest March_ , Yale University Press, London, 2001, p. 165.\n\n14 Ibid., p. 192.\n\n15 _Scott's Last Expedition The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p.323.\n\n16 Cherry-Garrard, A. _Diary_ , SPRI, MS 559\/4; BJ, 24\/10\/1911.\n\n17 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 183.\n\n18 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott Journals_. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005, p. 303.\n\n19 Ibid., p. 312.\n\n20 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic Expedition 1910\u20131912_ , SPRI, MS 1505\/3\/5\/9; BJ.\n\n21 A transparent protective layer under the eyelid that can cover the eye surface, protecting and moistening it.\n\n22 Although both dogs and ponies have nictitating membranes the exposed corneal surface is much bigger in the pony than the dog.The membrane has no blood supply and the cold sustained for long periods of movement may have resulted in corneal damage more easily in the ponies. Personal communication, Professor Peter Bedford, 2011.\n\n23 Ed. Jones, M., _Robert Falcon Scott Journals_ , Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 334.\n\n24 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary 03\/11\/1911\u201328\/01\/1912_. SPRI, MS 559\/5: BJ.\n\n25 Priestley, R., Lecture, _The Psychology of Exploration_ , SPRI, MS 1097\/16\/1; D.\n\n26 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 206.\n\n27 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ ,Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 126.\n\n28 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic Expedition 1910_ \u2013 _1912_ , SPRI, MS 1505\/3\/5\/9; BJ.\n\n29 Ibid.\n\n30 Seaver, G., _'Birdie' Bowers of the Antarctic_ , John Murray, London, 1947, p. 239.\n\n31 Ed. Jones, M. _Scott's Last Expedition The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 339.\n\n32 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic expedition, 1910\u20131912_ , SPRI, MS 1505\/3\/5\/9; BJ.\n\n33 Soloman, S., _The Coldest March_ , Yale University Press, London, 2001, p. 293.\n\n34 The letters were not preserved.\n\n35 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1911_ , SPRI MS 1505\/3\/5\/9; BJ.\n\n36 Fiennes, R., _Captain Scott_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2003, p. 285.\n\n37 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 217.\n\n38 Soloman, S., _The Coldest March_ ,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 190.\n\n39 Personal communication, Dr Edward Coats, 2010. (From the Omega Challenge Race to the pole 2009.)\n\n40 Seaver, G., _'Birdie' Bowers of the Antarctic_ , John Murray, London, 1947, p. 245.\n\n41 Ellis, A.R., _Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries_ ,Victor Gollancz, London, 1969, p. 132.\n\n42 Ed. Jones, M. _Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 363.\n\n43 _Daily Mirror_ , 22\/05\/1913.\n\n44 Lieutenant Evans returned to England with the relief ship.\n\n45 Ed. Jones, M. _Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 369.\n\n46 Ibid., p. 370.\n\n47 Ibid., p. 373.\n\n48 Ibid., p. 374.\n\n49 Ibid., p. 375.\n\n50 Ibid., p. 376.\n\n51 Ibid., _Appendix 111, 'Significant changes to Scott's original Base and Sledging Journals'_ , p. 470.\n\n52 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910_ \u2013 _12_ , SPRI MS 1505\/3\/5\/9: BJ.\n\n53 Ibid.\n\n54 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 232.\n\n55 _Daily Mirror_ , 23\/05\/1913, (Commander Evans' Lecture in the Albert Hall).\n\n56 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1911_ , SPRI MS 1505\/3\/5\/9.\n\n57 Ibid., p. 378.\n\n58 At Cape Evans, some skeletons of Scott's dogs remain with collars and chains still attached.\n\n59 Bowers, H., _Journals relating to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1911_ , SPRI MS 1505\/3\/5\/9.\n\n60 Evening Post,Vol. XXXV Issue 38 14\/02\/1913.\n\n61 Ed. Jones, M., _Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York,1996, p. 397.\n\n62 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 230.\n\n63 Ed. Jones, M., _Scott's Last Expedition:The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 368.\n\n64 Ibid., p. 376.\n\n65 Ibid., p. 383.\n\n66 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 238.\n\n67 Ibid., p. 289.\n\n68 Ed. Jones, M., _Scott's Last Expedition The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 387.\n\n69 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 240.\n\n70 Ibid, p. 239.\n\n71 Ed. Jones, M., _Scott's Last Expedition : The Journals_ , Carroll and Graff, New York, 1996, p. 389.\n\n72 Ibid., p. 390.\n\n73 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 239.\n\n74 Ibid., p. 240.\n\n75 The paraffin had leaked out because of inadequate seals on the tins that had allowed evaporation.\n\n## 15\n\n## The Aftermath\n\nThe news was cabled to Britain on 11 February 1913 and the reality of the disaster flew immediately around the world. Amongst the many letters and messages that had been found in the tent was Scott's 'Message to the Public', which (though this may not have been Scott's intention) forcibly focussed attention on Edgar's deterioration as a most significant contribution to the failure and death of the whole party. Over the next months in some quarters, Edgar was to be stigmatised as being the primary cause of the tragedy, not only being the first to die, but also as the only member of the party who was not of officer status.\n\nScott wrote that 'the advance party would have returned to the glacier in fine form and with a surplus of food, but for the astonishing failure of the man whom we had least expected to fail. Edgar Evans was thought the strongest man of the party'.1 After this Edgar became labelled as the 'Strong Man', with the implication that physical strength was his only asset, an implication often made by those with no knowledge of his contributions to Scott's expeditions. When the official report was telegraphed to London, two paragraphs from Scott's sledging journals were quoted in full; one relating to Edgar's death, the other, Scott's account of Titus Oates' death. The contrast in the modes of death, the self-sacrificing Captain and the Petty Officer (who held them up before he finally died a natural death), was gripping.\n\nSome of the early reports that made him the scapegoat were refuted; the early rumour that the fate of the Southern Party was sealed when Edgar's four companions had to drag him hundreds of miles on a sledge was denied,2 and Lieutenant Teddy Evans stated that reports that Edgar had gone mad were cruel, scandalous and without foundation.3 However, his four companions, notably Oates, who also seriously slowed the party's progress, were hailed as heroes.\n\nThree days after the official report, one and a half million children in elementary schools throughout the country gathered to hear 'The Immortal Story of Captain Scott's Expedition'. The 'Message' and Scott's account of Oates' death were quoted in full.4 The scene was set. Many Edwardians saw a tenuous relationship between physical strength, mental capacity and social status,5 and there are photographs and descriptions of Edgar as the 'strong man' which emphasised how mere strength did not necessarily imply a good character. Self-control and self-discipline were viewed as the epitome of masculinity, particularly for the middle or upper classes. It was the core of the heroic character and Edgar appeared to have lost control of his rational thought. He definitely did not represent the heroic ideal. _The Times Weekly Edition_ quoted a report from Christchurch, New Zealand, that said 'It would seem from what escaped some of the survivors that (Edgar) Evans lost his reason for the time, being under the great stress of fatigue and privation and was incapable of obeying orders, or assisting his hard pushed companions in the weary work of pulling the sledge. Indeed it became necessary in the end to lay him on it.'6 Edgar, the 'strong man', failed first and contributed significantly to the fate of his companions. Throughout February 1913, newspapers projected the view that Edgar had had serious psychological problems.\n\nRemarkably, none of the articles suggests a physical cause for Edgar's deterioration. Class and education were promoted as the important issues. Edgar's demise was hastened by his relative lack of education. He was not a gentleman and, therefore, apparently less able to withstand the strain of the return. The _Daily Express_ ' front-page article on 12 February 1913 quoted an 'eminent mental specialist' who stated that it was the uneducated man who would feel 'the mental strain and the dreary monotonous life amid eter nal snows' more acutely than the educated man.\n\nThe specialist wrote that:\n\n... experiments have proved that the brain is only kept active and healthy by the stimulus it is constantly receiving from the senses. The limitless white of the still snows would provide little stimulus for the eye to transmit. The deadly silence would deprive the ear of work. The monotony of the food would prevent the brain receiving the stimulus of a new taste. To an educated man this strain would be bad enough but he would be able to stimulate his brain with his store of learning... The absence of such a stimulus in an uneducated man such as presumably Seaman Evans would have been, might have been succeeded by a kind of self-mesmerism followed by mania and the delusion that he was being kept from food and home, both close at hand.7\n\nIn short, Edgar's education had not given him the psychological reserve to cope with the conditions, though it seems implausible nowadays that a knowledge of Virgil was considered helpful to a man battling against Antarctica's furies. Edgar's behaviour was contrasted unfavourably with the heroism of Oates and his comrades Scott, Wilson and Lieutenant Bowers.\n\nHistorian Professor Max Jones states that the extent of the criticism should not be exaggerated and that most commentators did not single out Edgar particularly as the cause of the disaster.8 This may be so, but the effect of the articles that were published must have been devastating to his wife, children and relatives in South Wales who were faced with the intimation, made by clever, educated men, that Edgar a seaman, had not only caused the death of the man he sincerely admired, but other important members of the 'gentleman class'. His oldest child, Norman, would have had taunts at school; his father had let the side down.The family's hero had been demoted to anti-hero status.\n\nHis children must have been devastated when they saw the Player's cigarette card series. Player's produced small coloured cards to go in their cigarette packets, a collection avidly collected by children. In the series on Polar exploration the first four are: Captain Scott, Commander Evans, Captain Oates and Dr Wilson. Number six is Lieutenant Bowers, but number five \u2013 'Taking Sea Temperatures' \u2013 was presumably the proposed illustration of Edgar, deliberately omitted. Other cards in this British series include a sledge party crossing a crevasse, sledge flags, Ad\u00e9lie penguins, the victorious Amundsen and his compatriot, Oscar Wisting, at the South Pole. Edgar's omission is marked and extraordinary.\n\n_Like English Gentlemen: To Peter Scott from the Author of Where's Master?_ (actually H.D. Rawnsley) was a children's book published in 1913. One can only hope that neither Edgar's children nor their friends read it: 'There were four men with the hero at the South Pole and their names are worth remembering, One was Petty Officer Edgar Evans, a great big brawny seaman who had been with him for many years.'9 The book recounts how they reached the Pole and started their return, 'but Evans, the man of mighty muscles, seemed to have lost his strength. He was always a little behind the others, found it harder than they to pull himself out of the snow drifts... He stopped dead \"I'm done\", said he10... But they were English gentlemen these four, the hero and Dr Wilson and Captain Oates and Lieutenant Bowers and so, such a thing as leaving Evans behind never came into their heads.'11 The diatribe continues: 'they counted the cost. They were willing to pay the price. Even if the price was to be their own lives... they were English gentlemen'.12 In contrast to Edgar, when Oates failed, his whole thought was for his comrades to save themselves. He knew, when the time came, 'how English Gentlemen die'.13\n\nRawnsley also wrote a Sonnet Sequence dedicated to the Antarctic Heroes. The Seventh Sonnet, dedicated to Edgar, contains the lines:\n\nAh, well for him he died, nor ever knew\n\nHow his o'er wearied stumbling forward drew\n\nDeath's snare about his friends to hold them fast14\n\nThe insidious damage was done. The feeling that Edgar had somehow failed because of his class persisted for years. The scientist and explorer Brian Roberts15 wrote in the 1930s: 'Science is no inspiration to those who have only done manual labour... This was surely the explanation of Seaman Evans' unaccountable breakdown when Scott's party realised they were not first at the Pole. The others knew that the true value of their journey had not been lost but to him it must have seemed that all their effort had been in vain.'16\n\nIt took years for Edgar to regain his rightful status as one of the Antarctic heroes. Gary Gregor, the librarian at Swansea Museum, wrote the first biography of his life as late as 1995.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 Arranged Huxley, L., _Scott's Last Expedition Vol.1_ , Smith Elder, London, 1913, p. 605.\n\n2 Pictures Past, The National Library of New Zealand, Evening Post, Vol. LXXXV, Issue 40, 17\/02\/1913, p. 7.\n\n3 _Daily Mail_ , 15\/02\/1913.\n\n4 Ed. Cubitt, G.; Warren, A., _The King Upon His Knees_ (Chap. 6 by Jones, M.) Manchester University Press, 200, p. 110.\n\n5 Jones, M., _The Last Great Quest_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 111.\n\n6 _Times Weekly Edition_ , 21\/02\/1913.\n\n7 _Daily Express_ 12\/02\/1913, No. 4009.\n\n8 Jones, M., _The Last Great Quest_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 112.\n\n9 Anon, _Like English Gentlemen To Peter Scott_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, [1913], p. 31.\n\n10 Ibid., p. 37.\n\n11 Ibid., p 41.\n\n12 Ibid., p. 43\n\n13 Ibid., p 48.\n\n14 Rawnsley, H. D., _To the Heroes of the Antarctic, A Sonnet Sequence_ British Review April 1913 80\u201384.\n\n15 Brian Birley Roberts 1912\u20131978. Member of British Graham Land Expedition 1934\u201337. Researched into cold climate clothing. Involved in drafting Antarctic Treaty of 1959.\n\n16 Brian Roberts, Personal Journals 1934\u201337 Vol. 1 British Graham Land Expedition Vol.1 01\/12\/1934\u201309\/12\/1935, p. 168.\n\n## 16\n\n## Why Did Edgar Die First?\n\nAmundsen wrote later that the main reason for the final tragedy was that the British had endured the terrific strain of man-hauling, whereas the Norwegians 'had dogs all the way to the Pole and all the way back to our base'.1 He said he never pulled anything at all.2 He was probably right in his conclusion insofar that if Scott had actually managed to get dogs on the plateau and kept them healthy, the dogs would have been able to pull the enfeebled travellers across the plateau and down to the Barrier, saving the explorers precious calories and time by allowing the injured to ride on the sledges. Certainly by the time the explorers died their bodies had been ravaged by a multiplicity of problems that were interdependent in contributing to their deaths. Conditions such as vitamin deficiency, malnutrition, dehydration and hypothermia all combined inextricably to accelerate the downward spiral, and Edgar, the heaviest man in the party, suffered the most. In addition, he and Captain Oates stand out with specific problems. Oates had an old war wound and gangrene. Edgar suffered from a cut hand that festered and needed constant attention; he had a fall that could have caused an intracerebral bleed and, as the only non-officer, he could have suffered from a feeling of cultural isolation.\n\nMalnutrition plagued the whole party; they were unaware of this but records of dreams of delicacies that vanished, food-shops that were shut and obsessive ruminations about food are commonplace. Edgar and his companions had been man-hauling since early December 1911. The summit rations of approximately 4,571 kcal per man per day had been started in those bleak days at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. These rations consisted of 1,054 kcal of protein, 1,953 kcal of fat and 1,564 kcal of carbohydrate.3 Amundsen's assault team's calorie intake was similar, but the two expeditions had totally different calorific demands. The British were man-hauling whilst the Norwegians travelled on sledges pulled by the dogs, or on skis without loads. Recent studies have shown that Scott's men would have used over 7,000 calories per day for the exhausting occupation of man-hauling.4 So although the diet contained the correct percentage of carbohydrate according to modern information,5 the total intake was too low. Taken from 7 December 1911, until Edgar died on 17 February 1912 (seventy-two days), each member of the team had built up a staggering calorie shortfall of approximately 175,000 calories. To fully comprehend what this deficit means, an average man eats 2,500 calories a day when performing his daily activities, so it is easy to see how this astounding calorie deficit, approximately equal to a single man's intake for seventy days in normal life, would have affected the explorers.\n\nWhen Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Dr Mike Stroud man-hauled across the Antarctic for sixty-eight days (fewer days than Edgar), they each lost 44lbs in weight.6 But, in addition, Edgar was the biggest man of the party. An individual's food requirements depends on his weight as well as his physical activity and Edgar's resting and hauling metabolic rate would have been higher than his companions; he would have needed a greater calorie intake to support his size. His rate of weight loss must have been considerably faster than his companions, and Scott wrote, 'we are pretty thin, especially Evans (he meant Edgar), but none of us are feeling worked out'.7 As Edgar lost weight he lost his insulating body fat.8 He would have lost muscle also,9 and this would have made man-hauling increasingly challenging. Cherry-Garrard wrote that Edgar must have had 'a most terrible time'. He went on, 'I think it is clear from the diaries that he had suffered very greatly without complaint. At home he would have been nursed in bed; here he must march'.10\n\nIntertwined with malnutrition is hypothermia. This is defined as a core body temperature of below 35\u00b0C or 95\u00b0F. The men were often pulling into the wind and sometimes into snow \u2013 a dangerous combination. The cold and his sweat reduced the insulation properties of Edgar's clothes to practically nothing.11 His temperature dropped, he shuddered in the wind and the only time he would have been reasonably comfortable was when he was actually pulling the sledge.12 The cold struck as soon as he stopped. Shivering and shuddering increases heat production,13 but as the concomitant disadvantage of increasing calorie requirements and the deadly combination of malnutrition, exhaustion, insufficient insulation and insufficient fluids decreased his ability to maintain body heat. Dr Wilson wrote that Edgar was 'feeling the cold a lot always getting frost bitten'.14 He had always had this tendency. It has been shown that a previous cold injury is a significant risk factor for frostbite,15 and this was the case with Edgar. As his body temperature fell he would fumble with accustomed tasks, he may have become forgetful16 and he may have felt sick. As his struggle continued he was increasingly at risk of irregular heart rhythms.17\n\nOn the high elevation of the Antarctic Plateau, there is a lower atmospheric pressure than at sea level. This means there is less oxygen to breathe as the air is 'thinner'. To maintain a sufficient level of oxygen in the blood, the explorers had to breathe rapidly. Each breath contains water vapour, as can be seen even at land level, when breath exhaled on cold dry days 'steams', and these droplets, which freeze instantly, are sometimes called 'the shower of life'. The explorers had to overbreathe constantly and, as a result, lost significant water vapour. The fluid lost in their breathing contributed to their dehydration.\n\nIn addition to the sweat and water vapour lost when they were man hauling, the problems continued when they got into their sleeping bags. When Edgar toggled down to rest in his bag, he knew he had no hope of an undisturbed sleep until the moisture from his breath and the perspiration from his clothes (which added to the icy layer already coating up the inside of the bag to a degree that it took over half an hour to wriggle into), warmed to something approaching body temperature.18 Until then the men shivered (and probably cursed) until something approaching comfort overtook them.\n\nOn 17 December Scott wrote that the team got thirsty and chipped up ice on the march as well as drinking 'a great deal' of water at the halts.19 In fact 'they were always thirsty'.20 In 1911, the importance of keeping well hydrated was not understood and the men drank about 6 pints (3,400ml) of fluid each day21 (mugs of tea at breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus fluid in the pemmican). This is completely inadequate. It is now known that enough fluid should be taken to keep the urine fairly dilute (i. e. a pale colour) and flowing freely. When, in 2009, the British team man-hauled across the Plateau to the Pole in the Omega 3 race (at about the same time of year as Scott, though ninety-seven years later), they covered more ground on a daily basis but drank between 6\u20138L, per day, virtually double Scott's intake. They drank 4\u20135L when they were pulling and the remainder in the tent. On this intake their urine was darker when they drank 6L, pale when they drank 8.22 In Antarctica the atmosphere is dry and sweat evaporates quickly from the skin, and in 1911 the men may not have actually realised that they were sweating, though they would probably have had headaches and felt short-tempered. Edgar may have been conscious of his heart racing. But even if the team had been aware of the need for the increased fluid intake, this would have been difficult to manage logistically. Enough fuel to heat ice or snow was a cause for concern on the return from the Pole when the fuel (paraffin) was found to have evaporated from the tins,23 and dehydration was to be a crucial factor in their fate.\n\nOf the general problems endured by all the party altitude sickness is an unlikely cause of Edgar's death. He had been on the Plateau for weeks and had acclimatised to the altitude during his exhausting climb up the Beardmore Glacier. Although people are sent back to sea level from the Plateau every year,24 the problem most frequently arises in those who have not had the time to acclimatise and nowadays the majority who work in the Antarctic have arrived by plane. Edgar and the remainder of the team had had time to acclimatise.\n\nVitamin deficiency unites the party's general problems with a specific problem in Edgar's case. Vitamin C deficiency has been suggested as the primary cause of Edgar's death on 17 February.25 This is unlikely, although the explorers had been on a diet deficient in vitamin C (on the Barrier, the Beardmore Glacier and the Plateau) for more than fifteen weeks. Summit rations also contained less of the other vitamins than the Barrier rations26 and had insufficient folic acid and vitamin B12. But clearly Edgar did not have overt scurvy; Dr Wilson, a careful reporter and not afraid to chart the men's medical problems, makes no mention of scurvy, a condition he was all too familiar with. However, Edgar must have had sub-clinical vitamin C deficiency, a condition that can exist without any clinical signs of scurvy whatsoever. We now know a good deal about scurvy, its causation and its signs. It is known that when a person previously saturated with vitamin C goes on a diet without fruit or vegetables, signs of scurvy do not appear for about sixteen weeks, after which time skin dryness and thickening occurs, followed by small petichiae \u2013 small purplish skin spots due to the release of a tiny amount of blood from very small blood vessels, the capillaries. Problems with the healing of cuts come later. However, blood levels of vitamin C reach low levels well before clinical signs develop.27\n\nEdgar always hated eating seal meat and its offal (which contains the vitamin), so his blood levels are very likely to have been low. But since he had no clinical signs of early scurvy, it is less likely that the fall into a crevasse up to his waist on 4 February would have caused a significant intracerebral bleed secondary to vitamin C deficiency. Scott would have been most unlikely to have allowed time to be spent looking for specimens on 8 February, however important this was for their scientific programme, if he had thought that Edgar was on an irreversible downward course. On 13 February, Edgar was able to cooperate in looking for a depot and raised hopes with the shout of 'depot ahead', (although his 'depot' was, in fact, just a shadow).28 He had no obvious localised weakness on one side of the body (which commonly happens in an intracerebral bleed) and there is no record of headaches. He was able to get into his skis and start in the traces on the day that he died, no doubt attempting to keep up till the end. The problems that were reported: 'no power to assist with camping work'29 and 'giving us serious anxiety'30 can equally well be ascribed to a number of conditions. His difficulty with his boots was caused, not by paralysis, but because of frostbitten hands. Scott's comment that Edgar was 'becoming rather dull and incapable'31 were made on the very day that Edgar had his fall, suggesting (as Scott had written previously), a problem that had been going on for far longer than a few hours.\n\nOther factors that could have contributed to Edgar's deterioration are: psychological problems and infection. Could the whole deterioration be secondary to psychological troubles? Dr Wilson recorded in his diary that he wrote for his family that Edgar's collapse was 'much to do with the fact that he had never been sick in his life and is now helpless with his hands frost-bitten'.32 But psychological problems are an unlikely suggestion. Edgar was an intelligent extrovert. He had good social skills and could talk equally well to officers and non-officers.33 34Although the concept of 'depression' did not exist in 1910, there are no positive clues to suggest this diagnosis, which is characteristically a recurrent condition. Edgar's behaviour before and between expeditions carries absolutely no hint of a 'personality wobble'. He had good family links and bonds to sustain him. He wanted to return to Antarctica and volunteered to do so. He contributed well until the final few weeks and on the day he died he was alert enough to ask for some string to tie up his boots. He may have been low, but his symptoms do not suggest serious, incapacitating depression. Debenham interpreted Edgar's low mood as being due to the fact that he (Edgar) thought that he had let Scott down, firstly by cutting his hand and then by delaying the party, i. e. that his psyche was responding to external factors, rather than being the primary cause of his problems. This was a comment supported by Scott's writing on 30 January, that Edgar had not been cheerful since the accident. If Edgar's plans for opening a pub in South Wales35 were dashed by him not getting to the South Pole first (and there is no obvious reason why they should have been; his friend PO Tom Crean ran a successful public house in Ireland until his death in 1938),36 Edgar's resilient, steely, gregarious mind would have readily turned to other enterprises. He was not a man to suffer from cultural isolation. He was too confident of himself.\n\nInfection may well have contributed to Edgar's death. Bacteria can exist in Antarctica's sub-zero temperatures.37 One such bacterium is Staphylococcus aureus, a bacterium commonly carried in the nose38 and sleeping bags,39 and the likely cause of Edgar's hand infection. Abscess formation typically occurs seven days after a wound becoming infected, as happened to Edgar. By February, his frostbitten fingers were suppurating and his nose was very bad (almost as bad as his fingers) and rotten looking. Infection would have increased his resting metabolic rate, so exacerbating his calorie requirements and further increasing his weight loss. A possible scenario is nasal carriage of staphylococci resulting in a wound infection in his hand and, following this, invasion of the blood stream, probably repeated.40 There need not have been any signs in the arm \u2013 the bacterium could have silently gained ascendancy and the final picture can be interpreted as low blood pressure and collapse related to infection.\n\nAnother infection that had been put forward as the cause of Edgar's death is anthrax: a bacterial infection particularly found in animals (in this case the ponies), that can be transmitted to humans.41 Typically, when anthrax affects the skin, an ulcer develops surrounded by fluid-filled blisters. It seems a less likely diagnosis here. It was Edgar's fingers and nails that persistently gave the greatest trouble. Anthrax was a condition that Dr Wilson would certainly have been familiar with from his training in St George's Hospital and he would have recorded his findings, particularly the characteristic black, necrotic (dead) tissue at the point where infection had started. Furthermore, pus is not a feature of anthrax and pus was a marked feature in Edgar's case. Also, no other members of the expedition, who had also been in close contact with the animals, showed evidence of the disease. Interestingly when floors in the Base were renovated recently and examined for anthrax, none was identified.42\n\nRoland Huntford writes that Edgar had been 'exposed to the risk of venereal disease',43 despite providing no supporting evidence. Whatever disease is implied by this statement, it would not have contributed to Edgar's death. The legal definition of venereal disease includes syphilis, gonorrhoea and chancroid (which can be ignored in this account).44 The genital ulcers of primary syphilis would have been noted on Edgar's medical examination, as would a rash related to secondary syphilis. In addition, none of the symptoms described in Edgar's case suggest the long-term complications of syphilis as a contributing factor to his death. However, it is impossible to disprove (or prove) whether Edgar had the post-acute phase of gonorrhoea. This could have caused discomfort in passing urine but would not interfere with his ability to man-haul and would have had no effect on his final days.\n\nAn intriguing suggestion was made by a Welsh television company that Scott, pushed beyond his limits by Edgar's incapacities and convinced that the team would do better without him, shot Edgar as he lay confused and helpless on the snow.45 This can be dismissed. Guns were not taken onto the plateau (every consideration was given to weight). When his companions found Edgar crawling around on the snow, Scott went back with Wilson and Bowers to get the sledge, leaving Oates with Edgar. Wilson, deeply religious and conscious of the sanctity of life, could never have written his untroubled farewell letters to his wife, family and friends, if there had been any suggestion of murder.\n\nAn interesting condition called paradoxical undressing could have affected Edgar in his last few hours. This forms a part of many hypothermic deaths. The term 'paradoxical' is used because the victim's temperature is already too low to sustain life, but as hypothermia tightens its insidious grip, the victim begins taking off his clothes. Scott wrote that Edgar's clothes were disarranged, his hands uncovered and frostbitten.46 The cause of paradoxical undressing, which even today causes police to assume some victims of hypothermia have been assaulted, is not clear. A possible explanation is that the hypothalamus, that part of the brain that regulates body temperature, finally fails and releases its control of the small blood vessels in the skin, allowing them to dilate so that the victim suddenly feels hot and throws his clothes off. This condition clearly was not the cause of Edgar's downward spiral, but may have contributed to his demise.\n\nWhen all these diverse medical conditions have been considered, it has to be asked if Edgar should have included in the Pole Party in the first place. The answer must be that he was a natural choice. Scott considered that he was strong, fit, a good companion and a representative of the lower deck. Of the other two lower deck representatives Lashly and Crean, Chief Stoker Lashly had already man-hauled the 400 miles from Corner Camp and was in no fit state for a gruelling further advance, so the choice was between Edgar and Crean. The choice in favour of Edgar was probably because Edgar was already a member of Scott's sledge team, a team that had proved how well it could pull. Scott had no reason to doubt Edgar's fitness so there was no reason to change the team's membership.47 Debenham wrote later supporting the choice of Edgar and saying that he 'did not think for a minute that \"Taff\" was chosen as the last of the five men'. Debenham thought that Scott had intended to take Edgar from the first, as the 'most skilful sledge master and rigger, the strongest man and unendingly cheerful'. Debenham understood the significance of Edgar's cut hand mentioned in Scott's diary and he (Debenham) wrote that after Edgar had cut his hand he was no longer cheerful, but he interpreted Edgar's slowing down as being firstly, 'because he thought he had let his Captain down by having the accident and secondly, later, because he knew he was delaying the party'.48 Debenham added that he 'thought that Scott added Oates as the last of the five as a reward for his management of the ponies and because he wanted the Army to be represented'.49 He wrote that if one could talk of an 'odd man out', it would be Oates; he was not an accomplished sledger and he had a leg wound from the Boer War. This was a comment supported by a note in Cherry-Garrard's journals in which he writes that Drs Atkinson and Wilson had discussed the final choice and agreed that Oates was very 'done up'. Dr Atkinson had said that he did not think that Oates wanted to go.50 Debenham reiterated that Edgar always got on well with officers (with the exception of Lieutenant Evans), and that he personally thought that his subsequent death was related to the cut hand.51 In Edgar, Scott chose a tried and true companion, an experienced and intelligent sledger, a cheerful, good-natured man. When it came to the return, any other man would have suffered comparably. Edgar's unique problems, his larger size and his hand infection, could not have been anticipated.\n\nWhen Edgar was clearly failing should his companions have given him the morphine tablets that Dr Wilson carried and allowed him to die painlessly before abandoning him to the snowy wastes? Although his death released them from this appalling ethical dilemma, two of those companions, at least, would not have left him if he had become incapable. The moral issue of what to do if one of them failed had obviously been discussed: Dr Wilson would never abandon a comrade. His whole life had been governed by a love of God and a desire to serve others. He had no fear of death. He would have stayed with Edgar; his creed, the essential condition that bound all dangerous enterprises, was that men must stand by each other in distress, even beyond the bounds of reason. Bowers, too, was deeply religious; to abandon Edgar would have been unthinkable. Furthermore, although Edgar was slowing their progress hugely, they did not consider that he was actually dying.\n\nIn relation to the remainder of the doomed party, after Edgar's death Scott said that the delays the party had suffered on the return had greatly weakened them by firstly making inroads into their surplus provisions and, secondarily, by making them later in the season than had been planned. This delay meant that the snow surface resembled sand \u2013 impossible to pull over. This well-known phenomenon is due to the fact that when the temperature falls to 30\u00b0 below zero, sledges cease to glide. The low temperature of between \u221230 and \u221240\u00b0 does much to explain the slowness of the British party on the Barrier. With a distance between depots of 70 miles and only enough food and fuel in each depot to cover that distance, the party had to average over 9 miles per day. For a week, however, the best march on the Barrier approximated 9 miles and, in the later stages, progress deteriorated to as low as 3. Their failure to maintain the required speed was undoubtedly due to Oates' breakdown, which became a tax on the party's energies. When they met persistent winds and frequent blizzards, they must have known that the outlook was hopeless. The _Times Weekly Edition_ wrote, however, that they 'never relinquished their gallant struggle and fought on to the bitter end'.52\n\nEdgar did not fail because he had not got to the Pole first. No one, neither his companions on that fateful journey nor the newspaper articles afterwards, seem to have grasped the basic fact that he was ill. The effects of the insufficient calories affected Edgar greatly as the largest and strongest of the party and his extra needs were exacerbated by his hand infection. These problems accelerated on the return journey, causing weakness and a greater susceptibility to the cold. The deterioration was so gradual that it was not understood by his companions, but in the light of modern understanding of body physiology it is possible to say that the collapse was due to a failure of the survival measures to maintain core body temperature and that his acquired infection is likely to be a pivotal cause of his premature demise. He probably had no idea what was happening in the toxic, confused state of his last few hours as he played out a twentieth-century Greek tragedy in which nature and malevolent fate combined to defeat him. But, to the last, he tried to obey and support Scott.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 _The Cambrian_ , 01\/02\/1913.\n\n2 Pound, R., _Evans of the Brook_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1963, p. 119.\n\n3 Rogers, A.F., _The Death of Chief Petty Officer Evans_ , The Practitioner,Vol. 212, 1974, p. 576. Butter in the diet gave over half the vitamin A and Carotene requirements for work at 4,500 kcal per day, plus a little vitamin D. Milk powder in the biscuits provided insufficient quantities of thiamine, nicotinic acid, riboflavin, folic acid and vitamin B complex. There was no vitamin C.\n\n4 Fiennes, R., _Captain Scott_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2003, p. 283.\n\n5 Stroud, M., _Nutrition Across Antarctica_ , BNF Nutrition Bulletin, 19, 1994, p. 150.\n\n6 Fiennes, R., _Captain Scott_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2003, p. 285.\n\n7 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Last Expedition vol 1_ , Murray, London, 1935, p. 434.\n\n8 Ward, M.P.; Milledge, J.S.; West, J.B., _High Altitude Medicine and Physiology_ , Arnold, London, 2000, p. 171.\n\n9 Ibid., p. 168.\n\n10 Cherry-Garrard, A., _The Worst Journey in the World_ , Picador, London, 1994, p. 544.\n\n11 Ward, M.P., Milledge, J.S. West, J.B. _High Altitude Medicine and Physiology_ , Arnold, London, 2000, p. 296.\n\n12 Priestley, R.E., _The Psychology of Polar Exploration_ , SPRI, MS 1097\/16\/1; D.\n\n13 Ward, M.P.; Milledge, J.S.; West, J.B., _High Altitude Medicine and Physiology_ , Arnold, London, 2000, p. 296.\n\n14 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London, 1972, p. 240.\n\n15 Cattermole, T.J., _The epidemiology of cold injury in Antarctica_ , Aviation & Space Environmental Medicine, 1999, Alexandria,Virginia, USA. p. 135\u2013140.\n\n16 Ward, M.P.; Milledge, J.S.; West, J.B., _High Altitude Medicine and Physiology_ , Arnold, London, 2000, p. 297.\n\n17 Ibid., p. 298.\n\n18 Priestley, R.E., _The Psychology of Polar Exploration_ , MS 1097\/16\/1; D.\n\n19 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Last Expedition vol 1_ , Murray, London, 1935, p. 396.\n\n20 Ibid., p. 397.\n\n21 Bowers, H., Miscellaneous stores list (compiled with Robert Falcon Scott British Antarctic Expedition 1910\u20131913), SPRI, MS 1453\/30; D.\n\n22 Personal communication, Dr Edward Coats, member of the British team, 2010.\n\n23 This evaporation was due to insufficient seals on the tins.\n\n24 Fiennes, R., _Captain Scott_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2003, p. 322.\n\n25 Rogers, A.F. _The Death of Chief Petty Officer Evans_ The Practitioner Vol. 212, 1974, p. 580.\n\n26 Ibid., p. 576. The rations contained little Thiamine, Riboflavine, Pyridoxine.\n\n27 Crandon, J.H.; Lund, C.C.; Dill, D.B., _Experimental Human Scurvy_ , New England Journal of Medicine, 1940, vol. 233, p. 353\u2013369.\n\n28 Scott, R.F. _Scott's Last Expedition vol 1_ , Murray, London, 1935, p. 444.\n\n29 Ibid., p.444.\n\n30 Ibid., p. 445.\n\n31 Ibid., p. 437.\n\n32 Ed. King, H.G.R., _Edward Wilson, Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic_ , Blandford Press, London 1972, p. 243.\n\n33 Taylor, G., _Letter to Stanley Richard_ , 11\/06\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 210, (Edgar Evans).\n\n34 Debenham, F., _Journal_ , 19\/01\/1911\u201308\/03\/1911 MS 279\/2: BJp, p. 54.\n\n35 Soloman, S., _The Coldest March_ ,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 283.\n\n36 Smith, M., _An Unsung Hero,The Remarkable Story of Tom Crean_ , Headline Book Publishing, 2001, p. 309.\n\n37 Hadley, M.D., _Nasal carriage of staphylococci in an Antarctic Community_. The Staphylococci, Proceedings of the Alexander Ogston Centennial Conference, Aberdeen University Press, 1981, p. 241\u2013253.\n\n38 Ibid., p. 239.\n\n39 Ibid., p. 245.\n\n40 Personal communication, Professor T.H. Pennington, University of Aberdeen, 2006.\n\n41 Falckh, R.C.F., _The Death of Chief Petty Officer Evans_ , Polar Record, 1987, 23 (145) p. 397.\n\n42 Personal Communication, Robert Headland, Emeritus Associate, SPRI.\n\n43 Huntford, R., _Scott & Amundsen_, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1979, p. 328.\n\n44 Chancroid is a sexually transmitted disease that causes a ragged ulcer at the site of the infection and is treated with antibiotics.\n\n45 Davies, J., _The Last Journey_ , Drama-documentary by Cardiff television and film company, Fflie. HTV Wales 31\/07\/2002, previously screened on Welsh TV company S4C, as _Y Daith Olaf_.\n\n46 Scott, R.F., _Scott's Last Expedition vol 1_ , Murray, London, 1935, p. 446.\n\n47 Crean came to the fore when on the return journey to base camp, Lieutenant Evans became dangerously ill with scurvy. Crean undertook an amazing 18 hour solo walk to Hut Point. He and Lashly were awarded the Albert medal for saving Lieutenant Evans' life.\n\n48 Debenham, F., Letter to Stanley Richards 25\/05\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 201, Edgar Evans Red File.\n\n49 Ibid.\n\n50 Cherry-Garrard, A., _Diary_ , SPRI, MS 559\/4; BJ,.Vol 3 19\/02\/11\u201311\/10\/11 24\/10\/1911.\n\n51 Debenham, F., Letter to Stanley Richards 25\/05\/1962, Swansea Museum, Box 201, Edgar Evans Red File.\n\n52 _Times Weekly Edition_ , 21\/02\/1913.\n\n## Epilogue\n\n_Terra Nova_ (carrying the Cardiff flag)1 reached Cape Evans on 18 January 1913. The ship had been thoroughly cleaned and a celebratory meal prepared for the five who, it was assumed, had reached the Pole and come back safely. Their letters were in individual pillowcases with each man's name printed on it; _Terra Nova_ carried supplies of chocolate, cigars and champagne \u2013 festive luxuries for all the men who had been marooned in Antarctica for months.\n\nTeddy Evans had recovered from his scurvy. He had been promoted to Commander while he was in England and now he returned with the _Terra Nova_. He shouted across the water through a megaphone,'Are you all well?'2 The ominous pause that greeted his enquiry spoke volumes. The silence was followed eventually by Lieutenant Campbell's reply,'the Southern Party reached the South Pole on January 18th last year, but were all lost on the return journey \u2013 we have their records'.3 The news of the heroes' deaths was greeted with silent shock, flags were lowered to half mast, celebrations shelved and the letters re-stored, for return to those wives, mothers, family and friends who had written with such eager anticipation.\n\nA 9ft cross was erected on Observation Hill, the hill that overlooked Hut Point, Edgar's home on the _Discovery_ days. The cross recorded the names of the dead men and the final line of Tennyson's poem _Ulysses_ , a tribute chosen by Cherry-Garrard:\n\nTo strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.\n\nWhen _Terra Nova_ reached New Zealand, press contracts required her to lay out to sea for twenty-four hours after the sad news had been cabled to Britain (on 11 February) and the next of kin informed. It was 12 February 1913 when she eventually entered Lyttelton harbour, her white ensign flying at half-mast. Here the crew found 'the Empire \u2013 almost the civilised world \u2013 in mourning. It was as though they had lost great friends'.4\n\nAt home, Lois heard the news on 11 February. She was in Gower. When the expedition funds had become seriously depleted after a year in Antarctica, volunteers in the crew, including Edgar, had offered to forgo their pay for twelve months. The decision had had a domino effect on the dependents and Lois and her children had moved back to Gower to live with her parents. She was on the beach with her youngest son, Ralph, when the telegram arrived. It was from New Zealand, sent by Commander Teddy Evans and forwarded from Portsmouth. It read simply: 'Members wish to express deepest sympathy in your sad loss.'5\n\nThe older children heard rumours of the disaster at school, but the full extent of their loss was only clarified when a journalist from the _South Wales Daily Post_ arrived to interview Lois. The reporter, describing her condescendingly as 'quite a superior and refined little woman', wrote that she had said: 6\n\nI received a bundle of letters last May, which had been brought to New Zealand by Commander Evans when he left the party.7 They were about fifty in number and covered the period of a whole year. The last one which though undated appeared either to have been written in December 1911 or January of last year was written in pencil. It stated that he was only 150 miles from the Pole and that the party were in good health and very confident of success. Since then I have heard nothing until this morning.8\n\nFrom the first she stoically supported her man: she told the press, 'I have this consolation; my husband died bravely and it seems he did not have to undergo such suffering as the other members of the party went through.'9 Her widowed mother-in-law, Mrs Sarah Evans, also rallied to the cause: 'I was always proud of my boy and am prouder than ever to know that he died a hero's death.'10 But just a few days later a reporter from the _South Wales Daily Post_ found Mrs Evans distressed at the rumour that it was 'through Edgar that the other members of the party had lost their lives'; Mrs Evans said, 'I'm worried because I feel that if he hadn't broken down they \u2013 Captain Scott and the rest of them \u2013 would have been alive to-day.' She went on, 'I can't help thinking about it all the time ever since I read about them being \u2013 forced to wait for him... Perhaps it would have been better if they had left him behind.'11\n\nThe reporter wrote that despite all efforts, the 'worthy old dame refused to be comforted'.12\n\nA local memorial service was speedily arranged on Sunday 16 February in St Mary's church, Rhossili. Following this, mention was made in the _Gower Church Magazine_ of that damaging phrase in Captain Scott's last message about, the 'strong man of the party \u2013 the man whom we had least expected to fail'. But the _Gower Church Magazine_ went on: 'A thrill of sympathy was felt all over the world on receiving the tragic news of the death of the five heroes on their return journey after the discovery of the South Pole. Rich and poor have sent messages of heartfelt sympathy with those who have been stricken with grief and have suffered such a loss.'13\n\nMemorial Services were held for Edgar in Cardiff and in chapels and churches throughout Gower. In Swansea's Albert Hall, prayers were offered for the bereaved of Gower,14 and Lois did have valued support from many sources; Commander Teddy Evans had suffered his own bereavement when his wife, Hilda, died from peritonitis on the return from New Zealand. He had moved on from the days of his antagonism to Edgar and clearly empathised with Lois to whom he wrote a gracious and consoling letter:\n\nDear Mrs Evans,\n\nI am writing to sympathise with you on your terrible bereavement.\n\nYour husband died a gallant death on the return march from the Pole after faithfully serving his leader, Capt. Scott, through a most trying time\n\nHe lost his life for the honour of his country, and the British Navy will be proud of having possessed such a brave man. His 'grit' will for ever be an example to the lower deck, his ability was remarkable and I wish to convey to you from the whole expedition our sorrow.\n\nI also write to tell you of the admiration we felt for your dead husband.\n\nI shall soon be in England, and I will see that you and yours will never want. If you are in immediate need write at once to:\n\nMr Wilkinson Green\n\nSecretary to Sir Edgar Speyer, Bart,\n\n7 Lothbury, London EC,\n\nI cannot tell you how sorry I am for you.\n\nBelieve me,\n\nYour sincere friend\n\nEdward G.R. Evans\n\nCommander R.N.15\n\nThis generous and supportive letter must have been a talisman to Lois that she could treasure. A letter from one of her husband's officers to cherish, words that would sustain and guard her and the children against all slights. Teddy Evans was as good as his word. He travelled to meet Lois to hand over Edgar's pocket book (sealed with two government seals and only to be opened by her). Yet another Evans, this time the Acting Secretary of the British Antarctic Expedition Committee, visited her and guaranteed that she and her children would receive enough money to cover their needs, until the relief fund, organised by his committee was in actual operation.\n\nLois said afterwards that, in relation to finance, she was pleased with the arrangements made for her future. The Admiralty had announced that the two naval representatives on the expedition, Scott and Edgar, would be treated as if they had been killed in action, so Lois received Admiralty and government pensions of approximately \u00a391 p.a. and a lump sum of \u00a396. The Admiralty pension included money for her children (2 shillings per week for each child until the boys were 14 and Muriel was 16),16 though Lois had to prove her children were still alive each year before receiving the government pension.17 Additionally she received income of \u00a31,250 from a trust fund raised by voluntary subscription. International as well as national organisations had contributed to the fund; it was said that the widows and orphans were wards not only of England but of the Empire.18 As well as these monies she had Edgar's British Antarctic Expedition salary of \u00a344 per year.\n\nAll this was a relief to Lois; the total she received was a very significant figure to her, far more than a Petty Officer's salary and probably a larger sum than she had ever dreamed of (though the monies recluded her taking up an offer from the London Orphanage Asylum, to board and lodge and educate one of her children until the age of 15). The sum was, in fact, considerably less than the money allocated to Scott's widow Kathleen, who received a lump sum of \u00a32,676, Admiralty and government pensions of \u00a3325 p.a. and the income from a combined trust fund of \u00a312,000 in addition to Scott's British Antarctic Expedition salary and income from books and articles.19 But the settlements granted to Lois, relatively modest as they were, gave her independence and dignity.\n\nThere were some national tributes: The Royal Humane Society's tribute of 11 February recorded 'its deepest sympathy and condolence to the relatives of Seaman (Petty Officer) Edgar Evans R.N'.20 The British Schools and University Club of New York sent Lois a three-page address in careful calligraphy (saying that 'overcome in the Polar desert, they died for the honour of England').21 _The Scotsman_ of 17 February 1913 wrote that Edgar had been a splendid seaman and his Commander's faithful sledge comrade in the memorable inland expeditions. The _Daily Express_ started a fund by selling Scott Memorial Booklets (6 _d_ for twelve).\n\nLois was not present at the memorial service in St Paul's cathedral, on 14 February, which was reported in _The Times_ as a 'National Homage to the Dead'.22 The mourners were led by King George and attended by representatives of the Scott, Oates, Bowers and Wilson families, but not Lois. It is not clear if she was invited. If so, perhaps she simply had not got the funds, or the inclination to travel to London so soon after receiving the news that she was a widow. It was a big occasion; attending were government ministers, Ambassadors and 'ministers of foreign states', national services, scientific societies and 'representatives of official life'. The _Dead March_ from _Saul_ was introduced by a roll of drums and was one of the most moving parts of the ceremony, which concluded with the National Anthem.23 The Cathedral was full; an estimated 10,000 people were unable to get in. But Lois was pleased when, after the ceremony, Frank and Eliza Evans, the parents of Commander Evans, wrote to her saying that it was only the Will of Providence that had taken one Evans instead of another. 'We trust that you, your children and your husband's mother will in time recover from the effects of the terrible misfortune which has fallen upon you.' 24\n\nOn 26 July King George V, with Prince Louis of Battenberg in attendance (a Lord Commissioner of the Admiralty), received the widows of those who had lost their lives in the expedition at an investiture in Buckingham Palace. During the private ceremony the King presented the wives with the medals and clasps that had been awarded to their late husbands in an event that must have been overwhelming for Lois. These Polar Medals were octagonal and hung on ribbons on which engraved clasps were suspended, each clasp recording the dates of the expedition that the recipient had been on. Edgar had been awarded his Polar Medal and Clasp after the _Discovery_ expedition, so Lois was presented with his 'Antarctic 1910\u20131913' clasp by the King in recognition of her husband's role.25\n\nKing George then went on to decorate surviving members of the expedition with their Antarctic Medals and Clasps (plus additional Albert Medals26 to PO Crean and Chief Stoker William Lashly for their bravery in saving the life of Commander Evans). 'Birdie' Bowers' medal was then presented to his mother and Commander Evans accepted Oates' medal on behalf of the family.27 There was a problem, however, over Edgar's actual 1902\u201304 medal; Lois had sold it,28 presumably when she was in financial difficulties in the later years of the _Terra Nova_ expedition. Subsequently a duplicate medal was made and given Lois in 1914.29 Robert Swan carried this medal and the clasps to the South Pole on his 1984\u201386 expedition that followed Scott's 1911 route.30\n\nIn contrast to the other explorers, Edgar's death was not followed by an outpouring of Welsh (or British) patriotic grief. This can be explained in several ways. Firstly, those national newspapers which had expressed their reservations about Edgar's role, that he had 'let the side down', that his companions, by staying with him had imperilled their own lives,31 had resulted in unease and, consequently, a reluctance to bang the nationalistic drum with too much fervour. If it was true that Edgar had been the weak link that brought the party down, especially if he had not faced death with the dignity of Captain Oates, then this was an outcome that could not be eulogised. Secondly, there was local suspicion that Edgar had neglected his family.32 But Edgar had never meant to ignore his family. When he signed on he was due to retire from the Navy after a few years and he hoped that the years in Antarctica would actually secure their future. The expedition's finances were well out of his sphere. Other crew members left their wives and children. To criticise him for leaving Lois and the children in need is being wise after the event. Importantly, his family never doubted this; his father-in law and his wife praised him as a good father, son and husband. The third reason for reserve was the nationally deeply engrained Edwardian prejudices concerning rank and education.\n\nThere were a few attempts to raise support for a memorial in Wales. The Swansea newspaper _The Cambrian_ called for there to be... 'at Swansea or in Gower some permanent memorial to the honour of Petty Officer Evans, who thus links this locality with one of the most heroic exploits of the British race'.33 The _South Wales Daily Post_ reported the mayor of Swansea as saying, 'this is an occasion when the whole country will take the matter up. But there is also a local aspect and in movements of this kind Swansea has never been behind'.34 But virtually nothing happened. Calls for a permanent memorial in South Wales fell on deaf ears. No specific memorial for Edgar appeared in Cardiff or Swansea, though a clock tower in the shape of a lighthouse, with the names of the Polar Party above the door, was presented to Cardiff city and sited by the lake in a city park.\n\nThe only memorial erected in the early years was put up in 1914, by Edgar's loyal, determined, widow.\n\nThe _Gower Church Magazine_ reads:\n\nA beautiful memorial tablet has been erected in Rhossili Church to the memory of the late Mr Edgar Evans Chief Petty Officer, who accompanied Captain Scott to the utmost point of the South Pole, and who perished on the return journey, to be much lamented by his widow and widowed mother, both at the time the news reached them residing at Rhossili Parish.35\n\nThe tablet is inscribed:\n\n_To the Glory of God_\n\n_In the memory of_\n\n_EDGAR EVANS_36\n\nThe Rector, who had married Lois and Edgar nearly ten years earlier, told the congregation that Edgar would go down in history as 'one who was deemed worthy to be chosen among the few last out of the band of heroes to accompany Captain Scott to the South Pole'.37 The Reverend Lewis Hughes said that Scott had valued Edgar as 'the strong man of the party, one with a wonderful head, equal to any emergency and brave in the face of difficulty'.38 He added (optimistically) that Edgar would never be 'forgotten by his country or fade from its annals' and that the expedition had 're-taught a world growing more luxurious and effeminate, the glory of a  soldier's endurance and capacity for stern duty'. He concluded (including Edgar in his comments, in spite of the pejorative comments concerning Edgar's education) that the 'expedition encouraged the possession of scientific courage to the last'.39\n\nEdgar would not have cast himself in the heroic mould. He was a sailor who had made the most of his opportunities. Like many people he probably hoped to benefit from the remarkably successful ventures to which he had contributed. But Antarctica had become a fascination to him. Personal gain had not been the main motive for him taking part in sorties that had so significantly increased knowledge about the unknown continent for the benefit of Britain and the world. But equally, he did nothing to deserve the comments about his 'astonishing failure', which cast a long shadow. Mud sticks and Edgar was temporarily, if lightly, airbrushed out of the record of the Antarctic heroes. He was not mentioned in the 1920 or 1933 _Who's Who_ of Wales. He is still not in the _Dictionary of Eminent Welshmen_ or the _Dictionary of Welsh Biography_. Indeed, national recognition took years.\n\nEven after the Second World War, appreciation came in small, slow steps. In 1948, Lois, by now the only wife remaining of the Polar Party, was an honoured guest at the premiere of the Royal Command film _Scott of the Antarctic_ with her sons, Ralph and Norman. Edgar was played by the acclaimed actor, James Robertson Justice. The film gave belated recognition to Edgar's contribution to Scott's expeditions.\n\nIn 1954, Sarah Evans (the niece who had gone to wave goodbye to Edgar in Cardiff in 1910) recorded her reminiscences which were the basis of an article, _Edgar Evans: A Gower Hero_40 written by Dr Gwent Jones, a founder member of the Gower Society. Later, a piece appeared in the _South Wales Evening Post_.41 This reignited the enthusiasm of the curator of Swansea Museum, Mr Stanley Richards, who canvassed vigorously for greater recognition, at least in Wales, of Edgar's contributions. Mr Richards wrote about Edgar as _The Martyred Hero of Antarctica_ , and mounted a vigorous crusade on Edgar's behalf. Specifically he campaigned for a local memorial in Swansea.\n\nMajor recognition came initially from outside Wales. In 1964 HMS _Excellent_ , the Royal Naval Gunnery School at Whale Island, Portsmouth, built a new accommodation block for the petty officers; the building was named 'The Edgar Evans Building'. It had a plaque that commemorated Edgar and displayed a pair of original skis used during the expedition. This was an important piece of Naval social history; the building was the first to be named for a Petty Officer (rather than a famous admiral) and showed that, fifty years after his death, Edgar's contribution was being recognised \u2013 at least by the Navy. Members of Edgar's family attended the opening and the Second Sea Lord; Sir Royston Wright, spoke of Edgar's strength of character, devotion, loyalty and bravery.42 The buildings were replaced in 2009 by a bigger, better accommodation block with a conference room and ballroom, but which retained Edgar's name. Opened by The Princess Royal in the presence of Edgar's grandson, John, and his great-grandson, Joshua, the buildings were named after two naval war heroes: Chief Gunner Israel Harding VC,43 44 Sergeant Norman Fitch VC45 and Edgar. The plaque and skis remain in a prominent position.\n\nIn 1974, Dr A.F. Rogers, an Antarctic veteran, produced an article on Edgar's death in _The Practitioner_.46 The article was of extreme importance because it was the first to consider in an objective manner, _medical_ causes that could have contributed to Edgar's death. But critical assessments of Edgar's perceived disadvantages47 and the inference he was not wholly loyal to Scott,48 belittled his reputation in spite of other objective articles, which considered his medical problems.49 50\n\nFinally, in 1994, Swansea Council hosted a Civic Ceremony with Edgar's daughter Muriel, aged 87, as guest of honour. Camera artist Herbert Ponting's film of the _Terra Nova_ expedition was shown and the Lord Lieutenant of West Glamorgan presented a bust of Edgar to the city. Here at last was the recognition that Edgar deserved. Sir Michael Llewellyn, the Lord Lieutenant, described Edgar as a very courageous man and the Lord Mayor of Swansea, reminding his audience that Edgar had his roots firmly in south-west Gower and suggesting that perhaps his recognition had been 'much too long in coming'.51 Gary Gregor's appreciation of _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer_52 was published in 1995.\n\nAppreciation continued outside Wales. Books such as _Captain Scott_ by Ranulph Fiennes,53 _Antarctic Destinies_ by Stephanie Barczewski,54 and _A First Rate Tragedy_ by Diana Preston55 gave an unbiased assessment of Edgar's contribution. New Zealand survey expeditions preserved his name by naming two geographical features in the Ross Dependency after him: the Evans Piedmont Glacier, a low coastal ice sheet offVictoria Land named in the 1950s by a New Zealand survey party and the Evans N\u00e9v\u00e9, named by a New Zealand geological survey in the 1960s.\n\nEdgar's status and character is now being re-established after years of disparagement. Reappraisal of Scott's expedition, in relationship to current scientific knowledge, has produced physical reasons for his untimely death.\n\nThose perceived defects, Edgar's rank and relative lack of education (factors completely beyond his control), are now understood to have played an insignificant role. Any doctor today, giving as his first diagnosis that Edgar's deterioration was due primarily to non-physical causes, could reasonably be accused of negligence. The implication that the lack of rational thought reflects inferiority and that rational thought is evidence of man at his highest level (and can protect a man by supplying him with greater reserves in adversity), is surely wrong. To suggest that Edgar could have avoided death, or faced it with greater composure, grit and courage if he had had a better education, is fanciful. The consolations of education and philosophy can only go so far. Any man facing death is more likely, if he can think at all, to be thinking of his immediate necessities, rather than of Virgil or other thinkers' philosophies.\n\nIn relation to the contrasting ways that Edgar and Captain Oates met their deaths, the situations are completely different. Oates was credited with meeting death in a magnificent, gentlemanly way because he remained in control of himself. He was able to articulate his last thoughts for his mother and his regiment, whilst Edgar was not able to make decisions or leave messages. But the reason that Oates remained in control of his actions was that, in contrast to Edgar, he was fully conscious throughout, only too horribly aware of his agonising gangrenous foot (which it is reasonable to assume obliterated the comforting solaces of philosophy or education). Although Oates may have wished for the relief of diminished consciousness, he remained, perforce, fully cognisant. He was able to make a decision, therefore, on when he thought that all hope for recovery or survival was finished and when his condition was materially damaging his companion's chances. Then, he ended his life for the benefit of his comrades. If Edgar had been aware of what was happening to him, he might well have done the same, but in his toxic and confused state he had no control over the way he died.\n\nEdgar is now mentioned in the _Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales_56 and the _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography_.57 He fully deserves his heroic place in Antarctic history: for his contributions to the _Discovery_ expedition when with Scott and Lashly, he was in the first group to travel on the plateau and, on their return, to make the striking geographical discoveries of the Dry Valleys in the Western Mountains; for his contributions to the _Terra Nova_ expedition, his expertise and practicality as sledging expert, his willingness to impart this knowledge to his colleagues, his humour and his self-control, right up until the last days of the final Polar Assault.\n\nScott appreciated his numerous gifts and Edgar reciprocated with a loyalty that endured despite the divisions of class, rank and education. He died as he had lived \u2013 doing his best.\n\n### Notes\n\n1 _Western Mail_ , 13\/02\/1913.\n\n2 _Nottingham Guardian_ , 13\/02\/1913.\n\n3 Pound, R., _Evans of the Brook_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1963, p. 123.\n\n4 Cherry-Garrard, A., _The Worst Journey in the World_ , Picador, London, 2001, p. 593.\n\n5 _Morning Post_ , 12\/02\/1913.\n\n6 _Morning Post_ , 12\/02\/1913.\n\n7 Lieutenant Teddy Evans suffered very badly, almost fatally, from scurvy when he led the final Supporting Party back from the plateau in 1912. He returned to England on the _Terra Nova_.\n\n8 All these letters appear to have been destroyed.\n\n9 _Morning Post_ , 12\/02\/1913.\n\n10 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 12\/02\/1913.\n\n11 _Cambrian_ , 21\/02\/1913.\n\n12 Ibid.\n\n13 _Gower Church Magazine_ , 17\/02\/1913.\n\n14 Gregor, G.C., _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer: Edgar Evans 1876\u20131912_ , Swansea City Council, 1995, p. 73.\n\n15 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 13\/02\/1913.\n\n16 Jones, M., _The Last Great Quest_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 108.\n\n17 Ibid., p.107.\n\n18 _Times_ , 19\/02\/1913.\n\n19 Jones, M., _The Last Great Quest_ , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, p. 108.\n\n20 Sotheby's catalogue, SPRI 07\/10\/1984.\n\n21 Ibid.\n\n22 _Times_ , Saturday, 15 February 1913, p. 8, issue 40136; Col A.\n\n23 _Western Mail_ , 15\/02\/1913.\n\n24 _Cambrian_ , 21\/02\/1913.\n\n25 Ibid.\n\n26 The Albert Medal was first issued in 1866 and discontinued in 1971. Originally issued for saving life at sea, it was extended in 1877 to cover saving life on land.\n\n27 _Times_ , Monday 28 July 1913, p. 9, Issue 40275, Col A. Court Circular.\n\n28 Personal communication, John Evans, Edgar's grandson, 2010.\n\n29 Yelverton, D., _Antarctic Unveiled_ , University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Appendix 8.\n\n30 Mear, R.; Swan, R., _In the Footsteps of Scott_ , Jonathan Cape, London, 1987. p. 142.\n\n31 _Times_ , 06\/11\/1913.\n\n32 Gregor, G., _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer Edgar Evans 1876\u20131912_ , Swansea City Council, Swansea, 1995, p. 82.\n\n33 _Cambrian_ , 14\/02\/1913.\n\n34 _South Wales Daily Post_ , 14\/02\/1913.\n\n35 _Gower Church Magazine_ , March 1914.\n\n36 There were two mistakes on this commemorative tablet. The words 'to seek, to strive, to find and not to yield' were written on it rather than, 'to strive, to seek, to find' and in the relief above the tablet the explorers were depicted with one ski-stick (as had been used in _Discovery_ days) rather than two.\n\n37 _Gower Church Magazine_ , March 1914.\n\n38 Ibid.\n\n39 Ibid.\n\n40 Jones, G., _Edgar Evans: A Gower Hero_ , Gower, 1954, vol. vii.\n\n41 _South Wales Evening Post_ , 05\/02\/1954.\n\n42 _Portsmouth Evening News_ , 18\/12\/1964.\n\n43 Victoria Cross. This is the highest military decoration. It is awarded for valour in the face of the enemy to members of the armed forces of the Commonwealth countries.\n\n44 Israel Harding, 1833\u20131917.Victoria Cross awarded for Harding's bravery in defusing a live shell that landed on HMS _Alexandra_ in Alexandria in1882. His action saved many lives.\n\n45 Norman Finch 1890\u20131966.Victoria Cross awarded for his defence of HMS _Vindictive_ at Zeebrugge in 1918, when, severely wounded, he continued to defend the ship against enemy fire, firing from an exposed position and saving many lives.\n\n46 Rogers, A.F., _The Death of Chief Petty Officer Evans_ , The Practitioner, _212_ , 1974.\n\n47 Huntford, R., _Scott and Amundsen_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London 1979, p. 522.\n\n48 Ibid., p. 520.\n\n49 Falckh, R.C.F., _The Death Of Chief Petty Officer Evans_ , Polar Record, 1987, 23(145).\n\n50 Williams, I., _Edward Wilson, medical aspects of his life and career_ , Polar Record, 2008, _44_ (228).\n\n51 Gregor, G., _Swansea's Antarctic Explorer Edgar Evans 1876\u20131912_ , Swansea City Council, Swansea, 1995, p. 82.\n\n52 Ibid.\n\n53 Fiennes, R., _Captain Scott_ , Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2003.\n\n54 Barczewski, S., _Antarctic Destinies_ , Hambledon Continuum, London, 2007.\n\n55 Preston, D., _A First Rate Tragedy_ , Constable, London, 1997.\n\n56 Ed. Stephens, M., _Oxford Companion to the Literature Of Wales_ , Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 187.\n\n57 _Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,_ Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 680\u2013681.\n\n## Plate Section\n\n1. Edgar as a young adult showing his proficiency badges. (Courtesy of Swansea Museum)\n\n2. Edgar's father in 1893. By this time he was a Quartermaster, sailing up the west coast of England from Swansea to Glasgow. (Courtesy of Keith Roberts)\n\n3. St Mary's church, Rhossili. (Courtesy of G.C. Gregor)\n\n4. Rhossili Bay. (Courtesy of G.C. Gregor)\n\n5. HMS _Ganges_ , a Training Hulk in Cornwall. (Wikipedia)\n\n6. SS _Discovery_. (By kind permission of Dundee Heritage Trust)\n\n7. The pack ice. (Courtesy of D.J. Williams)\n\n8. The ice Barrier. (Courtesy of D.J. Williams)\n\n9. Map of Antarctica showing Transantarctic mountain range. (Courtesy of D.J. Williams)\n\n10. A general view of the hut and Discovery at the bayside of Hut Point. (By kind permission of Dundee Heritage Trust)\n\n11. Southern depot parties preparing to start, 1902. (By kind permission of Dundee Heritage Trust)\n\n12. Sastrugi formed by the wind on Crater Hill. (By kind permission of Dundee Heritage Trust)\n\n13. Scott's hut at Cape Evans (named after Lieutenant 'Teddy' Evans), with Mount Erebus in the background. (Courtesy of Scott Polar Research Institute \u2013 SPRI)\n\n14. The Emperor penguin colony in Cape Crozier. (Image by Reginald Skelton. Courtesy of the Skelton Bequest to SPRI)\n\n15. _Discovery_ and the Aurora Australis. (Edward A. Wilson painting. Courtesy of Dundee Heritage Trust)\n\n16. The foot of the Ferrar Glacier. (NASA image)\n\n17. Modern picture of the field gun run which Edgar's team won for Portsmouth in 1907. (Courtesy of HMS _Excellent_ , Portsmouth Museum)\n\n18. The Western Depot Party, 1911. _From left to right_ : Griffith Taylor, Charles Wright, Lieutenant 'Teddy' Evans, Lieutenant 'Birdie' Bowers, Captain Scott, Frank Debenham, Sub-Lieutenant Tryggve Gran, PO Edgar Evans, PO Thomas Crean. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n19. Edgar on tour. (Courtesy of Adrian Raeside)\n\n20. The Ferrar and Koettlitz Glaciers, Cape Evans, Hut Point and the Dry Valley Map. (Courtesy of Peter Fretwell)\n\n21. Satellite image of the winter ice around Ross Island. Note that two large icebergs, A and B, have calved off the Ross Ice Shelf. A is nearly as big as Ross Island. B is approximately 178 miles long. (NASA image annotated by D.J. Williams)\n\n22. Edgar dressed for exploration. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n23. A dry valley. (NASA image)\n\n24. The journey to the Pole, 1911. (Map courtesy of D.J. Williams)\n\n25. The motor party led by Lieutenant 'Teddy' Evans, October 1911. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n26. Edgar Evans, 'Birdie' Bowers, Edward Wilson and Robert Scott in the tent. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n27. Tom Crean (left) repairing sleeping bags with Edgar Evans, during the winter months 1911. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n28. Edgar's modification to enable finneskoes to be securely fitted to skis, Antarctic winter 1911. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n29. Dr Atkinson's frostbitten fingers. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n30. Edgar Evans dressing Dr Atkinson's fingers. (Courtesy of SPRI)\n\n31. Edgar's naval memorial plaque fixed to an accommodation block named after Edgar in 1964 at HMS _Excellent_ , an important piece of Royal Naval social history. (Image courtesy of Jane Gregor)\n\n32. Lois' memorial for Edgar. In the memorial the men are shown using one ski stick rather than the two that were used in the _Terra Nova_ expedition. The quotation from Tennyson's _Ulysses_ should read: 'to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.' (Courtesy of Jane Gregor)\n\n33. Edgar's widow Lois with Norman, one of their sons, at the premier of _Scott of the Antarctic_ , in 1948. (Courtesy of John Evans)\n\n34. Edgar's Polar medals taken to the South Pole by Swann in 1987. (Courtesy of G.C. Gregor)\n\n## Copyright\n\nFirst published in 2012\n\nThe History Press\n\nThe Mill, Brimscombe Port\n\nStroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG\n\nwww.thehistorypress.co.uk\n\nThis ebook edition first published in 2012\n\nAll rights reserved\n\n\u00a9 Isobel Williams, 2012\n\nThe right of Isobel Williams, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.\n\nThis ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.\n\nEPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 7760 2\n\nMOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 7759 6\n\nOriginal typesetting by The History Press\n\nEbook compilation by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n_The Bad Wife Handbook_\n_The Bad Wife Handbook_\n\nRachel Zucker\n\nWESLEYAN POETRY\n\nWesleyan University Press  \nMIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT\nPublished by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459\n\nwww.wesleyan.edu\/wespress\n\n\u00a9 2007 by Rachel Zucker\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nPrinted in the United States of America\n\n5 4 3 2 1\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nZucker, Rachel.\n\nThe bad wife handbook \/ Rachel Zucker.\n\np. cm. -- (Wesleyan poetry)\n\nISBN-13: 978-0-8195-6846-5 (alk. paper)\n\nISBN-10: 0-8195-6846-5 (alk. paper)\n\nI. Title.\n\nPS3626.U26B33 2007\n\n811'.6--dc222007019778\n\n\"Cover photograph by Celeste Fichter.\"\n_In spite of_  \n _& because,  \nJoshua Goren_\nContents\n\nMonogamist 3\n\nThe Museum of Accidents 4\n\nCodary 5\n\nThe Secret Room 6\n\nFirmament 7\n\nMonogamist 8\n\nGalaxies Rushing Away 9\n\nAxon, Dendrite, Rain 10\n\nRhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker 11\n\nHermeneutic 12\n\nThe Tell 13\n\nWhere I Went Instead of Paris 14\n\nWife, Wife, Duck 15\n\nIt Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon 16\n\nAlluvial 17\n\nMonogamist 18\n\nMy Beautiful Wickedness 19\n\nFloating Wick in Petrol 20\n\nBridle 21\n\nThought, Antithoughts 22\n\nSex 23\n\nWhat Is Not Science is Art is Nature 24\n\nFreud Had Sex but Jung Had God 26\n\nSquirrel in a Palm Tree 31\n\nAnnunciation 51\n\nThe Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma 71\n\nAutographies 89\n\n_Acknowledgments, Dedications, and Notes_ 113\n\n... synonyms do not exist.\n\n\u2014 _Donald Hall_\n_Monogamist_\n\nA human being can't compare  \nsize and brightness\n\non two occasions. So we say  \n _the moon has a dark side_.\n\nWe say _the tide twice a day_.  \nI say _that man there, so unlike_\n\n_my husband_.\n_The Museum of Accidents_\n\nThe school girl's tights speckle  \nin the rain. In the city\n\nthe sparrow on sparrow feet skips  \nacross my path, legs invisible.\n\nWe are bound. Similar,\n\nindistinct forms called bodies,\n\nour Milky Way's spiral arms\u2014\n\nstars, nebulae, matter\u2014\n\nbound\n\nto great disaster.\n_Codary_\n\nOnce he was a type, kind, tide,  \nbut became a singularity.\n\nI stopped breathing.\n\nWhere the husband's orbit overlaps: darkness.  \nNo light can be shed on what lies beyond this\n\ngravitational sheer,  \nharsh polarity\n\nof wanting.\n_The Secret Room_\n\nIsn't hidden. Nor filled with goods  \nor bodies. This feeling\u2014\n\n[strip the wallpaper,  \nknock for panels]\n\nI can't explain it\u2014is always,  \nI think his gaze made it. I say\n\nwhat I don't intend  \nso as to say something of\n\nthis tending, tendency, tender  \nunsayable place I mean to take him.\n_Firmament_\n\nBelow his clean shadow:  \na sunlit prairie. A wheat field\n\nfrom the air: plush and temperate.\n\nThe breeze is a brave caress. There is  \nsomething I see in him: tip, edge, hint\n\n\u2014the skin of it. Shifting wheat\n\nover soil over cavern over water  \nover igneous over molten.\n_Monogamist_\n\nRiding a bike down a flight  \nof steps misnames them,\n\nreveals their lusty gravity.\n\nHave you heard that Brontosaurus  \nis a Camarasaurus head on\n\nan Apatosaurus body?\u2014my  \nlove's like that: shaped,\n\nnamed beast did, did not exist.\n\nThey should be called falls, this  \nplummet.\n_Galaxies Rushing Away_\n\nI'm trying not to try to  \nget him into bed. Instead I try\n\nbut the husband flinches when I  \nand flinches when I say\n\n_I love you_ and I do  \nlove you but say\n\n_I'm meeting a woman named Kate_.  \nThen, off to the winebar, order\n\n_sancerre_ , nice summery white at $7\/glass;  \nhe, me, and vast millions are fast,\n\n\u2014red shift getting redder, every galaxy  \nfrom every galaxy, vow, promise, primordial\n\natom\u2014rushing faster, all on our way  \nto greater disorder.\n_Axon, Dendrite, Rain_\n\nWhen he speaks I am allowed to look at him.  \nLet this perfect conjure slide over (all over)  \nthe thought reaching out to my loud now\u2014\n\nI want to\u2014\n\nbut find no way to make my hands  \nnatural, accidental. I try to make his skin  \na chaste idea. But even his gloves, made from slaughtered  \ngoats, their pliable kid leather become a bias-cut  \nslip, myelin sheath, the impulse _jumps_  \nnode-to-node, too fast for capture.\n\nThe body.\n\nLess, less real. I am aware of wanting  \nto look at him. In the long space  \nin which others speak I cannot look at him.\n\n_take your clothes off_\n\nAnd I do. In dream after dream, except  \nlast night when I'm running a long way  \nin the rain and, basketball in one hand, he  \nstands watching. And when he watches\u2014  \nI run and run, do not wake up  \nbut that\u2014(there,) that, that, that: rain  \nat my window, husband in my bed.\n_Rhyme, Lascivious Matchmaker_\n\nEach time I try to\u2014  \nhere comes my husband again and\n\nmy mind, I'm describing; context.\n\nForgive me, anemone, my green clearing.  \nHe is no still pool, but actual.\n\nIf I showed him my skull below the skin  \nthen threw out the skin, would he wipe clean\n\nthe bone? A thin gold wire  \nprevents my jaw from metaphor or...\n\nHis v-neck suggests\u2014  \nThe bruised way he sits\u2014\n\nWhat to do with his lips\u2014\n_Hermeneutic_\n\nThe sea is supposed to be something  \nmore than a saline menagerie.\n\nI thought to be full of feeling  \nrather than _with child_ was\n\nmutable, could stay small, but now I'm  \ndesolate, fleeting, pierced with this blunt\n\nfissure. My babies left a narrow passage  \nwhere longing festers. And here he entered.\n\nBrutal shunt, my heart fills  \nwith sea water. Involuntary muscles\n\nseize, shudder, refuse to scar.\n_The Tell_\n\nThe basketball makes him not my husband  \nand saying so in poems makes me\n\nthe bad wife. Where is the private, i.e., impassive  \nmask I purchased for my wedding\n\nbut then forgot to wear?\n\nMy mind wrote me a letter requesting to be  \nleft out of it. My body sent flowers\n\nand a note: \"sorry for your loss.\"  \nBut both paid to see the flop and stayed in 'til the river.\n\n_Better to fold the winning hand than fall in love_  \n _with your cards_ , says the husband.\n_Where I Went Instead of Paris_\n\nIn the city, out windows, I fit his face  \nonto the faces of other men and boys\n\nand look away before it fades.  \nI have learned to fly by running fast,\n\nthough the waking body won't comply.  \nHis face is the face of all men\n\nnot my husband; I see him everywhere.\n\nIn the next dream I shave my head  \nand find my skull misshapen. In the next dream\n\nI am raped in the elevator. The doorman  \nsteps over my body. He has your face.\n_Wife, Wife, Duck_\n\nI'm not sure what this could be called \"doubt\"  \nbut that's too simple these clouds: grayer than white\n\n(the white sky behind) like the sky at evening.  \nTo wish the best for someone\n\nI love might mean leaving  \nor leaving him alone. To wish for\n\nhim. Wish for him to\u2014\n\n_It looks like rain_ means  \nit's not raining.\n_It Took 24 Hours to Make the Moon_\n\nI forgot to think of him today.\n\nMade of carbon, oxygen, calcium: you, him, I, stars.\n\nWhen a Mars-like body and Earth collided  \nwithin hours was a protoplanet named Moon\n\nand a planet moved away.  \nFor days\n\nI forget.\n\nMantle, core, ocean, air, I  \nam made of our\n\n\u2014air, air, air and air\u2014  \ncarved-out crater of impact.\n_Alluvial_\n\nThey say God's voice in the city  \nsounds like a man but in the desert\n\nsounds like a woman. His voice, the spine  \nof nighttime, sounds like water.\n\nRock grazed by streamlets long enough  \nwill sunder. One word against my sternum and\n\nI unzip.\n_Monogamist_\n\nI've fallen ________ with him, stupid  \nclich\u00e9, with his dark blue\n\nofficewear. Maybe\n\nI just love my little boy too much\u2014he  \nlooks like him\u2014itself a grievous treason.\n\nJust ask my older son. Ask  \nthe husband. Ask anyone. Ask\n\nthe language for one decent synonym  \nand watch it stutter: perseveration,\n\nobsession, attention to detail  \naren't love exactly nor is\n\nchastity enough punishment.\n_My Beautiful Wickedness_\n\nSomeone dropped a house on me  \nand stole my blood shoes.\n\nThe girl with her skipping and singing  \ncomes to kill me. What then will become\n\nof my spells, sole treasure I possess?\n\nWhat I see when what I see  \nis not there\u2014I know he feels it.\n\nLooking at him like this\n\nisn't a spell to make him  \nlove anyone\n\nbut might. All the good wife  \nwants is to go home.\n\nWhen no one watches  \nI teach the dog to fly.\n_Floating Wick in Petrol_\n\nI am too happy to see him.\n\nSomeone must be blamed. Perhaps  \nthe therapist or my marrying young.\n\n_Say_ , _are you really this beautiful?_\n\nI dream a woman puts a gun in my mouth  \nto make me choose\u2014lustrous, sleek, sexed.\n\nNext a jade green sandal from a bottom  \ndrawer. Suede wedge with straps\n\nthat wind around my shin. My foot  \nin the smooth cradle is lavish, ignitable.\n\nPlease, say you are a dress I can put on for tonight,  \nsay you are a gun or untouched leather\n\npurse, a beaded belt or denim  \npatch or felt-bottomed box or basted hem, say\n\nyou are a spiral binding or photo of a forest  \nframed in beeswax, say a hat pin, say a buckle\n\nsay a gun or polished knob, say anything\n_Bridle_\n\nI promised to stay steady,  \nbut who knew the rage\n\nof arbors?\n\nForests, groves, flagpoles,  \n _Stand_ , we told them. _Stay_.\n\nWhen we set up the blocking,  \nmarked my toe-stops with tape,\n\nI can't describe it\u2014  \nhow my shoes abrade,\n\nfit, like casket.\n_Thought, Antithoughts_\n\nI've nothing to hold him,  \nsuspect I've been dreaming\u2014\n\na woman awake, her  \nhusband breathing\u2014she wants\n\nto be anywhere.\n\nHe's a man  \nwho happened to notice\n\nI made him want  \nto play guitar\n\nbut he didn't. This is the winter  \nthe husband started snoring\n\nand science said free will  \nis a feeling we believe in.\n\nPost hoc confabulation.\n\nI must get up and attend  \nthe microorganisms.\n_Sex_\n\nWane, wax, wobble.  \nMy mind is a map of hunger.\n\nThey say Abulafia could stop his heart  \nwith one letter. _Alef_\n\nlodged in his semi-lunar valve.\n\nSmall _e_ after breath  \nis what I do to keep living.\n_What Is Not Science Is Art Is Nature_\n\nI am dreaming a hole right into the voice of God.  \nStraight into the dark place where my children were made\n\nbut can't follow me back to. Right into the room  \nwhose windows are too high up to see out,\n\nthough the sloped roof is too low for me to stand up.\n\nIn New York snow is unusual, arrives like childhood  \nmemories that might not have happened, disappears\n\nwithout changing anything. But do we say,  \nwhen it snows, because some countries\n\ndon't believe in snow, _I dreamed_  \n _of snow_? No, we say the news was right or wrong.\n\nWe say this strong desire for a window\u2014huge square  \nglass through which a child standing up in a crib\n\nat night alone in a room at the bottom of a flight  \nof stairs far from the mother in winter sees:\n\na Greenwich Village garden cast in urban glow,\n\nquiet, because snow in the '70s was enough  \nto make the city slow and mute\u2014is real.\n\nSo, say it really happened. That doesn't mean\n\nit will again or did. Or that the dream  \ndoesn't make you ordinary.\n_Freud Had Sex but Jung Had God_\n\nI take water  \ninto my lungs\n\nin lieu of him, want for air,  \nhave none and not\n\nbecause a good wife rose up in me  \nor a sharp right turn, bright\n\ndiscipline befell me: I wanted  \nsugar and salt in equal measure\n\none making the other desperate  \nthe now tasteless by turns desperate\n\nthis was this wanting of course  \nit was the kind of snow that never\n\nsticks\u2014O blizzard! wild sky at wit's end\u2014\n\nbut when I look again  \nthe street is barely stained\n\n(sugar, flurry, salt, drift)\n\nand the flat, clean air swears  \nsnow never fell here.\n\n_Squirrel in a Palm Tree_\n\nup, out of the sentry box over the parapet, bastion, rampart, breastwork\n\n[don't think \"I have left them...\"]\n\ndraw and look, lift\u2014erase, draw and lift and lift and lift\n\nan erasable slate  \nthe velum top sheet takes away\n\n[\"left them\"]\n\nup, over the country\n\nthe edge of coast and further out the clouds like stones in deep waters\n\na river delving the lush green\n\nmarsh an amorphous rum babba, soaked and spongy\n\ngrasses and cattails misstate the surface\n\nthe cabin has the sharp inhale of opening a gift\n\n\u00d8\n\nhigh ceiling (blue) and pink and gray striped walls shape me\n\nmake a naked Alice in the bath\n\nbig and tiny\n\nhere and far away\n\na wonder the body fits\n\nso mythic is the mother-absentia\n\ntundra of abandon\n\nI suffer the gift, silence,\n\nfor once, nothing happening\n\nnone using my name to mean anything\n\n\u00d8\n\nbed as wide as it is long\n\nthe night inhuman calm\n\nthe outlets and picture frames and decorative plates are safe\n\nthe bathtub and mirror and doors and linens\n\nI am as light as negligee\n\nhave not my army's entourage\n\n\u00d8\n\non Sunday I will step back into the living room littered with toys  \nthe two boys happy\/shy\/mad to see me  \nbut like I dawdled in the shower\n\nlike I never was anywhere but ready to answer\n\n_where is my?_\n\n_can't find the..._\n\nlook here, the light through the sycamores and dense magnolias  \nlive oaks tasked with spanish moss\n\na veranda you reach through a twelve-foot window\n\n_be_ real\n\n\u00d8\n\nunnaturally light  \nlike a various gravity exhibit at a science museum  \nmy mother has a necklace made of severed reeds  \nthat seem to weigh  \nless than air\n\nthey look like bird teeth or shell splinters\n\n\u2014Haiti? Australia? Peru?\n\nshe can't remember where she got it\n\nbut the stones\u2014emerald rough from Sri Lanka  \non the bookshelf near the kitchen; square, flat rock from Arizona  \non the mantle in the bedroom\u2014those she knows by heart\n\na life of picking things up and bringing them elsewhere\n\n\u00d8\n\nhere is the tree of my thirtieth birthday:  \na palm between two sycamores\n\nthe pineapple-totem trunk is a woven present\n\nfronds rustling to offset loneliness\n\nsquirrel feasts on hope\n\n\u00d8\n\nalone, the room gets smaller despite there being fewer people  \nthe TV approaches like a hopeful lover\n\nlet us, I say to myself, consider the children objectively, which is impossible:\n\nthe boys who are babies create a slavish planet. this means I am bending and lifting and every each moment listening for disaster which is silence where his \"dadaka\" and \"teka-te _kah_ \" pause is surely climbing or choking or considering mischief\n\non guard, keeper! be lively!\n\nanything which requires concentration is danger\u2014\n\nso drag myself to watchfulness with a stab of catastrophic thinking so tired, delighted  \nI've half a mind to leave them and no mind left to do it and nothing to spare of this utter love\n\nmother in a foreign make this real\n\n\u00d8\n\nsome day they will leave _you_\n\nand you will visit the kingdom of adult concerns and never leave\n\nand will want to and will dream of night wakings and tiny spoons of temperate cereal on hands and knees for spilled cumin seeds you will remember the every night of tiny things back in boxes and on shelves and under and in and the ache ache ache of your back as he learns to walk or the relief of finally squatting in a parking lot to nurse him stop that wail\n\na woman with young children is not a woman but a mammal, salve, croon, water carrier\n\nshe has a prize they all desire\n\nlift, lift, life\n\n\u00d8\n\nif there are nests discarded on the sidewalk  \nI step around them knowing what it costs to weave one\n\nonce my shadow was the shape of a bear or egg with arms and legs  \nnow slim and bony the boys sucked the melon-sweet milk right out of\n\na letting, flesh mongers\n\nand if the nest, a relic, outlasts the wind, rain, marauders,  \nit is always the cupped halo of ambivalence\n\ndesire won over by desire is not the same as satisfaction nor lust nor yet resolve  \nI don't believe in happiness\n\n\u00d8\n\nI am equally and at once estranged from the person I knew as I  \nand from the mossy being made so carefully\n\nthe child becomes a wedge between actions and self like a cyclone of gauze wraps himself around my mothering  \nand makes a hollow form\n\nshape: human\n\ncocoon around a maelstrom\n\n\u00d8\n\nin New York the apartment's windows face south and my son knows little of the sunset only that at night it's on the other side of the world\n\nsleep with me, he says  \nI like the other sheets, he says  \nlime in my sippy cup?  \nanything to keep me\n\nobject of desires, I never satisfy because my body is impractical,  \nboundaried, impermanent\n\nhere, on the balcony, dusk draws the bundled leaves on winter trees  \nlike hanging planters or Christmas ornaments\n\ntwenty minutes later the leaves are hedgehogs,  \nthe branches: flaws and fractures in the skin of twilight\n\nnow on the other side of the world, the sun's fiery descent means little when witnessed less when missed\n\nperception or staying is a mighty effort\n\n\u00d8\n\nif the language would slip I could see what limber chance remains me\n\nbut is always my chaperone\n\nthe moon is so full it must recline  \nthe hip is the location the child claims\n\nand aches\n\nfrom use, from absence, the whole pelvis an isosceles arrowhead  \nbarely a ledge the arm comes to scaffold him, the elbow buffer from gaudy onlookers  \nthe breast becomes the shy boy's brow-rest\u2014does he remember the Cyclops wonders?\n\nI remember his greedy squeezing kneading tiny nail edge  \nmy love a tinderboxinflamed, viral\n\nobese, inhale\n\nI miss...\n\nwhen the child falls forward and catches himself with his hands, stands carefully, bunches his face: _fine, fine_ , I get to hold him now and kiss his palms and put my nose against his cheek\n\n\u00d8\n\nwhen away from my tree I want to brag the treasure\n\nsmooth green globe  \nbefore the husk mars innocence\n\nmonumental nut  \nwhere can I bury such bounty?\n\nthe sugar-milk is too much at once and must be dealt with  \nbut there is no dividing beauty, no rationing\n\nI must escape my reputation for hoarding\u2014so in love with the heft of the Asian pear,  \nthe lusty hue of the persimmon, I keep and keep until they spoil\n\n\u2014 _Crack it!_\n\nthese edibles, not memories,  \nthe fontanel bones of his skull about to close\n\n\u00d8\n\nsome women cherish the fathomless want of infants\n\nas it is all around me I cannot muster judgment and having been stayed from my sentence these three days by a stutter of double dashes -- I --\n\nam still, I\n\non either side of the long spine lie two shallow ditches walk your finger tips along these furrows but never pressure the raised column holy like the horizon it is the going and the getting and the lifting and the carrying the bending and listening kneeling and squatting it is my fingers' careful sweeping the alphabet floor mat at four am for the rubber binky it is the way my body in his twin bed tricks him to sleep the way I tucked his baby face against my belly and stood and stooped and swung like a mechanical gadget and set him down and made the back stay hunched so the hand could stroke his hair and sleep him and stayed when the back protested and when the mind tried to make sense the body stopped it\n\nmy love is the bent body, the mastered spine\n\nthe coast is a sure painter's mark  \nbut the horizon is nothing human\n\nfrom this height the flat expanse of farms and plots and houses, speckled towns  \nlike the oyster, lime, and sand sidewalk they call \"tabby\"\n\nthen like flecks of polished shell the tilted glance makes the settled patches rise  \nlike lily pads on tree-green ponds, the roads lascivious zippers\n\nand the sun through the horizon crawl-space may be the moon  \nfor it is everywhere a glowing ring and cannot be a star rather some bulb  \njust this width greater than the earth's diameter\n\nwhether my body is in conflict with the plane's intention is irrelevant\n\nmy children at this remove are figures, figments\n\nthe difference between here and there\n\nplanes always wanted to\n\nlighthouse, cliffside, pride\n\nthey carry but do not mother\n\n20 miles from LaGuardia the houses are little studs punched into denim, no longer in fashion\n\nthe tugs make snags in the nylon surface of the ocean, the houses and trucks  \nalong the capillaries, when,\n\n_oh_ my\u2014\n\nthe fortress edges of Battery Park, airshaft depressions of empty lots  \nand unbought air rights and\n\nthe Empire State buildingamazing  \nwith her glinting, ramrod posture, suddenly\n\nalone above her waist-high charges\n\n_Annunciation_\n\n_traveling or intussusception (an introduction)_\n\nthere is an inside as in my child as I see him or, earlier, felt him\u2014\n\nmyself a stricture outside the real\u2014 there is an outside as in his real face, fake\n\nlaugh, mimic cry and, before, the body bigger: what it looked like\u2014\n\nthere is an inside: my mind at night a plan the word escape, and outside:\n\nI in bed the body in place, in my place I put myself, the body, in, a stand-in, harbor\u2014\n\nthere is inside a bric-a-brac system: faith or habit, what turns my head,\n\nfires along the ocular chiasm\u2014 pinpoint this\/that while the hand goes thoughtless\n\nafter: grab and pull, peel and core, locate and obtain\u2014\n\n_balcony (florence)_\n\nthe fact (Italy) being around us\u2014 we go-betweens\u2014 the sky an impossible duomo\n\nor drop cloth over the cage\u2014 traverse and return\u2014 we traverse and rest\u2014 one thought\n\nat the edges transgresses\u2014 what is disillusionment?\u2014 a young man whistles by\n\non a bike\u2014 Catholics believe in impure thoughts\u2014 even saying is happen\u2014 but I want\n\nto believe in interiors: spaces others don't conceive\u2014\n\nthe bicycle is overtaken by a moped and that by car and that by bus and everywhere\n\nthe crowd teeming, seeming from here human, a given, a context, granted\u2014\n\neach particular (woman with two small dogs stops, searches for key in purse) is a point\n\non a tangent (man on moped) of some veiny larger\u2014 you are out, I am here\u2014\n\nwithin the city wall\u2014 _portes_ \u2014 breaks in the wall, notional membrane on the map\u2014\n\n_santa maria del carmine_\n\nyou become is\u2014 and suddenly are\u2014 [we] not just an emblem, my other\u2014\n\nyou tried to avoid saying always avoiding I tell you to say, say _it_ but I also avoid\n\nbecause emblem and becoming symbol but suddenly between Masolino\n\nand Masaccio, symbol and symbol, you suddenly become and are\u2014 at home the baby\n\navoids sleep, crying, wanting to say but not knowing how, let's avoid him\n\nfor the while occupied, crying his own space\u2014 meanwhile my intestines and internal\n\nhave returned to normal although the package somewhat slack my mind sets\n\nto tighten and look around, look for\u2014 then at night, last night, you suddenly are\n\nand not this time the obstacle but rather good company, a voice in the room\u2014\n\nribs heavy on the bed my body a cage pushing both ways voice in my head open mouth slips\n\nout\u2014 suddenly is\u2014 _is_ \u2014 and edged, mountainous\u2014\n\n_bed_\n\ncannot call it forgiving this thin pad over wood but when you knock on the cage\n\nof my body I do not break no less forgiving I do not crush or falter this is what it is to be\n\nknocked-up? though mostly the motion is down and I am 'under' and then\n\ndon't think just am until that woman breathing isn't me, baby at the foot of the bed not mine\n\nbody not around or inside but me and rather than situation I feel you are a problem\n\nforce to reckon with I am you are breath, then an occasional motor bike, long gasping night\n\nthen nothing my body inside-out and in the after notice the quiet as it closes in\n\n_avoid_\n\nin the morning gone again and only body, presence but not is\u2014 is this\n\nwhat I married? you: here, a given\u2014 _is_ , as in: situation, situated (choice made before)\u2014\n\nsome search for the soul or mind in the body: I think it is a membrane around\n\nthe void, scrim between skin and bones\u2014 I feel it lingering, clinging\u2014 not deep but\n\nrooted to itself\u2014 not leaking (contained) not touching\u2014 one cannot touch it\u2014\n\ndoctors open but do not find, open but not reveal\u2014\n\nsituation: we are two within a larger\u2014 each around an empty inside a pulled skin\u2014\n\nsometimes in contact we have no choice but choose proximity to make a smaller\n\nsystem\u2014 parcel, context\u2014 block out the bright or heavy rain verdant\u2014 what I am trying\n\nto describe is disappearance: what happened and how you can be and invisible,\n\nbe but not is\u2014 even the language knows it, fact without gerund\u2014 voice with edges\n\nbut not edgy\u2014\n\n_balcony_\n\nthere are two sides two centers therefore an interior or, instead, between\u2014\n\na space that is neither, a passage, a pause\u2014 of moment is the thing exposed but not within\u2014\n\nhere we walk as if together as if\u2014 scent of testosterone, then gone\u2014 another's\n\nMadeleine, another epic\u2014 I am outside and in and up and on\u2014 who knows perhaps I am also\n\nin your thoughts as you, your stand-in, are in mine?\n\nlater the terrace is chilly, exposed and the bells make the air softer the light pinkish\u2014 there is\n\nan advantage to self-possession but I can't remember what\u2014 the clouds watercolor\n\nambivalent, a misplaced seasky far from the sea\u2014 not at home but having brought it\n\nwith us\u2014 who snuck it into the luggage, what pocket? under whose saddle?\u2014\n\nthe silver cup of longing displaces me\u2014 I, almost unseated, wanted to make not an emblem but\n\nwhat, what is there that is real?\u2014 if you are a situation it is what you are\u2014 I tell\n\nthe story and we are still here despite being _d\u00e9pays\u00e9s_ or out of country, dizzy as if trying to find\n\nmy way with only a mirror and not eyes\u2014\n\n_santo spirito_\n\nthe angel humbles before her and she with her book raises her other hand\n\nas if to a man offering stolen watches, \"not interested\"\u2014 she looks comfortable,\n\nperhaps the chair was made specially\u2014 between them the showy tiles, a vase\n\nwith three dark flowers, her hand stays as it is\u2014\n\nwhen the child is born she becomes younger, more innocent, na\u00efve, she wears\n\nher blue cloak constantly\u2014 becomes younger until, in the end, the _piet\u00e0_ , who knows\n\nbut she _is_ younger than the son\u2014\n\n_sacristy_\n\nwhat if you only had one scene to work with, say the nativity or the annunciation\n\nand it had to say everything and was the only story you had\u2014 the angel over and over,\n\nslightly different tiles, flat or this time perspective\u2014 it has will have the same ending\n\nbut the curve of her hand, no thank you, slope of her gaze say something new\u2014 today\n\nshe hides behind the scene\u2014 the angel's arms crossed at the wrists like a double bow\n\nbut also, look again, like an embrace\u2014\n\nhow dare he with his golden curls the angel presumptuous his down-turned eyes and\n\nfolded wings\u2014 he has already removed his shoes and has beautiful feet\u2014 she alone, not yet\n\nof child, in some grand palazzo says shyly, no thank you, one hand poised in half prayer,\n\n(open, possible) not altogether proper\u2014 the other stubborn on the book\u2014 not yet a virgin\n\nher blue is French almost gray\u2014\n\nthen, when time flattens, the big fish comes to swallow Noah, ark and all, and Mary\n\nin her blue kimono goes to Holofernes\u2014 someone has taken her desire and used it to fashion\n\na child\u2014 deep, deep into the colonnade one vertebrae at a time someone has taken her\n\nand left a little changeling in exchange, now a virgin except that in the flimsy of her negligee\n\na knife and map of the jugular\n\n_portrait of unknown_\n\na pomegranate, calla lily, sprig of rosemary, meanwhile we do not say but rather tell\n\nand tell around the jelly-centered heart\u2014 come away! soft sugary evidence\u2014 what is the form\n\nof woman besides body?\u2014 there were flowers a given and a garden\u2014 one must\n\npay to enter but may leave as one desires\u2014 unencumbered by regret or so they said but the story\n\nrefuses to unfold peacefully\u2014 the past a torn ticket or smeared receipt\u2014 the story refuses\n\nto reveal or adhere but is dropped behind, a savory trail, birds circle wearily\u2014 I should have\n\nbrought pearls or marbles or pen caps\u2014 instead or _in her place an anemone_ \u2014 where I\n\ngo down springs up a delicate poison to mark descent: flower between my lips\u2014\n\n_cloister or \"vietato toccare le rose\"_\n\nthe church no matter how big is the idea of space but not space\u2014 they have painted\n\nthe windows which are sharp and pedantic, they have hung paintings in all the alcoves\n\nand in the paintings are windows and in the windows people look out at pictures\n\nof the world\u2014 they are therefore never going out and when pictured the child pale\n\nwhite and shrunken, the mother young and small in her dark blue, there is no escaping\n\nthe painting the world not real as it is allegory this place a huge tomb\u2014 turns out there is a price\n\nfor leaving\u2014 now we have found other places small places banal to inhabit\n\nand it is not so easy to break a gash in the wall and look out\u2014\n\noutside, the cloister is: breath, sinus, the habitable\u2014 here day comes into its own\n\nand takes me with it\u2014 into itself, a light blue with folds and tiny flaws\u2014 who knows\n\nif the column reaches up or down or even reaches as much as is and is again\n\nbut this time not a cage\u2014 the roof surrounds what is not roof, the walls create an inside-out:\n\ncloister\u2014 a woman could breathe here, someone celibate\u2014 building outside,\n\nair in\u2014 a woman could live among other women exposed and enveloped\u2014 but this is\n\nnever what I choose\u2014 a boy drawing, long sleeved thermal under a short sleeved T,\n\nlike a fallen Mormon looks up as though to sketch what is not there\u2014 don't touch the roses,\n\ndon't trample the grass\u2014 it's _interdit_ , _vietato_ \u2014 and the past meanwhile that shabby habit\n\ninsinuates and even the light blue day cannot protect me\u2014\n\n_ministries of grace (kansas city)_\n\nthe wings are not attached\u2014 background\u2014 he wears a scarf, almost a bib or like\n\na young boy planning to rob a train in his backyard, bandana\u2014 the sperm of God\n\nin straight gold rays streams in through the window\u2014 later Christ, a naked homely\n\nchild, unlike anything in the natural world\u2014\n\nGabriel always enters from the left or from inside the painting the right\u2014 which one\n\nor where are you?\u2014 I wasn't waiting just reading on my own writing letters\u2014 I wasn't waiting\n\nfor the natural world to perform or people to take their places I wasn't waiting\n\nwas occupied otherwise when came this new work some holy imposition\u2014\n\nhotel room when I finally sleep I have that dream there is a room in my apartment\n\nI've never seen it is my favorite dream this time the room is tiled: floor, walls and ceiling\u2014\n\nsquare white tiles the walls at odd angles like corners of an old house\u2014 the dream says\n\nI will spend a year in there making light stick to film and paper in low or no light then out\n\nthrough the light-safe door to look at what I made, will hit my head and feel lucky\u2014\n\n_annunciation (new york)_\n\nwhen the situation became upside down everything changed: perspective,\n\ncounting, there was none of it\u2014 I cannot even say unprepared the mother father angry\n\nnot wanting and not able to say solution or consequences when all I meant to say is,\n\n\"this happened\"\u2014 one could gloss perhaps a history but truth is who knows\u2014 who was\n\nthat masked man his wings folded back in the night no candle to read by\n\nthe baby sleeping, quiet\u2014\n\nwhen I woke up it occurred to me then at night and at morning and afternoon the calendar\n\nstaring its hard boxes\u2014 go in pull up the blanket around the baby he is too sweet\n\nsleeping the blanket will not kill him despite the doctor\u2014 I must sleep also but afraid, this way\n\nfear this way fear leads two ways is not reliable\u2014 how did this? who did we?\u2014\n\nI must think, sharpen my mind even on a stray arrowhead it is worth remembering\u2014 I saw\n\nthe angel it is a sick joke I was not I said interested in this or in that fucking angel\u2014\n\nbut no one will believe me\u2014\n\nMary was reading (an anachronism) probably religious texts (improbable) when\n\nGabriel interrupts\u2014 humbled? he thinks himself his message more important must insist\u2014\n\nwho is this woman of leisure in grand palazzo\u2014 what father taught her letters what\n\nsire built the chair, suitor gave her leather bound volumes\u2014 I write faster until progesterone\n\npulls me under not time left\u2014 haze of motherhood\u2014 she's never seen again reading\n\nor in repose, only holding: He alive, He dead, she holding, watching, surrounded\u2014 there is no\n\ngrace in this but work though I can't say I put up much resistance\u2014 mine a small\n\npalazzo: marriage, port-a-crib at the foot of the bed blocking the exit\u2014 one hand feeble\n\nbefore me, window already open, gold rays inside\u2014 I was am tired\u2014 there is nothing\n\nto say, it is not about language\u2014 so get up, get up now what we do the only matter\u2014\n\n_central park_\n\nJesus in the water does not look clean or fish-like or marine at all but only unafraid\n\nas if he knew he had gills as if the oxygen in the sea were the same as air\u2014 I will not\n\nget clean but will drown I have one name only\u2014 a spider rests in his lazy cross of web\n\nhigh up above the park bench\u2014 one branch to another\u2014 why in the world did the dove's\n\ntiny sprig comfort Noah, he had no gills\u2014\n\nI was not the subject but location\u2014\n\nand these first buds, some plot within my very death, I hardly mind\n\nhave eyes to see: this ravishing, there may not be another like it\u2014\n\n_sighting (nova scotia)_\n\nyou say it is a cloud formation not land but when two mornings later true mist\n\nrolls in we know we are missing something\u2014 was it just a strip of darker water over\n\nthe horizon\u2014 a craggy one line list of the missing: sex, romance, tourism, humidity\n\nobscured by the new baby, the baby, discipline, weather, will\u2014 our work, our work,\n\nthe distance to town, the meager produce, slippery rocks and what was for a moment\n\na whale on second look just driftwood behind a buoy\u2014\n\nthe sea today has got a grudge against something\u2014 look! I say, waves! and the baby\n\nwaves\u2014 a gull on the low-tide rocks tries to lift but is blown back and forced to land\u2014\n\nagain and again\u2014 wanting, wanting in spite of\u2014\n\n_maritimes_\n\nit was not where bodies washed up, were fished out or brought ashore but where\n\nwe landed, marine and rocky\u2014 the sea calm, a bay, but the tides in and out with fierce\n\nambition\u2014 two gray chairs in the sun almost touching\u2014 dry rocks, mossy rocks,\n\nseaweed covered and glossy close to the edge\u2014\n\ninside, the celibacy of pages turning, a computer-hum in the short utopia of a sleeping child\u2014\n\nthe I-mama growing and looking longingly out of doors through the big wall windows\u2014\n\nthe town has no church, library or playground just pale lettuce or fiddleheads for a short\n\nseason\u2014 the top rocks shiver their tidal pools, a striped-back bird like a skunk\u2014\n\nand on thick mist days I think of Cordelia, imprisoned, wishing\u2014 and not for Lear and not\n\nfor Burgundy and not the King of France but no one bothers asking\u2014\n\n_the shore_\n\nonce a virgin, one can change and change back\u2014 but once a mother\n\nalways\u2014 she was not a conduit or vessel but holy messenger, chosen\u2014 they were all\n\ntaking and wanting and swore his leaving made him stay, would make him\n\ndeep in the heart of the people\u2014 but what mother wants a child deep in the heart\n\nof the people\u2014 how then should she guard him, watch, gather?\n\nhis body a seed within her, a tadpole or parasite\u2014 docile, lazy child: animal born\n\nin captivity\u2014 what was new about him? only that he made her a mother,\n\nround with waiting\u2014 patient like all famous women, her blue like the part of the sea\n\nnone survive\u2014 when she looks again he is a trilliant-shaped glimmer, bitter\n\njewel\u2014 what is real? house, body, tide?\u2014 the water is too cold for anything, the house\n\nvelvety, badly decorated\u2014 it is a sin to stay inside\u2014 be rather by the edge\u2014\n\nshorelined\u2014\n\nin cities elevators never fail to sicken\u2014 too many things inside others\u2014\n\nbut here, the sea itself and its ambivalent rushing\u2014 back and forth, towards\n\nand fast away does not unsettle\u2014 largely a house myself, I have, when seated,\n\na kind of balance and from my gray chair are everywhere windows and color\n\nand in the distance the thin blue promise of what I know must be another coast\u2014\n\nChildren- (if it Please God)\u2014Constant companion, (& friend in\n\nold age) who will feel interested in one,\u2014object to be beloved\n\nand played with.\u2014better than a dog anyhow.\u2014Home, & someone\n\nto take care of house-charms of music and female chit-\n\nchat.\u2014These things good for one's health.\u2014but terrible loss of\n\ntime.\u2014\n\nMarry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D.\n\n\u2014 _Charles Darwin_\n\n_The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma_\n\nI. REPLICATION\n\nIs the Soul just a notion, a drug?\n\n\u2014 _Alice Notley_\n\nThat it was politically impossible.\n\nThat there was an alternative.\n\nThat I would stay.\n\nThat the lighthouse was useful.\n\nThat I would leave.\n\nThat germs infiltrate.\n\nThat babies before conception.\n\nThat the white collar means concern; the long beard, the shaved head, intensely dyed garment.\n\nThat sex is an effective way of generating warmth.\n\nThat a bay mare and wild iris are unalike.\n\nThat the gaze is not chemical or electricity requires a conductor.\n\nThat a saucepan and spoon are better toys.\n\nThat the office is not a tundra and not a mirage and not.\n\nThat traits are inherited.\n\nThat ideas will save us.\n\nThat a mother's face is not her mindset\u2014\n\neven the infant knows it. And yet we put her\n\non television, donate particle scopes.\n\nI tell you there is a secret world.\n\nThat children too young to walk must be carried.\n\nThat weight can be assessed or described.\n\nThat speech is directional.\n\nThat God knows genomes.\n\nThat the phone in and of itself is not a husband.\n\nThat a dream is not reason to evacuate.\n\nThat the man's death was made of 53 wing bones and the well-planned curve of highway.\n\nThat walking one way was, or this way is, or that the curved back of old bones as seen through\n\na low slit of window is anything but interference: the spiking lights on the mute-stereo or turned-down\n\ncardiogram.\n\nThe city is less \"planned\" than _exposed_\n\nand emerges, one bodega, tenement, row house,\n\npark, highway, until they've pushed out ambiguity.\n\nI believed greatly in the grabby valence of molecules,\n\ntricky protons and funny quarks, my son's invisible puppies:\n\nMuffin, Apple, Muffin, and Lemon.\n\nThe map's coincidence; the body's freak resemblance.\n\nThe _They never told me_ of women in labor or\n\n_Here we are_ under the chuppah.\n\nA flat bed excavator builds its own scaffold.\n\nSecret: to put away opposing evidence.\n\nII. TRANSCRIPTION\n\nwe could have been happy sooner\n\n\u2014 _Brenda Hillman_\n\n_this just in from biology:_\n\nbreasts signal fitness (lateral symmetry) to potential mates\n\n_this just in from sociobiology:_\n\nthe ape mother insures social standing for her daughters\n\n<in the language the real way I feel\n\nbut not _separable_ or _explain_ , and if I\n\nfelt otherwise, outside articulate,\n\nI would not, like a bad wife,\n\ngo tearing around in constant _where is the o o o of my belief ?_\n\n[we are fabric, of cloth, a plucked-at knot]\n\n(are you trying to read her poems and find out if she was sleeping\n\nwith someone or to reason the clitoris placement, whether just dreams\n\nor where she'd been going\u2014)\n\neven science believes in modesty>\n\n_this just in:_\n\nwe are happier than the poems describe\n\nI more I, you completely\n\nbut we came from a code like this with themes, similar names\n\nin the beginning the poem can be anything\n\nbut later not so many, likewise the idea:\n\nhuman marriage: where human means fallible\n\n<and despite knowing long ago that gender doesn't explain\n\nthe exploited and less-fun mother, the wrestling father,\n\nphysically removed husband or why\u2014\u2014\n\nit so appealed to us a system a code something to count on new god much more organic and when we saw it in models we said ah yes and I always knew it and started up with metaphor and talked about language and rhyme and adherence and valence and when they made a sheep with one mother it was proof and when the poem seemed to have some internal logic or visceral impact and when the dogs' eyes were so human and the other culture so like us and when a man savagely murdered his wife we looked for him all over her severed body because we so needed every part of our bodies to be us because it was unfashionable to say spirit this obviously valuable organism as something outside the body god must be the ultimate protein and everywhere was suddenly proof like a seventh grade girl knows, knows _He must notice\u2014_ >\n\nonly after, when we are in it\/ incontrovertible whatever it is (this) [marriage]\/ do we think to question\/\n\nhow did we, did we come to be here? what, other than the simple, well-used markers, made us\n\nmade us want to?\n\n_this:_\n\nprotein alone doesn't make a body or alone a body make\n\nIII. PROCESSING\n\nDarwin looked at the green disc of water surrounded by blue and knew.\n\nThe corals and coconut trees just above sea-level.\n\nSome made sense and other pieces, he made them.\n\nZoophytes, polyps, and actinozoa alive in their stony shelters.\n\nOnce, trying to keep three beetles, he put one under his tongue.\n\nWhen it released some vile liquid, he almost lost all.\n\nWrite it, decipher. Write it: desire.\n\nThe others believed in floods, want of floods, and famine.\n\nThe vegetable kingdom as God's green shadow.\n\nWere we born believing?\n\nOr, like the good giraffe, grow to seek some higher?\n\nAdults of the same species, we use and disuse,\n\ntalk and tool-make, carve a valley.\n\nWe blast, burn, marry, reason, and with signs and gestures,\n\ndance and drawing, make the earth subdue.\n\nIf we are animals we are not orphans.\n\nBut have not God.\n\nIf we are animals, need companions, love offspring.\n\nAlso tobacco, coffee, liquor.\n\nIf we're of animals then have not words for, nor coiled regret,\n\nnor cunning morals.\n\nVelum and air and in the water various cross-current similes for smother.\n\nThe actual time a heart packed in ice survives.\n\nWhat the skeleton wife comes home to make for dinner.\n\nHer fierce metabolism, narrowed profile: body, body-away.\n\nWhat two men witnessed under the four-polled canopy is,\n\non greater magnification, how the old hag in the new mother,\n\nfourth protein on the strand, sustains the huge placenta.\n\nHubris of scalpels: they never made a sheep\n\nso lonesome as a wife.\n\nThe world is full of feeble creatures in changed circumstances.\n\nAs the duck flies less, his wings diminish.\n\nThe human baby with its too big head, a homunculus addiction.\n\n_How amazing_ , wrote Darwin, _that the gelatinous bodies of polyps can conquer ocean waves_.\n\nHe was crazy for orchids, corals, doomed species.\n\nI go on loving you like water but\n\n[That a moment can stretch and fracture, etched with fault-lines,\n\ntactile, tensile, but taut, like the skated-over surface of ice\u2014]\n\n[When the sound of the life with small children, insatiable\n\nsalt cravings, or wanting to be fucked to sleep\u2014]\n\nsay: _mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell_.\n\nRename misery and we have knowledge.\n\nYoung marriage-lust for zygotes makes bassinets\n\nout of organelle cross-sections.\n\n_Mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell_.\n\nIV. TRANSLATION\n\nTwist sense and anti-sense strands together; cut one;\n\nwe unwind.\n\nIt takes energy to nick the supercoiled structure hard enough\u2014\n\n(they _want_ to bind)\n\nbut it can be broken.\n\nWe are wound, not knotted.\n\n_a mother, all function, has no morphology_\n\nThat we could look at this and decide the past.\n\nThat we could, that day under the chuppah, know.\n\nThat a single butterfly under the bough-lined structure, the rabbi with a glass and napkin, the\n\nmuffled pre-sound in the crowd's minds, the groom's trembling, the bride's gold frenum.\n\nThat hydrogen binds with a polar molecule.\n\nThat the vow could move two ways in time and the characters in the drama and the audience's\n\ncomplicity and the camera's perspective and the two men watching and the scene folding up inside the album and\n\nthe two boys on the bed wondering where they were before they were born and the mind of their mother and the\n\nsmooth-bottomed shoe of their father and if the glass so wrapped and swaddled broke or shattered or muffled was\n\nthe inorganic portent: sand, water, air, the compressed doctrine: an object's permanence and the social fabric the\n\nmind's usefulness the body's faithlessness the two-chambered heart the pornographic memory jealousy profit\n\naltruism patents partnerships postulates corporate metaphysics and history progress synonyms paradigms human\n\nmind the child's welfare.\n\nThat regret is not biological or an obstacle.\n\n_somewhere a heavy isotope named N-15 reveals my whereabouts_\n\nPhotography can't account for the edge of vision, how I,\n\nnaked, make fear brilliant. The eye is not\n\na camera\n\ntelescope\n\nlooking glass\n\nbut all collude.\n\nOrgans don't arise from needs. Nor does cardiomegaly mean\n\nwanderlust.\n\nAn ancient prototype of which we know nothing\n\npassed us organs of extreme perfection\n\nand organs of little apparent importance.\n\nUnstoppable eye in the cranial orbit.\n\nThe giraffe's small fly-flapper.\n\nProblems with the Central Dogma:\n\nIt doesn't allow for the promiscuity of proteins: how they seek\n\nothers.\n\nThat DNA made protein and protein made us is an attractive notion,\n\nlovely\u2014theorem, sermon, anodyne\u2014and resists evidence:\n\nchaotic cytoplasm,\n\nclandestine mechanisms.\n\nWe understand nothing\n\nfully, have eaten only\n\nthe ripe periphery, without\n\na palate for buds or boughlettes.\n\nFeral, _more at_ Fierce\n\nThe first wife was a hard-working molecule.\n\nA ribosome without membranes making\n\nand making unsheathed to every loving master.\n\nBy the millions she colonized the endoplasmic\n\nreticulum, the enfolding and crenellated mitochondria.\n\nInside the cell: the flap and footfalls of birds and nymphs,\n\na dulcet hymenaeus, rushing piety.\n\nPeppered-moths never rest on tree trunks; the textbook\n\nphotos are of dead specimens glued to sooty,\n\nwhite lichen-covered bark. Nocturnal creatures,\n\nlive moths hide in the high-up canopy\u2014\n\nWant to know everything?\n\nA woman's rope-like hair.\n\nA man's clavicle, how it forms an x-axis plateau of sternum-scapula.\n\nOur beautiful theories, their press of fealty.\n\nThe platonic tongue of wedlock.\n\nThe hush-hush palaver of optics.\n\nNote the raised perimeter and then deduce what fell:\n\nan edged islet I once believed bore life.\n\n_Autography_\n\nI want to change your mind. Not\n\nyou.\n\nYou're, as you are, what I want, even his\n\nblinking neon: [no] indecision\n\nvacancy sign. I have room\n\nfor you and these untrue\n\nI mean disloyal\n\naffections. I'm\n\na penny. Hardly\n\nsomething. One\n\nin a history of immodest\n\nwomen: want, wants, wonton, I.\n\n_Autography 2_\n\nLied. Said I'd be\n\nsatisfied with______.\n\nTruth is:\n\nI want to ruin your life.\n\nThrow them over, some\n\noverture, ignominious\n\nruin, some proven\u2014\n\nthe rest is marriage\n\nby which we bear up\n\nand better ourselves.\n\n_Autography 3_\n\nShall we discuss married sex?\n\nYes, let's take our clothes off and talk of pros and cons, the lag and lapse. The body carries on and there's no other\n\nless-revealed. Real: the husband over or under and going forward while the mind\u2014do you believe in it?\u2014why speak\n\nof it?\u2014flint-streak, it sparks and wanders, will not tame. I'm talking clearly, sincerely, when I say I saw a man and he\n\nwas not my married. This he'd you. He made you he. I made you husband; it was so. We chose to.\n\nAnd suppose I stayed shut-up in the always? Suppose I could have stayed shut-up like so, but o, the bad girl breeze\n\nblows in everywhere, finding the cracks and torments.\n\n_Autography 4_\n\nToday the pigeons tack\n\nin flocks above the city.\n\nThe air is crisp, forgetful.\n\nA plume became a cloud\n\nbecame a plume became a fog,\n\n_No!_ I said to the TV and tried\n\nto hold the whole thing up\n\nbefore I could say stop\n\nit\u2014did not.\n\n_Autography 5_\n\nDuring this time people protested. I didn't, though I never for one moment was for it. And people bought supplies and became political but I didn't though I never for one moment doubted these necessities. A poet acquaintance had a baby. I saw her and the baby\u2014they'd just been at a protest\u2014and felt like I'd never had a baby despite my two boys. I stopped reading newspapers except about science and stopped the TV news though poets were at protests and writing blogs and someone asked me how I could write such abstract lyrics at a time like this and I looked at him and wondered what it felt like to write a poem. Pregnant women looked freakish to me, like costumes or experiments. On my way to the day care I looked at the big bellied women or new mothers with strollers and wondered what was it like to push a baby out of your body. Last night as I gathered my little son out of the bath into a green towel\u2014clean, smooth, slippery, sleepy\u2014I wondered what that was like.\n\n_Autography 6_\n\nA poet friend said I was writing about the shifting you in marriage. I tried to set him straight by being clearer next time. Later he said my poetry \"uses slippage in point of view (between addressing a 'you' and narrating a 'he') to emphasize ambivalence about marriage, as though the speaker were struggling to keep her distance from the 'problem' and avoid using an intimate tone.\" So I saw then how little clear I'd been. All these problems with syntax. I'd tried to strip it, but the smooth under-bark, without its bumpy elephant skin, confused them into thinking I'd found something clean and solid. And they said I'd been hiding in science and in jargon and in metaphor and they said they liked my searing honesty but what did my husband think and they said we like this found language we like this information we like the idea of a young woman writing about her marriage but what did my husband think and when I'd written \"let's discuss married sex\" then I didn't, and they wanted more married sex, for the husband and wife to actually _have_ sex and then someone said, but they are, right? they do, right? it's just pretty subtle and they said we want more _blatant_ sex and someone said does anyone else see another _man_ in these poems? And then they said science is off-putting.\n\n_Autography 7_\n\nThat, between episodes, the husband,\n\nfacing the TV says _hey_... in a sweet way,\n\nshould not be so surprising.\n\n\"Clean me!\" cries my son in his spilled water.\n\n\"Dry you,\" I say with my exposed shirt hem.\n\n\"Clean!\" he begs, but there is no substance\n\nto clean water.\n\nThe budding trees misstate the season.\n\nI am astonished by my screaming offspring.\n\n_Autography 8_\n\nWhat the mother will not\n\n[myriad] say. Many\n\nto secret. This is not just\n\nabout being a woman. No one\n\nbelieves mothers are, anyway.\n\nThey want to know how many\n\nher love is\n\nand want more.\n\nSilence keeps them\n\nsafe so she\n\ngives it\n\naway: mute.\n\nMute, mute, mutter (her\n\nmouth's a busted clasp).\n\n_Autography 9_\n\nMy father with hardly hair on arms or legs and husband in his plush hide. I'm some other creature they look at say, _who knows what you're about?_ I had a body once, remember?\n\nMy boys are two porcelain bell-sounds inside expensive, ornate eggs. Their skin is almost transparent and still soft as a breast. O ache, how the boy already starts his crossing over. Only four years old when a little boat pushed off from shore. I thought he was on it but saw then it was me, the baby-mother, floating away. We lit the craft on fire by shooting torched arrows at that mother, and told the husband in his pelts don't stand too close. Watch her burn and flicker off the edge of boyland where I've long since interloped and dug my heels in. But see here, these were only the idea of feet and I fast become an indistinct sound with indeterminate source. Murmur. Rumor.\n\nOnly a hot, palm-shaped stigma where my littler boy touches my thigh keeps me alive, staves off the specter-mother's residence.\n\n_Autography 10_\n\nIn the sandbox my son pretends\n\nto be dead. On the wooden edge I try\n\nto look alive. I am\n\na wife, in other words\n\n\"woman acting\n\nin a specified capacity\" as in\n\n\"fishwife\" or \"mother.\"\n\nWhat I would rather\n\nis irrelevant other than\n\nafterhours otherwising.\n\nNo one begged me to become\n\nthis fiery virago, ceaselessly\n\nscraping and gutting, searching\n\nout places to bury the wasted\n\nentrails. One night I dug\n\ntoo close and struck a root,\n\nlooked up and saw him:\n\n\u2014plaque nailed\n\nto his trunk read \"this one?\"\n\n\u2014there. I must look for\n\nsomething else to look for\n\nor look at, like my boy\n\non his back in a box. Eyes\n\nclosed, palms up and open.\n\n_Autography 11_\n\nThe woman opening to speak, to say, what can this [this]\n\nif this is [real] then what other way of saying other are there?\n\n_It is like_ this. _This, everyday_.\n\nOpened her and cracked her chest and clamped it.\n\nQuick, we must pack it with ice, _I_\n\n_went to a wedding where two people loved one another_\n\n_they rang bells and I cried because the dancing_\n\nin time everything dies except furniture _my son said_\n\n_my intention was a little two step thinking the remedy was something similar_\n\n_like treating fever with marigolds or love with love but can die like that_\n\nThe spine tries to protect.\n\nBut the real this that she knows the this that the then this.\n\nEvery day. Every day. Every day.\n\n_Autography 12_\n\nWhat is likewise hard can cleave.\n\nAnd so my roving eye sought a sharp punishment wanting the underlying shape to realize and when a man returned my wanting I made this punishment and when I wanted more punishment I looked straight at him like a blade like a punishing cleaver needing sharpening the shrill tones of the knifeman's traveling business pierce every writing through with wanting business he seeks to punish the blade I sought to punish meant to cut away the excess thereby polishing but punished the dust of the knife the cleaver the glance the gaze\n\n_Autography 13_\n\nHere, take this.\n\nIf you die it is not a good remedy. If you are healthy and develop symptoms it is a good remedy for someone else who had a sickness with these symptoms. This is the law of similars. It applies.\n\nWriting is a way to cultivate illness. In other words torture. In other words pervade. If you die you might have had a sickness or rendezvous.\n\n_Autography 14_\n\nAt night I become exquisitely pretty.\n\nI don't want to. Seriously, I don't. Won't be convinced. Not. This time. I really, this time, I seriously. Not. Tonight.\n\nThen when you fall asleep I suddenly, well, want to. Is that what makes me beautiful?\n\nBetter pull the shades down against this blinking want-to, wasted body, the short-long-short signal I'm sending out across the city.\n\n_Autography 15_\n\nThe smoke is from the falling down\n\nI told my son who is afraid\n\nof fire. Forgive me\n\nfor lying. One day he will find out:\n\nthe building's mangled corset,\n\ncracked femurs and blown out lungs\u2014\n\nthere was no one, not one,\n\nto give our blood to. And birds\n\nclogged the gutters. And rats. And paper.\n\nThe paper.\n\nMy son dreams of fire. He dreams\n\nof a mouse with claws.\n\nMeanwhile a father I know buys potassium\n\nchloride, cipro, soup, duct tape.\n\nDreams of ghosts under the kitchen table.\n\nOf his brother. Of falling.\n\nAnother man says he'd have stepped over\n\nanyone to find his wife.\n\n_Autography 16_\n\nThings I've been asked not to write about include: the death of a young child, money, group therapy. What's the harm in an affair that never happened asks N? Therapist: when something's gone this far in the mind it means something's wrong in the marriage. We pay her and I tell them about my husband's cousin's daughter who, at two years, eight months and a matter of days\n\n_Autography 17_\n\nMy son almost made but missed the toilet: that was real.\n\nAnd when the night and its many beasts breathing brought him up again I said, _get back_\n\n_with your sharp bite, gorgeous fangs_.\n\n_Stop writing_.\n\nIt makes me visible, I meant to write invisible. Damn that night with her pester\n\nwhispering _lean_...\n\n_against him_.\n\nCotton dress shirt.\n\nI see what the stupid phrase means: \"mind like a steel trap,\" as I gnaw my leg off to escape mine.\n\nA reader, anonymous, suggested my poems would be better\n\nif the marriage\/motherhood stuff wasn't so literal.\n\nLife too, I'd say.\n\n_Autography 18_\n\nI've fallen in love with everyone\n\nto unlove him by comparison.\n\nAll men. All women.\n\nThe cross-eyed gym guy on the subway.\n\nThe woman with blond braids under her pink hat.\n\nI have banished and exalted humor. Was\n\nyoung. Old. Showed my sadness\n\nas a corpse shows the surgeon:\n\nsee my facts of living?\n\nFor my next act I must jump off a ferry for more\n\ngood material. Right?\n\nSomewhere, this snowy night, Spalding Gray's body\n\nfloats the Hudson, I'm certain.\n\nGathering material.\n\nIt's impossible to unlove some ideas.\n\nNo matter how stupid.\n\nThere he is again:\n\nthe unloved only.\n\n_Autography 19_\n\nI wanted to write a tiny poem,\n\nbut as soon as I built it, it lied.\n\nWas the closed-mouth kiss\n\nof marriage and children. I wanted\n\nto leave something radiant on the pillow,\n\nbut was needed elsewhere\n\nto proffer idioms; be stern and soothing, subtly\n\nclairvoyant, familiar, original, over and over,\n\na pot boiling over puts out its fire but is still\n\nnot safe. Bough so laden\n\nit wastes bounty. The lyric\n\nwas meant to contain desire;\n\nI want some precious toxin.\n\n_Autography 20_\n\nOne night a woman showed up.\n\nWe talked about poetry. She\n\nwas full-grown and had lived a life.\n\nHer poems were dreams and animals,\n\nflying objects and little wails or wafts of witchery.\n\nShe brought black bean soup from the place\n\ndownstairs and ate it at my table.\n\nA man showed up, a younger man, another woman, but\n\nI knew them: where they lived, if they had children.\n\nEven her name didn't make sense and her rusted voice\n\nmade us all be quiet. She drank tea, water, seemed to be\n\nAmerican, but her poems moved like the clean-plucked\n\nwing of a chicken when you run it under water: too\n\nhuman. Who invited her? Later I dreamed she was riding\n\nthe express subway uptown, studying flash cards.\n\n_Don't wake up until you see the flip sides_\n\nsaid the dream but that\n\nwoke me up.\nAcknowledgments, Dedications, and Notes\n\nMany thanks to the editors of the following journals for publishing poems from this book: _Barrow Street, Black_ _Warrior Review, Black Clock, Bridge, Chicago Review, Court Green, Crowd, Five Fingers Review, Gulf Coast, Lyric, Maggid_ , _New Orleans Review, Now Culture, Tango, Xantippe_ , and _Zeek_.\n\nSeven sections from \"Annunciation\" were published in _Barrow Street_ and won the Barrow Street prize. The poem, as a whole, was later awarded The Center for Book Arts Prize by Lynn Emanuel and was printed in a limited edition chapbook designed by Roni Grosz.\n\nI am deeply grateful to Catherine Barnett, Arielle Greenberg, Joy Katz, Wayne Koestenbaum, D. A. Powell and Suzanna Tamminen for their generous and insightful readings of these poems.\n\nLove and boundless appreciation for my \"sisters\": Joan, Arielle, Stacy, Erin, Miriam, and Dana.\n\n\u2022\n\n\"Squirrel in a Palm Tree\" takes place en route to and from and in Savannah, Georgia, at the end of December 2001. The poem was made possible by the teachers\u2014Eric, Rajihah, Joy, Aury, Jennifer, Rafiyah, Amanda, Martina\u2014and Peggy at Basic Trust Day Care Center and by Lynn Heitler and Philip Levy. Thank you.\n\n\"Annunciation\" is for Abram, child of light, and for Josh, Moses, and Stacy, who made the journey with me.\n\n\"Autography 6\" is for Jeff Enke.\n\n\"Autography 20\" is for Hermine Meinhard, John O'Connor, and Patricia Carlin.\n\nSome of the poems are for Alex Wright.\n\n\u2022\n\n\"... synonyms do not exist\" is from Donald Hall's essay \"The Unsayable Said,\" published by Copper Canyon Press.\n\nThe title, \"The Museum of Accidents\" refers to a proposal by French philosopher Paul Virilio for a new museum that would expose and exhibit \"the accident,\" an inevitable consequence of our accelerated, highly technological society.\n\n\"Is the Soul just a notion, a drug?\" is from Alice Notley's poem \"Sun is Very Near Hot and Buttockslike\" in _Disobedience_ , Penguin, 2001.\n\n\"We could have been happy sooner\" is from Brenda Hillman's poem \"Cascadia\" in _Cascadia_ , Wesleyan University Press, 2001.\n\nOn page 80, \"I go on loving you like water but\" is from John Ashbery's poem \"The Tennis Court Oath.\"\n\nOther sources for \"The Rise and Fall of the Central Dogma\":\n\nAmerican Museum of Natural History, \"Darwin\" show, November 2005\u2013August 2006.\n\nBarry Commoner, \"Unraveling the DNA Myth,\" _Harper's_ , February 2002.\n\nBenjamin Farrington, _What Darwin Really Said_ , Shocken, 1966.\n\nSarah Blaffer Hrdy, _Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species_ , Ballantine Books, 1999.\n\nJonathan Wells, Ph.D., \"Second Thoughts about Peppered Moths,\" <http:\/\/www.arn.org\/docs\/wells\/jw_pepmoth.htm>\nAbout the author\n\nRachel Zucker is the author of two previous books of poetry, _Eating in the_ _Underworld_ and _The Last Clear Narrative_ , both published by Wesleyan University Press. Zucker is the co-editor of the anthology _Efforts and_ _Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship_ , published by the University of Iowa Press. She has taught at NYU and Yale and was the poet in residence at Fordham University. She lives in New York City.\n\nwww.rachelzucker.net\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n**EARLY BIRD BOOKS**\n\n**FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY**\n\nLOVE TO READ?\n\nLOVE GREAT SALES?\n\nGET FANTASTIC DEALS ON BESTSELLING EBOOKS\n\nDELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX EVERY DAY!\n\n**The Web's Creepiest Newsletter**\n\n**Delivered to Your Inbox**\n\nGet chilling stories of\n\ntrue crime, mystery, horror,\n\nand the paranormal,\n\ntwice a week.\n\n# Felicia\n\nGeorge Alec Effinger\n\n**Acknowledgments**\n\nA great deal of research had to be done before the writing of _Felicia_ could begin. I would like to express my debt to the people who made this task simpler.\n\nI would like to thank the staff of the New Orleans Public Library for its generous help.\n\nI am also indebted to Justin Wilson, the well-known Cajun humorist, whose books and records of Cajun anecdotes first introduced me to these people and their way of life.\n\nI must thank Bobby Conner of the Cameron Parish Sheriff's Office for his help, and also Lieutenant Robert K. Lindsey of the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, who answered many questions and supplied me with details concerning the duties of law enforcement organizations during hurricane emergencies.\n\nFinally, I would like to thank Philip J. Decker of International Harvester for much information concerning trucks; C. W. McCall for his album _Wolf Creek Pass_ ; Dr. Shirley Van Ferney, for her friendship and support.\n\nMost especially, I have to thank Beverly Kandrac, without whose help _Felicia_ might have remained only a chapter and an outline.\nThe way of the superior man is threefold, but I am not equal to it. Virtuous, he is free from anxieties; wise, he is free from perplexities; bold, he is free from fear.\n\n\\- Confucius\n\n_Analects_\n\nWhat have I gained, that I no longer immolate a bull to Jove or to Neptune, or a mouse to Hecate; that I do not tremble before the Eumenides, or the Catholic Purgatory, or the Calvinistic Judgment Day\u2014if I quake at opinion, the public opinion, as we call it; or at the threat of assault, or contumely, or bad neighbours, or poverty, or mutilation, or at the rumour of revolution, or of murder? If I quake, what matters what I quake at?\n\n\\- Ralph Waldo Emerson\n\n_Character_\n**ONE**\n\n**The Calm**\n\n****\n****\n\n**1**\n\n****\n\nThe Louisiana Town was named Arbier, after a French priest who had ministered to the spiritual needs of the area's Indian population, back when the area's population had been only Indian. The present inhabitants of Arbier were proud of their heritage; only a very few of them could claim Indian blood, but that did not stop others from trying.\n\nThese local people pronounced the name of their town _Arber._ Outsiders always tried to pronounce it as Ar- _byay'_. The foreigners, as the locals thought of all outsiders, could be picked out easily. There were no tourists, only foreigners. Even other Louisianans were foreigners, from up north in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. Shreveport was practically Yankee country. The pride and clannishness of the townsfolk was such that when a visitor made the pronunciation error, no one would correct him. He would go on making the same mistake until he left the town, and the residents of Arbier would smile in a way that no foreigner could understand.\n\nIn the late 1950's, the town in St. Didier Parish had numbered only twenty-five hundred people. Now, some two decades later, the population of Arbier was hovering around three thousand. Nothing changed in the town except the names of some of those people, and the seasonal price of shrimp.\n\nOutside Paul Pierson's apartment there were two small balconies. They were shaded by the roof of the neighboring house in the morning, but as noon approached more of the black iron railings and bases absorbed the August heat. It was past eleven o'clock in the morning, and the topmost railings were already beginning to broil in the nearly direct rays of the summer sun. A mockingbird flew from the crepe myrtle tree in the backyard and landed on the railing outside Pierson's living room. The bird hopped sideways uncomfortably until it sat on the shaded part of the iron bar. Once it had settled down, the mockingbird began to run through its extensive catalogue of songs.\n\nPierson had sliding glass doors leading from his bedroom and living room onto his two balconies. The doors were open for ventilation, and the mockingbird's loud singing pierced the stillness of the apartment. Pierson was asleep, but his large gray Persian cat was not. The cat watched the bird intently from across the living room; almost every morning the bird sat on the balcony and taunted the cat. Almost every morning the Persian ran full speed across the living room carpet and jumped at the bird, hitting the sliding screen door. The mockingbird didn't fly away in fear; it did what its name suggested, it mocked. It sat on the iron railing and twittered at the furious cat.\n\nThe Persian may have failed to catch the mockingbird, but the noise succeeded in waking Pierson up. He rubbed a hand through his hair and stared blearily at the wall opposite him. Then he walked into the living room. \"Knock it off, Cy,\" he muttered. He picked up the cat and tossed him halfway across the floor. Then Pierson slid the glass door shut so the bird's singing wouldn't bother the cat any longer. Pierson closed the drapes in front of the door. Then he went back into the bedroom and lay down. After ten minutes he realized that he wouldn't be able to fall asleep again. He shrugged. It was going on noon, and he decided that he might as well get up. Still, though, it was a Saturday morning and he wasn't in any hurry. He pictured to himself his first few movements of the day: get up, pick his clothes up off the floor, go into the bathroom, wash up, get dressed. Maybe eat. Then the rest of the day was his. He thought about these moves from beneath the sheet that covered him. He made no motion to get up yet.\n\nInstead, Pierson rolled over and faced the young woman who was still asleep beside him. Her name was Maddie Gargotier, and Pierson thought that she was a little bit strange. It seemed to him that every few days she would make a crazy decision concerning her future or their life together. He was always amazed to learn how she arrived at these decisions. He guessed that her thought processes rarely had anything to do with real life. Her plans always seemed to her to be carefully made and irrevocable; fortunately, Pierson thought, she forgot them in a matter of hours.\n\nMaddie was a pretty young woman, twenty-two years old, with long dark hair that set off her pale, delicate face. She had high cheekbones, a small, freckled nose, and greenish eyes that changed color depending on the clothing she wore. Now, as she opened them, while she wore nothing, they were just greenish.\n\nPierson reached out fondly to touch her sleepy face.\n\n\"I have something to tell you,\" she said.\n\nPierson pulled his hand back, his gesture incomplete. This morning her words hit him very hard. They were precisely the same words his ex-wife had used on the day she had left him. Coming from Maddie, they were an unpleasant reminder. Here we go, thought Pierson. Either she's leaving me too, or she's pregnant.\n\nHe said nothing. He stared at her, blinking, waiting for her to say what she had to say.\n\n\"I'm joining the Navy,\" she said.\n\nThere wasn't anything for Pierson to do. He was relieved, in a way. It was another of Maddie's quirky inspirations. But he had learned from experience that at the moment she was determined to do what she said. Pierson lay in bed, waiting quietly, like someone who was sitting through a dull joke in the wan hope of a killer punch line. Anything Pierson could have said would have sounded mean and self-serving.\n\nThere was a long, uncomfortable pause.\n\n\"Well?\" asked Maddie.\n\n\"Well what?\" said Pierson, knowing precisely what she was waiting for.\n\n\"What do you think?\"\n\n\"Maddie,\" he said, \"I think that you'll see a lot of the world, get to wear fashionable uniforms, and mostly not have to make many decisions for a few years.\"\n\n\"Oh, Paul,\" said Maddie with a disgusted expression. \"I knew you'd say that.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"How what?\"\n\nPierson stared up at the ceiling. \"How did you know what I'd say? And what _did_ I say?\"\n\n\"Selfish,\" said Maddie. Pierson did not reply. \"I shouldn't even have asked you,\" she said. \"Me and Shelley and Betsy decided we'd do it together. We're all going down to take the tests the day after tomorrow. I want to see if I can get into the submarine service.\"\n\n\"I don't think they'll put you on one,\" said Pierson. He rubbed his eyes, which were itching and burning. He hadn't tried to touch Maddie since his first attempt. Now he didn't feel much like trying. He'd feel strange; in a way, she had become naval personnel, almost.\n\n\"I don't actually expect to be put on a submarine,\" said Maddie, \"but there's still lots that I can do.\"\n\nPierson had an answer to that, and he knew that he shouldn't give it to her. He did anyway. \"You don't like your job with Krieger-LaChapiet, right? And so you'll join the Navy. I give you five-to-two odds that you'll get the same job, except then you won't be able to quit.\"\n\n\"You're selfish, you're just plain selfish,\" said Maddie, rolling even farther away from him. \"You don't want me to try anything. You don't want me to make something out of my life.\" Pierson's previous reply had been just what he had thought it would be. A mistake.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, \"I want you to make something out of your life.\" He sighed. Maddie Gargotier had little enough to work with. Her father owned a popular bar in Arbier, and Maddie had practically grown up in it. The St. Didier Parish School Board didn't expend itself very hard making certain that the children of the electorate attended classes. Maddie's education had been intermittent at best. When she did go to the regional high school, she took mostly typing and secretarial courses. Her guidance counselor advised Maddie that these courses were the most practical; in Arbier they were certainly better than a life of crime, but little more. Most of the employees in the town and the surrounding areas needed farmhands or crewmen for fishing boats. There wasn't much demand for clerks or typists. Maddie had vague plans of going to New Orleans or Lake Charles or Lafayette to look for a job. Pierson couldn't understand how those hypothetical jobs might be better than her present position, in which she was virtually the entire main office of a small fishing supply house.\n\nPierson sat up and tried to untangle the sheet on his side of the bed. \"I don't want you to make a mess of your life, is all,\" he said.\n\n\"You let me worry about that, Paul,\" she said.\n\n\"Since when?\"\n\n\"You go to hell, Pierson,\" she cried. \"You come down here from Ohio all full of superiority. You think you can run anybody's life.\"\n\n\"I came down here to stay. I'm almost as southern as you are.\"\n\n\"You are not,\" said Maddie, still angry. \"You got to be born to it. You can't even remember if you say 'crick' or 'creek.' You can't remember for here, or for Ohio neither.\" That was true.\n\n\"I'm lost without you, Maddie,\" said Pierson. He smiled.\n\n\"I'll tell you what,\" she said. \"Forget about what I said.\n\nCome on back, and go to hell _again._ \" She started sorting through the pile of clothing on the floor. \"I want the bathroom first,\" she said.\n\n\"You got it,\" said Pierson. \"And tonight, Navy person, you sleep in a hammock. See how you like it.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Maddie, turning around and facing Pierson belligerently, \"who says I'll even come back here tonight?\"\n\n\"I didn't think you would,\" he said. \"If you really want to sleep in a hammock, you'll have to go somewhere else.\"\n\nMaddie didn't know how to interpret his remark. This was natural, because Pierson didn't know, either. He wasn't sure if he was playing or genuinely angry. Maddie just stared. Pierson stared back, and after a few seconds Maddie turned and went into the bathroom. Pierson decided to go into the living room and wait; by the time she was finished in the bathroom he would know what he was feeling. He got dressed and brushed his hair. Then he went into the kitchen and took a bottle of Dr. Pepper from the refrigerator for breakfast. He opened it and went into the living room, where he put on the television.\n\nThe Channel Five weatherman was giving his noon report. \"There's good news and bad news in the weather today,\" he said. \"You can see all of it in this morning's satellite photograph from the New Orleans Weather Service. This white mass here is Hurricane Dinah. She's the good news. This high-pressure ridge extends down through Florida and out over the ocean. Dinah spun into it late last night, and it looks like she's rebounding to the north-northeast, away from the Florida coast and definitely no threat to the Gulf region. The latest predictions are that Dinah will rain herself out over the Atlantic, gradually filling in, presenting no threat to any populated areas. But we all know what hurricanes like to do. They like to make fools of weathermen. So we'll still keep an eye on Dinah until she's officially downgraded off the map.\n\n\"That's the good news. The bad news is this tight spiral of clouds over the Virgin Islands. Yesterday that was Tropical Storm Elsie. Today she's Hurricane Elsie. You can see on the satellite loop the definite cyclonic rotation. Her winds are clocked at eighty-five miles per hour, with some winds up to a hundred and twenty miles per hour. Her course has been generally to the west, but we're hoping that the same high-pressure system that diverted Dinah will push Elsie aside. We'll have a better idea of what's going on with Elsie on the Six O'clock Report tonight.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe weatherman's words were listened to in silence all over Arbier; the people in the town knew what a passing run from a hurricane meant. They had lived through them before. They had no desire at all to do it again. But every year, from about the first of June through October, the Hurricane \"season,\" the residents of Arbier watched the weather reports closely. They needed every hour of warning, in case a hurricane turned toward the Gulf coast. Arbier was hit early in such a case; after the small town was mauled the hurricane moved inland, losing some of its force and terror. But Arbier always took the full strength of the storm's power.\n\nWalter Boshardt, the sheriff of St. Didier Parish, watched the Channel Five news program from his usual lunchtime booth in Mrs. Perkins' diner, the Crisis Caf\u00e9, on Ridge Street. He shook his head when he heard what Strahan the meteorologist had to report. As the weatherman said, it was good news and bad news. But to Boshardt's mind, the good news hardly made up for the bad. It meant that the sheriff had to live with an imaginary killer named Elsie for a few days. Elsie, the personality engendered by the Weather Service, was imaginary; Elsie the murderous storm was very real, already taking lives and destroying property in the Caribbean.\n\nSheriff Boshardt had been elected to his office four times in sixteen years. The reason was simply that the people of St. Didier Parish liked him. He was a tall, trim man, darkly tanned by the Gulf coast sun, with deep-set, intelligent eyes and short blond hair which he described as \"rapidly failing.\" He liked to sit in the diner and laugh with his friends, he liked to sit in Mike's and drink a couple of beers and watch football or basketball on the color television, and he liked his job. Maybe that was the reason his constituents were so pleased with him.\n\nBoshardt divided his duties into two categories. First, he enforced the laws of the parish and the state. This part of his job was necessary, even vital, but Boshardt didn't care for it very much. He was sometimes embarrassed to arrest someone for a misdemeanor, particularly a person whom Boshardt knew well. He never let that interfere with his work, though; he felt uncomfortable, but he did it.\n\nThe second category of duties was more in the line of public service. He enjoyed this a great deal more. He spoke to children in the schools about safety and avoiding accidents. He delivered talks to groups of parents on what to do when their children ignored the safety speeches. He presented information on teenage drinking and drug use. He gave short courses in disaster relief. He was aided in these duties by several deputies, but he performed most of his tasks himself. He hated to delegate jobs; he wanted to be certain that things would be done right, and the best way to do that was to do the work himself.\n\nHe was eating a plate of red beans and rice and washing it down with a glass of cold beer. He mopped up the gravy with chunks of French bread, almost obsessively, every three forkfuls. While he ate, he stared at the television screen.\n\nSkip Strahan, the Channel Five weatherman, was finishing his segment of the noon news. \"Present temperature on the square in downtown Linhart is eighty-nine degrees. Humidity at sixty-seven percent. Winds from the south-southeast at eight miles per hour. Outlook for the Linhart viewing area: clear today and tonight, high in the low nineties, low tonight in the upper seventies. Partly cloudy tomorrow afternoon, with a fifty percent chance of rain late in the day. High tomorrow in the low nineties. That's all for now. Sheila Downing will be back at six o'clock with the weather update.\" The image of Strahan's young face was replaced by a bank commercial. Sheriff Boshardt turned his attention back to his lunch.\n\n\"Glad that storm moved north instead of heading on into the Gulf,\" said the waitress, a seventeen-year-old girl named Lauren.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Boshardt.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Lauren. \"Seems this is the time of year for hurricanes to make a run for us.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Boshardt, mopping up the gravy on a piece of bread.\n\n\"And I don't know why they have to name hurricanes after women.\"\n\n\"Neither do I, honey,\" said the sheriff. He looked at her thoughtfully.\n\n\"So Dinah's gone,\" said the waitress. \"It's sad, sort of. If we were going to have a hurricane, I like the name Dinah better than\u2014what is it? Elsie?\"\n\n\"I had a grandmother name of Elsie,\" said Boshardt quietly. That wasn't true; he hadn't, really. He just wanted to take a quiet shot at the girl. He swallowed a long mouthful of beer, staring at the wall beyond the row of booths.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry,\" said Lauren, flustered. \"I didn't mean anything by it.\"\n\nNo, you didn't, thought Boshardt. And neither did I. He laughed softly. So we're all even, and that's the way I like it to be.\n\nHe smiled at the waitress, and she started to say something, but didn't. She turned and went into the kitchen. Boshardt shook his head sadly. At the time, he didn't know why.\n\nIt was almost twelve-thirty. The sheriff stood up and ran a hand through his hair. He yawned.\n\n\"Had enough?\" called Mrs. Perkins from the kitchen.\n\n\"Yeah, Ma,\" said Boshardt. \"Real good today. I'll leave you a couple of bucks on the counter.\"\n\n\"You don't have to, Sheriff,\" said the old woman.\n\n\"I know,\" said Boshardt. \"If I had to, I'd eat somewheres else.\" It was about the same thing she said to him every day, and the same thing he said to her. He left two dollars beside the cash register, then walked back out into the hot air that covered Ridge Street like clear fire.\n\nThe patrol car was parked about forty yards from the Crisis Caf\u00e9. Boshardt hoped that he wouldn't meet anyone he knew on the way to the car; he was a very friendly person, and he valued his close relationship with the people of Arbier, but after a heavy meal on a hot day he didn't want to have to smile and make idle conversation. He wanted to get in the car and drive for about fifteen miles and let the garlic and hot sausage fade away into his tissues. He decided to drive up to Linhart and check on the office.\n\nRidge Street, one of Arbier's four main streets, ran straight from the northern corporation limit south to the Gulf of Mexico. The street ended with a driveway paved poorly with asphalt and covered with small white shells; the drive narrowed into a rutted dirt track, which led directly to a very old wooden pier that visibly swayed with the slapping of the waves. Beside the pier on the narrow beach was a bait shop, long since closed down and abandoned. Sheriff Boshardt had to go down to that old shack about two or three times a year, to chase away high school kids or drunks or noisy couples; these people could easily find other places to have their disorderly times, and Boshardt encouraged them to do just that.\n\nHe thought about that bait shop as he passed by the Sea-Ray Motel, which was usually the second stop for the unmarried couples, some of the high school kids, and a surprising number of the drunks, not all of whom were unemployed vagrants. The shack made a southern border for Arbier, a kind of outpost. The Sea-Ray Motel guarded Arbier's northern frontier. Beyond the Sea-Ray, Ridge Street became a parish road, as bad as the asphalt and shell driveway. The noise grew irritating as Boshardt drove along; the car bumped and swayed from one deep chuckhole to another. The shells popped and cracked beneath the tires. A thick cloud of dust and dirt fanned up around the car. Boshardt rolled up the windows as the fine dirt sifted in on him.\n\nThe parish of St. Didier had three main population centers. They were Arbier; Linhart, the parish seat, with about six thousand people; and, northwest of Linhart, the town of Delochitaches, which the people there pronounced De- _lock'_ -i-tus. Boshardt thought that it was just plain unfriendly for a town of eighteen hundred to have a name like that. He had to be careful to give Delochitaches as much attention as he gave Arbier and the rest of the parish; he really didn't like that community.\n\nArbier, where Boshardt had been born and where he grew up, received the greatest share of his time. Many of the people in the parish believed that he should live in Linhart; but in the first place, Boshardt didn't want to leave the house he had lived in all of his life, the same house his parents had moved into after their wedding; in the second place, Boshardt could cite statistics to prove that the crime rate in St. Didier Parish did not justify his moving. It really didn't make any difference where he lived. He could do almost as good a job from Seattle, Washington.\n\nMost of the people of Arbier earned their livings either on the sea or in the fields. On the sea were shrimp boats and fishing trawlers; there were also off-shore oil rigs. In the fields to the north and west of the town was sugar cane. Boshardt looked at the fields of green, waist-high cane as he drove by. Boshardt thought that St. Didier Parish was one of the most beautiful in the state, although by national standards the parish was impoverished.\n\nArbier's residents had a characteristic shrug that they presented to inquisitive foreigners. Like the unwillingness to correct a visitor's pronunciation, reserving that for local folk, the shrug was meaningful to the people of Arbier. Tourists and reporters interpreted the shrug as part of the Cajun spirit; only another native would have understood just how hostile the gesture was.\n\nThe sheriff left Arbier behind, and the cane fields. Soon the farming communities began to flash by on the sides of the road. They were each nothing more than a couple dozen pine board shacks, roofed with tarpaper or sheets of galvanized metal. There was always a gas station, a grocery store that might also contain a post office, and three or four lounges. That's what they called themselves. He just wished that they wouldn't call _him._ Sometimes there was trouble, and sometimes he had to go tend to it. Out here, in tiny villages of one or two hundred people, there was very little concern or respect for the law. People didn't feel part of the parish or the state; they felt separate and virtually exempt from the rules of distant lawmakers. Store owners and lounge operators often had reason to disagree.\n\nLounges. Hell. Boshardt took a quick glance into the open door of Marie & Pal's Lounge, in Capita, Louisiana, as he drove by at thirty-five miles per hour. The inside of the bar seemed as black as death, with only a fuzzy red rectangle glowing faintly in the back. That was all Boshardt could see. No people, no life. Blackness. He drove on.\n**2**\n\nThere was a man registered under the name of Robert Branford in Room 8 of the Sea-Ray Motel. The day manager suspected that this was not the man's real name; the manager didn't especially care. Most of the business he did was with people using false names. What made Robert Branford unusual was that he was alone.\n\nA light went on on the switchboard in the office. The manager saw that it was the man in Room 8. \"Yes?\" he said.\n\n\"I'd like to make a long-distance call, please,\" said Robert Branford.\n\n\"Sure,\" said the manager. He dialed the long-distance operator. \"Operator? This is the Sea-Ray Motel. A guest in Room 8 would like to make a long-distance call. Thank you.\" He pulled the patch cord and went back to his reading. He didn't need to eavesdrop to be entertained. Not at the Sea-Ray.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Robert Branford. \"I'd like a number in Miami Beach, please.\" He gave the operator the number and waited for the connection to go through. He heard the phone in Florida ringing.\n\n\"Hello?\" said a man's voice on the other end.\n\n\"Hello, Tom?\" said Robert Branford. \"This is Chuck in Louisiana. In Arbier.\" He pronounced the town's name wrong.\n\n\"Right,\" said Tom. \"I was expecting you half an hour ago.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about that. It took me a while just finding a motel around here. They don't get much tourist trade, you know.\"\n\n\"As a matter of some interest,\" said Tom, \"I don't know. But that's fine. We don't want a lot of strange people getting in our way. Who's at the motel with you?\"\n\n\"With me? Nobody,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Don't be stupid. In the other rooms.\"\n\n\"Oh. A couple of guys that work on the off-shore rigs. A black hooker turning tricks in Room 13\u2014\"\n\n\"It figures you'd find that pretty fast.\"\n\nThere was a pause. Chuck was annoyed, but he kept his anger under control. Tom kept Chuck and the rest of the crew under control; that was what Tom was for. \"Yeah,\" said Chuck at last. \"The rest of the rooms go by the hour instead of the day. It's that kind of place.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" said Tom. \"You must fit in real nice. What do they think you're doing there?\"\n\n\"I dropped kind of a hint that I'm doing research for a magazine article. That covers all the questions I might ask, and also driving around casing the town.\"\n\n\"Terrific. You're using your head. What do you think of the place? What was it? Arbier?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck. \"I think it's just what we want. Maybe about three thousand people, but you never see more than a dozen at a time, even downtown, even during business hours. Everything's on four main streets. You could drive right through the town and miss everything if you took your eyes off the road to change radio stations. Of course, then you'd be in the Gulf of Mexico.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Tom. He sounded weary.\n\n\"That's the thing, too. It's right on the water, just the way you wanted. The highest point in the town is about seven feet above sea level. Any kind of heavy weather off the Gulf, and the whole place could be wringing itself out for days.\"\n\n\"So the people there probably know what to do during heavy weather.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Chuck. \"That's what we want, isn't it?\"\n\n\"That's what we want.\"\n\n\"How about, uh, Bill?\"\n\n\"Who?\" asked Tom.\n\n\"Nelson. You know. He wants everybody to call him Bill.\"\n\n\"He called in from New Orleans. When he was supposed to. He says that's a piece of cake, too. No sweat.\"\n\n\"Everything's going our way\u2014so far,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I might remind you that so far isn't very far at all yet,\" said Tom.\n\n\"No,\" said Chuck, \"but we're getting there.\"\n\nThere was a brief pause. Chuck could hear the sound of liquid being poured into a glass. The sound made him thirsty. Over the telephone he heard Tom sigh. \"Look,\" said Tom, \"Denny and his crew will be there in two days then,\" he said. \"If he can find the goddamn place.\"\n\n\"If he gets lost,\" said Chuck, \"tell him to call me.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Tom, sounding even more tired. \"That's just what I'll have him do.\"\n\n\"Look, if you don't think I can handle this, just say so. I'll be happy to watch. Just so I get my share.\"\n\n\"Chuck, I have a few things I want you to understand. This is the kind of operation that requires careful planning. You want to know why? Because the parts of this operation will be working at great distances from each other. I will be coordinating things, but to a certain extent you will all be on your own. So you have to understand your individual roles completely, and perform them perfectly. Your individual role, Chuck, is not being cute. Please don't be cute, Chuck. Because if you keep it up, there are Curt and Allen, neither of whom you've ever met, and they'll be looking through your dresser drawers in a matter of hours. And you won't like that at all. So don't be cute.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Chuck bitterly. \"You plan everything. You tell us what to do. Okay, we'll do it. But it all better work out, because there are more of us than there are of you, even with whatever their names were.\"\n\n\"Goddamn it, there you go again. You're being cute. Last time, Chuck. Positively the last time.\"\n\nThere was silence. Chuck glared at the wall in his motel room. Finally he spoke. \"What about Miami? Is Ed ready there?\"\n\n\"Ed has been redeployed. We came to the conclusion that the operation could be better handled by Nelson in New Orleans. It will be less expensive and involve fewer people that way. The simpler the better.\"\n\n\"Simple! This thing's getting to be like the Normandy invasion.\"\n\n\"True,\" said Tom, \"cute, but true. When you're taking advantage of natural disasters and the panic of simple people, you have to do it with quickness and finesse. And style, too. I like to do everything with style.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Chuck, \"style will see us through.\"\n\n\"It will,\" said Tom, \"better than cuteness.\"\n\n\"I'll call again tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You do that, Chuck. I'll be waiting anxiously.\" He hung up. In Arbier, Chuck held the receiver for a few seconds, frowning. Then he slammed the phone down angrily and went out to find a liquor store. He returned a short while later; he flicked the television set on and sat on the edge of the bed. He listened to Skip Strahan's noon weather report while he mixed Seagram's and 7-Up in a plastic tumbler. The liquor and the 7-Up had been easy enough to obtain in a chain drug store, but the plastic tumbler had cost Chuck\u2014Robert Branford\u2014a quarter in the motel office.\n\nChuck heard little of the weather report, but he did pay attention to the news of Hurricane Dinah and Hurricane Elsie. Hurricanes were going to play a large part in his immediate future. He raised his tumbler toward the television screen, in silent toast Jo the weatherman and his storms. Then he stretched out on the bed and drank until he lost the bottle.\n\n* * *\n\nSkip Strahan turned from his weather map and looked into the number two camera. \"We'll have a better idea of what's going on with Elsie on the Six O'clock Report tonight,\" he said. Then he gave a quick summary of the forecast for the Linhart viewing area, smiled, and waited for the red light on the camera to go off. When it did, he heard the intro to the bank commercial; he held his pose, smiling determinedly, until the director signaled for him to stop. \"Okay,\" said Strahan.\n\n\"Good job, Skip,\" said the director.\n\n\"Okay.\" Strahan walked off the news show set and headed for his small office and dressing room. He wanted to get the makeup off as quickly as possible. He hated it. He had never grown used to wearing it. It made him feel filthy and greasy.\n\nAfter he finished cleaning it off and changing from the station's uniform tie and blazer into his own more casual clothes, he sat for a minute looking into the mirror. He was feeling kind of rocky. He had taken three Valium before the show began. He didn't feel them at all. He felt terrible, and as he sat looking at his reflection he realized that he was feeling steadily worse. His ears were buzzing loudly and his throat was very dry. He felt a panic coming on. He opened the drawer in his dressing table and took out the bottle of tranquilizers. He swallowed two more with a gulp of warm Coca-Cola. He waited, pretending that he could feel the Valium attacking his anxiety, returning him to a normal frame of mind. His head still buzzed, though, and his hands were sweaty. He thought about taking two more pills.\n\nThe telephone on the dressing table interrupted him. He picked up the receiver. It had to be important, because the receptionist wouldn't let viewers get through to the station personnel otherwise. \"Hello?\" he said.\n\n\"Skip?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"This is Darlaine.\"\n\nStrahan had to think for a few seconds. Darlaine? A weird name. Who was it? Then he remembered, and he knew how she had gotten past the woman at the switchboard, and he didn't like it. Darlaine was the wife of Walter Boshardt, the sheriff of St. Didier Parish. When Skip Strahan made a romantic conquest, he made it count. He wondered angrily why he never learned from past mistakes; he knew that this mistake was not one of his ordinary lapses. If this one blew up, he'd be lucky to get a job broadcasting weather reports to penguins in Antarctica. \"How are you, Darlaine?\" he said, wishing that someone would call him away, or that some fire or emergency would happen.\n\n\"Fine, Skip.\"\n\nThe conversation sat there for a long, uncomfortable moment.\n\nStrahan almost asked how her husband was, but that was a bad question. He said nothing instead.\n\n\"I was wondering,\" said Darlaine Boshardt, \"maybe you'd be interested in talking to the Arbier Boys' Club about what to do in a hurricane.\"\n\n\"I did that two months ago,\" he said. \"To the Boys' Club. They didn't pay much attention.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She thought for a moment. \"How about the P.T.A.? Have you talked to them yet?\"\n\n\"Not recently,\" said Strahan.\n\n\"I'm sure I could get you scheduled. And you could get your regular fee. I'll bet the Boys' Club didn't give you your regular fee.\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to talk to the parents,\" said Strahan. \"When you have it all worked out, call the station and leave word with one of the secretaries.\" He hoped that she would take the hint and hang up.\n\nShe didn't. \"I was also hoping to see you soon, myself,\" she said. \"Nothing about the weather or anything.\" She tried to sound coy, but the result was so unbearable that Strahan wanted to throw down the receiver.\n\n\"I'll try, Darlaine,\" he said, \"but you know what it's like during hurricane season.\" He left it at that, because she didn't know what it was like. She wouldn't realize that his job was just about the same as it was all during the year. He got most of his information, forecasts, and satellite photographs from the Weather Service in New Orleans. All he did was organize it, draw his lines and numbers on the maps, and read the official conclusions to the folks at home.\n\n\"I guess so,\" said Darlaine.\n\n\"Yeah. Well. I'll try to get down to Arbier for one reason or another soon. I'll see you then.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, please.\" She almost cooed; Strahan shook his head.\n\n\"I have to go now,\" he said. \"I have to draw the maps for Sheila's evening report.\" That was a lie.\n\n\"All right, Skip. Don't forget. Goodbye.\"\n\n\"'Bye, Darlaine.\" He hung up, wondering what she didn't want him to forget. He unclenched the fist that hadn't been holding the telephone; he looked at the bottle of Valium, then decided not to take any more. He was beginning to feel a little less edgy now. It was all beginning to overwhelm him; the tranquilizers helped him cope with the pressure and the fear he felt during the day and at night. The powerful sleeping pills got him to sleep. The mood elevators and amphetamines got him going in the morning. It was one long cycle. He got the Valium and the Quaaludes from a doctor in Linhart, who was treating him for excessive anxiety. He got the mood pills and the pep pills from a doctor in Arbier, who was treating him for acute depression. He didn't dare tell either doctor about the other. Now he was locked into the cycle, and he couldn't break it. Without the uppers or downers he would be lost; he hated even to think about what he would feel like. And he had to feel good, he had to be ready, every day, in front of television cameras, in front of many thousands of people. He had to smile.\n\nHe didn't want to. He just wanted to lie down. He just wanted to forget about Darlaine Boshardt.\n\nThe telephone rang again. He didn't answer it this time. The sound of the ringing disturbed him, but he didn't move.\n\nAcross town, Corinne Strahan listened to the ringing of the phone in her receiver. Her husband wasn't answering the call; she guessed that he was in his dressing room, because just a few moments before she had tried to call and his line was busy. She hung up and dialed again; the switchboard operator put her through again, and once more she listened to the sound of the telephone ringing. After ten rings, she gave up.\n\nCorinne could easily have gotten into her car and driven to the studio to see her husband. In fact, that was something she used to do very often, after the noon broadcast. They had had lunch together a few times every week. Now, Skip didn't seem to mind missing their lunches together; she understood that he needed all the rest he could get between broadcasts.\n\nOn this day, there was very little for her to do. She had taken two loads of washing to the laundromat\u2014the washateria, as they called it in Linhart. Corinne thought the word was funny. All that work had been finished by ten-thirty. She still had to go shopping for dinner, but there wasn't any hurry about that. The market was right across the street. Skip didn't get home until seven-thirty, anyway, even though he didn't have to do the late report on Sunday. They didn't eat dinner until nine o'clock. . . .\n\nCorinne sighed. She had a lot of trouble getting through the day, too. She knew about the pills and things that Skip was taking. She sure didn't need anything to get her going in the morning, though. Her problem was filling up the time she had. She could watch television, but that meant hearing Skip's voice or seeing him at noon, and that just made her feel worse. She had thought about getting a job.\n\nWhat would Skip say if she told him she was going to work in the cane fields? The idea made her laugh. It was a brief interruption in her boredom. Too brief. Quickly, the tedium re-formed itself around her.\n\nIt was after one o'clock. To Corinne, it seemed as though it ought to be the middle of next week, so slowly had the morning gone. She picked up the phone again, letting a telephone number materialize in her mind. She didn't care whom she called. It turned out to be her father; that didn't surprise her very much. Corrine had talked Skip into renting an apartment for her father, an aging, sick widower. Skip had insisted that Corinne's father not live near them. He didn't want to have to go over to his father-in-law's every time a faucet started dripping. They had agreed to find a place for the elderly man in Arbier; Corinne's father had lived his entire life in Baltimore, and he resisted moving south. Faced with the prospect of living the rest of his life entirely alone, however, he did not resist very strongly. Now Corinne kept in close touch with him and visited him whenever she could talk Skip into driving down.\n\n\"Hello, Dad?\"\n\n\"Corinne?\"\n\n\"How many other daughters do you have?\" she asked. \"Some I don't know about? You been stepping out that I don't know about?\"\n\nHer father laughed. The sound seemed hoarse and frightening to Corinne. \"I'm glad you called,\" he said. \"I was hoping the two of you would visit me this weekend. I know how Skip feels but, damn it, I don't like to be alone here. I'm not going to pretend that there are things that need fixing. I just want to see you. You're my only child, Corinne.\"\n\n\"I know, Dad. But you have to understand how Skip thinks. He believes that this way is the best for all of us.\"\n\n\"Corinne, I'm not going to be here forever. One of these days soon, something's going to come along and carry me away. And before that happens, I want to see as much of you as I can. You're the only thing in the whole world that gives me any happiness. It's selfish, I know, but I think I've earned the right to a little of that.\"\n\n\"Dad,\" said Corinne sadly, \"you're trying to make me feel guilty again. You're trying to blackmail me emotionally. That's just the very thing that Skip objects to. And so do I. You know that it would take a team of angels to carry you off; you're just too stubborn for anything less.\"\n\n\"All right. Well. Remember what I said.\"\n\n\"Okay, Dad. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.\"\n\n\"I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Goodbye, Dad.\"\n\n\"Goodbye, Corinne.\"\n\nShe hung up the phone. The conversation lasted less than ten minutes. It wasn't even quarter after one yet.\n\nShe thought about calling Skip again, but she pictured him resting in his office. She wondered if that's all people did in small towns in places like St. Didier Parish\u2014try to think up people to call on the telephone. Maybe they had to do it to reassure themselves that they were part of a genuine community after all. In places like Linhart and the parish's other towns, it was very difficult to prove that any other way. The telephones were the only link between people. That and the weather, which was the favorite topic of conversation. Maybe that was why Skip was so popular with the viewers, why he was always in demand as a speaker at functions. The weather governed peoples' lives, interfered with them, to a greater extent than in many other parts of the country.\n\nNone of it made the least damn bit of difference to Corinne Strahan. Suddenly she hated everything. Everything. Without exception.\n**3**\n\n****\n\nWalter Boshardt checked the Linhart office and found that his deputy there was doing an acceptable job. The deputy in charge, Captain Brierrer, had little enough to do. Sergeant Marty Theriot and several other officers were there to help him, and they had to make work for themselves in order to justify being on the parish payroll. Theriot particularly enjoyed setting up speed traps, a practice that Boshardt disapproved of but did not forbid. Today the sheriff just ducked into the office, told one of the officers to attend to a few minor tasks, and ducked out again. The drive up to Linhart had been enjoyable. Now Boshardt could drive back to Arbier; he would enjoy that, too. Law and order were thriving in his parish, and everywhere he looked there were peace and open bottles of Dr. Pepper. Except here, by his office. He frowned at the machine, dug in his pocket for some change, and bought a bottle to drink on the way back. Then he walked across the shell-paved parking lot to his car.\n\nWalter Boshardt was comfortably in his middle years. He had lived through many hurricane warnings, and he had lived through four of the actual monsters themselves. It never felt exciting until afterward.\n\nThe sheriff had several special fears, things that had shadowed him since childhood. He had an almost paralyzing fear of dangling power lines, which could fry him as he walked the streets of Arbier or rode in his patrol car. He had nightmares during Hurricane Watches; he saw the black living wires snaking toward him from snapped poles. He could feel the prickling touch of the wires, just before he awoke. He was not afraid of flooding or the invisible dangers of disease that accompanied the rising water. He did wait anxiously for a tile from a nearby roof to come smashing through the taped and boarded windows of his office, driven by winds to a speed of nearly two hundred miles an hour. He had unpleasantly clear notions of what debris traveling at that speed could do to an unprotected human head.\n\nThe people of Arbier, for the most part, did not share the sheriff's fears. They had their own. Most of these worries were over matters of finance: would the hurricane ruin the new stock of merchandise; would the flood waters destroy a house full of furniture; would the winds rip the half-built home apart, or heave a family's house trailer across the lot, or flatten this season's half-grown money crop. . . . Their own personal safety came in a poor second. It was often risked in defense of a locked box of securities or a new automobile.\n\nLittle thought was given to the future, other than the necessities of next year's farming, or the stocking of merchandise for a holiday sale. One natural disaster might make people think temporarily of securing themselves against whatever blows the future might hold; but these thoughts were quickly forgotten, and the next natural disaster would catch them just as ill-prepared, just as surprised, just as frantic. The sale of plywood would be phenomenal for a couple of days, because in between storms no one had thought to install any more permanent safeguards. Flashlight batteries would disappear from stores, because families had neglected to set anything aside. Stores would be stripped of canned goods. Sheriff Boshardt and his deputies had to step in and stifle that fear before it grew beyond containable limits.\n\nBoshardt disliked that, more than any other part of an emergency. A frightened crowd could do more damage to a town, and to itself, than any number of loose house trailers or untethered boats crashing in the hurricane winds.\n\nDarlaine Boshardt, the sheriff's wife, had watched her husband in action for nearly two decades. She shared none of the pride which the people of St. Didier Parish felt toward him. She did not respect his capable manner. She thought that everything he did, he did for his own personal glory. She had little to say to him, and she avoided him at home. This situation made him unhappy, but over the years he had become accustomed to it. He had to; it wouldn't change.\n\nHer real name wasn't Darlaine. She had been born Dorothy Sauk Micheton. She had decided that Dorothy was a plain name, and had required everyone of her acquaintance to call her Darlaine, shortly after her marriage to Boshardt. He still found it difficult to call her by that name; he avoided it as much as possible, rarely calling her by any name other than \"Honey.\"\n\nDarlaine Boshardt had her own medicine for her quirky tantrums and grudges. She usually found a young man she had never met before, and she took him out to the Sea-Ray Motel, in full view of the entire town of Arbier. She always registered under her married name. Everyone in the town, almost everyone in the parish, knew what she did. Instead of laughing at the sheriff, though, the people of St. Didier Parish just thought that his wife was still a little unbaked in the middle.\n\nThe sheriff was well-liked throughout the parish. He was not a descendant of an old Acadian family, that was true. But his parents had lived in Arbier for many years, and Boshardt's mother had grown up in St. Didier Parish. His wife's flagrant adulteries were as well-known to him as to the whole town; both the sheriff and the town chose to ignore her, for different reasons. Walter Boshardt had achieved a kind of uneasy truce with his wife. The town of Arbier passed her behavior as the actions of a foreigner. Walter Boshardt had been too popular in Arbier for Darlaine's antics to undermine that acceptance. In private, perhaps, the residents of the town clucked their tongues and talked about her. But none of that tainted their feelings toward the sheriff.\n\nSkip Strahan, a recent selection of Darlaine Boshardt's, tended to agree with the parish's estimate of her. He was sorry that he had gone along with her. It seemed that he had gotten himself into a situation that might be difficult to work out of. She was more interested in him than she had been with previous men, possibly because he was a television personality. Darlaine understood all of this; she knew of Strahan's reluctance to continue their ugly affair. It was his reluctance that excited her. She had no intention of letting him get away now. She would do anything to watch him wriggle uncomfortably; calling him up and behaving foolishly was nothing compared to what she was fully ready to do.\n\nWhatever she had to do, it was probably something she had already done some time in the past. She had done quite a lot in the past.\n**4**\n\n****\n\n_It was in the town of Kepton, Ohio, twenty years before, near the end of President Eisenhower's second term._\n\n_Paul Pierson went home from school early, His third grade teacher had told her class that there was a bad weather warning, and they were all dismissed to go straight home. Paul and his classmates celebrated, because it was something different, something that broke up the daily pattern. The teacher cut their cheers short, making sure the children understood that they were to go directly home._\n\n_Outside, the air was chilly and damp. It was late March, and little patches of dirty, unmelted snow still remained in protected areas among bushes and in shaded recesses. Paul walked home feeling strange and dreamlike. The wind was oddly quiet. Nothing rustled the stark, black branches of the trees around the schoolyard. The sky was dark. It was obvious to Paul that a storm was approaching. But Paul knew that the school wouldn't send them home almost half an hour early just because of a storm. This sky was different than any he'd ever seen; there was a greenish cast to the heavy clouds. Paul didn't like the way the light made familiar things look. The peculiar color and the stillness exaggerated the frightening sensation. When he got to the end of his street, Paul ran the rest of the way home._\n\n_Another ominous thing was that his father's car was parked in the driveway. Never before had Paul's father come home from work before school let out. All of these unusual things made Paul wonder what was happening. They made him afraid._\n\n_\"I'm home, Ma,\" he called as he went in the side door of the house._\n\n_\"Is that you, Paul?\" called his mother from the living room._\n\n_\"Of course it is, Connie,\" said his father. \"Who did you think it was?\"_\n\n_\"I'm just wondering why the school sent him home, is all,\" said Paul's mother._\n\n_\"Because there's a tornado, that's why,\" said his father._\n\n_\"A tornado?\" said Paul, startled._\n\n_\"Don't scare him, Michael.\"_\n\n_\"I'm not,\" said Paul's father. \"Are you scared, Paul?\"_\n\n_\"No,\" said Paul. He was lying._\n\n_\"We ought to go down to the basement,\" said his mother nervously._\n\n_\"I don't want to go down there,\" said Paul. \"There's bugs.\"_\n\n_\"There's a Tornado Watch for this part of Ohio,\" said his mother. \"The radio said we should plan to seek shelter in case a tornado is seen. That means going down to the basement.\"_\n\n_\"We don't have to go down yet,\" said Paul's father. \"Just if we hear that a tornado's been spotted. We'll have plenty of time.\"_\n\n_\"What if we don't hear?\" cried his wife. \"What then? Are you going to take a chance like that?\"_\n\n_\"The monster lives down there,\" said Paul. No one paid any attention to his objection._\n\n_Paul's father began to get annoyed. \"All right,\" he said. \"Bring the radio and the flashlight.\"_\n\n_\"What about food and water and blankets?\" asked Paul's mother._\n\n_Her husband stared for several seconds. \"How long do you think we'll be down there?\" he shouted at last._\n\n_\"I don't want to go down there,\" said Paul._\n\n_They went down anyway. When they were all in the damp cellar, Paul's mother began worrying again. \"Which corner?\" she asked._\n\n_\"What?\" asked Paul's father._\n\n_\"The tornado corner,\" she said, \"which corner is it?\"_\n\n_\"How should I know?\" Paul's father was so irritated that the boy thought his dad might prefer sitting upstairs in the path of a tornado to any more of this nonsense._\n\n_\"They said on the radio which corner was the safe one for waiting for a tornado,\" said Paul's mother. \"I think it was the north corner. Then the tornado would blow everything over you, instead of on top of you.\"_\n\n_\"I don't think it was the north corner,\" said Paul. \"We studied it in school last semester. I don't think it was the north corner.\"_\n\n_\"This house doesn't have a north comer,\" said Paul's father in a quiet, restrained voice. It was a voice of fury only barely held back. \"I found that out last spring when they put in the sewers.\"_\n\n_\"Maybe it was the west corner, then,\" said Paul's mother._\n\n_\"It doesn't have a west corner, either,\" said her husband. \"That's logical.\"_\n\n_\"What?\" she asked._\n\n_\"This house has four corners,\" said Paul's father, sighing. \"It has a north-northeast corner, a east-southeast corner, a south-southwest corner, and a west-northwest corner. Take your pick.\"_\n\n_\"I don't know,\" said his wife, her face gray and frowning in the dim light. \"If we go into the wrong corner, we'll be killed.\"_\n\n_\"In that case,\" said Paul's father, \"I'd rather be killed upstairs on the couch.\"_\n\n_\"Shut up, Michael.\"_\n\n\"You _shut up.\" It was beginning to sound like one of their usual arguments. Paul's mother started to cry. \"Stop crying,\" said the boy's father._\n\n_Fortunately for the Pierson family, on that occasion there were no tornadoes sighted in the entire state of Ohio. But the argument did not die; over the years, whenever there was a Tornado Watch, the family would go down into the basement and wait. The correct comer remained a mystery; in between tornadoes the matter was forgotten, and no one ever learned which corner was the safe one. Again, luckily, Paul Pierson grew to maturity without ever seeing the evil funnel cloud of a tornado. But tornadoes played an important part in his growing up, and they figured in his nightmares and anxiety dreams for the rest of his life. So did the dark, damp cellar._\n**TWO**\n\n****\n\n**The Tropical Storm**\n**5**\n\nMonday Morning, an August Monday morning, began in Arbier. Cyrus, the Persian cat, flung himself futilely against the screen door of the balcony. Paul Pierson woke up, noticed that Maddie Gargotier was already missing from her side of the bed, and made a gesture that he almost believed was amused. He went into the living room, tossed the cat into the hallway then went back into the bedroom to pick up a set of clothes for the day's work. This task was not too difficult; in the summer heat and humidity of the southern Louisiana climate, Pierson wore a light short-sleeve shirt, a pair of dungarees, and a pair of sneakers every day. The shirt was changed daily, and the blue jeans once a week. On this particular day, Pierson grabbed a blue tee shirt from a laundry bag on the floor, found the blue jeans on the rug by the bed, and searched until he found where he had kicked the sneakers the night before. He didn't worry about socks. In the town of Arbier, the wearing of sneakers made Pierson eccentric. There were many sayings about the behavior of people who didn't conform to the Acadian fashion, and they all had to do with _le Bon Dieu:_ \"If God had wanted man to wear shoes. . . .\" Pierson had an appropriate reply which he never had the courage to use. It went something like, \"If God had wanted people to dance, he would have built the world with polished hardwood floors.\" Knowing the Acadian love of festivals and weekly fais-do-does\u2014community dances\u2014Pierson risked social banishment for such a remark. Such a thing was not unheard of. Why, to call a native a Cajun to his face, unless the situation was particularly friendly, was enough to fuel a life-long feud. It was never the person an outsider spoke to who was the Cajun. It was always someone else who was the down-the-bayou Cajun.\n\nPierson washed, dressed, made himself a breakfast of Dr. Pepper and stale doughnuts, put some dry food in a dish for Cy along with a dish of water, and left for work. At the time, Pierson was employed by a Monsieur de Crout. The job was as unattractive as it sounded. Pierson was a fish sorter. After turning his back on his unsatisfying home life, college life, married life, he had looked for more rewarding experiences among the \"real Americans,\" the ones he had read about but never seen. If the general mixtry\u2014as the local phrase had it\u2014represented real America, forty-nine other states and a large portion of Louisiana had never been so informed. It satisfied Pierson though. He had never seen or even suspected that such a foreign enclave of people existed right in the heart of rural America.\n\nIt wasn't his duty to bring that information to me ignorant millions. It was his job to put the red snappers in one ice-filled box, the flounder in another, the pompano in a third, and so on, all day. It was a very unglamorous way to earn a living; Maddie had made that point several times in their stormy relationship. Pierson had to agree; he came home every day in the most pungent of states. Pierson had no intention of making the fish-sorting profession his life-long vocation, but according to theory it paid the rent and kept Cy in fish-flavored foodlike substances.\n\nThat was the theory. The reason that Pierson's stride was a bit more determined than usual on this Monday morning was that the actual practice in the matter did not come close to its platonic ideal. Pierson had worked the entire summer for Monsieur de Crout and had not received any pay for three weeks. Old Monsieur de Crout was a good man, Pierson thought. He wouldn't have called his employer lovable, but that isn't a quality essential in someone whose main function in your life is the paying out of money. Three weeks is a long time to work for someone on the basis of likableness. De Crout was an old-time Arbierian; he had lived in the town for decades, before the influx of newer, non-Gallic families shortly after the Second World War. For that reason, de Crout enjoyed certain privileges which Pierson would never know. De Crout's shop had no sign outside. Its display windows were forever empty\u2014why not? Everyone in Arbier knew that old Monsieur de Crout ran a fish shop. Members of the old Acadian families treated each other even more specially than the town as a whole treated foreigners. And as far as Pierson could see, it was too late for anyone in the world to enter into that confraternity.\n\nStill, money was money. The rent was due. There was a stack of bills on Pierson's nightstand that was already falling onto the floor and getting kicked inadvertently beneath the bed. The good-time cash that Pierson liked to keep in his pockets was slowly dwindling also. Pierson had decided that he couldn't take any more of Monsieur de Crout's muttered excuses or obscure gestures. The situation was embarrassingly simple: either Pierson got his back pay, or he quit his job. That idea wasn't so bad, as the young man thought about it. After a few days, he might even stop smelling like a fish store himself. Then he could learn what his cat's real feelings for him were.\n\nEvery day, old man de Crout would buy fresh fish caught in the nearby waters of the Gulf, or in the brackish marshes. During crawfish season, the little, ugly mudbugs were de Crout's main source of income. But late summer meant the end of crawfish season, and Pierson had to work with the fish he had learned to identify. These, plus case after case of fresh oysters, were shipped by truck to restaurants within the parish and as far away as New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It wasn't a demanding job. Pierson had as one of his main objections that the job wasn't demanding enough. Line after line of argument went through his mind as he walked along Ridge Street toward Monsieur de Crout's fish store.\n\nThe town of Arbier was waking up and beginning its day at the same time. Pierson recognized several people on his way to work, and he greeted them all. The greetings weren't always returned, because to some of the residents he wasn't much more than the advance party of an invasion, determined to crush the Acadian way of life and replace it with the spiritless and detestable lifestyle they witnessed every day on television commercials. They could swear they would never let that happen. So it was that from these culturally proud people Pierson received never as much as a nod, a recognition that he existed. That would be an invitation to the very kind of change they feared the most. To these stern Acadians, \"change\" did not always mean \"progress.\" Indeed, \"progress\" was rarely a positive word. A common attitude was \"it was good enough for my _grand-p\u00e8re_ , it's good enough for me, for true.\" Anywhere else, this kind of reasoning might be foolish, but here in the odd cultural climate of southwestern Louisiana, it was perfectly natural. So every day Pierson greeted people he knew would ignore him, because he wanted to belong to the community, and because he had no one else to greet.\n\nIt was still early, because Pierson's job required that he have the fish sorted and boxed, ready for shipment, when the truckers were ready. They had deadlines to meet at their destinations as well. The restaurants couldn't wait, and customers couldn't be put off with a shrug and a muttered explanation that the fish packer in St. Didier Parish had taken his time getting to work. If he had stopped to consider it, Pierson would have realized that he was an important cog in one of the chief industries of the state. But on this Monday morning, he didn't feel exceptionally important. He felt angry, angrier by the step, angrier the closer he got to old man de Crout's shop. He was building his anger within him, because otherwise he would be helpless against the odd ways of the old man.\n\nThere was no light inside the shop. There never was. De Crout didn't think that it was necessary. He didn't need a bank of fluorescent lights to help him tell a pound of crawfish from a flounder, and neither did his patrons. As for quality, that was the job of Pierson and his co-worker, Ti' Jacques Barditon. They sorted and threw away the poor quality fish. The restaurant clients to the north and the local housewives who did their shopping in Monsieur de Crout's shop rarely had cause for complaint.\n\nPierson opened the front door. There was complete silence. It was a disquieting feeling. Pierson always felt that there should be a bell tinkling over the door to announce the entry of a patron, or the faint sounds of activity from the back room. But whenever Pierson arrived at the shop\u2014and no matter how early he arrived, old man de Crout was already there\u2014he was always met by the same unpleasant stillness.\n\nThe noise of the door shutting brought old Monsieur de Crout out from the back of the shop. \"You ready to do a day's work today, _hein_?\" he asked. \"We got us a load of shrimp to pack, the Lord himself would get tired just thinking about how hard it was making those little fish.\"\n\nPierson didn't even think about telling his employer that the shrimp weren't fish; he had given that up long ago. Besides, he was still in the grip of the anger he had carefully built up on his walk along Ridge Street. \"Monsieur de Crout,\" he said, and his voice was much less forceful than he wanted it to be, \"I have a couple of things I have to say to you.\"\n\n\"And after the shrimp, you and Ti' Jacques can start on those snappers. Save two or three good ones, too.\"\n\n\"What I meant was, I haven't been paid in over three weeks, you know. If you can't pay me today, I'm going to have to quit this job and find me another. It's not that I don't like working here. It's just that my landlord won't understand my excuse if I can't give him his rent.\"\n\nDe Crout stared silently for a moment. _\"Le sacr\u00e9 am\u00e9ricain,\"_ he muttered finally. Pierson had lived in Arbier long enough to know how derisive the expression was. \"I do my best, me,\" said de Crout. He took a sip of coffee from the demitasse he held. \"If that's not good enough, _eh bien_ , I don't know what to say.\" He turned and went into the back room of the shop. He had left the decision up to Pierson: either the young man could follow de Crout and get to work, or he could walk out the door, quitting his job, and making sure that almost the entire three thousand people of Arbier would hear about it by the end of the day.\n\nPierson glared at the empty doorway to the back room. He took a deep breath, hating the fishy smell of it. \"If God had wanted people to eat fish,\" he said quietly, \"he wouldn't have put them in the ocean and us on the land.\" He turned and started for the door, but before he touched the doorknob he heard de Crout's voice from the back room. \"There are some people, and some times, when the name of _le bon Dieu_ may be used, but this was not the time, and this was not the person.\" Pierson was amazed that de Crout had heard his remark, and even more frustrated because he knew that it would just aggravate the situation.\n\n\"All right,\" said Pierson, \"we'll see what the sheriff's office has to say about this.\" As he left the store, he met Ti' Jacques coming in.\n\n\"Allo, Paul,\" said the tall, skinny boy who had been his helper for the last few weeks.\n\n\"Morning, Jacques,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"I see you leaving by the door.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Well,\" said Ti' Jacques, \"you could be leaving, you, for some coffee or some rope or something. Or you could be leaving-leaving.\" The doubling of the word intensified it much more to the Acadian ear than any other more rigorously correct grammar might.\n\n\"I'm leaving for sure,\" said Pierson. \"I quit.\"\n\nJacques squinted his eyes a little. \"You fooling me with fun, boy?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" said Pierson. \"I just told old man de Crout to shove his job. He ain't no charity case, and I'm not no volunteer.\"\n\n\"Just let me warn you. These old Frenchmens, they a little different than me and you. He'll be mad in there, I tell you, mad like goddamn. And he won't let it sit either. By the end of the afternoon you'll be lucky to find a job as a stake in the ground. These old Frenchmens, I tell you, they been here a long time, they been here forever. I only been here seventeen years. So when it comes to putting up against one of them, me, I'd just rather not, _hein_?\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Pierson, \"but what does a person do in this town if he wants to get paid for the work he does?\"\n\nTi' Jacques's squint changed into a smile. \"He gets born here,\" he said. Then he pushed past Pierson, into De Crout's fish store.\n\nPierson was back on the sidewalk, in the bright sunlight. Ridge Street was busier now, as more people were on their way to work. He couldn't think of anything to do, so he headed back to his apartment building, hoping that Maddie might have returned. He supposed that she had made good on her promise to join the Navy, or at least gone up to Linhart with her friends to find out all the wonderful things the recruiter there could promise them. But, knowing Maddie as well as he did, Pierson thought that it was just as likely that she had forgotten the entire project already and had just gone off to catch a few catfish for supper. His threat concerning the sheriff could wait until later.\n\nAs he walked slowly back to his apartment, it was simple for Pierson to pick out the members of old Acadian families and people who had moved into the area in more recent times. The Acadians were the descendants of French settlers of Nova Scotia, some of the earliest European settlers in the New World. After a time, during which they followed their old lifestyle, brought over from Brittany, they were forced out of their homes by a political upheaval that saw Great Britain, not France, master of Canada. The Acadians' ancestors were conscripted, and sent back to England; they returned to the fishing life along the coast of Brittany; they settled along the Atlantic coast wherever the local settlers permitted them. But most of all, the Acadians traveled to south Louisiana, which at that time belonged to France. This dispersion is still spoken of as _le grand d'erangement_ , and it is the beginning of Cajun history. The Cajuns\u2014the descendants of the original Acadians\u2014were justifiably proud of their heritage and bitter about the harsh treatment they had received. They developed their own culture out of whatever material came to hand. If they found something as ugly and unappetizing as a crawfish, they found ways to turn the thing into one of the most versatile and delicious of local ingredients.\n\nIt is a matter of pride to the Cajun housewives and chefs that they will not attempt substitutions; nothing is made that cannot be completed with purely local items. The meat, the fowl, the seafood, the spices, the vegetables, everything is plucked from the earth where _le bon Dieu_ allowed them to settle.\n\nPerhaps this is one of the things that separates the Acadian spirit from the Creole. To most people, the two words mean the same thing. Nothing could be more incorrect. A Creole, technically, is a purebred descendant of the original French or Spanish settlers of the Louisiana territory. Of course, there are incredibly few of these people around the Gulf coast parishes today, although many an old _grand-p\u00e8re_ will try to tell you that he can trace his lineage back to the pirate Jean Lafitte himself. Creole today is reserved for the more metropolitan areas of the Louisiana area. One dines on Creole cooking in New Orleans or St. Martinville\u2014 _le petit Paris_ \u2014but everywhere the Cajun influence makes itself known.\n\nThere is a kind of insolence and pride in the genuine Cajun attitude that outsiders can't help but admire, as much as they puzzle over it. Why did that fellow insist that he was not a Cajun, but that everyone else for miles around was? Why is the word sometimes a cause of clannish spirit and other times a curse filthy enough to bring out guns and knives? Most visitors to the area\u2014and there are a few, a little-little, as a Cajun would say\u2014never catch the distinction as they go around looking for the typical Cajun town or the typical Cajun restaurant.\n\nThere is a perfect parallel in America, thought Pierson as he waited for a truck to pass on Ridge Street. He used to play basketball in Ohio. On those playgrounds, which often came close to being battlegrounds as well, he heard the black ballplayers call each other \"nigger\" with a kind of blithe humor. But Pierson knew goddamn well that he could _never_ use that word in that way, no matter how long he played in pick-up basketball games nor how well the blacks in the area got to know him. The same rule applied to \"Cajun.\" Maddie had made that clear early in their relationship. She wasn't no coonass Cajun, her. Maybe them stumpjumpers up to Delochitaches, them, they were Cajuns for goddamn. But Maddie Gargotier and her father, well, it didn't even bear talking about.\n\nThe building that Pierson lived in fit into the neighborhood about as well as he did. It had been built in the mid-sixties as an investment. The typical house in Arbier was short and squat, white, with a porch to entertain neighbors and friends. On one side of the house, outside the kitchen, was a shelf called a _tablette_ where the housewife could work without having to put up with the intolerable heat of the kitchen itself. Above the house proper, reached by a narrow flight of stairs outside the house, was the _gar\u00e7onni\u00e8re_ , a small attic where the young boys slept. The shutters over the windows were painted on the inside only, as were the doors. The Acadian logic said that when the shutters and doors were open, as they were most times, the painted sides showed to the world. When they needed to be closed, there was no one around to see the unpainted sides.\n\nPierson's landlord had made a bad mistake. He had built a brick, modern apartment house in the middle of a row of necessarily identical Acadian homes. Of the eight apartments in the building, only three were occupied\u2014one by Pierson, one by a woman downstairs, the third by the landlord's caretaker. Actually, Pierson himself would have preferred living in the attic of a legitimate Cajun household, but the treatment he got on the first two days after his arrival in Arbier persuaded him otherwise.\n\nHe stopped for a moment and opened his mailbox. It was empty. There was an elevator, but Pierson walked up to the third floor where his apartment was. Walking was his only exercise, and he was vaguely proud of his refusal to give in to such luxuries as two-story elevator rides.\n\nPierson opened the front door, to be met by Cyrus. \"Nothing, Cy,\" said Pierson. The young man sighed. \"Nothing,\" he said again. He walked into the living room. \"Maddie?\" he called. There was no answer. He looked into the bedroom and the bathroom; they, too, were empty. No Maddie, no mail, no job. What about friends? Pierson passed on that one, too. Health? That was a little better, except for his allergy to one of the billion-odd local growing things. He wasn't that young anymore; he couldn't just go down and get into a basketball game with the other kids. Besides, the other kids would all be with their _p\u00e8res,_ netting crabs, shrimping, even trapping m'sieu muskrat. There was no such thing as a summer vacation for Cajun children, not the way Pierson had known vacation in Ohio. He didn't even bother to wonder which way was better; he just sat down on the couch, let Cy jump into his lap, and began to feel sorry for himself.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck sat in a chair in his room at the Sea-Ray. He was bored. He was more bored than he could ever remember. He got up and went into the bathroom. He looked at the toilet, but he felt no urgent need. He looked on the wall to the left. A rectangular piece of cardboard hung there. The words \"Your _Personal_ Bathmat\" were printed on it. \"All for me,\" muttered Chuck. He looked at his reflection in the mirror over the sink. He wasn't feeling well. \"Damn it,\" he said. Then he went back to his chair.\n\nAfter watching a few minutes of television, Chuck turned off the set and picked up the telephone.\n\n\"Yes?\" said the desk man.\n\n\"Long distance,\" said Chuck. He put through a call to Tom in Miami Beach.\n\n\"What?\" said Tom, by way of greeting.\n\n\"It's me,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Chuck.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Tom. \"What?\"\n\n\"I just wanted to be sure that everything was going okay.\"\n\nChuck heard Tom sigh. \"I really hate to say this, Chuck,\" said Tom, \"but I guess I have to. Do you remember the Boston job a couple of years ago?\"\n\nChuck frowned. \"Sure,\" he said.\n\n\"You'll recall how you almost blew that one for us.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck, \"thanks for reminding me.\"\n\n\"Any time,\" said Tom. \"And, naturally, you remember last year in Detroit.\"\n\nChuck didn't answer. There was an uncomfortable pause.\n\n\"Well,\" said Tom, \"I assume you do. See, Chuck, it's just that I feel that of everyone involved in this enterprise, this masterpiece of planning, you might be the best choice for the person most likely to foul up. No personal feelings involved. Please understand that. I'm just going on past experiences.\"\n\nChuck took a deep breath. \"Tom,\" he said, \"I've always done\u2014\"\n\nTom interrupted. \"I know, I know.\"\n\n\"You really hate me, don't you, Tom?\"\n\n\"I said there were no personal feelings involved. In a job this complex, there can't be.\"\n\n\"Sometimes I wonder if I really understand you,\" said Chuck. He realized that his hands were sweating and his throat was sore.\n\nTom laughed loudly. \"You don't,\" he said. \"I'll bet you don't.\"\n\n\"I don't have to, right?\" said Chuck.\n\n\"You don't have to,\" said Tom, \"right.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Chuck, \"I'll call again.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Tom. \"By the way, I really do hate your guts a lot.\" He hung up.\n\nChuck hung up his receiver. He felt terrible. He stood up, then sat down again. All that he could think to do was go into the bathroom. He thought that he was spending too much time walking back and forth from one room to the other. He just sat and stared. His stomach hurt.\n**6**\n\n****\n\nThe Monday August morning in Linhart, Louisiana broke in almost the identical way in which it did further south, in Arbier. Corinne Strahan opened her eyes but did not move her head from the embroidered pillow. She listened for a moment to the scream of a bluejay and the more melodious call of a bird she couldn't identify. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. There wasn't much to do, there wasn't any hurry to do it, and she wasn't in a mood to finish her few chores so that she could enjoy hour after hour of solitary leisure.\n\nIt was still early. Skip would be at the station, getting ready his Monday noon weather report. She picked up the telephone and called the station. The switchboard operator recognized her voice and connected her with her husband. \"Hello, Skip?\" she said when he answered.\n\n\"Uh huh,\" he said. He didn't sound pleased at being interrupted.\n\n\"Listen, I was just sitting here and I can't think of any reason why we couldn't have some kind of party for the people there at the station. I mean, we could all pack lunches and go down to Arbier when they bless the shrimp fleet or something.\"\n\n\"Did you just wake up?\" asked Strahan.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, give yourself a few minutes, and then think about how ridiculous the whole idea is. We're not one big, tight-knit family up here. We don't have a station bowling team, and we don't have a station softball team, and the idea of everybody going down to Arbier to watch some guy in white robes throw holy water at a bunch of fishing boats\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, Skip,\" said Corinne, already exhausted by the defeat, \"it was just an idea. I just wanted to talk to you. I woke up, and you were gone, and I just wanted to talk to you.\"\n\n\"You wake up every morning, and I'm gone most of them.\"\n\n\"Yes, Skip,\" said Corinne, \"I know.\"\n\n\"Everything okay there?\"\n\n\"What's to go wrong?\"\n\n\"Then I'll see you when I get home.\"\n\n\"Sure, Skip. I'll watch you at noon and six.\"\n\n\"Great. Tell me how I do. Well, I have to go.\"\n\n\"I love you, Skip.\"\n\n\"I love you, Corinne. Goodbye.\" There was a click, and then Corinne Strahan was listening to dead air. She hung up her phone and put her head back on the pillow. She stared at the ceiling.\n\nHalf an hour later, showered and dressed, she was taking care of the tiny troubles that were her responsibility. She went shopping first. She got into her car and drove to the supermarket. That took ten minutes. She went into the store and picked out a shopping cart. That took another minute. The day was flying by.\n\nIn the supermarket she met a woman who called her by name. Corinne tried, but she couldn't recall the woman's name, or even where they knew each other from. All Corinne could do was act friendly and hope that the other woman would give her a clue.\n\n\"Corinne!\" said the other woman. She was dressed in blue corduroy jeans, brown loafers, and a faded sweatshirt that said TKE on it. It was clear that this woman didn't care at all about what the Creole and Cajun families thought of her. After all, she was beyond salvation, beyond acceptance, so why bother? Corinne envied that attitude for a moment. She struggled to identify the woman.\n\n\"Hello,\" said Corinne, tossing a box of pretzels into her shopping cart.\n\n\"Listen, I don't have time to stop and chat,\" said the woman. \"I really wish I did, but I have to pick up the kids in about five minutes. But I really do want to talk to you about that charity drive. Skip could be so helpful.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Corinne. She didn't remember a charity drive, either. \"Give me a call anytime. I'm home most of the day, anyway.\"\n\n\"Great,\" said the woman. \"I'll talk to you then.\" She pushed her own cart up the aisle. Corinne noticed that her blond hair looked about as real as a passport photograph. She shook her head and finished her shopping. It didn't take long. She was home again before half-past eleven. It took her ten minutes to put the groceries away. She carefully folded the bags and stored them under the sink. Then she went into the living room, turned on the television to Channel Five, and waited for the news.\n\nShe didn't listen very hard to the newscasters' reports. She knew vaguely that the President was somewhere, that some European country that she thought was a friend of America suddenly was angry with us, and that a once-wealthy Hollywood star had been found dead in a sleazy hotel in New York. She couldn't remember where the President was, which country had a grievance with us, or who had died. But her attention increased when Skip came on with the weather report.\n\n\"Let's run the satellite film,\" he said. Corinne felt a little thrill as she watched him. He was carefully made up, wearing a tie and the station's news team blazer. He looked very authoritative, which was probably the most important quality in a weatherman. The satellite film filled the television screen with fuzzy areas of gray and white. Corinne had a difficult time deciding where the Gulf coast was.\n\nSkip held a pointer and indicated a fuzzy white area. \"This is all that remains of Hurricane Dinah. She's almost completely filled in and is busily raining herself out over the mid-Atlantic. She shouldn't even be a threat to shipping routes. And Hurricane Elsie bumped into the same high pressure ridge and followed almost in Dinah's tracks. Elsie, too, has been downgraded. She's no longer a hurricane. She's officially a tropical storm, with gusty winds reaching a maximum of about fifty miles per hour. She's heading out to sea in a northeasterly direction, and as the surface temperature cools down, she ought to dissipate just the way Dinah has.\"\n\nThat was when Corinne's interest failed. She was proud of the way Skip did his job; she just didn't care anything about the job itself. She listened as he finished his report, watched a few commercials, then turned off the television. She waited a quarter of an hour to let Skip get the makeup off and change clothes. Then she called the station again.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mrs. Strahan,\" said the switchboard operator, \"but Mr. Strahan's not here.\"\n\n\"He's not there?\" Corinne said, feeling a little stupid. \"He was just on, doing his weather report.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said the operator, \"but as soon as he finished, he hurried out of here. He told me to tell anyone who called that he had an important appointment.\"\n\n\"He didn't mention an appointment to me this morning,\" said Corinne.\n\n\"I'm sorry, ma'am. That's all I know.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, thanks a lot,\" said Corinne. She hung up, wondering where her husband had gone. She knew that he often gave lectures to schools or social groups, but those were almost always in the evenings. He should still be at the station, monitoring the Weather Service reports coming in from New Orleans.\n\nIt was twelve-thirty. Corinne Strahan couldn't think of a thing to do. She wandered around her house. In the bedroom she went to her husband's dresser. She knew he kept his medicines in the sock drawer, in the back. They were supposed to be secret, but it was almost impossible to keep secrets in marriage unless one partner was horribly naive. Corinne pushed the socks away and saw six large vials of pills. She recognized the names of two of them. One was a stimulant, and Corinne knew that she definitely didn't need excess chemical energy. She couldn't find uses for her own natural vitality. The other vial contained a mild tranquilizer. Corinne thought that it might be pleasant to spend a few hours in a nice, calm state, like the time she had the accident and they gave her that injection in the hospital. She didn't have anything else to do. She counted out six of the pills, put the vials back behind the socks, went into the bathroom, and swallowed the tranquilizers with a glass of water.\n\n* * *\n\nThere was a high bamboo hedge mixed with wide-leaved banana plants around the home of Walter and Darlaine Boshardt in Arbier. Nevertheless, when Darlaine got out of bed and got dressed, she could see the town she hated so much clearly enough. Unlike her husband, who had been in Arbier all his life and who loved the town, Darlaine wanted to leave with a passion that went past rationality. She dreamed of the most incredible excuses, but she could never find anything plausible enough. Her husband had lived his whole life not only in Arbier, but in this same damn house. It would take something very drastic to make him decide to move. Darlaine Boshardt knew that her happiness was certainly not drastic enough of a reason.\n\nShe recognized his way of thinking, and she knew that his feelings were every bit as strong as hers. She had mentioned on several occasions that she might feel better living in Linhart, where she wouldn't feel so stifled. His reply was that Linhart was exactly the same as Arbier, except that there were a few more churches, a few more \"lounges,\" and the majority of the black population in St. Didier Parish.\n\nThe sheriff's family had settled in Arbier long enough ago so that he was granted almost the same acceptance as any of the native Cajun families. Almost, but not quite. The difference didn't seem to bother Walter. The difference was much greater in Darlaine's case. That she was tolerated at all was only because of her marriage to the sheriff. Whenever one of the local people came up to her and spoke in that crazy dialect, calling her \"Madame Bozar,\" she wanted to strangle him. And because Darlaine Boshardt of Arbier had started out as Dorothy Micheton of New Orleans, she had the suspicion that most of the old-timers of Arbier spat at her shadow as she passed.\n\nIt was early yet, and she had the whole day to kill. That was the way she thought of her life: killing one day after another. Corinne Strahan had her husband's drugs stuffed behind his socks in the dresser. Darlaine Boshardt had something hidden also, in an unused chest of drawers. It was an old black book for listing telephone numbers. She thought for a few minutes, then went to find the notebook.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul Pierson decided that feeling sorry for himself was getting him nowhere. It wasn't solving any of his problems, and it wasn't getting him any closer to finding solutions to emergencies that needed immediate attention. So, using a line of reasoning that made him proud of himself, he stopped feeling sorry for himself. He also tossed Cy off his lap. The cat landed with his own peculiar gracefulness in the middle of the living room floor, looked around, blinked, then jumped up to the plastic dust cover on Pierson's stereo set. Cy was asleep again in a matter of seconds. Pierson wished that he could summon up that same kind of nonchalance. He tried to brush off the long gray hairs that Cy had left on his clothes, but that, as always, was impossible. Pierson made a few halfhearted attempts, then went to the telephone. First he called the Landry School of Secretarial Skills in Linhart, where Maddie sometimes attended various classes. No one there had seen her among the two dozen people in the small building. He called her father's bar, but old M'sieu Gargotier had not seen or heard from his daughter in a few days. Pierson shrugged. He had to let Maddie have her way. Actually, the situation was a little different. Maddie _took_ her way, and Pierson had to adjust to it. He guessed that she had gone up to Linhart after all, to see the Navy recruiter. He was kind of curious about what the man would tell her, particularly when she said that she was interested in the submarine service. He wished that he could be in the recruiter's office when the Navy man asked her if she could type.\n\nPierson went to the refrigerator and found a half-finished bottle of Dr. Pepper. It was a little flat, but that never bothered him. He swallowed what was in the bottle in two gulps. Then he went downstairs and out to Ridge Street, where he picked up a copy of the _St. Didier Dispatch_ , a weekly newspaper printed in Linhart. The local paper, the weekly _Arbier Observateur_ , was printed mostly in French and had little useful information for Pierson, in any event. The feeling in Arbier was that if anything was worth knowing, the news would travel faster by the network of women working at their _tablettes._\n\nPierson looked through the Linhart weekly and found three possible job opportunities. Each was followed by a telephone number but no name. Pierson called the first number. A man's voice answered. \"Allo,\" it said in thick Cajun accent.\n\n\"Hello,\" said Pierson. \"I'm calling about your advertisement in the _Dispatch._ \"\n\n\"Oh, _dommage_ ,\" said the man. \"She is filled, that one, for true.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Pierson. \"I'm sorry to have bothered you.\"\n\n_\"C'est rien,_ \" said the man. There was a click as he hung up.\n\nPierson tried the second job offer, and got the same response. As soon as his voice made it clear that he was not a genuine native, and when he had to declare that he wasn't related to some family in Delochitaches, that job, too, was filled. The third job interview took even less time.\n\n\"Damn it,\" said Pierson, throwing the newspaper down. He thought that it wouldn't be any problem learning French; after all, school children did it all over the United States at an early age. But he knew he would never learn Cajun French, in speech, manner, or style. That was a severe handicap in the immediate neighborhood.\n\nPierson, in his restlessness, wandered down Ridge Street toward the center of town. He noticed that a few shops were already putting up two-by-four frames on which sheets of plywood would later be nailed in the event of a Hurricane Watch to protect plate glass windows. An old wives' rhyme that Maddie had chanted recurred in Pierson's memory: \"June, too soon. July, stand by. August, get ready you must. September, remember. October, it's over.\" Already, early in August, some of the weather-wise shopkeepers were getting ready. He had noticed advertisements in the Linhart newspaper for plywood sheets. The ads covered almost two full pages. August and September were big months for the local lumberyards.\n\nThe Gulf coast residents, from Florida, along the Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana coasts, to Texas, could be divided into three classes. First, there were the people who scoffed at the damage a hurricane might do. \"It's a storm,\" said these people. \"The winds are higher, the water comes up, maybe you get a few inches on your new carpet, but, what the hell, it's just a storm.\" These people, it could be determined, had never lived through the full fury of a hurricane. Then there were the store-strippers, the ones who knew that all facilities and utilities might be out for days on end. They descended on every grocery store in the neighborhood and bought canned goods to last them four or five times as long as necessary. When these easily panicked people finished, the storekeepers had full cash registers, empty shelves, and weary, dazed expressions. The third category knew well what the turbulent winds of a hurricane could do, especially close to the ocean's edge, as Arbier was. They knew about the hurricane surge, the tidal wave that arrived about the same time as the calm eye of the storm. They knew that water that swirled around one's feet could rise to chest level in a matter of seconds. As soon as a Hurricane Warning was issued, meaning that there was the possibility of a hurricane within the next twenty-four hours, these people packed everything they could into their cars and drove inland. Hotels and motels miles from the coast were booked solid. Families went to stay with relatives and friends until the storm passed. Then they returned to their homes, to see what destruction the hurricane had caused.\n\nPierson viewed the nailing of the wooden frames as farsighted and wise, but he knew that he didn't have much to worry about in his third-story apartment. Maddie had often laughed and called him a fool, almost hoping a hurricane would come and knock some of his Yankee wise-assness out of him. But she took back those wishes, remembering things she had seen on the sand and mud-filled streets of Arbier in years past.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne felt very nice, and then she felt a little drowsy, so she stretched out on the couch. She dozed for a little while, all the time feeling that there was nothing else in the whole world beside the cushion she rested on, her head, and a little portion of her body down to her shoulders. Her arms and legs were something she remembered pleasantly. After a while, the numbness wore off, and she discovered that she was in the same house in the same Linhart, Louisiana, with the same nothing around her. She only had one useful sensory channel: the telephone. She dialed the television station.\n\n\"Hello, Mrs. Strahan,\" said the operator at the station.\n\n\"Hi,\" she said. \"Could you give me Skip?\"\n\n\"Gee, I'm sorry, Mrs. Strahan,\" said the operator in a voice that conveyed absolutely no regret. \"You know when you called before that he was away on some appointment.\"\n\n\"Didn't he leave a message for me?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Let me check.\" There was a brief silence while the switchboard operator made a quick search of her tiny realm. \"I'm really sorry, Mrs. Strahan, but there ain't no message, neither.\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" said Corinne. \"Have him call me when he gets back.\"\n\n\"That's just fine,\" said the operator. \"I have your other message waiting here for him, too. He'll give you a call when he gets in. He'll have to be back pretty soon for the evening show.\"\n\n\"Uh huh,\" said Corinne Strahan and slammed the receiver down into its cradle, cutting off the outside world more than ever before. She took out a cigarette, lit it, took two puffs, put the cigarette in an ashtray from some Florida motel, and forgot about it. It burned down without attracting any attention.\n\nCorinne Strahan stalked her domain, her dominion, her pitiable meaningless territory. She lit another cigarette. She sat down in an armchair in the living room. The chair was a color Skip always called \"off-green.\" Corinne had picked out the chair, and every time Skip made his little remark she cringed. He would go on about the chair. \"Why doesn't it commit itself?\" he would ask, as she became angrier. \"It could either be part of the room or definitely decide against it. It's the chair's goddamn decision.\" Then Skip would look very tired, and he would collapse on another chair, a sort of beige armchair, but Corinne refused to grant him any pity on the green chair's account. His tiredness might be legitimate, but he had spoiled the whole effect with that constant round of dull humor.\n\nToday, though, Skip was somewhere else. Somewhere. Corinne would have traded her neighbor's children\u2014she had none of her own\u2014to be somewhere else. Baltimore, for one, where she grew up. Tahiti was nice, she heard.\n\nThe phone rang. She listened to it for a while, still a little groggy from the pills she had taken. She was thinking about Tahiti. She realized that she didn't have the slightest idea where Tahiti was, or what it looked like, or what the people there looked like. But she knew enough to bet her life that it was a much more interesting place than Linhart. The telephone stopped ringing. Corinne was glad of that. The ringing noise just didn't belong, not in the peace she had built for herself in the last hour or so.\n\nThe peace was fading fast. That was why the prescriptions had to be refilled. Damn it, she thought, why isn't there something you can take to. . . . She caught herself before she finished the childish wish. All right. Life wasn't what she dreamed it would be. But whose was? She watched the smoke curl from the second cigarette, breathing its last in a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge ashtray. She sneered at it. She wondered if their whole life was going to be put together with artifacts from a world that didn't seem to care very much about them. Every year they received a letter from some mission in Arizona, pleading for money for the starving children. There was a picture of a starving child, his eyes big and round, his stomach distended, his arms skinny and frail. Every year Corinne sent the mission five dollars, but every year they got the same appeal, with the same picture. The poor Indian kid didn't seem to get any better on their five dollars. Was the mission hinting that all that kept the boy from health and full development was an increase in their donation? Corinne lit another cigarette and put it in the Howard Johnson's ashtray, and another in the Florida ashtray, and a third in an ashtray from a hotel in New Orleans, and a fourth in an ashtray shaped like a bird with a yawning bill. She put the cigarette in the bird's beak. No worm today, bird, but with luck you could develop a harmful illness. The cigarettes around the room sent up vague curls of smoke. It was like burning incense, back when she had posters of the Jefferson Airplane on the wall and she listened to the Doors and sang along with Joan Baez, hoping that the world's problems would disappear if only someone listened.\n\nThe room was quiet. No one listened. The cigarettes burned.\n\nThere was a mild cloud of smoke drifting toward the ceiling. Corinne moved through it soundlessly. She put on the television set and changed the channel. They were playing _The Maltese Falcon_. That pleased Corinne. She always loved that movie. She could never figure if Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade, was a very good guy, or just a mildly good guy who missed his big chance. She had fantasies, sometimes, and she remembered that she once had a fantasy with Humphrey Bogart playing the male lead. She was playing the female lead, except that she was Lauren Bacall. They were at a beautiful nightclub. There were lots of potted palms, and tables with candles sunk deep in round glass jars, and a shiny dance floor. There was an orchestra, but it was playing Simon and Garfunkel songs. Corinne's husband appeared. Bogart, with a sneer and a bit of a lisp, said, \"You spend so much time learning the tricks of the trade, why don't you learn the trade?\" Skip had been speechless. Corinne had loved that fantasy; she still loved it even now, as she resurrected it from her memories.\n\nThe cigarettes had all burned down and left the air with an odor Corinne hated. She regretted lighting those cigarettes. Now she not only felt lonely, she felt stifled.\n\nHumphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade, was just meeting Sidney Greenstreet, as Kaspar Gutman. Gutman was pouring Spade a drink, obviously waiting for Spade to tell him to stop. \"You begin well, sir,\" said Greenstreet as Gutman. \"I distrust a man who says 'when.'\" Gutman continues pouring. \"He's got to be careful not to drink too much. It's because he's not to be trusted when he does.\" The fat man hands Bogart the drink. \"Well, sir,\" says Gutman, \"here's to plain speaking and clear understanding.\"\n\n\"Don't do it, Spade,\" said Corinne. \"Never trust a man who's twice as big as you are.\" There was a silence in the room, as the two actors drank their drinks and Corinne wondered if Skip were twice as big as she was. No, she thought, she was about a hundred and ten pounds, depending on whether or not the bathroom scale was in a good mood, and her husband was an inch over six feet tall and well-built. He was not too big to be untrustworthy.\n\nShe wondered where he was. She went to a closet and got out a hobby kit Skip had given her for their anniversary. He was thirty-five, she was five years younger, and already he felt that she was ready for the cheap, easy craft industry. This particular kit was a board of pine, stained to look almost like walnut, with small white dots all over it. The kit builder was supposed to hammer many identical brass nails into the places marked by the white dots. Then, following a set of printed instructions, the bored fool would wind white string from nail one to nail two to nail three until the kit was finished. It would take about as long as the rest of _The Maltese Falcon,_ a happy coincidence. And then Corinne would have a beautiful string image of a sailboat against a walnut-stained sea. There was even a frame for the finished likeness. She could have the whole thing finished before Skip came home after the six o'clock show. He would be pleased. He would be tired and he would say something about the green chair, but he would be glad that she had put the kit to use. She planned what she would say. \"Where will we put it, Skip?\"\n\nOn the television, Sam Spade was making another call on Kaspar Gutman. He was taking another drink. \"Oh, no,\" said Corinne. She knew what was going to happen. Skip would say, \"Anywhere you think it would look good.\" That's what would happen.\n\nHitting all the brass nails with the small hammer the kit supplied hurt her fingers after a while. Then she started stringing the white cord. She felt like a fool.\n\nThe telephone rang. She dropped the kit to the floor as she jumped up. \"Hello?\" she said.\n\n\"Hello,\" said a man's voice. It was a little squeaky and high-pitched. It isn't Sam Spade, thought Corinne. \"Is Skip homer?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Corinne. \"I was wondering where he was myself.\"\n\n\"I'm calling on behalf of the St. Didier Parish Baby Town. We were hoping that Mr. Strahan would donate some time to our annual fund-raising bazaar. When I talked with him last week, he seemed a little enthusiastic.\"\n\n\"He gets that way sometimes an hour or two after work,\" said Corinne. She immediately regretted her words.\n\n\"Eh?\" said the man.\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Corinne, \"I'm just very edgy right now, so just don't pay any attention to anything I say.\"\n\nThe man's voice changed. It slowed down and dropped in pitch. \"I've had experience handling situations like yours,\" he said. On the television screen, Humphrey Bogart was falling over in a drugged stupor. \"Maybe you would permit me . . . ?\" He left the question dangling, but it was such an open question that Corinne had no idea what to say.\n\nThe St. Didier Parish Baby Town, she thought. It sounds like a used-car dealer. A couple of dozen babies on this shell-paved lot, with strings of light bulbs above them, some of them burned out, and spinners in the breeze, and pennants of different colors. And the babies. They'd have OK stickers on them. This baby with 495 written across its forehead, and on its chest you could have it's a steal! A used-baby lot.\n\n\"Look, Mrs. Strahan, my name is Carl Steinbrenner. You can get in touch with me here, or your husband can. Or. . . .\" Again, he left the possibilities open.\n\nCorinne knew what the possibilities were. One, there was finishing the stupid string boat. Two, there was watching _The Maltese Falcon_ , even though she'd seen it at least ten times before. And there was the third possibility. \"My husband lets me handle all his social and business engagements,\" she said, which was not the truth at all.\n\n\"Ah, I see,\" said Steinbrenner. \"Then perhaps we could discuss this over dinner.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry,\" said Corinne, \"it's kind of a ritual when Skip gets home. I couldn't be away at dinnertime.\"\n\n\"A drink then,\" said Steinbrenner, \"just a drink or two, and we can have the whole thing settled.\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" said Corinne, her mouth and throat suddenly dry, her hands shaking, the feeling of contentment she had been encouraging disappearing as quickly as the smoke from the long-dead cigarettes. On the television, Sam Spade's face looked very bad. He was talking to his secretary on the telephone. Every expression showed pain. \"Yeah,\" said Spade, \"let's do something right for a change.\" Corinne thought for a few seconds.\n\n\"Are you still there, Mrs. Strahan?\" asked Steinbrenner.\n\n\"Corinne,\" she said slowly. \"Call me Corinne.\" She was still frightened, but she was oddly excited, too.\n\n\"Can I come by, or shall I meet you somewhere?\"\n\n\"Where are you now?\" she asked.\n\n\"In my office, here in Linhart,\" He said.\n\n\"Do you know Bar's Mike and Grill? You go out Hanson Highway south, make a right on Couletain Boulevard. It ends on a small parish road. Take it left, past the causeway over Bayou Chien Mort.\"\n\n\"No, I don't know the place at all,\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" said Corinne, \"because I've never been in there either.\"\n\nThere was silence from both Steinbrenner and Corinne. On the television, a man with bullet holes in him was dropping a black bird wrapped in old newspapers at Sam Spade's feet.\n\n\"It would be a terrific opportunity,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Corinne, in what she hoped was a low, breathy voice, one like Mary Astor used on Humphrey Bogart sometimes in _The Maltese Falcon._\n\n\"No,\" said Steinbrenner. \"I meant\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" said Corinne. \"Keep on that goddamn asphalt road. Stay on it until you hit the causeway over Bayou Chien Mort. Bar's Mike and Grill will be another mile or two, on your left. That road turns into Ridge Street at Arbier. If you get that far, you know you've passed the place.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Steinbrenner, his voice even more shrill, giving away his expectations. \"I'll be there in, oh, an hour.\"\n\n\"I'll be at least a drink ahead of you then,\" said Corinne.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said Steinbrenner, \"I'll catch up.\"\n\n\"Okay. We have a lot to talk about.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said the man.\n\nOn Corinne's television screen, Spade had checked the black falcon at a San Francisco baggage terminal and mailed the claim check to his post office box. Very shrewd, thought Corinne.\n\n\"We have a lot to talk about,\" she said. She hoped that she sounded enigmatic. \"I'll see you then.\" Without waiting for any further word from Steinbrenner, Corinne hung up the phone. She paused to look in a decorative mirror in the dining room. She was not displeased.\n**7**\n\nAbout noon, Darlaine Boshardt pulled up to the office of the Sea-Ray Motel. She got out of the car, walked across a narrow strip of grass, crossed the sidewalk that led to the rooms, and walked up the sidewalk to the motel's office. She walked in a way that indicated that she was sorry there weren't more people to see her. As it was, there was just the day manager. She opened the door and approached her solitary audience. He was reading a book with a cover that was tastelessly pink, a book he was quick to hide when Darlaine came in.\n\n\"Oh,\" said the day manager, \"hello, Mrs. Boshardt. We're pretty filled up, I'm afraid. I'll have to give you Room 9. There are permanents in 8 and 13, and every other room is occupied right now. Maybe you'd rather wait. I mean, some of those rooms will be vacated not too long from now. If you know what I mean.\"\n\n\"Of course I know what you mean,\" said Darlaine sharply. She crossed her legs, pulled her skirt down in a habitual gesture, and stared.\n\n\"I, uh, I see you're by yourself,\" said the day manager. \"Do you want the key to Number 9?\"\n\nDarlaine gave the man a malicious look that easily conveyed the notion that he had asked the wrong question. \"Yeah,\" she said, standing up and crossing the distance between the chair and the desk in two long strides, \"give me the key and let me register. When Mr. Right gets here, he won't have to go through the trouble. Tell him I'm in\u2014what was it?\u2014Number 9, waiting eagerly, my skin almost tingling with the anticipation of his gentle caress. Hell. Give me the key and the book.\"\n\nThe day manager didn't dare say anything. He merely handed her the key to Room 9 and turned a registration book to face her.\n\n\"You know,\" she said, her voice still a little bitter, \"this place has a quaint old charm. I mean, you don't fill out small white cards when you check in. You still sign a book. There aren't many places that still operate that way.\"\n\n\"It depends on the parish ordinances,\" said the manager. He allowed himself a little smile. Darlaine's promiscuities were well-known around Arbier. The male partners' identities were protected by the manager. Some of those male partners were very influential in the immediate area, in the south, or, on occasion, in the whole country. It didn't make any difference though. All of those men signed themselves in as John Smith, sometimes from New York, sometimes from Los Angeles. It didn't make any difference at all, thought the manager. Darlaine Boshardt and this guy John Smith were having a regular and torrid romance. The manager looked at the register: _Darlaine Boshardt, 8 W. 3 Street, Arbier, Louisiana._ The manager made a notation of the room number and the time. Before he could say anything, Darlaine was walking out of the office, slamming the screen door. The manager hated it when people slammed the door.\n\nAbout ten minutes later a man came in and sat down in the same chair that Darlaine Boshardt had used. The manager looked up questioningly but said nothing. It wasn't his job to ask anything. The man could sit there all day if he wanted. Sometimes they spent a long time in the chair and then silently left. The manager assumed that this was Darlaine's current lover. Ha, thought the motel employee, he could suggest to Mrs. Boshardt that she should see a psychiatrist, but as soon as she got herself down on the doctor's couch, her problems would start all over again.\n\n\"Uh,\" said the man.\n\nThe day manager looked up. His expression was as blank as he could make it. He had worked very hard at that.\n\n\"Uh, I'm, uh, supposed to meet someone at this motel.\"\n\n\"Let's see,\" said the clerk, pretending to give the matter thought. \"Female?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said the man. He was obviously almost ready to panic.\n\n\"Oh, about forty-five real years old, making a very good try at looking ten years younger. Hair very coarse, like straw. It used to be a nice auburn but now it's so mousy you could bait a trap with it. The wrinkles are making their presence felt. Yeah, felt and _seen._ A thin woman on a large frame, dedicated to every fad diet that comes along. She was pretty once, you can see it, but now she's. . . .\" The manager paused, unable to finish the sentence with just the right word. All the time he had been staring down at the Formica top barrier. Now, though, he looked up at the man. \"Now,\" said the manager, \"she's what she is.\" He showed the register to the man. The stranger looked at the book and saw Darlaine's name on it. He reacted with shock, with a visible jerk. Then he took the pen and wrote in the register. The desk clerk turned the book around again and made his notations. He saw that the man had signed himself in as John Smith, of New York, New York. At least Darlaine was faithful to the men she wasn't being faithful with. The desk man smiled a little. Good old John Smith.\n\n\"Can I have the key, please?\" asked John Smith.\n\n\"Key?\" said the manager. \"Oh, don't worry about it. She has it, and I'll give you one-to-ten odds she'll answer if you knock. I'll give you one-to-eight odds that she'd answer if any man knocked.\"\n\n\"You're a real son of a bitch,\" said John Smith. \"You know that?\"\n\n\"Listen, friend,\" said the manager, \"you're the one going down to Number 9. I'm just going to stay here where I belong and fantasize about all the grotesque and ugly things the two of you are going to do, that the maid is going to have to clean up in an hour.\" He gave John Smith a big grin. He knew that if John Smith were Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum or even, for God's sake, Robert Redford, he would punch the desk clerk in the mouth. But none of those three would be skulking down to Room 9 for a quickie with the wife of the parish sheriff.\n\nJohn Smith just turned around and walked out. He slammed the screen door, harder than most people. The manager winced. The door slamming was just payment for what he had said to John Smith. A few seconds later he had gotten over the entire affair and was back with his pink-spined pornographic novel.\n\nJohn Smith was as mad as he had ever been before. He was so angry, he had passed the stage of trying to think up clever replies to the manager's insolent, smirky behavior. He thought that he ought to have said something, at least, or even hit the man. But John Smith had never hit a man in his entire life. He reminded himself that he had never met a woman at a motel before either. That thought made him feel better. It made the manager seem insignificant. After all, he was just being the kind of man John Smith expected all motel desk clerks to be. He couldn't know from previous experience. And John Smith was hoping that the woman, Darlaine, in Room 9, would be the kind of woman he expected. Of course she was, he reasoned. Otherwise she wouldn't be there. That made him feel better. The manager, who was already shrunken to a maggot with human tendencies, disappeared entirely from John Smith's thoughts. He went over one idea, again and again, as he walked down the narrow sidewalk to Room 9: Darlaine was the kind of woman he thought she was. She would probably be dressed in the kind of strangely erotic things that he had seen in pornographic magazines he had confiscated from his students when he had taught in Shreveport. She would be standing by the desk, in front of the mirror, wearing a black corset, black garter belt, and black stockings. Maybe she had high-heeled shoes. John Smith had never decided whether or not that was an erotic effect. With a flush of excitement, he realized that he would find out in a moment or two.\n\nHe knocked on the door of Room 9. Darlaine Boshardt's voice answered from the other side. \"Come on in,\" she said. \"I left it unlocked.\" John Smith hesitated and took a deep breath. There were two thoughts that he should have considered, but didn't. First, if the manager was as low as John Smith thought him to be, a human worm in fact, what did that make John Smith? Second, if Darlaine Boshardt was as cheap as John Smith thought her to be, what did that make John Smith? These two thoughts remained buried as he turned the knob and went into the room. It didn't occur to him that she had left the door unlocked and, as the manager had said, any man at all could have gotten there first.\n\nDarlaine Boshardt was dressed in a light print dress and brown panty hose. She had kicked off her shoes and was lying on the bed. She was smoking a cigarette. There was a large number of butts in the ashtray on the bedside table. \"I'm glad you got here. _The Maltese Falcon_ gets on in a little while, and I figured I'd end up spending the room rent watching that old thing.\"\n\n\"You already took care of the room rent?\" asked John Smith.\n\nDarlaine sighed wearily. \"Yeah, yeah, don't worry about it.\"\n\nJohn Smith sat down in a red imitation leather chair in a corner of the room. He was too intimidated to lie down beside her on the bed. \"Well,\" he said nervously, \"I guess we're here.\"\n\nDarlaine raised her eyes to the ceiling. \"I got sent a good one this time.\"\n\nJohn Smith got up from the chair and sat on the edge of the bed. \"I just sort of meant that we didn't have much time to get to know each other, that's all.\"\n\n\"What do you want to know?\" She wondered why they always asked that same series of questions: what do you do, are you lonely, are you glad you met me, have I helped to make you forget?\n\n\"Nothing, really,\" said John Smith. His fingers rested on the zipper down the back of Darlaine's dress.\n\n\"Well,\" she said, \"I'm terribly fascinated by you. What do you do?\"\n\nJohn Smith pulled down the zipper and answered the question at the same time. \"I'm a teacher. Social Studies. They hired me because I learned French during the war, I guess.\"\n\n\"You know French?\" she asked, pulling the dress up over her head. Now she wore nothing but the panty hose and a bra. \"What's a _pirogue_?\"\n\n\" _Pirogue_? I never heard the word before.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said, pulling off the panty hose. John Smith was aroused and exasperated by this woman at the same time. \"Almost every kid you teach will have one, and I'm not going to tell you what the word means. What's the French word for sidewalk?\"\n\n_\"Le trottoir,\"_ said John Smith.\n\n\"Not around here, it isn't. It's _banquette._ You pick up a little if you live here as long as I have.\" She sighed loudly. \"But you don't pick up enough, and you won't pick it up fast enough.\"\n\nJohn Smith was struggling with Darlaine's bra. \"They warned me about this distrust of outsiders,\" he said, \"but they said I would do better, because I can speak French.\"\n\n\"You talk French French, not Cajun French. By the way, those are clasps, not snaps. Here, let me do it.\" She took off the bra quickly. Her breasts were large and sagging. Now she wore nothing but her bikini underpants. \"Oh,\" she said, as though the undressing had been completely without erotic effect, which in her case was true, \"you'll do better than most strangers. You give some people a _bonsoir_ or a _bonjour_ and you might get a little better service in a store. You give your class a _comment \u00e7a va, classe?_ when you enter the classroom, and you won't have dirty tricks played on you. But the first time a kid tries showing off his English and says something like, 'My father say I got to told you that you got to brought yourself around for some fine eating like you never ate before,' and you say 'Huh?' you can be sure you'll be marked. How long have you been in Arbier?\"\n\nJohn Smith was a little angered by Darlaine's attitude. \"A couple of days,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, then, don't worry. You're probably marked already. So, anyway, the tits are here, the underpants and all the rest of the good stuff is down there. I suppose they do it the same in Shreveport as they do it here.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said John Smith. He took off his clothes and piled them on the chair, unlike Darlaine, who had thrown hers randomly to the floor.\n\n\"That's too bad,\" said Darlaine, \"I was hoping for something different.\"\n\n\"Look,\" said John Smith, \"if you want something different, I can give you different.\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" she said, \"I've been through all of that. No, you're going to put that thing in me, and we're going to move around, and you're going to come but I won't, and then we get dressed, I turn the key in to the office and go home in my car. You go home in your car.\"\n\n\"You make it sound so exciting,\" said John Smith.\n\n\"I never promised you excitement,\" she said, crushing the cigarette in the ashtray. \"I just gave you the idea that you were going to get laid. And you are. So start with the foreplay.\"\n\nJohn Smith was angry and a little hurt. He started sucking on one of her nipples while he fondled the other between his thumb and index finger. Both nipples grew hard, but there wasn't a single noise from Darlaine. He reached down and started to slide her underpants off. She raised up a little to make it easier for him, but she wouldn't help any further. When his hand moved through her pubic hair and started rubbing, faster and faster, just a little bit away from where he could give her some genuine pleasure, she grabbed his erection and started stroking it. He immediately groaned with pleasure and increased the tempo of his rubbing. Darlaine wished that John Smith would stop making such ecstatic noises. She imagined with distaste how he would sound when he actually entered her. He rubbed harder, in the wrong place. It wasn't actually bad, she thought; he was making her feel better than she had felt before he arrived. But that wasn't saying very much.\n\nApparently John Smith decided that he had accomplished the goals that foreplay was designed to achieve. He grabbed both of her shoulders and tried to shove his erection into her. He missed his mark and prodded against her. Oh, Lord, he thought.\n\nDarlaine made an impatient noise, grabbed him, and guided him into her. His moans and cries grew louder. She wanted to stuff the sheet into his mouth. She moved rhythmically but without enthusiasm. In a few minutes he came. He stayed on top of her because one time, years before, a woman had told him that she hated to have a man pull out immediately after he came. John Smith waited for what he thought was a reasonable length of time, then rolled over to the other side of the bed. He was sweaty and exhausted.\n\nDarlaine was not. \"If you ask me 'How was it?' I'll get up and get dressed, and then I'll leave and take your clothes with me.\" She lit a cigarette and smoked it. Then she got up and got dressed.\n\n\"I think I'll take a shower,\" said John Smith. He waited for a sarcastic remark from Darlaine. He didn't have to wait long.\n\nShe picked up her purse from the floor under the nightstand and walked to the door. She touched the doorknob and then turned around to face him. \"Well,\" she said, \"I guess sex isn't everything.\" Then she opened the door and left.\n**8**\n\nAt the time that Corinne Strahan was waiting anxiously for her husband to appear on her television set, at the same time that Darlaine Boshardt was making plans to meet John Smith at the Sea-Ray Motel, Paul Pierson was trying to work off some of his frustration. The first thing that he did only made the situation worse. When he was younger, in Ohio, he used to skip stones across Tinker's Creek. He could skip stones for an hour and then, somehow, he would feel better. On this Monday, however, Pierson went down to the end of Ridge Street. He stood on the edge of the narrow beach and felt the anger in him grow. He couldn't even skip stones in this lousy town. They didn't even have stones. All they had was small white shells. Pierson knew that he couldn't skip a small shell. He looked out at the pier, which seemed at any moment ready to topple into the waves. Waves, thought Pierson. Even if he had a nice supply of flat rocks, it wouldn't be as much fun trying to skip them against the waves. He kicked the sand, kicked some shells, turned around, and headed back toward town.\n\nThe weather report was on the television as Pierson entered the Crisis Caf\u00e9 on Ridge Street. He saw that Sheriff Boshardt was in the same booth that he usually took. Another booth was occupied, and one table. Pierson slid into a third booth. While he waited for Lauren, the seventeen-year-old waitress, to bring him a menu and a glass of water, he listened to what the Channel Five weatherman had to say. It seemed that there was another tropical storm, moving south of Cuba, heading for the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula. The other two storms were dying quickly.\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Pierson,\" said Lauren. She stood beside the booth, an order pad in her hand, waiting patiently. There was a menu on the table top. Pierson wondered how it got there without his knowing it.\n\n\"Oh, hi,\" he said. Lauren just stood there, waiting. Pierson didn't want to make the situation worse by picking up the menu and looking at it. \"How about a small bowl of gumbo and the stuffed crab?\" he said.\n\n\"Fine,\" said Lauren. \"Anything to drink with that?\"\n\n\"A Coke, I guess.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. \"I hear you quit your job over at Monsieur de Crout's. He can be awful stubborn when he wants, and he wants to be most of the time.\"\n\nPierson was amazed. \"How did you know that?\" He thought that he ought to talk to the sheriff, to demand his money. He would, too, later.\n\nLauren was surprised at Pierson's reaction. \"In a town like this, everybody knows everything. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's bad.\"\n\n\"For crying out loud,\" said Pierson bitterly, \"maybe that's why I haven't had any luck getting another job today.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" said Lauren, with the typical deprecating shrug of a genuine Acadian resident of Arbier, \"but I don't think so.\" She turned and went into the kitchen.\n\nPierson stared after her. She was a lovely girl, and he wished that she didn't treat him like a foreigner. After all, he thought, he came into the Crisis Caf\u00e9 almost every day. He thought of himself as a regular. He watched as she came out of the kitchen, carrying a tray of food to the party at the table. She's really all right, thought Pierson. His light brown hair was cut medium length, half covering his ears. His mustache was carefully trimmed. He looked like he would fit into any social situation with ease, and he would, too, in New York, or Los Angeles, or Chicago. He got the first inklings that what were normal characteristics and advantages in the big cities were definite drawbacks in Arbier, Louisiana. It wasn't just that he was a foreigner. He was a damned _odd_ foreigner.\n\nLauren's long, dark hair hung down her back and moved only very little as she walked. Suddenly Pierson had an upsetting thought. He was twenty-nine years old. Lauren was seventeen. If he had been going out with her in his senior year in high school, she would have been just getting ready for kindergarten. On top of feeling in the wrong place, Pierson was beginning to feel old.\n\nA short time later, Lauren brought a bowl of gumbo. The steaming fragrance made Pierson forget his troubles for a few seconds. But the sight of Lauren helped him to remember. \"Say, Lauren,\" he said, \"twenty-nine isn't really old, is it?\"\n\n\"You can't say,\" she said, setting the stuffed crab on the table beside the hot gumbo. \"Old for what? It would be awful old for a muskrat, I think.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"And you probably know my answer, Monsieur Pierson,\" she said, smiling. She turned and walked away again. Pierson felt even more frustrated. She had given him a perfect answer. The trouble was that he didn't know what her answer was. He devoted his attention to his lunch, which was a much more satisfying way of passing time.\n\nHe finished lunch and left Lauren a large tip. The sun was bright and he had to squint as he stepped out on the sidewalk bordering Ridge Street. He took a deep breath. He smelled the ocean, which made him think of fish, which made him think of old man de Crout. For a tiny, flashing moment, he had the idea of going back, apologizing, and asking for his job back. But the thought passed like a mild attack of heartburn, and Pierson was faced with what he feared the most: what to do with the rest of his life. Maybe coming south had been a mistake. Or, if the south had not been a mistake, maybe a town like Arbier was. He could go to New Orleans, but that would be admitting his weakness. New Orleans, for all its French influence and continental grace, was just another big city in some respects.\n\nHe walked up Ridge Street toward Monsieur Gargotier's bar. He took one of the side streets before he got to the bar. The houses were all the same, white frame buildings, one main story and an attic, with an outside flight of stairs running up to it. Around the houses there were miniature jungles of flowers, shrubs, and trees. Each house seemed to have its own pecan tree, its own magnolia, and its own palm tree. The magnolias had already blossomed, and the creamy white flowers had disappeared or were a dead, shriveled brown. There were spiky bushes of Spanish dagger, reaching up three feet or more. The crepe myrtles were still in bloom, and the rose bushes. There were dozens of other flowers and shrubs, all with their own special blossoms, but Pierson couldn't name any of them. Overhead flew gulls and terns. At night came the nighthawks, birds no larger than mockingbirds, which flew in erratic paths, chasing insects for food.\n\nPierson passed a row of houses on this street, stopped, and thought. He didn't have much money\u2014he wasn't the kind of person to put part of his paycheck away for emergencies. All right, he decided, if they didn't want him in their Acadian kingdom, it wouldn't hurt his pride too much to leave. He was sure he could find a job in New Orleans, where they didn't care if your mother's maiden name was French. If it came to the worst, he could always stay with his parents in Ohio for a while. That was a terrible thought. He didn't like the idea of going back at the age of twenty-nine, just because some hick town had driven him out with its clannishness. He was getting a bit old to go running back to his parents. If he gave the matter more thought, he could probably come up with a few better alternatives. He finally decided to do that, but not for a while yet. It was only a little after lunchtime. He had the rest of the day to do serious thinking. He made a right turn at the first cross street and in a few minutes he was back at his apartment. He took the elevator up to his floor. Maybe every Cajun in the parish would laugh at him for using the elevator, instead of the stairs, as God intended. At the moment, however, that didn't make any difference at all to Pierson. The Cajuns would most likely call the thing an elligator and a big-big foolishment. Pierson thought that the Cajuns could take their elligator and shove it.\n\nThe apartment was empty, except for Cyrus. The cat rubbed himself against Pierson's legs, but Pierson was not in the mood to pet the cat. \"Not now,\" he said, pushing Cy aside. The cat came back. Pierson picked him up and tossed him into the living room. For a few seconds, Cy stared at Pierson. Then the cat blinked a few times and jumped up to his place on the dust cover of Pierson's stereo. Pierson gave the apartment a quick check, but Maddie wasn't home yet. Pierson sat down on the couch in the living room, feeling more frustrated and angrier than he had ever before. He had to do something to relieve the tension, but the town of Arbier offered very little for him to choose from. For the moment, Pierson just sat and stared.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne Strahan was going to meet Carl Steinbrenner at Bar's Mike and Grill. She arrived first. That made her more anxious. She parked her car, a small Japanese station wagon, and went inside. It was dark. There was a bar that ran the length of the room, a glowing juke box at the far end of the room, and two pinball machines against the wall opposite the bar. There were three small tables breaking up the space between the bar and the pinball machines. There were three men sitting at the bar. None of them looked like he could possibly be Steinbrenner. Corinne hesitated.\n\n\"What'll it be, Ma'mselle?\" asked the bartender.\n\nCorinne felt panic rising up in her. It didn't seem like she could go anywhere or do anything without making a fool of herself. She wished first that Steinbrenner hadn't called, and then she wished that she hadn't agreed to meet him. Finally, she wished that she had a couple of her husband's pills. That thought shocked her. She sat down at the bar, thinking that it might be more conspicuous to take a table. Then she decided that a single woman sitting alone at a bar looked pretty bad, too. The panic went away, replaced by the feeling of being evil that she had enjoyed so much earlier. She enjoyed it more now. \"I'm sorry,\" she said to the bartender, \"a whiskey sour, please. I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\"I know, I know,\" said the bartender, raising both hands to indicate that he didn't want to hear her story. He made the drink and set it in front of her, along with a cocktail napkin with very bad, very unfunny jokes on it. \"I just make you three or two drink, when your friend come. I just aks you, 'How you are?' but you know I don't care. I just make drinks, me, and I hear all kinds of stories. Now I got to brought myself down to where them three coonass Cajuns is, and listen to their stories like I never before hear them. And I got to go, me, because they three of them and only one of you.\" He gave her a shrug and went back to the three men sitting at the other end of the bar. Corinne was glad, actually. She didn't feel like pouring out her heartaches to a local bartender. That was sinking too low. It was bad enough that she would end up doing that with Steinbrenner.\n\nShe sipped her drink slowly, stretching it out, hoping that Steinbrenner would arrive before she finished it. He didn't. She sat with the empty glass in front of her for a while. Then she read the cocktail napkin. She couldn't believe that someone had actually been paid to write the jokes on the napkin and someone else got money for the cartoon drawings. She wondered how much they got. She wondered what the competition in the cocktail napkin business was like.\n\nAfter about ten minutes, the woman she had met in the supermarket came in, wearing the same loafers and corduroy jeans, but she had changed from the sweatshirt to a light blouse. Her coarse, dyed blond hair was puffed up in a style that Corinne thought had been dead since the Johnson administration. \"Hi,\" said the woman. Corinne still couldn't remember who she was.\n\n\"Hello,\" said Corinne. Then she felt obliged to say, \"I'm waiting for someone.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" said the woman. Corinne noticed that the bartender had already mixed the woman's drink. She must be one of the regulars. The woman took the drink and sat at one of the tables.\n\nThe bartender came over to Corinne. \"Listen,\" he said, \"it don't make some different to me if you drink another drink or you just sat there.\"\n\nCorinne smiled. \"Thanks,\" she said, \"I think I'll wait until my friend comes.\" Again, the bartender shrugged. He muttered something as he turned to walk back to the three men.\n\n* * *\n\nSt. Didier Parish bordered the Gulf of Mexico, which made shrimping and fishing an important industry. The parish was shaped roughly like a triangle, with its broad base along the Gulf. It came to a rounded point a few miles south of Interstate 10, the main east-west route leading to Houston and beyond on the west, and Mobile and beyond on the east. In the southern part of the parish, west of Arbier, there were marshes, incredible mazes of water and dry knolls, cypress trees and water hyacinths. It wouldn't take a stranger ten minutes to get lost in those marshes, and it wouldn't take much longer for him to drown. Still, there were people living in there, in ancient shacks built up on stilts, wherever a tiny piece of dry land permitted it. These were the most isolated Cajuns of all, people who knew no English, who spoke French from the day they were born to the day they died. They called the marshes _prairie tremblante._ Close to the ocean the water became so brackish that it killed the trees. The Gulf's brine lightened the color of the water; further inland the water in the marshes sometimes was dark brown or purple.\n\nThere were little canals cut through the marsh, alleyways for hunters, fishermen, or trappers. Sometimes bridges covered stretches of marsh where there was absolutely no firm footing. A native of the area could walk through the marshes with complete confidence. Alligator grass, salt cane, oyster grass, cattails, and Spanish dagger plants all grew wherever they could find firm ground for their roots. A native could tell by the color of these plants whether it was safe to walk there or not. Tiny variations in color conveyed important information, knowledge that meant the difference between a safe journey and an unmarked grave among the cattails.\n\nSometimes water hyacinths and alligator grass floated on the surface yet were attached to the shore. When they died and sank, new plants would occupy their old space. Watery marsh area was filled in from both directions at once. The water hyacinths were considered a menace, because they grew so rapidly and covered deep stretches of water, choking off bayous that were necessary for transportation. Many studies have been done and suggestions made about how to get rid of them. Still, they grow and cluster and trap the unwary traveler. There is even an argument about where they came from. Some experts claim that they were introduced at the International Cotton Exposition in New Orleans in 1884. But even these experts are divided as to which nation is responsible. The leading contenders are Japan and Venezuela.\n\nBut it makes no difference to the Cajuns who live in the marsh area. There are little hummocks of ground, called _ch\u00eani\u00e8res_ , from the French word for oak. Great, gnarled oaks, heavy with gray-green Spanish moss grow on these isolated islands. The local Cajuns earn their meager livings in several ways. A visitor might be shocked to learn that the principal agricultural concern of these Cajuns was cattle; he might be even more startled to see a cow swimming from one _ch\u00eani\u00e8re_ to another. Sugar cane cannot be cultivated so close to the Gulf, because the salt spray kills the plant. But further back in the marshes, there is a large industry in rice farming.\n\nAll of this was within fifteen miles of Arbier. It's very possible that a Cajun from the marshes, a crab netter or a muskrat trapper, would have the same disdain for the old families of Arbier as the latter do for \"foreigners.\" It is difficult to say, because it is difficult to mingle the two groups. On road maps, these marshy regions are indicated by large, unblemished expanses of white. There are no roads. Yet there may be as many people living among the _ch\u00eani\u00e8res_ as in Arbier itself.\n\nThere are many bayous through St. Didier Parish, some of them unnavigable. The main bayou, Bayou Chien Mort, or Dead Dog Bayou, runs from the marsh land east to a brackish swamp, a _cypri\u00e8re._ There are two causeways across the bayou, one on the old parish road and the other on Hanson Highway, the two main routes between Arbier and Linhart. Just before the bayou, the sugar cane fields begin to occupy all the available land. There are little cuts in Bayou Chien Mort, coulees, leading back to more shacks on untrustworthy-looking stilts.\n\nThe old parish road and Hanson Highway. Paul Pierson made his choice. The highway would get him to Linhart quicker, but he didn't especially want to get to Linhart in a hurry. So he took the old asphalt road. As he drove, he could see houses that had been ripped apart by hurricanes in previous years. He could see that with most of the land only slightly above sea level, most of St. Didier Parish was particularly vulnerable. He drove along the old blacktop road, listening to a radio station playing Cajun music.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne Strahan had another whiskey sour at Bar's Mike and Grill on the old parish road. She sat, nervously tapping one foot and hating the taste of the cigarettes she was smoking. The woman who seemed to know her seemed also to know the three men at the end of the bar. In any event, she joined them, and after a little while, the woman left the bar with one of the men. Corinne said nothing, and the woman didn't say goodbye. Corinne waited.\n\nAfter a while Carl Steinbrenner arrived. He was completely unremarkable, Corinne thought. He wore a light suit and he didn't seem to sweat. He came up to her and said, \"Mrs. Strahan?\" Corinne was a little annoyed. There wasn't another woman in the place.\n\n\"Call me Corinne,\" she said.\n\n\"Fine,\" said Steinbrenner, \"and you call me Carl.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Corinne, and there the conversation died until the bartender took his order for a gin fizz. A gin fizz, thought Corinne. Would Sam Spade have ordered a gin fizz?\n\nHalf an hour later, Corinne was in her station wagon, driving south on the parish road. Behind her was Carl Steinbrenner, driving a battered Ford. His car was about the best thing about him, she thought. It was the only thing with personality.\n\nWhen they arrived at the Sea-Ray Motel, Corinne's pulse rate jumped. She felt sick. She felt unreal, as though she were in a dream, and someone else's dream at that. She parked the car but sat behind the wheel. Both hands clutched the steering wheel.\n\nCarl Steinbrenner parked his car next to hers. He got out and walked over to the station wagon. \"I'll go check us in,\" he said, smiling. She said nothing. She didn't even want to nod. Steinbrenner went into the office. He was very careful not to slam the screen door. Corinne could hear everything that was said in the office.\n\n\"I'd like a room, please,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\n\"All right,\" said the desk clerk. \"Sign the book.\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence. Corinne relaxed enough to look around the place. It was long and low, a single row of rooms. How many private dramas were enacted every day in this place? she wondered. Then she saw one of the private dramas coming down the sidewalk, out of Room 6. It was the bleached blonde and the man from Bar's Mike and Grill. \"My God!\" murmured Corinne.\n\n\"'Mr. and Mrs. John Smith,' eh?\" said the desk clerk as he made his notations in the register. \"If you take a glance at this page, you can see that you're the fourth Mr. and Mrs. John Smith since I came on duty. I don't expect you'll be with us long?\"\n\n\"Just give me the key, please,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\nThe woman in the blue corduroy jeans got into a car with the man. Before the man could start his engine, Corinne had turned her key and driven away from the motel. In her rearview mirror she could see the strange man's car behind her and Carl Steinbrenner running out of the office, waving one arm and shouting something. Corinne was almost sick with disgust. She couldn't imagine how she had let herself get into the situation. She was glad that she had the nerve to leave, but she loathed the person who had agreed to go to the Sea-Ray Motel with Carl Steinbrenner.\n\nNot far from the motel was the turn-off for Hanson Highway. She took it and did fifty-five miles per hour until she reached Linhart. She was shaking and her head was buzzing. She wanted to cry, but somehow she couldn't. She wanted to get out, but she didn't know what she wanted to get out of. Her body. She hated her body. She hated what it made itself do. She hated what her body wanted, how it acted when it got those things. And her mind was worse yet. It made her do things even when her body didn't want to.\n\nShe parked the station wagon in the garage and hurried inside her house. It was getting late. She should think about dinner. She washed her hands first. Then she went into the kitchen. Everything looked hateful. She forced herself to take a few deep breaths and calm down. She acknowledged that she felt guilty, but she reminded herself that she really hadn't done anything to feel guilty about. If anything, she proved that she was a different kind of woman than the bleached blonde. She should be feeling better, but she wasn't.\n\nThe telephone started to ring. Corinne's eyes widened. Who? Skip? No, most likely it was a frustrated Carl Steinbrenner. She listened to the noise of the telephone. It kept ringing. It was almost enough to make her pull the cord from the wall. Then it stopped. The silence was frightening, too. She was very alone. She went into the living room and turned on the television. She had a choice of three shows. There was a talk show with a celebrity host that Corinne despised, a soap opera that had been running on the radio when Corinne was a baby, and a movie with John Payne and Virginia Mayo. She turned off the television and went into the bedroom. She pulled open the drawer where her husband's drugs were hidden behind his socks. She took out a vial that said _One capsule at bedtime._ Corinne poured two of the blue capsules into the palm of one hand, closed the vial, and put it back behind Skip's socks. She went into the bathroom and swallowed the blue capsules with a cup of water. About fifteen minutes later she started to feel a tingling sensation in her hands and feet. She felt that everything was, after all, all right; and if it was the blue capsules that made her feel that way, then she thanked the blue capsules. After another few minutes she had a difficult time walking from the living room to the kitchen. She stumbled over something. Her head was filled with a buzzing noise. She went back into the bedroom, knocking against the wall repeatedly along the way. She fell on the bed and was asleep. That was the way Skip found her, when he came home at seven-thirty.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was early afternoon when Darlaine Boshardt left Room 9 after her assignation with her own John Smith. As she was leaving, a man came out of the room next door. \"Hi,\" he said.\n\n\"I suppose,\" said Darlaine. She was in a foul mood. Sometimes sex did that to her. Sometimes it put her to sleep, and those were the times she looked forward to.\n\n\"I guess you and your husband are on vacation,\" said Chuck. \"My name is Robert Branford.\"\n\n\"I suppose we all have our crosses to bear,\" said Darlaine. She didn't like talking with this man, and she wanted to be far away from the motel by the time John Smith had finished showering and dressing.\n\n\"It's really a shame,\" said Chuck. \"It's about two o'clock now, isn't it? And checkout time was noon. You could have saved some money.\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" said Darlaine. \"The guy at the desk gives me special rates.\" She turned, cutting off the conversation as cleanly as if she had used a knife. Behind her, Chuck shrugged. Darlaine walked to her car, unlocked the door, and got in. She pulled out of the motel's driveway and headed toward the turn-off onto Hanson Highway. She pushed the gas pedal as far as it would go, and she watched the needle swing from left to right, from ten to thirty to fifty to seventy. She held a steady seventy miles per hour as she drove north toward Linhart. She felt terrible, and pushing the car around helped a little. Besides, being the wife of the parish's sheriff, all the police knew her. She knew them, too. She wouldn't be stopped.\n\nShe crossed the new causeway over Bayou Chien Mort. She was passing small farm communities. There were fields of sugar cane, soybeans, and sweet potatoes. There were many birds, of many colors, but Darlaine paid them no attention. After a while, the anger or the frustration, whatever she felt, went away. She took a shell-paved side road, turned around, and headed back home, to Arbier.\n\nThe drive home was at a slower speed than the drive north. She drove with her teeth clenched, as if she was forcing herself to do something she hated. She didn't ask herself whether or not that was true. It was enough that she had her nice home in Arbier, and she had her Sea-Ray Motel ready whenever she needed it, and she had her car to go back and forth, from Arbier sometimes as far as Linhart, and back.\n\nDarlaine tried to imagine what it would be like to be married to John Smith. She gave one derisive snort. Then how about that idiot in the room next door? She gave another derisive snort. She passed the motel and followed Ridge Street to W. 3rd. What would it be like to be married to the sheriff of St. Didier Parish? That was an important question, one deserving more consideration than the other two. She thought for a moment before she gave her final derisive snort, stopped the car in the driveway, and got out.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul Pierson was determined to do something positive, forceful, and decisive. There was nothing he could do about squaring his chin or broadening his shoulders, but he knew that he could still play some of the social games with the best of them. He drove up the parish road. He passed Bar's Mike and Grill and the rickety causeway over Bayou Chien Mort. He passed two more little bars and a gas station. Then he saw a solitary building by the side of the road. A sign on one side of the building said _Gussie's Lounge._ There were two cars parked beside the bar. Pierson pulled into the small parking lot and got out. The sweat had made his shirt stick to the seat cover. He felt dirty. He went into the bar.\n\nGussie's Lounge was dimly lit. There was a bar along one side of the single room. There were a number of tables, each with a tablecloth and a deep, round candleholder. The candles were not lit. There were three pinball machines at the back of the bar and a juke box in a corner. Pierson waited for a minute until his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He saw a bartender, a man on a stool, and two girls sitting at a table. All four people were looking at him. He tried to smile coolly, the way Philip Marlowe would have. For an instant, Pierson wondered how that character of Raymond Chandler would succeed in the Greater Arbier area. The answer came very quickly: better, much better, than Paul Pierson.\n\nPierson walked to the back of Gussie's Lounge. He put a quarter into one of the pinball machines. Before he pushed the re-set button, he noticed the score the previous player had registered. Fifty-two thousand. Pierson needed sixty-five thousand to win a free game, according to a little card on the machine. He pushed the re-set button, and the previous score cleared. A silver ball popped in front of a spring-operated plunger. He pulled back on the plunger and let go. The silver ball shot forward, bumped against a few obstacles, made a few bells ring, then sped directly between his useless flippers. Again the ball popped up in front of the plunger. He pulled it back and let go. The ball bounced around, hitting things, raising his score. This time he got to use a flipper to keep the ball in play, but not for very long. His third and last ball was much like the second. His final score was a little over seven thousand. Today, thought Pierson, pinball playing is not the decisive thing I am looking for. He went to the bar and ordered a beer. He took the glass and went to the table where the two girls were sitting.\n\n_\"Bonjour,\"_ he said.\n\nThe girls did not answer. Pierson thought it was odd that two young girls would be sitting in a bar so early in the day. He pulled out one of the other chairs at the table, but before he could sit down, the man at the bar said something in French.\n\n\"What was that?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"He say he don't like you some at all,\" said one of the girls. They both laughed. Pierson looked at them for a moment, took a sip from the glass of beer, and walked back out into the bright sunlight. It was a beautiful day for skipping stones.\n**9**\n\n****\n\n_It was in New Orleans, Louisiana, almost thirty years before, and the President was Harry S. Truman._\n\n_Dorothy Sauk Micheton was excited. After dinner, Michael Grey was going to call on her. They were going to see_ High Noon, _with Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. Dorothy was excited because this was the first time that her parents had let her go out on a date without another couple. Michael Grey went to the Boisogn\u00e9 School, a very exclusive boys' school in New Orleans. Dorothy went to the St. Teresa School for Young Women. Everyone knew that was probably the most exclusive school in the city._\n\n_Along with the excitement went a good deal of nervousness. There were all kinds of stories about the boys over at Boisogn\u00e9, and how she would have to fight Michael Grey off all evening. She just laughed when her friends teased her, and she just nodded politely when her mother gave her a rather strict set of instructions. But the truth of the matter was that Dorothy Sauk Micheton did not want to fight anyone off. She rather hoped that Michael Grey would prove to be less of a gentleman than the picture she had of him in her mind. These thoughts made her feel guilty, but she thought them just the same, again and again until she heard the doorbell ring._\n\n_She was so nervous she didn't know what to do. Suddenly she seemed awkward and completely without any of the social graces that girls who attended St. Teresa's were supposed to have. She answered the door, said hello to Michael, and invited him into the living room. She introduced him to her parents and her younger sister. He seemed very nice, almost as shy as she was. That surprised her._\n\n_The two teenagers stood in the living room, trying to make pleasant conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Micheton, but it was almost impossible to do. Dorothy's mother rescued the two youngsters from the situation by saying, \"I suppose you had better be getting along, now. They're not going to hold up the start of the movie for you.\"_\n\n_\"All right, Mother,\" said Dorothy, kissing her mother on the cheek._\n\n_\"And you remember what I said,\" said Mrs. Micheton._\n\n_\"Yes, yes, of course,\" said Dorothy. She put on a light coat, with Michael's aid, and the two of them went to the door. They were followed by Dorothy's father._\n\n_\"It was very nice meeting you, Mr. Grey,\" said Mr. Micheton. \"I'd like to remind you that Dorothy has to be home by midnight.\"_\n\n_\"Yes, sir,\" said Michael Grey. He shook hands with Dorothy's father, opened the front door, and guided Dorothy down the front stairs. They walked up to a blue Packard. He opened the door for her._\n\n_She was astounded. \"Your car?\" she asked. She had thought that they were going to take two streetcars to get to the theater._\n\n_\"Well,\" said Grey, \"it's my father's. He lets me use it sometimes. Get in.\"_\n\n_The nervousness increased as they drove downtown to Canal Street. Dorothy had never been alone with a boy in a car before. That in itself was a thrilling, provocative thing. She got a great deal of pleasure from merely thinking about the possibilities. But those thoughts brought a burden of guilt. The important factor for Dorothy Sauk Micheton was that the guilt was not enough to prevent her from making new fantasies._\n\n_\"You don't have to be so cold, you know,\" said Grey._\n\n_\"Excuse me?\" said Dorothy, her voice sounding oddly shrill to her._\n\n_\"I mean, you could sit a little closer.\"_\n\n_\"Oh.\" She slid across the seat. The pleasurable feelings grew, and the guilt grew with them. What if her parents knew? What if the sisters at St. Teresa's knew?_\n\n_Grey put one arm around her shoulders as he drove. \"I hope we can find someplace to dump this machine downtown,\" he said. He didn't notice that Dorothy had almost cried out when his hand touched her shoulder. Oh, there was something she wanted. . . ._\n\n_They parked the car and walked a few blocks to the theater. It was a Friday evening, and there was a large crowd already forming a line in front of the ticket window._ High Noon _was supposed to be a good movie. A girlfriend of Dorothy's said that it was swell, and Dorothy had planned to see it herself some Saturday afternoon. But seeing it with Michael Grey was so much better._\n\n_Inside the theater he put his arm around her again. Sometimes the feeling was wonderful, and sometimes she was afraid. Michael Grey's hand moved slowly down her arm, and his thumb touched, just barely touched, her breast. She took a sudden breath. He moved the thumb up and down, an inch at a time, slowly caressing her breast. She felt the nipple inside her brassiere grow hard, and she knew that Michael Grey would know that too. She pushed his hand away, and it retreated to her shoulder. Her pulse throbbed in her ears. She felt giddy. Michael Grey sat like a statue through the rest of the movie, and it took that long for Dorothy to recover. She never noticed enough of_ High Noon _to tell her parents when she came home. She just said that it was terrific._\n\n_After the movie, Michael Grey ushered Dorothy out of the theater and across the French Quarter to the_ Caf\u00e9 du Monde _for beignets and coffee. Dorothy was feeling very adult. She loosened up a little and her conversation began to consist of more than one- or two-word answers to his questions. It was obvious that he was impatient about something, but Dorothy just didn't know what to do._\n\n_After they left the_ Caf\u00e9 du Monde, _Michael and Dorothy walked back to where he had left the car. They drove to Audubon Park. In the moonlight the huge live oaks draped with Spanish moss were like things out of a dream. Dorothy was happy, but she was still excited, and she knew, suddenly, what she wanted. Oh, how she wanted. But she knew neither her parents nor the sisters would teach her how to get it. Dorothy hoped that Michael knew. She hoped that he would grab her, force her, take the full responsibility and she could have the pleasure, but not the guilt. . . ._\n\n_He touched her breasts, and she shivered. The pleasure, and the guilt. . . . He put one hand on her leg and she gasped. He moved the hand higher, to her knee. Please, she thought, don't. Please, she thought. The pleasure grew, and she felt herself wanting to be controlled by him. The guilt grew just as rapidly. If she could only let him know what she wanted . . . But guilt prevented that._\n\n_With a sudden stroke of insight, Dorothy realized that she had no idea what_ he _wanted. Should_ she _be doing something? Responding to his increasingly vigorous caresses with some kind of lovemaking of her own? All she knew to do was fall back helplessly, or seemingly helplessly, and let him have his way. Somehow she knew that if he did have his way, her own wants would be satisfied._\n\n_\"Don't be such a dead weight,\" he said, and the words and the panting, growling voice shocked her. For the moment, the guilt overrode any other feelings. She pushed his hand away. It was obvious that he was not going to force her or overwhelm her. He was being just enough of a gentleman to frustrate them both. She hated him suddenly, for the pleasure he was causing, and the guilt that the pleasure caused._\n\n_\"You know,\" he said, sitting up and running a hand through his tousled hair, \"if I had to choose between you and my right hand, I don't know who'd win. Come on. Loosen up.\"_\n\n_But Dorothy was crushed for that evening. That great longing, the aching need, was not going to be filled. She didn't know what to do with him, to encourage him. She wanted to be taken, and he would never do that unless he received the proper responses from the girl. What responses? she asked herself. She wished she could loosen up, like he suggested. There was too much ignorance and too much guilt. She would lose the ignorance eventually, but the cycle of guilt and pleasure would never be broken. Never._\n\n_Dorothy Sauk Micheton might be frustrated again some time in the future, but she swore that she would never be helpless again._\n**THREE**\n\n****\n\n**The Hurricane**\n**10**\n\nA full-scale hurricane may be the most powerful and terrifying thing in the world. Some people might argue that a tornado was worse, that the winds in a tornado reached velocities several times greater than the worst hurricane. That may be true. But a tornado is a short-lived phenomenon, compared to the hurricane which has an average life span of eight or nine days. Some hurricanes die quickly, others defy all Weather Service logic and continue on with their devastation for two weeks or more. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of people are left homeless, and gigantic areas of ruin mark the storm's passing.\n\nOn Saturday, there had been a small area of low pressure in the south Atlantic. This was nothing to be alarmed about. It was a common enough occurrence. Skip Strahan had noted its existence. He saw that it had grown on Sunday, and began to suspect that it might develop into another tropical storm. It seemed that there were more hurricanes every year. Some people blamed the testing of nuclear devices for all the changes in the weather. Other people blamed other things, some so ridiculous that the speakers themselves had trouble believing them. The truth was that there probably weren't more hurricanes than in earlier times; it was only that the satellite monitors spotted storms that might otherwise have gone undetected. Before the first weather satellite was launched, the Weather Service might go through an entire hurricane season and not get past D or E. Now, however, it was only early August, and already Skip was following the sixth tropical storm of the young season. That was the classification of all storms with winds in the fifty-six to seventy-four miles per hour range. Skip showed satellite films of the tropical storm, which had been named Felicia by the Weather Service. On Tuesday, Felicia became a hurricane about one hundred miles southwest of Cuba. Her winds had been clocked at ninety miles per hour, with some gusting up to one hundred and twenty miles per hour.\n\nSkip Strahan looked at the information which he received from New Orleans and the data from the National Weather Service there, whose duty it was to issue Hurricane Warnings. He took a deep breath. Unlike her predecessors, Felicia was moving into the Gulf of Mexico. There was no known method of predicting the path of a hurricane. They followed whimsical, twisting routes, sometimes defying all that the science of meteorology had learned about storms.\n\nThere was a hurricane in the Gulf. Her name was Felicia. Her position was about fifty miles east of the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula. From now on, Skip would have to stay at his post, relaying the information he received from New Orleans to the people of St. Didier Parish. He hoped that Felicia wouldn't cause him too much trouble.\n\n* * *\n\nSheriff Walter Boshardt woke up. He yawned and rubbed his temples. He let his head fall back on the pillow. He felt warm and drowsy. Then he shook his head and forced himself to sit up again. For some reason, it was more difficult to get out of bed this morning. But Boshardt did it. He was the sheriff of St. Didier Parish, the top law enforcement officer in the parish. There were no local police in any of the communities in the parish, so the sheriff and his thirty men and their ten patrol cars had to guard the safety and well-being of a lot of Cajun coonass bastards who were probably still asleep.\n\nBoshardt shook his head again, to get the idea out of it. It was more likely that the muskrat trappers in the marshes and the rice field workers and the cane workers and the cattlemen and the farmers were already awake and at work. It was time for Boshardt to check in.\n\nHe looked across the bedroom, at the other twin bed where his wife was asleep. Dorothy. That was her name when he married her. Darlaine. Boshardt frowned and went into the bathroom. He thought about the life he had with her, the unpleasant tone of that life. He thought about her flagrant affairs around the parish. He thought about how everyone he spoke to carefully avoided that subject, out of respect for him, for the competent, reliable job he had done as sheriff. No one spoke of Darlaine's activities within his hearing, but Boshardt knew what they were thinking. Maybe there was no way out of the situation. Maybe there was. Boshardt had to get to work.\n\nHe shaved and brushed his teeth and took a quick shower. Then he got dressed, putting on the light brown uniform of the St. Didier Parish Sheriff's Office. There was a flat-brimmed hat that went with the uniform, but Walter Boshardt usually just carried it and left it in his patrol car. He made certain, however, that the rest of his staff wore their uniforms, including their hats, properly at all times while on duty. Boshardt smiled when he thought about that. Why did he do it? Why did he make his men so conscious of their appearance, when his own example showed that the hat wasn't important? Well, he answered himself as he drank a cup of coffee, he made the deputies wear their hats because it seemed the thing to do. He smiled again. The coffee was brewed with chicory, and it was hot and strong and dark. It was good southern Louisiana coffee. They couldn't drink the stuff up to Shreveport. Those Protestants up there were too solemn and quiet. How he'd like to get the sheriff from one of the northern parishes, along the Arkansas border, to come to a Saturday night fais-do-do. It would be like a preacher in a whorehouse.\n\nBoshardt finished the coffee, checked his appearance in a full-length mirror inside the bedroom closet door, and left the house. He got into his patrol car, which he had left in the driveway behind Darlaine's car, and drove to the Arbier office. When he opened the door, the air-conditioned coolness hit him. It felt good, and he took a deep breath. His brown uniform was already darkened with sweat.\n\n\"Morning, Sheriff,\" said a uniformed man behind a desk.\n\n\"Morning, Sergeant,\" said Boshardt. \"What do we have?\"\n\n\"We had a complaint last night,\" said the sergeant. \"You won't believe it, but we had a complaint from the Sea-Ray Motel.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me Sparkle's back,\" said Boshardt. He sat in a chair beside the desk.\n\n\"No,\" said the sergeant, \"the last I heard of him or her or whatever it is, he or she was in New Orleans.\"\n\n\"So what about last night?\"\n\n\"Some customer complained to the night manager about too much noise from the next room, and when the night manager didn't do anything, he called us. Somebody, let me see, it was Auguste who went, but by the time he got there, the people in the next room had checked out and everybody was happy.\"\n\n\"Everybody's always happy at the Sea-Ray,\" said Boshardt, shaking his head.\n\n\"It's the biggest amusement park in the parish,\" said the sergeant.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Yeah, this.\" The sergeant handed Boshardt a sheet of paper.\n\n\"Hurricane, huh? Well, you know what to do. Captain Shaeffer will be in charge. I'll have to go up to Linhart and have a meeting with the department heads. We'll have to figure out the deployment of the patrol cars and the men. Then I'll have to stop by Delochitaches, too, I suppose, though you could evacuate the whole place with a phone call to the right person. God, I hate this.\" Boshardt crumpled the paper and tossed it onto the desk. Then he reached over, picked it up, and straightened it out as best he could.\n\n\"It's an early one, isn't it?\" said the deputy.\n\n\"Yeah, well, you usually think of late August, more likely September for hurricanes hitting Louisiana. But right now I'm thinking about Audrey, back in 1957, and I'm thinking how she hit us and Cameron Parish. And she was June, I think, if I remember right. I'm thinking of the streets of this town filled with the goddamndest stinking mud you'd ever want to smell, and it was covered with sand from the beach, like snow. There wasn't any Arbier after that for weeks. Most of the parish was wiped out. That storm blew sea water in a huge wave that rolled almost twenty miles inland. Nobody had any idea of what to do or where to start. That storm killed a lot of people. I was home from college then, and I was working with my father, shrimping. We thought we had the boat safely moored. We took her up Black Run Bayou and secured her. After Audrey, we went to get the boat, and she plain wasn't there. Not a sign. To this day, I don't know what happened to that boat. And our house. . . .\" Boshardt's voice trailed off. He stared for a while. The sergeant said nothing.\n\nSuddenly Boshardt roused himself. \"All right,\" he said, \"this time will be like the last few years. Linhart gets the news from New Orleans, and everybody in the parish holes up safe and sound. _If_ the hurricane comes here.\"\n\n\"It's still down there off Mexico.\"\n\n\"You've got to be ready,\" said Boshardt. \"I'll see you later. You get the message to Captain Shaeffer when he comes in.\"\n\n\"Check. Anything else?\"\n\n\"Isn't it enough?\" asked Boshardt, as he walked out the door.\n\nSheriff Boshardt didn't know it yet, but there was a large game being set around him, with himself as one of the principal players. If he had been told all the details, he might not have called it a game; still, it had all the necessary elements. There was a playing area\u2014the town of Arbier. There were players\u2014how many? It was too early to tell exactly how many, or even into how many teams they could be divided. There were goals and rewards and maybe penalties. There was a requirement for skill. There was a large element of luck.\n\nWhenever one of the major factors in a situation is a hurricane, there is a goddamn huge element of luck.\n\n* * *\n\nHurricanes need two things to stay alive: heat and moisture. The storm starts as a small area of low pressure over water at least eighty degrees Fahrenheit. Warm, moist, light air is drawn into the area. Because warm air is lighter than cool air, it begins to circulate upward. Water vapor in the air condenses as it cools at higher altitudes. The condensation releases the energy to keep the cycle going. The spinning air mass grows, and clouds start to form. More warm, moist air is drawn into the system. More water vapor condenses, more energy is released. The spinning clouds begin to take on a characteristic spiral formation. The air that enters at the bottom and rises to lose its moisture content is blown away by winds in the upper atmosphere. The hurricane grows and grows, a self-perpetuating pump that has all the heat and moisture it needs in the places where hurricanes are born. These places are the south Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico.\n\nIt is only when the hurricane, pushed by some vague influence of barometric pressure or other atmospheric conditions, comes over land that the pump stops working. The friction of the air mass moving across the land slows the hurricane. No longer is there moist air to be drawn up and around. The land mass rises above sea level. The hurricane rapidly fills in and becomes a scattered mass of squalls.\n\nBut meteorologists know that there is absolutely no way to predict where a hurricane is going to move. Sometimes, against all scientific theory, they maintain their tight spiral formations and hurricane-force winds across huge stretches of land.\n\nThe only thing to do with a hurricane is hide from it.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck woke up in Room 8 of the Sea-Ray Motel. He had had a very bad night's sleep, and he was in a foul mood. The sheet and blanket were twisted around his legs. He kicked free of them and sat up. He had a terrible taste in his mouth. He went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror over the sink. His tongue was coated and swollen. \"Goddamn this place,\" he muttered. He thought he was probably being poisoned by the drinking water, which most likely came out of some stagnant bayou. Or the coffee, which he could barely drink without a good quantity of milk and sugar. Or the bugs. God, he knew he'd been bitten by at least a dozen different kinds of disease-carrying bugs. Chuck just wanted to go home. He almost picked up the telephone to call Tom, to tell Tom that he was going to quit. Arbier wasn't Chuck's kind of place at all, although the Sea-Ray approached his idea of civilized living.\n\nHe got dressed in a tee shirt and a pair of wash-and-wear slacks. He put a pair of sandals on his feet and a pair of sunglasses over his eyes. Then he went outside. He went into the office. The screen door slammed, and the desk clerk jumped a little. He put down the book he was reading.\n\n\"Haven't you finished that book yet?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"Listen, friend,\" said the desk clerk, \"I read it once for the story line, and now I'm going back over it for style.\"\n\n\"How's the style?\"\n\n\"Style ain't so bad. How's yours?\"\n\nChuck wanted to hit the desk clerk, but he stopped himself. \"I registered a complaint in here last night,\" he said.\n\n\"So I heard.\"\n\n\"Well, your friend the night manager isn't very effective in crisis situations, is he?\"\n\n\"That's not his job,\" said the clerk. \"It's not mine, either.\"\n\n\"Then what are you here for?\"\n\nThe desk clerk smiled. He held up the porno book, but he didn't say a word.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" said Chuck. \"And the cops were really terrific too. I told those morons in Room 9 that I was calling the sheriff's office, and they were gone like a flash. Then I just about get to sleep, and this goddamn defender of law and order wakes me up.\"\n\n\"Seems to me that some of that was your own fault,\" said the clerk. \"We got thirty officers to patrol the whole parish. So a complaint about noisy neighbors isn't going to get very high priority.\"\n\n\"Especially in this motel,\" said Chuck.\n\nThe desk clerk gave Chuck a smile that Chuck wanted to break into a million pieces.\n\n\"You're in a good mood today, aren't you?\" asked Chuck.\n\nThere was a brief silence from the desk clerk. \"Yeah,\" he said at last, \"on the whole, I think it's not a bad day.\"\n\n\"Well, if I get any more trouble out of you, you'll start to have a bad day all around.\"\n\n\"I don't see how. I really don't see how.\" The clerk went back to his reading, ignoring Chuck.\n\n\"Look,\" said Chuck, \"you know why I'm here.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said the clerk, not looking up. \"You're complaining about that rock band that checked in at three this morning.\"\n\n\"No, that's not what I meant. I mean, you know why I'm in Arbier.\"\n\n\"You said you were doing a magazine article, I think,\" said the clerk. \"But so far, all I've seen go into your room were a couple of bottles of liquor, and all I've seen come out is that black bitch in Room 13.\"\n\nChuck fought to keep himself under control. It was one of the most difficult things he ever had to do. Finally, he said, \"Well, that business about the magazine article wasn't the truth.\"\n\n\"You know, I half suspected that,\" said the clerk.\n\n\"I work for a film producer. Sort of an advance man. I'm finding locations and noting typical local people.\" He paused, expecting that the desk clerk would be surprised and interested. He was disappointed. \"This film we're working on,\" he said, \"will probably have some scenes shot in Arbier. The rest of my crew was supposed to get in last night, but they haven't got here yet. We're going to need two rooms, each with twin beds.\"\n\n\"We got them,\" said the desk clerk, still not looking up. \"If you want them, put down a deposit.\"\n\n\"How much do you want?\"\n\n\"Give me, oh, twenty-eight bucks and you can have Room 7 and Room 9 until noon tomorrow.\"\n\nChuck took the money out of his wallet and put it on the counter.\n\n\"If I didn't know you better,\" said the clerk, \"I'd think you were renting those rooms on either side of you for the quiet. But that's stupid.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Chuck. \"It's stupid.\"\n\nThe desk clerk continued his reading. He hadn't looked at the bills Chuck had put on the counter. \"How much you got there?\" asked the clerk.\n\n\"Twenty-eight, like you said.\"\n\n\"Terrific.\" There was a long silence. Chuck soon realized that the clerk wasn't going to move from his chair until Chuck had left the office. Chuck turned and left the office, muttering under his breath. He gave the door a loud slam on the way out.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" shouted the clerk. Chuck stopped on the sidewalk. He went back into the office. \"Here,\" said the clerk, handing Chuck the keys to Rooms 7 and 9.\n\nChuck nodded and took the keys. \"Go to hell,\" he said.\n**11**\n\nThere was an extra noise that woke Paul Pierson up. There was the sound of the mockingbird, and the sound of Cy's frantic scrabbling at the screen. But there was something else. It was the sound of the lock opening and the front door swinging and the hinges making their croaking, protesting sound. Pierson sat up in bed quickly. Sometimes the landlord came in, uninvited, to spray for roaches. Once the landlord had come into the bathroom, while Pierson was taking a shower, because the woman downstairs had some trouble with her plumbing. Very often, Pierson couldn't figure his landlord out.\n\nIn any event, Pierson grabbed his blue jeans and pulled them on. He also pulled on an Ohio State sweatshirt. As he freed his head and jerked the sweatshirt down, he saw Maddie, standing in the doorway of the bedroom, smiling.\n\n_\"Bonjour,\"_ she said happily.\n\n\"Well,\" said Pierson, \"look who it is. The mistress of the oceans herself.\" He was in a very bad mood, but Maddie didn't seem to notice.\n\n_\"Allo, mon cher cousin,\"_ she said. _\"Je suis Mathilde Gargotier, la plus belle\u2014\"_\n\nPierson interrupted her. \"Maddie,\" he said, \"you know goddamn well that I don't understand your French. And you know just as well that I'd probably be burned up because you never came home last night.\"\n\n_\"Mon Dieu!\"_ she cried in false outrage. \" _Quel_ shock! _Quel_ surprise! What am I, your little _b\u00e9b\u00e9,_ that you get mad as goddamn if I don't come home when you think I should? Since when do I have to check in and out, like this was a prison? I am here because I wanted to be here. Last night, I didn't want to be here, so I wasn't. It is very simple.\"\n\n\"It may be simple,\" said Pierson, \"but it's also not plain, common courtesy. I never said that I owned you, or that I had any right to keep you here if you wanted to leave, or the other way around. I just think I deserve a little more consideration.\"\n\n\"You know, I'm beginning to think that I don't want to be here now, either. I think I may go visit _mon p\u00e8re,_ because I haven't seen him in many-many days. Or I will go to the caf\u00e9 for a demitasse of _caf\u00e9 noir._ But standing here, looking at your idiotic Ohio State sweatshirt, is beginning to make me angry.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Pierson, \"I'll bite. Why are you getting angry?\"\n\nMaddie grunted and kicked one of Pierson's sneakers across the room. She turned around and walked out of the room. Pierson stared after her for a few seconds, controlling his own temper. He couldn't understand what she had to be angry about. It seemed to him that he was the injured party. After a while he went out and found her sitting on the couch in the living room.\n\n\"Well?\" she said.\n\n\"Well what?\"\n\n\"Well, what are you so mad about?\"\n\nPierson took a deep breath. He had to choose his words carefully, he knew, or Maddie would blow up all over again. \"I was worried about you,\" he said. \"I thought you'd get home late, but when you didn't get home at all, and you didn't call, I got worried.\"\n\n\"You sound like a parent,\" said Maddie.\n\n\"Well, why didn't you call?\"\n\nMaddie smiled. \"Well, you know me and Shelley and Betsy went up to Linhart yesterday, to join the Navy. So, along the way we argued, and we decided it would be better to join the Air Force instead. But then I changed my mind again, and I went back to the Navy.\"\n\n\"Come on already.\"\n\nMaddie smiled, remembering the day before. \"When we got to Linhart, we went to the post office. Shelley and Betsy went to see the Air Force man, and I went to see the Navy man.\" She paused for a long while, and her expression changed. She looked as if she had just tasted something that she wanted to spit out.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"They wanted to know if I could type,\" she said.\n\nPierson laughed, and Maddie threw a cushion at him. \"No,\" she said, \"they had all kinds of interesting things I could do, but at the last minute I told them I would think it over for three or two days. And I waited, and Shelley and Betsy came out, and you know what? They told the Air Force man the same thing. So we started home, and we took the old road, and we stopped at Henriette's for _un petit,_ maybe two, and we stopped at Marie & Pal's, for _un petit,_ and we stopped at Medoux's for _un petit,_ and then Shelley told Betsy to drive, and we stopped at Beaumont's who used to be Schoenberg for _un petit,_ and then I drove, and we stopped at Gussie's for _un petit,_ and there may have been one or two more in there, I don't remember. But we got to Betsy's house, and we laughed a lot, I remember that all right, and I remember Shelley passing out, and Betsy asked me if I wanted her to drive me here, and all of a sudden, like that, I couldn't remember any English. And I answered her in Cajun, and she couldn't understand me, but it didn't make any difference because in a little while I passed out. And today I feel fine.\" She smiled.\n\n\"You're proud of yourself.\"\n\n\"I am,\" she said.\n\n\"And what are you going to do now?\" he asked. \"You've quit your job and you're not going into the Navy.\"\n\n\"Who says I'm not?\" she said with a frown.\n\n\"You're not, are you?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not. This morning, when the three of us woke up, we decided what we're going to do.\"\n\nPierson gave a short laugh. \"I can hardly wait to hear it. What are the three of you going to do?\"\n\nMaddie's expression became very serious. She put on a very affected attitude. \"We're going to Las Vegas,\" she said. \"We're going to be show girls.\"\n\n* * *\n\nDarlaine Boshardt got up at half-past ten. She lay in bed for a while, wondering how she was going to kill the day. She didn't feel up to taking someone out to the Sea-Ray. She could drive up to Linhart, that thriving metropolis, and do some shopping. She might even get on I-10 all the way into New Orleans. She hadn't been to New Orleans in a long while, she thought. There were too many bad memories. Since her parents had died, there didn't seem to be any reason for going to New Orleans. All that the city had were places for which she had a lingering hatred. She sighed and got out of bed. She washed and dressed and brushed her hair. God, how she hated her hair. It had been beautiful once. She looked in the mirror. _She_ had been beautiful once. Sometimes she felt so frustrated that she came close to doing something violent. Feeling helpless was the most painful thing of all. There were times when she was helpless, like now. She wanted to be her younger self again, and she was helpless to do anything about it. She wanted to be somewhere where her presence was important, but, thanks to her husband, that was impossible. She was helpless to do anything about it. And as powerful as she was at controlling most situations and people, she had to admit that now and then she was totally helpless.\n\nShe tried to shrug the feeling off. She went to the telephone and dialed the television station in Linhart. The switchboard operator there didn't recognize Darlaine's voice. \"I'm sorry, ma'am,\" said the operator, \"but Mr. Strahan is busy because of the hurricane in the Gulf.\"\n\n\"Hurricane?\" said Darlaine. \"Listen, miss, I'm Darlaine Boshardt, the wife of the sheriff. I'm calling because of an emergency. This is official business.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mrs. Boshardt,\" said the operator. Her voice was shaky. There was a click, a few seconds of line noise, and then Darlaine heard Skip Strahan answer the phone.\n\n\"Yes?\" he said. He sounded angry.\n\n\"Hello, Skip. It's me, Darlaine. I wanted to call about confirming your engagement to speak at\u2014\"\n\n\"Look, Mrs. Boshardt\u2014\"\n\n\"Darlaine.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Anyway, right against the eastern coast of the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula we have this hurricane. A real live one, getting bigger and bigger all the time. Now this hurricane could rain itself out over the Yucat\u00e1n, and then we'd all be happy. But there is the very real possibility that the hurricane will recurve to the north and east. That means us. That's why there's a Hurricane Warning out. Okay?\"\n\n\"Sure, Skip. I know you must be working hard, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm working my ass off, Mrs. Boshardt. I don't have any time to talk to you. Maybe give me a call come wintertime.\" He hung up, and Darlaine was listening to static. She hung up too.\n\n\"If you work your ass off, honey,\" she said to the phone, \"you're going to miss it some day, and that ain't no lie.\" She walked into the living room and switched on the television set. Channel Five was showing re-runs of \"Leave it to Beaver\" with a white caption running along the bottom of the picture. The caption said, _A Hurricane Warning has been issued for the entire Gulf coast, from Brownsville, Texas to Key West, Florida. Hurricane Felicia is located just off the eastern coast of the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula, and is described as \"very dangerous.\" There is a possibility that Hurricane Felicia will turn and strike somewhere along the Gulf coast during the next twenty-four hours. Stay tuned to this channel for further advisories._\n\nDarlaine turned the channel selector. She had a choice of a soap opera, where someone evidently had amnesia but was a key witness in a court case involving an important man in the community and a woman with a shady past, or a game show where contestants were going out of their minds with rapture by winning washer-drier combinations. These two stations were running virtually the same caption at the bottom of the screen. Darlaine turned off the television. \"Well,\" she said aloud, \"that's how I spend my day. I wait for the hurricane.\"\n\nThe telephone rang. She wondered who would be calling her. Perhaps the day wasn't a total waste after all. \"Hello?\" she said into the phone, after running from the living room.\n\n\"Hello, Mrs. Boshardt?\"\n\nDarlaine was disappointed. \"Yes,\" she said, \"speaking.\"\n\n\"Uh, this is Sergeant Hebert at the Arbier sheriff's office. Sheriff Boshardt gave me instructions to call you and tell you that there is a Hurricane Warning out and that you should get ready to take the proper precautions.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Darlaine, \"thanks.\"\n\n\"Do you need any help, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Thanks for calling, Sergeant.\"\n\n\"Sure, ma'am,\" said the officer. \"Any time.\"\n\n\"Any time is right.\" Darlaine hung up the telephone.\n\n* * *\n\nOn a normal day, Skip Strahan received his day's weather predictions from the office of the United States Weather Service in New Orleans. He also took his own readings with a small battery of sophisticated equipment that the television station operated. Now, however, he was on twenty-four-hour alert. His desk was covered with maps and charts, barometer readings along the path of the hurricane, and dozens of pages of related data. He had only one assistant at the station, Sheila Downing, and her desk was just as littered with material as his. The trouble was that, at the moment, there was little for them to do. The hurricane was stalled against the Yucat\u00e1n. It hadn't moved for hours, although it was growing in size. Perhaps there was a small area of high pressure there holding off the oncoming hurricane. Strahan knew that hurricanes often stalled when they reached land. This was a particularly dangerous time for the coastal communities. They could feel the full strength of the hurricane's winds for hour after hour. Then, for some reason, perhaps a change in pressure inland, the hurricane would move on. There was no way of foretelling the movements of the storm.\n\nSilently Skip prayed that the hurricane would rain itself out, fill in, and die over the Yucat\u00e1n. Many lives would be lost there though.\n\nSuddenly Skip shoved the maps away from him. He felt as if he was going to scream if he had to chart any more reports from New Orleans. He went to his jacket, which hung on a coat rack. He took out a small vial and poured two yellow pills into the palm of one hand. He paused for a moment, then added a third. He got a paper cup of water from the water cooler and took the three pills. In less than fifteen minutes he was feeling better. In half an hour he realized that he was whistling while he plotted the latest data from New Orleans.\n**12**\n\nAbout eleven o'clock in the morning, Sheriff Walter Boshardt completed his tour of the shops along Ridge Street. He was putting off the drive to Linhart, for reasons which weren't clear. For a moment, he stood on the sidewalk. The sky was bright, clear blue. There was a slight breeze from the Gulf, and the fresh smell of it roused so many memories in Boshardt's mind that they mingled and coalesced simply into pleasure. He looked down W. 3rd Street, his street. He wondered if his wife were awake yet. He stared down that street for a while too, thinking of all the years he had walked along, kicking the little white shells that were everywhere. And the great oaks with their weight of Spanish moss covered it all, like a canopy. The cry of a killdeer broke his train of thought; he looked up to see the bird flying back to the mud flats where it made its home. Boshardt wondered if that bird, as well as the town he loved so well, was already marked for destruction by Hurricane Felicia. It was too early to panic, but it was just the right time to prepare. Now Sheriff Boshardt knew that all the shopkeepers in Arbier were aware of the Hurricane Warning. What preparations they made were their concern from then on.\n\nThere was nothing left to do but make the drive to Linhart, and then to Delochitaches. He wanted personally to see that his meager forces were well-prepared for whatever might happen.\n\nBoshardt thought that a cup of coffee before the drive would do him some good. He walked the short distance along Ridge Street to the Crisis Caf\u00e9. He opened the door and was welcomed by the air-conditioned coolness. He tried to remember when he was a boy, before every shop in the town could boast air-conditioning. He tried to recall the heat and the humidity, the constant heaviness of the air, the whirring of the small electric fans that seemed to do no good at all. He laughed. That was one memory that came easily enough.\n\n\"Now this sheriff what we got here,\" said a man at a table, noticing Boshardt's laugh, \"he ain't got the worry, _mais non,_ I tell you for true. Hey, _cousin,_ you look how he brought himself here and he laugh, that one. _Certainement,_ if that how you call Felicia brought herself here, there don't be no laugh. Other hurr'canes, I never will forgot, whoo man! Don't they swat us like _les maringouins!_ \" He slapped his arm as though he were swatting a mosquito.\n\n\"You don't pay no attention to this in the back Cajun,\" said another man. \"He lives so far out in the marshes, he was surprised when I told him Hoover wasn't President no more. He picks moss, this one, a moss cutter. And he talks like that to the sheriff.\"\n\n\"It's all right, boys,\" said Boshardt. He sat in his usual booth, and Lauren came right over to take his order. \"How about the catfish?\" he asked.\n\n\"Have you ever know when we had to say 'no' to the catfish?\" she asked smiling. \"The catfish, special for the sheriff. And coffee. Black?\"\n\n\"Black-black,\" he said. She smiled again and went into the kitchen. Boshardt watched her go. She reminded him. . . .\n\n\"We bring you a special weather advisory from the Channel Five weather station,\" said the announcer on the television. All at once, all conversation in the diner stopped. Lauren and the owner, old Mrs. Perkins, came out of the kitchen to listen.\n\nOn the television, the picture changed to Skip Strahan, standing before a large map of the Gulf region. \"There is little more to report,\" he said. \"Hurricane Felicia has remained stationary off the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula for several hours. Her winds are now measured at over one hundred and twenty-five miles per hour, with strong gusts of over two hundred miles per hour. She is about two hundred miles in diameter, a giant storm system that is throwing gale-force winds a great distance from the central eye of the hurricane. This information has been compiled from data gathered by the National Hurricane Center in Miami and supplied to the National Weather Service Hurricane Warning Bureau in New Orleans. New advisories will be put out every six hours by the office in New Orleans. If Felicia makes any movement, we will get the information to you as soon as we can. Stay tuned to this channel for further information.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Mrs. Perkins.\n\n\"What?\" asked Lauren, shrugging. She walked over to the sheriff's booth. \"I can't wait to see the look on your face when you put that catfish in your mouth,\" she said.\n\n\"Why?\" asked the sheriff. \"Is it special catfish or something?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Lauren, \"I was watching Mrs. Perkins because I always think I'm going to learn some of her secrets. I never do, but I always try. Anyway, she skinned this here catfish, and then she gutted it, and she cut the head off, and she cut the tail off. Then she goes to fry the thing, and I say, 'Aren't you going to wash it, Mrs. Perkins?' And she says, The damn thing's been swimming in water all its life. If it ain't clean now, it ain't _never_ going to be clean.' So I learned one of her secrets, after all.\"\n\n\"You can take the old catfish out of the bayou,\" said Boshardt.\n\n\"Yes, sir, I know the rest,\" said Lauren, laughing. She went into the kitchen and came back out with a tray for another booth. Then she came back to Boshardt's booth. \"Say,\" she said, \"I wish you could say something to Mrs. Perkins. She's a nervous wreck on account of this hurricane business.\"\n\n\"She has a right to be,\" said the sheriff.\n\n\"I suppose business will drop like an egg off a table,\" said Lauren.\n\n\"That's a bad thought,\" said the sheriff. He pictured the egg spattered all over the floor, an image of how the town of Arbier might be blown apart, hopelessly battered beyond repair.\n\n\"It's a dumb thought,\" said Lauren. \"This whole thing is starting to get me down, too.\"\n\n\"If that hurricane starts to move, and if it starts to swing toward us, you're going to get the strangest feeling up your backside, and then you won't feel so much like laughing.\"\n\n\"How about you, Sheriff?\" asked the pretty seventeen-year-old.\n\n\"Well, to tell you the truth, I got that feeling right now, listening to Strahan on the television. It'll go away, the feeling, I mean, but it'll come back.\"\n\n\"Then come in here for some coffee,\" said Lauren. \"Maybe we'll have some more back-of-the-bayou Cajuns. They're always fun.\" She disappeared once again into the kitchen.\n\nWalter Boshardt stared after her. A little girl from a tiny town in a very small parish in Louisiana. She laughed at the \"back-of-the-bayou Cajuns,\" but what would she do in a city, like New Orleans? How would she react to New York City? Sheriff Boshardt relaxed in the booth. He sighed. He realized that Lauren would most likely think that the people in New York were just as funny as the Cajuns. He wished that he could have her simple outlook. It would take a lot of the sting out of the next day or two.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne Strahan woke up, got out of bed, washed, dressed, did the laundry, and sat down on the couch in the living room. She was finished for the day. The modern conveniences in her wonderful home had given her hours and hours of leisure time. What was she going to do? she asked herself. There was volunteer work, except that she hated being with old people or crippled people or mentally retarded people. She could take a course or two at the extension school of Hebert College. She could learn conversational Portuguese, so she could talk with some of the shrimpers.\n\nCorinne went to the closet, and took out another kit that Skip had given her. She couldn't even remember when it was that she had gotten it. There was a layer of dust on the box lid. It had probably sat in the closet for a long time. It was a decoupage kit. Corinne looked at it for a while. That made her a decoupageuse, she decided. She was going to decorate a lunch pail for Skip. She didn't have a lunch pail, and Skip didn't need one, and would look absolutely foolish going into work with one.\n\nCorinne thought for a few seconds, trying to decide what else she could do with the kit. She could decorate a wastebasket. That was a wonderful idea.\n\nCorinne Strahan realized that she had just decided to spend the whole day decorating a wastebasket. Foreign leaders she had never even heard of were dying or being assassinated, people walked on the moon\u2014or they used to\u2014and she couldn't do anything more meaningful than decoupage a metal wastebasket, one she would have to go out and buy first anyway.\n\nShe put the kit on the coffee table and turned on the television. To her surprise, Skip's face filled the screen. She listened to his words, and she felt the first shiver of fear. In Linhart she was safe enough. But her father in Arbier was in an awfully vulnerable place. Maybe she should go down and get him. She listened to Skip. Evidently there was plenty of time. The hurricane was stuck against Mexico. Sort of decoupaged against the Yucat\u00e1n, she thought. She turned off the television when Skip finished his message. There was nothing good on until _Casablanca_ at one o'clock. She might as well go out and buy the metal wastebasket and get to work. She could have it finished by the time Skip came home.\n\nGod, she wished that she could do something.\n\n* * *\n\nThe worst effects of a hurricane come from the sea. The hurricane surge which accompanies the eye of the storm can be as high as twenty-five feet. Waves pushed by the hurricane winds can reach thirty feet or more. The waves on top of the surge are often enough to wash inland for great distances. Cities such as Galveston, Texas have learned this horrible truth through experience. Thinking themselves protected by a large beach area and sand dunes, people awaited the approach of a hurricane with curiosity rather than fear. Only when the giant wall of seawater roared upon them, crashing and swirling mile after mile inland, did they realize how incautious they had been. This realization did not last long for many people. For many people, it was the final realization of their lives.\n\nToday the United States Weather Service provides accurate information and estimates of the size and potential danger of any hurricane likely to hit the country. The main center in Miami cooperates with other departments and meteorological groups, with radar stations all across the hemisphere, to keep an accurate picture of the hurricane activity in the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. This information is funneled down to local weather bureaus, which relay the data to even smaller communities. In modern times, when nearly every household has at least one television set, the news of an approaching hurricane can be circulated many hours ahead of time, giving plenty of time for preparations or evacuation. With the advances in meteorological science, with the aid of weather satellites and the benefits of the communications media, there are no longer disasters on the scale of the Galveston hurricane in 1900, when over six thousand people died and the city was so utterly ravaged that it could be said that there was no more Galveston. The survivors of that disaster showed great courage, and with help from the government rebuilt the city. Arbier had been hit by hurricanes in the past.\n\nArbier had been virtually destroyed and rebuilt. The residents of the town knew that no hurricane could ever wipe Arbier off the map totally and forever. Still, like the old proprietor of the Crisis Caf\u00e9, the people of Arbier were already beginning to feel a heaviness in the stomach as fear began to take hold.\n\nTo someone like Sheriff Boshardt, who could view the situation of the entire parish as a whole, the situation was a great deal worse. He thought of the people living to the west of Arbier, in the marsh country. Many of those people would fail to be warned, or refuse to leave their homes for safer shelter. Those people would die a particularly horrible death.\n\n* * *\n\nIn Linhart, Deputy Sergeant Marty Theriot was just waiting for the day's routine work to progress from the In box to the Out box. Every day he had a huge amount of paperwork, and every day he put off facing it. On top of everything, there was a hurricane in the Gulf. Felicia did not impress Deputy Theriot very much. Linhart was far enough inland to keep it safe from the dangers of the ocean. Every year, there was at least one hurricane in the Gulf, but it was only infrequently that they came near enough to the Louisiana coastline to do more than drop a little rain. Deputy Theriot decided that there was plenty of time to worry later, when the hurricane showed that it intended to land in St. Didier Parish.\n\nMeanwhile, there was at least three hours of paperwork to be done. He looked at it for a long time; for some reason, today it was worse than usual. He fiddled with the reports for fifteen minutes more, accomplishing nothing. Then he called one of the other officers over and assigned that man to do the day's paperwork. \"Sheriff Boshardt will be here in a little while,\" said Theriot. \"He's going to want to meet with us about this hurricane thing. We're all going to be on standby status in uniform on twelve-hour shifts. So before he gets here, I'm going to secure the people along the old parish road. A lot of those people probably don't know about this thing.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said the officer, frowning. He knew well enough that Theriot was just dumping extra work on him.\n\n\"I'll cover the road down to the causeway. I expect the Arbier office will take care of the rest of the route. In any event, I'll be back before the sheriff gets here.\"\n\n\"You damn well better,\" said the officer.\n\n\"You talk like that to me again,\" said Theriot, \"and I'll have you out in the swamp helping alligators cross the road.\"\n\nHe turned and walked toward the door. He didn't see the gesture the officer made. That was all right, though, because he imagined it well enough. It made him smile.\n\nHe took a patrol car and started out along the old parish road. His first stop was going to be Henriette's Lounge, about a half mile before the community of Capita. He pulled into the strip of parking lot and got out of the car. Just as he slammed the door shut, he heard a call come over the radio. \"R Six to R, can you give me a 10-42?\"\n\nTheriot reached in and picked up his mike. He answered before anyone at headquarters in Linhart could reply. He wanted to show them that he was really at work. \"Robert Six, this is Robert Eight,\" he said. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"On the north fork to Delochitaches,\" was the answer from R Six.\n\n\"Try Pichon's,\" said Theriot. \"It's about halfway between Delochitaches and Linhart.\" A 10-42 was a query about restroom facilities.\n\n\"Pichon's, got it. Know the place. Thanks.\"\n\n\"10-4,\" said Theriot. He replaced the mike and went into Henriette's Lounge.\n\n\"Allo, Monsieur Theriot,\" said the short, fat woman behind the bar. \"I hope you don't brought yourself here for no troublement.\"\n\n\"Not this time, Henriette,\" said Theriot, taking off his hat and putting it beside him on the bar. \"Give me a Screwturkey.\"\n\n\"I don't fix that drink some at all,\" she said. \"What that is?\"\n\n\"You call yourself a barmaid?\" said Theriot in mock astonishment. \"It's a drink I invented myself. Wild Turkey and orange juice.\"\n\n\"I think I be sick, me, for true,\" said Henriette. She made the drink and gave it to Theriot. He started to pay for it, but she wouldn't accept the money.\n\n\"Thanks, Henriette,\" he said. \"I'm not drinking on duty this way.\"\n\n\"How you figure that, _hein_?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said the deputy. \"I'll figure it some other time. You know about the hurricane?\"\n\nHenriette shrugged. \"Don't they another thing on the radio all day?\"\n\nTheriot took the drink and went to the single pinball machine at the back of the bar. There were two things that Marty Theriot loved more than anything else. One was busting someone's ass for speeding, and the other was playing pinball. Theriot thought that he was probably the best pinball player in Louisiana.\n\nHe put a quarter in the machine. On the back glass were the words \"Hi-Lo Express\" in bright colors. Theriot played his first ball. He would have three, and he needed seventy-three thousand points to win a free game. He got sixty-one thousand with the first ball. He turned the machine over, past one hundred thousand points, on the second ball. He had won two free games. With his third ball he ran his score to one hundred sixty-four thousand points. He won four free games, and another when the last two digits of his score matched the numbers that appeared on the back glass when the game was over. Theriot grinned. \"You owe me a buck and a quarter, Henriette.\"\n\nThe fat woman shook her head. \"I give you them drink\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" said Theriot, \"forget about it. Thanks for the drink.\"\n\n\"Sometime, Monsieur Theriot, you put me mad. Mad-mad.\"\n\n\"Just so you know about the hurricane. Keep listening to your radio.\"\n\n\" _Bonjour,_ Monsieur Theriot.\"\n\nHe put his hat on and left the bar. The bright sunlight made him squint, even after he put on his sunglasses. He got in the car, and the seat covers were hot. He swore softly. He started the car and headed toward Marie & Pal's.\n\n* * *\n\nAt eleven-thirty, Channel Five started running an old episode of \"My Little Margie.\" Darlaine Boshardt got up quickly and changed channels. She found another game show where people were subjected to the grossest humiliations in order to win plastic bowls to keep leftovers in, and another soap opera where a good wife was falsely accused of having an affair with the lawyer husband of a woman having an abortion while their slightly retarded son was being enticed into the automobile of a strange man. Darlaine sighed heavily. She turned the television off and began pacing the living room. \"My God,\" she muttered, \"I'm pacing.\" She lit a cigarette. She gave a short, humorless laugh. She thought, Now I'm lighting a cigarette. What comes next? The hidden bottle of liquor in the closet? She stubbed out the cigarette and went outside. At least there was a world out there.\n\nIt was a hot, humid, bright world. The crepe myrtles on the tree lawn were kind of pretty, much nicer than the bamboo and banana plant stockade she had around her house. She walked a short distance and was met by a neighbor.\n\n\"Allo, Madame Boxar,\" said the woman.\n\n\"Say, Mrs. Lefort, how's it going?\"\n\nMrs. Lefort was confused. _\"Pardon?\"_ she said.\n\n_\"C'est rien,\"_ said Darlaine, shaking her head. She lit another cigarette, from a pack she carried in a pocket of her blouse. She didn't offer one to Mrs. Lefort.\n\n\"Don't that a shame about how you call hurr'cane?\" asked Mrs. Lefort.\n\n\"I'm not worried yet,\" said Darlaine. \"When I see them dragging the shrimp boats up Ridge Street, then I'll start to worry.\"\n\nMrs. Lefort laughed. \"You fooling with me, _hein_?\"\n\nDarlaine said nothing.\n\n\"I got to brought myself home now,\" said Mrs. Lefort. \"I got the jambalaya for Fran\u00e7ois, and then I make _m\u00e9nage,_ I. . . .\" Her voice trailed off and she looked frustrated as she searched for the English word \"housework.\"\n\n\"You what?\" asked Darlaine.\n\n_\"Merde alors!\"_ muttered Mrs. Lefort, angered by Darlaine's attitude. According to Madame Lefort's way of thinking, Arbier was a town of French-speaking people, and she shouldn't have to struggle to get an idea across to a foreigner. She turned and walked hurriedly into her house.\n\nDarlaine was left standing alone on the sidewalk. She noticed the roses growing outside Mrs. Lefort's house. They were a deep, beautiful red. Darlaine looked the other way, toward Ridge Street. There was nothing exciting to see there. She flicked the cigarette into the street and turned back to her own house. So choke on it, Madame Lefort, she thought.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul Pierson tried to imagine Maddie Gargotier as a Las Vegas show girl. Even with the visual aid of Maddie walking very slowly and very stiffly around the living room, he couldn't quite make the image. \"No,\" he said.\n\n\"No, and why not?\" she asked.\n\n\"What happens when some bigshot gambler, some guy who's just lost thirty thousand to the house, tells the pit boss he wants you for the night?\"\n\nMaddie turned to look haughtily at Pierson. \"Then,\" she said coldly, \"I give myself to him. For a great deal of money.\" Her eyes grew wider. \"And I would bring Betsy and Shelley with me, and we would become the most famous, the most desired, the most\u2014\"\n\n\"Worn out,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"A Gargotier never wears out,\" she said. There was a silence in the room while both people considered the lunacy of that remark.\n\nCyrus ran across the room and hurled himself against the screen door. \"Hey, _minou,_ \" said Maddie, walking over and picking up a thrashing, squirming Persian cat, \"did you miss your Maddie?\"\n\nCy twisted from her grasp and threw himself against the screen again. \"Apparently not,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"You don't know everything, _Monsieur_ Pierson,\" she said. \"Try and act that way with me when I am the most beautiful and most glorious show girl in the whole world. People will come from miles around just to see me step outside my house. I will have men, you don't know, I will have men, they will come all the way from Lafayette, from _New Orleans_!\"\n\n\"If you get to be really famous,\" said Pierson, \"maybe you'll have fans as far away as Biloxi.\"\n\n\"Don't laugh at me, Paul. If I decide to do a thing, I shall do it.\"\n\n\"We're all aware of that,\" said Pierson. He clicked on the television and slumped down on the couch. The program was a game show, but what attracted his attention was the caption running across the bottom of the screen. \"Oh, boy,\" he said.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Maddie, turning to look at the television. She read the news of Hurricane Felicia. She raised both hands to her face, covering her eyes. \"Oh, Paul!\" she cried.\n\nPaul got up and went over to her. He put his arm around her. \"It's all right, Maddie,\" he said. \"A Gargotier doesn't go to pieces, just because of a thing like a hurricane. Besides, it's a long way away, and it might not even affect us.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" she said, \"I'm thinking about Mexico, where Felicia is. Those poor people! The dogs, the monkeys!\"\n\n\"It's all right, Maddie,\" said Pierson, a little bewildered. \"We'll get Mexico some more monkeys.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIn the Crisis Caf\u00e9, Sheriff Boshardt had finished his fried catfish and was drinking his coffee. For some reason he was putting off the drive to Linhart. Right after the coffee, though, he was going to leave and get in the car and get on Hanson Highway north. . . .\n\nHis thoughts trailed off and were cut off sharply by the voice of the Channel Five weatherman. He stood before a large map of the Gulf area. There was a little marker shaped like a circle with two spiral arms; the marker was placed against the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula.\n\n\"The latest report we have from the New Orleans office is that Hurricane Felicia is still right here.\" He pointed to the marker. \"She may move at any time, but she appears to be stalled against the Mexican coast. Those coastal communities are being inundated with rain and sea water pushed by the hurricane's winds. So far, Hurricane Felicia has posed no threat to the coast of the United States. Updated records of her position will be made regularly, and we will break into our regularly scheduled programming to tell you if and when Felicia moves. Keep tuned to this station for all the available news of the storm.\" Skip Strahan's face and voice disappeared, and were replaced with the regularly scheduled game show.\n\n\"I don't know why they have to make everybody worry so much,\" said Lauren.\n\n\"You're too young to remember Hurricane Audrey, in 1957,\" said the sheriff. \"When it was done, that hurricane probably destroyed the livelihood of every person in the parish. It destroyed the entire cane crop, just about. It ruined many shrimp boats. The farmland as far north as Linhart was covered with seawater. People died, girl. I could tell you stories that are so ugly, you'd go hide now and not wait for the hurricane.\"\n\n\"That was in 1957,\" she said lightly. \"We've got satellite pictures of her now. We'll have hours of warning. That's just what I was saying. There's no need to get everybody all anxious and wrought up over a hurricane that may not come within hundreds of miles of here.\"\n\n\"We'll feel it,\" said the sheriff with finality. \"One way or the other, we'll feel it.\"\n\n\"You feel it in your bones, eh?\" said Lauren.\n\nThe sheriff looked up at her sadly. He shook his head. \"You don't know what it feels like to be responsible for the well-being of twenty thousand people. If even one person, one crazy old country Cajun, dies, it will be my responsibility. Me and my men have to see that everyone is safe, and most people don't realize how unsafe they are.\"\n\n\"A hurricane is just a storm,\" said Lauren insistently. \"It's just a big storm.\"\n\n\"That's exactly the kind of thinking that kills people,\" he said. \"That's the kind of thinking that causes people to die for their stubbornness. If we have to go into a Hurricane Watch, which means that the storm is coming right on us, the sheriff's office is going to have a tough job on its hands.\"\n\n\"You're up to it, Sheriff Boshardt,\" said Lauren. \"That's why you've been sheriff almost as long as I've been alive.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said the sheriff. \"Every time there's a Hurricane Watch, we go out and try to persuade people to move to safer places. But those people who live in the marshes are sure that they're safe enough where they are. The bulletins will say, 'People living in low-lying areas should seek safer shelter.' How do those people know that most of the parish is a low-lying area? They think those poor old shacks built up on stilts, on those damned little mounds of earth, are high enough. You can't force people to leave their homes. You can't force people living in a trailer park to believe that a hurricane can pick up a house trailer and throw it a hundred yards. People just don't realize how terrible a hurricane is until it's too late, and then they're dead.\"\n\n\"It's your job to worry,\" said Lauren. \"It's my job to wait on customers. I'll do that, and if you tell me to run, I'll run. But I won't get worked up for nothing.\"\n\n\"All right, Lauren,\" said Boshardt wearily. He went to finish his cup of coffee and discovered that he already had.\n\n\"Want some more?\" asked Lauren.\n\n\"No,\" said the sheriff, \"I have work to do.\"\n**13**\n\nAt noon, Skip Strahan received news from New Orleans that Hurricane Felicia was moving. He plotted the new coordinates and frowned. He knew that a hurricane might make any number of twists and turns and loops before it died. But there were several paths which had recurred often enough so that Strahan, as a meteorologist, had cause for concern. Felicia had crossed part of the Yucat\u00e1n and was now over the Gulf again, north and west of her previous position.\n\nInstead of weakening when she crossed the land, she seemed to be growing in strength now that she was once more over water. Strahan hoped that Felicia didn't recurve as many hurricanes did in similar circumstances. Strahan foresaw Felicia's path: the hurricane might move in a great arc north and west, and turn east, hitting the coast of the United States in Texas or Louisiana. He hoped he was wrong. The trouble was, it was almost impossible for the hurricane to get out of the Gulf without doing immense damage somewhere. It was almost absurd to think that Felicia would thread her way eastward, among the islands of the Caribbean, out safely into the Atlantic, and there die. No, somebody was going to have to take it on the chin from Felicia. As a meteorologist, Strahan knew that they could only wait and see. Privately, he had a growing feeling of fear and vulnerability. They were safe enough in Linhart, safe from some of the storm's effects. But nowhere was completely safe. Weathermen, trying to impress audiences with statistics, liked to say that the energy released by a hurricane was equivalent to thousands of nuclear bombs, that the amount of water lifted and dropped as rain measured in the billions of gallons. Skip avoided that kind of hysterical reporting. The hurricane was enough drama as it was. He didn't have to pump excitement into the situation. He had a captive audience, as long as the hurricane was a danger.\n\nAlmost everyone in the parish was depending on him to relay the information he received from New Orleans. He didn't like to be in so prominent a position. His stomach hurt, and sometimes he felt like he was going to vomit. He took a couple of tranquilizers. Then he told the station manager that he had prepared a new bulletin. Skip would go on the air with it in a few minutes. Skip took another couple tranquilizers. He straightened his tie and checked his hair. Someone touched up his makeup. He was ready to give the news to the people of St. Didier Parish.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck met Sheriff Boshardt outside the Crisis Caf\u00e9. \"Sheriff Boshardt?\" asked Chuck. \"I was wondering if I could talk to you for a minute.\"\n\n\"Not right now,\" said Boshardt. He had just heard Skip Strahan say that Hurricane Felicia had rebounded off the Yucat\u00e1n Peninsula and was heading north and west. \"I've got to get up to Linhart.\"\n\n\"I just want a minute, Sheriff.\"\n\nBoshardt gritted his teeth. He took a deep breath. \"All right,\" he said at last.\n\n\"I'm new in Arbier,\" said Chuck. He pronounced it wrong. \"I'm staying at the Sea-Ray Motel.\"\n\n\"I hear they have a real nice place there,\" said Boshardt. He really wanted to get rid of this man and drive up to Linhart. He had work to do.\n\n\"What the thing is, is that I'm an advance man for a major Hollywood film company. We're planning to do quite a bit of filming around Arbier and St. Didier Parish, and it's my job to clear everything with you.\"\n\nSheriff Boshardt waved at the man impatiently. \"Come on by the office. There's someone there who can help you.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Chuck, in a confidential manner, \"I've told people that I'm here to do a magazine article. The fewer people who know why I'm really here, the better. You've never seen anything like a town with a film company shooting there. Everybody wants to be in the picture. Suddenly we're swamped with Hollywood hopefuls. You can save us a lot of time and money if you'd just let me know what sort of official permits we might need. I'm expecting four large trucks full of equipment, props, costumes, along with the crew. We're going to need a place to park all of that.\"\n\n\"Well, I can understand your problem, of course,\" said the sheriff. \"There are a couple of small formalities you'll have to go through, but there won't be any trouble. I'm very proud of our town here, and the parish. I'm glad that we've been chosen as a location for a film.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Chuck, \"Arbier best fits what I've been looking for.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" said the sheriff. \"Now I've got to get going. There's a hurricane in the Gulf, and we probably won't be hit, but we have to take precautions just the same.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Chuck, \"thanks a lot.\"\n\n\"I'll talk to you later,\" said Boshardt. \"Meanwhile, go on over to the office. There will be a deputy there who can take care of the paperwork for you. And don't worry about the deputies trying to get into your movie. Right now, they all have more important things to worry about.\"\n\n\"I hope I'm not making any trouble for you,\" said Chuck.\n\nBoshardt just waved and headed for his car. Chuck followed him as though to continue the conversation, but it was obvious that the sheriff didn't want to be bothered any longer. Chuck just shrugged. It was a little after noon. He thought he would go into the caf\u00e9 for lunch.\n\n* * *\n\nBoshardt had hoped that Felicia would spend herself on the Yucat\u00e1n peninsula, perhaps heading straight down, away from the Texas-Louisiana coast. Sure, those poor Mexicans would suffer. They didn't have adequate shelters. They wouldn't have adequate warning for the most part. Perhaps thousands would die, hundreds of thousands would be left homeless.\n\nBoshardt made a clucking sound with his tongue. When it came right down to it, he'd rather that hundreds of thousands of strangers be left destitute than a smaller number in his own parish. He wished it happened to the other guy.\n\nBut wishes don't always come true, he thought. And now Felicia had left the land and was back over water. She would grow now, she would become more dangerous yet. She might speed up. She could cross the Gulf in as short a time as ten or twelve hours.\n\nWalter Boshardt got into his patrol car and headed north on Hanson Highway to Linhart, thirty miles inland from Arbier. The people in Linhart wouldn't have to fear the storm surge, most likely, the giant tidal wave that came along with the hurricane. But if the hurricane crossed into St. Didier Parish, or anywhere within a couple hundred miles to either side, the winds would devastate the city. Little Lauren, at the Crisis Caf\u00e9, shrugged and wondered what was so frightening about a \"big storm.\" Boshardt had seen enough to answer her, but he didn't. He had seen dead women holding dead babies, the corpses flayed and stripped of their skin by sand blown by two hundred mile per hour winds. Sheriff Boshardt had seen plenty, and he didn't ever, ever want to see it again.\n\nThe cane fields north of Arbier, on either side of Bayou Chien Mort, would be ruined by Hurricane Felicia, if that storm determined to turn her attention to St. Didier Parish. There he was again, giving an unhuman thing, a storm, human attributes. Well, he thought, it was true. The spray carried by the winds would ruin the crop, the winds themselves would flatten the growing sugar cane. The bayou would overflow the levees it had built for itself, depositing more silt. But, in the process, it would kill many people, the marsh dwellers, the moss cutters, the trappers who went after muskrat and nutria, the cattle would die, the rice crop would be ruined. Farther inland, where the ground was less marshy, better drained, the winds would still flatten everything growing. There was such a potential for total catastrophe. . . .\n\nThe sheriff drove at a constant fifty-five miles per hour to Linhart. He put the car in his reserved parking place at the sheriff's office, and went into the building. He was greeted by everyone there, but the greetings came from faces that wore anxious expressions. Boshardt just nodded in return.\n\nHe went to the desk where an officer was doing the day's routine paperwork. \"Where's Theriot?\" he asked angrily.\n\nThe officer looked up with a wry expression. \"He said he was going out to warn the people along the old parish road.\"\n\n\"Like hell he is,\" said Boshardt. He went to another desk. There was a radio transmitter and receiver on it. He sat down in front of the microphone. \"Robert One to Robert Eight,\" he said, \"what is your 20?\"\n\nThere was no reply.\n\nBoshardt waited a minute, then tried again. \"Robert One to Robert Eight, what is your 20?\"\n\n\"Robert Eight to Robert One, I'm on the parish road, not quite to the old causeway.\"\n\n\"Well, listen up, Robert Eight. I'm giving you the goddamndest biggest 10-19 you've ever had. You haul your ass back here super-quick. Got it?\"\n\n\"Check, Roger One,\" came the amplified voice of Marty Theriot.\n\n\"All right, then. We got work to do, Theriot.\"\n\n\"10-4,\" said Theriot. He sounded slightly disgusted. There was a click as he turned off his microphone. Boshardt got up from the radio unit. He walked around the offices for a few minutes, overseeing the activities of his deputies. It didn't take very long.\n\n\"Where's Brierrer?\" he asked.\n\n\"He's gone to set up an emergency station at the high school,\" said one of the deputies.\n\n\"Goddamn it,\" said Boshardt, \"he's supposed to be in charge here. He could have sent somebody else. Goddamn it, we got to get together here.\" There was complete silence in the offices as Boshardt stalked around. He stood behind one deputy and watched the man filling out forms.\n\nAfter a few minutes, Deputy Sergeant Marty Theriot came in. He was met by an icy, threatening glare from Boshardt. \"Good afternoon, Deputy,\" said the sheriff.\n\n\"Say, Sheriff,\" said Theriot. He walked up to the desk where the officer was doing Theriot's paperwork. \"Why don't you let me do that?\" he asked. The officer looked up at him. His expression was vaguely contemptuous. He got up from the chair. Theriot sat down and took up where the officer had left off.\n\n\"All right now,\" said Walter Boshardt. \"When Brierrer gets back, tell him he's in charge here. That means he _stays_ here. The rest of you are on twelve-hour shifts. You can work out the schedule any way you want to. We've been through this before. Let's stop acting like a bunch of old ladies in a thunderstorm.\" He turned, still angry, and left the office.\n\n* * *\n\nThere was a moment's silence in the sheriff's office in Linhart after Walter Boshardt went out the door. Theriot was swearing under his breath as he filled in the official reports. The other deputies went about their routine duties, almost as though there was no threat of a hurricane. The normal maintenance of the parish had to continue, unbroken, even through a time of tension. After about ten minutes, though, Theriot threw down his pencil. \"Hey,\" he said to the officer who had done most of the work that morning, \"finish this up.\" The officer gave Theriot a disgusted look, but said nothing. Theriot took a paperback book out of one drawer and went to the men's room. He sat in a stall and read a few pages. The book he was reading was _The Maltese Falcon,_ which his wife had told him about. She had seen the movie on television the day before. Theriot's expression was sour as he read on. If it were up to him, he would have slapped that Sam Spade character in the parish prison before half the books had gone by. He couldn't believe what the local cops were letting him get away with. He ticked off the charges on his fingers. Withholding evidence. Conspiracy to commit theft. Theft. Aiding and abetting a known felon. Accessory before and after the fact to murder. The list grew longer and longer. Theriot shut the book in disgust. He really hated that guy Spade. He was thankful that there wasn't anyone like him in the parish. Oh, there was that idiot Bordinaro right there in Linhart, who dealt mostly in divorce cases, peeping and trailing stuff. But he rarely got in the way of the parish police. He knew that Boshardt wouldn't stand for it. If anything important turned up, Bordinaro usually turned it over to the sheriff's office.\n\nTheriot left the lavatory and went back to his desk, where the officer was doing the paperwork. Theriot tried to open the drawer, to put the paperback away, but the officer wouldn't move. \"Would you mind?\" asked Theriot. The officer reluctantly shoved his chair back. Theriot opened the drawer and tossed the paperback in. \"Thanks a lot,\" he said.\n\n\"Any time,\" said the officer.\n\nTheriot was feeling angry. He didn't like the way the sheriff had talked to him. He thought it was a little early for Boshardt to go into a full-blown panic reaction to this hurricane. The sheriff had embarrassed him in front of the entire department.\n\nTheriot went to the side window and peered through the blinds. To his disgust, he saw that Boshardt hadn't left yet. The sheriff was leaning against his car, drinking a bottle of soda pop. \"Come on already,\" murmured Theriot. At last, Boshardt finished drinking, put the empty bottle in a case beside the machine, and got into his patrol car. In a few seconds, he was pulling out of the driveway and heading north and west toward Delochitaches.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Theriot. He had been put in a bad mood. He had already played enough pinball for the day. There was only one thing left that might restore his equilibrium. \"I'm going out to catch lawbreakers and evildoers,\" he told the office in general. He put on his flat-brimmed hat and went outside. After the air-conditioning in the office, the heat of the day almost made Theriot gasp. He got in his patrol car and drove south along Hanson Highway.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne Strahan was more than bored. She was frightened. She wished that Skip were home. It wasn't that he was a protective father-figure to her. He wasn't. It was just unfair that she had to face this whole day alone, with a hurricane wandering God only knew where around the Gulf of Mexico. She thought of their house. A chunk of debris, hurled by a wind of a hundred fifty or two hundred miles per hour, could do horrible things. She had heard stories, when she first came to Louisiana, about the awful things that hurricanes had done in the past.\n\nShe was still thinking these thoughts when she became aware that she was dialing the telephone. \"Hello,\" said the operator on the other end. \"Channel Five, your alive station for entertainment, news, weather, and sports.\"\n\n\"Hello, Eileen,\" said Corinne. \"Can I talk to Skip?\"\n\n\"Well, he gave orders that he wasn't taking any calls today. The hurricane, you know.\"\n\n\"I guess so. I just wanted a little reassurance I guess.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said the switchboard operator. \"Let me see if I can get him on the line. Hold on.\" Corinne heard static for a few seconds. Then she heard Skip's voice. He sounded impatient.\n\n\"Okay, Corinne,\" he said, \"everything's okay. Now let me go. I've got to do the latest plot.\"\n\n\"Skip, what about my father?\"\n\n\"Your father will be okay. You can't start panicking yet. We'll have plenty of warning if Felicia heads our way. Let me go. I have work to do.\"\n\n\"Skip, don't go away yet.\"\n\n\"Corinne,\" he said mildly, \"I'm getting all of this information from New Orleans. They're getting it from Miami and Puerto Rico and radar installations all over. So by the time it gets to me, it may be an hour old. I can't take time off to have a nice conversation with you. You know that.\"\n\n\"I know that, Skip,\" said Corinne. She knew that the situation had become serious, because the captions on the television were now being broadcast in both English and French.\n\n\"Okay, I'm going.\"\n\n\"Skip.\"\n\nThere was silence.\n\n* * *\n\nDarlaine Boshardt walked up her street and turned on Ridge Street. She was going to the Crisis Caf\u00e9. The small restaurant was a meeting place of many of the people in town, many of the shrimpers who had just returned from a long time at sea, and oil men from the offshore rigs. She met many of her men in the Crisis Caf\u00e9. She thought it was a shame there wasn't a better way of checking them out first. She was thinking of John Smith. What an idiot he had turned out to be. But Darlaine had to take what she could get, and the selection around Arbier was sometimes very limited.\n\nThere were a few people in the diner having lunch. A man at a table told her that her husband had been in just a little while before. \"Don't that a shame you miss him?\" said the man.\n\n\"Uh huh,\" said Darlaine. She looked around. There were a few men at the tables or in the booths, but no one she would consider picking up. She took a table by herself. She smoked a cigarette almost without realizing that she was doing it. She waited for the damn waitress to come over. Darlaine felt impatient. She knew her husband was out somewhere; she hardly ever saw him anymore. They both kept such odd schedules that they hardly ever met to exchange even brief series of remarks.\n\nLauren came over to the table. \"Good afternoon, Mrs. Boshardt,\" she said. \"Do you want to see a menu?\"\n\nThe door opened and Chuck came in. Darlaine appraised him quickly. Well, she thought, that's this afternoon.\n\n\"Would you like to see a menu, Mrs. Boshardt?\" asked the young waitress again.\n\n\"What?\" said Darlaine. \"No. Yes. Give me a menu.\" Lauren left to get a menu. Darlaine watched Chuck closely. He said hello to the two Cajun men sitting at the table. They nodded and shrugged. Darlaine smiled, knowing what they were thinking. It made Chuck seem so innocent, as he walked among these people who resented his very obvious air of superiority. He took a table not far from Darlaine. Lauren returned with two menus, one for Darlaine and one for Chuck.\n\nLauren stood by Darlaine's table, patiently waiting for her to decide. \"How about the broiled trout amandine,\" Darlaine said.\n\n\"Anything to drink?\"\n\n\"A bottle of Dixie.\"\n\n\"All right, Mrs. Boshardt,\" said Lauren, making a quick notation on her order pad. Then the young waitress went to Chuck's table and stood beside him. \"Ready to order, sir?\"\n\n\"Uh, not just yet,\" he said.\n\n\"Okay,\" said Lauren, \"I'll come back in a minute.\" She went into the kitchen.\n\nDarlaine looked at Chuck. He wasn't a bad-looking man. She remembered the rather acidic conversation she had had with him the day before, at the Sea-Ray. That made her smile again. She realized that Chuck was looking at her, so she held her smile. He smiled in return.\n\nLauren came back and took his order. \"I'll have the chopped sirloin, medium rare, fried onions, and mashed potatoes,\" he said. \"And a bottle of beer.\"\n\n\"Dixie or Falstaff?\"\n\n\"Surprise me,\" he said, and laughed. Lauren looked at him with an expression of mild distaste, and the other people in the restaurant were very aware of his loud, obnoxious behavior.\n\nDarlaine got up and sat at his table. \"Do you mind if I join you?\" she asked. \"Some of these local coonass types can be very unfriendly to strangers.\"\n\n\"Whatever happened to southern hospitality?\" he asked.\n\n\"Appomattox,\" she said. They both laughed. \"No, really, around here they're a little stiff-necked about strangers. They take a while before they admit they like you. But once you're in, you're in for good. You've never seen anything like the way they help each other. It can be a nice town.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" said Chuck. \"I saw you at the motel yesterday. I figured you were just passing through.\"\n\nTerrific, thought Darlaine. This guy is a real winner. \"It's like this,\" she said. \"Some people pass through the town and live at the motel. I live in the town and pass through the motel.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Chuck, smiling broadly. \"Then maybe you can help me.\"\n\nDarlaine gave him one of her practiced looks and said, \"I'll certainly give it my damndest.\"\n\nChuck didn't seem to notice. \"You see,\" he said, \"I'm the advance man of a production company. We're making a film, and part of it is going to be shot in Arbier. I need someone who can help me find the right locations and the right people.\"\n\n\"I can certainly try,\" said Darlaine.\n\nLauren came out of the kitchen some time later, with both Darlaine's and Chuck's orders. Their conversation had been tentative and suggestive, but neither had made any strong moves. \"Mrs. Boshardt,\" said Lauren, \"are you sitting at this table now?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lauren,\" said Darlaine. Lauren put the plates of food in front of the two people, and poured two bottles of beer into two glasses.\n\n\"Mrs. Boshardt?\" asked Chuck. \"Are you the wife of the\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, waving a hand impatiently. \"But don't let that stop you.\"\n\nChuck finally got the idea and smiled. \"Maybe after lunch we can go back to the Sea-Ray. I can kind of outline what I'm looking for.\"\n\n\"Say, what's it like,\" she said, \"staying there more than an hour at a time?\"\n\n\"It's not great, let me tell you,\" said Chuck with a sour expression. \"I'm trying to sleep, see, and along about three in the morning this rock band from New Jersey, of all places, checks into the motel. So naturally the manager puts them right next door to me. You wouldn't believe the noise. They were throwing beer cans against the wall and shouting. Those walls must be the legal limit for thinness, too. So I go over to the night manager to complain, but he doesn't want to do anything. So I knock on this group's door, and I tell them to cut it down. They give me this story about how they wanted to travel around the country and discover America and all that. And they were smoking grass in their van, getting really stoned, and for some reason got off I-10 from New Orleans and got good and lost. I told them again to please turn it down. They thought they were really big. A rock band. But I shot them down with a real good line.\"\n\n\"What was it?\" asked Darlaine, bored already.\n\n\"I said, 'Yeah, and just about everybody else from New Jersey.' Then I went back to my room, and the noise got louder. I could hear them mocking me out, tossing more beer cans against the wall. About four o'clock, I hear them playing the radio. Some station at some black college. I hear this line, 'If all the women in Texas is as ugly as Sapphire's mother, well, the Lone Ranger goin' to be alone for a long time.' An old 'Amos and Andy' recording.\"\n\n\"What did you do then?\" asked Darlaine, without any interest at all.\n\n\"I went back there, and I knocked on the door, and I told those kids that I was calling the cops. They were gone in twenty minutes. Then the cops gave me a bad time.\"\n\n\"I'll have to talk to my husband about that,\" said Darlaine, \"if I ever see him.\"\n\n\"Well, how's your trout?\" he asked.\n\n\"That sounds gross.\"\n\n\"Anyway,\" he said, waving for the waitress, \"I would really appreciate any help you could give me.\" When Lauren came to the table, he asked for the ketchup. \"By the way, young lady,\" he said to Lauren, \"you might be just right for one of the local walk-ons we'll cast here in town.\" Lauren looked excited by the possibility.\n\n\"We'll have to see, of course. I can't promise you anything. That's up to the director and the producer and the woman in charge of casting.\" Lauren smiled. The chance of being in a movie was the biggest thing that had ever happened to her, even bigger than being Crab Queen the year before. She went back into the kitchen, and Chuck could see that for a long time she would be thinking of nothing but that movie role. He smiled.\n\n\"By the way,\" he said, \"I haven't introduced myself. My name is Robert Branford.\"\n\n\"What?\" asked Darlaine. \"Not 'John Smith'?\"\n\nChuck looked puzzled. \"What?\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah, yeah,\" said Darlaine, lighting a cigarette. \"I forgot. You're already staying at the Sea-Ray. It's been a while since I've strayed from my John Smith.\"\n\n\"I hope it doesn't cause you too much anxiety,\" he said.\n\n\"If you can stand it, honey,\" she said, \"I figure I can, too.\" She drank half the glass of beer in one long gulp.\n**14**\n\nFrom Linhart there was a single blacktop road to Delochitaches. Sheriff Walter Boshardt drove along, suddenly wishing that it was a week later, that everything was over with, that whatever would happen had happened, that there was only the work of dealing with the effects of Hurricane Felicia, whatever they might be. If the hurricane moved west and hit Mexico, or northwest and hit Texas, all St. Didier Parish would experience would be some heavy showers, some winds in the gale range. Or Felicia might loop all the way over to Florida, and the effects on St. Didier Parish would be about the same. But if Felicia made straight for the vulnerable, low-lying coast of Louisiana, he would just as soon get it over with. That was why he felt a sense of relief when Felicia began to move. The suspense of having her stalled against the Yucat\u00e1n was growing almost unbearable. Now, once more over water, Felicia would become more dangerous than ever, and more prone to movement. But at least there wasn't the terrible waiting, hour after hour, and the same report: no movement, stay tuned, wait for further information.\n\nDelochitaches as a community was barely discernible from the part of Louisiana around it that wasn't Delochitaches. It made a town like Arbier seem like a major urban center. In population, Delochitaches was roughly half the size of Arbier. Almost every person in that number was a farmer. The area was rich with alluvial soil, and where the conditions were right, one might see a variety of crops.\n\nThe incorporated town of Delochitaches itself was very, very unimpressive. There was no way to get to the town except by the very bad road Boshardt had taken from Linhart and, from the other direction, a similar road branching off from Hanson Highway. The downtown area of Delochitaches consisted of four shops, one of which doubled as the town's post office, and a gas station. Along the road Boshardt counted at least a dozen lounges in about eight miles. Delochitaches had three of its own, mingled among the four shops and the gas station.\n\nThe people in Delochitaches were different, too. There was a greater mixture of national heritages. There was a good number of Germans and Scandinavians, fewer genuine Cajun French. The attitude and manner of Delochitaches was completely different than Arbier. Linhart seemed to Walter Boshardt to be working at being a compromise between the two smaller communities.\n\nBoshardt pulled into the sheriff's office in Delochitaches. He rarely came in person. More often, he would send someone else. But today the situation was grave enough for Boshardt to deal with it himself.\n\n\"Afternoon, Sheriff,\" said the deputy that worked at a desk at the front of the office.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Boshardt, pushing through a swinging gate. \"Where's Mike Miller?\"\n\n\"He's here someplace,\" said the deputy.\n\n\"Right here,\" said Miller, coming out of a room in the back of the office.\n\n\"All right,\" said Boshardt, \"we've been through the hurricane routine before. The seven of you are responsible for Delochitaches. You think you can handle it?\"\n\n\"We're not counting on a lot of looting, if that's what you mean,\" said Miller.\n\n\"Just be careful, Captain,\" said Boshardt. \"Some people will take any chance to loot anything. And if the worst happens, if we have to take the full force of that damn hurricane, you have a lot of people spread around a lot of ground. Getting them all to a shelter could take a lot of time and trouble. You won't get any help from Linhart. They'll have enough of their own problems. You're on your own. But if I get word that the hurricane is heading for us, I'll call for the National Guard as soon as I can. Still, you might have to go a while on your own. Get the people as safely sheltered as you can. If the hurricane makes a move for us, pull your cars in some protected place, I don't know, maybe under a railroad trestle or something. Don't endanger yourselves without damn good reason. I don't want any dead heroes. I can do without state funerals. Got it?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Miller, \"I got it.\"\n\n\"Stay in touch with Linhart,\" said the sheriff, \"and, through them, with me.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Boshardt. \"The next day or two might get real bad, or it might not. Let's just do our best.\"\n\n\"We always do that,\" said one of the deputies.\n\n\"Do you?\" he asked, with a weary expression. \"Do you really?\" Then the sheriff walked quickly out of the office, back into the tiny collection of peeling, cracked single-story buildings that made up downtown Delochitaches. He walked to his car. His first duties in the situation were finished. The next move was up to Felicia.\n\nSheriff Walter Boshardt leaned against his car. He felt like having a drink. It would be easy enough to get one. But he wouldn't go into one of the lounges, in uniform, in an emergency situation. That wouldn't look right. Still, Boshardt kind of wanted that drink. He looked up at the sky. It was bright blue. There wasn't the faintest trace of clouds anywhere. But the sky didn't fool Walter Boshardt. One of the main reasons that he had been elected sheriff for the past sixteen years was that very little fooled him. He didn't take chances, he didn't take bribes, he didn't take drinks while on duty.\n\nFor a very brief moment, Boshardt wondered if it was too late to change.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Skip?\"\n\n\"Look, baby,\" said Strahan, \"if you keep calling me like this, I'm just plain not going to answer.\"\n\n\"Skip,\" said Corinne, \"don't you understand? I'm really afraid.\"\n\nStrahan paused and took a deep breath. His stomach muscles felt tight, and there seemed to be a band around his head, getting tighter and tighter. When he finished talking with Corinne, he planned to take about six Valiums. The palms of his hands were sweating and he felt his arms and legs making tiny convulsive jerks. \"Corinne, how many times do I have to tell you that there isn't a thing in the world to be afraid of? That's right here in Linhart you're probably in the safest place in the entire parish?\"\n\n\"What about Dad?\"\n\n\"Your father lives in a furnished room in a large old house in Arbier. They built those houses years ago, and those houses were built to take a lot of punishment. You can't worry about your father. Look. There's nothing you can do anyway. Besides, the hurricane hasn't shown any sign that it's headed toward us.\"\n\n\"Then it's okay?\"\n\n\"It's okay, baby.\"\n\n\"That's all I wanted to hear, Skip. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"You've called me about once an hour, and I've had to go through the same routine with you. This is the last time, understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, Skip.\" She sounded chastised. She sounded slightly embarrassed.\n\n\"Then I can get back to work?\"\n\n\"Yes, Skip. I love you.\"\n\n\"I love you, too, baby, but you've got to buck up now.\"\n\n\"All right, Skip. Call me later?\"\n\n\"If I get a chance. See you when my shift ends.\"\n\nCorinne said goodbye and hung up the telephone. She knew that Skip's \"shift\" wouldn't end until the hurricane emergency was over.\n\nShe went back to her reading. She had the television on, it was one o'clock, and _Casablanca_ had just started. She sat in her usual spot on the couch, a paperback copy of _The Day of the Locust_ in her hands. A neighbor had told her about the movie she had seen, made from Nathanael West's novel. Corinne was reading the book, and it was a great emotional experience for her. She identified with the character of Homer Simpson, a poor, wretched, futile man, impotent in every sense of the word. Like Homer Simpson, Corinne encouraged the sadness she felt in her, because the sadness brought a strange kind of pleasure. Homer Simpson's paralyzing sickness was not apparent to her. She only knew that his sadness was a lovely thing; she missed West's point completely. She wished that she could feel that same aching of the soul. It would be like art.\n\nThe narrator of the movie said, \"But the others wait in Casablanca, and wait . . . and wait . . . and wait.\" At the bottom of the screen, the same weather advisory was making its circuit in English and French. Corinne read _The Day of the Locust,_ and something about the book increased her anxiety. She couldn't quite put her finger on the precise quality of the book that made her feel that way. She kept reading. The movie played on the television. Every once in a while she would glance up. Sometimes she would see Humphrey Bogart. Once she saw Peter Lorre, firing a pistol and running, she didn't know why, and then being dragged away. She didn't see him again for the remainder of the movie. She saw Sidney Greenstreet. It was the whole gang from yesterday's movie. The only exception was that there was Ingrid Bergman instead of Mary Astor.\n\nReading the book, she nearly cried over Homer Simpson. How could a writer treat his own creations so cruelly? And Homer Simpson lived through everything that West threw at him, sad, perhaps, but human. Corinne found so little in books and movies that was human. Like the movie that was on now. Humphrey Bogart's character was so cool, so resourceful. He probably didn't even sweat, even though he was on the upper lip of Africa. She read the book more, and watched the movie less.\n\nFor one thing, the book didn't have a bi-lingual warning running across its bottom section.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was a little after one o'clock. A teletype in the news room at Channel Five began chattering out information, weather data from New Orleans. Skip Strahan read it and nodded. The storm had moved a little further northward. Her size was about three hundred miles in diameter, according to the radar measurements. Her winds were up to two hundred fifty miles per hour, at the eye, where they would be strongest. Gale force winds surrounded the hurricane for hundreds of miles. The eye itself was about fourteen miles in diameter. Hurricane Felicia was a tight, circular system. There was absolutely no sign of dissipation.\n\nStrahan tore the paper off the teletype and took it to his desk. There was a discrepancy between the barometric pressure in the New Orleans data and his own readings. Strahan sat back in his chair, wanting like hell to give up. He didn't have the equipment, the staff, or the time to do what he had to do. He had to get the news to some twenty thousand people who were sitting by radios and televisions all across the parish.\n\nStrahan thought about taking another couple of tranquilizers, but he knew that if he did that, he might just pass out. Go right to sleep at his desk. And it would take a hurricane to wake him up.\n\n* * *\n\n\"What are you doing?\" asked Pierson, amazed at the frantic activity of Maddie Gargotier.\n\n\"Don't you listen?\" she asked. \"Don't you read? There's a hurricane, and you're just standing there.\"\n\n\"What am I supposed to do?\" he asked.\n\nShe stared at him. \"What are you supposed to do? See those big glass sliding doors? What happens when a big old garbage can comes smashing through them? _Hein?_ We got to tape them up. You have, uh, what is it?\"\n\n\"Masking tape.\"\n\n\"Yes. Make Xs on the doors, on the glass.\"\n\n\"What's that going to do?\" he asked.\n\n\"It keeps the glass from shattering,\" she said.\n\n\"A garbage can at two hundred miles an hour,\" he said, \"all the masking tape in the world isn't going to keep the glass from breaking.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, \"but you won't have little pieces flying around the house like a bomb.\"\n\n\"All right, okay. I'll put masking tape on the windows. Then what?\"\n\n\"Then we take many-many pins and pin the drapes together tight.\"\n\n\"So the shattered glass won't go flying around the room, huh?\"\n\n_\"Mais oui,\"_ she said.\n\n\"Two hundred miles per hour, something heavy like lawn furniture or something, and we're protected by masking tape and pins.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she cried, \"what were you planning on doing?\"\n\n\"I was going to take Cy into the dining area, far away from any windows, and listen to a battery-powered radio until the whole thing was over.\"\n\n\"Oh, you Americans!\" she cried in anger. \"Clean out the bathtub.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Clean out the bathtub with Lysol or something. Boiling water. Then fill the tub.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because, you _imb\u00e9cile,_ the water system breaks, and the electric system, she also breaks, and for days we don't have water to drink or wash or flush the toilet.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Maddie,\" said Pierson. \"I really don't know what to do. You just tell me, and I'll do it.\"\n\nShe was furious. _\"Idiot!\"_ she screamed. \"That's what I'm doing!\"\n\n\"And I really appreciate it, Maddie, I really do. I can't possibly tell you how much I appreciate this. Really.\"\n\n\"Are you being sarcastic with me, Pierson?\" she asked.\n\n\"Sarcastic-sarcastic,\" said Pierson. Maddie threw a book at him.\n\n* * *\n\nDarlaine finished her meal, drank another bottle of beer, and lit a cigarette. She tapped the ashes onto her dinner plate, even though there was an ashtray provided.\n\nChuck was going on and on about the movie they were going to film in Arbier. \"It's going to be kind of an _On the Waterfront,_ but about the competition between the traditional old shrimpers and the others with their more modern and expensive boats.\"\n\n\"Dagos, we call them. They're Portuguese, mostly. From Florida. They fish further out in the Gulf and take most of the catch.\"\n\n\"Right, right,\" said Chuck excitedly, \"it's an area that's been completely untapped by the film media.\"\n\n\"Medium,\" said Darlaine. She was watching Lauren. She wondered if her husband had ever taken sweet Lauren\u2014where? The Sea-Ray? She laughed out loud. But that Lauren. That's how I used to look, thought Darlaine. \"Crummy waitress,\" she muttered.\n\n\"What?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"I said, she's a crummy waitress.\"\n\nChuck laughed. \"Want to see a great trick you can play on crummy waiters and waitresses?\" Before Darlaine could get in a frantic \"No!\" he had done it. He pushed back the tablecloth in front of him. Then he filled his water glass to the brim with hers. He dropped a nickel into the full glass, and took a cardboard sign on the table advertising the Crisis Caf\u00e9's Friday Fish Fare. He put the cardboard over the top of the water glass, and turned the whole thing upside-down on the hard surface of the table. Then he slid out the piece of cardboard.\n\n\"See?\" he said proudly. \"There ain't no way in hell she can get that nickel or take that glass away without spilling the water all over everything. Mostly herself, if she's as clumsy as most hicks are.\"\n\n\"Did you really say 'hicks'?\" asked Darlaine.\n\n\"I didn't mean that,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Darlaine, looking at Chuck unpleasantly. \"We're all just good old boys down here, sitting on our cabin steps, playing the banjo and singing spirituals, going to gumbo festivals, living close to the earth.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Chuck, slightly offended, \"I didn't mean it like that.\"\n\nDarlaine didn't answer. She was watching Lauren as she walked toward them with a tray.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne Strahan was an hour into _Casablanca._ Humphrey Bogart was getting drunk with Dooley Wilson. \"I bet they're asleep in New York,\" he said. \"I bet they're asleep all over America.\" He showed his drunken frustration and said, \"Of all the gin joints in all the towns all over the world, she walks into mine.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Corinne. \"What kind of a movie would it be if Ingrid Bergman had walked into Marie & Pal's? For God's sake!\" She had put her book aside, and was now devoting her whole attention to the movie. It seemed that Ingrid Bergman was in love with both Paul Henreid and Humphrey Bogart. \"I bet she goes off with Claude Rains,\" she said, as she got up and turned off the television.\n\nShe sat back down and lit a cigarette. The decoupage idea had died. The book was making her depressed. The movie was too political or something for her. She sat in her lime green living room and smoked the cigarette. She thought about Skip. She thought about her father. She thought about lime green being a really rotten color for a living room. When she stubbed out the cigarette, she lit another. When they were choosing colors, she had preferred Sahara beige. Skip had said that it would show fingerprints and dirt. Now they had a lime green living room.\n\nCorinne thought about knocking herself out again on Skip's sleeping pills. He had carefully not mentioned anything about her taking them the day before. After all, she was under a lot of stress too.\n\nShe thought about the drugs while she smoked the cigarette. She wished there was something comforting on television. Art Linkletter's \"House Party.\" \"Strike it Rich.\" She remembered those programs from her childhood. She thought about the drugs and decided they were probably a bad idea, although she really liked the tingling in her hands and feet just before she got wobbly. She had cracked her head against something the day before, and it was bruised now. She couldn't remember doing it. She just sat there and smoked.\n\n* * *\n\nSkip Strahan got the news from New Orleans, the news he had half-expected to get all afternoon. Hurricane Felicia had begun to pick up speed and had begun to curve eastward. Her projected path would have her enter the Texas-Louisiana coast somewhere between Galveston, Texas, and Grand Isle, Louisiana. Of course, there was a time factor involved. It was three in the afternoon, Tuesday, and at Felicia's current rate of progress, landfall might not occur until Wednesday evening, around six o'clock. That is, thought Strahan, if the damned storm kept to the same path, the same curve, the same speed. And when had he ever known a hurricane to do that? He prepared a new advisory based on the data from the National Weather Service Hurricane Warning Bureau. This time, however, the Hurricane Warning would become a Hurricane Watch. The warning lights would be lit to alert the fishermen: a vertical column of three lights, red, white, red. That meant hurricane. The warnings flags would go up: two square flags, red with smaller black squares in their centers. Hurricane. It was coming. Skip stood up from his desk, and he suddenly felt so weak that he almost fainted. Maybe some Dexedrine. Maybe not, considering all the downers he'd been taking.\n\nHe wanted to go home, to go away. But he couldn't.\n\nHurricane Felicia was coming.\n**15**\n\n****\n\n_It was in Arbier, Louisiana, not quite forty years before, and it was near the end of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term._\n\n_The rain never stopped. Walter Boshardt was five years old. He never would have believed that something like rain would terrify him so much. But the rain never stopped._\n\n_The first day was like a storm, a bad storm. It was such a bad storm that his mother and father ran around the house doing things. Their fine house. The house that Walter Boshardt's father had lived in for some years before he married the woman who was to become Walter's mother._\n\n_At first, Walter enjoyed the rain. It was a hard storm but, living on the coast in semitropical Louisiana, he was used to rain. It seemed that there was a regular schedule that the weather followed, especially during the summer months. Then the temperature would be about ninety degrees, and the variance from this figure was no more than five degrees either way, day or night. The large house that the Boshardts lived in had rooms with very high ceilings, so that the warmer air would rise up and the cooler air sink down. The humidity was also constantly fierce, day after day ranging through eighty percent to ninety percent and even higher. And, of course, there was the daily shower, about one o'clock. Walter, at the age of five, was still curious about this happening. The days began almost identically. In the morning, when he went out to play, the skies would be bright blue and completely free of clouds. The air would smell fresh, with a small bite in it from the waters in the Gulf, only a matter of a mile or so away. Walter would play with his friends until lunchtime, when his mother would call him back to the house. He would eat\u2014almost always a bowl of tomato soup, a sandwich, and a few cookies, all washed down with milk laced with a small amount of coffee. After lunch, the bright blue sky would begin to collect cumulus clouds. With alarming speed, for the young boy, black thunderheads would pile up above the town. They looked like bad things, sent by a malevolent force, a monster perhaps. In any event, after about fifteen minutes or half an hour, the black thunderheads would begin to drop their burden of rain. There would be a brief summer shower. If Walter went outside, as he often did, he could look across the flatness of the land out into the Gulf itself; the rain would look like a curtain. His mother would sometimes call him inside again, because all around them glows of lightning made immediate, almost artificial displays that were at once attractive and threatening._\n\n_On this particular day, when Walter was five years old, the rain began early in the day. His parents were worried, and he didn't know why. There was a peculiar and incessant rushing sound coming from the palm trees around the house and the broad-leaved banana plants. The sound itself was enough to make Walter uncomfortable. He wished that it would go away. But, like the rain, the constant roar of the wind through the wide leaves of the pliable plants didn't seem ever to stop._\n\n_It rained, and the wind blew. At first it seemed interesting to Walter. He had never experienced anything like this before. The rain was so hard that when he looked out of one of the windows, he couldn't see across the street. There was a mask of rain._\n\n_\"Can I go out in it, Mommy?\" he asked._\n\n_His mother was behaving in a nervous, frantic way that Walter had never seen in her before. \"What?\" she asked. \"For God's sake, no!\" Walter was disappointed._\n\n_\"You know something, Francy?\" asked his father. \"I better go get the car filled up. If the power goes off, there won't be any way of gassing up the car.\"_\n\n_Walter's mother seemed distracted. \"I guess,\" she said, \"but I hate to see you go out in that. The streets are already flooded.\"_\n\n_\"Oh, it won't be bad,\" said Walter's father. \"I have to do it.\"_\n\n_\"All right,\" said Walter's mother. \"But be careful and come straight back.\"_\n\n_\"You sound like you're talking to the kid.\" Walter's mother was too busy with other things to reply._\n\n_\"Can I come, Daddy?\" asked Walter._\n\n_\"No, son, you stay here.\"_\n\n_\"But why?\"_\n\n_\"Because it's safer.\"_\n\n_Walter pouted and started to scream. \"It's only rain,\" he shouted. \"It's just a lot of rain.\"_\n\n_\"I don't know about that,\" said Walter's father, but Walter didn't know what he meant._\n\n_\"Walter,\" said the boy's mother, addressing his father, \"You know, I think perhaps we ought to move away from here.\"_\n\n_\"Oh, you're just thinking up nightmares again,\" said Walter's father._\n\n_\"No, I'm not,\" said Walter's mother. \"When I was about, oh, five years old, there was this hurricane that swamped Cameron Parish so bad, it looked like the people there had all been killed and that it would take a miracle to put the place to rights again. And then, when I was thirteen, there was another hurricane east of us that killed a couple of dozen people or more and did millions of dollars of damage. I'll be afraid if you go.\"_\n\n_Walter's father was getting impatient. \"I told you why I have to go. We'll need supplies. The car needs gas. I'll have to go put the lawn furniture and the kid's toys in the garage. You're starting to panic. That's the worst thing that can happen to you now. Just keeping saying to yourself, 'It's just raining hard.'\"_\n\n_\"Then why are you taking all of these hurricane precautions,\" asked Walter's mother._\n\n_\"Fran\u00e7oise,\" he said, \"there's such a thing as good, constructive behavior. We might as well prepare for the worst.\"_\n\n_There was a silence for several seconds. Then Walter's mother spoke. \"I can assume, then,\" she said, \"you've decided to ride this thing out in this house.\"_\n\n_\"Of course, of course,\" said Walter, Sr. \"What else is there to do? Take little parish roads all the way up to your folks' place in Lafayette? Those roads are probably tiny rivers by now.\"_\n\n_\"That's just what I mean, Walter. You can't go out.\"_\n\n_\"I_ have _to go out,\" said Walter's father. Without a further word, Walter's father began putting on his heavy rain gear._\n\n_\"Can I come, too, Daddy?\"_\n\n_The man was silent for a bit, then said, \"Put on your raincoat.\"_\n\n_\"Oh,_ mon Dieu, _no!\" cried the boy's mother. \"There's no reason to take him along with you. It's dangerous out there.\"_\n\n_\"No, it isn't,\" said the man. \"It's just raining hard.\"_\n\n_\"The radio said that the barometer has dropped a lot,\" she said. \"It said we should prepare for a possible hurricane.\"_\n\n_\"There's nothing we can do except what we've already done, and a few odd precautions. I'll take the boy just down to get gas. I don't want him frightened by this heavy rain.\"_\n\n_\"I'm not scared, Daddy,\" said young Walter Boshardt. No one paid him any attention._\n\n_\"All right,\" said his mother, heaving a great sigh. \"I'll finish putting up water, just in case. While you're out, see if you can get some canned food. This might really be a hurricane coming.\"_\n\n_\"A bad storm,\" said the elder Walter Boshardt._\n\n_Walter and his father went out to the garage. It was difficult fighting against the wind and the rain. The water stung his face. He had never experienced anything like it. He held his father's hand all the way from the house to the garage. It was a short distance, but the water was coming down so hard the garage was almost invisible. In later days they would learn that they had, in fact, been touched by the edge of a hurricane. The rain was particularly hard in southern Louisiana, so the storm must have stalled for quite a long time against the coast. The rain did not stop for four days. In that time, the city of Lafayette reported a total of almost twenty-seven inches of rain, almost twenty inches in one day._\n\n_The journey to the gasoline station was slow and careful, because visibility was almost non-existent. Walter's father cursed, something the boy rarely heard. When they got to the gasoline station, there was no one there. There was a sign that said \"Sorry. No gas.\" Walter's father cursed some more. They stopped at a small grocery store and bought enough canned food to last a few days. There wasn't much left to choose from._\n\n_On the way home, an overhead powerline had broken, and was swinging on the ground, spitting sparks. It looked to Walter like a huge, awful, black snake that would kill anyone who came near it. He knew nothing of electricity. He just knew that the powerline was something to stay away from._\n\n_\"I hope they get that fixed soon,\" muttered Walter's father. \"Some damn fool is going to try to touch it, and he's going to get the last surprise of his life.\"_\n\n_\"I want to go home, Daddy,\" said Walter._\n\n_\"All right, son,\" said his father. \"There's nothing more we can do out here. We close the shutters, bring out the candles, and open a window on the lee side of the house, just in case. Hysterics aren't going to get us anywhere. I wish your mother understood that. Then I suppose I have to go down and secure the boat. I'll run it up one of the bayous as far as I can and anchor it and tie it down. Then I put the car in the garage, come inside, and wait for the rain to go away.\"_\n\n_Walter's father had been musing to himself. Walter was turned around in the seat, looking through the back window, through an almost opaque wall of rain, at the snapping, fizzling powerline. He would dream of it that night. He would dream of it whenever he got into trouble, or whenever his parents had minor arguments that disturbed him._\n\n_After a block or so, he could no longer see the black snake of a cable. He turned around and was quiet. His father had stopped speaking aloud to himself, concentrating on driving through the fierce rain. They arrived safely at home, and neither of them had said another word._\n\n_Walter went inside the house. His mother was still doing frantic things. His father immediately left again to go to his shrimp boat. Walter sat in his room, unable to see anything through the other side of the window. But he could hear the most terrifying sound, a howl, a rumble, a constant and powerful din caused by the wind through the sturdy plants around the house and by the horrible quantity of rain that fell in so brief a time and by the thunder that accompanied it all._\n\n_It was something he would never forget. It was something he never learned to get used to._\n**FOUR**\n\n****\n\n**Felicia**\n**16**\n\nDeputy Sergeant Marty Theriot was sitting in his patrol car, on Couletain Boulevard facing Hanson Highway. He was a little disappointed. There wasn't as much traffic as he had expected, and his speed trap hadn't netted a thing. But, like any fisher or trapper knows, the most important quality is patience. Patience was something that Marty Theriot had a huge supply of. He could sit and watch traffic on Hanson Highway for hours, if he had to. He had been known to spend the entire day doing it.\n\nHe was surrounded by farmland. To his right there was a stretch of land leading down to Bayou Chien Mort. It had once been swampland, but now it had been partially drained and was cultivated with soybeans. Across from Theriot and to his left were great rectangular patches where, according to the soil conditions, sugar cane, corn, or yams were growing.\n\nMarty Theriot put down the book he was reading. It was titled _Pet Lovers,_ but one look at the illustration on the cover or a glance at the opening pages would prove that it wasn't a book for people who raised tropical fish or went to cat shows. Theriot put the book on the seat beside him, and stared. Across Hanson Highway\u2014the \"Coonass Boulevard\" as it was known throughout the parish\u2014was a field of yams. \"Go yams!\" muttered Theriot. He remembered how he used to take girls out to watch \"the yam races.\" Always late at night, always in out-of-the-way places. There never was much yam-watching done, even though Marty promised the girls that such famous yams as Citation, Man o' War, and Secretariat were running. \"Hey, yams,\" said Theriot. \"What's that, yam?\" He now saw the yam as a dog. \"I think the yam is trying to tell me something.\" And the yam would bark several times, skipping about impatiently. \"Yeah,\" said Theriot, \"'Fury, the story of a yam and the boy who loved him.'\" The yam was a horse again.\n\nAt that moment a semi passed him at about seventy miles per hour. \"Holy jump up and sit down,\" said Theriot, \"I got me one.\" He started after the eighteen-wheeler with siren screaming and the blue lights on top of his patrol car flashing. He overtook the truck and signaled for it to pull over to the side of the road. He waited until the satisfied grin left his face before he got out of the car. Then he adjusted his flat-brimmed hat and his sunglasses and walked up to the cab of the truck.\n\n* * *\n\nThe telephone rang. The noise in the quiet room startled Corinne. She was a little frightened, for no reason that she could think of. She picked up the receiver and said, \"Hello?\"\n\n\"Hello, Corinne?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Uh, Corinne, this is Carl Steinbrenner.\"\n\n\"Oh, the used-baby man,\" said Corinne.\n\n\"Ha, ha,\" came the reply. There wasn't a touch of humor in Steinbrenner's voice. \"I'm just calling about yesterday. I was very sorry when you left. I was very disappointed.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry,\" said Corinne. She had hoped that she would never hear from the man again. \"I guess I owe you an apology,\" she said.\n\n\"Well,\" said Steinbrenner's voice, \"I can understand your position. It's just that, like I said, I was a little disappointed.\"\n\nCorinne paused. She knew what went on down at the Sea-Ray. If Steinbrenner had been so disappointed, no doubt the desk clerk advised him of some young woman at the motel who was receiving visitors.\n\n\"Well, I'm sorry,\" she said.\n\n\"Okay, let's forget about Monday. Let's talk about today.\"\n\n\"There isn't a whole lot to talk about,\" said Corinne.\n\n\"I'd like to see you again,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\nCorinne thought that he must be really stupid not to pick up the gigantic hints she was dropping. \"I'm very busy today,\" she said. \"Being the wife of a television personality, I have a lot of important things to do. You know.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm sure you do. But I was thinking that you could give me just an hour or two of your time today. I didn't call you earlier because I thought you might need time to think things over.\"\n\nWhat things? wondered Corinne. Whether or not she would go to bed with Carl Steinbrenner, who dealt in unwanted babies. Corinne had never been to bed with anyone but Skip. That was what she had to think over. She did it very quickly. The book, the television, the craft kits, Skip's distance, the hours. . . . \"I'll meet you there,\" she said. Her voice was a hoarse whisper.\n\n\"What time?\"\n\n\"An hour from now. Is that all right?\" she asked.\n\n\"Fine,\" he said.\n\n\"You know my car?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\n\"I'll wait in it. You get the room.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said.\n\n* * *\n\nA telephone rang in the bedroom of an old house in Mobile, Alabama. A man hurried to answer. \"Hello?\" he said.\n\n\"Sure,\" said another man.\n\n\"Tom?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Tom. \"I've been trying to get you for an hour or so.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" said the man in Alabama.\n\n\"That's all I hear from you guys, Denny, Sorry. Yeah, you're the sorriest lot I've ever worked with.\"\n\n\"What's up?\" asked Denny. \"I wanted to go already. The other guys are getting restless. Truckers, you know. They can spend only so much time drinking beer and playing pinball.\"\n\n\"So go.\"\n\n\"To Arbier?\" asked Denny.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" said Tom. \"Why is it that the guys I have in the gang are all such losers? I give an order, and everybody obeys. But, God, I really get sick thinking about the way you guys obey. It's like improv crime. It's like something out of the 1960s. You turn every job into a happening. It's not fun for me, believe it.\"\n\n\"I really sympathize,\" said Denny. \"I can just picture what a hellish nightmare it must be for you. You hire us, you tell us where to go, who to meet, what to do. Then you say don't go. Then you say go.\"\n\n\"Leave all that to me. I have today's New Orleans _Times-Picayune._ They're giving Hurricane Felicia big play. The idiot in Louisiana seems to be getting his act together.\"\n\n\"Chuck?\" asked Denny. \"I don't believe it. I'd have thought he'd fallen into the Gulf by now.\"\n\n\"Knowing Chuck,\" said Tom, \"he will. But he knows the job comes first. Any accidental suicides will have to come later. Good man, that Chuck.\"\n\n\"Here's to Chuck,\" said Denny. \"Right. So we can go now?\"\n\n\"You heard me,\" said Tom. \"I've been following the Louisiana situation in my usual manner, and I say go. I've got this timed exactly, and only God or Chuck could screw this up now.\"\n\n\"All right, Tom,\" said Denny. \"I'll get the guys together, we'll mount up and strike the pavement. Hit the road. On to Louisiana and a life of luxury. Juleps on the verandah. Darky women clinging to me, because I'se so good. We'll get there as soon as we can.\"\n\n\"Make it sooner,\" said Tom. \"According to the New Orleans paper, Felicia is curving on a path for the Louisiana coast, and I don't want you too late, or you'll get caught up in the evacuation traffic. Get there soon.\"\n\n\"That's what the boys like to hear,\" said Denny. \"The hammer will be down all the way.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Tom.\n\n\"We're going to get there, don't worry,\" said Denny.\n\n\"Everybody says don't worry. When I hear that, I start to worry.\"\n\n\"So worry,\" said Denny.\n\n\"No,\" said Tom, \"you age too fast in this business. Either that, or you don't age at all. I like what the newspapers are saying. Everything's starting to fall in place.\"\n\n* * *\n\nSheriff Walter Boshardt was a little bewildered. He had been reluctant to leave Arbier, to make the trip to Linhart and Delochitaches. Now that he had done it, he was reluctant to go home. Why? He couldn't answer. It was getting to be late afternoon, Tuesday. The hurricane might not make any kind of disturbance for twenty-four hours. Perhaps his mind was trying to tell him to relax, that his resources would be needed later, that it was unwise to waste them now.\n\nWhatever the reason, Boshardt sat in his patrol car and thought. His first thoughts were about his wife. That made him sadder. Dorothy\u2014he never thought of her as Darlaine\u2014didn't belong in a town like Arbier. She was right about that. She belonged in a city, a place where she could be among society people. He understood her frustration, her hostility. She had said, when they were married, that she was willing to sacrifice that social life to be his wife. But it was a rash promise, and one she first regretted and then forgot.\n\nThere didn't seem to be a solution. Boshardt shook his head. Even the idea of discussing the matter was impossible. There were only two choices. Either they left Arbier for a large city like New Orleans or Atlanta, so Darlaine could immerse herself in things that the sheriff could barely imagine, or their life went on as it was. The latter seemed to be the more probable, even though it made the future look a trifle bleak.\n\nA call came through on the sheriff's two-way radio. \"Robert Two, this is Robert One.\" Boshardt picked up his microphone and flicked the switch.\n\n\"Robert One, this is Robert Two,\" he said.\n\n\"Great to hear from you, Sheriff. Just thought you might want to know that the Hurricane Warning is now a Hurricane Watch for the area between Galveston and Grand Isle for the next twenty-four hours.\"\n\nBoshardt felt the same shiver of fear that he had tried to describe to Lauren in the diner. \"Thanks for the good news, Robert One. Terrific. 10-4 and out.\" He switched his mike off and put it back. He headed back to Arbier. He ran a hand through his short, blond hair. He had a very unpleasant feeling, a sense of something waiting for him, coming to meet him. And her name was Felicia.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You want to know how bad things are?\" asked Deputy Sergeant Marty Theriot.\n\n\"Tell me,\" said the trucker, who had stepped down from his International cabover tractor at the order of the deputy.\n\n\"Yeah, I'll tell you, boy,\" said Theriot. \"I had you at seventy.\"\n\n\"Maybe you don't know it, but there's this hurricane, see,\" said the trucker. \"And I have to drive into Arbier to pick up this load of fish and crabs and who knows what the hell else. And I'd dearly love to get in there and get out before this here hurricane hits me.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said the deputy, \"I can sympathize with you, but that don't mean I can just let you get away with breaking the law.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"So what do you have to give me?\" asked Theriot.\n\nThe trucker dug in his pocket and came out with a ten dollar bill.\n\n\"Hey, boy,\" said Theriot, \"what do you call that?\"\n\n\"It's a bribe,\" said the trucker.\n\n\"Not that little thing it ain't.\"\n\nThe trucker added another ten. \"That's a whole lot better,\" said Theriot.\n\n\"Can I go now, smokey?\" he asked.\n\nTheriot's expression changed quickly. He looked as angry as he could pretend. \"What did you call me, boy?\" he asked in a threatening voice.\n\n\"I just wanted to know if I could go now,\" said the trucker.\n\n\"Not that,\" said Theriot.\n\n\"You mean 'smokey,'\" said the trucker.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Theriot. \"You calling me some kind of nigger? You're about to get your face twisted on sideways.\"\n\n\"'Smokey' means a cop like you,\" said the trucker. \"Because of your hat. Smokey the bear. Get it?\"\n\n\"Yeah, boy, I get it, but I'm still mad. Get it?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said the trucker, pulling out another ten dollars. \"I thought all you guys understood that talk. You must hear it all the time.\"\n\n\"You better hurry up before you get caught by this here hurricane,\" said Theriot. As the trucker turned to climb back into his rig, Theriot said, \"Put the hammer down to Arbier boy. I'll catch you on the flip-flop.\"\n\nThe sudden use of trucker slang stopped the driver. He looked down at Theriot. \"Negatory, buddy,\" he said, \"not if I can help it.\" He got into his cab, slammed the door, and started off again toward Arbier.\n\nTheriot was grinning as he went back to his patrol car. His receiver could pick up all twenty-three channels of Citizen Band radio transmission. He switched from the police channel to the one commonly used by truckers. He could hear a transmission by the trucker he had just stopped.\n\n\"Break one-oh. This is the Ragin' Cajun,\" said the trucker, asking for the use of the channel. \"We got a smokey on the side, on the Coonass Boulevard, about ten miles southbound out of Linhart town. Just fed the bear what I was savin' for lunch. Any of you good buddies out there, come on?\"\n\nTheriot couldn't resist. He flicked the switch on his mike and answered. \"Break one-oh. This is Deputy Sergeant Martin Theriot of the St. Didier Parish Sheriff's Office. Just wanted you to know it wasn't anything personal, Ragin' Cajun. Keep the rubber side down and the shiny side up, boy.\"\n\n\"What do you know, the smokey's got ears,\" said the Ragin' Cajun. \"Mercy sakes, good buddies, you got a copy on me, come on? You better watch for this bear 'cause he's Fine and _Superfine_.\"\n\n\"A big 10-4,\" said Theriot. \"I'm going to pull the big switch now, so you're on your own.\"\n\n\"Thanks a lot, smokey,\" said the trucker. \"All the good numbers to you.\" He sounded bitter. Theriot smiled and switched back to the police channel. He picked up his porno book and read for a while.\n\n* * *\n\n\"I told you not to call, Corinne.\"\n\n\"Skip, I have to talk to you,\" she said.\n\n\"You've said that every time you've called.\"\n\n\"But look. The situation is worse now, isn't it?\"\n\nSkip looked at his charts. He was feeling pretty well, because of the Elavil he had taken. \"It's not much worse,\" he said.\n\n\"But you put out a Hurricane Watch, didn't you?\" she asked. \"Doesn't that mean that the hurricane is coming toward us?\"\n\n\"It means that at the last plotting. New Orleans decided that it was more likely that Felicia is curving toward us rather than south and away from us. There's still almost twenty-four hours leeway, and the hurricane could do almost anything in that time.\"\n\n\"Skip, you're always trying to soothe me like that. I want to know the truth. Are we going to get hit?\"\n\nIt was the same question that everyone in the parish was asking, and it was the one question he couldn't answer. He had his own readings, the data from New Orleans, the satellite pictures from New Orleans, and their estimates. Still, hurricanes hardly ever followed predicted paths. It was unreasonable to expect Skip to know where the damn thing would be hours from now. \"I don't know, Corinne,\" he said. \"Now, let me go. I have a lot of work to do.\"\n\nHe hung up. That decides it, thought Corinne. She had used the telephone conversation with Skip to decide for her whether or not she would meet Carl Steinbrenner. Apparently she was. She sighed. Going to bed with Steinbrenner. Was that any better than decoupaging a wastebasket? It was all the same. Anyway, there was nothing on television now. All the children's shows had started, and she didn't feel up to watching old \"Quickdraw McGraw\" cartoons. She smoked a cigarette and paced around the house. She turned on the television. One of the Little Rascals was saying, \"Aw, gee, Miss Crabtree, we ain't every going to play hooky again.\" Or something like that; Corinne wasn't paying close attention. The Little Rascals or Our Gang or something. She turned off the television when she became aware of the Hurricane Watch message at the bottom of the screen. She felt very frustrated. At last she went into the bathroom, washed, brushed her dark brown hair, and put on a different blouse. Then she went outside, got in her little station wagon, and drove south on Hanson Highway, toward the Sea-Ray Motel.\n\n* * *\n\nAt four o'clock, Darlaine had finished putting on her clothes. She lit a cigarette, but she didn't say anything to Chuck. She checked her appearance in the mirror and went outside.\n\nChuck was still in bed, covered by the sheet. They had hardly said a complete sentence between them. He had found her not terribly exciting, not wildly erotic. \"She's been pushing forty for so long, it's starting to push back,\" he said to himself.\n\nAfter a little while, he sighed and got out of bed. Neglecting his socks and underwear, Chuck put on a pair of slacks and a sports shirt. He thought about Darlaine. He laughed. She had come with him when he left the Crisis Caf\u00e9, and together they went to the sheriff's office. Chuck was a little embarrassed when everyone in the office said hello to Darlaine. The deputies in the Arbier office gave Chuck some strange looks. At least, Chuck thought they did. He felt very conspicuous with Darlaine obviously impatient. A deputy filled in the forms and gave Chuck the appropriate permits so that his film company could operate in the Arbier area.\n\n\"What about the trucks?\" he had asked then.\n\n\"What kind and how many?\" asked the deputy.\n\n\"Four eighteen-wheelers,\" Chuck had said. \"All the props, costumes, lights, that sort of thing. One is a kind of on-location dressing room.\"\n\n\"You want to park them somewhere, is that it?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Chuck had said.\n\n\"I don't know if you need a permit or not,\" the deputy had said. \"What the hell, I'll write you out one anyway. Then if anyone complains, you'll have something to show them.\"\n\n\"I really appreciate this,\" Chuck had said.\n\n\"No, no,\" the deputy had said. \"We're always glad to cooperate with film crews and documentary people. It's good business for us. Expands the tourist trade.\"\n\nChuck had thought that the only place to house tourists was the Sea-Ray Motel. The idea at the time had seemed ridiculous, and now it still seemed crazy. Chuck had been given official permission to park his four tractor-trailers just inside the town's corporation limits, in a vacant lot opposite the motel.\n\nChuck picked up the telephone and placed a long distance call to Miami Beach. \"Hello,\" said Tom.\n\n\"This is Chuck. Everything here is fine. The only thing I'm wondering about is your trucks. They were supposed to be here yesterday, weren't they?\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said Tom. \"That's my business. Give me a call if they're not there tomorrow morning. I heard from Denny, and it sounds like they're taking their time moseying across the south. All of you guys are getting a free ride on this thing, while I have to sit here and listen to you bitch.\"\n\nChuck pictured Tom in Miami Beach. He must be really suffering, thought Chuck. Like hell. \"All right,\" he said into the telephone, \"How's everything else?\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Tom. \"Nelson called in and said the situation in New Orleans was stable. Stan and Ed are just waiting for Denny and his goddamn truckers to get to you.\"\n\n\"Sounds like we're ready to play.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Tom. \"Except for one thing. One of Denny's men never made the appointment. Anyway, you can go on three trucks. But remember our deal. I think the best thing for you to do is get some local to drive a truck. Rent one. I don't want you coming out short on your end of this thing.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" said Chuck, \"don't worry about me.\"\n\nTom sounded tired. \"I always worry about you, Chuck. You can't imagine how I worry about you.\"\n\n\"How do I find another driver?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"That's your problem,\" said Tom. \"The whole matter is in your hands. This is your chance to show how great you are in a desperate situation.\"\n\n\"Everything's settled,\" said Chuck. He heard Tom hang up his telephone. Chuck got out a telephone book for the St. Didier Parish area and found the truck rental listings. After he reserved a twenty-foot truck, he would have to find someone to drive it. He thought for a while. Then he decided that the best place to find someone was the Crisis Caf\u00e9. Everyone in town seemed to pass through there at some time in the day. But that could wait until morning. In the morning, things would begin to happen very quickly indeed. Chuck took out a bottle of liquor he had bought that morning, opened it, and drank enough so that he didn't wake up until after midnight. At that time he felt sick. He heard pounding on his door. He got up, staggered to the door, and opened it. His eyes were bleary and his mouth felt like it had been used as a container for unpleasant things.\n\n\"Hey, Chuck.\" It was Denny. With him were two other men whom Chuck didn't recognize.\n\n\"Here,\" said Chuck. He felt miserable. He stumbled around in his dark room. He got the keys for the other two rooms and went back to the door. \"Here,\" he said. \"I'll see you in the morning.\" Then he waved Denny and his truckers away.\n\nChuck went into the bathroom and looked at his tongue. It was coated and swollen. The corners of his mouth were cracked and sore. He ran some cold water and splashed it on his face. He had no clear idea of why he was doing that. \"I'll die of some strange tropical disease before all of this is over with, I know it,\" he said. Then he left the bathroom and stretched out on the bed. In the room to his left, Room 7, there was the sound of beer cans being thrown around. \"They're worse than the rock band,\" muttered Chuck. He drank some more of the liquor and was soon asleep again.\n\n* * *\n\nWhile Chuck slept, Denny, in Room 9, was watching television. The Hurricane Watch was broadcast continuously. A map showing the present position of Hurricane Felicia was always on the screen, and Skip Strahan and Sheila Downing took turns with the other Channel Five newscasters. There wasn't much for any of them to say, however, except report on Felicia's present position, speed, and strength. The hurricane was making a curve that would send it into the coast of Louisiana somewhere near Arbier. Denny got bored with the weathermen and turned off the television. Besides, he had a date in fifteen minutes in Room 13.\n**17**\n\nIt was half past eight on Wednesday morning when Sheriff Walter Boshardt walked into the Arbier office. He was greeted by the four deputies who were on duty. They would be relieved in half an hour by the other four deputies of the Arbier office.\n\n\"All right,\" said Boshardt, \"what's happening?\"\n\n\"Quiet night,\" said one of the deputies.\n\n\"Felicia?\" asked Boshardt.\n\n\"Latest reports are that she's moving northwest, that she'll hit Texas around Corpus Christi. We can expect gale force winds. The gale warnings have gone out, but we're still paying close attention to the hurricane.\"\n\n\"Best thing to do,\" said Boshardt. \"We'll have to go on the assumption that she'll hit us anyway. Better safe than sorry.\"\n\n\"Right, Sheriff.\"\n\nBoshardt nodded. He imagined the activity around the town. Even without the hurricane, the gale force winds were enough to do quite a bit of damage. Every shop in the town must be covered with plywood sheets over the plate glass windows. Gale force winds range as high as seventy-three miles per hour. That was a whole gale. It was something to be cautious about.\n\n\"Any changes, let me know as soon as you can,\" said Boshardt. He thought he could afford to go over to the Crisis Caf\u00e9 for a little breakfast. He had left the house too quickly to grab anything to eat.\n\nAs he sat in his booth in the caf\u00e9, he wondered why he still had the same feeling he had experienced the day before. That hurricane wasn't finished with St. Didier Parish and with Arbier. But the first demitasse of strong, black coffee began to wash that feeling away, and Mrs. Perkins' _pain perdu_ completed the job, and the second small cup of coffee left Boshardt feeling better than he had felt in days.\n\n* * *\n\nAbout fifteen minutes after Sheriff Boshardt left the Crisis Caf\u00e9, Chuck came in. He got ugly glances from some of the people sitting in the booths and tables in the diner. Chuck was aware of the looks. He was aware that the people of Arbier had not taken to him with the kind of friendliness he had hoped for. Chuck was a little slow to realize that his manner had made him worse than just a foreigner to the Cajun residents. When the Cajuns spoke of Chuck, which was not very often, the word that came up often was _cagou_ \u2014disgusted.\n\nChuck walked to the back of the diner. He watched as the natives of the town followed him with their eyes. Chuck sat in a booth. The attitude of the people of Arbier made Chuck nervous.\n\nLauren came over with a menu after a few minutes. He ordered bacon and eggs and a cup of coffee. Then he said, \"Say, you wouldn't know anyone who's looking for some work, do you?\"\n\nLauren didn't say anything, but she pointed to a young man sitting by himself at a table. It was Paul Pierson. Chuck got up and sat at Pierson's table. \"Listen,\" said Chuck, almost in a whisper, \"I understand you could use a quick hundred bucks.\"\n\nPierson looked at Chuck. \"Yeah,\" he said hesitantly.\n\n\"Can you drive a truck? One of those twenty-foot rental jobs?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Some of the local merchants have hired us to remove some of their more valuable merchandise from the town, on account of the hurricane. We'll be going to Linhart with it.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"When you're finished eating, wait for me, and we'll go back to the Sea-Ray together. I'm staying at the Sea-Ray.\"\n\nPierson didn't say anything. He just sipped his coffee.\n\n* * *\n\nSkip Strahan had been running on energy supplied by his small, private pharmacy. He was beginning to show the effects of all the uppers and downers and mood elevators he was taking. When he was on camera he was fine. He was strong enough to control his actions then. But as soon as his shift ended and he stretched out on a small cot in the dressing room, he began to show nervous symptoms. He was highly irritable. His hands shook and his legs seemed to throb with muscular spasms.\n\nThe news from New Orleans was better on Wednesday morning. It looked like Hurricane Felicia would bypass Louisiana completely. Texas would have to prepare for the worst, while Linhart would experience only the gusty winds and heavy rain associated with the outer fringes of the spiral storm.\n\nSkip sat in the dressing room. It was ten o'clock in the morning. The day was warmer than the last two or three had been. The sky was bright, but covered with a feathery tracing of cirrus clouds. There had been no shower activity the day before, and the winds were barely noticeable. That was the kind of weather he had learned to associate with the approach of a hurricane.\n\nSkip got a telephone call from some moron of a college professor who wanted to take his single-engine plane into the hurricane for some dumbass experiment. Skip tried to talk the man out of the idea, but the professor wouldn't listen to reason. Over the years, fliers had learned through bitter experience never to fly into a hurricane on a single engine. The incredible winds, the sudden updrafts and downdrafts, the squalls threw the airplane around like a toy balloon. Those airplanes were the large airplanes used by the Navy and Air Force. A small one-engine job wouldn't have much of a chance against Felicia. At last Skip felt that he had persuaded the professor not to try the experiment. If the man did, Skip would hear about it later. The professor might be the first casualty of Hurricane Felicia.\n\n* * *\n\nAbout eleven-thirty, the Sheriff went for a walk down to the end of Ridge Street. He wanted to look at the Gulf. He noticed that the waves were rolling in at a much slower rate than usual. Normally, waves break about fourteen a minute. Now, Boshardt counted six a minute. The waves were high swells crashing against the small sandy beach. The spray flew around the pier. He could hear the groaning of the wooden piles as the pier took the impact of the huge waves. The wind had picked up a little from earlier in the morning. It was from the northeast, gusty, maybe ten to twenty miles per hour. Looking over the Gulf, the Sheriff could see a shower falling over the ocean. It seemed to be getting closer. Boshardt turned and went back to his office.\n\nThe four deputies who had gone on duty at nine o'clock didn't even look up as he came in. He went to a desk and called the Linhart station, then the Delochitaches station. Everyone was relaxed but ready. That was the way things should be, thought Boshardt.\n\nHe sat at the desk, fiddling with a pen. Then, impatiently, he went outside again. The cirrus clouds overhead had changed to billowy cumulus clouds which were building and piling high over Arbier. The afternoon shower, thought Boshardt. Maybe a little stronger than usual. He could see the cumulus clouds forming huge thunderheads in the distance.\n\nIt was very quiet outside. There were no people about, no traffic. It made Boshardt uncomfortable. He went back into his office. He wished that something would happen to relieve the tension. Then he wished that nothing would happen. Tension was better than disaster.\n\n* * *\n\nWhen the telephone rang, Corinne knew who it was before she answered. She was right. It was Carl Steinbrenner. \"Hello, Corinne,\" he said.\n\n\"Hello,\" she answered. She was feeling the tremendous burden of guilt that she had accepted after meeting Steinbrenner the day before.\n\n\"Guess what,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Corinne. She felt worried, anxious, and excited, all at the same time. She was having an affair. It was like something on one of the soap operas. An affair. Something that was doomed to failure, something that would bring her only tears at the end, but something that would give her life meaning until then. And later, when the affair was over, she would look back. She would always have the memories of those passionate embraces, the longing, the ecstatic moments.\n\n\"I got you a present,\" said Steinbrenner.\n\nThere hadn't been any passionate embraces, thought Corinne. There had been absolutely no longing, and not one single ecstatic moment.\n\n\"Do you want to know what it is?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sure,\" she said. The guilt was heavier than she had expected. It was almost paralyzing.\n\n\"Meet me at the Sea-Ray,\" he said. \"An hour from now, and I'll show you.\"\n\nCorinne didn't know what to say. She suddenly realized that for Steinbrenner, she was probably just a lunch-hour quickie. A present. What? Some perfume? A cute little pin or bracelet? Maybe one of the better of his used babies? \"All right,\" she said.\n\n\"I'll see you then. Same as yesterday,\" he said.\n\n\"Same as yesterday,\" she said, and hung up the telephone. She went into her bedroom, opened Skip's sock drawer, and took out a vial of tranquilizers. She took three, just to calm herself down. She didn't even check her appearance in a mirror. She went outside, got into her station wagon, and drove south on Hanson Highway. She passed a patrol car from the sheriff's office parked just off the highway, on Couletain Boulevard. She slowed down as she went by. Half a mile later, she sped up again. She got to the Sea-Ray long before Steinbrenner. She smoked a cigarette and listened to the radio.\n\n* * *\n\nSkip went on the air. He was very tense as he read the bulletin he had written from data he had just received from New Orleans. \"The eleven-thirty report from the National Weather Service Hurricane Warning Bureau in New Orleans reports that Hurricane Felicia has turned again. She is on a heading that will bring her to hit the Louisiana coast somewhere between Cameron and Terrebonne Parishes. I repeat, Hurricane Felicia has changed course, and is on a heading that will bring her to hit the Louisiana coast somewhere between Cameron and Terrebonne Parishes.\" He paused. His mouth was suddenly very dry.\n\n\"Hurricane Felicia's winds are now measured at an average of one hundred twenty-five miles per hour. It is estimated that Felicia will be a storm of extremely dangerous intensity. The eye of the hurricane should reach the Louisiana coast about three o'clock this afternoon. People living in low-lying districts should seek other shelter as quickly as possible.\" Skip repeated the last part of the bulletin, and the director changed cameras, turning to a newscaster. Skip went back to his dressing room. He took a couple of pills. He noticed that he was running low. He might have to ride out a hurricane without them. He didn't like that thought at all.\n\n* * *\n\nBoshardt was furious. He had heard Strahan's bulletin.\n\n\"That damn fool!\" he shouted. \"Don't those weather people realize they could be costing lives with those bulletins? He says the eye of the storm will hit us at three. So people will say, 'Well, we've got hours to get ready.' But, goddamn it, when the eye gets here, we'll already have gone through half the hurricane. The front edge of the thing should hit the coast about one o'clock.\" Boshardt did some thinking. \"We have to evacuate now,\" he said. \"Arbier is going to go down again. We've got to get everybody up to the shelters in Linhart.\"\n\n\"We only have an hour and a half,\" said one of the deputies.\n\n\"So let's get our asses in gear,\" said Boshardt. \"We have four men here, and three patrol cars. Get everybody out of here. One of you guys go and warn the Sea-Ray. That place will be under water in a couple of hours. We've got to get everyone out of Arbier and up to Linhart.\"\n\n\"What if they won't go?\" asked a deputy.\n\n\"You always have a few who won't leave,\" said the sheriff. \"Try your damndest to make them go, but remember we don't have much time. 'Low-lying areas!' The whole goddamn coast of Louisiana is a low-lying area. Those people out in the marshes think they're all right because they built a shack on stilts on some damn hump of dry ground.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to go out there?\" asked one of the deputies.\n\n\"No,\" said Boshardt, \"I'll do it. I can speak enough of their Cajun to persuade them. Maybe.\"\n\n\"What about manning the office here?\" asked a deputy.\n\n\"Screw the office,\" said Boshardt. \"You have an hour and a half. I don't want any of you to take any chances. When that storm hits, I expect all four of you to be near Linhart. I want the cars in protected areas. If you do your job right, Arbier will be secure. It's just a matter of moving everybody inland. This town won't be good for anything but mosquitoes and mud pies by tonight. Got it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said one of the deputies.\n\n\"Then let's get going.\" Boshardt went to a telephone and called his home. There was no answer. Well, thought Boshardt, she's out for the day already. They'll find her at the Sea-Ray. They'll get her to a shelter. He went outside, got in his patrol car, and headed west, toward the marshes.\n\n* * *\n\nWhen Maddie woke up, she was alone. Pierson was gone. She turned on the television and watched for a while. Then she heard of the Hurricane Watch as Felicia turned toward St. Didier Parish. At first she was nervous and frightened. She wished that Pierson were home. Maddie paced the apartment. Finally she called her father and spoke to him. He didn't seem to be worried. He said that he was driving up to Linhart and would take her along with him. He would be by in fifteen minutes. Maddie said goodbye and hung up the telephone.\n\n\"Hey, _minou,_ \" she said to Cyrus. \"I'm sorry, I can't take you along. I'll put you in the bathroom and shut the door. You'll be safe there.\" She went into the bathroom and saw the tub full of water. \"You won't like that,\" she said. She let the water out, thinking that maybe she was making a mistake. But if the hurricane did hit Arbier, they wouldn't be able to return to the apartment for days, very likely. She let the cold water tap on the sink run in a gentle rivulet, in case Cy got thirsty while he was alone. She put a large bowl of dry cat food in the bathroom, picked up the gray Persian, and tossed him into the bathroom. Then she shut the door. She sighed. \"Now I must go be of service,\" she said.\n\nShe went downstairs by the elevator, and waited for her father. The day didn't look too bad. A heaviness to the air that made her more frightened. Dark, scudding clouds above. In a few minutes Monsieur Gargotier arrived in his car. Maddie got in. The back seat was filled with supplies and canned food, enough to last ten people a week or more. They would be all right.\n\n* * *\n\nDarlaine Boshardt was at the Sea-Ray, watching television in bed with John Smith. This was a different John Smith, one she had never tried before. It was in the middle of their unusually quiet lovemaking that Skip Strahan read the bulletin.\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said Darlaine.\n\n\"What?\" asked John Smith. He was about to give the woman a couple of powerful thrusts that would make her respect him. So far, nothing else seemed to work. She never made a sound.\n\n\"I said, wait a minute,\" said Darlaine. She listened to the news. \"We're going to get the hurricane, after all.\"\n\nJohn Smith looked worried. \"We better get out of here.\"\n\n\"Don't panic,\" said Darlaine. \"This motel is built to stand heavy weather. Why don't we just stay here and have a party?\"\n\n\"A party?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Darlaine. \"A hurricane party. We used to have them all the time, in New Orleans. We could get those four guys next door, and the black bitch. They probably have some bottles with them. And we all sit around and drink.\"\n\nJohn Smith thought about what they would all do. Sit around and drink, sure. But his limited knowledge of Darlaine was enough to persuade him that there would be more going on. With himself and the truckers and a black whore. He smiled. It sounded like a good way to pass the day. All that would be on the television were weather reports, anyway. \"All right,\" he said, \"a hurricane party.\"\n\n\"And I get to send out the invitations,\" said Darlaine.\n\n\"Let's finish here, first,\" said John Smith, giving Darlaine a couple of quick thrusts.\n\n\"Aren't we finished here?\" she asked. \"I thought we were.\"\n\nYou're a mean broad, thought John Smith. He grabbed Darlaine's shoulders and pushed her firmly against the bed, then he brought her legs up, over his shoulders, and pounded her as hard as he could. After a few seconds, he felt his orgasm building. He cried out when he came.\n\n\"Now we're finished here,\" said Darlaine. She got out of bed and was putting on her clothes. \"I'm going over to invite those truckers.\"\n\nYou bitch, thought John Smith.\n\n* * *\n\nDeputy Sergeant Marty Theriot was sitting in his favorite speed trap, just off Hanson Highway on Couletain Boulevard when he got a call from the Linhart office. Captain Brierrer told him of the Hurricane Watch, and that the leading edge of Felicia could be expected to hit around St. Didier Parish in less than an hour and a half.\n\n\"Roger dodger, Robert One,\" said Theriot. Doggone it, he thought, now I have to go warn all those roadhouses again.\n\nHe backed the car in a driveway and turned, heading toward the old parish road. He would have to stop in every one of those goddamn bars and warn the people of Hurricane Felicia. He smiled.\n\nOverhead, a helicopter chuttered by, airlifting men from the off-shore oil rigs to safety in Linhart. They're really serious about this, thought Theriot. For the first time since the first Hurricane Warning, he felt the smallest bit uncomfortable. He didn't like hurricanes, not at all. They were a genuine pain in the ass. They were a hell of a lot of work. Ugly work. Finding buried corpses with only a hand sticking up out of the mud. Crawling through collapsed buildings, looking for more corpses.\n\nThe corpses would be easier to find in a couple of days, he thought. All you had to do was look for about a million flies.\n\n* * *\n\nThe traffic on Hanson Highway north was dense with people from Arbier fleeing to the shelters of Linhart. The small crew that worked out of the sheriff's office in Arbier had done its job. Of course, they had met some resistance, but on the whole most people reacted sensibly. The only intelligent thing to do was run from the storm, run north, where the hurricane surge and the abnormally high tide and the long, slow, huge waves couldn't reach them. Some of the people panicked, and there were minor accidents, but the deputies from the Arbier office helped the traffic flow as quickly as possible.\n\nThe one place where a deputy met resistance was at the Sea-Ray Motel. The desk clerk told the deputy that he couldn't just leave the place. Some people had chosen to ride out the storm in the motel. \"For crying out loud,\" said the desk clerk, \"it must be a good mile to the Gulf. And it would take a pretty good wind to wobble these walls.\"\n\nThe deputy tried to explain that a good mile wasn't very good, not when the land was as flat and low as St. Didier Parish. Besides, they were expecting a pretty good wind, too. Nevertheless, the desk clerk wouldn't leave.\n\n\"I have guests here,\" he said. \"They don't want to leave. What if they want ice or something?\"\n\nThe deputy didn't say anything more. He turned and walked out the screen door. It slammed behind him. The deputy noticed that Mrs. Boshardt's car wasn't in the lot.\n\nBy half-past twelve, the evacuation of Arbier was almost completed. The deputies joined the tail-end of the procession northward. They would all be safe in Linhart when the storm struck. One of the deputies had expressed pity for the people who wouldn't leave. All he got from his partner was a silent but meaningful shrug.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne left the Sea-Ray when she heard Strahan's announcement. She was only a little way from the house where her father lived. She started the engine of her car and backed out of the motel's parking lot. Carl Steinbrenner wasn't even in her thoughts. She drove down Ridge Street, then made a right turn onto W. 2nd. She pulled into a driveway, got out of the car, and ran to the stairs up to the furnished room where her father was passing the end of his lonely life. She pressed the doorbell and knocked. The elderly man didn't answer for a short while. For a moment, Corinne thought that perhaps he had taken a ride with someone else to Linhart. But finally he came to the door.\n\n\"Corinne,\" he said, surprised. \"What are you doing here? You should be in Linhart.\"\n\n\"Come on, Dad,\" she said. \"I'm taking you home with me now.\"\n\n\"No, no, Corinne,\" said the old man. \"I'm just going to stay here. It's just a storm. I've been through a lot of storms.\"\n\n\"This is a hurricane, Dad,\" said Corinne. \"You're too close to the Gulf here. You've got to come with me.\"\n\n\"Corinne,\" said her father sternly, \"how much self-respect do I have left? Eh? One thing I want, I want to sit here and wait out the storm. That would be a thing to do. I don't want to be dragged to an emergency shelter. That smells too much like putting me away in an old-folks' home.\"\n\n\"Dad, listen. It's not a matter of self-respect. It's a matter of self-preservation. You're in a lot of danger here.\"\n\nThe old man smiled, for the first time in a very long time. \"Yes,\" he said, \"I kind of like it.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThere was a gawky, strange-looking bird wading through the marshes as Sheriff Boshardt drove west. A roseate spoonbill, he told himself. It'll be dead, soon.\n\nA lot of things would be dead, soon, thought Boshardt. The marsh birds, the Louisiana heron, the oyster catchers, the ibis. The muskrat and nutria, the alligator, the snakes, all dead, all killed by the storm. The people of the marshes. All drowned.\n\nBoshardt looked at his wristwatch. He had an hour before Felicia would make travel impossible. Half an hour out, half an hour back. He felt like Paul Revere. Right, he thought. Sure.\n\nHe stopped at many little communities among the marshes, tiny groups of people who lived together on an island of solid ground in the middle of the marsh, the trembling prairie. He urged them all to get to better shelter, to warn others. He watched his time. There were probably as many people living in the marshes as there were in the towns. Boshardt knew that he couldn't reach them all.\n\nBoshardt kept an eye on the Gulf as he rode back. It was getting close to one o'clock. He made a call on his two-way radio to Linhart, to find out if the situation had changed. No. Hurricane Felicia was due at one o'clock. Boshardt pushed the gas pedal to the floor. At one o'clock he was back in Arbier. The town was virtually deserted; the sheriff suspected that some of the three thousand people in town had chosen to remain. Boshardt felt sick. He passed the Sea-Ray, and there were cars parked there. His wife's wasn't among them. He pulled into the motel and went into the office. No one was there. He knocked on doors, but no one answered except at Room 6. A man, dressed only in a pair of trousers, opened the door a little. \"Yeah?\" said the man.\n\n\"Look,\" said Boshardt. \"There's a hurricane due in just a little while. This isn't a safe place. You'd better evacuate as soon as you can.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said the man. He shut the door. Boshardt could hear murmurings through the door, but the words were indistinct. The man opened the door a bit again. \"We took a vote,\" he said. \"We decided to stay here.\"\n\nBoshardt's hands clenched. Like the old Cajuns in the marshes, these people thought they were safe. At last, the sheriff admitted to himself that he couldn't be responsible for them. There was no way to force such a large number of people to leave their homes. He had to be satisfied with the fact that he had tried.\n\nThere was no satisfaction. There was only the pain that he would feel after the hurricane, when the casualty figures for his parish were published.\n\nBoshardt got back into his patrol car and headed north, to Linhart. Except for a few stragglers in Arbier, and the people who wouldn't leave the marshes, Arbier was secure. Every shop window had been boarded up. Private houses had been protected in a similar fashion.\n\nA mental image of what Arbier would look like after Felicia had finished with the town entered Boshardt's mind. He shuddered.\n\nIt was one o'clock. Boshardt was halfway between Arbier and Linhart. The hurricane was due very soon.\n\n* * *\n\nBoth the day manager and the night manager had efficiency apartments at the Sea-Ray. The night manager had taken the warning of the deputy and gone to a shelter in Linhart. The day manager, however, was going to ride out the storm in his own apartment. He had been through hurricanes before. He knew the constant boredom of watching weathermen on television, plotting the storm's movements. He knew that the rain would be heavy, but he had already done his best to seal the openings around windows and the door. He had filled his bathtub with water, and he had a battery-powered radio, in case the power went off. He had a supply of candles. Now, come hell or high water, he was ready.\n\nSkip Strahan was telling people that was just what to expect. Hell. And high water.\n\n* * *\n\nAt half-past one the storm was late. Pierson was getting nervous. He didn't like the idea of driving a truck right into the bloody arms of a hurricane. But Chuck didn't seem to be too concerned. The one time that Pierson had mentioned to Chuck that they ought to be moving, Chuck had waved the notion aside. \"These big mothers aren't going to be bothered by a little wind and rain,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"What about mine?\" he asked, referring to the twenty-footer they had rented earlier in the day.\n\n\"You're all right, kid,\" said Chuck. \"Just relax.\"\n\nPierson tried, but he couldn't relax. Denny and the two other truckers seemed relaxed. He had been introduced to them. They gave him their names; one was Marsh Rabbit and the other was Old Mole. The nicknames were their Citizen Band radio handles. Denny used the handle Cracker Smacker. The truckers didn't include Pierson in their conversation very often. Pierson wasn't a trucker, he was outside. Pierson was getting very tired of always being outside.\n\nThe truckers were proud of their rigs. They related to their trucks the same way a cowboy related to his horse, at least on television. The tractors were painted and decorated. Old Mole had his name painted in decorative script on the doors of his cab. He was driving a Kenworth cabover tractor. Marsh Rabbit had a longnose Diamond Reo. Denny had a Peterbilt cabover. The three men were discussing the pros and cons of longnoses as opposed to cabovers. A longnose was a tractor that had the engine out in front, while a cabover had the engine beneath the driver. The cabover didn't ride as smoothly as the longnose, but the driver had a clearer view of the stretch of road immediately ahead of him. The vans these cabs pulled were simple, undecorated forty-footers. There were no company names or emblems on them. The only thing that gave them personality were the bumper stickers. Old Mole had one that said, \"Jesus was a trucker.\" Denny's said, \"I speed up to run down little animals.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Chuck. \"Let's get going. Mount up. Let's ride into town.\"\n\nAs Pierson was walking toward his rented twenty-footer, he heard one of the truckers behind him say, \"Anything with less than thirteen gears is a bicycle.\"\n\nChuck walked from one truck to another, giving assignments. \"Denny,\" he said, \"you're frontdoor. Mole, you're backdoor. And the Rabbit and the kid are rocking-chair.\" Rockingchair were all the trucks between frontdoor and backdoor.\n\nThe trucks moved out of the vacant lot in the order Chuck had assigned. The drive into Arbier was only a matter of a few minutes. The front truck, with Chuck riding with Denny, stopped almost at the end of Ridge Street. Marsh Rabbit stopped his truck a few hundred yards behind him. Chuck came back to tell Pierson to stop and park his truck the same distance behind the Rabbit, and Pierson saw that Old Mole was a good distance behind him.\n\n\"Open the tailgate on your truck,\" said Chuck.\n\nPierson climbed out of his truck and did as he was told. He was still nervous about being in Arbier with Felicia so near, but the element of risk was why Chuck was willing to pay him a hundred dollars.\n\n* * *\n\nIt takes about three days for a tropical depression to grow to hurricane strength. Felicia was already an old hurricane, judging by the satellite photographs that New Orleans received at regular intervals. These films were made available to local weather bureaus and television and radio stations. The constant work of plotting the storm's path was wearying but vital. The southwestern coast of Louisiana was particularly vulnerable to the furious destruction of a hurricane. In that part of the state, it was sometimes difficult to decide which was water and which was land. The storm surge would wipe out everything in its path. Because the coast remained low and marshy for so many miles inland, that path would be a long one.\n\nSometimes hurricanes behaved in ways that were strange, even for those notoriously erratic storms. Sometimes a hurricane will attack a land area and drop virtually no rain. Sometimes the land area is so inundated with the hurricane's rain that floods become a major hazard. In Louisiana, where the water table is relatively close to the surface, swimming pools had been known to pop up out of the ground, or buckle and crack. The water in the pool might become contaminated. After a hurricane, the danger of the spreading of disease was another peril the local inhabitants had to face. Hurricanes had more than one way to strike down human lives in their paths.\n\nThe storms were hundreds of miles across. The gale force winds that announced the arrival of the hurricane might exist four hundred miles from the eye of the storm.\n\nIn Arbier, there were no gale force winds. It was one thirty, and Felicia had not made her presence known. Perhaps she had stalled, as she had stalled against the Yucat\u00e1n. In New Orleans and Linhart, data came in from radar installations. It seemed that the southwestern parishes had been given a little extra time, a short reprieve. Those in charge of evacuation and those running the emergency shelters used the extra time and were grateful. Things would get bad soon enough.\n\n* * *\n\nAt Bar's Mike and Grill on the old parish road, Deputy Sergeant Marty Theriot was sitting on a stool. He was drinking straight whiskey. He was unaccountably nervous. He thought a drink would help him settle down to his job.\n\nHe had strayed across the bayou on the old causeway, into Ward Two, which was technically the responsibility of the Arbier office. He had come to the bar because one of its owners, Michael Bonneaux, was a very close friend. It was half-past one. The hurricane was half an hour late already. Theriot swallowed a shot of whiskey and clenched his teeth to prevent a grimace from showing.\n\n\"They sometimes do this, don't they?\" asked Bonneaux.\n\n\"Sure,\" said Theriot. \"I wish it would come already. I hate this waiting.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"\n\n\"You ought to get out of here,\" said Theriot. \"The bayou is going to get awful big awful fast. One second everything will be all right, and the next second you'll reach down to scratch yourself and you'll be ass-deep in bayou water.\"\n\n\"I got time, I figure. I've got everything in the car, all ready to go. But I have the radio on, and when it tells me that Felicia has hit Arbier, I'm going to jump in that car and go so fast up to Linhart\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Theriot. \"Give me one more, and then I have to get back into my own ward.\" Bonneaux poured another shot of whiskey for Theriot. The deputy tossed it down again trying to hide the grimace. He put some money on the bar, adjusted his hat and sunglasses, and walked toward the door.\n\n\"Lots of luck,\" said Bonneaux.\n\n\"Yeah. I got to be out in this mess. Lots of luck to you, too.\"\n\nBonneaux paused for a moment. \"I wonder how much the government would give me if this place drowned.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Theriot, \"maybe nothing. Just to be on the safe side, why don't you set it on fire? In the middle of the flood, there's no way for fire equipment to get to you.\"\n\n\"No fire insurance,\" said Bonneaux.\n\n\"No?\" said Theriot. \"Well, you have time to think of something.\"\n\n\"Yeah. See you.\"\n\n\"Check,\" said Theriot. \"10-4.\" He stepped outside and looked at the sky. It didn't look especially threatening.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck rode with Denny. When they arrived in Arbier, he told Denny to go down almost to the end of Ridge Street. Then he picked up the microphone of Denny's CB radio. \"Break one-oh for the Marsh Rabbit. Good buddy, you pull your rig up behind, say a couple of hundred yards. I'll get that local in the four-wheeler to hang back another couple of hundred. And you, good old Mole, you do the same, come on?\"\n\n\"A big 10-4, right from Old Mole's heart to yours.\"\n\n\"Break one-oh for Cracker Smacker. I'm getting you wall to wall and treetop tall, come on?\"\n\n\"Let's get to work,\" said Chuck. He turned off the microphone and put it back. Then he and Denny got out of their truck. They took a look around the area at the end of Ridge Street.\n\n\"Not a whole hell of a lot to choose from, is there?\" asked Denny.\n\n\"No,\" said Chuck. \"Whatever there is though, we got to get it. Old Tom is sitting in the Miami Beach wonderfulness right now, and he wouldn't like it for sure if we screwed this up.\"\n\n\"Tom does have a way about him, don't he?\" said Denny, with a brief smile.\n\n\"You don't know him as well as I do,\" said Chuck. \"He'd just as soon trade in his wife if his girl friend wanted a new car.\"\n\n\"Let's move,\" said Denny. \"I want to get out of here. There ain't anybody left here. This empty town is giving me the creeps.\"\n\n\"It gives me the creeps when it's full of people,\" said Chuck. \"Good old Hurricane Felicia couldn't pick a better spot to land on. There isn't a town in the whole country I'd rather see wiped out.\"\n\n\"I wish we had something to toast good old Hurricane Felicia,\" said Denny.\n\n\"Good old Hurricane Felicia,\" said Chuck, laughing. He stood beside the truck for a while and thought. Finally, he said, \"You think you can get back in the rig, swing it around, and run the rear end through that boarded-up window?\"\n\n\"No sweat,\" said Denny. He climbed back into the cab and drove the Strick trailer through the plywood and the plate glass behind. Then he pulled the truck out a little, and got out of the cab. He and Chuck went into the store and started loading all the merchandise they could into the truck. Televisions, stereo sets, all sorts of appliances. They worked hard to fill the truck. It took some time. Behind them, Old Mole and Marsh Rabbit were doing the same thing to two other stores.\n\n\"You think you can finish up on your own?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"Sure,\" said Denny. \"The jewelry store is next. Can I blow the safe?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Chuck, chewing his lower lip. \"Yeah, go ahead. I was just thinking that there were some private homes that might be interesting.\"\n\n\"Screw that,\" said Denny. \"You might run into somebody.\"\n\n\"Hell, there ain't anybody here,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"There always is a bunch of diehard types.\"\n\n\"Then don't blow the safe. We can manage without it.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Denny.\n\n\"I'm going down to help that kid in the rented truck.\"\n\n\"Hurry back,\" said Denny. \"We want to be out of here as soon as we can.\"\n\nChuck gave him a thumbs-up sign and went to where Pierson was watching what was happening.\n\n* * *\n\nAt two o'clock, Skip Strahan was sitting behind a desk in the Channel Five news set. With him on the broadcast was one of the regular newscasters.\n\n\"Maybe you can explain what's happening,\" said the newscaster.\n\n\"There are a number of factors involved,\" said Skip. \"I couldn't really give a definite answer to that, Pete. It's two o'clock, and New Orleans said that the hurricane was due an hour ago. They're getting regular radar scans from the station in Lake Charles, as well as the satellite photos. I have to keep repeating that the path of a hurricane is a very strange thing in a world that is seemingly governed by strict natural laws. The trouble here is that Felicia is governed by those same laws, but we as meteorologists have not as yet completely understood what they are.\"\n\n\"So what you're saying is that Hurricane Felicia is liable to go anywhere at any time,\" said the newscaster.\n\n\"Right, Pete. I wish I could be more exact about this, but I'll just give the latest bulletin, which was compiled here in the Channel Five Weather Center from information relayed to us from the various hurricane warning organizations. 'Hurricane Felicia,'\" he read, \"'is stalled some distance off the coast of Louisiana, due south of St. Didier Parish. The storm has winds that average one hundred twenty-five miles per hour. The eye of the storm is estimated at roughly fourteen miles in diameter.'\" He added, \"I'd also like to repeat the warnings I gave before. People living in low-lying areas should move away north to safer shelters.\"\n\n\"I guess we can't do anything but wait for the storm to hit,\" said the newscaster.\n\n\"Uh huh,\" said Skip. Suddenly, right then, while he was on the air, Skip began to feel an anxiety attack coming on. His hands were sweating and shaking, and he made fists and hid them below the desk. He felt dreamlike, unreal. His head seemed to be spinning off into space. He wished that the director would cut to a commercial soon. A drop of sweat ran down his forehead, and he flicked it away with one hand; the hand immediately went to his lap again. He was aware that the newscaster was speaking, but he didn't know about what. After a short while, the panic eased, and Skip realized that the newscaster had asked him a question. \"I'm sorry,\" he said, \"what was that?\"\n\n\"I asked if the hurricane was likely to lessen in strength while she's stalled off the coast.\"\n\n\"No, Pete, actually the conditions favor just the opposite. The warm, wet air of the Gulf is perfect fuel for a hurricane. Unless the winds in the upper atmosphere start failing to carry the spent air that's risen up the spiral chimney of the hurricane, there's no reason at all to suspect that Felicia will lessen in intensity.\" With gratitude he saw the director make the hand signal that indicated that they were going to a commercial. Skip wanted to hurry during the ads and take a few pills. He was trying to decide which.\n\n* * *\n\nIn Henriette's place, the television was on Channel Five. They had just heard Skip's explanation\u2014or lack of explanation\u2014of why Hurricane Felicia hadn't arrived on time.\n\nOne of the men sitting at the bar raised his glass at the television. \"That guy, what's his name, Strahan, he doesn't know much, but I'll be goddamned if he can't know it at you for the rest of the afternoon.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" said one of the other customers. \"If you know so much about hurricanes, why don't you go down and apply for his job?\"\n\n\"I've waited for more than one of these things,\" said the first customer. \"The trouble with Strahan is, he works so hard because he's just too plain lazy to steal.\"\n\n\"And your problem,\" said the second customer, \"is that you'd rather be drunk than here.\"\n\n\"I'm working on it,\" said the first customer proudly.\n\n\"You'll be a lot of help, when that hurricane starts piling water up around our noses.\"\n\n\"Me,\" said the first customer, \"I'm going to be plenty safe.\"\n\n\"Going to a shelter?\"\n\n\"Naw,\" said the first man, \"I'm going to get as much liquor and beer in me as I can first, and then I'm just going to float around on old Henriette.\" He laughed. No one else did. The first customer was already too far gone to notice the look he got from Henriette. He was very close to being bounced out the door.\n\n* * *\n\nThe sky didn't look very ominous, but the thunderheads above let loose a shower, much like the regular afternoon showers, that lasted fifteen minutes or more. Then the rain stopped.\n\nIt was half-past two. The hurricane was an hour and a half late. An hour and a half more for the people trying to get to shelter, thought Boshardt. He was in the Linhart office, getting reports from the Linhart deputies and the Delochitaches office. Everything seemed to be moving smoothly. Now if the hurricane would only make up its mind. . . .\n\nBoshardt sat back in his chair. He was tired. He thought that sixteen years was long enough to be sheriff. He was forty-five years old. He might think about quitting at next election time. He didn't know what he'd do instead. Maybe move to New Orleans, to please Dorothy. There were a lot of things he could do. He could become the head of some large company's security force. He could teach at a police training school. He could fish and hunt and do all those things that he put off every year. He loved duck hunting. He loved fishing in the Gulf.\n\nBoshardt caught himself daydreaming. All right, Felicia, he thought, make your move. We're as ready as we'll ever be. That's not too ready, but its the best we can do. He looked at the report. Hurricane Felicia, size, winds, position. It didn't make any sense for a moment. Walter Boshardt rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He wanted to go home.\n\nFor a second time, the vision of what Arbier might look like after Hurricane Felicia had gone through it flashed through Boshardt's mind. No, he thought, he couldn't go home. A lot of people couldn't go home. For a while the roads would be impassable. For a while the flood waters would make it impossible to get to the homes. For some, there would be no homes, not any longer.\n\nBoshardt was just plain tired of waiting.\n\n****\n****\n\n**18**\n\nIt was two-thirty in Arbier, and Hurricane Felicia had not sent the faintest sign of her intentions. Pierson kept looking up at the sky. There was just a flat layer of clouds. There had been a shower, but nothing unusual, nothing to make him worry.\n\nNothing except the activity of the men he was with. As he watched, the four men smashed into almost every shop on Ridge Street and emptied it of its valuable contents.\n\n\"Come on, kid,\" said Chuck at one point. \"I hired you to help.\"\n\n\"You hired me to drive,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"I hired you to do what I tell you to do,\" said Chuck in a threatening voice.\n\n\"Sure,\" said Pierson. He was suddenly afraid.\n\n\"Now,\" said Chuck, \"what I want you to do is this. You back your truck up to that plywood covering that store's window, see? You've seen the Rabbit do it. Then you kind of nudge the plywood. It takes a lot of skill, you see. You kind of give the plywood this kind of push, and the plywood will break. That's good, that's what we want. But you don't stop there. You keep nudging and you keep pushing, and the glass behind the plywood will break too. That's our main objective, or at least the first important part. Do you think you can handle that?\"\n\n\"I can handle it,\" said Pierson. \"I don't think I want to, though.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" asked Chuck. \"You can see all the fun we're having all up and down this street.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Pierson, \"it looks to me like you're looting the town.\"\n\n\"That's swell,\" said Chuck, throwing up his hands in disgust. \"'Looting the town,' the kid says. Just because we're breaking into every shop and maybe later a few homes, he thinks we're looting the town. What kind of kid is this? Where are you from, boy?\"\n\n\"Ohio.\"\n\n\"That explains it,\" said Chuck, nodding. \"'Looting the town.' I like the way you put it. Very, uh, very\u2014\"\n\n\"Succinct,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Shut up and get to work.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I want to be a part of this,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"You _are_ a part of it,\" said Chuck. \"You've seen enough movies and enough television to know what would likely happen to you if you tried splitting now.\"\n\n\"I'd die an agonizing death.\"\n\n\"And Tom thinks I'm a wise-ass,\" said Chuck. \"So, what are you going to do? The decision is yours. But hurry. You're running out of time.\"\n\n\"I think maybe I'll try nudging this here store.\"\n\n\"Nudge away with a clean conscience, kid,\" said Chuck. \"You were compelled to do it.\" He turned away and went back to his own work.\n\nPierson climbed into his truck and drew a deep breath. Then he swung the truck out into the street, steered it around so that it was perpendicular to the sidewalk, and put the truck into reverse. He climbed the curb with a jolt. Then he felt and heard the plywood covering the store window break. He heard the bell-like tinkling of many fragments of glass as they fell. Pierson shifted gears and let the truck roll forward a little. Then he got out. Chuck was watching him. Pierson climbed through the hole he had made and began transferring the contents of the store into his truck.\n\nPierson looked up the street, after about half an hour. It was almost three o'clock. There was still no sign of the hurricane. Chuck looked back at him and gave him a nod. \"Well,\" muttered Pierson, \"I'm pillaging a town.\" He wondered what came next. Rape was always fashionable, and it made a great team with pillaging. Pierson shook his head. He wasn't the rape type. He had enough trouble with a woman, even when he had her full cooperation.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne was having a difficult time talking her father into going with her to safer shelter in Linhart. He wouldn't hear of the idea. He wanted to stay in the house. It was a matter of great importance to him, and Corinne couldn't understand why.\n\n\"Dad,\" she said, \"you've told me that I'm your only child. That's why you moved down here. To be near me. But it works the same way for me. You're the only father I have.\"\n\n\"Corinne,\" said the old man, \"I've told you that I've made a decision. Now, do you think I'm senile?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" she said.\n\n\"Do you think your father is naturally stupid?\"\n\n\"Of course not, Dad.\"\n\n\"Then I have arrived at my decision through normal, reasonable ways, and I'm sticking to my decision. I'm staying here, in Arbier, in this house, in this room, because it's the only thing left that I can hang onto.\"\n\n\"You're not senile, Dad,\" she said, \"and you're not stupid. But you are stubborn, to the point that you're endangering both our lives.\"\n\n\"I'm not endangering your life, Corinne,\" said her father. \"You're supposed to get in your car and drive away, back to Linhart. I'm fine. I've got canned food here and pots of water. I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Dad, just listen to me. It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Then go.\"\n\n\"Oh, for God's sake, Dad, I'm starting to get angry.\"\n\nCorinne's father was sitting in an old, faded armchair. He sank back further into the cushioned wings of the chair and sighed. \"You're treating me like a child,\" he said. \"Is that what happens when you get old?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dad.\"\n\n\"Well, Corinne, I'm still your father. I can still tell you to leave me alone and go home. Would you deliberately disobey me?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dad.\"\n\n\"Then put on the television. We'll watch it together until Felicia comes.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThe party in Room 6 of the Sea-Ray Motel wasn't yet going at full swing. The truckers Darlaine had hoped would come were off doing something.\" They had made some kind of nebulous excuse and gone away, promising to come back later. Now there was just Darlaine, the black hooker, John Smith, and the day manager. They had a couple of bottles of liquor, and they were already progressing nicely through them. The sex part was over, as far as Darlaine was concerned, until the truckers got back. John Smith had had his audition, and the day manager didn't rate one.\n\n\"You think this place is really safe?\" asked John Smith.\n\n\"There have been hurricanes before,\" said the day manager. \"You're going to get a lot of water coming through under that door. We're going to have to seal it off. But, other than that, we're set. This motel isn't made out of cardboard, you know.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Darlaine, \"it's mostly dried mud built up around a framework of sticks.\"\n\n\"If you're getting worried\u2014\" said the day manager.\n\n\"Never mind her,\" said John Smith. \"Mrs. Boshardt has her little jokes.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said the day manager, \"I see most of them as they stop in for the key.\"\n\nJohn Smith flushed with anger, but he said nothing. He went over to the black hooker. \"How come you hang around a place like this?\" he asked.\n\n\"You mean, 'What's a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?' Is that what you asked me?\" said the black woman.\n\n\"No,\" said John Smith. \"I didn't mean it that way. I was just wondering what was so special about Arbier. I wouldn't think you'd have much business.\"\n\n\"I'd have a hell of a lot more if it weren't for that mother,\" she said, pointing to Darlaine. John Smith laughed. Darlaine turned around and gave them both a cool smile.\n\n\"You want to hit me again with a whiskey and water?\" said the day manager.\n\nDarlaine got up and made the drink. She thought about sort of spilling it on the day manager, but she decided that was just too bitchy. She gave him the glass without a word.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said. Darlaine grunted a reply. She stretched herself out on one of the beds.\n\n\"Well,\" said John Smith, \"any time now.\"\n\n\"And then what?\" asked Darlaine.\n\n\"The hurricane,\" said John Smith.\n\n\"And then what?\" asked Darlaine.\n\n\"That's when the fun starts.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" asked Darlaine. \"And then what?\"\n\n\"Then I suppose you get it from fifteen directions at once by the truckers, me, and that guy,\" said John Smith.\n\nDarlaine stared at him for a few seconds. \"And then what?\" she asked at last. No one said anything for a while after that.\n\n* * *\n\nAt three o'clock, Chuck gave his crew the signal that they were finished in Arbier. They closed the tailgates on their trucks and got ready to leave. Chuck came back to talk to Pierson. \"Listen,\" said Chuck, \"the plan is to drive out the old parish road. We're meeting the rest of the gang at this place called, uh, wait a minute, it's a place\u2014\"\n\n\"Bar's Mike and Grill?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"No, no,\" said Chuck, annoyed, \"shut up and let me think.\" There were several seconds of silence. \"Yeah, I got it. This place is run by this German guy, name of Weiss, but he changed it to Blanc down here. We stop there, and Stan and Ed will meet us there.\"\n\n\"All right with me,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"I hope so,\" said Chuck. \"You hang in there behind Old Mole, and you'll have Marsh Rabbit and me and Denny behind you.\"\n\nPierson said nothing. He climbed up into his truck and started the engine. He waited for Old Mole to swing his eighteen-wheeler out and around. Pierson followed slowly as they drove out Ridge Street. He could see in the mirror that Marsh Rabbit and Denny\u2014Cracker Smacker on the CB, which Pierson didn't have in his rental truck\u2014were following closely behind.\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" muttered Pierson, \"if you get me out of this, I promise to be good. I won't even masturbate again, and I won't sleep late on Sundays, I may even go to church, and maybe I'll marry Maddie.\" He thought for a few seconds. \"That last part, Lord,\" he said, \"uh, don't hold me to that. Maybe all the rest, though. You hanging in there, God?\"\n\nThe small convoy of trucks passed the Sea-Ray Motel, and Pierson looked at it. \"Goodbye, old motel,\" he whispered. He wondered if he would ever see it again.\n\nIt was right then that fear hit him.\n\nIt was right then that he realized that he was in a very dangerous situation. He was in a situation that could lead to some very terrifying possibilities. He was party to a massive felony already. He was stuck in the middle of a bunch of trucks filled with stolen goods, things that had been looted from the empty town of Arbier. If they were caught. . . .\n\nIf they _weren't_ caught. . . .\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" whispered Pierson.\n\n* * *\n\nThe trucks made their way up the old parish road, about seven miles from Arbier, to Blanc's. They parked their trucks by the side of the road and went into the roadhouse. Denny and the Rabbit went straight to the bar and ordered drinks. Old Mole went to the pinball machine in the back of the place. Pierson stood just inside the door. Chuck watched him. He knew that he'd have to keep a sharp eye on that kid. The kid was a weak link in their carefully planned operation.\n\nChuck paced around the barroom. He ordered a gimlet. Old man Weiss, or Blanc, had to look the drink up in a book to find out how to make it. It didn't come out right, but Chuck drank it anyway.\n\nPierson came into the bar and stood by Old Mole, watching the trucker play pinball. The trucker was good. Chuck watched Pierson from the bar. He knew that the kid was probably trying to figure out how to get away. Chuck couldn't let that happen. It was a little after three o'clock. Stan and Ed should be coming pretty soon. Then they could all get the hell out of this hayseed parish.\n\nChuck wished that Stan and Ed would get there. He went to the door and looked out. There was nothing moving anywhere. There were no birds, no airplanes, no cars, no people. Nothing but sugar cane.\n\nChuck sat down at the bar and had another drink. He thought that he ought to be careful. He didn't want to be half-crocked when Stan and Ed arrived.\n\n\"How come you're still open when there's a hurricane coming?\" asked Pierson.\n\nBlanc shrugged. It was that same old shrug that Pierson had seen so many times since he had come to Arbier.\n\n\"I'll tell you,\" said Blanc, in a German-tinged accent, \"I'm ready to go if it gets bad. But it might not get bad. You know how much money it costs to shut down the oil things out there in the Gulf and fly the men away and lose all that time and work? You know how much it costs for big companies to shut down for a couple of days because of a lousy storm? Millions of dollars. Me, I don't have millions of dollars. So when they show me a hurricane, I go to Linhart; meanwhile, I stay here and sell you drinks.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Pierson, \"I see.\" He went to the back of the room and played the pinball machine. His score was so bad, he put another quarter in, hit the reset button just to clear the score off, and left the game free for whoever wanted to play it. Chuck watched all of that carefully. The kid didn't seem to be much of a problem after all. To Chuck, Pierson didn't seem very bright.\n\n\"You stay open here because a guy in Miami Beach paid you to, right?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"That was a consideration,\" said Blanc. \"But think. When the hurricane comes, how much is my life worth? What I received from the gentleman in Miami Beach? No.\"\n\nNo is right, thought Chuck. Tom probably overpaid the guy.\n\n* * *\n\nAt four o'clock, there was still no sign of Hurricane Felicia. \"What's the latest status?\" asked Sheriff Walter Boshardt, sitting in the office in Linhart.\n\n\"The same,\" said Deputy Auguste. \"Felicia is still stalled, same size, same wind velocity, no forward progress.\"\n\n\"How long are we going to have to wait for the thing?\" asked Marty Theriot.\n\n\"Until the thing isn't a danger,\" said Boshardt. \"That could take hours. A hurricane stalled like that, I don't know. But it's starting to get on my nerves.\"\n\n\"You think it's getting on your nerves,\" said another deputy. \"You should see what it's like over at one of the emergency shelters.\"\n\n\"No, thanks,\" said Boshardt. He pushed his chair back and put his feet up on the desk. \"I wouldn't want to set foot inside one of those shelters. Like at the high school. You got all those families and kids and crying babies, and everyone has about eight square inches to sit in, and there's nothing to do, hour after hour, and everybody gets mad at everybody. I'll stay here and play sheriff. You deputies can go round up strays and take them to the shelters.\"\n\n\"If only the damned thing would move,\" said Theriot.\n\n\"You just want something to do,\" said Boshardt.\n\n\"Sure, I want something to do.\"\n\n\"Don't let the tension get to you,\" said the sheriff. \"It reduces your efficiency.\"\n\nTheriot made an expression of disgust. \"I'll take care of my efficiency,\" he said.\n\n\"Why don't you go out and rouse the countryside?\" said Boshardt.\n\n\"I did that all morning,\" said Theriot.\n\n\"Do it some more. If the storm starts to move, get back here for orders. This office will be the command center for the whole parish now. Keep moving, direct anyone you see to the nearest shelter, stay in your car and listen to the radio. We'll let you know when that hurricane makes its play.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Theriot. No pinball, no speed traps. It was a bad day. Marty Theriot had a personal grudge against Hurricane Felicia. He didn't know how he could even the score, but he was going to give it some thought. He went out to his patrol car and drove through the streets of Linhart.\n\n* * *\n\nAt four o'clock, Chuck was very impatient. He was pacing around in front of the door to Blanc's. Stan and Ed hadn't shown up yet. Chuck was anxious to get moving. The longer the trucks waited by the side of the road\u2014the longer Chuck and his men had to spend in a little roadhouse on an old parish road in St. Didier Parish\u2014the greater were the chances that they would be caught making the break for safety.\n\nChuck was feeling a little sick. He didn't like this part of the operation. In the four trucks out there were thousands of dollars worth of stolen goods. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. There was even a Jaguar convertible that Old Mole had gotten into his van. Old Mole was very proud of that.\n\nChuck wasn't feeling proud. The first part of the plan had gone off without a hitch. Into the town, loot it, and out. Clean, perfect, not a soul around. But Stan and Ed had a more difficult assignment, and they might take longer to reach this rendezvous. In any event, each passing minute made Chuck's stomach feel worse. His head hurt, too. He decided that it would be best if he didn't drink any more. Old Mole, Marsh Rabbit, and Denny didn't seem to share his anxiety. Pierson, of course, was ready to break from the strain, too. That kid from Ohio was probably ruining his mind, trying to come up with some way of escaping. Chuck was keeping close watch on Pierson, but that was just another source of aggravation.\n\n\"When were they supposed to be here?\" asked Denny.\n\n\"They were supposed to meet us here at three,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Well, I wish they'd hurry up. I'm getting hungry.\"\n\nHungry, thought Chuck. That's all he has to worry about.\n\nMarsh Rabbit came up to the bar and got a Coke. \"How was that nigger lady last night, boy?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nothing special,\" said Denny. \"About what you'd expect in a town like that. Nothing spectacular. But she got the job done.\" His smile broadened. \"Yeah, she sure did get the job done.\"\n\n\"I want to get out of here,\" said Chuck in a low voice.\n\n\"That town was a pretty poor excuse for a place for people to live in,\" said Marsh Rabbit.\n\n\"Go see if Stan and Ed are coming,\" said Denny.\n\nChuck got up from his stool and went to the door again. Once more, there was nothing to see. The trucks, that was all. Nothing else.\n**19**\n\n****\n\nAt five o'clock, four hours after the initial prediction of Hurricane Felicia's arrival, there was still no change. Sheriff Boshardt realized that the situation was serious, even without the hurricane. What he and his deputies had talked about so light-heartedly an hour before was now becoming true. The people in the shelters might be growing into an uncontrollable mob. The tension was building. There had to be some way of releasing it. There had to be a way, but in all the years of Boshardt's experience, he had never learned what to do in this particular situation.\n\nAbout every half hour the office received calls from the emergency shelters. There was nothing for the sheriff to say beyond what the people on television were saying. The condition was stable. There was no movement evident in the storm.\n\nBoshardt picked up a telephone and dialed his home number. He didn't expect to get an answer, and he didn't. Then he called the emergency shelters in Linhart and tried to have his wife paged. He had no success with that either. He called the shelter in Delochitaches. Once more, there was no word of his wife. Either she wasn't responding to the paging, or she wasn't at any of the shelters. Boshardt was worried. Neither he nor the deputy had seen her car at the Sea-Ray. Still, it was just like her to do something foolhardy in an emergency like this. Boshardt hung up the phone, frustrated. There was nothing more he could do. He returned his attention to the matters at hand.\n\n* * *\n\nDeputy Sergeant Marty Theriot cruised the streets of Ward One, which included Linhart. He was surprised to see that a large number of people in that town were still out. He stopped whenever he saw a pedestrian, warned the person to go to the nearest emergency shelter, and gave directions. Then Theriot would drive on. He listened to the police call channel of his two-way radio, but there was little new information being broadcast.\n\nTheriot, like the people in the shelters, like Boshardt himself, was growing impatient. The storm was four hours overdue. There was always the possibility that the hurricane had turned and was going for Texas or somewhere farther east along the Louisiana coast. But then, he reminded himself, radar fixes on the storm would show that, and the sheriff would have the news from New Orleans. There was nothing anyone could do but wait and prepare.\n\nTheriot gave some thought about driving along the old parish road south to the old causeway over Bayou Chien Mort. The small communities along the road were composed of houses and shacks that had no chance for survival. He was sure there were many people still in those communities, people who thought the masking tape on the windows and the canned food and the tub full of water would see them through the hurricane. But Theriot knew that Hurricane Felicia would knock those houses into splinters of wood fallen down around the tub full of water and into a lot of small pieces of glass with masking tape on them. The people who lived in those houses and shacks would be counted in the casualty list.\n\nHe drove through the town of Capita and was dismayed to see how many people were planning to ride out the hurricane in tiny shacks made of planks and boards, sheets of galvanized metal, and tar paper. The small dwellings looked so weak that Theriot imagined that he could topple them himself, if he gave himself a good running start.\n\nHe stopped in front of one of the shacks. A woman stood in the doorway. There were three young children hanging on to her. The woman was curious but not worried. \"Afternoon, ma'am,\" said Theriot, getting out of his car.\n\n\"Hi,\" said the woman.\n\n\"How many people you got living in this house?\" he asked.\n\n\"We got, uh, let's see.\" The woman paused for a moment, her brows drawn together in concentration. \"We got me and my husband, the kids, there's five of them, and we got my mother living with us.\"\n\n\"Well, you'd best get to a shelter in Linhart,\" said Theriot.\n\n\"How we goin' to do that?\" asked the woman. \"We don't have no car.\"\n\n\"You don't have a car,\" said Theriot absently. He was thinking about communities like this, scattered all over the parish, and people like this woman living with seven others in a thrown-together shanty. \"You know about the hurricane?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sure,\" said the woman.\n\n\"You think you'll be safe here?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be here if I didn't.\"\n\nTheriot frowned and shook his head. \"I hate to say this, ma'am, but, uh, I don't think you're safe here.\"\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" said the woman. \"We been living here for a while, now, and the place has held up pretty good.\"\n\n\"Has this place ever been hit by a hurricane while you were here?\" asked Theriot.\n\n\"No, but we're far enough from the Gulf, my Larry says, and we figure just to ride out the storm here.\"\n\n\"Ma'am,\" said Theriot, \"if that hurricane comes this way, or even if it misses this town so you get the slow edge of the storm, this whole town is going to be flattened like something big stepped on it. You get me? These houses are going to be lying around in pieces, and underneath the pieces are going to be you and your Larry and your kids and your mother and everyone else all along this road.\"\n\nThe woman shook her head. \"What are you trying to do, scare me? All right, if we could get to a shelter, maybe we'd go. But these people here can't get to a shelter. Larry, he works at the sugar refinery. But right now he doesn't have a job. We get checks from the government, but between you and me, they're awful small. And we just don't have money for no car.\"\n\nFrom inside the shack came the sound of a baby crying. \"I got to go, mister.\"\n\nTheriot just stood there, wondering what to do. \"Right, ma'am,\" he said, \"thanks.\" He turned and went back to his car. He switched on his microphone and called the office in Linhart. \"Robert One, this is Robert Eight.\"\n\n\"Go ahead, Robert Eight.\"\n\n\"Look. I'm sitting by a small row of shacks. The things are so pitiful, they look like they'd fall over if a dog lifted its leg and went on them. Can't we get a bus or something down here?\"\n\n\"We'll look into it on this end, Robert Eight.\"\n\n\"Check. 10-4,\" said Theriot. He put the microphone back. He had done his duty, and now he was going to find a bar open in Ward One. Most of the lounges along the old parish road were closed and boarded up. But there had to be a place open in the town itself.\n\n* * *\n\nAt five o'clock, Chuck was almost on the verge of nervous collapse. Denny and the two truckers were also getting a little concerned. Pierson was long past that stage.\n\n\"You have any idea where they are?\" asked Denny.\n\n\"How would I know?\" said Chuck. He was practically shouting.\n\n\"You know what I'd do?\" asked Denny.\n\n\"Uh, no, I don't know what you'd do,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"What I'd do, see, I'd call Tom in Miami Beach and find out if he knows what's going on.\"\n\nChuck stared for a moment. Then he slowly nodded his head. \"Yeah,\" he said, \"that's a good idea.\" He took out a couple of dollars and stepped up to the bar. \"Hey, Monsieur Weiss, or Herr Blanc, or whatever, give me some change for this.\"\n\nThe bartender gave Chuck a nasty look. \"Maybe I'll just close up here and go up to Linhart,\" said Blanc.\n\n\"Just give me the change.\"\n\nBlanc went to the cash register and made change for Chuck.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Chuck. He went to the pay phone and put through a call to Miami Beach. When the switchboard operator answered, he said, \"Room 566, please.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said the operator. Chuck listened to the telephone ringing. \"Your party doesn't answer, sir,\" said the operator.\n\n\"Let me have the front desk, then,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said the operator.\n\nChuck heard the phone ring again, and a male voice said, \"Desk, Can I help you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Chuck. \"I have a friend staying at your hotel. I just called his room, and there was no answer. I just wanted to check and see if I had the right room number.\"\n\n\"What was the name?\"\n\n\"Tom Smith,\" said Chuck. \"I thought it was Room 566.\"\n\n\"Just a second,\" said the desk man. \"Here. Tom Smith, Room 566. He checked out of the hotel about two hours ago.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Chuck, not understanding at all. \"Did he leave any kind of message or forwarding address.\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"I see. Sorry to bother you.\" The desk man started to tell Chuck how it wasn't any bother at all, but about two syllables into the sentence Chuck hung up the phone. He walked to the bar and stood between Denny and Old Mole.\n\n\"Well?\" asked Denny.\n\n\"Tom checked out two hours ago. No forwarding address.\"\n\nDenny frowned. \"I don't like that.\"\n\n\"Me neither,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I think we're going to have to do us some big thinking,\" said Denny.\n\n* * *\n\nA telephone rang in the Linhart branch of the parish sheriff's office. One of the deputies answered. He listened for a moment. Then he said, \"I think you'd better talk to the sheriff himself.\" The deputy looked around. Boshardt was just coming out of the men's room. \"Sheriff,\" said the deputy, \"I think you'd better take this call.\"\n\n\"I don't have time,\" said Boshardt. \"Let Captain Brierrer take it.\"\n\n\"I really think you'd better talk to this man,\" said the deputy.\n\nBoshardt gave the deputy a strange look, but took the telephone. \"Hello?\" he said.\n\n\"Is this Sheriff Boshardt?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"This is Isaiah Columbier.\" He was one of the few blacks in Arbier. The sheriff knew him well. \"I just wanted to let you know that the whole town of Arbier done been trashed.\"\n\n\"What was that?\" asked Boshardt.\n\n\"Ridge Street look like it been hit with an A-bomb. They's broken wood and broken glass all over. And the stores and shops, they's all empty now.\"\n\n\"Isaiah,\" said Boshardt, \"why aren't you in Linhart, in an emergency shelter?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Columbier, \"I was down in the basement of the kids' school, you know, way down, 'cause I figured no hurricane is going to get me down there. And I wait and I wait. And I wait, and there ain't no hurricane. So up I come, and I look around, and I see that every store in town done been cleaned out.\"\n\nBoshardt chewed a knuckle while he thought. \"Isaiah,\" he said absently, \"you're going to drown down there when the hurricane comes.\"\n\n\"I'll be all right.\"\n\n\"You come on up here, fast,\" said Boshardt. \"I don't want to have to go and drag your body out of the muck.\"\n\n\"I think maybe you'd best come down here,\" said Columbier.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Boshardt. \"That's what I'm thinking about.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\"I do believe that it's time to start hitting the road,\" said Marsh Rabbit.\n\n\"It's five-thirty,\" said Denny. \"Let's roll 'em.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" said Chuck, \"I'm in charge here.\"\n\n\"Right, right,\" said Old Mole, \"give us the order, and we'll follow you into the yawning mouth of Hell.\"\n\n\"Old Mole likes to talk like that,\" said Marsh Rabbit. \"Before he was a trucker, he was an instructor of freshman English at some eastern college.\"\n\n\"Let's get going,\" said Chuck. \"Mole up front. Denny behind. The kid and me. Rabbit, you got backdoor.\"\n\n\"Groovy,\" said Denny.\n\n\"What?\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I said, 'Groovy,'\" said Denny.\n\n\"That's what I thought you said,\" said Chuck. \"I don't believe it, though. Come on.\"\n\nThe truckers and Pierson left Blanc's and climbed into their rigs. Old Mole eased his eighteen-wheeler onto the old parish road. Denny followed. \"All right, kid,\" said Chuck, \"you just act nice.\"\n\n\"And nobody will get hurt,\" said Pierson. \"Isn't that what desperate men always say?\"\n\n\"I'm not especially desperate,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"The way you were acting in the bar, I thought maybe you were waiting for something to hatch.\"\n\nChuck said nothing for a while. He was thinking. The plan seemed to have developed a hitch. It looked like Stan and Ed weren't coming to the rendezvous at Blanc's, and Chuck and his crew couldn't wait any longer. They wanted to get out of St. Didier Parish, to follow the old parish road north, take the road to Linhart, then Hanson Highway to Route I-10. Once they were on the interstate, they were in the clear. But Chuck really wanted to get out of the parish.\n\nWhile Chuck was planning, Pierson was assessing his own predicament. Chuck would probably not want to let Pierson go, because Pierson could go straight to the cops. But Chuck had to get rid of Pierson sooner or later. Pierson drove and thought. Maybe Chuck would say, \"Hey, kid, you're part of the gang. Welcome to the wonderful world of crime.\" No, really no.\n\n\"What time is it?\" asked Chuck.\n\nPierson took a quick glance at his watch. \"Going on six o'clock.\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" said Chuck sourly.\n\n\"That hurricane is five hours late,\" said Pierson. \"Maybe it turned or something.\"\n\n\"You're dumb, kid,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Yeah, well, I try to do the best with what my parents gave me.\"\n\n\"You're still real dumb.\" Chuck didn't say anything for a while.\n\nPierson thought about trying to make an escape. Once they got into Linhart, on the way to Hanson Highway, he could open the door and jump to safety. At maybe forty miles an hour, onto the pavement. He'd be real safe. He scratched that plan and started another.\n\n\"There's a few things I don't understand,\" said Pierson after a while.\n\n\"I'll believe that,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"No, I mean, why go to all this trouble, just for four trucks of television sets and toaster-ovens? You're taking an awful big risk, just doing it. I suppose you'd know that the town would be empty, but the hurricane could have hit us anytime. We could have been killed.\"\n\n\"I already told you, kid,\" said Chuck, \"you're dumb. You are awful dumb. You haven't figured it yet. Anybody else would, but you, kid\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Pierson, \"I'm dumb.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck. \"Let me tell you a little secret. There ain't no hurricane.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Pierson, bewildered.\n\nChuck smiled. \"I love that look on your face. You look like a doctor's just told you that you were pregnant.\"\n\n\"What do you mean about the hurricane?\"\n\n\"We're all part of a gigantic scheme, a monstrous plot against the safety and well-being of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"You're kidding.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Is there a hurricane?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"No, goddamn it, no!\"\n\n\"Then what about\u2014\"\n\nChuck cut him off. \"Look. Tom's got a guy and a gang in New Orleans, see? Since Saturday, they've been feeding all this phony information about this phony Hurricane Felicia.\"\n\n\"What about the radar units all over, and the Air Force and Navy planes, and all that?\"\n\n\"Doesn't make any difference. Our guy in New Orleans would take that information and send out to Linhart the rigged stuff. This parish is such a nuthouse, nobody would notice the difference. Not unless they had gone to some other place, like Texas or somewhere, and realized that the television weathermen weren't mentioning any hurricane. And then these people would have to come back here today and try to convince someone in charge that the Linhart station was wrong. No one would listen. We timed it just like this afternoon\u2014zip in, zip out. The plan wouldn't work anywhere but someplace like this. Nobody goes anywhere. Nobody talks to you. Hell, their idea of a good time is to go down to the department store and try on gloves.\"\n\n\"There isn't a department store in Arbier.\"\n\n\"That's what I mean, kid. You're really dumb.\"\n\n\"And all the cops\u2014\"\n\n\"They're getting people to shelter. All the cops will be in Linhart. That's something we have to watch when we drive through there, but we have phony log books, in case we're stopped. There's only one little thing wrong.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You, kid,\" said Chuck. \"What am I going to do with you?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Pierson, \"I won't tell.\"\n\nChuck looked up, as if to heaven. What he saw was the ceiling of the cab. He threw up his hands in disgust. \"He won't tell, he says. Look, kid, do you promise? Oh, kid, are you dumb.\"\n\n\"So you put this gang of thugs\u2014\"\n\n\"Not 'thugs,'\" said Chuck. \"I don't like that.\"\n\n\"All right, you put this gang of soldiers of fortune in New Orleans, right? They take over the weather service there. Now, to tell you the truth, it's not very likely and I don't believe it. But, okay, they feed Linhart and St. Didier Parish all this phony stuff. But just to get four trucks of junk? It just doesn't seem worth it.\"\n\n\"There's more, kid,\" said Chuck. \"In a job planned by Tom, there's always more.\"\n\n* * *\n\nSheriff Boshardt was speeding down Hanson Highway, from Linhart to Arbier. There was a growing, complaining doubt in his mind. If he saw what he expected to see in Arbier, there was going to be a lot of trouble. Trouble for him, the kind that could end his professional life. Trouble for the town of Arbier. Trouble for the parish.\n\nAs he crossed the northern corporation limits, he saw that the trucks that had been parked across from the Sea-Ray were gone. It wasn't more than a minute later that he saw that what Isaiah Columbier had told him was true. The town had been looted. Looted of everything. Boshardt drove slowly down Ridge Street. Every shop window had been smashed open, the protective wood broken into kindling. Even old man de Crout's fish place. Why would anyone loot a fish store? Boshardt turned down W. 4th Street, where the nicer homes were. Some of their front doors had been broken open, too. Boshardt sat in his patrol car and frowned. For a moment, he was paralyzed by the sight the town of Arbier presented him with. Then he knew that he had to do something about it. He picked up his microphone. \"Robert One, this is Robert Two. Do you copy?\"\n\n\"Go ahead, Robert Two.\"\n\n\"I want you to call the weather service in New Orleans.\"\n\n\"10-4, Sheriff.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Boshardt. He waited until he got a reply.\n\n\"Robert One to Robert Two. Can't get through, Sheriff. There's just a recorded announcement giving the latest statistics on the hurricane.\"\n\nBoshardt frowned. He took a notebook from the glove compartment of his car. \"Listen up, Robert One. I have an unlisted number I want you to try.\" He gave the deputy the number, sat back again, and waited. He had a sick feeling in his stomach, and his mouth and throat were dry.\n\n\"Robert Two, the same recorded announcement.\"\n\n\"10-4, Robert One. Thanks. Call Channel Five and find out where Strahan gets his information.\"\n\nThe wait was a little longer this time. It seemed like hours to the sheriff. While he was waiting, he called the Delochitaches office. \"Robert Four, this is Robert Two.\"\n\n\"Go ahead, Robert Two.\"\n\n\"I want roadblocks on Hanson Highway north of Linhart. I want roadblocks on the road leading northwest from Delochitaches. I don't care if it takes every man and car in the parish. If you need help, let me know. Get those deputies off their asses in Linhart.\"\n\n\"Check, Robert Two.\"\n\nAfter he finished talking to Delochitaches, Boshardt got a call from Linhart. He was told that Strahan took a lot of his own readings, but his main source of information was fed to him through New Orleans.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Boshardt. \"I got to put two and two together.\"\n\n\"What's up, Sheriff?\" said the deputy in Linhart.\n\n\"We just got suckered into one of the bigger con jobs I've ever seen. I don't think there _is_ a hurricane.\"\n\nThe Delochitaches station called back. \"The roadblocks aren't a problem, Sheriff. What are we looking for?\"\n\nBoshardt stared straight ahead. \"We're looking for three tractor-trailer rigs with the town of Arbier inside.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\"Simple plan,\" said Chuck. \"Tom likes to keep things simple. The organization is split into three parts. You got me and Denny here. You got Nelson in New Orleans. And there's Stan and Ed in Stiles Creek.\"\n\n\"Stiles Creek?\"\n\n\"Louisiana Power and Light nuclear generator. An inside job. Stan knows the place inside out. We're all going off somewhere with this stuff that Stan and Ed are taking. They have about, I don't know, fifteen guys with them. There will be only a skeleton crew at the generator, because of the hurricane. A piece of cake for Stan and Ed.\"\n\n\"Except they didn't show.\"\n\n\"Forget it,\" said Chuck. \"We're going to build ourselves a bomb, the way I get it from Tom, and then we can make ourselves a whole pile of money.\"\n\n\"Clever, nice,\" said Pierson. \"And these trucks?\"\n\n\"The sheriff sees the town. He figures the town's been looted. All of his attention goes there. Stan and Ed do the job at Stiles Creek and meet us at Blanc's. We all get away, and the future looks bright.\"\n\n\"Except they didn't show.\"\n\n\"Forget it, I said. Maybe they got hung up somewhere.\"\n\n\"I just had a thought,\" said Pierson. \"Try this one on. You said in Blanc's that Tom checked out of his room. Where is he now?\"\n\n\"I don't know, you dumb bastard,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Where are Stan and Ed now?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Chuck was beginning to sound worried.\n\n\"You're a little slow, but you'll pick it up,\" said Pierson. \"Chuck, _mon ami,_ you've been thrown to the wolves.\"\n\n\"Naw,\" said Chuck. His eyes were wide.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"Linhart, and then I-10.\"\n\n\"And then where?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nThere was a short, painful silence. Finally, Pierson looked over at Chuck. \"Boy are you dumb,\" he said.\n\nJust then, it started to rain.\n\n* * *\n\nIn a hotel in Miami Beach, a telephone rang at the main desk in the lobby. A man working behind the desk picked up the phone. \"Desk,\" he said.\n\n\"Right,\" said Tom. \"I was out for a while. Were there any messages?\"\n\n\"I'll look,\" said the desk clerk. There was silence for a while. \"Yes,\" said the desk man, when he returned to the phone. \"That man from Louisiana called.\"\n\n\"Somehow I just knew he would,\" said Tom.\n\n\"I gave him your message,\" said the desk clerk. \"I told him that you had checked out already. If he calls again, shall I tell him the same thing?\"\n\n\"I wish you would,\" said Tom. \"You don't know how aggravating it can be sometimes.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" said the desk clerk. \"Are you planning to check out soon, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" said Tom. \"Another few days, I think. Just tell whoever calls that I'm gone. I don't think anyone but Chuck Smith will call, though.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" said the desk man.\n\n\"What about that storm?\" asked Tom.\n\n\"The hurricane? Felicia? Should be no trouble to the Miami area. I wouldn't worry about it. In fact, from what I recall hearing on the radio at lunch, it should be hitting the Louisiana coast just about now.\"\n\n\"Just about now?\" said Tom. \"How about that. I sure feel sorry for whoever gets caught by it.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said the desk man, \"I've seen hurricanes. They're no fun at all.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" said Tom cheerfully. \"They can be fun to watch. From a distance. I'll read all about it in the paper tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Will there be anything else, Mr. Smith?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Tom. \"Could I have some ice sent up?\"\n\n\"You'll have to call Room Service, sir.\"\n\n\"I'll do that. And thanks for delivering my message to Chuck Smith.\"\n\n\"Quite all right, sir,\" said the desk clerk. \"We've dealt with that kind of thing before. We've had many celebrities here.\"\n\n\"Celebrity,\" said Tom. \"Sure, I like that. Thanks.\" He hung up the phone.\n\n* * *\n\nThe rain got worse, and the wind was rapidly getting stronger. Pierson looked at Chuck. Chuck chewed his lower lip, but didn't say anything for a while. Finally, he said, \"Come on. Stop the truck and come with me. I'm going to try to get Stan and Ed on the CB.\"\n\n\"Are they driving a truck?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"Ed is,\" said Chuck. \"He has a CB in it. Stan has a CB in his car.\"\n\n\"Nice,\" said Pierson, anxiously looking at the weather as it worsened, making driving difficult.\n\n\"Tom's like that,\" said Chuck. \"He always says that good communications make for better, uh, what you call. . . .\"\n\n\"Communications?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"No, no, I mean, uh. . . .\"\n\n\"Teamwork?\"\n\n\"Yeah, sort of,\" said Chuck. Pierson stopped the rented truck. He saw in his mirror that Marsh Rabbit had stopped also. \"You're coming with me,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I'd love to,\" said Pierson. Together they climbed out of the truck. The wind was very strong, and the rain was coming down in almost solid sheets of water. In a few seconds, they were drenched. They ran back to the Rabbit's tractor-trailer rig. Chuck opened the door on the passenger side and climbed in. He slammed the door. Pierson opened it and climbed in beside Chuck.\n\n\"You could wait outside,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I might run away,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Not likely,\" said Chuck. \"But thanks.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Pierson.\n\nChuck picked up Marsh Rabbit's microphone. He used channel ten on the CB, calling for Stan and Ed. There was no response.\n\n\"You're wasting our time,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Maybe they're on another channel,\" said the Rabbit.\n\nChuck turned to channel eleven. He tried again. No response.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Pierson nervously, \"this storm is getting worse.\"\n\n\"Let me have that,\" said Marsh Rabbit. He took the microphone away from Chuck and switched to channel nine, which is used only in case of emergency. \"Break nine,\" said the Rabbit, \"what's the weather situation, come on? This is the Marsh Rabbit, good buddies, and the water's coming down like all hell.\"\n\n\"Break nine for the Marsh Rabbit,\" came the reply. \"This is Jackson Fenmore. It's a hurricane, good buddy. A hurricane. Felicia.\"\n\n\"10-4,\" said the Rabbit. \"Mercy sakes and 10-4.\"\n\n\"We'll see you,\" said Fenmore.\n\n\"Hope so,\" said the Rabbit. \"Hope to do that. We gone.\" He hung up the microphone. He looked at Chuck. The expression was unpleasant.\n\n\"A hurricane,\" said Chuck. \"What a coincidence.\"\n\n\"Stop it,\" shouted Pierson. \"Can't you understand? This is a big job, you idiot, bigger than even you. That's why the trucks were late. Tom wanted the hurricane. You're supposed to get caught in it. You're just wasting our time here. We got to keep moving.\"\n\n\"What a coincidence,\" murmured Chuck, stunned.\n\n\"Let's get back, let's get moving,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Sure,\" said Chuck. \"Better take it easy on the hills in this weather.\"\n\n\"Hills?\" asked Pierson. \"What hills?\"\n\n\"Let's get back to our truck. Don't try no funny stuff,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I don't have to,\" said Pierson. \"Tom's done enough for all of us for at least the next ten years.\"\n\n\"I can't get over it,\" said Chuck. \"I mean, Tom watching for the storm to grow and sending me right into the damn thing. It's got to blow the whole job. We'll never make it away from here.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's some kind of initiation,\" said Pierson, climbing down out of Marsh Rabbit's cab. He had to shout to be heard.\n\n\"No,\" said Chuck, \"I already been through that. It wasn't as bad as I thought.\"\n\n\"Is this?\"\n\n\"Worse,\" said Chuck, still a little dazed. \"A lot worse.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIt was about six-thirty when the rain started to come down so hard that Boshardt could barely see the road ahead of him. He pulled over onto the shoulder and waited until the squall had passed. Boshardt was on his way back to Linhart. He wanted to catch those trucks and he personally wanted to put the cuffs on that guy Chuck. \"A film company!\"\n\nThe rain subsided a little, but didn't stop completely. The wind through the cane made it look like an ocean, rolling with waves. The wind was from the northeast, and it got stronger and stronger. The rain came down harder. Boshardt tried driving slowly along Hanson Highway, but he found it difficult, against the wind and rain.\n\n\"Robert Two, this is Robert One.\"\n\n\"Go ahead, Robert One,\" said Boshardt, peering forward through the wall of rain.\n\n\"The hurricane is moving.\"\n\n\"I got you, Robert One.\" What would he do now? He had thirty men, covering the whole parish. Should he keep up the roadblocks or use his men to rescue stranded people? Well, thought the sheriff, if it came to a choice between human lives and a bunch of electric popcorn poppers. . . .\n\nThe wind grew. Water forced its way into Boshardt's car, even though the windows were shut as tight as he could make them. In a matter of minutes, the winds had grown to gale force. As he tried to drive against them, he felt the push of the wind trying to blow him off the road. Before Boshardt had covered half the distance to Linhart, he was trying to drive against full hurricane strength winds. He gave up. It was impossible.\n\nThe two-way radio still worked, but the static caused by the storm made communication difficult. Boshardt got through a message that the deputies manning the roadblocks should instead be used in search and rescue operations. The sheriff knew that things were going to get a lot worse, very soon. \"Be careful,\" said Boshardt. \"Use your judgment. We want to save as many lives as we can, but not at the expense of our own.\" Boshardt could barely hear the acknowledgment from Linhart, because of the static interference.\n\n* * *\n\nThe howl of the wind was a terrible experience. The shrieking soon became unbearable. Darlaine and her party at the Sea-Ray cheered when the first hard rain started to fall, but it was only a matter of minutes before the black woman said that the constant noise was making her nervous. John Smith smiled. The rain beat against the window and door. It began to come in, driven by the full force of the wind. The palm trees in the courtyard of the Sea-Ray were bending with their tops almost to the ground.\n\n\"This is it,\" said the day manager.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Darlaine. \"Somebody give me a cigarette.\"\n\n\"Here,\" said John Smith.\n\nDarlaine took the cigarette and lit it. The noise from the wind was so bad that no one spoke. They sat and watched television. Skip Strahan was explaining that Hurricane Felicia had begun to move inland, that the town of Arbier could expect hurricane force winds for about two hours.\n\n\"Two hours of that racket,\" said the black woman. \"It's driving me nuts.\"\n\n\"You should see the rain,\" said the day manager, peering through the window. \"It's all dark out there, and the rain is coming down like hell.\"\n\n\"This isn't as much fun as I thought it would be,\" said Darlaine.\n\n\"It isn't much fun at all,\" said John Smith.\n\n* * *\n\nIn the marshes to the west of Arbier, the bayous swelled and grew. Livestock drowned, whole herds of animals trying to fight winds of one hundred miles per hour or more perished. People who were foolish enough to go out were stung by sand and pebbles, shells, debris. The sand stung and drew blood. The wind made it almost impossible to move. A person couldn't stand against winds that strong; one could barely crawl to safety.\n\nThere was a strange kind of beauty about the hurricane, too. Along the small beach south of Arbier, the sand was blown away, and the static electricity generated by the wind-driven sand made a myriad firefly lights. But in order to see the beauty of the storm, one had to risk its dangers. Most people thought it wasn't worth it. Others did, and many of them died.\n\n* * *\n\nThe water moved inland. The sea marched forward, like an army fighting house-to-house battles. Slowly one part of the town would be surrounded by the water. A few minutes later, the water had reached halfway up Ridge Street. The water moved on and grew deeper.\n\n* * *\n\nThe spiral shape of the hurricane allowed the sheriff moments when he could see a little of the road ahead. The rain never stopped completely, but in between the spiral bands, between squalls, he drove carefully onward. The water was rising, and the road was almost covered. He tried to call Linhart, but he had to give up, because the static on the radio and the gigantic roar of the wind made communication impossible.\n\n* * *\n\n\"How long is this going to last?\" asked Darlaine. She was already tired of the storm, and the endless pounding of the rain and wind were getting on her nerves.\n\n\"He'll tell us,\" said John Smith, pointing to the television.\n\n\"Maybe we should have gone to Linhart,\" said the black woman.\n\n\"We could go now,\" said Darlaine.\n\n\"In that?\" asked John Smith. \"You're kidding.\"\n\nDarlaine wasn't kidding. She was afraid. But she wasn't going to let the others know it.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne and her father sat in the room and tried to block the noise of the wind. She turned up the television as loud as she could, but the noise from outside overpowered everything else.\n\n\"It's all right, Corinne,\" said the old man, \"sit down.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Dad, but the storm is making me nervous.\"\n\n\"Why? Because it's a hurricane? Just think of it as a bad thunderstorm. That's all.\"\n\nIn Arbier, the water crept in farther, grew deeper.\n**20**\n\nIt was about seven o'clock, and Hurricane Felicia was still growing. She was dropping her burden of rain on the Louisiana coastline. The winds along the outside of the storm were not as strong as the winds close to the eye, but they were strong enough to make driving almost impossible.\n\n\"Let's go,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Right,\" said Pierson. \"If you don't like the way I'm driving, then why don't you take the wheel? It's all I can do to keep us on the road. I can't see where I'm going, and the wind has the broad side of this truck to blow against.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Chuck. \"This storm is our way to get out of this mess.\"\n\n\"You think so?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck, \"everybody will be too busy with the hurricane to worry about us. We can drive the trucks somewhere, dump them, and go home.\"\n\n\"A swell day's work, I think,\" said Pierson grimly. \"Anyway, you determined that this was a hurricane. How did you get that notion?\"\n\n\"I'm figuring that maybe you were right. For all I know, maybe Nelson was never in New Orleans, and Stan and Ed. . . .\" His voice trailed off.\n\n\"Aw, come on,\" said Pierson. \"It's not so bad. Everybody gets used once in a while. That's the way the human race works. That's evolution. You got a user and a usee, and the fitter of the two survives.\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"You don't know anything, you get set up to take the rap for something you don't even understand, and you still think you're the crime king of the Deep South.\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Can you see anything out there?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"Road. There's got to be road.\"\n\n\"I know there's road,\" said Pierson, \"but there's also marshy land that's getting marshier, and bayou that's going to be the mighty Colorado any minute now. I just wanted you to help me tell them apart.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Chuck, \"what do you see?\"\n\n\"I think I can see the taillights of Cracker Smacker's rig.\"\n\n\"Denny?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Pierson, \"Denny. I thought he was Cracker Smacker.\"\n\n\"He is,\" said Chuck absently. \"Follow his lights, then.\"\n\n\"Right into the bayou, probably. Your mind is starting to fuzz up on you, you know that?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"My mind is fine.\"\n\n\"I think, under the circumstances, that I can allow myself a biting retort. How about this one: If your mind was so fine, why are we driving through a hurricane in a bunch of trucks full of looted merchandise, without any definite destination in mind?\"\n\n\"We're just going to play it by ear from here on.\"\n\n\"'Play it by ear,' he says,\" said Pierson. \"By the way, where's my hundred bucks?\"\n\n\"We'll talk about your hundred bucks when this merchandise is delivered.\"\n\nThey rode in silence for a while, each concerned with his private thoughts. Pierson knew that he was still in grave danger, although he tried to make the situation seem less like a captor-prisoner affair. Chuck was distracted by the failure of the scheme to conclude as he had expected. He grew angrier as he realized that he had absolutely no way to get in touch with anyone else in the supposed operation. Now he wondered how much of what Tom had planned and confided to Chuck was the truth. It seemed to Chuck that it was very little. He had been made a scapegoat, and he didn't like it.\n\nThe trucks crept on, fighting against the wind and the rain. It took all of Pierson's strength to keep the twenty-footer on the road. \"We have to get clear of the low part of the parish,\" he said.\n\n\"What?\" said Chuck, roused from his angry musings.\n\n\"I said, we have to get clear. If this is a hurricane, you can expect a lot of water to come rushing across the bottom part of the parish. I don't want to see if this truck floats.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck. \"Then push the pedal down and let's get moving.\"\n\n\"There is still the problem of visibility,\" said Pierson. \"I can't see a damn thing out there.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Chuck, \"if you can't see anything, it's probably the road. If you _can_ see something, it's probably a building or a tree, and you don't want to hit it.\"\n\n\"What a great rule of thumb,\" said Pierson. \"Just drive along into whatever you can't see.\"\n\n\"Can you come up with anything better?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"I got us this far, didn't I?\"\n\nChuck just turned his head and looked out the window. There was a constant stream of water; it came in the top of the window, where the seal was not perfect. The water ran along the roof of the cab and dropped, every few seconds, into Chuck's crotch. He didn't notice until a sizable puddle had formed. \"Jesus Christ,\" he muttered, trying to slap the water away.\n\n\"Don't worry about him,\" said Pierson. \"He's probably with Tom in Miami Beach.\"\n\n* * *\n\nSkip Strahan was smiling. He held the smile, and held it, and held it, until the director ran a finger across his throat. The station cut to a commercial, and Strahan got up. His shift was over. He could get some rest.\n\nThe first thing he wanted to do, however, was call Corinne. He dialed the number. The phone on the other end rang and rang ten times before Strahan hung up. Maybe Corinne had gone to a shelter.\n\nStrahan went to the dressing room and sat on the cot. He took a couple of Valiums, just in case. He wasn't feeling edgy, but he had put in a long shift and he knew that as soon as he relaxed, the nervousness and anxiety would return. He put his feet up on the cot and stretched out. He was almost asleep when a thought occurred to him. He got up again and tried calling Corinne's father in Arbier. There was dead silence. The telephone lines were down already.\n\nSkip took a deep breath. He didn't think that his wife would be foolish enough to spend the hurricane with her father. More likely she went to get him earlier in the day and bring him up to Linhart. Skip cheered himself with that thought. That was really the most plausible explanation. She had not called him at the station because the facilities in the emergency shelters were limited, and she may not have had access to a telephone.\n\nThat was probably the explanation, he thought, as he stretched out again on the cot. He closed his eyes. He was very tired, and his back and neck muscles hurt. He tried to relax, but he couldn't get the picture of Corinne out of his mind. He saw her clinging to something, with a huge tidal wave raised above her, ready to crush her as it fell.\n\nSkip took another deep breath, and another tranquilizer. He didn't even get up for water. He just swallowed the pill. Everything was fine. Everything would work out fine except for some cowbirds and some Cajuns and some muskrats that would die during Hurricane Felicia's stay in Louisiana.\n\nEverything was fine.\n\n* * *\n\nBayou Chien Mort had grown into a mean, rushing, ravaging flood. The bayou had spawned lesser rivers, and these were hard at work eroding the highway, eating up the ground on both sides of the roadbed, and creating new streams, all running into the swamps of the east.\n\nThe winds were so strong that the sheriff was sure his car was going to be blown over, but he made steady progress whenever a break in the storm would let him see.\n\nAs he passed Couletain Boulevard, he could see a dark shape in front of him. The curtain of water that ran in rivulets down his windshield wouldn't let him see clearly what the object was. He crept forward carefully. The wind was bellowing so loud that the sheriff found himself holding the steering wheel in clenched fists. His knuckles were white. Relax, he told himself. Don't get into a panic.\n\nHe drew next to the dark shape. It was an old, battered car. It was stopped on the side of the road. Hours before, it would have had its left wheels on the edge of a cultivated field. Now a dark, swirling river ran parallel to the highway, joining up with the bayou further south. The river had already cut away several feet of earth.\n\nThe sheriff tried to determine if there were anyone in the car who might need help. He couldn't see anything, looking through his windshield, through the falling torrent, and into the car.\n\n\"Doggone it to hell and back,\" muttered the sheriff. He couldn't leave the car on the side of the road without investigating. That probably meant getting out of his own car and bucking against hurricane winds that most likely could blow him away.\n\nHe pulled his car up next to the other. It was leaning over to the left, where the driver had driven off the road. Yesterday, it wouldn't have been a problem. Today, thanks to Felicia, the car was balanced precariously over a vicious stream of black water. Boshardt slid across his seat. He could peer into the other car. He saw an old woman. He would have to get the woman and whoever was driving the car to shelter.\n\nBoshardt took a deep breath. He opened the door of his patrol car and got out. Immediately, the wind hit him and nearly sent him sprawling. He clung to the door and rose up, using every bit of strength he had. The rain pelted him so hard that he almost cried out. He tasted blood. He didn't know where it came from.\n\nThe old woman in the other car was signaling to Boshardt. He couldn't understand her. Then Lauren, the waitress from the diner, pressed against the window and motioned that the sheriff should transfer the old woman to his car.\n\nBoshardt was having trouble breathing. The rain was so dense that it was hard to take a breath without inhaling a quantity of water. Boshardt had heard stories of people who, for lack of better shelter, tied themselves in trees above the racing floods of water. These people were usually found some time later, drowned by the falling rain.\n\nBoshardt had a better view of the situation than he had in his car, although he had to shade his eyes from the rain in order to see at all. He turned away from the wind. The rain pelted the back of his head. He saw that the arm of the bayou that ran along the roadside was at least six feet deep, judging by the amount of exposed roadbed and earth. The car was teetering over this new outlet of Bayou Chien Mort.\n\nThe sheriff signaled to Lauren to open the passenger's door of her car. Lauren did so. With her help, the sheriff managed to get the old woman in both arms, and to support her as she tried to get out of the old car. The rain hurt her. Boshardt felt sympathy for her; he couldn't tell if the old woman were crying or not. She gasped for breath. Slowly, Boshardt managed to get the old woman into his patrol car. She moved over on the seat and put her head on the dashboard. Now Boshardt could tell. She was crying, in loud, racking sobs. The sheriff wondered what had happened.\n\nHe went back for Lauren. As he turned he noticed that the car had slid forward and to the left. He tried to shout through the storm, but he couldn't make himself understood. Lauren reached out to him, and Boshardt almost had hold of her hand when the car toppled over the embankment and into the black water below. It sank beneath the surface with a brief cluster of bubbles.\n\nBoshardt stared down at the rushing bayou water. He knew that as long as he lived, he would remember the feeling of Lauren's hand slipping out of his and the look on her face as the car carried her down to a quick but ugly death.\n\nBoshardt stood beside his patrol car. He fell to his knees. The wind almost pushed him flat. He hurt. His whole body hurt. But he forgot all of that while he vomited.\n\nIn a little while he stood and made his way back to the car. It wasn't a great distance, but Boshardt's strength had been all but used up. He got into his car. The old woman was muttering, senile, nattering at him, sobbing.\n\nThe sheriff looked at her with loathing. This woman had cost Lauren her life. No, thought Boshardt, he couldn't think that way. But the only alternative was that _he_ had caused Lauren to die. The old, old, wrinkled woman prattled constantly. Saliva ran down her chin. She turned to Boshardt and said, with an unreadable expression, _\"Les grenouilles magiques! Les grenouilles magiques!\"_\n\nHe didn't have any idea what she was trying to say. He only knew that the old woman, who had turned again and was crying softly, would not have been the person he would have chosen to save, if he had been given a choice. And that knowledge, for some reason, made him feel filthy.\n\n* * *\n\nHurricane Felicia moved across the parish like a giant hunting animal, a creature digging out prey wherever a living thing had hidden itself. It crushed its prey, or drowned it, or blasted it with a vast arsenal of debris.\n\nThe strength of Felicia's winds did strange things. Sheets of metal were ripped from roofs and wrapped around poles. A blunt two-by-four was thrown through a tree like a spear. In Arbier, the streets were filling with water. On the water floated broken poles, limbs from trees, wires, chunks and bits and pieces of houses. There were a large number of animal corpses in the water, and some human dead. All these things bumped their way inland as the hurricane pushed the water along.\n\n* * *\n\n\"Are you still having trouble?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"You mean seeing?\" asked Pierson. \"Yeah.\" They were proceeding cautiously, still on the old parish road, not yet to the causeway. Pierson was thinking about that causeway. He was wondering if it were still there.\n\n\"You think we have a good chance, don't you?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"A good chance of what?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"Of getting out of this,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Sure,\" said Pierson. Both men knew that meant nothing. They were silent again.\n\nThe truck ahead of Pierson swung sharply. Pierson put on the brakes and slowed down while he watched what Denny would do. The Cracker Smacker up ahead brought his rig under control again, and they all continued.\n\n\"That's something, ain't it?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"The wind?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck, \"It's driving me crazy, listening to it. I wish it would stop. It feels like it's never going to stop.\"\n\n\"It'll stop,\" said Pierson. \"It's coming out of the northeast from right ahead of us. Then the eye comes. Then the storm comes again, from the other direction, right?\"\n\n\"How should I know?\" asked Chuck. \"I'm from Chicago.\"\n\nPierson was about to say something, but he kept quiet. For the moment at least, it seemed to Pierson that Chuck had dropped his pose of dangerous gangster. He was just a frightened guy in a truck. With a hurricane around him and a flood coming behind him. That put him in exactly the same situation as Pierson, and as long as things stayed that way, Pierson felt that he was safe.\n\n\"You know,\" said Chuck after a while, \"I can't stand any more of this.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Pierson. \"What are you planning to do?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"Well, I wish somebody had some plans,\" said Pierson. \"The winds are getting stronger, and this old truck, man, I mean, I don't know if I can keep it on the road much longer.\"\n\n\"You'd better keep it on the road\u2014\"\n\nChuck stopped abruptly. Ahead of them Denny's truck was hit by a strong gust, and the truck jackknifed and flipped over. The wheels spun in the rain. There was no sign that Denny had escaped.\n\n\"What do I do?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"You keep going,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"What about Denny?\"\n\n\"What do I care, what about Denny? Nobody has been thinking too much of what about Chuck.\"\n\nPierson drove the twenty-footer carefully by the tractor-trailer rig. There was still no sign of the driver. In his mirror, Pierson saw that it was impossible for the back door rig, Marsh Rabbit, to get by the jackknifed rig. He saw Marsh Rabbit climb out of his cab and fall to his knees. Then the rain obscured everything between the jackknifed truck and Pierson.\n\n\"You did a good job, there,\" said Chuck, \"squeezing by.\"\n\n\"A job,\" said Pierson wryly, \"just a job, like any other job. In a hurricane, in a convoy of looted wealth and riches.\"\n\n\"What happened to the Rabbit?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't think we have the Rabbit with us any longer,\" said Pierson. \"I saw him climb out of his cab, and I saw him fall.\"\n\n\"Hell,\" said Chuck, \"I hope he's all right.\"\n\n\"Here's an interesting thought,\" said Pierson. \"Supposing you were driving this tractor-trailer, see, and you were way out in the middle of no man's land, and you were in the middle of an out-and-out hurricane, and your truck blows all over the highway, and you're carrying a load of looted stuff, what would you do?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Chuck. \"I'm hoping I won't have to make that decision.\"\n\nMe, too, thought Pierson.\n\nAnother heavy squall broke, and the winds pulled the truck out of Pierson's control. He was almost dragged into the left margin of the road. He knew that if he ever got the truck on that marshy shoulder, there wasn't anything on God's earth that he could do to get it out. He strained on the wheel, and the wind pulled against him, and he pulled, and swore, and kept the truck on the road.\n\n\"I don't know if it's you or the wind, but one or the other is making this ride scary as all hell,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I think I'll let the storm take all the honors on this one,\" said Pierson. \"Me, I'd prefer just a plain old summer's drive up to Linhart.\"\n\nPierson looked at Chuck. Chuck looked like he wanted to throw up.\n\n* * *\n\nBoshardt was still feeling sick. He felt sick all through his body. He felt sick in places that medicine wouldn't touch but that several jolts of good whiskey liquor might. Beside him crouched the small old woman. She didn't seem to have any knowledge of what was happening around her. She muttered words that Boshardt could make out, now and then, in French. She never said Lauren's name. When Boshardt asked her who she was, the old woman looked at him in a puzzled way. Boshardt repeated the question, in French and English. All he got was that bewildered stare.\n\nThe hurricane was blowing almost directly head-on, but every once in a while a heavy gust would catch the car broadside, and then it took all of Boshardt's skill to keep from going out of control. He was moving forward at about fifteen miles per hour. The sheriff guessed that it was about the same forward speed as Felicia was making. Great, he thought to himself, I'm staying in the same place in the storm. He thought that if he could only go faster, he could outrace the hurricane to Linhart. He knew that he was probably not in the worst part of the storm, the winds at the center, surrounding the eye. If he were there, he would be dead. Those winds could top two-fifty, and his trusty patrol car wasn't about to stand up to that.\n\n\"No, old patrol car,\" said Boshardt to himself, \"you and me, well, we been through a lot together, ain't we, girl? And I think maybe we got one more hard ride left in us. Anyway, we'll sure give it all we got, right, old girl?\" He waited for an answer, and all he could hear was the constant thunderous roar of the wind, and the rain on the roof, which sounded like hammer blows. \"Well, old girl,\" he said after a while, \"maybe we don't have one more ride left in us. Why don't we just lie down right here, open up a couple of cans of Dixie, and pass into history?\" He drove on, talking to himself, keeping his spirits up. The noise that he was driving through reminded him of his childhood, his first hurricane. He shuddered.\n\n\"Well, it's me again, old girl,\" he said nervously. Then he looked over at the old woman tucked into the far corner of the front seat. He realized that he was mumbling to himself in almost exactly the same way as she was. That made him more frightened than the hurricane. And the hurricane made him pretty damn scared.\n\nThere was water standing on the field to the right and left of Hanson Highway. There was water as far as the eye could see. There was at least a foot of standing water everywhere, on the fields as well as on the highway ahead of him. Boshardt grimaced. He hated to go out in that wind again, but he had an idea that removing the fan belt might keep the engine dry as he drove through the water. A lot of wet stuff was going to be kicked back, and the carburetor and distributor could be soaked. He argued, and he finally persuaded himself that while the storm was coming from the northeast, getting out and opening the hood of the car would amount to the same thing. He'd be left with a soaked engine that wouldn't feel up to burning anything.\n\nBoshardt clenched his teeth and drove slowly through the water on Hanson Highway. He drove as quickly as he could without creating waves that would pile up in front of the car. Against all odds, and to his surprise, he made it into Linhart. He arrived at one of the emergency shelters, ordered someone to see to the old woman, and then drank a couple of cups of black coffee. The warmth of the building, the sudden quiet, lulled him. He stood up and stretched. He looked at his watch. In about forty-five minutes, the eye of the storm would reach the coast of St. Didier Parish.\n\nWith the eye came the hurricane surge.\n\nThe surge. A wall of water. Everyone always described it as \"a wall of water.\" But there is no better way of describing it, thought Boshardt. A cubic yard of water, a simple three feet by three feet by three feet, weighed fifteen hundred pounds. And if the surge plus the waves were mounting to twenty-five or thirty feet high, how many thousands and millions of tons of water was that? Smack. Down on Arbier.\n\nEven the town of Arbier wouldn't stop the surge. That land was too low and marshy. With an uncomfortable feeling, Boshardt thought that the surge might well reach Linhart.\n\nForty-five minutes. Then the _real_ trouble would start.\n**21**\n\nThe winds grew stronger as the hurricane moved over the drowned coastline of St. Didier Parish. As the eye of the hurricane approached, the gusts became increasingly dangerous. It was difficult to tell just how fierce Felicia really was. Already, in Linhart, Skip Strahan's anemometer had been ripped loose by the very winds it was measuring.\n\nThe wind played evil tricks as it moved inland, almost as though Felicia knew that she didn't have long to live once she forced her way across country. The wind whipped around houses and buildings and, following the same aerodynamic laws that kept aircraft aloft, pulled off roofs and hurled them away, to crash and break apart.\n\nThe wind tugged at the wood frame building where Corinne and her father were waiting out the storm. The power had gone out some time before. There were no more television newsmen to tell them how the storm was doing. They didn't need to be told. The pressure of the air outside the house was lower than the air pressure inside; the windows popped out with a frightening clatter of broken glass. The hurricane struck the house, again and again. Corinne huddled close to her father. She held on to him as if she were a small child again. They had a battery-powered radio, but even the local station in Linhart had difficulty broadcasting through the storm. All Corinne could hear was static. She turned the radio off. The static made her nervous. The howling of the winds was growing steadily louder. She had to shout to make herself heard to her father.\n\nFelicia pushed water from the Gulf of Mexico ahead of her, mingled with the huge amount of rain she dropped. The water in Arbier rose higher.\n\nCorinne clung to her father. He tried to soothe her, but it did no good. Corinne thought about Skip's pills and how she would like to take a few, fall asleep, and wake up when the whole hurricane was over.\n\nIt was very dark in the house. The dark clouds of the hurricane covered the evening sky. Corinne's father began gently rocking her. She was crying.\n\nThe winds and the force of the water began to tear the house apart. The groaning of the wood frame house as it began to break up was almost swallowed up by the sound of the wind. But Corinne's father heard it. He knew that the house would become no shelter at all in a little while.\n\n* * *\n\nThe huge tidal wave associated with the hurricane was building in the Gulf. It was not a tidal wave precisely; it had nothing at all to do with the tides. It was completely Felicia's doing. It was a long ridge of water almost twenty feet high, and it was moving along with the rest of the water pushed by Felicia. The wave hit at half-past eight. At that time, Corinne was aware that the house was breaking apart. The rush of the wave, the hurricane surge, completed the job. One moment, Corinne was wrapped in her father's arms. The next, the house was destroyed by a massive wave, and Corinne found herself thrashing about, trying to keep her head above the water. She couldn't find her father for a while. The house had been reduced to floating fragments on the black pool that had been the town of Arbier. After several seconds of floundering, Corinne saw her father. He wasn't far away. She struggled to him and supported him. She held onto him with all her strength and soothed him just as he had soothed her.\n\nShe found a large chunk of floating wreckage and climbed on, pulling her father. He gasped for breath. He tried to talk. Corinne hugged him closer. The wind and the rain made it hard to breathe. On a raft made from a part of someone's house, they floated wherever Felicia sent them.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You know what's happening?\" asked Chuck.\n\nPierson's jaws were clenched tightly. He was fighting a deadly battle against the storm. He didn't answer.\n\n\"I said, do you know what's happened? The winds seem to be getting stronger.\"\n\nPierson nodded. He knew that. He could feel Felicia trying to pull the truck out of his control. The muscles of his arms were beginning to feel weak from the strain. Pierson knew that in the personal competition between Hurricane Felicia and Paul Pierson, Felicia would be the victor, in straight sets.\n\n\"I don't like this,\" said Chuck. \"Shouldn't it start to get better by now? How long is this going to last?\"\n\nPierson was tired of hearing Chuck ask that question. \"I don't know,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Chuck, \"I know you don't know. You haven't been much of a plus to this operation.\"\n\nPierson turned for a moment to look at Chuck. \"All right,\" said Pierson, \"tell me where I screwed up.\"\n\n\"We ought to be in Linhart by now. We ought to be further than this. We're not even to the causeway yet.\"\n\n\"I'm paying so much attention to the left-to-right movement that I can't spare much time for the forward movement. But we're making progress.\"\n\nChuck stared out the side window. He couldn't see anything but water. Water on the window, blurring vision. Water on the road. Water piling up against the fronts of the lounges along the parish road. \"God, I want to get out of this,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"I'm tired of hearing about it,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"And I'm tired of hearing you complain.\"\n\n\" _Me_ complain!\" The wind had grown in intensity. They had to shout to make themselves heard.\n\n\"Never mind,\" said Chuck. \"How about if we stop at one of these roadhouses, break in, and wait for the hurricane to go away?\"\n\n\"Look,\" said Pierson, pointing to one of the lounges beside the road. He couldn't recognize which one it was, because the sign along with the roof, two walls, and part of a third had caved in and were starting to float about on the water. \"I have to drive through this.\"\n\n\"Just get me out of it,\" said Chuck.\n\nThe hurricane hit them broadside again, and once more Pierson fought against the immense force that was trying to topple him over into the drenched field on the left side of the road. The truck started to skid, and Pierson steered into it, bringing the truck around safely.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" cried Chuck. He was panic-stricken.\n\n\"Never mind that,\" said Pierson. He was watching what was happening ahead of him. His windshield wipers were almost of no value at all, but he could see clearly enough to know that Old Mole was in serious trouble. The tractor was headed almost directly toward the field to the left, while the trailer was pointed along the road. Old Mole brought the truck under control, but the wind pushed the trailer toward the field. This time, the Mole couldn't stop it. The wind won the contest. The trailer was shoved by the wind. As Pierson watched, the trailer began to tip slowly. For a second it seemed balanced on the wheels on the left side. Then, slowly, the trailer fell. It must have made a tremendous noise when it crashed to the ground, but Pierson, only a short distance behind the Mole, heard nothing but the roaring winds. The back of the trailer buckled, and the doors sprang open. The loot that the Mole had so carefully loaded into his van spilled out, all over the parish road. Some of the smaller items were carried along on the sheet of water that covered the road. Television sets broke, and there were displays of silent explosions. Loot was spread in all directions. The Mole had difficulty opening the door of his cab, which now pointed up to the black sky. Eventually, though, the Mole pulled himself out of the cab. The winds pushed him against his truck. He made motions with his hands to Pierson.\n\n\"Do we pick him up?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" asked Chuck. \"No, we don't pick him up. If he can't keep his damn truck on the road, then to hell with him.\"\n\nPierson didn't like the tone of Chuck's voice. It seemed to him that Chuck was getting a little crazy from the storm. He had reason, of course, thought Pierson. After all, the way he had been played for a sucker, and then having to ride through a hurricane without any goal in mind, and watching the other members of his gang falling like dinosaurs into the tar pits. Chuck was a little way around the bend, Pierson decided. It was an unpleasant conclusion.\n\n\"You want to see my pistol?\" asked Chuck.\n\n\"What?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"I have this gun, see, and I was wondering if you'd like to see it.\"\n\n\"Not particularly. Maybe tomorrow, when we have more leisure.\" Pierson was driving slowly by the frantically gesturing Old Mole. He left the trucker and his fallen rig behind and continued down the old parish road. They were about two miles from the causeway.\n\n\"The thing is,\" said Chuck, in a low voice, \"I already have the pistol out. It's a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. It's a nice piece.\"\n\n\"Could I ask a question?\" said Pierson. \"Because, I mean, we've been through a lot today, and I was just wondering why you have the gun out.\"\n\n\"It's the right time,\" said Chuck. \"That was Tom's old line, the bastard. He was always saying that there was a right time for everything.\"\n\n\"I'd like to meet this Tom some day,\" said Pierson. He was straining his eyes to see ahead.\n\n\"Maybe you will,\" said Chuck. \"Maybe you won't. Stop the truck.\"\n\n\"Stop the truck?\"\n\n\"Yeah, right,\" said Chuck, \"stop the truck.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I've got this pistol in my hand is why.\"\n\nPierson stopped the truck.\n\n\"Now get out,\" said Chuck.\n\n\"You're kidding,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"Out.\"\n\nPierson opened the door. It was very difficult. He had to push against the force of the wind. As he got out, the wind slammed the door shut again. Pierson was thrown to the side, like he was a sheet of old newspaper. He fell, sprawled awkwardly in the thick mud of a field. He saw the truck start up again and move slowly forward along the road. \"You're not getting far,\" said Pierson.\n\n* * *\n\nDarlaine sat in the dark motel room. There was no electricity, and there was no party.\n\n\"We should have known the lights would go out,\" said John Smith. He was lying alone on the floor, soaking wet.\n\n\"Look,\" said the day manager, \"it's just something I overlooked.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Darlaine, \"it seems to me that a hurricane is a damn fine time to start overlooking things.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do now?\" asked the black woman.\n\n\"I got a great idea,\" said Darlaine. \"We send somebody outside, and the rest of us pick an object in the room. Then we call the person back inside, and if he's still alive, he wins.\"\n\n\"Terrific,\" said John Smith.\n\nThe rain water was flowing in smooth streams along the window and from beneath the door, although they had stuffed towels there to soak the water up. The carpet in the room was drenched.\n\n\"How long before the eye?\" asked the day manager. \"I really want to see that.\"\n\n\"The guy on TV said the eye was due around eight or eight-thirty,\" said the black woman, \"but this whole storm was late, so I don't know what to think.\"\n\nThe winds never stopped their roaring. As the eye approached, the winds grew stronger. The walls of the motel started to shake.\n\n\"Oh boy,\" said John Smith, \"the motel's going to fall down.\"\n\n\"It ain't going to fall down,\" said the day manager. \"When they build down here, they build to stand up to these things.\"\n\nThe walls vibrated. With a tremendous crash, the window broke. A small rock had been flung through it by the wind. The rock smacked against a wall and fell to the floor.\n\n\"You know,\" said the day manager in a quiet voice, \"if that rock had hit\u2014\"\n\n\"Sure, sure,\" said Darlaine.\n\nThey had all become very frightened. The walls shook harder. The bellowing of the hurricane was louder, now that the window had broken. Rain came through the opening and quickly began to flood the room.\n\n\"Do we have anything to plug that window with?\" asked John Smith. No one answered.\n\nThere was a soft whimper from part of the darkness. Someone had been injured, cut by the flying glass. \"What's wrong?\" asked John Smith.\n\n\"I hurt,\" said the black woman.\n\nDarlaine stood up. The water was almost an inch deep in the room. It squished under her feet as she walked to the bathroom. She turned on the cold water tap, hat no water came out. Wonderful, she thought, just what we needed. She said nothing. She went back into the room and sat on the bed farthest from the window. She had thought to wet a washcloth for the black woman, but she couldn't. No water. She thought that it might be ironic. After a while she didn't care any more.\n\n\"You know,\" said John Smith in an anxious voice, \"this wall is starting to crack.\"\n\n\"You're crazy,\" said the day manager.\n\n\"I hurt,\" said the black woman. \"I hurt a lot.\"\n\n* * *\n\nPierson remained where he was, lying in the field. He had tried to stand up twice and been blown down both times. Across the road was one of the lounges. He thought about Chuck's idea. He thought about breaking into the bar. He gave it a lot of consideration, but he knew that if he had trouble standing up, he'd have a lot more trouble trying to cross the road, walking almost at a right angle to the force of the wind. The mud was just fine, for now. There was a lot of water on top of the mud, but Pierson could breathe if he turned his head away from the wind and raised it a little.\n\nAfter a couple of minutes, though, he realized that he was in a lot of danger. The rain fell so hard that the exposed parts of his body were red and painful. \"Well,\" he said to himself, \"let's get going.\" He tried to stand again. The mud sucked him back, and the wind pushed him flat. He tried to get to his knees; he succeeded, but the effort cost him a great deal of strength. He knelt in the field, his head hanging down, for another minute, while he tried to get air into his lungs. There seemed to be more water than air in the atmosphere around him, he thought.\n\nWith another effort, he got to his feet. The wind tried again to knock him down, but this time it failed. Step by step, Pierson crossed the road. He was wading through water that was getting deeper every minute.\n\nThe door to the barroom was boarded up. Pierson tried to rip the boards away. He couldn't. The rain stung him like millions of wasps. He was gasping and choking. He thought that he might very well die on that old parish road, unless he could find shelter soon.\n\nHe went around to the side of the bar. The building gave him some protection from the wind, but not much. He saw a small rectangular window set into the wall about a foot over his head. He looked around for a rock. There were only the white shells. He took off his shoe and broke the window. Then he reached up and tried to grab onto the bottom of the window frame. The rough edges of the broken glass ripped his hands. He couldn't pull himself up.\n\nPierson staggered blindly back to the road. Maybe someone would come by, he thought. Maybe the Marsh Rabbit had managed to maneuver his rig around Denny's, and would pick him up.\n\nPierson headed north, toward Linhart. He wanted to get away from the storm. He knew that the farther away from the Gulf he went, the safer he would be.\n\nPierson discovered that the rain, driven by the wind at such tremendous speed, made seeing impossible. He couldn't see. He was walking forward into God only knew what.\n\nHe remembered what Chuck had said. Drive into what you can't see. Pierson wondered if that held true for walking into a hurricane, too.\n\nThe winds had played with Pierson for a little while. Now, as the eye approached, so did the stronger winds. Pierson found it impossible to move. He fell to the ground and curled up. He was bleeding from many little cuts, his hands were torn by the glass. He could barely breathe. The water was rising to cover him like a blanket.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck was not a particularly good driver, even under the most perfect conditions. Now, he found it almost impossible to push the truck through the water that was building up in front of it. He was moving forward at about five miles an hour.\n\nHe was thinking about what would happen if he got safely to Linhart.\n\nSuddenly he felt a cold, shivery feeling. He had already admitted to himself that he might not make it to Linhart. He had to force himself into more positive thoughts.\n\nHe tried one. _When_ he got safely to Linhart, he could ditch the truck, go to an emergency shelter, and wait out the rest of the storm. Chuck looked through the windshield. There was a fraction of a second, as the windshield wiper made its arc, when he could see the road ahead. He had to use those bits of time wisely, or he would drive blindly into the muck and be stranded. It could not be long before the sheriff's office was alerted to the fact that Arbier had been sacked. The county mounties would be out, looking for the trucks. They would find Marsh Rabbit and Denny. A little further along they would find Old Mole. He wanted to be far enough away, possibly safe in a shelter, when that happened. As soon as the hurricane ended, and as soon as regular services began again, he wanted to get out of the parish, out of the state, out of the South altogether.\n\nHe gave no thought to Pierson.\n\nChuck wondered where Tom was. He had a fantasy about meeting Tom at some future time, somewhere, maybe Vegas or Los Angeles or a bar in New York. What would they have to say to each other? He practiced that for a little while. \"Tom!\" he said, pretending. \"Hey, where'd you go?\"\n\n\"To our rendezvous,\" Tom would say.\n\n\"What rendezvous?\" he would ask.\n\n\"Oh,\" Tom would say, \"did I forget to tell you? I'm terribly sorry.\"\n\nThe fantasy ended as the truck stalled out. The water had drowned the engine. Nothing happened when Chuck tried to start the truck up again. He had a very limited notion of what made cars or trucks run. If he went outside, something he really didn't want to do, he couldn't accomplish anything. He couldn't diagnose the problem, he couldn't fix it.\n\nChuck's eyes filled with tears. He was in a dead truck. The wind pelted the windshield of the vehicle with shells that made loud smacking noises. Chuck was very frightened. He sat quietly, his hands in his lap, and stared.\n\nThe idea came to him that if the sheriff's deputies found the three tractor-trailers, someone was bound to tell them about the twenty-footer. People in Arbier knew there were four trucks. A deputy himself had made out the permits for the trucks. He couldn't stay with the truck. As much as he hated to, as frightened as he was, he opened the door. The monstrous noise of the wind terrified him. He was shaking. He was crying.\n\nHe stepped out into the storm. He was knocked down. He cringed by the side of the truck, trying to breathe.\n**22**\n\nCorinne clung to her father as they swept along on the raft of wreckage. It seemed crazy to Corinne. They were sailing by houses, or parts of houses, that only a few hours ago were filled with people. It was like taking a drive or a pleasant walk, except they were borne on the crest of a deepening flood. The water swirled them out onto Ridge Street, and the water became even more cluttered with debris. Every once in a while, Corinne saw a human corpse, and then she would gasp and turn her head away. Her father was weak, she knew, from the experience of the house breaking up around him. She held him and sheltered his head from the rain. She said soothing things to him, things which she herself didn't believe.\n\nCorinne worried about Skip. He would still be at the station. He would be safe in Linhart. But what if he tried to find her? What if he went to all the emergency shelters and she wasn't there? What would he do? He'd call home, of course, but there was no one there to answer. Then he would get the idea that she had come to Arbier, to get her father, and that she might be in some sort of danger.\n\nWhat would Skip do then?\n\nWould he come down himself, against the hurricane, bulling his way through the winds and the rain and the flood waters? Would Skip do that for her? She smiled. She rocked her father's head in her lap, and told him not to talk. She just wanted to hold him and protect him. She felt surprisingly good. The thought of Skip coming to rescue her made her feel good. The act of comforting her father made her feel good. It was like having a child.\n\nWhen the wreckage turned, sometimes Corinne was exposed to the full intensity of the storm. Then the salt spray carried by the winds made it difficult to breathe. She was stung by the airborne objects that the hurricane threw at her. A tear fell down her cheek, not because she was frightened, but because of what the storm had done to Arbier. There was no more Arbier.\n\nSuddenly Corinne wondered if there would be a Linhart after she and her father were rescued. If not, where would they go? What would Skip do? What would her father do?\n\nCorinne was overwhelmed by the uncertainty. After a while the wreckage turned and the high part, the part Corinne was leaning against, protected her from the wind a little. She saw that the water was not very deep as she passed the ruined shops along Ridge Street. She was floating on a few feet of water. She knew that it would get deeper before the storm ended.\n\nShe floated by the Sea-Ray Motel. She stared at it. Some of the roof had been torn off. Some of the front wall had caved in.\n\nThe Sea-Ray. Carl Steinbrenner. The hurricane.\n\n* * *\n\nThe eye of the hurricane arrived at half-past eight, exactly on schedule. To Pierson, it was a strange feeling. Over a period of about ten minutes, the winds died down until there was hardly a breeze. He looked up, and the sky was dusky and clear. The air felt stifling, almost dead. There was complete silence for a while. After the constant shrieking of the hurricane, the silence hit Pierson. He found it hard to breathe.\n\nHe started down the road to Linhart. He had about a mile to the old causeway, and about fifteen miles after that to Linhart. How long would the calm last? He didn't know. Maybe an hour. He'd never make it.\n\nHe stopped running. He looked instead for shelter, any kind of shelter. There wasn't any. About a hundred yards farther down the old parish road was Bar's Mike and Grill. He ran for it.\n\nThe front of the bar was boarded up. He pulled at the boards with his bloody hands, but he couldn't work them loose. He went around to the side of the bar. There was a window in the front, boarded over long ago, judging by the warped wood and rusty nails. There was a window in the back, taped over. Pierson went to the back of the bar, and there was a wooden plank, left over from the boarding of the front door perhaps. Pierson carried the plank to the side of the building. He wondered if it was too wet to support him, even for the short time he needed. He broke the back window, this time making sure that he had smashed all the glass from the bottom. He leaned the plank against the side of the building. He stepped back a little, took a step and then vaulted onto the plank and up into the window. The plank cracked beneath him, but his head, shoulders, and arms were inside. He struggled for a few moments, and then he fell painfully into the dark men's room of Bar's Mike and Grill. There was a splash of water when he landed.\n\nPierson stood up. His arms, shoulders, and chest were lacerated and bleeding. He hurt worse than he had ever hurt before. He cleaned his wounds as best he could. He didn't know what else to do. There was no running water from the sink.\n\nPierson went out into the dark bar. There were a few inches of water on the floor. He went to the pay phone. He picked up the receiver and listened. There was silence. He dropped in two nickels. The silence continued. Pierson hung up the phone.\n\nThe bar was very dark and very quiet. Pierson thought about washing his wounds with alcohol, whiskey. Then he thought that maybe that could wait a while. He pulled a chair out from a table and sat down. His wounds ached and throbbed, but for the first time in several hours he felt at peace. He took a deep breath, one with no water in it, and smiled. He'd wait out the storm in Bar's Mike and Grill.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You should see it out here!\" said the day manager. The party inside was not excited by the sudden calm. \"Come on! Storm's over!\"\n\n\"Storm ain't over,\" said the black woman. Her voice was very low.\n\n\"It's clear up there,\" said the day manager. \"I can see stars starting to come out.\"\n\n\"My God,\" said Darlaine, \"what a way to spend an afternoon. I should have gone to a movie instead. And to think that I could be in Linhart, right now, listening to Skip Strahan, instead of lying here in the dark. I'm soaked.\"\n\n\"Take your clothes off,\" said John Smith, \"you'll catch cold.\"\n\n\"You come near me one more time, baby,\" said Darlaine, \"and you'll wish your father had stuck to jerking off.\"\n\nJohn Smith didn't say anything. There was absolute silence in the motel room.\n\n\"Why don't you come out?\" said the day manager. \"There's not too much damage really. We got a couple of feet of water and some of the motel is down, but we came out of it all right.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThere was no one to see it, but a pile of water twenty feet high was swelling and rolling toward the beach. It crashed on the shore. The pier disappeared, and the old bait shop. They disappeared as though they had never existed. The water raced into Arbier, smashing buildings, tearing down poles and trees. The flood spent its fury quickly, but the water still moved on, like a fast-running river, down the channels of the streets. Corinne's raft was picked up and carried at a fierce speed and deposited in the cane field between the old parish road and Hanson Highway.\n\nThe water flooded the motel. There was no warning. One moment the water was not quite knee-deep, the next moment the water was chest-high. The party in the motel screamed in fear and horror as the water swept in on them. They sputtered as the water filled the room. Then the water settled. It even receded a bit. The day manager had been pushed against the outside wall of the motel. When he had caught his breath, he called through the window, \"Everybody all right?\"\n\n\"I'm okay,\" said Darlaine, \"it just took me by surprise.\"\n\n\"I'm all right,\" said the black woman.\n\n\"What about John Smith?\" asked the day manager.\n\nDarlaine waded slowly through the water. It reached to her armpits. She went over to where John Smith had been sitting. Her foot bumped against him. \"He's, uh, he's still under the water,\" she said.\n\n* * *\n\nCorinne took a deep breath after the flood spun her all the way out of the town, halfway to the bayou. She cradled her father's head in her lap. She prayed and was grateful that they had come through it all right. She wanted to be rescued. She had a disquieting thought. She was between the two main roads. Perhaps, in the growing darkness, rescue teams might not see her. She didn't know what to do. The worst was over, and she was glad of that. She rocked her father and whispered to him.\n\n* * *\n\n\"You better come in here,\" said Darlaine.\n\nThere was a distant roar from the south. The wind picked up again. What light there had been in the dusky sky disappeared as black clouds moved in. The wind grew stronger as quickly as it had diminished during the approach of the eye. Before the day manager could get inside, the winds were already hurricane strength. There were many objects floating on the surface of the water, and the renewed winds picked them up and hurled them around like shells from a mortar. A pink plastic lawn flamingo that had once decorated the courtyard of the Sea-Ray hit the day manager on the back of the head. He fell, stunned, beneath the water. No one noticed.\n\nThe hurricane freshened and grew stronger. Besides the force of the winds, the storm now had the added impetus of its forward motion. The winds were coming in the opposite direction from the first part of the storm. They would last just as long and do just as much damage. They might cost more lives though, because despite all the warnings on television, radio, and in the newspapers, people insisted on going outside when the eye of the storm passed. Like the day manager, many of these people were caught unsheltered when the storm took up again.\n\n* * *\n\nThe hurricane surge reached as far as Bar's Mike and Grill, but by then it had traveled nearly fifteen miles inland. The water level in the bar raised a few inches. Pierson barely noticed. He was in a lot of pain.\n\nHe heard the increasing howl of the winds and nodded. \"Yeah,\" he said, \"here it comes. Second half kick-off.\" He wondered how Maddie was. She must be in a shelter, he told himself. But then he had the frightening idea that she would have one of her insane notions and decide to stay behind and defend Arbier. Would she really do that? he wondered. No. No. She was in a shelter, probably with her father. She was probably running the place. He smiled. His whole body hurt, but he still smiled. He wished the second half of the storm would end. He wanted to see Maddie. Thinking of her, he lost consciousness and his head fell forward onto the table.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck was in a lot of trouble. He couldn't stand pain, and that's all the hurricane offered him: pain. Physical pain and mental pain. He walked along the old parish road until it came to an end, where the old causeway used to be. Now there was no causeway. Bayou Chien Mort had swollen and torn the causeway from its moorings. There was no way to get across the bayou except by the newer, higher, concrete causeway along Hanson Highway. Chuck thought for a moment. He considered his position. He knew that the hurricane would begin again and attack from behind him. But his goal was still Linhart, and to get to Linhart, he had to cross the bayou. That meant getting to Hanson Highway.\n\nChuck frowned. How could he get to the highway? One, he said to himself, I can walk all the way back down the old parish road, passing as I go Denny, Old Mole, and Marsh Rabbit. Or I could walk cross-country, through the muck of the cane fields, to the highway. That seems to be the only thing to do.\n\nHe started off across the field. He was perhaps a hundred yards from the old parish road when the hurricane winds began again. He shouted and cried. The stinging of the rain was making him insane with the torment. The storm would last another two hours.\n\nIf Chuck had been a Louisiana native, if he had lived in Arbier all his life, he might have recognized the water hyacinths when he saw them. But he didn't. To him, through the heavy veil of rain, the plants looked like some kind of flowering thing growing in the earth. He stepped right off the mucky ground into a weed-choked bayou cut-off. The water was up to Chuck's chin. He struggled forward, but the water got deeper. He stopped. The water was old, stagnant, and foul-smelling. The hurricane's roar and the pelting of the raindrops tortured him. He walked back a step, and then another, and he felt the bank of the cut-off at his back. He turned, hardly able to breathe, and tried to clamber back up onto the field. It took a great deal of effort. He pushed himself up, but the muck slid away as he tried to hoist himself out of the cut-off. His feet were sinking in the muddy bottom. He knew that he had to get out of the water or he would be dead in a few minutes. He raised one foot from the mire and kicked a foothold in the cut-off's bank. Then he pulled the other foot free and tried to hoist himself out. He got both elbows onto the ground, but his foot was stuck fast in the cutoff's bank. He wrenched it and screamed with the pain, but he was able to wrestle his way out of the water. He stopped, prone in the field, with water pooling around his head. He was exhausted. He could barely move his arms and legs.\n\nSomething told him that unless he found shelter, he would die of exposure. He was already worn out just from the work of trying to breathe. The hurricane was throwing things at him, and a rock or stick hurled at the speed of the winds would smash his head to an unrecognizable mass. He should have stayed with the truck, he decided. It was safer inside the truck. He stood up painfully. The wind pushed him down again. He decided to crawl through the deep mud, through the water that was standing on it. The mud wouldn't let him go without a struggle. Every yard forward on his hands and knees was a struggle. It was the hardest struggle of his life, and he was certain that it could be his last. Of that, he had no doubts at all.\n\nHe thought this just before he tumbled down the embankment and into the midnight dark waters of Bayou Chien Mort.\n**23**\n\nIt was almost midnight, and the hurricane had moved on. Felicia would continue to make her presence felt however. Behind her trailed a mass of rain squalls and huge thunderstorms. But the wind had dropped to forty miles an hour, and Sheriff Boshardt made the decision that rescue operations should begin.\n\n\"Wait until morning,\" said the head of emergency operations in Linhart.\n\n\"We can't wait until morning,\" said the sheriff. He was thinking about Arbier, people trapped there, people who had climbed to rooftops to escape the rising water. He was thinking about the people of the marshes, the real Cajuns. These people needed rescuing, and a matter of hours might make all the difference between life and death.\n\nSheriff Boshardt was also thinking about his wife. For the first time in his career, he let a personal consideration influence him in making a decision. But, he told himself, there were enough other reasons to rationalize the decision.\n\nAn emergency rescue vehicle started out from Linhart, pulling a trailer with six boats. Following the vehicle were six cars of the parish sheriff's office. They drove down Hanson Highway. The darkness hid the destruction that Felicia had caused. Because it was near midnight, the rescue workers did not notice that the cane had been flattened and ruined, that the cultivated crops were now lifeless stalks in rows of muck that stretched across the parish. These things would be seen at first light, and they would be seen in silence, because the significance of the destruction was too evident to be spoken of. The governor of the state of Louisiana would fly over St. Didier Parish in a helicopter. He would make a speech about the courageous Cajuns and their heritage. He would ask for aid. The President in Washington would declare St. Didier and surrounding parishes disaster areas, and federal funds would be used to rebuild part of the parish. But there wouldn't be enough money, it wouldn't come soon enough, and it couldn't replace what had been lost.\n\nThe emergency rescue vehicle drove as far south as the fork with the old parish road. From there on the water was too deep. The six boats were unloaded. Each carried one man with a searchlight and another man who rowed and steered the boat.\n\n\"I'd like to go in the first one,\" said Boshardt.\n\n\"Certainly,\" said the deputy who was climbing in. He gave Boshardt the searchlight.\n\n\"Come on,\" the sheriff said. He waited until another boat had been unloaded and manned, and he ordered it to follow him. \"The Sea-Ray is just a couple of hundreds yards from here, right? There were people there. Let's pick them up.\"\n\n\"Check,\" said the man in Boshardt's boat. They moved across the water, with only the slight noise of the oars splashing. The rain continued to fall, and the sky southward, over the Gulf, was lit almost continuously by lightning. Every few minutes there was a loud crash of thunder. Sometimes the rain began to fall especially hard, but the rescue workers tried to ignore it.\n\nIn the lead boat, Boshardt swung the searchlight around until he saw what he was looking for. The Sea-Ray Motel. It was demolished. It would be a long time before the Friday-night couples checked into it again. There was virtually no part of the motel that didn't show some damage. Not a room was left intact. Boshardt played the light along the motel, from one end to the other. The light picked out two people, who had climbed the wreckage of the building and were clinging to a part of the roof. \"Move in closer,\" said the sheriff.\n\nThe boat made its way as close to the motel as it could. Boshardt looked up at his wife and the black woman. \"You climb down,\" he called. \"We'll get you in the boats, and we'll get you out of here.\"\n\n\"Goddamn you!\" shouted Darlaine at her husband. \"It had to be you, didn't it? It had to be you, the hero, right? It had to be you who came and got me!\"\n\n\"Come on down, honey,\" he said.\n\n\"You take this black bitch away,\" said Darlaine in a shrill voice, \"but me, goddamn it, I'll wait up here until Christmas before I let you take me away.\"\n\nBoshardt turned around carefully in the boat. He called back to the boat that had followed him. \"Hey,\" he said, \"you just take Mrs. Boshardt and get her back to the cars. We'll handle the other woman.\"\n\nDarlaine was still screeching at her husband, but Boshardt had stopped listening. The black woman climbed carefully down, and the sheriff helped her into the boat. She was badly cut and her blouse was soaked with blood. \"Let's get her back fast, buddy. She's going to a hospital.\" Boshardt's boat turned and went back to the cars on Hanson Highway. The black woman was transferred to a patrol car, which turned and sped to Linhart. The sheriff ignored Darlaine's frantic, hate-filled screaming.\n\n\"Let's see what the town looks like,\" he said, and his boat started down the channel that had been Ridge Street. Boshardt had seen this picture before, but it still sickened him. How long would it take for the water to drain away? How long before the streets were no longer filled with the vilest smelling mud? Before the flies and corpses hidden away and dead carcasses were removed? How long would it be before there was an Arbier again?\n\nThe rain fell, and the forty mile an hour winds made the rowing difficult. Two of the boats had outboard motors, but the rain, and the chance that the rain would worsen, made the rowboats a better choice.\n\nBoshardt traveled up Ridge Street. The damage done by the looters had been hidden by the water. But the water would go away, and the people would come back, and the repairs would be made, and there would be another hurricane some day.\n\n\"Let's go back,\" he said to his rower. \"Take me back to the cars.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" They turned in the middle of Ridge Street and headed north.\n\n* * *\n\nA patrol car, blue lights flashing and siren sounding, made its way up the old parish road. The siren woke Pierson, and he came to with a start. It was completely dark in the bar, darker than before. But it was quiet. The only sounds he heard were a gentle tapping of raindrops and the siren. The hurricane was over, he decided. He had slept through the second half of the storm. He stood up, and his body, cut and slashed by the glass, hurt. He found that he couldn't stand up completely straight. He could hobble a little, hunched over like an old man.\n\nHe took a chair with him into the men's room. He stood on the chair and carefully slid through the broken window. He cut himself again, but not as badly. He hobbled as quickly as he could around the side of Bar's Mike and Grill. The patrol car had passed the bar and gone farther up the old parish road. Then it stopped, backed up, and turned around. The causeway was out. There was nowhere else for the patrol car to go. Pierson stood in the middle of the road. The patrol car slowed down on the return trip. It stopped just in front of Pierson. A deputy inside slid across the front seat and opened the door. \"Get in,\" said the deputy.\n\n\"Am I under arrest?\" asked Pierson.\n\n\"No,\" said the deputy, \"you're all cut up and bloody. We'll get you up to Linhart and get those cuts taken care of.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Pierson, as the patrol car went around the tractor-trailer rigs that looked like huge sea creatures lying dead on some beach.\n\n\"There were these truckers\u2014\" said Pierson.\n\n\"We know, we know. You'd better believe we know.\"\n\nPierson was anxious. Maybe the truckers would tell the deputies that Pierson had been part of their gang.\n\n\"We're looking for a fourth guy,\" said the deputy.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Pierson. Oh, God, hey, he thought.\n\n\"Drove a twenty-foot rental truck. Chuck Smith. I made out the damn permits myself. I feel great, I can tell you.\"\n\n\"One good thing,\" said Pierson, \"he can't have gone too far in the hurricane.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said the deputy, \"and it's still raining and it's still heavy winds out there.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Pierson. He suddenly realized that the three trucks held most of the contents of most of the stores in Arbier. The looting of the town had actually saved a lot of things that would otherwise have been ruined.\n\n\"We'll get him,\" said the deputy. \"If the storm didn't get him first.\"\n\nPierson thought about Chuck. That stupid lerp, he thought. Set up by Tom. Couldn't even figure out that he was the fall guy, set up to be eliminated in a phony operation he'd never understand. No gang in New Orleans. Maybe no gang at the nuclear generator either. Pierson laughed out loud, but there was no humor in it. Chuck, the eternal fall guy. Pierson wondered if he would ever know exactly what Tom's real scheme was, if the news would ever trickle down to St. Didier Parish. Something, maybe nearby, maybe far away. Good old Chuck; just a fall guy, just a diversion? Pierson remembered how proud and confident Chuck had sounded. Where was he now? Dead? About to be captured by the sheriff's men? Dead, a fall guy; captured, a fall guy. And Tom had rid himself of his most expendable colleague. Pierson wondered what kind of man Tom was. For one thing, he didn't mind flinging old partners into the garbage if he needed or wanted to. No, thought Pierson, as he shifted painfully on the seat, I can do without meeting Tom.\n\nBut good old Chuck. Boy, was he dumb.\n\nThe deputy stopped where the old parish road met Hanson Highway. There were three other people who had been rescued. The deputy took all four, including Pierson, to an emergency shelter in Linhart.\n\n\"What do you think those looters were trying to do?\" asked Pierson, his expression displaying curious innocence.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said the deputy as they arrived in Linhart. \"The way I see it, it's the old thing about the good guys against the bad guys. Get out here. This school is one of the shelters. You'll get coffee and hot soup and like that.\"\n\n\"Thanks a lot,\" said Pierson. \"And if it comes to the good guys against the bad guys, I think I'll take the good guys less three points. That's giving them the home field advantage.\"\n\nThe deputy smiled. \"See you later,\" he said, and he headed back down Hanson Highway. Pierson and the three other refugees went into the shelter.\n\n* * *\n\nMost of the people who had remained in Arbier, and who were still alive, had been moved up to Linhart. After some time, a rescue worker caught Corinne in his beam of light. He called to her.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she called back. \"You'll have to come and get me, though. I don't know if I can walk through all that mud, and my father is a little weak too. We've been sitting here for hours.\"\n\n\"Be right there,\" said the man. He walked across the field to Corinne's little shelter. Each step was difficult. The mud clung to the man's boots, and with each step he pulled his foot up with a loud sucking noise.\n\n\"I don't think I can make it through that,\" said Corinne.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" said the rescue worker, who was now only a small distance away. \"I'll help you, then I'll come back and help your father.\"\n\n\"Take my father first, please?\" asked Corinne. \"The hurricane was hard on him.\"\n\nThe rescue worker bent down to help the old man up. Corinne's father didn't move. His arms were locked. The rescue worker felt how cold the old man was. \"Ma'am,\" he said, \"your father's been dead for a long time. I'm really sorry.\"\n\nCorinne looked up at the rescue worker. She felt very strange inside. She remembered the feeling she had experienced when she floated by the Sea-Ray, the feeling that the hurricane was a punishment for her meeting with Carl Steinbrenner. But this. . . .\n\nCorinne screamed. She scrambled away from the corpse of her father. It wasn't so bad that Corinne had been forced to go through the hurricane; but her father's life. . . .\n\nSurely Carl Steinbrenner wasn't worth _that_ much.\n\n* * *\n\nBoshardt sat in an emergency shelter, drinking coffee and eating a sandwich. He felt disgusted. Ever since the hurricane had started, there had been nothing but frustration and failure for the sheriff. He wanted to quit. He wanted to quit so badly that if there had been a way, he would have gone off in the night and left all this behind. But he had always lived in Arbier. Forty-five years. And he knew that he was capable of standing up to the emergency. But the real truth was that he didn't want to.\n\nHe wanted to go home. The mental image of Arbier under water, with a searchlight playing on the boarded-up shops, the ruined homes, made Boshardt cringe. He felt responsible. He wasn't, of course, but that didn't take the feeling away.\n\n\"All right,\" he muttered, \"let's get the show on the road.\" He had to go question the truckers who had looted the town. He had to go out to the marshes, to check the people in the back. But the minimal roads through there would be under water for days.\n\n\"Who do we have here?\" he asked.\n\n\"Theriot, Auguste, and me,\" said the deputy.\n\n\"Right. Tell Theriot to get his car and follow me.\"\n\nSheriff Boshardt put on his flat-brimmed hat and went out of the emergency shelter in the school. He was chagrined to see that it was still raining and that the winds were still so high. Theriot came running out of the building. As soon as he saw the sheriff, he put on the hat he was carrying.\n\n\"Come on, Marty,\" said the sheriff. \"They're holding the truckers where they caught them, and I want to get to them before those dumb-ass deputies spoil everything.\"\n\n\"All right, boss,\" said Theriot. He got in his car and followed the sheriff.\n\nAs they drove, the sheriff thought about how the hurricane had created so many problems that had nothing to do with a freak of weather. Like Darlaine\u2014Dorothy. What was their relationship going to be like in the morning? What about the owners of the ransacked stores? Could they sort through the stuff in the trucks?\n\nBoshardt thought. The night was dark, the rain made the driving hazardous. Boshardt was being particularly careful. For the most part, the storm was over. But it was foolish to think that it was completely over. Felicia still had some kick to her.\n\nThey slowed and came to a stop about halfway between the causeway on Hanson Highway and the town limits of Arbier. A gust of wind hit the sheriff as he got out of the car. Yeah, he thought, Felicia hasn't finished. It may rain for days. He walked toward the deputies who were holding the three truckers. He took about three steps and then heard a loud, crackling sound. One of the deputies pointed behind Boshardt. The sheriff turned and saw that a powerline had broken, and that it was sparking and spitting on top of Theriot's patrol car.\n\n\"Oh, God!\" cried Boshardt. He ran toward Theriot, gesturing, shouting that Theriot shouldn't get out of the car. He was fine, sitting up on four rubber tires, as long as he stayed in the car.\n\nTheriot didn't understand what the sheriff was trying to say. He grabbed the door handle. The door of the patrol car opened, and Theriot put one foot out onto the wet pavement. Theriot's body jerked. The door swung farther, and the deputy's corpse fell to the ground. Rain ran along his body.\n\nThe sheriff turned away. He had seen too much. He had felt too much. He went to one of the deputies to tell him to call Linhart, because another powerline was down and because they had a deputy dead in the line of duty.\n\n\"Can you handle that, deputy?\" asked Boshardt.\n\n\"Sure,\" said the young man. His voice was very shaky.\n\n\"Fine,\" said Boshardt, \"because I believe I'm about through for the evening.\" He walked back to his car. It was difficult, and he leaned into the winds which tried to knock him down. Not this time, he thought. You've had your chance at me. Not this time.\n\nMaybe next time.\n\n* * *\n\nSkip Strahan woke up. It was dark in the room. He stood up and walked back toward the studio. He met a newsroom director on the way.\n\n\"Fifteen minutes, Skip,\" said the director.\n\n\"Fifteen minutes, what?\" asked Strahan. He was feeling very groggy.\n\n\"Fifteen minutes, you go on. You tell people what the storm's doing, where it's gone. You tell them not to do stupid things, like that. You know.\"\n\n\"Storm?\" asked Strahan.\n\n\"You slept through most of it. Sheila covered for you. We couldn't wake you up. Like you were drugged or something.\"\n\nStrahan felt his face flush. \"My God,\" he said. \"Look, Hal, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Forget it,\" said the director. \"We covered, like I said. But look, Skip, uh, I think you might be in some trouble when this is all over.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Strahan. He was worrying about Corinne. \"I have to go,\" he said.\n\n\"Fifteen minutes,\" said the director. \"Less, now.\"\n\n\"Then I go,\" said Strahan. \"My wife.\"\n\n\"Sure, Skip. After you get off.\"\n\nSkip's stomach muscles tightened as he thought about Corinne. He went back to get his blazer. His hands shook as he poured out a few tranquilizers. He stared at them. He slowly poured them back into the vial.\n\n\"Ten minutes, Skip,\" called the director.\n\n* * *\n\nPierson was resting on a cot. His wounds had been treated and dressed. He was resting. He felt warm and good.\n\n\"Hey, Pierson, you!\"\n\nPierson looked up. It was Maddie.\n\n\"I was waiting to see how long it took for you to brought yourself here,\" she said.\n\n\"You're talking funny,\" said Pierson. He had been given an injection to ease his pain, and everything seemed a little vague. A very good vague.\n\n\"That's because with all these people, sometimes I speak English, sometimes I speak French, sometimes in between,\" she said. She was smiling. She was very happy.\n\n\"Did you have a nice hurricane?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nice,\" she said. \"Not nice-nice, but nice.\"\n\n\"That's nice,\" said Pierson.\n\n\"You fooling me? I don't want to be fooled with.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Pierson. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"I am aiding my fellow man,\" she said.\n\n\"How are you doing that?\"\n\n\"I don't give orders, I follow them,\" she said, and she was very proud.\n\n\"Will you take care of me?\" he asked.\n\nMaddie frowned. \"Why should I?\" she asked.\n\n\"Look at me,\" he said. \"I'm bandaged and hurt and weak from loss of blood and everything.\"\n\n\"How did you lose your blood?\" asked Maddie.\n\n\"I crawled through the window of Bar's Mike and Grill.\"\n\n\"That will teach you to stay out of barrooms,\" she said.\n\n\"Even your father's?\"\n\n\"My father doesn't have a bar,\" she said. \"He runs an establishment.\"\n\n\"Right, I forgot.\"\n\n\"You'll never guess what I'm going to be,\" she said.\n\n\"What? I won't even guess. Just tell me.\"\n\nMaddie drew herself up and said softly, \"A nun. Or a nurse. A nurse-nun.\"\n\n\"I want to go to sleep, Maddie.\"\n\n\"You go to sleep, then. There are plenty of other people here.\"\n\n\"You still like me?\" he asked.\n\nShe frowned, then nodded. \"Go to sleep,\" she said quietly. \"By the way, you missed the tornado.\"\n\nPierson's eyes grew wide. \"Tornado?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Maddie. \"They sometimes come with hurricanes. Not big tornadoes, though. I wish I'd seen it.\"\n\nThe deputy who brought Pierson into the station some time before stopped by. \"We got those truckers, all right,\" he said. \"They tried to walk across the cane fields between the old parish road and Hanson Highway. Still looking for the fourth guy, though. I think he's lost for good.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Pierson, thinking of Chuck.\n\n\"We just lost a deputy now, too.\"\n\n\"The constant battle of good guys against the bad guys,\" said Pierson. \"The good guys won, all right, but they didn't cover the point spread.\"\n\nThe deputy nodded seriously. He was remembering Theriot. \"You take it easy,\" he said.\n\n\"I've got a new nurse-nun to watch over me,\" said Pierson. \"Maddie, what's a marsh rabbit?\"\n\nMaddie made a face. \"You know m'sieu muskrat? You know they skin him for fur? The part that's not fur, they eat. That's marsh rabbit.\"\n\nPierson shuddered. \"Blech,\" he said.\n\n\"You go to sleep,\" said Maddie.\n\n* * *\n\nChuck scrabbled and fought his way to the surface of the churning river that had been Bayou Chien Mort. He was being carried along, and it was all he could do to keep his head above water. After some time, Chuck grabbed the roots of a large live oak tree and hung there. There was something big floating toward him. It was long and square. When he lost his grip on the roots, he made a grab for the floating thing. It bumped up against the bank of the bayou. Chuck struggled onto the thing. Then the strength of the winds made it difficult to breathe, and the constant pelting of the rain hurt so much. . . .\n\nChuck's arms clung to the floating object. He awoke, and the hurricane was over. It was still raining, and still windy, but it was more like a regular shower. The sky was lighter. He wondered if it was morning.\n\nChuck's fingers found depressions carved into the surface of the thing he was riding. They were letters. They spelled \"Gaudier.\" There were dates. \"My God,\" said Chuck, his voice low and hoarse. \"Oh Lord, I spent the night on a tomb.\" That fact frightened him and amused him at the same time. A tomb. He had been rescued by a tomb. He owed a debt to whoever this Gaudier was. Chuck tried to find humor in the situation. After a short while, after he realized that his arms were too tired to hang on much longer, Chuck admitted that there wasn't much humor.\n\nHe had no idea how a tomb came to be floating in the bayou, but he wasn't going to question his good fortune. The floating tomb came to rest against the bank of the bayou, where the gnarled roots of a tree made an obstacle. Chuck took a couple of deep breaths. He was glad that the hurricane had ended. He was glad that he was still alive\u2014thanks to old Gaudier\u2014and, with luck, he might even get away from the cops.\n\nOther things had sought shelter from the storm, and now one crept slowly toward him. Chuck clung to the tomb. The snake crawled slowly, slowly onto the tomb. It stopped just at the name on the tomb's occupant. The snake raised its head. There was a single row of dull yellow scales on its throat and belly. Chuck had seen a snake like that before.\n\nIt crawled slowly toward him.\n**24**\n\n****\n\n_It was in Chicago, Illinois, twenty-two years before, and it was during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's second term._\n\n_Chuck was ten years old, in the fifth grade. On this particular day, his class and two of the other fifth grade classes were taking a field trip. Chuck liked that a lot. It meant getting out of class, not having to turn in assignments\u2014assignments he hadn't done the night before, because he knew they were all going on a field trip._\n\n_The class went to the zoo. They had a lot of fun, but the teachers looked a little weary from trying to hold their classes together. Some of the boys wanted to watch the sea lions, long after the rest of the class had moved on to the large cats. Chuck liked the cats. Lion, tiger, panther, leopard. They paced their cages restlessly. It made Chuck wonder what it would be like if they ever got loose. All that stored-up energy let loose. Chuck followed his class, but as they left the cats, he turned around and shuddered._\n\n_Mrs. Fry moved her class as though they were a flock of sheep. She picked three or four of the good kids to stand in the front of the mob, and the bad kids followed behind. That was because the bad kids knew that if they didn't follow along, they might not have any more field trips._\n\n_Chuck was bored with their guide, who gave the class all kinds of information about all the animals they were seeing. Mrs. Fry hadn't said that they were going to have a test on it, so Chuck wasn't listening. The guide went on about where this antelope lived, and what this sort of furry thing ate, and what that bird did during mating season. Chuck didn't care at all. If Mrs. Fry did give them a test, he could always complain that they didn't have a warning and it wasn't fair. That was the way Chuck was._\n\n_When they came to the Reptile House, however, Chuck was fascinated. He loved looking at the alligators and crocodiles. The guide told the classes how to tell them apart. One had a pointed snout, one had a blunt snout. For the rest of his life, Chuck would remember that, but he never remembered which animal had which snout._\n\n_The girls hated the snakes, but the boys loved them, probably because the girls hated them. The guide laughed. It sounded like a practiced laugh, because he must have guided grade school classes like this for years, and the boys and girls always reacted the same way._\n\n_The guide told an assistant to remove a snake from its glass case._\n\n_\"Here, boys and girls,\" said the guide. \"I'm going to pass this snake around. Don't be afraid. See? It's not slimy. It's not dangerous at all.\" The girls shied away from touching the snake, but the boys were anxious to see what the thing felt like. It was a disappointment. Chuck held the snake for a few seconds; the snake stuck its tongue out at him._\n\n_After the snake was returned to its case, the guide showed them other snakes. He showed them dangerous ones, like the boa constrictor, which didn't look like it could crush much of anything. The coral snake was small but deadly. The cobra was interesting._\n\n_\"What's that one?\" asked Chuck._\n\n_\"That's a water moccasin, son,\" said the guide. \"Don't worry. You'll probably never see one. Not as long as you live.\"_\nAll rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nCopyright \u00a9 1976 by George Alec Effinger\n\nCover design by Open Road Integrated Media\n\nISBN: 978-1-4976-0570-1\n\nThis edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.  \n180 Maiden Lane  \nNew York, NY 10038  \nwww.openroadmedia.com\n\n**GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER**\n\nFROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA\n\nFind a full list of our authors and\n\ntitles at www.openroadmedia.com\n\nFOLLOW US\n\n@OpenRoadMedia\n\n# Table of Contents\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nEpigraphs\n\nPART ONE: The Calm\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nPART TWO: The Tropical Storm\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nPART THREE: The Hurricane\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nChapter 15\n\nPART FOUR: Felicia\n\nChapter 16\n\nChapter 17\n\nChapter 18\n\nChapter 19\n\nChapter 20\n\nChapter 21\n\nChapter 22\n\nChapter 23\n\nChapter 24\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \nTable of Contents\n\nTitle Page\n\nDedication\n\nPraise\n\nPrologue\n\nOne\n\nTwo\n\nThree\n\nFour\n\nFive\n\nSix\n\nSeven\n\nEight\n\nNine\n\nTen\n\nEleven\n\nTwelve\n\nThirteen\n\nFourteen\n\nFifteen\n\nSixteen\n\nSeventeen\n\nEighteen\n\nNineteen\n\nTwenty\n\nTwenty-one\n\nTwenty-two\n\nTwenty-three\n\nTwenty-four\n\nTwenty-five\n\nTwenty-six\n\nTwenty-seven\n\nTwenty-eight\n\nTwenty-nine\n\nThirty\n\nThirty-one\n\nAbbreviations in Notes\n\nNotes\n\nBibliography\n\nList of Plates\n\nAcknowledgements\n\nIndex\n\nCopyright Page\n_by the same author_\n\nIT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL: GREAT EQUATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE (editor)\n\nTo my mother and the memory of my late father\n[T]he amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.\n\nJOHN STUART MILL, _On Liberty_ , 1869\n\nWe are nothing without the work of others our predecessors,  \nothers our teachers, others our contemporaries. Even when, in  \nthe measure of our inadequacy and our fullness, new insight  \nand new order are created, we are still nothing without others.  \nYet we are more.\n\nJ. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, Reith Lecture, 20 December 1953\nPrologue\n\n[A] good deal of unkindness and selfishness on the part of parents towards children is not generally followed by ill consequences to the parents themselves. They may cast a gloom over their children's lives for many years.\n\nSAMUEL BUTLER, _The Way of All Flesh,_ 1903\n\nAll it took was a single glass of orange juice laced with hydrochloric acid. A few minutes later, it was clear that his digestive problems were due to a chronic deficiency of stomach acid. For months, he had been admitted to hospital every few weeks to be fed vitamins intravenously, but the doctors had no idea why his digestion was so poor. Now, following the orange-juice experiment, a laboratory test on the chemical contents of his stomach confirmed the conclusion that his stomach contained far too little acid. The simple prescription of a pill to be taken after every meal ended almost eight decades of digestive problems. As a result, Kurt Hofer, the friend who suggested the experiment and made the correct diagnosis, became the reluctant health guru to Paul Dirac, one of the most revered - and strangest - figures in the history of science.\n\nHofer and Dirac both worked at Florida State University but otherwise appeared to have little in common. Hofer - just over forty years of age - was a top-drawer cell biologist, a spirited raconteur who told all comers of his early family life among Austrian mountain farmers and his moment of cinematic glory as a well-paid extra in _The Sound of Music._ Hofer's eyes glittered when he told his stories, his thickly accented voice swooped and surged for emphasis, his hands chopped and shaped the air as if it were dough. Even in this lively company, Dirac was unresponsive, speaking only when he had a pressing question to ask or, less often, a comment to make. One of his favourite phrases was: 'There are always more people who prefer to speak than to listen.'\n\nDirac was one of the pre-eminent pioneers of quantum mechanics, the modern theory of atoms, molecules and their constituents. Arguably the most revolutionary scientific breakthrough of the  twentieth century, quantum mechanics uprooted centuries-old prejudices about the nature of reality and what can, in principle, be known for certain about the universe. The theory also proved to be of enormous utility: it underpins the whole of modern microelectronics and has answered many basic questions that had long defied straightforward answers, such as why electricity flows easily through wire but not through wood. Yet Dirac's eyes glazed over during talk of the practical and philosophical consequences of quantum physics: he was concerned only with the search for the fundamental laws that describe the longest strands in the universe's fabric. Convinced that these laws must be mathematically beautiful, he once - uncharacteristically - hazarded the unverifiable conjecture that 'God is a mathematician of a very high order.'\n\nThe ambitions of Kurt Hofer were more modest than Dirac's. Hofer had made his name in cancer and radiation research by carefully carrying out experiments and then trying to find theories to explain the results. This was the conventional, bottom-up technique of the English naturalist Charles Darwin, who saw his mind 'as a machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts'. Dirac, a classic example of a top-down thinker, took the opposite approach, viewing his mind as a device for conjuring laws that explained experimental observations. In one of his greatest achievements, Dirac used this method to arrange what had seemed an unlikely marriage - between quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity - in the form of an exquisitely beautiful equation to describe the electron. Soon afterwards, with no experimental clues to prompt him, he used his equation to predict the existence of antimatter, previously unknown particles with the same mass as the corresponding particles of matter but with the opposite charge. The success of this prediction is, by wide agreement, one of most outstanding triumphs of theoretical physics. Today, according to the cosmologists' standard theory of the early universe - supported by a wealth of observational evidence - antimatter made up half the material generated at the beginning of the Big Bang; from this perspective, Dirac was the first person to glimpse the other half of the early universe, entirely through the power of reason.\n\nHofer liked to compare Dirac with Darwin: both English, both uncomfortable in the public eye, both responsible for changing the way scientists think about the universe. A decade before, Hofer was  amazed when he heard that Dirac was to move from one of the world's leading physics departments, at the University of Cambridge in England, to take up a position at Florida State University, whose physics department was ranked only eighty-third in the USA. When the possibility of his appointment was first mooted, there were murmurings among the professors that it was unwise to offer a post to an old man. The objections ended only after the Head of Department declared at a faculty meeting: 'To have Dirac here would be like the English faculty recruiting Shakespeare.'\n\nAround 1978, Hofer and his wife Ridy began to pay visits to the Diracs on most Friday afternoons, to wind down for a couple of hours after the week's work. The Hofers set off from their home near the campus in Tallahassee at about 4.30 p.m. and took the two-minute walk to 223 Chapel Drive, where the Diracs lived in a modest, single-storey house, a few paces from the quiet residential street. At the front of the house was a flat, English-style lawn, planted with a few shrubs and a Pindo palm tree. The Hofers were always welcomed warmly by Dirac's smartly dressed wife Manci, who laughed and joked as she dispensed sherry, nuts and the latest faculty gossip. Dirac was painfully spare and round-shouldered, dressed casually in an open-necked shirt and an old pair of trousers, content to sit and listen to the conversation around him, pausing occasionally to sip his glass of water or ginger ale. The chatter ranged widely from family matters to local politics at the university, and from the earnest utterances of Mrs Thatcher on the steps of Downing Street to the most recent sermon from Jimmy Carter in the White House garden. Although Dirac was benign and receptive during these conversations, he was so reserved that Hofer often found himself trying to elicit a response from him - a nod or a shake of the head, a few words, anything to make the conversation less one-sided. Just occasionally, Dirac would be moved to contribute a few words about one of his private enthusiasms - Chopin's waltzes, Mickey Mouse and any television special featuring Cher, the brassy chanteuse.\n\nDuring the first two years or so of these visits, Dirac showed no sign of wanting to talk about himself or of having any deep feelings, so Hofer was ill prepared when, one Friday evening in the spring of 1980, Dirac's vacuum-packed emotions burst into the open. 'I remember it well. It was pretty much like all my other visits except that I was  alone,' Hofer says. 'My wife decided not to come as she was tired, heavily pregnant with our first child.' At the beginning of the visit, Dirac behaved normally and looked alert and ready to absorb the conversations around him. After the customary pleasantries, the Diracs took Hofer by surprise when they ushered him through the formal front room - where they always talked during their Friday chats - to the less formal family room at the rear of the house, adjoining the kitchen and overlooking the garden. The Diracs' pre-war taste was reflected in the decor of this room, dominated by the wood of the floorboards, the panelling on all four walls, and the huge 1920s sideboard covered with framed photographs of Dirac in his prime. A mock-Baroque chandelier hung from the ceiling and, on most of the walls, there were paintings with no trace of modernity.\n\nAs usual, Manci and Hofer chatted convivially while the frail Dirac sat motionless in his favourite old chair, occasionally looking through the glass sliding doors to the garden. For the first half an hour or so of the conversation, he was, as usual, mute but came vibrantly to life when Manci happened to mention his distant French ancestors. Dirac corrected one of Manci's historical facts and began to speak about his family origins and his childhood in Bristol, talking fluently in his quiet, clear voice. Like a well-rehearsed actor, he spoke confidently, in carefully articulated sentences, without pausing or correcting himself. 'I was startled - for some reason, he had decided to take me into his confidence,' Hofer says. 'I'd never seen him talk so eloquently in private.'\n\nDirac described his roots in the rural villages of Bordeaux, in western France, and how his family migrated to the Swiss canton of Valais at the end of the eighteenth century. It was in Monthey, one of the region's industrial towns, that his father was born. As soon as Dirac began to talk about his father, he became agitated, and he turned away from his wife and Hofer, adjusting his pose so that he was staring straight into the fireplace. Hofer was now looking directly at the profile of the top half of Dirac's body: his hunched shoulders, his high forehead, his straight and upward-pointing nose, his white smudge of a moustache. The air conditioning and television were switched off, so the room was silent except for the occasional rumblings of traffic, the barking of neighbourhood dogs, the rattling of the lid on the simmering casserole in the kitchen. After spelling out his ancestry with the precision of a genealogist, Dirac reached the  part of his story where his father arrived in Bristol, married Dirac's mother and started a family. His language remained simple and direct, but, as he began to talk about his childhood, his voice tightened. Hofer, watching Dirac's silhouette sharpen with the fading of the early evening light, was transfixed.\n\n'I never knew love or affection when I was a child,' Dirac said, the normally neutral tone of his voice perceptibly tinged with sorrow. One of his main regrets was that he, his brother and younger sister had no social life but spent most of their time indoors: 'we never had any visitors'. The family was dominated, Dirac recalled, by his father, a tyrant who bullied his wife, day in, day out, and insisted that their three children speak to him in his native French, never in English. At mealtimes, the family split into two: his mother and siblings would eat in the kitchen and speak in English, while Dirac sat in the dining room with his father, speaking only in French. This made every meal an ordeal for Dirac: he had no talent for languages, and his father was an unforgiving teacher. Whenever Dirac made a slip - a mispronunciation, a wrongly gendered noun, a botched subjunctive - his father made it a rule to refuse his next request. This caused the young Dirac terrible distress. Even at that time, he had digestive problems and often felt sick when he was eating, but his father would refuse him permission to leave the table if he had made a linguistic error. Dirac would then have no option but to sit still and vomit. This did not happen just occasionally, but over and over again, for years.\n\nHofer was aghast, scarcely able to believe his ears. 'I felt extremely embarrassed, like I was witnessing a friend pouring out his most terrible secrets to his psychiatrist,' he recalls. 'Here he was, a man famous for equability and his almost pathological reticence, openly talking of the demons that had haunted him for nearly seventy years. And he was as angry as if these awful events had happened yesterday.'\n\nManci barely stirred, except once to bring nibbles and alcohol, and to slow down the preparations for dinner. She knew that on the very rare occasions her husband chose to tell his story, it was best to keep well out of his way and to let him get it off his chest. As the evening turned colder, she brought him a blanket and draped it over his legs, covering him from his lap down to his ankles. Hofer braced himself as Dirac resumed and explained why he was so quiet, so ill at ease with normal conversation: 'Since I found that I couldn't express myself in French, it was better for me to stay silent.'\n\nDirac then moved on to talk about other members of his family: 'I was not the only one to suffer,' he said, still agitated. For thirty-seven years, his mother was locked in a disastrous marriage to a man who treated her like a doormat. But it was Dirac's brother who felt the brunt of their father's insensitivity: 'It was a tragedy. My father bullied him and frustrated his ambitions at every turn.' In what appeared to be a change of tack, Dirac mentioned that his father always appreciated the importance of a good education and that he was respected by his colleagues as a conscientious, hard worker. But this was only a brief respite. Seconds later, Dirac was struggling to control his rage when he spelt out the conclusion he eventually reached about the extent of his debt to his father: 'I owe him absolutely nothing.' That final rasp made Hofer flinch; he could not help but grimace. Dirac hardly ever spoke an unkind word about anyone, but here he was, denouncing his own father with a vehemence most people reserve for the cruellest abusers.\n\nDirac stopped talking abruptly, just after nightfall. His monologue had lasted over two hours. Hofer knew that any words from him would be inappropriate, so he said his subdued goodbyes and walked home, numb and drained. Soon to be a father himself, he reflected on his own youth as part of a close and loving family: 'I simply could not conceive of any childhood as dreadful as Dirac's.' Time tends to embellish, distort and even create childhood memories: could it be that Dirac - usually as literal-minded as a computer - was exaggerating? Hofer could not help asking himself, over and again: 'Why was Paul so bitter, so obsessed with his father?'\n\nLater that night, after talking with his wife Ridy about Dirac's account of his young life, Hofer made up his mind to find out more about it. 'I thought he might open up again during our later gettogethers. ' But Dirac never mentioned the subject again.\n**One**\n\nEnglish home life to-day is neither honorable, virtuous, wholesome, sweet, clean, nor in any creditable way distinctively English. It is in many respects conspicuously the reverse [. . .].\n\nGEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Preface to _Getting Married_ , 1908\n\nAs Kurt Hofer had seen, the elderly Paul Dirac was fixated on his father Charles. But most of Dirac's acquaintances knew nothing of this: at home, he allowed no photographs of his father to be displayed, and he kept his father's papers locked in his desk. Dirac examined them from time to time and talked with distant relatives about his father's origins, apparently still trying to understand the man he believed had blighted his life.\n\nDirac knew that his father had endured a childhood no less miserable than his own. By the time Charles Dirac was twenty, in 1888, he had done three stints of national service in the Swiss army, dropped out of university in Geneva and left home, without telling his family where he was heading. He became an itinerant teacher of modern languages - the subject he had studied at university - and held posts in Zurich, Munich and Paris, before he fetched up two years later in London. English was one language that he did not speak well, so it is not clear why he chose to live in Britain; perhaps it was because it was the world's wealthiest economy, with plenty of teaching jobs at relatively high salaries.\n\nSix years later, Charles Dirac had acquired a sheaf of complimentary references. One, written by the headmaster of a school in Stafford, stated that Monsieur Dirac 'is possessed of very great patience combined with firmness [. . .] I believe he is much liked both by his colleagues and pupils.' His employer in Paris had praised 'his capacity to analyze and generalize, which enabled him to point out my mistakes and help me to ascertain scientifically why they were mistakes'. Charles settled in Bristol, a city famous for the high quality of its schools, and he became Head of Modern Languages at the rapidly expanding Merchant Venturers' School on 8 September 1896, contracted to teach thirty-four hours a week for an annual  salary of one hundred and eighty pounds. He stood out among the teachers because of his conscientiousness, his thick Swiss-French accent and his appearance: a short, stocky, slow-moving man with a drooping moustache, a receding hairline and a face dominated by a huge forehead.\n\nMellowest of British industrial cities, Bristol was known for the friendliness of its people, its mild and wet climate and the hilly roads that wend their way down to the moorings on the river Avon, eight miles from the coast. Bristol was then a thriving manufacturing centre, producing Fry's chocolate, Wills's cigarettes, Douglas motorcycles and many other commodities. Together, these industries had eclipsed the declining trade in shipping, which had been the city's main source of wealth for centuries, some of it based on the slave trade. Most of the city's wealthiest maritime figures were members of the Merchant Venturers' Society, a secretive group of industrialists with a strong philanthropic tradition. It was the generosity of the Society that had made possible the founding of Charles's school together with the high standard of its workshop and laboratory facilities.\n\nDuring a visit to the Central Library a few months after his arrival in Bristol, Charles met Florence Holten, the guileless nineteen-year-old librarian who would become his wife. Though no beauty, she was attractive and possessed features that she would later pass on to her most famous child: her oval face was framed by dark, curly hair, and a firm nose darted out from between her dark eyes. Born into a family of Cornish Methodists, she was brought up to believe that Sunday should be a day of rest, that gambling was sinful and that the theatre was decadent and best avoided. She had been named after the nurse Florence Nightingale, whom her father Richard met during the Crimean War, where he served as a young soldier before becoming a seaman. He was often away for months at a time, leaving behind his wife and six children, of whom Flo was second eldest.\n\nFlo Holten and Charles Dirac were an odd couple. She was twelve years younger than him, a daydreamer uninterested in pursuing a career, whereas Charles was strong-minded and industrious, devoted to his job. The couple had been raised in different, scarcely compatible religions. She was from a family of devout Methodists and so had been raised to frown on alcohol, whereas Charles had been brought up in a Roman Catholic home and liked a glass of wine with his meals. Catholicism had been the cause of riots in Bristol and other  English cities, so Charles may at first have kept his religious beliefs to himself. If he did disclose them, his relationship with the young Flo would have raised eyebrows in her circle.\n\nDespite the possible sectarian tensions, by August 1897 Charles and Flo were engaged, though Flo was feeling sore. Charles had chosen to 'break the spell' of their relationship to visit his mother Walla, a dressmaker in Geneva, leaving his fianc\u00e9e to sulk in Bristol's incessant rain. His father had died the year before. He had been a highly strung junior schoolteacher and later a stationmaster at Monthey station in south-west Switzerland but was dismissed for repeatedly being drunk on duty, leaving him plenty of time to pursue his interest in writing romantic poetry. The Swiss stretch of the Rh\u00f4ne valley had been home to the Dirac family since the eighteenth century, when - according to family lore - they moved from the Bordeaux area in western France. The names of many of the towns in this region and its vicinity end in _-ac_ , such as Cognac, Cadillac and the little-known village, about ten kilometres south of the Angoul\u00eame, called Dirac. Charles believed his family had originated there, but there is no evidence for this among the family records, now stored in the town hall of Saint Maurice (near Monthey), where the colourful Dirac coat of arms - featuring a red leopard with a three-leaf clover in its right paw, below three downward-pointing pine cones - is one of many painted on the walls.\n\nUneven postal delays caused Charles's letters from Switzerland to arrive out of order, infuriating Flo, who wished that 'letters went by electricity like tram cars'; a century would elapse before long-distance lovers benefited from the type of communication she was vaguely envisioning - electronic mail. Lonely and disconsolate, she repeatedly read Charles's notes and, when her family was not looking over her shoulder, replied with newsy letters of how they could not resist teasing her about her pining for 'my own boy'. Struggling to put her longing into words, she sent him a poem full of ardour; in return, he sent a posy of Alpine flowers which she hung round his photograph.\n\nAlmost two years later, Flo and Charles were married 'according to the rites and ceremonies of the Wesleyan Methodists' in Portland Street Chapel, one of the oldest and grandest of Bristol's Methodist churches. The couple moved into Charles's residence in 42 Cotham Road - probably in rented rooms - a short walk from Flo's family  home in Bishopston, in the north of the city. Following custom and practice, Flo stopped doing paid work and stayed at home to do the housework and read about the first skirmishes of Britain's latest imperial venture, the Boer War in South Africa. Soon, she had other things on her mind: the Diracs' first son Felix was born on the first Easter Sunday of the new century. Nine months later, the country mourned the passing of an era when Queen Victoria, having reigned for an unprecedented sixty-three years, died in the arms of her grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Soon after a period of national grief, mitigated only by relief at the ending of the war, the family prepared for a new beginning of its own. In July 1902, they moved into a slot in one of the new terraces on Monk Road, to a roomier, two-storey home that Charles named after his native town of Monthey. The Diracs would soon need extra space as Flo was again pregnant, with only a few weeks to go before the birth.\n\nOn Friday, 8 August 1902, Bristol's eyes were on London, where King Edward VII was to be crowned on the following day. Thousands took the train from Bristol to the capital to see the coronation procession, but the celebrations were a sideshow in the Dirac household. On that Friday morning, Flo gave birth at home to a healthy six-pound boy, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. He was, as his mother later recalled, a 'rather small', brown-eyed baby, who slept contentedly for hours in his pram in the patch of the front garden. His mother worried that he ate less food than most children, but the family doctor reassured her that Paul 'was OK, perfectly proportioned'. His parents nicknamed him 'Tiny'.\n\nWhen Felix and Paul were young, they resembled each other, each a quiet, round-faced cherub with a thick bonnet of black, curly hair. Flo dressed them stylishly in thick woollen waistcoats topped with stiff, white-lace Eton collars that reached out to their shoulders, like the wings of a huge butterfly. From family letters and Flo's later testimony, it appears that the boys were close and liked to be with their father, whose top priority was to encourage them to learn. With the virtual absence of visitors and opportunities to mix outside their immediate family, Paul and Felix probably did not appreciate they were being brought up in a singularly unusual environment, a hot-house of private education overseen by a father who would speak to them only in French and a mother who would talk only in English.  According to one witness, the young Paul Dirac believed that men and women spoke different languages.\n\nBut Paul and Felix were let off the leash occasionally. Their mother sometimes took them to the Bristol Downs so that they could play on the vast expanse of grassy parkland stretching from the cliffs of the Avon Gorge to the edges of the city's suburbs. From their favourite spot on the Downs, the Dirac boys had an excellent view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, one of the most famous creations of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the charismatic engineer who also left Bristol with its Floating Harbour and Temple Meads railway station, two of the city's finest monuments.\n\nIn the summer, the family would take a bus trip to the beach at nearby Portishead, where the boys learned to swim. Like most families of their modest means, the Diracs rarely took vacations, but, in 1905, they went to Geneva to visit Charles's mother, who had an apartment a stone's throw from the lake and ten minutes' stroll from the railway station. The brothers spent hours by the lakeside statue of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, playing together and watching the artificial geyser shoot its jet of water ninety metres towards the sky. When the seventy-year-old Dirac told this story, one of his earliest memories, he liked to point out that his first trip to Switzerland took place at the same time as Einstein was having his most successful spurt of creativity in Berne, only a short train journey from Geneva. That year, Einstein wrote four papers that changed the way people think about space, time, energy, light and matter, laying the foundations of quantum theory and relativity. Twenty-three years later, Dirac would be the first to combine the theories successfully.\n\nThere exist two vivid snapshots of life in the Dirac household in the summer of 1907, shortly before Paul started school, a year after the birth of his sister Betty. The first is the correspondence between Charles Dirac and his family when he was in Trinity College, Cambridge, attending the International Esperanto Congress. Earlier in the year, Charles had qualified to teach the language, which he championed in Bristol for the rest of his life. When Charles was away, his family showered him with loving notes. Flo's affectionate gusto was almost as intense as it had been in the heat of their passion, ten years before. Up to her ears in the chaos of having to look after the three children - taking them for walks, feeding the pet mice,  cooking Paul his favourite jam tarts - she had the undivided attention of her boys: 'It is very quiet without you, the boys are sticking to me for a change.' She assured her husband that his family at home 'all had a nice dinner, mutton, peas, junkets [a sweet dessert]'. The boys missed Charles terribly, Flo told him, just as she did: 'I shall miss you in the bye-bye [i.e. bed] tonight.' Flo enclosed in her letters to Charles notes from Felix and from Paul, who wrote in stick-letter capitals of the welfare of the mice and, most importantly, his love for him: 'Tiny hopes Daddie has not forgotten little Tiny' and 'I love you very much. Come home soon to your own Tiny Dirac xxxxx.' Charles replied with a postcard, written mainly in English but with a little French, promising to bring home some Esperanto chocolate and concluding, 'I would not go out if I did not have to.'\n\nNothing in this loving correspondence bears any sign of the terrible home life that Dirac described to Kurt Hofer. Charles's use of English words appears to be inconsistent with the French-only linguistic regime that Paul claimed his father practised, and his father's tone bears no sign of the heartlessness that Paul remembered.\n\nIt is clear that Charles was as keen as any other father to keep a photographic record of his children. At about this time, he purchased a camera - probably one of the fashionable Kodak box Brownies - to take pictures of his children, many of them showing Felix, Paul and Betty reading avidly. Charles also wanted a portrait of his family to be taken by a professional and for the result to be printed on postcards for family and friends. The photograph, the only surviving image of the entire family, was taken on 3 September and gives us the second impression of the Diracs in 1907. Flo looks demure and serious, her long hair tied up at the back, baby Betty on her lap. Felix is leaning towards her, smiling broadly and looking directly into the camera like Paul, whose left arm rests on his father's right leg, apparently seeking reassurance. Charles leans forward to the camera, eagerly, his alert eyes shining. He steals the picture.\n\nThis photograph of a happy family is subverted by Dirac's later memories of trauma and unhappiness. In one stinging memory, his parents bawled at each other in the kitchen while he and his siblings stood in the garden, frightened and uncomprehending. He once remarked in an interview that his parents 'usually ate separately', though twenty years later friends wrote that he told them he 'never'  saw his parents have a meal together - apparently a rare example of his being caught exaggerating. The rift between his parents was, according to Dirac, responsible for his dining-table ordeals. Three times every day, the tinkling of cutlery, the clatter of saucepans on the gas stove, the waft of cooking smells through the house presaged the ritual that he loathed. In none of the surviving accounts of the dining arrangements did he explain why he alone sat with his father, while his brother and sister ate with their mother in the kitchen. The only partial explanation that Dirac ever gave was that he could not sit in the kitchen because there were insufficient chairs. But this says nothing about the mystery of why Charles singled out him, not Felix or Betty, for special treatment.\n\nThe dining ritual was particularly harrowing on winter mornings, Dirac remembered. He would sit at the table with his father in the silent room, warmed by the burning coal in the fireplace and lit by a few oil lamps. Charles would be dressed in his three-piece suit, ready to cycle to the Merchant Venturers' School, always anxious not to be late for Assembly. His wife, scrambling and disorganised in the kitchen, made his anxieties worse by serving breakfast - usually large portions of piping-hot porridge - much too late for comfort. While he was waiting for his breakfast, Charles gave his first French lesson of the day to his younger son. Quite apart from Dirac's hatred of these arrangements, he grew to dislike eating mainly because his parents insisted, even when his appetite had been sated and he felt sick, that he must eat every morsel of food on his plate.\n\nFor the young Dirac, this was normality. In his early thirties, he wrote to a close friend of the sourness of his home life: 'I did not know of anyone who liked someone else - I thought it did not happen outside novels.' In another letter, he wrote: 'I found it to be the best policy as a child [. . .] to make my happiness depend only on myself and not on other people.' According to Dirac, his best defence against the unpleasantness and hostility he perceived all around him was to retreat into the bunker of his imagination.\n\nDirac first experienced the company of children outside his family shortly after his fifth birthday, when he started at the small and intimate Bishop Road Junior School. This was his first opportunity to socialise, to get a sense of other children's lives, of other domestic customs and practices. But he apparently made no attempt to talk to  other children: he remained silent and continued to live in his own private world.\n\nThe school was round the corner from his home, so close that he could hear its bell ringing at the start of the day. Despite the daily hurry of the breakfast routine, he and his brother always arrived on time. Dirac's class typically consisted of about fifty children crammed into a room about twenty-five feet square, the pupils sitting in rows of identical wooden desks, learning in an atmosphere that was, by today's standards, extremely disciplined and competitive. At the end of their time at school, children had to compete for scholarships that would help to pay for their senior education. Success meant that the child's parents would have to pay little or nothing; failure often meant that the child would be sent out to work.\n\nPaul and Felix were recognisably brothers, but Felix had a rounder face, was a few inches taller and was more heavily built. He was placid and well behaved, though given to lapses of concentration, as his headmaster pointed out when he wrote across his school report: 'The boy appears to me to be a perpetual dreamer. He must wake up!' Felix appears to have taken the advice, as he soon improved and did well in most subjects, especially drawing.\n\nFrom Dirac's later descriptions of his early life, we might expect him to have been an unhappy child, but there are no signs of this in the extant descriptions of him at the time. Twenty-seven years later, when his mother wrote a short poem about him for her own amusement, she described him as 'a cheerful little schoolboy', and added that he was 'contented' and 'happy'. In official reports written when he was eight, teachers at Bishop Road do not comment on his demeanour, saying only that he was 'well behaved', 'an intelligent boy' and 'a very steady worker'. But there are indications that Dirac was not performing to his potential. A few teachers allude to this, most notably the Headmaster, who, on seeing that Dirac had only just managed to be ranked in the top third of the class, wrote on his report in November 1910, 'I expected to find you higher.'\n\nAmong the boys Dirac did not get to know at Bishop Road School was Cary Grant, then known as Archie Leach and living in poverty about half a mile from Monk Road. In the classrooms and playground of the Bishop Road School, Dirac acquired the distinctively warm Bristol accent, which sounds slightly hickish to other native English speakers, evocative of farmers in the south-west of the  country. Like other young natives of Bristol, Dirac and Grant added an L to the pronunciation of most words that end in the letter A, a practice that is now dying out, though many English people still recognise Bristol as the only city in Britain to be able to turn ideas into ideals, areas into aerials. Cary Grant shed this accent when he emigrated to the United States, but Dirac kept it all his life. He spoke with a gentle intonation and an unassuming directness that would surprise the many people who expected him to talk like the plummy-voiced English intellectual of popular caricature.\n\nLike his brother, Dirac's ranking in the class gradually improved. He was good though not exceptional at arithmetic, and he did well in most subjects that did not involve his meagre practical skills. Soon after his eighth birthday, his teacher described him as 'An intelligent boy, but must try hard with his hand-work', drawing attention to his poor marks for handwriting (45 per cent) and drawing (48 per cent). His disappointed teacher commented that he should have done better than thirteenth in the class. Two years later, Dirac was consistently at or near the top of his class, his overall grade occasionally lowered by his relatively weak performance in history and brush-work.  At home, he pursued his extra-curricular hobby of astronomy, standing in his back garden at night to check the positions of the visible planets and constellations and, occasionally, to follow the track of a meteor hurtling across the sky.\n\nThe school did not teach science but did give classes in freehand drawing and also technical drawing, a subject that provided Dirac with one of the foundations for his unique way of thinking about science. His mother later drew attention to his 'most beautiful hands', suggesting that his long and bony fingers equipped him well to be an artist. Technical drawing, used by engineers to render three-dimensional objects on a flat piece of paper, is now taught at very few English junior schools, and rarely at senior level. Yet, in the early twentieth century, it was a compulsory subject for half the pupils: for a few lessons each week, the class would split into two: the girls studied needlework, while the boys were taught technical drawing. In these classes, Dirac learned to make idealised visualisations of various manufactured products by showing them from three orthogonal points of view, making no allowance for the distortions of perspective.\n\nBritain was among the slowest of the wealthier European countries to introduce technical drawing into its schools and did so only in the  wake of the Great Exhibition in 1851. Although the Exhibition was a great popular success, the most perceptive of its 6.2 million visitors saw evidence that mass technical education in Britain would have to improve substantially if the country were to retain its economic hegemony against growing competition from the USA and Germany. The Government agreed, enabling the Great Exhibition's prime mover Sir Henry 'King' Cole to change the technical curriculum of English schools so that boys were taught technical drawing and given an appreciation of the beauty of manufactured objects as well as natural forms. There was, however, a backlash to this practical notion of beauty in the form of the Aesthetic Movement, which flourished in England from the mid-1850s. The movement's leader in France was the flamboyant poet and critic Th\u00e9ophile Gautier, a weight-lifting habitu\u00e9 of the Louvre's Greek galleries. His phrase 'Art for art's sake' became the motto of the English aesthetes, including Oscar Wilde, who shared Gautier's belief that formal, aesthetic beauty is the sole purpose of a work of art. This view would later be distantly echoed in Dirac's philosophy of science.\n\nSir Henry Cole's reforms endured: the guidelines set out by him and his associates were being used in Bishop Road School when Dirac began his formal schooling. In 1909, the educationist F. H. Hayward summarised the prevailing philosophy that underlies the contemporary teaching of art: 'drawing aims at truth of conception and expression, love of beauty, facility in invention, and training in dexterity [. . .] nature study and science lessons cannot proceed far without it.' Hayward urged that students should practise their drawing skills by trying to represent accurately both natural and manufactured objects, including flowers, insects, tables, garden sheds and penknives. In autumn 1912, Dirac was asked to draw a penknife, and he did it competently enough - like all his other drawings, it includes not a line of embellishment.\n\nThe school took pains to teach its pupils how to write legibly, according to textbook rules that Dirac and his brother apparently studied closely. They developed a similar style of handwriting - consistent with the rules set out in the books they studied - neat, easy to read and virtually devoid of flourishes, except for the unusual forming of D, with a characteristic curl at the top left. Dirac did not change this calligraphy one iota for the rest of his life.\n\nIn the early summer of 1911, school inspectors noted that 'the  boys who are particularly bright and responsive are being carefully trained in habits of self-reliance and industry.' Nearly three years later, when Dirac was in his final year at the school, the inspectors visited Bishop Road again and wrote warmly of this 'progressive' school and the practical education it offered: 'a keen, vigorous and thoughtful head [teacher]. Staff [are] earnest, painstaking [. . .] Drawing is well taught and handwork is resourceful, the boys make a number of useful models and are allowed considerable freedom in their choice while the work is so taken as to train them in habits of self reliance, observation and careful calculation and measurement. '\n\nBishop Road School wanted to give its pupils the skills they needed to get good jobs. But, for Dirac, the most important consequence of this practical approach was that it helped to shape his thinking about how the universe works. As he was sitting at his desk in his tiny Bristol classroom, producing an image of a simple wooden object, he had to think geometrically about the relationships between the points and lines that lie in a flat plane. In his mathematics classes, he also learnt about this type of Euclidean geometry, named after the ancient Greek mathematician who reputedly discovered it. So, Dirac studied geometry using both visual images and abstract mathematical symbols. Within a decade, he would transfer this geometric approach from concrete technological applications to the abstractions of theoretical physics - from an idealised, visual representation of a wooden fountain-pen stand to an idealised, mathematical description of the atom.\n\nLater in life, Dirac would say that he never had a childhood. He knew nothing of the rites of passage of most other young boys - long weekend afternoons spent stealing eggs from birds' nests, scrumping from nearby orchards, dashing out in front of trams. In many ways, as a child he seems to have behaved much as Newton had done. 'A sober, silent, thinking lad [. . .] never was known scarce to play with the boys abroad' was how one of Newton's friends described him: the description applies equally well to Dirac as an infant.\n\nDirac was not interested in sport, with the exception of ice-skating, which he learned with Betty and Felix at the nearby Coliseum rink, the talk of Bristol when it opened in 1910. Decades later, his mother recalled that he would sit quietly, reading books that he had  placed neatly around him and learning long poems that he would recite to his family. She shed some light on his sheltered childhood when she spoke to reporters in 1933: '[his father's] motto has always been to work, work, work, and if the boy had showed any other tendencies, then they would have been stifled. But that was not necessary. The boy was not interested in anything else.' There is little doubt that Charles Dirac impressed his sedulous work ethic on his younger son, who later wrote admiringly of his father's conscientiousness:\n\nOne day while cycling [to school, my father fell off his bike], trying to avoid a child who ran out in front of him, and broke his arm. He was very conscientious, so he continued to the school and continued with his teaching, in spite of the broken arm. Eventually, the head master found out about it and sent him home, and told him not to come back until he was better.\n\nPaul was also aware that his father was exceptionally careful with money. In April 1913, Charles took the biggest financial decision of his life by purchasing a more expensive and more spacious home. The family moved from the cramped terrace of Monk Road to a neat semi-detached residence a few minutes' walk away in a slightly more salubrious part of Bristol, at 6 Julius Road. The Diracs now had a home befitting Charles's status in the community, with separate rooms for their two boys so that Dirac now had a place to escape, a private place where he could work alone. The family still kept themselves to themselves, inviting no visitors into their home, apart from Flo's family, her guests - all female - at a monthly afternoon tea party and the steady stream of pupils who took private language lessons from her husband.\n\nLike many parents, Charles entered all his children for scholarship exams. When Felix was nine years old, he failed one of these exams, leading his father to demand an explanation from his teachers; Betty also failed the exam a few years later. Paul had no such problems: he passed every scholarship exam with flying colours and, thus, unlike Felix and Betty, ensured he was educated at minimal expense to his parents.\n\nDirac could see new technology making its imprint on Bristol. The city centre was a patchwork of centuries-old buildings and brand-new ones, many of them emblazoned with advertisements for new  services and products. Open-topped motor cars vied for space on the roads with horse-drawn carriages, bone-shaking bicycles and the trams that made their jerky way round the city. When a programme of road construction began, in the early years of the century, cars began to dominate the city. In late 1910, Dirac had witnessed the beginnings of the Bristol aviation industry, one of the first and largest in Britain. The leading figure in this new Bristol industry was the local entrepreneur Sir George White, who founded the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company and supervised the building of some of the earliest aircraft in a tram shed in Filton, a few miles north of the Diracs' home. Long afterwards, Dirac told his children that he would rush out into the back garden to see aeroplanes precariously taking off from the new airfield less than a mile away. It seems that he wanted to find out more about this new technology: among the papers he kept from his youth were details of a programme at a local technical college, beginning in December 1917: 'Ten Educational Lectures on Aeronautics'.\n\nDirac and his brother stood out among the boys in Bishopston as they both spoke good French even before they started school. According to one report, local boys would stop the Dirac brothers on the streets and ask them to speak a few sentences of French. This knowledge of French was also obvious to the students at their next school, where the language was taught by the school's most feared disciplinarian - their father.\n**Two**\n\nIn the world of commerce,  \nIn the crafts and arts,  \nSons of her are honour'd  \nNobly bear their parts;  \nWhile in sports and pastimes  \nThey have made a name,  \nTrain'd to wield the willow,  \nLearn'd to 'play the game'.\n\nVerse of the Merchant Venturers' School song\n\nOn 4 August 1914, when Dirac was preparing to start at senior school, he heard that Britain was at war - the first conflict to involve every industrialised country in Europe. 'The European War', which would claim more British lives than any other, was to be the backdrop to the whole of his secondary education at the Merchant Venturers' School.\n\nLike most other British cities in the UK, Bristol quickly prepared for the war, the urgency of the preparations heightened by the statement by the Boer War hero Lord Kitchener that the conflict would be decided by Britain's last million men. On the last day of August, in his capacity as Secretary of State for War, Kitchener sent a telegram to the Bristol Citizens' Recruiting Committee asking them to form a battalion of 'better class young men', and within a fortnight some 500 professional men had volunteered for the 'Twelfth Gloucesters', part of 'Kitchener's Army'. Within a few weeks, the focus of the city's industries had changed from making money to supplying the military with everything from boots and clothes to cars and aircraft. Even the Coliseum ice-rink was commandeered as a site to assemble warplanes.\n\nThe first casualty lists were published barely a month after the declaration of war. The Bristol newspapers reported that the Allies had contained the initial German onslaught and that the battle lines had hardened to form a series of linked fortifications that stretched from the Franco-Belgian border on the coast right through to the Franco-Swiss border, close to where Charles Dirac had been brought up. After Parliament passed the Aliens Registration Act, Bristol was one of the UK cities to be declared a 'prohibited area'. Charles had to register with the authorities as a foreigner, although he was hardly a threat to British security. By the time his elder son arrived at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Secondary School, Charles had spent almost a third of his forty-eight years as its Head of French, doing more than any other teacher to extend the school's reputation for excellence beyond its established forte of technical subjects to modern languages.\n\nIt took Charles about fifteen minutes to cycle from his home to the school in Unity Street, in the heart of the city. The building was round the corner from the Hippodrome, Bristol's newest and swankiest music hall, where the young Cary Grant secured his first job, as a trainee electrician helping to operate the lighting rigs - soon after Paul started at the school. The school's Edwardian-Gothic building had been opened in April 1909, after the previous school on the site had burnt down. Everyone in the vicinity of the new school heard the clatter and rumblings from the basement workshops. The vibrations were so violent that the school's near-neighbour, Harvey's wine merchants, complained of the incessant disturbance to their cellars.\n\nThe behaviour of Charles Dirac, whose pupils nicknamed him 'Dedder', emerges clearly in the testimonies of several of his fellow teachers and his students obtained by the Oxford University physicist Dick Dalitz in the mid-1980s. One of Dirac's fellow students, Leslie Phillips, gave a sense of the reputation of Monsieur Dirac:\n\nHe was _the_ disciplinarian in the school, precise, unwinking, with a meticulous, unyielding system of correction and punishments. His registers, in which he recorded all that went on in the class were neat and cabalastic; no scholar could possibly understand their significance. Later, as a senior, I began to realize the humanity and kindness of the man, the twinkle in the eyes. But to us in the junior school, he was a scourge and a terror.\n\nDedder was well known for his old-fashioned, strictly methodical approach to teaching and for springing random tests on his students, so that they always had to be prepared. If he caught them cheating in these tests or in their homework, he punished them with four half-hour periods of detention on Saturday afternoons. 'You never wrote this. Saturday at four for cribbing,' he told Cyril Hebblethwaite, later  Lord Mayor of Bristol. Most teachers routinely meted out corporal punishment by whacking errant boys across their backsides with a slipper or cane with an enthusiasm that bordered on the sadistic. But there is no record that Charles was fond of this form of chastisement, either at school or at home.\n\nIt is easy to imagine Monsieur Dirac's terrified pupils looking at Paul and Felix and wondering, probably out loud, 'What's he like at home?' Their father's strict classroom regime did, however, bring the benefit of a supply of comics that he had confiscated and brought home for his children. The young Dirac read these cheap 'penny dreadfuls', black-and-white comics full of slapstick cartoons, juvenile jokes, detective stories, sensational tales of soldierly adventure and even the occasional topical reference to the build-up of the German military. This one concession to popular culture in the Dirac home gave the young Paul an enduring taste for comics and cartoons.\n\nThe boys' mother also inflicted her share of pain on them by keeping their hair in tight curls and making them wear knickerbockers long after they were fashionable. They wore short breeches and garters so tight that, when they were removed, they each left an angry red line around the boys' legs. Dirac long remembered the taunts of his fellow pupils for being what nowadays would be damned as 'uncool'. Such was his induction into that most characteristic of English anxieties, embarrassment.\n\nLike all parents at that time, Charles and Flo worried that their children would catch tuberculosis, then responsible for one in every eight deaths in the UK. It was particularly brutal in culling adult males: it accounted for more than one death in three among men aged fifteen to forty-four. The Dirac children were all born during the first decade of a government-funded anti-tuberculosis campaign that urged all citizens to get out into the open air, to take plenty of outdoor exercise and thus to get plenty of fresh air into their lungs. This philosophy may have encouraged Charles to decline to pay for his sons' tram fares to and from school and therefore to force them to walk there and back twice a day (they had lunch at home). Paul later resented what he believed was his father's meanness, though it probably led him to acquire a taste for taking long walks, soon to become one of his obsessions.\n\nIt took only weeks for Dirac to establish himself as a stellar pupil at the Merchant Venturers' School. Except for history and German, he shone at every academic subject and so was usually ranked as the top student of his class. The curriculum was wholly practical, with no room for music nor - to Dirac's relief - Latin and Greek. Instead, the school focused on subjects that would equip its boys to take up a trade, including English, mathematics, science (though not biology), some geography and history. What made the education at this school special was the high quality of the teaching of technical skills such as bricklaying, plasterwork, shoemaking, metalwork and technical drawing. For the previous fifty years, government inspectors had praised the school for giving one of the best technical educations available to any child in the country.\n\nIn the school's laboratories, Dirac learned how to fashion pieces of metal into simple products, how to operate a lathe, how to cut and saw, how to turn a screw thread. Away from the clatter of machinery, the puddles of oil and the coils of swarf, he learned more of the art of technical drawing. These lessons built on the introductory classes at Bishop Road and showed Dirac how to produce plans for more complicated objects, developing his ability to visualise them from different angles. In his 'geometric drawing' classes, Dirac considered cylinders and cones, and he learned how to see in his mind's eye what happens when they are sliced at different angles and then viewed from various perspectives. He was also taught to think geometrically about objects that are not static but moving, and he learned how to draw the path of, for example, a point on the outside of a perfect circle as it rolls along a straight line, like a speck of dust on the outside of a wheel rolling along a road. To students who first encounter these shapes - curved, symmetrical and often intricate - they are a source of delight. If, as is likely, Dirac wondered how to describe these curves mathematically, his technical-drawing teachers would probably have been unable to enlighten him as they were usually former craftsmen with little or no mathematical expertise.\n\nAlthough Dirac focused intensely on his college work, he was well aware of the scale of the war. All day long, convoys of trucks passed through Bristol with their supplies for the soldiers at the front, and huge guns were towed through the streets, shaking nearby buildings. At night, the streetlamps were extinguished to make the city a difficult target for the expected convoys of German airships, although  they never arrived. The city's rapidly expanding aviation industry was on a war footing, so the threat of aerial bombing was clear to Dirac, who passed a busy aircraft factory every time he walked to and from school.\n\nUnreliable news of the conflict trickled back from the battlefronts through newspapers and by word of mouth. The Government's censorship policy prevented journalists from reporting on the full extent of the carnage, but readers could form a broad picture of the conflict and its ramifications. In February 1916, the Germans began their campaign to try to wear down the French Army at Verdun, and in July the British Army attacked on the Somme. Casualty figures soared, although the battle lines changed only slowly. In April 1917, the Germans introduced unrestricted U-boat warfare, aiming to cut supplies of food and other resources to the UK and thereby to force the enemy to the conference table. This brought the United States into the war, and Bristol celebrated by giving its schoolchildren a half-day holiday on 4 July, Independence Day. Meanwhile, Russia was in turmoil, with the fall of the monarchy in February followed nine months later by Lenin's Bolshevik revolution.\n\nEvery day, the Dirac family read about these events in the local and national newspapers. The inside pages of the _Bristol Evening News_ showed head shots of uniformed teenage soldiers, with a few lines that listed their regiment, when they fell and whom they left behind. Despite the depressing regularity of these reports, the recruitment campaigners maintained a constant flow of army volunteers, many of them younger than the minimum legal age of eighteen. Some of the boys shipped out to the killing fields were only a year older than Dirac. The nearest he came to military service was a brief stint in the Cadet Corps in 1917, but around him there was plenty of evidence of the experiences of less fortunate young men. He would certainly have seen legions of wounded and maimed soldiers hobbling around the city, having returned from France for treatment.\n\nBut the war was a boon for Dirac's education. The exodus of the school's older boys depleted the higher classes and enabled Dirac and other bright children to fill the gaps and therefore make quick progress. He excelled at science, including chemistry, which he studied in a silence that he broke on one occasion, a fellow student later remembered, when the teacher made an error, which  Dirac gently corrected. In the foul-smelling laboratories, Dirac learned how to investigate systematically how chemicals behave and learned that all matter is made of atoms. The famous Cambridge scientist Sir Ernest Rutherford gave an idea of the smallness of atoms by pointing out that if everyone in the world spent twelve hours a day placing individual atoms into a thimble, a century would elapse before it was filled. Although no one knew what atoms were made of or how they were built, chemists treated them as if they were as palpable as stones. Dirac learned how to interpret the reactions he saw in the laboratory test tubes simply as rearrangements of the chemicals' constituent atoms - his first glimpse of the idea that the way matter behaves can be understood by studying its most basic constituents.\n\nIn his physics lessons, he saw how the material world could be studied by concentrating, for example, on heat, light and sound. But the mind of young Dirac was now venturing far beyond the school curriculum. He was beginning to realise that underneath all the messy phenomena he was studying were fundamental questions that needed to be addressed. While the other boys in his class were struggling to get their homework done on time, Dirac was sitting at home, reflecting for hours on the nature of space and time. It occurred to him that 'perhaps there was some connection between space and time, and that we ought to consider them from a general four-dimensional point of view'.  He appears to have shared much the same opinion as the Time Traveller in the 1895 novel _The Time Machine_ by H. G. Wells, whose science-fiction novels he read: 'There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.' Such an opinion had wide currency at the end of the nineteenth century, and Dirac may have read the Traveller's words when he was a child. In any case, the young Dirac was mulling over the nature of space and time before he had even heard of Einstein's theory of relativity.\n\nDirac's teacher, Arthur Pickering, gave up on teaching him with the rest of the boys and sent him to the school library with a book list. Pickering once set the prodigy a set of tough calculations to keep him busy at home that evening, only to hear from Dirac on his way home that afternoon that he had already done them. And Pickering opened up another new vista to Dirac when he suggested that he look  beyond simple geometry to the theories of the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, who had proposed that the angles of a triangle do not always add up to exactly 180 degrees. Just a few years later, Dirac would hear how Riemann's geometric ideas - superficially without relevance to science - could shed new light on gravity.\n\nCharles Dirac understood as well as anyone that his younger son had an exceptionally fine mind coupled with formidable powers of concentration. By imposing a rigorous educational regime at home, Charles had produced a workaholic son in his own image, as he presumably intended. What Charles did not apparently appreciate as acutely as other people was Paul's odd behaviour. The young Dirac's fellow students certainly regarded him as strange. In testimonies given sixty years later, several of them described him as a very quiet boy; two accounts speak of 'a slim, tall, un-English-looking boy in knickerbockers with curly hair', and 'a serious-minded, somewhat lonely boy [who] haunted the library'. Even at that time, he had a monomaniacal focus on science and mathematics. Games did not appeal to him and, when he was obliged to play, his participation seems to have been superfluous: one of his fellow schoolboys later remembered that Dirac's style of holding a cricket bat was 'peculiarly inept'. As an old man, Dirac attributed his dislike of team games to his having to play soccer and cricket with the older and bigger boys on the Merchant Venturers' playing fields.\n\nHis appreciation of literature was also extremely limited. He never understood the appeal of poetry, though he did read novels written to appeal to young boys, including adventure stories and tales of great battles, scrutinising each text with the care of a literary critic. As a nine-year-old, Bishop Road School had awarded him a prize of Daniel Defoe's _Robinson Crusoe_ , a novel that always strikes a chord with those who are happy to be away from the crowd - almost, but not quite, alone.\n\nIt was the mathematics and science lessons that did most to shape Dirac's way of thinking. Decades later, when his history teacher Edith Williams renewed contact with him, she told him that, when he was a student in her class, she 'always felt you were thinking in another medium of form and figures'. By every account of Dirac's behaviour in his mid-teens, he had the same personality characteristics as today's pasty-faced technophiles who prefer using the latest software and gadgets to mixing with other people and who are happiest sitting  alone at their computer screens. From a modern perspective, the young Dirac was an Edwardian geek.\n\nAt the Merchant Venturers' School, the class sizes shrunk and the range of lessons narrowed. When Dirac began at the school in September 1914, there were thirty-seven boys in his class; by the time he left in July 1918, four months before the end of the war, there were eleven. At the Speech Day, July 1918, he received a prize - as he had done every year - and heard the Headmaster announce that ninety-six boys had been killed and fifty-six wounded in the year 1916-17. For the rest of his life, he would remember these litanies of death.\n\nNor was there any respite at home from the gloom. In Dirac's eyes, when his father returned home from school, his persona changed from the school's fair-minded and respected disciplinarian to bullying tyrant. He still imposed his linguistic regime at the dinner table, where wartime shortages and rationing had made Flo's meals simpler and less abundant. By the beginning of 1918, there were long, morale-sapping queues for bread, margarine, fruit and meat. The price of a chicken rose to a guinea, a week's wages for a manual labourer. The shortages encouraged many families, including the Diracs, to cultivate fruit and vegetables, and it was mainly for this reason that Paul Dirac took up gardening, though the hobby would also have given him another reason to escape the atmosphere inside the house.\n\nAnother source of unhappiness in the Dirac family was that Charles and Flo each had a favourite child: Paul was his mother's, Betty her father's, with Felix left out in the cold. As a student, Felix had done almost as well as his younger brother at Bishop Road, but the gap between their abilities at senior school became so wide that it began to cause serious friction between them. The two brothers no longer walked around together but were continually bickering. In his later life, Dirac was uncharacteristically forthright about the reason for the rift: 'having a younger brother who was brighter than he was must have depressed him quite a lot'. This is a telling remark. Dirac was never socially sensitive and, as an old man, was exceptionally modest and given to understatement, so he was probably making light of how painful Felix found the experience of being academically outclassed by his younger brother.\n\nAs he came to the end of his studies at the school, Felix had set his heart on becoming a medical doctor. His father, however, had other ideas: he wanted Felix to study engineering. This subject was popular among young people, just as Bernard Shaw had foreseen in his novel _The Irrational Knot_ : a new class of engineer-inventors would go 'like a steam roller' through the effete boobies of the aristocracy. The future appeared to be in the hands of H. G. Wells's 'scientific samurai'. It certainly seemed sensible for Felix to use his practical skills to take a course that would virtually guarantee him employment. As Charles probably realised, for Felix to train to be a doctor would entail six expensive years of training, with little prospect of the costs being offset by Felix winning one of the scarce scholarships to medical school. Felix tried to stand firm, but Charles forced him to climb down, doing more harm to their relationship than he probably realised.\n\nThe cheapest and most convenient place for Felix to study was at the university's Faculty of Engineering, housed in the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, which shared the same premises and facilities as the Merchant Venturers' School. Probably with a good deal of resentment, Felix began his course in mechanical engineering there in September 1916, his studies funded by a City of Bristol University Scholarship.\n\nPaul never contemplated studying anything other than a technical subject. He could have taken his pick from dozens of science courses, and seriously considered taking a degree in mathematics, but decided against it after he learned that the likely outcome would be a career in teaching, a prospect that held no appeal for him. In the end, in the absence of a strong preference of his own, he decided to follow his brother - and, apparently, their father's advice - by studying engineering at the Merchant Venturers' College, supported by a generous scholarship.\n\nIn September 1918, Felix was preparing to begin the final year of his engineering course, which he had been finding hard going - throughout, he had languished near the bottom of his class. At the same time, Paul, aged only sixteen, was about to join the ranks of the engineering students - two years younger than the other students in his class. Felix must have known that others were comparing his talent with his brother's and that he would not emerge well from the comparison.\n**Three**\n\nA report by the Bristol Advisory Committee, working in conjunction with the Employment Exchange, issued early in 1916, threw light on the effect of the war on the labour of young people in the preceding year. It stated that boys were almost generally fired by the ambition to become engineers [. . .]\n\nGEORGE STONE and CHARLES WELLS (eds), _Bristol and the Great War_ , 1920\n\nOn the overcast morning of Monday, 11 November 1918, Dirac set off from his home as usual to walk to the Merchant Venturers' College. It was the beginning of his seventh week at the college, and appeared to be like any other day. But when he arrived, he found that all lectures had been cancelled. He soon heard the reason: suddenly and unexpectedly, the war had ended.\n\nBy midday, the centre of Bristol had become the site of a vast, anarchic carnival. During a day of noisy jubilation not seen before in living memory, English reserve was abandoned. Church bells rang out, businesses shut down, everyone felt licensed to drape themselves in the national flag, to march the streets, to bash empty biscuit tins and dustbin lids and anything that would make a lot of noise. All over the city, Union Jacks hung from windows, lamp posts and from the hundreds of trams and motor vehicles that had been commandeered for the day without demur from the police. Among the groups of marchers repeatedly singing 'Rule Britannia' was a group of American soldiers on the way to war, each of them holding a corner of the Union Jack. Nearby, a group of grammar-school students carried an effigy of the Kaiser, once a resident of Bristol. Dirac's fellow Merchant Venturers' students caroused around the city, singing the song they had composed for the occasion. Dirac long remembered the chorus they sang at the top of their voices: 'We are the boys who make no noise,' followed even more loudly by 'Oo-ah, oo-ah-ah.'\n\nThe Prime Minister David Lloyd George spoke that day in the House of Commons of the curious mixture of regret and optimism in the country after 'the cruellest and most terrible War that has ever  scourged mankind. I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came an end to all wars.' Fate, however, had yet more cruelty in store: the Spanish Flu pandemic that broke out towards the end of the conflict cost even more lives than the war. To try to slow the spread of the virus, Bristol's schools had been closed, leaving thousands of children wanting to spend the afternoons laughing at new film comedians such as Fatty Arbuckle, but they were thwarted by the closing of the cinemas during school hours by the local Council's Malvolios.\n\nThe novelist and poet Robert Graves remarked perceptively that before August 1914, the country was divided into the governing and governed; afterwards, although there were still two classes, they had changed into 'the Fighting Forces [. . .] and the Rest, including the Government'. The new divisions were clear at the Merchant Venturers' College after the war: Dirac saw young men returning from the battlefront suddenly outnumber the original intake of students, whose closest brush with the enemy had been through reading newspaper reports. The soldiers had returned to a brief welcome, but they had to settle down quickly to normal life, encumbered by disfigurement and by shell shock and other psychological damage. These men, most of them still in uniform, brought a new grittiness and pragmatism to the lecture rooms. Dirac later observed: 'the new students had a more mature outlook on life, and in the Engineering Faculty they were especially eager to learn results of practical importance and [they] did not have much patience with theory.'\n\nThe returning soldiers were among the thousands who flocked to that year's Christmas treat in Bristol: the opportunity to see and take a tour around the inside of a captured German submarine U86. It was moored in the docks, the Union Jack flag fluttering on one of its masts above the German naval ensign. Everyone knew the significance of the display: the tank, the machine gun, the aircraft, radio and poison gas had all played their part in the war, but none had seemed more menacing than the submarine. Now this most feared weapon was impotently on show, like a dead shark.\n\nEngineering was evidently not the subject best suited to the talents of the young Dirac. The course at the Merchant Venturers' College was more practical than theoretical and therefore exposed his limited  manual skills while not making the most of his mathematical gifts. True to form, Dirac strode ahead in mathematics and was 'a student who got all the answers exactly right, but who had not the faintest idea of how to deal with apparatus'. Not only was he maladroit, his mind was on other things: he spent much of his time in the physics library, reflecting on the fundamentals of science. With no money and nothing else to do during the day, Dirac would walk down from his home in Julius Road to the college and work in the libraries six days a week. He did, however, make his first friend among the other thirty-one students in the class: Charlie Wiltshire, another solitary young man with a mathematical bent.\n\nThey were taught mathematics by Edmund Boulton, nicknamed 'Bandy', as his gait gave the impression that he had just dismounted a mare. Not a strong academic, Bandy showed his class how to tackle textbook mathematical problems in orthodox ways, only for Dirac repeatedly to proffer simpler and more elegant solutions. Soon Dirac and Wiltshire were segregated so that they could work at a pace that would not shame everyone else. Poor Wiltshire may have felt better if he had stayed behind, as he found the task of keeping up with his friend's mathematical progress 'utterly hopeless'. Within a year, they had completed the mathematical content of their degree, but Wiltshire was permanently scarred. Over thirty years later, he wrote that the experience of trying to stay abreast of Dirac had left him with a 'pronounced inferiority complex'.\n\nMathematics was only a small part of Dirac's curriculum: he spent most of the time fumbling in the laboratories with Wiltshire or trying to stay alert during lectures. Unlike most students, he did not like to be spoon-fed and preferred to learn in private, ideally alone in the library, where he would flit back and forth between passages in books and journals, making his own links and associations. One course of lectures that did keep Dirac on his toes was given by the hard-driving head of the electrical-engineering department, David Robertson, a theoretically minded engineer who had been confined to a wheelchair after contracting polio. Dirac admired Robertson for arranging his life methodically and for the way he used clever labour-saving initiatives to help overcome his disability. It was difficult for Robertson to deliver standard chalk-and-blackboard presentations, so he used a precursor of digital presentation software: a continuous series of lantern slides lit - none too reliably - by a flickering carbon arc lamp. Robertson rushed through his commentary, giving no quarter to the intellectual limitations of his audience or to their need to write legible notes. Dirac's favourable opinion of him was not shared by the great majority of his students, who were left trailing in frustration and despair.\n\nRobertson ensured that the electrical-engineering course was built on solid theoretical foundations. Dirac and his colleagues specialised in electrical engineering only in their final year, after they had been given a grounding in physics, chemistry, technical drawing and other types of engineering - civil, mechanical and automotive. No one could reasonably accuse the course of being out of touch with business: Dirac was taught the elements of management, contract law, patents, bookkeeping and accountancy. He even learnt about income tax.\n\nThe course was based in the engineering laboratories. Dirac spent many hours every week there, working with Wiltshire, learning about the mechanical structures and machinery that underpinned industry, including bridges, pulleys, pumps, internal combustion engines, hydraulic cranes and steam turbines. He measured the strength of materials by stretching them until they snapped and by observing how much they bent under stress. The course on electrical engineering was extremely thorough, and Dirac learned about the subject from its roots - simple experiments in electricity and magnetism - through to the minutiae of the design and operation of the latest hardware of the electricity-supply industry. H. G. Wells could not have asked for a more thorough training for a future leader in his technocratic utopia.\n\nThe university Engineering Society organised trips to local factories, partly to give the students a sense of the noise and grime in which most of them would soon be working. A posed photograph taken on one of these trips in March 1919 shows the physical appearance of Dirac and his fellow students, all of them male. Each of them is wearing a tie, a hat and an overcoat, several of them have a stick, and a few are still in military uniform. The sixteen-year-old Dirac is standing at the front, hands in his pockets, looking blankly at the camera with a hint of adolescent rebelliousness. It is the first of many photographs of him as a young man to show confidence and resolve shining out of his eyes.\n\nSix Julius Road was a cold and unloving refuge to Dirac, but for many local people he seemed to be part of an admirable home. The reputation of Charles Dirac was still on the rise: he had become one of the 'Big Four' housemasters at the Merchant Venturers' School, and his private language classes were thriving at home. A few minutes after the beginning of each tutorial, in the small study overlooking the front garden, Flo knocked on the door to bring Charles and his student a pot of tea and a plate of biscuits - part of the attentive service students took for granted at that address. She spent most of her time running the house but liked to while away afternoons reading romantic novels and the poetry of Robert Browning, Robert Burns and Rudyard Kipling. In an exercise book, she wrote out some of her favourite verse and a collection of aphorisms that indicated her penchant for traditional virtues: 'Control, give, sympathise: these things must be learnt and practised: self-control, charity and sympathy.'\n\nThe Diracs' daughter Betty was as timid as her brothers. Most such girls of her generation began a menial job straight after leaving junior school, but Charles and Flo wanted her to continue her education at the nearby Redlands Girls' School, where she studied without special enthusiasm or achievement. It was convenient for her father to accompany her to school after 1919, when his school relocated to Cotham Lawn Road, ten minutes' walk from the Diracs' home. The move was unpopular with its teachers, though it was made palatable for Charles by a sweetener - promotion to the more lucrative post of Associate University Lecturer. His colleagues in the staffroom respected him as one of the most effective teachers in Bristol, though many regarded him as odd. He did nothing to shed this reputation when he told one of them that he had been trepanned: presumably a surgeon had drilled a tiny hole into his head, intending to let out evil spirits.\n\nTo some of Charles's fellow teachers, there was a whiff of fraudulence about him: they found out that the letters B. \u00e8s. L. ( _Baccalaur\u00e9at-\u00e8s-Lettres_ ) that he almost always put after his name signified only that the University of Geneva had pronounced him able to embark on higher education. He had spent only a year at the university, as an _auditeur_ , taking notes but not a degree. One of his colleagues later chuckled as he recounted the minor staffroom scandal involving Charles: as he was not eligible to wear the full academic  dress, he bought a gown and asked his wife to make him a hood in red, white and blue. She knew nothing of the deception and only found out about it several years later.\n\nIn the spring of 1919, for reasons that are not clear, Charles Dirac sought British nationality for the first time. He wrote urgently to the Swiss authorities, saying that after teaching in the UK for thirty years, 'professional reasons' made it essential that he renounce his Swiss nationality. When he submitted his application to the British authorities, he said he wanted the right to vote after the government had withdrawn it, following the recent amendment to the Aliens Registration Act, which also denied Flo - as the wife of a 'foreign national' - the right to vote in future general elections (she had voted for the first time six months before, in common with other British women over thirty years of age). Perhaps, too, he wanted his daughter and elder son to be eligible for the scholarships available only to British citizens? Whatever his motivation, Charles swore allegiance to George V in front of a justice of the peace in Bristol on 22 October 1919. On that day, his children also became Britons, having previously been classed as Swiss, a status that, according to Betty's later recollections, caused her to be teased in the playground for being 'one of those Europeans'. Paul Dirac was no longer a foreigner, but, to many British eyes, he would always have the air of one.\n\nIn the early summer of 1919, when Paul's first-year results confirmed his potential as a top-flight student, Felix became the first person in his extended family to be awarded a degree, though only with third-class honours. The disparity between the brothers' academic talents had never been so stark, so it is probably no coincidence that the relationship between them became seriously troubled at about this time. In the pained and elliptical comments Dirac made later about Felix, he remarked they would often 'get into a row', though he gives no details of the arguments. One possibility is that they were seeded by Felix's jealousy and sense of inferiority, nourished by Paul's lack of empathy with his brother and by his inability to muster tactful words that were sorely needed to preserve Felix's sense of self-worth. Among his colleagues in his later career, Paul Dirac was famous for not understanding the feelings of others and for his lack of tact. It is unlikely that he was any different when he was a young man.\n\nAfter Felix had taken his degree, he left home and moved about  a hundred miles away to Rugby, which was rapidly changing from one of the West Midlands' sleepy market towns into a booming centre of the new electrical technology. Felix took a three-year student apprenticeship at the British Thomson-Houston Company, on a starting wage of a pound a week, giving him a measure of financial independence. Meanwhile, his penniless brother continued to study engineering - while moonlighting in physics - at the Merchant Venturers' College. As he had already chomped his way through the mathematics part of the course, he seemed destined to spend the remaining two years of his engineering degree fumbling his way through his laboratory exercises and listening to his lecturers drone their way through the syllabus. When especially bored, he amused himself in the library by hunting down the longest German words in the technical dictionaries (hyphens barred) and reading about the subject that most interested him, physics. His scientific imagination was ripe for a challenge, and, a few weeks after he began his second year at university, it arrived.\n\nNo event in Dirac's working life ever affected him as deeply as the moment when relativity 'burst upon the world, with a tremendous impact', as he remembered nearly sixty years later. Einstein became a media figure on Friday, 7 November 1919, when _The Times_ in London published what appeared to be just another post-war edition, including the news that the King supported the proposal of an Australian journalist for two minutes' commemorative silence on the anniversary of Armistice Day. On page 12, the sixth column featured a 900-word article that most readers probably passed over, unless the headline, 'Revolution in Science', captured their attention. Yet this was a momentous piece of journalism, and it helped to propel Einstein from relative obscurity in Berlin to international celebrity; soon, his moustachioed face and frizzled mane of black hair were familiar to newspaper readers all over the world. The unsigned article reported the apparent verification of a theory by Einstein that 'would completely revolutionize the accepted fundamental physics' and thereby overturn the ideas of Isaac Newton that had held sway for over two centuries. The observations were made by two teams of British astronomers who had found that the deflection by the Sun of distant starlight during the recent solar eclipse was consistent with Einstein's theory but not Newton's. When he was an old man, Dirac  remembered this as a time of special excitement: 'Suddenly Einstein was on everyone's lips [. . .] [E]veryone was sick and tired of the war. Everyone wanted to forget it. And then relativity came along as a wonderful idea leading to a new domain of thought.'\n\nDirac, Charlie Wiltshire and their fellow students were fascinated by Einstein's new theory and tried to find out what the fuss was about. This was not an easy task. Their teachers, like most academics in the UK, were no more knowledgeable than their students about this alleged scientific revolution. Apart from occasional articles in scientific journals such as _Nature_ , the primary sources of knowledge about the new theory of relativity were newspapers and magazines, whose editors gave commentators thousands of column inches to speculate - usually facetiously - about the new theory and its apparent defiance of common sense. On 20 January 1920, _Punch_ featured an anti-Semitic poem that exemplified popular puzzlement with the theory that had originated behind the lines of the UK's bitter enemy:\n\nEuclid is gone, dethroned,   \nBy dominies disowned,   \nAnd modern physicists, Judaeo-Teuton,   \nFinding strange kinks in space,   \nSwerves in light's arrowy race,   \nMake havoc of the theories of Newton.\n\nThe pages of the newspapers and magazines were replete with advertisements for scores of half-baked accounts of Einstein's work churned out only months after the theory came to public attention. At that time, there were no science journalists, so Dirac and his friend Wiltshire had to rely on popular articles written by scientists, notably Arthur Eddington, the Quaker astronomer and mathematician at the University of Cambridge and the only person in Britain to have mastered the theory. He had even got his hands dirty in one of the eclipse expeditions that produced crucial support for the theory.\n\nIn a stream of entertaining articles and books, Eddington deployed witty, down-to-earth analogies that made even the most complex abstract ideas accessible and arresting. His skill is exemplified in the account he gave in 1918 of Einstein's famous equation _E_ = _mc_ 2. Other authors could only crank out a dreary and barely comprehensible explanation of the equation's neat connection between the  energy _E_ equivalent to a mass _m_ , and the speed of light in a vacuum (symbolised by the letter _c_ ). Eddington knew better. In his explanation, he used the equation to do a calculation that he knew would interest his readers: he worked out the total mass of the light that the Sun shines onto the Earth and then used the result to comment on the controversial question of whether to keep daylight-saving time:\n\nthe cost of light supplied by gas and electricity companies works out at something like \u00a310,000,000 an ounce. This points the moral of Daylight Saving: the Sun showers down on us 160 tons of this valuable stuff every day; and yet we often neglect this free gift and prefer to pay \u00a310,000,000 an ounce for [light of] a much inferior quality.\n\nEddington and other writers fuelled Dirac's interest in understanding how the material universe works. But he spent most of his time studying for his engineering degree, struggling to concentrate in lectures, mastering the theoretical concepts, doing experiments and writing them up in immaculate accounts that feature scarcely a single crossing-out. To the modern eye, they almost look as if they had been printed by machine in a special typeface that successfully mimics ordinary human handwriting, with every repeated letter reproduced identically.\n\nCharlie Wiltshire was one of the very few people who glimpsed the human side of Dirac. To most people, he looked like a cold-hearted solipsist, uninterested in human contact, engaged only by mathematics, physics and engineering. Even in those repressed times, Dirac appeared to be exceptionally narrow-minded and inhibited.\n\nSoon after his eighteenth birthday, Dirac had to spend time away from his sheltered environment for the first time. He travelled to Rugby, where his brother Felix was one of the small army of young apprentices in the local factories, to spend the summer as a trainee engineer, and, perhaps, to see whether he was suited to factory work. By the end of his month-long stay, the answer was clear.\n\nDirac worked in the British Thomson-Houston electrical goods factory, located on a ninety-acre site next to the railway station. The factory dominated the town. It was said that everyone who lived in Rugby either worked there or knew someone who did. Certainly, everyone in the town was familiar with the saw-tooth profile of the factory's roofs, one of them bearing the sign 'Electrical Machinery'.  And everyone, wherever they stood, could see the smoke billowing from two chimneys that pointed to the sky like a pair of smouldering lances.\n\nDirac arrived in Rugby sporting a new wristwatch, a device that had a decade before been regarded as effeminate for men (and outr\u00e9 for women) but had become respectable after soldiers in the war had found them useful. He lodged above a draper's shop on a street corner, precisely midway between the factory's two entrances, a few minutes' walk away. Dirac was one of about a hundred vacation students who provided menial labour, mainly in the relatively quiet testing laboratories well away from the turbine-construction area, when many of the workers were on holiday. It was a slow-news summer, enlivened only by the dramatic lockout of the Electrical Trades Union and by a local polo match in which one of the players was the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill.\n\nFlo regularly wrote to Paul, the first of several hundred letters that she sent him between then and her death. It seems that he kept all of them. These first letters were warm and newsy, telling him of Betty's new dog, how 'Daddy missed you when he had all the grass to cut' and of the new overcoat she was going to have done up for him ('I showed it to Pa & he wants it for himself'). Flo repeatedly complained that he was not telling the family enough about what he was doing. 'Do you ever come across Felix?' she asked. The answer was that the two brothers did pass each other on the streets of Rugby, but they did not exchange a word. Their relationship had deteriorated into a state of cold hostility; Paul apparently offered his brother the same expressionless stare that he gave almost everyone else. Either their mother did not know of her sons' falling out, it seems, or she was too blinkered to notice.\n\nDirac's employers in Rugby gave him the only poor report he would receive in his entire life. David Robertson later showed him the damning comments and disclosed that he was the only vacation student from Bristol ever to receive an unfavourable report. It judged Dirac to be 'a positive menace in the Electrical Test Department', to 'lack keenness' and to be 'slovenly', making it clear between the lines that Dirac would be unwise to seek a future on the factory floor.\n\nIn late September 1920, Dirac returned to Bristol to prepare for his final undergraduate year, when he specialised in electrical engineering. His passion, however, was the theory of relativity. One of  his frustrations was that he could not find an accessible technical account of the theory that would explain, step by step, how Einstein had developed his ideas. Of the academic disciplines that contributed the reams of piffle Dirac read about relativity, none was more prolific than philosophy. One commentator wrote: 'A philosopher who regards ignorance of a scientific theory as insufficient reason for not writing about it cannot be accused of complete lack of originality.' The writer of those words was one of the most talented young philosophers working in Britain, Charlie Broad. Having originally wanted to be an engineer, he trained in both philosophy and science at Cambridge and acquired more expertise in relativity theory than the great majority of physicists, many of whom knew next to nothing about Einstein and his work. In the autumn of 1920, soon after Broad was appointed as the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, he gave a series of lectures for final-year science students on scientific thought, billed to include a description of Einstein's theory. Dirac and several other engineering students sat in on these lectures, though few of them were sitting alongside Dirac to the end, as the going quickly became tough and the material had little to do with engineering. For Dirac, the course was a memorable experience, as it was for Broad, who wrote thirty years later in his autobiography:\n\nthere came to these lectures one whose shoe-laces I was not worthy to unloose. This was Dirac, then a very young student, whose budding genius had been recognized by the department of engineering and was in the process of being fostered by the department of mathematics.\n\nBroad was a wonderfully idiosyncratic lecturer. He always appeared with a carefully prepared script, and he read every sentence twice, except for the jokes, which he delivered three times. Although he spoke drearily, his content was compelling, jargon-free and spiked with witty references to Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde and other literary figures. Trenchancy was one of his strongest suits. During a warning about the snake oil of most popular accounts of relativity, he counselled that 'popular expositions of the Theory are either definitely wrong, or so loosely expressed as to be dangerously misleading; and all pamphlets against it - even when issued by eminent Oxford tutors - are based on elementary misunderstandings.'\n\nBroad's treatment of relativity in his course was unconventional to  the point of quirkiness. He taught Einstein's first theory and his more general version together, taking a unified approach and concentrating on the basic ideas rather than on the mathematics. Broad's aim was to make it clear that the theories give 'a radically new way of looking at Nature'. The first of Einstein's theories is usually dubbed the 'special theory' because it deals only with observers who move in straight lines at constant speeds with respect to one another; for example, passengers on two trains moving smoothly on parallel tracks. Einstein based his theory on just two simple assumptions: first, that when each of the observers measures the speed of light in a vacuum, they will always find the same value, regardless of their speed; and, second, that measurements made by the observers will lead them to agree on all the laws of physics. Einstein's great insight was to see that if these assumptions were followed to their logical conclusion, a new understanding of space, time, energy and matter emerged.\n\nA casualty of Einstein's theory was the widely accepted belief that the universe is pervaded by an ether, which Broad argued had become superfluous:\n\nthere was supposed to be a peculiar kind of matter, called Ether, that filled all Space. On these theories the Ether was supposed to produce all kinds of effects on ordinary matter, and it became a sort of family pet with certain physicists. As physics has advanced, less and less has been found for the Ether to do.\n\nContrary to the theory, the existence of such a substance would imply that there is a uniquely privileged frame of reference, so relativity implies that the ether is an unnecessary assumption and may well not exist, unless experiments say otherwise. Einstein also noted that measurements of space and time are not, as almost everyone else thought, independent but are inextricably linked, leading to the idea of a unified space-time, a concept introduced by his former teacher Hermann Minkowski, a German mathematician. Finally, Einstein showed that an inevitable consequence of this new way of thinking was his equation _E_ = _mc_ 2, implying that the mass of a small coin is equivalent to the vast energy needed to run a city for days or indeed to raze it. An apocalyptic vision of this power had already been presented by H. G. Wells, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, in his novel _The World Set Free._\n\nFor most purposes, the predictions of Einstein's special theory were extremely similar to the corresponding ones made by Newton's theory. The two sets of predictions, however, were noticeably different at speeds approaching the speed of light in a vacuum: Einstein claimed that, under these conditions, his theory was more accurate, though it would be several decades before the superiority was convincingly demonstrated by experimenters. In the meantime, Einstein's reasoning made it possible to amend the description of anything given by Newton's theory and produce a 'relativistic' version - one that agreed with the principles of the special theory of relativity. Two years later, Dirac took up a new hobby, aiming to produce relativistic versions of Newtonian theories - an activity he pursued like an engineer upgrading tried-and-tested designs to ones that perform to a higher specification: 'There was a sort of general problem one could take, whenever one saw a bit of physics expressed in a non-relativistic form, to transcribe it to make it fit in with special relativity. It was rather like a game, which I indulged in at every opportunity.'\n\nEinstein's second theory of relativity applied to _all_ observers, including ones who are accelerating; for example, observers who fall freely under the action of gravity. In this 'general theory of relativity', Einstein proposed a geometric picture of gravity, replacing Newton's concept that an apple and every other mass is subject to a force of gravity by a radically new way of describing the situation. According to Einstein, every mass exists in a curved space-time - roughly analogous to a curved sheet of rubber - and the motion of the mass at every point in space-time is determined by the curvature of space-time at that point. Because the theory is relativistic, information cannot be transmitted faster than light, and all energies contribute to mass (via _E_ = _mc_ 2) and therefore to gravity. It turns out that, in the Solar System, where almost all matter has comparatively low density and travels much more slowly than light, the predictions of Einstein's theory of gravity are in extremely good agreement with Newton's. But, in some situations, they can be distinguished, and one of the most straightforward ways of doing so involved measuring the bending of starlight by its gravitational attraction to the Sun during a solar eclipse: Einstein's theory predicted that this deflection would be twice Newton's value. This was the prediction that Eddington and his colleagues believed they had verified in their solar-eclipse experiments.\n\nIt was during one of the early lectures in Broad's course that Dirac had a revelation about the nature of space and time. Broad was talking about how to calculate the distance between two points. If they lie at the sharpest corners of a right-angled triangle, then every schoolchild knows that the distance between the points (the hypotenuse) is given by Pythagoras's Theorem: the square of this distance is equal to the _sum_ of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. In the space-time of the special theory of relativity, things are different: the square of the distance between two points in space-time is equal to the sum of the squares of the spatial lengths _minus_ the square of the time. Dirac later recalled 'the tremendous impact' on him of Broad's writing down that minus sign. This dash of chalk on Broad's blackboard told Dirac that his schoolboy ideas about space and time were wrong. He had assumed that the relationship between space and time could be described using the familiar Euclidean plane geometry, but if that had been true, every sign in the formula for the distance between two points would have been positive. Space and time must be related by a different kind of geometry. Pickering, Dirac's mathematics teacher at the Merchant Venturers' School, had already introduced him to the Riemannian geometry that Einstein had used to describe curved space-time. In this way of looking at space and time, the angles of a triangle may not add up to 180 degrees as they do in ordinary Euclidean space. In Einstein's general theory of relativity, matter and energy are linked with the space and time in which they exist: matter and energy determine how much space-time is curved, and the curvature of space-time dictates how matter and energy move. Thus, Einstein offered a new explanation of why the apple in the tree in Newton's garden fell: it was not the gravitational pull of the Earth that was responsible but the planet's curvature of space-time in the region of the apple.\n\nInspired by Broad's lectures, and by Eddington's semi-popular book _Space, Time and Gravitation_ , Dirac soon taught himself the special and general theories, another early sign of his special talent as a theoretician. The mathematical complexities of Einstein's general theory so terrified most physicists that they found excuses not to bother with it, whereas Dirac - an engineering undergraduate, not a registered student of physics - studied it voraciously. While other nineteen-year-olds were seeking beauty in the flesh, he sought it in equations.\n\nBroad was sceptical of the contribution philosophy can make to advance the understanding of the natural world (he called it 'aimless wandering in a circle'), but his lectures persuaded Dirac that the subject was worth pursuing. One text he took out of the library was John Stuart Mill's _A System of Logic_ , which the young Einstein had studied some fifteen years before. Mill had been the nineteenth century's pre-eminent British philosopher, the most cogent voice of empiricism, the belief that human beings should ground every concept in verifiable experience. His approach to ethics was largely utilitarian, believing that the ultimate good is one that brings the most happiness to the greatest number of people and that the right-ness of any human action should be judged according to its contribution to public happiness. Mill was influenced by other empiricists, notably by his friend Auguste Comte, the French pioneer of the positivist belief that all true knowledge is scientific, including knowledge about 'sociology', a word that Comte coined. Mill had no time for the Kantian 'intuitionist' view that some truths are so exalted that they transcend experience: he dismissed as meaningless many unverifiable statements made by bishops, politicians and others he regarded as airy-fairy moralists. Mill's views and his feet-on-the-ground public spiritedness were enormously influential among Victorians and have become the essence of the liberal English consensus. He influenced Dirac, and many others, more than they knew.\n\n_A System of Logic_ , published in 1843, is a plain-spoken if laborious account of how empiricism can shape every aspect of human life. The book features Mill's agenda for science, which assumes that there is an underlying 'uniformity of nature'. The aim of scientists should be to explain more and more observations in terms of fewer and fewer laws, every one of them grounded in experience and induced from it. For Mill, the agreement between an experimental measurement and a corresponding theoretical prediction does not imply that the theory is correct, as there may well be many other theories that give equally good agreement. He argued that scientists have the never-ending task of finding theories that are in ever-better agreement with empirical observations.\n\nIn a memoir he wrote in his seventies, Dirac said he gave 'a lot of thought' to philosophy, trying to understand what it could contribute to physics. He recalled that he read _A System of Logic_ 'all through',  which we can safely interpret to mean that he read and pondered almost every word of it, his usual practice. Although he found it 'pretty dull', it introduced to him the important idea that the disparate scientific observations and theories he had learned about had an underlying unity. Furthermore, science should seek to describe this unity using the fewest possible laws of nature, each of them formulated in the simplest possible way. Although this probably influenced the thinking of the young Dirac, he concluded that philosophy was not an effective way of finding out what makes nature tick. Rather, as he put it in an interview in 1963, 'it's just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made'.\n\nThe best way of understanding nature's regularities, he was coming to believe, was through mathematics. Dirac's lecturers in the engineering classes had drummed into him that mathematical rigour is unimportant; mathematics is simply a tool to obtain useful answers that are correct or, at least, accurate enough for the purpose in hand. One exponent of this pragmatic approach to the mathematics of engineering was Oliver Heaviside, an acid-tongued recluse who had invented a battery of powerful techniques that made it easy to study the effects of passing pulses of electric current through electrical circuits. No one quite understood why these methods worked, but he didn't care: what mattered to him was that they gave correct results, with a speed more rigorous methods could not match and without generating inconsistencies with other parts of mathematics. Engineers prized Heaviside's methods for their usefulness, but mathematicians mocked them for their lack of rigour. Heaviside had no time for pedantry ('Shall I refuse my dinner because I do not understand digestion?') and rejected the attacks of his detested opponents. He even entitled his autobiography after them: _Wicked People I Have Known._ 52\n\nDirac studied Heaviside's techniques and later remarked that there was 'some sort of magic' about them. Another of the engineers' clever tricks that impressed Dirac concerned the calculation of the stresses exerted on materials; for example, by a gymnast balancing on a beam. Engineers routinely calculate these stresses using special diagrams that generate correct answers much more quickly than the mathematicians' rigorous techniques. In his classes, Dirac used this method to represent stresses in this way and saw its power; within a few years, he would use similar techniques in a different context, to understand atoms.\n\nOne of the lessons he learned in his engineering classes was the value of approximate theories. In order to describe how something works, it is essential to take into account the quantities that do most to affect its behaviour and to single out the quantities unimportant enough to be ignored. David Robertson taught Dirac a lesson he later regarded as crucial: even approximate theories can have mathematical beauty. So, when Dirac studied electrical circuits, the stresses on revolving shafts in engines and the windings of the rotors in electric dynamos, he was aware that the underlying theories had, like Einstein's general theory of relativity, a mathematical beauty.\n\nIt was probably Dirac's reflections on Einstein's theory that first led him to believe that the goal of theoretical physicists should be to find equations that describe the natural world, but his studies of engineering were the source of a proviso: that the fundamental equations of Nature are only approximations. It was the job of scientists to find ever-better approximations to the truth, which always lies tantalisingly beyond their reach.\n\nApart from the embarrassing report Dirac had been given in Rugby, his record during his degree was almost flawless: only once in three years did he fail to top his class in every subject (the spoilsport was the assessor of a Strength of Materials course who ranked him second).  But it was clear that his real talents were in theoretical subjects and mathematics. Early in 1921, within a few months of completing the degree, his father suggested that he set his sights on studying at Cambridge. Early in February, Charles wrote to St John's College, almost certainly acting on the advice of Ronald Hass\u00e9, head of Bristol University's mathematics department and a member of Cambridge University's network of talent-spotters. Hass\u00e9 was a graduate and research student of the college, notable as the first person in Cambridge to speak of Einstein's 'theory of relativity'.\n\nCharles enquired whether the college would let him have details of 'any open scholarship in mechanical science or mathematics' that his son could apply for. The college responded swiftly and arranged for Dirac to make his trip to Cambridge in June 1921, to sit the college's entrance examination. Dirac's application to the college, made when he had just turned nineteen, is the earliest extant example of his adult handwriting. It shows that he wrote with the precision and  clarity of a calligrapher, each letter standing upright with some of the capitals decorated unobtrusively with a tiny curlicue.\n\nDirac passed the entrance examination handsomely, winning an annual exhibition (a minor exhibition) of \u00a370, which was disappointingly short of the minimum of \u00a3200 a year that he needed to live in Cambridge. Charles argued that it was 'out of the question' to give his son the additional money as he earned only \u00a3420 a year and had no other income, neglecting to mention his lucrative private tuition. Bristol council refused to help because Charles and Paul had become British citizens only two years before and were therefore ineligible for financial assistance. Disappointed, Charles later wrote to Cambridge asking to be kept informed if any other opportunities should arise for his son. He concluded, 'I am sorry to trouble you, but I believe the boy has an exceptionable [ _sic_ ] head for mathematics and I am trying to do my best for him.' When an official at St John's College offered tactfully to advise him further if he would provide more information about his family's finances, Charles did not reply.\n\nAlthough Paul's Cambridge application had stalled, by July he had a first-class honours degree in engineering, a qualification that he and his father hoped would all but guarantee him employment. However, his graduation coincided with the worst depression in the UK since the industrial revolution: unemployment soared to two million. To every job application, Dirac drew a blank. Thus, the most talented graduate Bristol had ever produced found himself unemployed. But this turned out to be a stroke of luck.\n**Four**\n\nMathematics [. . .] does furnish the power for deliberate thought and accurate statement, and to speak the truth is one of the most social qualities a person can possess. Gossip, flattery, slander, deceit all spring from a slovenly mind that has not been trained in the power of truthful statement.\n\nS. T. DUTTON, _Social Phases of Education in the School and the_  \n_Home_ , London, 1900\n\nWhat might have happened to Dirac if he had got one of the jobs he applied for, perhaps in the burgeoning aviation industry? Might the loss to physics have been offset by a commensurate gain for aeronautics? That these are questions of virtual history is due to the mathematician Ronald Hass\u00e9, who deftly steered Dirac's career from engineering to science. Things could easily have worked out quite differently. In September 1921, when Dirac was at a loose end and looking for jobs, David Robertson suggested to Dirac that, rather than hang around doing nothing, he should do an electrical-engineering project. Dirac dabbled in some experiments, but, after a few weeks, Hass\u00e9 wooed him back to the lecture theatres in the mathematics department, having arranged for him to do a full mathematics degree free of charge and for him to skip the first year's work so he could complete it in two years.\n\nDirac's fellow mathematics students were struck by his punctuality. For the first lectures of the day, beginning at 9 a.m., he was always the first to arrive, silently occupying a seat in the front row and showing no interest whatever in his fellow students. He spoke only when spoken to and talked only in clipped, matter-of-fact sentences that bore no trace of emotion. One of the students later recalled that no one even knew the name of the 'tall, pallid youth' or showed much interest in him until the results of the Christmas examination results revealed that the new student 'P. A. M. Dirac' was top of the class.\n\nSome of the students resolved to make some enquiries about their mysterious colleague. They were surprised to learn that although he  was eighteen months younger than anyone else in the class, he already had a degree in engineering. One of his characteristics was that although he was preternaturally silent, he did stir if he spotted a serious scientific error. In one such incident, after a lecturer had filled two and a half blackboards with symbols and left almost all the students frantically scribbling as they tried to keep up with him, he realised that he had made a mistake. He stood back from the blackboard and turned to Dirac: 'I have gone wrong, can you spot it?' After Dirac identified the error and explained how to put it right, the lecturer thanked him and resumed his exposition.\n\nIn Dirac's first year of his new course, he studied pure mathematics - the branch of mathematics pursued with no concern for its applications - and applied mathematics, employed to solve practical problems. One of his lecturers was Peter Fraser, a farmer's son from the Scottish Highlands, a bachelor who lived much of his life in a reverie and liked to tramp the countryside while contemplating the higher truths of mathematics. He did no original research and never wrote a research paper but channelled all his intellectual energy into his teaching. Dirac believed he was the best teacher he ever had.\n\nShortly before 9 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Dirac was in his seat, awaiting the next episode of Fraser's teaching of a special type of mathematics, known as projective geometry, largely a French invention derived from studies of perspective, shadows and engineering drawing. One of its founders was Gaspard Monge, a draughtsman and mathematician who much preferred to solve mathematical problems using geometric ideas rather than complicated algebra. In 1795, Monge founded the descriptive geometry that Dirac had used in the first technical drawings he made in Bishop Road School, representing objects in three orthogonal points of view. Jean-Victor Poncelet, an engineer in Napoleon's army, built on Monge's ideas to set out the principles of projective geometry when he was a prisoner in Russia in 1812. His ideas and their consequences were to become the mathematical love of Dirac's life.\n\nWhen most students come across projective geometry, they find it an unusual branch of mathematics because it primarily taxes their powers of visualisation and does not feature complicated mathematical formulae. What matters in projective geometry is not the familiar concept of the distance between two points but the _relationships_ between the points on different lines and on different planes. Dirac became  intrigued by the techniques of projective geometry and by their ability to solve problems much more quickly than algebraic methods. For example, the techniques allow geometers to conjure theorems about lines from theorems about points, and vice versa - 'that appealed to me very much', Dirac stressed forty years later. To him, an impressionable young mathematician, this was a powerful demonstration of the power of reasoning to probe the nature of space.\n\nFraser also persuaded Dirac of the value of mathematical rigour - an uncompromising respect for logic, consistency and completeness - something he had, as an engineering student, been taught to wink at. In Dirac's studies of applied mathematics, he learned how to describe electricity, magnetism and the flows of fluids using powerful equations that yielded neat solutions, all consistent with experimental observations. He also used Newton's laws of mechanics to study the contrived examples that inform the education of every applied mathematician: rigid ladders resting against walls, spheres rolling down inclined planes, and beads sliding around circular hoops. Dirac filled several exercise books with his answers, most of them flawless. He did most of this work in his bedroom, his escape from the family he perceived to be unloving and a refuge from Betty's yapping dog. Betty was developing into an unambitious, self-deprecating young woman, in awe of her brother Paul's intelligence, content to while away hours doing nothing. Her father doted on her, as Bishopston local Norman Jones remembered sixty years later when he said that his main recollection of Charles Dirac was 'seeing him always carrying an umbrella, struggling up the hill [. . .] often with his daughter, of whom he was very fond'.\n\nDirac saw Felix only occasionally, at weekends, when he returned from his lodgings in the Black Country of the Midlands, near Wolverhampton. The brothers were still not on speaking terms.\n\nIn the final year of his course, Dirac should have been given the choice of specialising in either pure or applied mathematics. He wanted to take the pure option but did not get his way. His fellow student on the honours mathematics degree programme, Beryl Dent - the strong-minded daughter of a headmaster - had the upper hand because she was paying for her tuition, unlike Dirac. She expressed a firm preference for studying applied mathematics, and her wishes carried the day, perhaps partly because it was easiest for the lecturers  to teach the same courses to the two students. So, for the first time since he began senior school, Dirac had to work alongside a young woman, but his relations with her were strictly formal; they seldom spoke.\n\nDirac spent the 1922-3 academic year with his head down, building on the applied mathematics that he had learned the year before. One bonus for him was that his course included a few lectures on the special theory of relativity, though he probably knew more about the subject than his lecturer. By the time he had finished, he had acquired considerable expertise in Newtonian mechanics. Although he knew that Einstein had found fault with Newton's laws of mechanics, they worked extremely well for all real-world applications, so it made good sense to master them, as tens of thousands of other students - including Einstein himself - had done before.\n\nDuring his mathematics degree, Dirac encountered the ideas of William Hamilton, the nineteenth-century Irish mathematician and amateur poet. He was a friend and correspondent of William Wordsworth, who served science well by helping to persuade Hamilton that he would do better to spend his time on mathematics rather than on poetry. Among his discoveries, Hamilton was most enamoured with his invention of quaternions, mathematical objects that behave peculiarly when they are multiplied together. If two ordinary numbers are multiplied, the same result emerges regardless of their order of multiplication (for example 6 \u00d7 9 has the same value as 9 3 6). Mathematicians say that such numbers 'commute'. But quaternions are different: if one quaternion is multiplied by a second, the result is _different_ from the result obtained if the second is multiplied by the first. In modern language, quaternions are said to be 'non-commuting'. Hamilton believed that quaternions have many practical applications, but the consensus was that they are mathematically interesting but scientifically infertile.\n\nDirac also heard about Hamilton's reformulation of Newton's laws of mechanics. Hamilton's approach largely dispensed with the idea of force and, in principle, enabled scientists to study any material thing - from a simple pendulum to cosmic matter in outer space - much more easily than was possible using Newton's methods. The key to Hamilton's technique was a special type of mathematical object that comprehensively describes the behaviour of the thing under study, the Hamiltonian, as it became known. Hamilton's  methods became another of Dirac's fixations and were to become his favourite way of setting out the fundamental laws of physics.\n\nThe mathematics degree did not present a sufficient challenge to keep Dirac occupied, so Hass\u00e9 encouraged him to take as many of the undergraduate physics courses as his timetable allowed. Once again, Dirac chose to study fundamental subjects which were not covered in his syllabus. In one course, he studied the electron, the particle discovered twenty-five years before in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge by J. J. Thomson, a man equally adept at investigating nature theoretically and - despite his ham-fistedness - experimentally. Several of Thomson's colleagues thought he was joking when he argued that the electron was smaller than the atom and was a constituent of every atom; to many scientists, the idea that there could exist matter smaller than the atom was inconceivable. Yet he was proved right, and, by the time Dirac first became acquainted with the electron, textbooks routinely ascribed electric current to the flow of Thomson's electrons.\n\nDirac also attended lectures in atomic physics given by Arthur Tyndall, a kindly and articulate man with a keen eye for scientific talent. Tyndall introduced Dirac to what was to prove one of the central insights of twentieth-century physics: the idea that the laws of 'quantum theory', which describe nature on the smallest scale, are not the same as the scientific laws that describe everyday matter. Tyndall illustrated this by describing how the energy of light arrives not in continuous waves but in separate, tiny amounts called quanta. At first, this idea was not taken seriously, as virtually all scientists were convinced that light behaves as waves. Their faith rested on the unarguable success of the theory of light published several decades before by the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, the Cavendish Laboratory's first professor. According to this theory, checked by many experiments, the energy of light and all other types of electromagnetic radiation is delivered not in lumps but continuously, like water waves lashing against a harbour wall.\n\nQuantum theory had been discovered - largely by accident - by Max Planck, the Berlin-based doyen of German physics. He happened on the idea of quanta when he was analysing the results of some apparently obscure desktop experiments that investigated the radiation bouncing around inside the reflecting walls of ovens at steady temperatures (the experiments aimed to help German industry  improve the efficiency of lighting devices). The quantum emerged stealthily from the darkness of those ovens through the ingenuity of Planck, who brilliantly guessed a formula for the variation in the intensity of the radiation with its wavelength, at every temperature setting of the oven. In the closing weeks of 1900, Planck found he could explain the formula for the 'blackbody radiation spectrum' only if he introduced a concept that seemed completely contrary to Maxwell's theory: the energy of light (and every other type of radiation) can be transferred to atoms _only_ in quanta.\n\nThe conservative Planck did not view this quantisation as a revolutionary discovery about radiation but as 'a purely formal assumption' needed to make his calculations work. Einstein first recognised the true importance of the idea in 1905, when he took the concept of radiation quanta literally and demonstrated that the reasoning Planck had used to derive his black-body radiation spectrum formula was hopelessly flawed. The challenge was to do better than Planck by finding a logical derivation of the formula.\n\nWhen Planck discovered the quantum of energy, he also realised that its size is directly determined by a new fundamental constant, which he denoted _h_ and others dubbed Planck's constant. It figures in almost every equation of quantum theory, but nowhere in the previously successful theories of light and matter, retrospectively labelled 'classical theories'. The minuscule size of the constant means that the energy of a typical quantum of light is tiny; for example, a single quantum of visible light has only about a trillionth of the energy of the beat of a fly's wing.\n\nIn these lectures, Tyndall introduced Dirac to a new way of thinking about light, to new physics. But although Tyndall was admired for his clear presentations, quantum physics was then vague, provisional and messy, so it was impossible for him to present to Dirac the kind of tidy, well-reasoned course that he preferred, underpinned by clear principles and concise equations. This may explain why, if Dirac's later recollections are correct, his first course in quantum theory made virtually no impact on him. His main interest remained relativity.\n\nDespite his earlier setback, Charles Dirac had not lost hope of sending Paul to Cambridge. Late in March, Ronald Hass\u00e9 wrote to the applied mathematician Ebenezer Cunningham, one of the Fellows of St John's  College, reminding him of Dirac's failure to win a local scholarship that would have enabled him to take up the place that he had won two years earlier. Hass\u00e9 pointed out that he was 'certain to get first class honours in June', and that he was 'an exceedingly good mathematician', interested mainly in 'general questions - relativity, quantum theory etc., rather than in particular details, and is, I think, very keen on the logical side of the subject'. Among his perceptive comments, Hass\u00e9 did include some provisos about the young Dirac's character: 'He is a bit uncouth, and wants some sitting on hard, is rather a recluse, plays no games, is very badly off financially.' Those minor points aside, Hass\u00e9 warmly recommended that the college should accept Dirac if he could find the funds to eke out a living.\n\nThis time, Paul Dirac was successful. In August, after he heard that he had won a place at Cambridge, he asked to study relativity with Eddington's Congregationalist colleague Cunningham, who had introduced an unusual version of Einstein's special theory of relativity to the UK shortly before the Great War. At that time, Cunningham and Eddington were streets ahead of the majority of their Cambridge colleagues, who dismissed Einstein's work, ignored it or denied its significance.  But Cunningham was not available: he had given up supervising graduate students after the war, when he had been pilloried as a conscientious objector, most woundingly by authorities who prevented him from working in schools on the grounds that he 'was not a fit person to teach children'. The supervisor chosen for Dirac was another mathematical physicist, Ralph Fowler, a generous-spirited man with the build of Henry VIII and the voice of a drill sergeant. He was not a master of relativity but the foremost quantum theorist in the country and an expert in linking the way materials behave to the enmasse behaviour of their atoms. For Dirac, wanting above all to study relativity, this was not encouraging news.\n\nTwo scholarships - one of \u00a370 per year from St John's College, the other from the Government's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research for \u00a3140 per year - were sufficient to fund Dirac's first year in Cambridge, provided he lived frugally, as was his wont. The arrangements seemed to have fallen into place, but, in September, he received bitter news: the university required students to settle their bills at the beginning of term, but his government grant was going to arrive too late. He feared that he would again have to forgo his place, all for the sake of \u00a35.\n\nBut his father came to the rescue by handing him the money he desperately needed to be sure of solvency in Cambridge. Dirac was touched. This was a crucial act of compassion, he later said, and it minded him to forgive his father for the browbeatings round the dinner table and all the other earlier miseries. Charles Dirac did not seem so bad after all.\n**Five**\n\n[. . .] I could behold  \nThe antechapel where the statue stood  \nOf Newton with his prism and silent face,  \nThe marble index of a mind for ever  \nVoyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.\n\nWILLIAM WORDSWORTH, _The Prelude_ ,  \nBook III, 'Residence at Cambridge', 1805\n\nCambridge has never been the most welcoming place. Visitors who first arrive by rail are often surprised when they realise that the station is almost a mile from the town centre. This rebuffing nudge was quite intentional. Four decades before the station opened in 1845, the authorities had helped to fight off proposals to link the town to London with a canal, but pressure to make Cambridge part of the emerging railway network was irresistible. They did, however, ensure that the station was about twenty minutes' walk from the nearest college so that students would be less tempted to flit off to London and that outsiders would think twice about invading the town's privacy. In 1851, the Vice Chancellor of the university complained to the directors of the railway company that 'they had made arrangements for conveying foreigners and others to Cambridge at such fares as might be likely to tempt persons who, having no regard for Sunday themselves, would inflict their presence on the University on that day of rest'.\n\nAs soon as Dirac - and every other new, luggage-laden student - emerged from the station, he had to trek to the city centre or join the queue for one of the few buses that took passengers to Senate House Hill. On Monday, 1 October 1923, when he walked into St John's College through the Tudor Great Gate, he entered an unfamiliar world of tradition, camaraderie and privilege. He would have been greeted by college porters - resplendent in their liveries and silk hats - each of them charged with keeping an eye on the students and with an obligation to report any errant behaviour. The college admitted only men, many of them in jodhpurs and flat caps  and talking in voices that advertised their breeding. Dirac's social standing was given away by his cheap suit - purchased from the Bristol Co-Op - his gauche manners and, on the odd occasion when he spoke, his accent. There was also something out of the ordinary about his appearance. A small and well-tended black moustache lay above his snaggled top teeth, his wan face topped with a thatch of black curly hair and dominated by his assertively pointed nose. Not quite six feet tall and recognisably his father's son, Dirac had bright eyes, a large forehead that revealed a receding hairline and, already, the slightest of stoops.\n\nThe sense of tradition in the college is most powerfully expressed in its architecture. Some of it was four centuries old, its construction funded by the posthumous largesse of Henry VIII's bookish paternal grandmother, Lady Margaret Beaufort. The enduring presence of these buildings reminds students that their academic home will remain long after all but the most talented of them have been forgotten. Dirac arrived there with no great ambition, and he was unaware of his academic standing relative to his fellow science students, though he had already decided to do only the most challenging fundamental research. This tradition dates back to Galileo, the founder of modern physics, who took the first steps to cast what he called 'the book of nature' in the language of mathematics. He did this at the turn of the seventeenth century, almost a hundred years after the completion of the first buildings of the college. In this sense, St John's is older than physics.\n\nCollege life reflected the origins of British academia. The earliest scholars had been monks, all wearing the same clothes, and all going about their contemplative lives within an agreed set of timetables and rules. In 1923, all the official students of the college and the rest of the university were male, each of them required to wear a gown and mortarboard in public. Any student who went into town incorrectly attired knew he ran the risk of being nabbed by one of the university's private policemen (proctors or 'progs') or their assistants ('bulldogs'), who roamed the streets after dusk. A transgression of the dress code was punished by a fine of 6s 8d, no laughing matter for any young man keen to preserve his spare money, though not nearly as serious as the penalty for being caught with a woman in his room.\n\nThe students were waited on hand and foot. By 6 a.m., the invariably female bed-makers ('bedders') were hanging around the stone staircases, ready to begin their morning's work. The gyps - man-servants - were available all day to clean, wash up and run errands for the students and for the Fellows (also known as 'dons'). Such service was not, however, available to young Dirac in his first year. He spent it in a cold and damp shoebox of a room in a four-storey Victorian house, a fifteen-minute walk from St John's, sharing with two other lodgers. At a cost of almost \u00a315 a term, the landlady Miss Josephine Brown delivered coals and wood for their fires, supplied gas for the lamps that lit their musty little rooms, provided them with crockery and cleaned their boots. Like all the other landladies approved by the university, Miss Brown was obliged to keep a record of any failure of Dirac's to return home by 10 p.m. Always early to bed, he would not have given her any trouble.\n\nDirac had his first experience of grand dining in Hall, where he took his meals. The room is magnificently appointed, with an elaborately decorated wooden ceiling, Gothic stained-glass windows and dark-wood panels hung with portraits of some of the college's most distinguished alumni, including William Wordsworth. The formalities began at 7.30 p.m. with the arrival of the procession of Fellows and other senior members of college at their long table, under the calm gaze of Lady Margaret, whose portrait in oils hung above them. The students were already seated in their gowns along the six rows of benches, either side of three long rows of tables, each of them set with crisp white linen tablecloths, the college coat of arms worked into the damask.\n\nIt was expected that every head should be dutifully cocked, every pair of hands solemnly crossed in silence as one of the students read the Latin grace from a tablet. The moment he finished, a hundred conversations surged to fill the hall.\n\nThe menus, written by hand in French, described the three courses in a style that would meet the approval of a Paris gourmet. The meal might begin with scalloped cod or lentil soup, move on to a main course of jugged hare or boiled tongue and end with gooseberry pie and cream or a plate of cheese with cress and radishes, or even sardines on toast. Much of this rich food was wasted on Dirac, whose poor digestion made him favour more basic fare, which he ate slowly and in only modest quantities.\n\nDirac's fellow diners consisted mainly of the young men of the  Brideshead generation (in Evelyn Waugh's novel, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte were then beginning their final year over in Oxford). Many of them had been privately educated at schools such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby, where they had learned Latin and Greek and the art of discoursing easily about the fashionable topics of the day, such as T. S. Eliot's modernist poetry, or of passing supercilious judgement on Shaw's latest provocation. Dirac was ill equipped to join them.\n\nEvery night, alcohol circulated up and down the dinner table in Hall, loosening the students' tongues, freeing them to shout ever more loudly to make themselves heard over the din. Amid the cacophony, Dirac sat impassively, a teetotaller in the Methodist tradition, silently sipping water from his glass. He had left Bristol never having consumed a cup of tea or coffee, so his first sampling of these drinks was an event for him. Neither much appealed to him, though he did have the occasional weak and milky tea, its caffeine dose scarcely exceeding homoeopathic levels. Decades later, he told one of his children that he drank coffee only to give himself courage before giving a presentation.\n\nDirac's manner at the dinner table became the stuff of legend. He had no interest in small talk, and it was common for him to sit through several courses without saying a word or even acknowledging the students sitting next to him. Too diffident even to ask someone to pass the salt and pepper, he made no demands at all on his fellow diners and felt no obligation to maintain the momentum of any dialogue. Every opening conversational gambit would be met with silence or with a simple yes or no. According to one story still in circulation in St John's College, Dirac once responded to the comment 'It's a bit rainy, isn't it?' by walking to the window, returning to his seat, and then stating 'It is not now raining.' Such behaviour quickly persuaded his colleagues that further questioning was both unwelcome and pointless. Yet he did prefer to eat in company and to hear intelligent people talking about serious matters, and it was by listening to such conversations that Dirac slowly learned about life outside science.\n\nHe was fortunate to go up to Cambridge at this time. The colleges had just seen the departure of the last students in military uniform, which took precedence over academic dress until the students were officially demobilised. Now that Britain was under no threat of another international conflict, this was an optimistic time, and the  next generation of students was anxious to get back to academic work. Dirac was studying in the university's largest department, mathematics, famous for its high standards and its competitiveness. Among the students, the highest cachet was reserved for those who both excelled in their studies and who competed successfully in sport, which is why Hass\u00e9 had thought it relevant to remark in his reference for Dirac that he 'played no games'. Most students took at least some part in the social life in Cambridge - chatting in the new coffee bars, singing in choirs, slipping out in the evening to the cinema or to see an ancient Greek play. None of this interested Dirac. Even by the standards of the most ambitious swot, he was exceptionally focused on his work, though dedication is no guarantee of success, as thousands of students find out every year. He had been consistently top of the class in the academic backwater of Bristol, but he had no idea whether he would be able to compete with the best students in Cambridge. From the moment Dirac and his colleagues arrived, the dons were watching every one of them, always on the lookout for a student of truly exceptional calibre - in Cambridge parlance, 'a first-rate man'.\n\nIt did not take long for the extent of Dirac's talent to become clear to his supervisor, Fowler, who took a brisk interest in his progress, giving him carefully chosen problems to tackle, constantly encouraging him to hone his mathematics. Students who brought Fowler a good piece of work were rewarded with his favourite exclamation, 'Splendid!', and, more often than not, a pat on the back. He was an inspirational presence in the department, but sometimes unpopular: by spending much of his time working at home or on trips to the Continental centres of physics, he often frustrated the students who yearned for the succour of his advice. But Dirac was not so dependent; he was content to be lightly supervised, to work alone and to generate many of his own projects. Soon, he realised that he had been lucky to have been allocated the most effective supervisor of theoretical physics in Cambridge.\n\nFowler's manner was unique in the mathematics department. The prevailing culture was intensely formal, and the academics - every one of them male and dressed like a banker - kept their heads down in their offices and college rooms. The use of first names was all but forbidden: even the friendliest of colleagues referred to each other by their surnames and, outside the common room, conversations rarely  lasted longer than politeness deemed necessary. Opportunities for them to meet outside the college were minimal as there was no tradition of communal tea and coffee breaks and no programme of seminars. Nor was there any of the staff-student socialising now almost de rigueur in modern university life. Apart from Fowler's guidance, Dirac was left to his own devices. He soon settled into a private routine that would have rendered him invisible among the thousands of his fellow students. With no room of his own in the department, he worked on problems that Fowler set him, read recommended books and the latest journals and reviewed the notes he had made during the lectures. He relaxed only on Sundays. If the weather was fine, he set off in the morning for a few hours' walk, dressed in the suit he wore all week, his hands joined behind his back, both feet pointing outwards as he made his way around the countryside in his metronomic stride. One of his colleagues said he looked like 'the bride-groom in an Italian wedding photograph'.\n\nDirac would put his calculations firmly at the back of his mind, aiming to clear his head so that he could approach his work fresh on Monday morning. Pausing only to eat his packed lunch, he looked every inch the city gent inspecting the local terrain: to the north, there was the winding valley of the river Great Ouse and to the east, the geometrical network of fenland drains and Tudor-style buildings with their Dutch gables. He would return in time for dinner at St John's and then walk back to his digs through the foggy backstreets of Cambridge, most of them unlit. On Monday morning, he was ready for another six days' uninterrupted study.\n\nDirac's reserve did not prevent him from meeting many of the country's most famous scientists soon after he arrived. Among them was the man who had introduced him to the technicalities of relativity theory, Arthur Eddington. He was a young-looking forty-year-old, always neatly dressed in his three-piece suit, the knot of his dark tie poised just below the top button of his starched shirt. For someone so eminent, he was surprisingly lacking in confidence - he often sat with his arms crossed defensively, weighing his words carefully. His unique strength as a scientist lay in his hybrid skills as a mathematician and astronomer, giving him the ideal qualifications to play a leading role in tests of the general theory of relativity. He was one of the few scientists who could work on the experiments because, as a Quaker, he was registered as a conscientious objector. Unknown to  most of his colleagues, Eddington had used his reputation to contrive the media hullabaloo that followed the announcement in November 1919 that the solar eclipse results supported the prediction of Einstein's theory rather than Newton's.\n\nDirac attended his lectures and, like most people who first encountered him through his dazzling prose, was disappointed to find that he was an incoherent public speaker who had the habit of abandoning a sentence, as if losing interest, before moving on to the next one. But Dirac admired Eddington's mathematical approach to science, which would become one of the most powerful influences on him. There was no love lost between Eddington and the other great figure of Cambridge science, the New Zealand-born Ernest Rutherford. The two men had sharply contrasting personalities and diametrically opposed approaches to physics. Whereas Eddington was introspective, mild-mannered and fond of mathematical abstraction, Rutherford was outgoing, down to earth, given to volcanic temper tantrums and dismissive of grandiose theorising. 'Don't let me catch anyone talking about the universe in my department,' he growled.\n\nUnlike Eddington, Rutherford did not look in the least like an intellectual.  By the time Dirac first felt his surprisingly limp handshake, Rutherford was a burly fifty-two-year-old, with a walrus moustache, staring blue eyes and given to filling his pipe with a tobacco so dry that it went off like a volcano when he lit it. Everyone knew when he was in a room as he spoke more loudly than anyone else. To the people who saw him waddling down Trumpington Street, he had the brash, confident air of a man who had done well out of life by running a chain of betting shops. But his appearance was deceptive: he was the most accomplished experimental scientist alive, as he was the first to confirm. His most famous discovery, the atomic nucleus, followed after he suggested to two of his students that they should investigate what happens when they fired subatomic particles at a thin piece of gold foil. After he heard that a few of the particles were deflected backwards, Rutherford imagined his way into the heart of the atom and concluded that the core of every atom is positively charged and occupies only a tiny fraction of its space, 'like a gnat in the Albert Hall', as he put it. He first identified the existence of atomic nuclei in the summer of 1912, when he was working at the University of Manchester, eight years before he moved to Cambridge  to become J. J. Thomson's successor as Director of the Cavendish Laboratory. Soon after he arrived there, he made one of his bold predictions about atomic nuclei by proposing that most of them are made not only of protons, each positively charged, but also of hitherto-unidentified particles with about the same mass but no electrical charge. Rutherford encouraged his colleagues to hunt for these 'neutrons', but their desultory experiments drew a blank.\n\nThe mid-1920s were not a productive time for Rutherford as he was no longer making ground-breaking discoveries but was devoting his prodigious energy to directing the Cavendish Laboratory, which he ruled like an absolute but benevolent monarch. The laboratory was tucked away in Free School Lane, a side street that was a few minutes' walk from the mathematicians' offices, but a world apart. Built in 1871, the Victorian Gothic fa\u00e7ade of the laboratory was much the most impressive part of the building. After walking through the front door, visitors found themselves in a dingy corridor next to a hall half-filled with haphazardly parked bicycles. To the modern eye, the laboratories look like the kind of functional workshops Heath Robinson might have set up in his garage: bare brick walls and wooden floors, pedal-operated lathes, hand-operated vacuum pumps, glass-blowing equipment, sturdy benches covered with greasy tools and some pieces of equipment so primative that they would be hard to sell from a junk shop. The authorities in Cambridge had worried whether an environment like this was worthy of a university for gentlemen, but they acknowledged that it had established itself as an exceptionally productive centre for physics research, and at only modest cost. In 1925, the total budget of the laboratory, including all salaries and equipment, was \u00a39,628.\n\nAlthough Rutherford was disdainful of mathematical physicists - or pretended to be - he welcomed tame theorists who would do difficult calculations for him, such as his son-in-law and golfing partner Fowler, the only theorist to have his own office in the Cavendish. Visiting theoreticians had nowhere to sit except in the squalid, unheated library, a shabby tearoom that reeked of congealed milk and stale biscuits. Many of the older theoreticians reciprocated Rutherford's disdain by having nothing to do with activities at the Cavendish, but some of the younger students accepted Rutherford's invitations to attend the laboratory's regular Wednesday afternoon seminars, preceded by tea - often poured by Lady Rutherford - and,  sometimes, Chelsea buns. At the Cavendish, Dirac came to know two of Rutherford's 'boys', who were to become his closest friends: the Englishman Patrick Blackett and Russian Peter Kapitza. Both had been trained as engineers, but their personalities were quite different, exemplifying the two extremes that Dirac liked most: shy introverts like himself (Blackett) and boisterous extroverts (Kapitza). In their different ways, these two men would powerfully influence Dirac, drawing him out of his shell in his early years at Cambridge, keeping him at the hub of experimental activity, introducing him to dozens of new acquaintances he would not otherwise have made and to a field that had previously been of no interest to him: politics.\n\nBlackett and Kapitza had recently turned up at the Cavendish, like jetsam thrown up by the war. Blackett had arrived first, in January 1919, when he was twenty-one years old and still in his navy uniform. He had been given a first-rate technical education at a naval college and, days after graduating, went to war, aged sixteen. On 31 May 1916, the first day of the battle of Jutland, the most violent naval conflict of the war, he was at one of the twin fifteen-inch turrets of HMS _Barham_ , relentlessly bombarded by German warships too distant to see. By the end of the day, he was walking on the deck - the air thick with TNT fumes and disinfectant - among the charred corpses, some with their limbs blown off.\n\nThree weeks after arriving in the Cavendish, he resigned his commission and took a degree in natural sciences to prepare himself for a life in experimental physics. He cut a suave, romantic figure: six feet two inches tall, slim, handsome as a movie star, yet with the haunted demeanour of a midshipman who had seen his mates die in agony in front of his eyes. In the laboratory, he quickly proved to be an ingenious experimenter, with the scientific virtues of imagination and scepticism. One colleague noted that he was 'not easily convinced even by his own ideas'.\n\nIn almost any other laboratory, Blackett would have stood out as the finest student of his generation. However, in that exceptional phase in the history of the Cavendish, he had plenty of competition, especially in the chunky form of Kapitza, who had earlier beaten Blackett to the scholarship for the university's best laboratory student, one of several small victories that helped to fuel Blackett's resentment of him. Kapitza had settled in the UK in 1921 looking - as one of his Trinity colleagues observed - 'like a tragic Russian  prince', insecure and depressed after the deaths of four members of his close family within a few months at the end of 1919: scarlet fever took the life of his infant son, shortly before his father, wife and baby daughter fell victim to Spanish Flu. In the summer of 1921, after braving an initial rejection, he persuaded Rutherford to take him on as a student in the Cavendish. Kapitza idolised Rutherford for his straightforwardness, his energy and his uncanny ability to ask nature the right questions to make it yield its deepest secrets. When Rutherford was out of earshot, Kapitza referred to him as 'the Crocodile', the young Russian's favourite creature: Kapitza collected poems about crocodiles and even welded a metal model of one to the radiator of his open-topped Lagonda. Kapitza's name for his boss may have been an unconscious reference to the reptile that appeared prominently in books by the Soviet Union's most popular children's writer, Korney Chukovsky. Like most parents in Russia, Kapitza had probably read his children the famous stories of the crocodile who swallows people and dogs but who good-naturedly disgorges them unharmed. Chukovsky encouraged his readers to regard the crocodile with a mixture of fear and admiration, just as Kapitza saw Rutherford.\n\nBy the time Dirac arrived in Cambridge, Kapitza was one of the town's most colourful characters. Although he did not speak any language well - even, it was said, his own - he loved to talk, words tumbling incessantly out of one side of his mouth. He chatted merrily in his high-pitched voice, delighting his colleagues with his card tricks and the amusing stories he told in 'Kapitzarene', a language that seemed to consist of Russian, French and English in roughly equal parts. He returned to the Soviet Union every year to see his family and to advise on the programme of industrialisation being pushed by Lenin's successor, Joseph Stalin. He was playing a dangerous game, as the economist John Maynard Keynes told his wife in October 1925 after Kapitza mentioned that he was planning to visit Russia to advise Trotsky on their country's electrification programme, having secured a firm promise that he could return to Cambridge: 'I believe that they will catch him sooner or later [. . .] he is a wild, disinterested, vain, and absolutely uncivilized creature, perfectly suited by nature to be a Bolshie.'\n\nDirac had no such reservations. Near the end of his life, in a nostalgic account of his early days with Kapitza, Dirac wrote that he was  immediately taken with his boldness and self-confidence. They shared a passion for science and engineering, but much divided them: Kapitza delighted in chit-chat, whereas Dirac ignored it; Kapitza loved literature and theatre, whereas Dirac had little time for either; and Kapitza was sceptical of the abstractions of theoretical physics, which were meat and drink to Dirac.\n\nOn Kapitza's first day in the Cavendish, he was surprised by one of Rutherford's first instructions, forbidding him to spread Communist propaganda in the laboratory. Kapitza worked sedulously at his bench but in his spare time never made any secret of his support of Lenin's politics and pleasure at the defenestration of Russia's land-owning aristocracy during the 1917 revolution. As he wrote later, although he never joined the Communist Party, he always supported its goals: 'I am in complete sympathy with the socialist reconstruction directed by the working class and with the broad internationalism of the Soviet Government under the guidance of the Communist Party.'\n\nIn the early 1920s, the British Government was worrying about the stability of the country's institutions, concerned that Communists would infiltrate and subvert them. It is hardly surprising that, only two years after he arrived in Cambridge, an anonymous informer had tipped off the Government's Security Service MI5 with a report 'to the effect that Kapitza is a Russian Bolshevist'. In collaboration with the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, they kept him under surveillance, anxious that he did not suspect for a moment that he was being watched.\n\nIt was probably Kapitza who introduced Dirac to Soviet ideology, a subject that would later become a crucial ingredient of their friendship. In the mid- to late 1920s, such beliefs were not in vogue in Cambridge, as the great majority of students and dons were not seriously interested in politics. The only prominent Marxist don was the economist Maurice Dobb, who, like Kapitza, was based at Trinity College. The tenor of political conversations in its senior common room was the soul of moderation, equilibrium being guaranteed by moderates such as Rutherford and by a bevy of conservatives that included the poet and classicist A. E. Housman and Charlie Broad, who had moved to Cambridge and was living in the rooms once occupied by Newton.\n\nKapitza liked to compare himself to Dickens's Mr Pickwick, and it was an apposite comparison: each, with winning brio, had founded a club whose members had elected him to be their permanent president. In setting up the Kapitza Club in October 1922, he had shaken his postgraduate colleagues out of their lethargy and persuaded them to attend a weekly seminar on a topical subject in physics. The talks usually took place in Trinity College on Tuesday evenings, after a good dinner. The speakers, normally volunteers from the club's members, spoke with the aid only of a piece of chalk and a blackboard mounted on an easel and had to be prepared for a series of interruptions, mediated by Kapitza with the quick wit and \u00e9lan of a modern-day game-show host.\n\nThe rules of the club were that a student could become a member only by giving a talk and that his membership would be withdrawn if he missed a few meetings. Soon after Dirac's arrival in Cambridge, he started going to the club and joined the less frequent, more theoretically inclined \u2207 V Club, named after a common symbol in mathematical physics. This club - the nearest the theoreticians came to having a seminar programme - was attended by dons as well as students, so its proceedings were more in keeping with the stiff ambience of the mathematics department. Rutherford attended them only rarely, scoffing that theorists 'play games with their symbols, but we in the Cavendish turn out the real facts of nature'.\n\nDespite all these new experiences, the postcards Dirac sent home did little more than confirm he was still alive:\n\nDear Father and Mother\n\nI am coming home next Thursday. I expect I shall arrive by a late train.\n\nLove to all\n\nPaul\n\nAll his postcards were like this. They each bore a sepia photograph of a Cambridge scene and about a dozen sterile words, consisting entirely of facts and brief summaries of the weather. His mother set the pace of the correspondence by writing to him almost weekly letters that continued until the middle of Dirac's career, giving her view of life in 6 Julius Road and her relationship with Charles. At this stage, the letters give no sign that the family was unusual: chatty and steeped in maternal affection, they continually stress how  much he was missed - an emotion that Dirac never reciprocated. Charles Dirac apparently did not write to him, though Flo went out of her way to underline that his father was 'very anxious' to know how he was getting on.\n\nFlo told her son how excited the family was by its new toy, a radio. The Diracs were in the first generation of families to buy a receiver, scarcely a year after they first became available in 1922. Their home did not yet have a mains supply of gas or electricity, so Charles had to walk down to the local tram station to charge up the radio's accumulator (its battery). It was worth the inconvenience: the new device livened up 6 Julius Road, replacing the day-long silence with a soundtrack of programmes from the new British Broadcasting Corporation, including talks, concerts and news. The Diracs would gather round the radio each night to hear the newsreader orate as if he were addressing a funeral. On 22 January 1924, they heard that Ramsay MacDonald had been appointed Britain's first Labour Prime Minister. The party that had begun as the creature of the trade unions was in Downing Street, its agenda and rhetoric moderate enough to avoid panicking the British public, always wary of rapid change. Flo reported to Dirac that his father was 'pleased that the Labour government have got in at last. It is the best for teachers' salaries.'\n\nIn Flo's letters, she hardly mentions Felix. In the spring of 1924, still based near Wolverhampton, he was earning a modest wage as a draughtsman and was cycling home to Bristol during his short vacations.  Stooped over his drawing board, his rimless eyeglasses perched on his nose, he spent his days making technical drawings for a manufacturer of heavy machinery and advising engineers in the workshops. A steady worker, he was admired for his politeness and reliability by his colleagues, who knew - as he must have done - that he could look forward to nothing more in his professional life than mediocrity. In private, he began to pursue interests that set him apart from his parents and brother: he became a Buddhist and dabbled in astrology, seeking help from a guru, the Revd. Sapasvee Anagami Inyom, based in south-west London. To judge from his communications to Felix, this counsellor was a theosophist, someone who sought knowledge of God through a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist teachings. His letters - long on generalities, short on specifics - each began with a florid salvo ('Greetings in the Glorious Love, Joy  and Peace in the Three Gems') and continued with pages of windy reassurance. By embarking on this spiritual path, Felix was abandoning both the Methodism of his mother's family and his father's Catholicism, and by following astrology he was perhaps goading his brother, who, like every other scientist, will have dismissed the notion that local stars and planets influence human fortunes as fatuous.\n\nUnlike his brother, Felix showed an interest in the opposite sex. He acquired a girlfriend, and the relationship became serious enough for his father to suggest that Felix and his girlfriend should visit the family home when Paul was present so that the whole family could meet her. He may well have been disappointed by his mother's rejection of the idea, and it appears that his brother was miffed. In the first public interview Paul gave about his family life, almost forty-five years later, he laughed when he quoted the words his mother used to veto the request - 'Oh no, she mustn't, she might go after Paul' - and, unusually, gave his description of the incident a dab of colour by commenting on his mother's protectiveness: 'I rather resented it.' He said nothing about whether he would have accepted the invitation to meet the young woman but implied that - in this isolated case - his father behaved much more reasonably than his mother. Paul's account of her behaviour appears to be the only criticism he ever made of her in public or private, perhaps a sign of the anger she caused him by her possessiveness towards him and the insensitivity she showed to his brother. This is a rare example of his recalling empathy with his brother or anyone else.\n\nAfter his arrival in Cambridge, Dirac realised that if he was to work on truly fundamental research, he had some catching up to do. The University of Bristol had given him an excellent technical training and a basic grounding in mathematics, but there were several gaps in his education. Among the most serious was his ignorance of the unified theory of electricity and magnetism set out fifty years before by James Clerk Maxwell. This theory, with Darwin's theory of evolution, was the most important scientific advance of the Victorian era and did for electricity and magnetism what Einstein's general theory of relativity would later do for gravity. Maxwell described electricity and magnetism in a handful of equations and used them to predict successfully that visible light consists of electromagnetic waves (or  'electromagnetic radiation'). Such light waves fall within the small range of wavelengths that human eyes can see. Electromagnetic waves with shorter wavelengths than visible light include ultraviolet radiation and X-rays; waves with longer wavelengths include infrared radiation and microwaves.\n\nDirac first learned about Maxwell's equations in lectures given by Ebenezer Cunningham, who found the precocious Bristol engineer-mathematician to be assertive and quick to ask questions about physics that he did not understand. Maxwell's equations must have been thrilling to Dirac: in just a few lines of mathematics, they could explain the results of every experiment on electricity, magnetism and light that he had ever done in Bristol, and much else besides. When he heard about the equations, he saw why Einstein's light quanta had, until a few years before, been so widely ridiculed: the idea flatly contradicted the accepted Maxwellian view that light consisted of waves, not particles. However, nine months before Dirac arrived in Cambridge, news from Chicago suggested that Einstein might be right: the American experimenter Arthur Compton had found that, in some circumstances, electromagnetic radiation - including, presumably, visible light - really can behave not as waves but as discrete particles. He had scattered X-rays from free electrons and found that he could explain his measurements only if each scattering is due to a collision between two particles, like a pair of snooker balls striking one another. This is just as Einstein had suggested - the radiation and the electrons were both behaving as particles - in contradiction to the wave picture. Many physicists refused to believe these results, but Dirac was one of the few who took them in his stride, unencumbered by years of familiarity with the deceptive success of Maxwell's theory.\n\nOne of the scientists who dismissed the new photon picture of light as nonsense was the Danish theoretician Niels Bohr. He had made his name in 1913, when he built on Rutherford's suggestion that every atom contains a tiny nucleus. Rutherford's picture could not explain the experimental discovery that atoms emit and absorb light with certain definite wavelengths (each type of atom that gives out visible light, for example, emits only light with a particular set of colours). It is as if each atom has its own 'song', composed of light, not sound - instead of musical notes, each played with a characteristic loudness, every atom can give out light with its own set of colours, each  colour with a characteristic brightness. Scientists had, somehow, to understand the composition of every atomic melody. Bohr came up with his idea soon after he heard that the colours of the light emitted by hydrogen - the simplest atom, containing only one electron - had an extremely simple pattern, first spotted in 1885 by Johannes Balmer, a Swiss schoolteacher. He happened on a simple but mysterious formula that accounted for the colours of the light given out by these atoms, a mathematical encapsulation of hydrogen's signature tune. Every other atom was more complicated and much harder to understand. Bohr's achievement was to take the cue from the hints in this pattern, to build a theory of the hydrogen atom and then to generalise it to every other kind of atom.\n\nBohr's atom had a positively charged nucleus, which has most of the atom's mass, orbited by negatively charged electrons which are tethered by the attractive force between the opposite charges. In much the same way, the planets are held in their orbits around the Sun by the attractive force of gravity. He imagined that the electron in a hydrogen atom could move around in its nucleus in only certain circular orbits - called by others 'Bohr orbits' - each of them associated with a particular value of energy, 'an energy level'. Each of these orbits had its own whole number, known as a quantum number: the orbit closest to the nucleus was labelled by the number one, the next orbit by the number two, the next orbit by three, and so on. Bohr's innovation was to imagine that the atom gives out light when it jumps (or, in other words, makes a transition) from one energy level to another of a lower energy, simultaneously emitting a quantum of radiation that has an energy equal to the difference between the energies of the two levels. Bohr was saying, in effect, that matter at the atomic level behaves very differently from everyday matter: if the apple that fell in Newton's garden were able to lose energy by descending down a set of allowed energy values, it would not have fallen smoothly but would have made its way jerkily to the ground, as if bumping its way down an energy staircase. But the energy values of the apple are so close together that their separation is negligible and the fruit appears to slide smoothly down the staircase. Only in the atomic domain are the differences between energy values significant enough for the transitions to be jerky.\n\nBohr's theory offered a simple understanding of Balmer's mysterious formula. In just a few lines of undemanding high-school algebra,  any physicist could derive the formula using Bohr's assumptions, leaving the satisfying impression that the pattern of hydrogen's colours was comprehensible. Yet Bohr's theory was only a qualified success: according to the laws of electromagnetism, it was absurd. Maxwell's theory said that the orbiting electron would shine - continuously give out electromagnetic radiation - and thus gradually radiate its energy away. So it would not take long before the orbiting electron would spiral to its doom in the nucleus, with the result that the atom would not exist at all. The only way Bohr could counter this was to assert, by fiat, that orbiting electrons do not give off such radiation, that Maxwell's theory did not work on the subatomic scale.\n\nWith a remarkable sureness of intuition, Bohr extended his ideas to all other atoms. He suggested that each atom has energy levels and that this helped to explain why the different chemical elements behaved so differently - why, for example, argon is so inert but potassium is so reactive. Einstein admired the way Bohr's ideas explained Balmer's formula and the insights they gave into the differences between each type of atom, hinting at an understanding of the very foundations of chemistry. As Einstein remarked in his autobiographical notes, Bohr's theory exemplified 'the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought'.\n\nBut no one properly understood the relationship of Bohr's atom to the great theories of Newton and Maxwell. These theories came to be described as 'classical', to distinguish them from their quantum successors. A fundamental question was, how, precisely, does the theory of the very small merge into the theory of the comparatively large? To answer this, Bohr developed what he called the correspondence principle: the quantum description of a particle resembles the classical theory more and more closely as the particle's quantum number becomes larger. Similarly, if a particle vibrates rapidly and therefore has a very small quantum number, quantum theory must be used to describe it; classical theory will almost certainly fail.\n\nThis principle was too vague for Dirac: he preferred theoretical statements to be expressed in an equation with a single, lapidary meaning, not to be set out in words that philosophers could dispute. But he was fascinated by Bohr's theory of the atom. He had not heard of it in Bristol, so Fowler's lectures on the theory were an eye-opener. Dirac was impressed that Bohr had come up with the first tractable  theory of what was going on inside atoms. Dirac spent long afternoons in the libraries studying his notes from Fowler's lectures and poring over the classic textbook _Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines_ , by the Munich theoretician Arnold Sommerfeld. Required reading for every student of quantum theory, the book set out Bohr's picture of the atom and showed how it could be refined and improved. Sommerfeld gave a more detailed description in which the possible orbits of the electron are not circular (as Bohr had assumed) but elliptical, like the path of a planet round the Sun. He also improved on Bohr's work by describing the motion of the orbiting electron not using Newton's laws but using Einstein's special theory of relativity. The result of Sommerfeld's calculation was that the measured energy levels should differ slightly from the levels predicted by Bohr, a conclusion supported by the most sensitive experiments. Bohr knew as well as everyone else in atomic physics that his theory was fatally flawed and therefore only provisional; what was unclear was whether the theory that succeeded it would be based on a few tweaks to Bohr's ideas or on a radically new approach.\n\nAt the same time as he was learning and applying Bohr's theory, Dirac was immersed in geometry, which he studied privately and at weekly tea parties held on Saturdays by the mathematician Henry Baker, a close friend of Hass\u00e9's. Now approaching his retirement, Baker was an intimidating man with the thick moustache which was, in those days, almost mandatory. His parties took place at four o'clock on Saturday afternoons in the Arts school, a grim Edwardian building only a short walk from the Cavendish. Apart from the porter and a few cleaners, the School was as lifeless as a museum at midnight until Dirac and fifteen or so other aspiring scholars of geometry arrived and knocked on the front door. Baker regarded these meetings as his opportunity to promote his love of geometry to his most able students. The subject needed him: for almost a century, it had been the most fashionable branch of mathematics in Britain, but its popularity was waning as fashion began to favour mathematical analysis and the study of numbers.\n\nThe parties - better described as after-hours classes for devotees - were friendly but tense with formality and protocol. Each gathering began promptly at 4.15 p.m., and, in the time-honoured way at English universities, could not begin until everyone had been served  a cup of tea and a biscuit. The only students allowed to be late were the sportsmen - rowers, rugby players and athletes who would arrive red-faced and settle down hurriedly after depositing their knapsacks full of sweaty kit. Each week, Baker arranged in advance for one of the students to give a talk to the party before submitting to a grilling by the audience, most of them writing with one hand and smoking with the other. Baker was a spirited teacher, a no-nonsense mediator but a stern host - he had no compunction about berating any student whose attention showed the slightest sign of wandering. For several of the young men, the parties were a chore, but they were a highlight of Dirac's week: '[they] did much to stimulate my interest in the beauty of mathematics'. He learned that it was incumbent on mathematicians to express their ideas neatly and concisely: 'the all important thing there was to strive to express the relationships in beautiful form'.\n\nIt was at one of these parties that Dirac gave his very first seminar, about projective geometry. From his fellow students and Baker, he also became acquainted with a branch of mathematics known as Grassmann algebra, named after a nineteenth-century German mathematician. This type of algebra resembled Hamilton's quaternions, as they are both non-commuting: one element multiplied by another gives a different result if the two are multiplied in a different order. Some applied mathematicians jeered that Grassmann's ideas were of little practical use, but such concerns did not trouble Baker. He warned his students to expect no public recognition for anything they achieved in pure mathematics, whereas 'if you discover a comet you can go and write a letter to \"The Times\" about it'.\n\nBaker was the type of don Cambridge academics called 'deeply civilised' - a subject specialist whose enthusiasms were grounded in high culture. One of his hobbies was the culture of ancient Greece, and he was fascinated by the Greeks' love of beauty, which he believed was as good a stimulus to a scientific life as any. This may be one reason why Dirac drew attention to the aesthetic appeal of Einstein's theory of gravity in a talk he gave at one of Baker's gatherings, having pointed out that its predecessor, Newton's law of gravity, 'is of no more interest - (beauty?) - to the pure mathematician than any other inverse power of distance'. This is Dirac's first recorded mention of 'beauty'. In Bristol, he had been encouraged to  take an aesthetic view of mathematics; now, in Cambridge, he had found again that the concept of beauty was in vogue. The popularity of the concept was at least partly due to the enduring success of _Principia ethica_ , published in 1903 by the philosopher George Moore, one of Charlie Broad's colleagues in Trinity College. Writing with a refreshing absence of jargon, Moore made the incisive suggestion that 'the beautiful should be defined as that of which the admiring contemplation is good in itself'. Soon the talk of intellectuals, _Principia ethica_ was admired by Virginia Woolf and her colleagues in the Bloomsbury Group and declared by Maynard Keynes to be 'better than Plato'. Over a century before, Immanuel Kant had rendered the subject of beauty too complex and intimidating for most philosophers, but Moore made it accessible again in a way that commanded respect. Although _Principia ethica_ did not consider the aesthetics of science, Moore's common-sense approach to beauty probably influenced his scientific colleagues at Trinity, including Rutherford and the college's most eminent pure mathematician, G. H. Hardy: both often talked about the beauties of their subject. Kapitza, too, looked on experimental physics not as 'business', as it was to several of his colleagues, but as a kind of 'aesthetic enjoyment'.\n\nAlthough Dirac was not interested in philosophy, this fascination with the nature of beauty had powerful resonances for him. Like many theoreticians, he had been moved by the sheer sensual pleasure of working with Einstein's theories of relativity and Maxwell's theory. For him and his colleagues, the theories were just as beautiful as Mozart's _Jupiter Symphony_ , a Rembrandt self-portrait or a Milton sonnet. The beauty of a fundamental theory in physics has several characteristics in common with a great work of art: fundamental simplicity, inevitability, power and grandeur. Like every great work of art, a beautiful theory in physics is always ambitious, never trifling. Einstein's general theory of relativity, for example, seeks to describe all matter in the universe, throughout all time, past and present. From a few clearly stated principles, Einstein had built a mathematical structure whose explanatory power would be ruined if any of its principles were changed. Abandoning his usual modesty, he described his theory as 'incomparably beautiful'.\n\nDirac was extremely hard to read. Usually, he looked blank or wore a thin smile, whether he was making headway with one of his scientific problems or depressed by his lack of progress. He seemed to live in a world in which there was no need to emote, no need to share experiences - it was as if he believed he was put on Earth just to do science.\n\nHis belief that he was working solely for himself led to one of his rare spats with Fowler. Soon after Dirac began in Cambridge, Fowler gauged the ability of his new student by asking him to tackle a non-trivial but tractable problem: to find a theoretical description of the breaking up of the molecules of gas in a closed tube whose temperature gradually changes from one end to the other. Some five months later, when Dirac found the solution, he wanted to file it away and forget it, a suggestion that dismayed Fowler: 'if you're not going to write your work up, you might as well shut up shop!' Dirac succumbed and forced himself to learn the art of writing academic articles. Words did not come easily to him, but he gradually developed the style for which he was to become famous, a style characterised by directness, confident reasoning, powerful mathematics, and plain English. All his life, Dirac had the same attitude to the written word as his contemporary George Orwell: 'Good prose is like a window pane.'\n\nThat first paper was a piece of academic throat-clearing, of little consequence and unrelated to the fundamental theories of physics that Dirac loved. In his next three papers, however, he was on the more congenial ground of relativity. In his first paper on the subject, he clarified a point in Eddington's mathematical textbook on Einstein's general theory of relativity, and in the next two applied the special version of the theory first to atoms jumping between energy levels and then to soups of atoms, electrons and radiation. It was not until the end of 1924 that he produced an outstanding piece of work, an exploration - using Bohr's atomic theory - of what happens to the energy levels of an atom when the forces acting on it change slowly. Although Dirac came to no startling conclusions, his paper attested to his mastery of Bohr's theory and of Hamilton's mathematical methods. Yet Dirac was starting to believe that such exercises were hollow. The more he thought about the Bohr theory, the more dissatisfied he was with its weaknesses. Others shared this dissatisfaction: physicists all over Europe feared that a logical theory of the atom might simply be beyond the human mind.\n**Six**\n\nMy grief lies all within,  \nAnd these external manners of lament  \nAre merely shadows to the unseen grief  \nThat swells with silence in the tortured soul.\n\nWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, _Richard II_ ,  \nAct IV, Scene 1\n\nTowards the end of Dirac's graduate research, Ebenezer Cunningham described him as 'quite the most original student I have met in the subject of mathematical physics' and 'a natural researcher'. By the time he returned to Bristol for Christmas in 1924, he had every reason to be pleased with himself: he had written five good papers - well above the average for even a strong graduate student - with little help from Fowler or any other senior colleague. He was certain to get his Ph.D. But Dirac knew that his work had so far involved mainly tidying up loose ends in other people's projects and that he had not done nearly enough to deserve a place with Bohr and Einstein at the forefront of theoretical physics. For the moment, Dirac was biding his time in the green room, awaiting inspiration, before he could step out on the international stage.\n\nThroughout the preceding year, Dirac may have noticed that his mother's letters indicated her deepening unhappiness and that she was manoeuvring him into the position of a confidant. Early in the summer, she had complained of having little money of her own, a theme that was to become a leitmotif of her correspondence with him. Charles earned a respectable salary and supplemented it by giving private tuition but was always worried about money and had - like many a husband at that time - no compunction about giving his wife only enough to run the house. Too proud to turn to her friends or siblings, she was reduced to asking Paul for money: '[Pa] is grousing about the bills just now especially the grocer's, so I am wondering if you will be able to spare a few shillings a week next time you are home?' Though Dirac does not appear to have responded in writing, it is reasonable to suppose that he was disturbed by it as he was living frugally on his grant and had no additional income from teaching. To give his mother money would reduce him to penury.\n\nIn June, he had moved out of his digs into one of the grandest buildings in the college, the neo-classical New Court, built in the early nineteenth century. In his rooms in the west wing of the building, he had for the first time the benefits of being able to work in complete private, disturbed only by the cleaner and bed-maker. Many well-off students put their individual stamp on their own patch of the college by bringing their own furniture, oriental rugs, paintings and trinkets. Dirac's room was as bare as a jail cell, but the accommodation gave him all he needed: peace and quiet, regular meals and warmth. The only irritation for him was the regular ringing of the chapel bell: a few years later, he told a friend that it 'gets on my nerves sometimes' - so much so that 'I am a little afraid of [it]'. But his mother knew that he was happier in Cambridge than he was in Bristol, and she feared that he would no longer be content in the modest and ill-kept family home now that he had gone up in the world. Shortly before he returned to Bristol for the Christmas vacation, she prepared his bedroom, beating the carpet and scrubbing the floor, 'the best I can do to such a shabby room'.\n\nFelix had settled in Birmingham, living in lodgings in the south-west of the city and working in the machine-testing laboratory of a factory. With no sign that his career was about to move up a gear, it may have been hard for him to hear his parents talk about the successes of his younger brother in Cambridge. Felix had good reason to be envious: he was still tethered to a stool in a drawing office, plying a trade that brought him little money and, it seems, little satisfaction. Still regretting that his father had refused to let him study medicine, Felix volunteered for the Ambulance Corps, evening work that gave him glimpses of the doctor's life he had longed for. He was sharing none of this with his brother - they lived separate lives, all fraternal affection spent.\n\nEarly in the cold and dreary January of 1925, Felix snapped. He left his job, though he took care to remain on good terms with his employer, the technical manager in the Testing Machine Department, who certified that he always found Felix 'to be obliging, courteous, and painstaking in his work'. He stopped writing to his parents and sister and did not tell either them or his landlady what he had done  or that he was living off his savings. He pretended still to be at work, leaving his digs in the morning and returning for his evening meal, sometimes attending classes at the nearby Midland Institute.\n\nBy the end of winter, his savings ran out. His landlady did not suspect that anything was wrong until the first Thursday evening in March, when he did not return for dinner.\n\nThe chilly, overcast morning of 10 March began like any other term-time Tuesday for Paul Dirac. There was a hint of spring in the air. As usual, before beginning his day's work, he walked across the stone courts of St John's to the Porter's Lodge to see if there was any mail in his pigeonhole. He found a tiny envelope - small enough to fit in the palm of his hand - postmarked in Bristol late on the previous night, though it was not the weekly note from his mother. He opened the folded letter and saw that it was from his mother's sister Nell. She began uneasily, asking him to bear up for the news that she was about to convey because his 'parents are so greatly upset'. Felix was dead.\n\nHis body had been discovered four days before under a holly bush on the edge of a field two miles south of the Shropshire village of Much Wenlock. Smartly dressed in a suit and bow tie, Felix had a spanner in one of his pockets and was still wearing his bicycle clips, though his cycle was nowhere to be seen. The people who found him assumed that he had killed himself by taking poison, as an empty glass bottle lay next to his corpse. He carried no identifying papers and left no final message; the only clue to his identity was the case of his glasses, which bore the name of an optician in Wolverhampton.\n\nNot so long ago, Dirac had loved his brother and looked up to him, shared the same bedroom and the same handed-down comics, ran with him on the Bristol Downs and followed him to university. They had been split by arguments, resentments and jealousies, all of them now rendered pathetically insignificant by grief. Now, the act of suicide had made reconciliation impossible.\n\nDirac's feelings about all this are not known, as there is no documentary evidence of his reactions. If he behaved according to type, he will have received the news with the calm of a statue and told no one in Cambridge about it, apart, perhaps, from Fowler. But it is possible to speculate on his emotions from the testimonies of the few close family members with whom he shared his pain decades later, if only  for a few moments. If we extrapolate the feelings he showed then back to 1925, it is reasonable to conclude that the passing of Felix left his brother with a tapeworm of anger, sadness and guilt gnawing inside him.\n\nThe news of Felix's death had been all over Bristol late on the Monday afternoon: the _Evening News_ announced the death in a front-page article under the headline 'Dead in a Field'. A report on the following day noted that Felix's death had caused 'a profoundly painful sensation in the city', hinting that the tragedy was all the more incomprehensible because the deceased was 'the son of one of the most respected gentlemen connected with education in this city'. Charles and Flo did not read the report when it was published as they were in Shropshire to identify their son's body and attend the first stage of the inquest. Dirac had just received his aunt's letter and may have wondered why his parents had not wired him as soon as they heard the news. Did they really believe that he would not want to be among the first to hear of his brother's death? Four decades later, Dirac told friends that he was shocked by his parents' distress. The death of his brother was 'a turning point' for him: 'My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much. [. . .] I never knew that parents ought to care for their children, but from then on I knew.'\n\nIf these and his other recollections of his early family life are accurate, they indicate the extent of his emotional detachment. He appears to have been unaware of many of the experiences that do most to shape the lives of children - the fondness of their parents, the importance of family rituals, the day-to-day entanglements of family life. Nor does he ever even allude to the possibility that the coldness of the Dirac household could have been due at least in part to his own insensitivity. These are among the strongest clues that he suffered from what amounted to a kind of emotional blindness.\n\nFrom Dirac's portrayals of his father's cold-hearted tyranny and his mother's overweening maternalism, it would be natural to expect that the suicide of Felix would have hurt his mother much more than his father. But it was the other way round. Charles was poleaxed. This was no ordinary grief: his doctor advised him to rest for a year; his family feared for his sanity and even worried that he might take his own life. Flo, by contrast, took it all in her stride, though she was distressed that she had misunderstood Felix and  had not seen the disaster as it approached. In a memorial poem to him she wrote thirteen years later, she wrote, 'He had dropped the mask.'\n\nOn a bitterly cold Sunday, two weeks after Charles and Flo first heard of their son's death, they attended a memorial service for him at a nearby church. When Flo returned home, she wrote to Dirac with a mother's firmness: 'Mind you meet Pa on Thursday & stick to him all the time after the inquest, there's a dear boy, & bring him home safely whatever he may hear.' Dirac did as she requested: a few days later, he travelled to the enquiry, held within a mile of the hills where Felix had been found, a part of the country finely etched into the English imagination by Housman's bitter, nostalgic poetry. At the enquiry, Dirac and his heartbroken father sat next to each other when they listened to the coroner read his report. He began by noting that the body had been found on Friday 6 March. The corpse was of a man about twenty-five years old, five feet nine inches tall, with thin features, dark hair, a slight moustache and good teeth. Felix had taken his life, the coroner concluded, by 'taking cyanide of potassium whilst of unsound mind'.\n\nWitnessing Charles Dirac's grief taught his son a lesson: no matter how painful life might become, he would never commit suicide, because the price paid by his family would be too great. Betty was no less affected: in her later life, she never spoke about the circumstances of Felix's suicide, though she once remarked to her children that he had been killed in a car accident.\n\nIt appears that Dirac kept working to his usual routine. Fowler had gone on sabbatical in Copenhagen to work with Bohr, leaving Dirac in the care of the young astrophysicist Edward Milne. He set Dirac the task of investigating the processes going on at surfaces of stars such as the Sun, a problem that Dirac solved efficiently, though once again he did not come up with any eye-catching conclusions. For several months, Dirac's productivity plummeted. He never explained why, but it is reasonable to speculate that he was slowed down by grief and, possibly, that he was turning his attention from tackling readily solvable problems to looking for a truly fundamental research problem. Dirac had yet to show that he had the ability to identify such a challenge, the hallmark of a great scientist. But it is clear that he was developing the talent: he returned to the unexplained question of understanding black-body radiation, which had first led Planck to the idea of energy quanta.\n\nDirac investigated a daring new idea first introduced by a twenty-six-year-old French student, Louis de Broglie, in his Ph.D. thesis. De Broglie used special relativity to argue with startling boldness and originality that every subatomic particle - including electrons - should have an associated wave of a nature yet to be understood. Dirac was inured to thinking of the electron as a particle, for example, in orbit around an atomic nucleus, so de Broglie's notion of a wave-like electron seemed to be a mathematical fiction of no importance to physicists. He carried out some initial calculations but put the work aside after concluding that he had done nothing worth publishing. Having sniffed the scent of an important problem, he had then lost it; but he would soon return.\n\nIn early May, almost two months after the death of Felix, Dirac was looking forward to the visit of Niels Bohr, widely regarded as the world's leading atomic scientist (he had won the Nobel Prize for physics two years before). Then approaching his fortieth birthday, he was an imposing figure: tall, noble and good-natured, with a huge head and a heavily built body that still bore traces of youthful athleticism.  His sprawling hands had once helped him to become a top Danish goalkeeper, narrowly missing selection for his country's soccer team in the 1908 Olympics. Those hands now spent much of the time relighting his pipe or cigarettes; like his fellow chain-smoker Rutherford, Bohr was a serial cadger of matches. The two men had worked together in Manchester for three months in the early summer of 1912, and Bohr had come to regard Rutherford as a 'fatherly presence'. It was an improbable friendship. Both were profound, intuitive thinkers and impatient with mathematical thinking, but their modes of expression were entirely different: Rutherford was a straight talker whose bluntness could make a navvy blush, whereas Bohr - an inveterate mumbler - was almost always polite and struggled to articulate the tortuous debate going on inside his head. His words were well worth hearing, however, and his audiences sat in silence, straining to hear his every word.\n\nBohr gave his talk, 'Problems of Quantum Theory', on 13 May and spoke again at the Kapitza Club three days later. He underlined his view that the current atomic theory was only provisional and that a better-founded one was sorely needed. Bohr was also  unhappy with the need to describe light sometimes as particles and at other times as waves. Shortly before, he had failed to resolve the dichotomy, and he was now gloomy about the state of quantum physics. Such confusion intimidates mediocre thinkers, but for the most able ones it signals an opportunity to make their name. One student who was bright enough, in Bohr's estimation, to solve the problems of quantum theory was the German prodigy Werner Heisenberg, based in G\u00f6ttingen but soon to visit Cambridge. He was very different to Dirac: widely cultured and with a fondness for conversation and patriotic songs which had been nurtured around campfires during his years in the German Youth Movement. Heisenberg would declare over a glass of beer that 'physics is fun', a phrase that would not have entered the heads of the serious men who had founded the subject eighty years before.\n\nOn the cool Tuesday evening of 28 July, the sweet summer air calm and damp after a day of wind and light showers of rain, Heisenberg addressed the Kapitza Club, his first presentation in Cambridge. He expected to be met with the university's famous formality but, instead, found himself talking in a makeshift college room, with several members of his audience having to sit on the floor. It is not clear whether Dirac was awake throughout Heisenberg's seminar or even if he attended it. Some of the physicists who attended vaguely remembered that Heisenberg spoke about the light emitted and absorbed by atoms and that he remarked in a coda that he had written an article about a new approach to atomic physics. Later, Heisenberg could be sure only that he did mention this article to his host Fowler, but no one in Cambridge - or even Heisenberg himself - appears to have realised that they had been part of history in the making.\n\nDirac returned home for the summer break having secured funding for another three years' research from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, which dispensed scholarships funded by the Exhibition's unexpected profits. Dirac's application had been recommended by Maynard Keynes and included encomia from Cunningham, Fowler and the physicist and astronomer James Jeans, who affirmed that Dirac had 'ability of the highest order in mathematical physics'. Much was expected of the young Dirac, though he had published nothing of consequence since his brother's suicide.\n\nDirac probably had to fend off his mourning parents' requests for  him to return to Bristol. His father had already tried to persuade him to apply for the post of Assistant Lecturer in Mathematics at the university, but there can never have been any question that Dirac would accept such a post - he was starting to become aware of his academic worth. And he was still awaiting a challenge equal to his talent.\n\nEarly in September 1925, a postman walked up the steep path to the front door of 6 Julius Road and delivered an envelope that changed Dirac's life. The package, sent by Fowler, contained fifteen pages of the proofs of a paper sent to him by its author, Werner Heisenberg, who had made several corrections to it in his slanting handwriting. This article, written in German, contained the first glimpse of a completely new approach to understanding atoms. Most supervisors would have kept the proofs to themselves, to get a head start on their fellow researchers. Fowler, however, sent the proofs to Dirac with a few words scribbled on the top right-hand corner of the front page: 'What do you think of this? I shall be glad to hear.'\n\nThe paper, technical and complex, would not have been easy reading for Dirac, whose training at the Merchant Venturers' had given him only a modest command of German. He could, however, see that this was not just another run-of-the-mill exercise in the mathematics of quantum theory. Bohr's theory featured quantities such as the position of the electron and the time it takes to orbit its nucleus, but Heisenberg believed that this was a mistake, as no experimenter would ever be able to measure them. He made this point when he summarised the aim of his theory in the article's introductory sentence: 'The present paper seeks to establish a basis for theoretical quantum mechanics founded exclusively upon relationships between quantities which in principle are observable.' Heisenberg knew that it would be extremely difficult to come up with a complete atomic theory built along the lines he envisaged in a single flourish. That would have been too big a task. Instead, he attempted something simpler, by trying to set out a theory of an electron moving not in three dimensions of ordinary space but in just _one_ dimension, that is, in a straight line. Such an electron exists only in the mind of the theoretical physicist, but if this prototype theory worked, then maybe it would be possible to extend it and produce a more realistic version of the theory, one that could be applied to atoms.\n\nHeisenberg considered how classical theory describes his electron,  moving back and forth, and how quantum theory might account for it, bearing in mind that the two theories must merge smoothly, according to the correspondence principle. The new theory looked completely different from its classical counterpart. For example, there is no mention in the quantum theory of single numbers to represent the electron's position; instead, position is replaced by numbers in a square array, an example of what mathematicians call a matrix. Each number in this array is a property of a _pair_ of the electron's energy levels and represents the likelihood that the electron will jump between that pair of energy levels. So, each number can be deduced from observations of the light given out by the electron when it jumps between them. In this way, Heisenberg demonstrated how to build an entirely new atomic theory solely in terms of _measurable_ quantities.\n\nThis picture looks bizarre to anyone coming to it for the first time. With astonishing boldness, Heisenberg had abandoned the assumption that electrons can be visualised in orbit around a nucleus - an assumption no one had previously thought to question - and replaced it by a purely mathematical description of the electron. Nor was this description easy to accept: for example, if it were to apply to ordinary matter, an object's precise location would not be measured with a ruler but would be given in terms of an array of numbers that give the chances of its making transitions to other energy states. This was no one's idea of common sense. In making an imaginative leap like this, Heisenberg was behaving rather like a painter who had switched from Vermeer's classically descriptive style to one based on the abstractions of Mondrian. But whereas painters can use abstraction simply as a technique for producing an attractive image that may or may not refer to real things, abstraction for physicists is a way of representing things en route to the most accurate possible account of material reality.\n\nDirac initially found Heisenberg's approach too complicated and artificial, so he put the paper aside, dismissing it as being 'of no interest'. About ten days later, however, Dirac returned to it and was struck by a point that Heisenberg made in passing, almost halfway through the paper. Heisenberg wrote that some of the quantities in the theory have a peculiar property: if one quantity is multiplied by another, the result is sometimes different from the one obtained if the sequence of multiplication is reversed. This was  exemplified by the quantities he used to represent position and momentum of a piece of matter (its mass multiplied by its velocity): position multiplied by momentum was, strangely, not the same as momentum multiplied by position. The sequence of multiplication appeared to be crucial. Heisenberg later remarked that he mentioned this point as an embarrassing aside, hoping that it would not put off the paper's reviewers and encourage them to think the theory was too far-fetched to be worth publishing. Far from being disconcerted, Dirac saw that these strange quantities were the key to a new approach to quantum physics. Several years later, his mother told an interviewer that Dirac was so excited that he broke his rule of saying nothing about his work to his parents and did his best to explain non-commutation. He did not try again.\n\nUnlike Heisenberg, who had never come across non-commuting quantities before, Dirac was well acquainted with them - from his studies of quaternions, from the Grassmann algebra he had heard about at Baker's tea parties, and from his extensive studies of projective geometry, which also features such relationships. So, Dirac was not only comfortable with the appearance of such quantities in the theory, he was excited by them, although at first he did not understand their significance, nor did he know how to build on Heisenberg's ideas. What Dirac did notice was that Heisenberg had not constructed his theory to be consistent with special relativity so, true to form, Dirac played his favourite game of trying to produce a version of Heisenberg's theory that was consistent with relativity, but he soon gave up. At the end of September, Dirac prepared to return to Cambridge, convinced that the non-commuting quantities in the theory were the key to the mystery. To make progress, he needed to find the lock - a way of interpreting these quantities, a way of linking them to experimentally observed reality.\n\nOne person who, unknown to Dirac, shared his excitement about the theory was Albert Einstein, who wrote to a friend: 'Heisenberg has laid a big quantum egg.'\n\nAt the beginning of October, Dirac began his final year as a postgraduate student. With Fowler's encouragement, he set aside his books of intricate calculations based on the Bohr theory, well aware that - if Heisenberg's theory was right - those calculations were all but worthless.\n\nIt was during one of his Sunday walks, soon after term began, that Dirac had his first great epiphany. Long afterwards, he could not recall the exact date, though he clearly remembered those first exciting hours of discovery. He was, as usual, trying to forget about his work and let his mind wander in the tranquillity of the flat Cambridgeshire countryside. But on that day, the non-commuting quantities in Heisenberg's theory kept intruding into his conscious mind. The crucial point was that two of these quantities, say A and B, give different results according to the order in which they are multiplied: AB is different from BA. What is the significance of the difference AB - BA?\n\nOut of the blue, it occurred to Dirac that he had come across a special mathematical construction, known as a Poisson bracket, that looked vaguely like AB - BA. He had only a faint visual recollection of the construction, but he knew that it was somehow related to the Hamiltonian method of describing motion. This was characteristic of Dirac, as he was much more comfortable with images than with algebraic symbols. He suspected that the bracket might provide the connection he was seeking between the new quantum theory and the classical theory of the atom - between the non-commuting quantities in Heisenberg's theory and the ordinary numerical quantities in classical theory. Fifty-two years later, he remembered, 'The idea first came in a flash, I suppose, and provided of course some excitement, and then of course came the reaction \"No, this is probably wrong\". [. . .] It was really a very disturbing situation, and it became imperative for me to brush up my knowledge of Poisson brackets.'\n\nHe hurried home to see if he could find anything about the Poisson bracket from his lecture notes and textbooks, but he drew a blank. So he had a problem:\n\nThere was just nothing I could do, because it was a Sunday evening then and the libraries were all closed. I just had to wait impatiently through that night without knowing whether this idea was any good or not, but still I think that my confidence grew during the course of the night. The next morning I hurried along to one of the libraries as soon as it was open [. . .].\n\nA few minutes after Dirac entered the library, he pulled from one of the shelves the tome that he knew would provide the answer to his question: _A Treatise on the Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies_ by the Edinburgh University mathematics professor  Edmund Whittaker. The index directed him first to page 299, where Whittaker set out the mathematical formula for the bracket. Sure enough, as Dirac had surmised, the Poisson bracket, which first appeared over a century before in the writings of French mathematician Sim\u00e9on-Denis Poisson, had the form of two mathematical quantities multiplied together minus two related quantities multiplied together, the multiplication and minus signs making it appear similar to the expression AB - BA. In one of his greatest insights, Dirac saw that he could weave an entire carpet from this thread - within a few weeks of uninterrupted work he had set out the mathematical basis of quantum theory in analogy to the classical theory. Like Heisenberg, he believed that mental pictures of the tiniest particles of matter were bound to be misleading. Such particles cannot be visualised, nor is it possible to describe them using quantities that behave like ordinary numbers, such as position, speed and momentum. The solution is to use abstract mathematical quantities that _correspond_ to the familiar classical quantities: it was these relationships that Dirac pictured, not the particles that they described. Using the analogy with the Poisson bracket, together with the correspondence principle, Dirac found connections between the abstract mathematical quantities in his theory, including the crucial equation connecting the symbols associated with the position and momentum of a particle of matter:\n\nposition symbol \u00d7 momentum symbol - momentum symbol \u00d7 position symbol = _h_ \u00d7 (square root of -1)\/(2 \u00d7 \u03c0)\n\nwhere _h_ is Planck's constant and \u03c0 is the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of every circle (its value is about 3.142). The square root of minus one - the number that, when multiplied by itself gives minus one - plays no role in everyday life but is common in mathematical physics. So there was nothing new on the right-hand side of the equation. The most mysterious part of the equation was on the left-hand side, especially for those unwise enough to think of the position and momentum symbols as anything other than abstractions: they are not numbers or measurable quantities but _symbols_ , purely mathematical objects.\n\nTo all but mathematical physicists of the most austere disposition, Dirac's description looked remote from reality, but, in the right hands, it was possible to manipulate his abstract symbols to make  concrete predictions. In Eddington's words, 'The fascinating point is that as the development process proceeds, actual numbers are _exuded_ from the symbols.' By this, Eddington meant that the underlying symbolic language yielded, after mathematical manipulation, numbers that experimenters could check. The value of the theory depended on whether these predictions agreed with the readings on counters, dials and detecting screens. If the theory did that successfully and was logically consistent, it must be judged a success, according to Dirac, no matter how peculiar it looked.\n\nFowler appreciated that his student had done something special. Dirac's theory, much more ambitious than Heisenberg's prototype description of the artificial case of an electron jiggling about in a straight line, sought to describe the behaviour of _all_ quantum particles in _all_ circumstances throughout _all_ time. He knew, however, that the most important priority was to demonstrate that his theory could account for the most important general observations that experimenters had made about atoms. In a few lines of algebra, Dirac demonstrated that energy is conserved in his theory - as it is in the everyday world - and that when an atomic electron jumps from one energy level to another, it gives out a quantum of light whose energy is equal to the difference between the two levels. This indicated that the theory was able to reproduce Bohr's successes, without having to assume that electrons are in orbit, like planets round a star, doomed to cascade into the nucleus. For Dirac, it was meaningless to use such graphic images - quantum particles can be described only using the precise, rarefied language of symbolic mathematics.\n\nAlthough Dirac had been inspired by Heisenberg's paper, the two men had sharply different approaches to their subject. Heisenberg proudly referred to his paper as 'the great saw', a tool to cut off the limb on which the old Bohr theory rested. Dirac, on the other hand, sought to build a bridge between Newtonian mechanics and the new theory. His dream was that all the mathematics that Hamilton and others had used to recast Newton's theory of mechanics would have exact counterparts in the new theory. If Dirac was right, physicists would be able to use the infrastructure of 'classical mechanics' - the stuff of hundreds of textbooks - in the construction of the new theory, which had been named the year before by Heisenberg's senior colleague, Max Born: 'quantum mechanics'.\n\nBy early November, Dirac had written his paper and had given it an  ambitious title that would catch the attention of even the most casual browser: 'The Fundamental Equations of Quantum Mechanics'. Fowler was delighted. Only a few months before, he had described his student's ability to 'push forward the mathematical development of his ideas' and to 'view old problems in a fresh and simpler way'. Now he could alter the focus of his praise of Dirac from his potential to his achievement. Fowler's highest priority now was to ensure that the paper was published as quickly as printing schedules allowed; if one of Dirac's competitors managed to submit a similar paper before him, then, according to the unwritten rules of the scientific community, Dirac would be regarded as an 'also ran'. Like sport, science is supposed to be an activity in which the winner takes all. Fowler had recently been elected a Fellow of the UK's academy of science, the Royal Society, qualifying him to send manuscripts for publication in its proceedings in the confident expectation that they would be accepted without delay.\n\nFor most physicists in Cambridge, the discovery of quantum mechanics was a non-event. Apart from his discussions with Fowler, Dirac made no effort to draw his colleagues into the new revolution in physics that he knew was afoot. Word was beginning to spread, however, that he was a 'first-rate man' in the making, though his wispy, almost wordless presence gave no clue to the depth and subtlety of his thinking. It appears to have been at about this time that his colleagues invented a new unit for the smallest imaginable number of words that someone with the power of speech could utter in company - an average of one word an hour, 'a Dirac'. On the rare occasions when he was provoked into saying more than yes or no, he said precisely what he thought, apparently with no understanding of other people's feelings or the conventions of polite conversation.\n\nDuring a meal in St John's Hall, he crushed a fellow student who was devoting his time to workaday problems in classical physics: 'You ought to tackle fundamental problems, not peripheral ones.' This was Rutherford's credo, too, though his approach was more down to earth. Rutherford was wary of the theorists' effusions about their latest hieroglyphics until the results were useful to experimenters. Quantum mechanics had yet to do that. Most physicists found it implausible that nature could be so perverse as to favour a theory that required thirty pages of algebra to explain the simplest  atom's energy levels, rather than Bohr's theory, which explained them in a few lines. For Rutherford and his boys, the real sensation that autumn was not the revelations about quantum mechanics but the discovery that electrons have spin. Made at the University of Leiden by two Dutchmen, this discovery took everyone by surprise. In terms of the Bohr picture of the atom, it was easy to envisage crudely what was going on: the orbiting electron is spinning, just as the Earth spins like a top around its north-south axis. Though soon to be taken for granted, many leading physicists thought the idea that the electron has spin was ridiculous.\n\nOne of the postgraduate students who first heard in Cambridge that term about the discovery of spin was Robert Oppenheimer, a dapper, well-to-do American Jew just arrived from Harvard, then riddled with anti-Semitism. He was emotionally fragile, unsure of what he wanted to do with his life but outwardly confident and always keen to display the breadth and depth of his cultural interests. After Rutherford refused to accept him as a student, he spent a few unproductive weeks working with J. J. Thomson, then well over the hill. Oppenheimer disliked Cambridge life - the 'rather pallid science clubs', the 'vile' lectures, having to live in 'a miserable hole'. He saw fellow American students 'literally dying off under the rigors of disregard, climate, and Yorkshire pudding'. By the end of his first term in Cambridge, Oppenheimer was judged by a close American friend to have 'a first class case of depression'.\n\nDirac mentioned none of his new student acquaintances in his postcards home, and virtually nothing about his work. His frustrated parents had to wait six weeks for him even to confirm that his lodgings were comfortable. Flo, having seen her son ratchet up his work rate after tumbling to the importance of Heisenberg's first paper, began what was to become her ineffectual refrain: 'Don't work too hard; have some fun if it comes your way.' Dirac's father was still a broken man, suffering in the cold weather and - in his wife's words - shuffling around 'so slowly that he is like a block of ice'.\n\nOne of Flo's favourite subjects was national and local politics, but that autumn she wrote little about them, probably because there was not much to write about: Britain was stable and quietly prospering. As the country entered the second half of the 1920s, it seemed at last to be coming to terms with its memories of the war, encouraged by the growing international consensus that disagreements should never  again be resolved on the battlefield. This understanding was manifest in the hailed Treaty of Locarno, a non-aggression pact between France, Germany and Belgium, guaranteed by the two supposedly impartial powers, Italy and the UK. Some English schools celebrated by giving their pupils a day off when the treaty was signed in London on 1 December, the day the Royal Society published Dirac's first paper on quantum mechanics. Fowler had managed to cut the time between the submission of the paper and its publication from the usual three months to three weeks.\n\nWord passed around the cognoscenti of quantum theory that a star had been born. Dirac's earlier work had gone largely unnoticed, but here was a paper that appeared to have been written by a mature mathematician and physicist. One of those who had not heard of Dirac before his first work on the new theory was Heisenberg's boss in G\u00f6ttingen, Max Born. Though given to understatement rather than hyperbole, in his memoir he described his first reading of Dirac's early work on quantum mechanics as 'one of the greatest surprises of my life [. . .] the author appeared to be a youngster, yet everything was perfect in its way and admirable'.\n\nHeisenberg, too, was jolted by the paper. On 23 November, a few days after he received the proof copy Dirac sent him, Heisenberg replied in a two-page letter (in German) that began a fifty-year friendship. He began graciously by telling Dirac that he had read his 'beautiful work with great interest', adding that 'There can be no doubt that all your results are correct, insofar as one believes in the new theory.' The discoverer of the new theory was unsure of whether he had hit on ideas of lasting value.\n\nWhat followed must have made Dirac's heart sink: 'I hope you are not disturbed by the fact that part of your results have already been found here some time ago.' Born had independently found the relationship between the position and momentum symbols, a connection that Dirac probably thought he had been first to make. Also, Heisenberg's theory accounted for the Balmer formula for hydrogen atoms, according to a virtuoso calculation by Heisenberg's slightly older friend Wolfgang Pauli, an Austrian theoretician known for his brilliance, his unsparing intellectual aggression and for drinking a glass of wine too many in the nightspots of Hamburg. Heisenberg's note bore the disappointing message that other European theoreticians were on the same track and the deflating prospect that they would repeatedly beat him into print.\n\nIn the ten days following his first letter, Heisenberg wrote Dirac three more warm and complimentary notes, pointing out technical difficulties and minor errors in Dirac's first paper and seeking to clarify details. He concluded his letter of 1 December: 'Please do not take these questions that I write to you as criticisms of your wonderful work. I must now write an article on the state of the theory [. . .] and still wonder at the mathematical simplicity with which you have overcome this problem.' Dirac knew that he was facing some of the toughest competition theoretical physics had to offer. Heisenberg was working in G\u00f6ttingen not only with Born and his student Pascual Jordan but also in association with some of the world's leading mathematicians. The trio of Born, Heisenberg and Jordan were working in the G\u00f6ttingen tradition of a close relationship between the theoretical physicists, mathematicians and experimenters, in sharp contrast with the virtual separation of the communities in Cambridge, where individuality was prized. So, in the undeclared contest to be the first to develop quantum mechanics into a complete theory, the combined might of the mathematicians and physicists in G\u00f6ttingen was pitted against the loner Dirac. He knew that Heisenberg had given his German competitors a head start of two months.\n\nIt would take several years before quantum mechanics crystallised into a complete theory. During that time, it was a work in progress by about fifty physicists. In retrospect, they resembled a group of construction workers who had agreed on a common project - to build a new theory of the behaviour of matter - though not on how to accomplish it. In this case, the construction site was dispersed across north-western Europe, and virtually all the builders were male, under thirty, intensely competitive and craving the respect of their peers as well as the blessing of posterity. There was no official leader, so the workers were free to concentrate on any part of the project they liked. In this quasi-anarchy, some tasks were sure to be done by several people at the same time so, when useful results emerged, there would be quarrels about who most deserved the credit for them. All the workers had their favourite tools and their own preferred way of solving the problems in hand. Some approached  it philosophically, some mathematically and some with their eyes on what experiment could teach them. Some concentrated on the project's grand plans and others on its details. Most of them liked to collaborate and to bounce ideas off their colleagues, while a few others - notably Dirac - had no wish to be in anyone's team. It was rarely easy to see which of the new ideas were duds and which were gems, nor was it obvious whose approaches to the problem were the most promising. Not that any physicist felt bound by a need to take an entirely consistent approach; all that mattered was getting the job done, by whatever means were available. In the end, prizes for a new scientific theory tend to be awarded as they are in architecture for a new building - not to the people who talked most eloquently during the construction but to those who set out its vision and who did most to realise it.\n\nDirac knew that he and his colleagues had taken only the first step towards the building of a complete theory of quantum mechanics. There was much to do.\n**Seven**\n\nA door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you knew is wrong.\n\nTOM STOPPARD, _Arcadia,_ 1993, Act 1, Scene 4\n\nEinstein admired the new quantum mechanics, but he was suspicious of it. On Christmas Day 1925 in Berlin, he wrote to a close friend that it seemed implausible to him that something so simple as a number representing a quantum particle's position should have to be replaced by an array of numbers, 'a genuine witches' multiplication table'. Seven weeks later, he was coming to the conclusion that the theory was wrong.\n\nDirac had no such qualms - he was sure that Heisenberg had pointed the best way ahead. Yet although Dirac was working with Heisenberg's theory, their approaches to it were quite different: whereas Heisenberg thought the theory was revolutionary, for Dirac it was an extension of classical theory. While Heisenberg and his G\u00f6ttingen colleagues strove constantly to account for experimental results, Dirac's priority was to lay the theory's 'substrata', following a favourite term of Eddington's. Dirac was following Einstein in taking a top-down approach, beginning with mathematically precise formulations of fundamental principles and only afterwards using the theory to make predictions.\n\nA few weeks after Christmas - the first the Dirac family had spent without Felix - Dirac gave a talk at the Kapitza Club about his just-published paper on quantum mechanics. Two days later, he sent off for publication the proof that his theory reproduced Balmer's formula, the first of three papers on the new theory that he wrote in the first four months of the year. In these first papers on quantum mechanics, Dirac was trying both to understand the theory and to apply it. Puzzled by the symbols in Heisenberg's theory, he spent months unsuccessfully trying to relate them to projective geometry; none of his ideas worked. He was using mathematics that was unknown or at least unfamiliar to most of his colleagues, yet he  rarely gave details of the mathematical techniques he was using or the experimental observations he was trying to explain. He thus managed to perplex both physicists and mathematicians. Nearly fifty years later, Dirac admitted that his attitude to mathematics was cavalier:\n\nI did not bother at all about finding a precise mathematical nature for [some of my symbols] or about any kind of precision in dealing with them. I think you can see here the effects of an engineering training. I just wanted to get results quickly, results which I felt one could have some confidence in, even though they did not follow from strict logic, and I was using the mathematics of engineers, rather than the rigorous mathematics which had been taught to me by Fraser.\n\nThose words would have puzzled Dirac's peers in the spring of 1925. Most of them would have been hard pressed to identify in his papers any remnants of an engineer's training, nor did his writings flaunt the quick-and-dirty approach to calculations favoured by engineers. Rather, Dirac's papers appeared to be impenetrable to all but the mathematically adept. One reason why Dirac's approach was so puzzling was that he was an unusual hybrid - part theoretical physicist, part pure mathematician, part engineer. He had the physicist's passion to know the underlying laws of nature, the mathematician's love of abstraction for its own sake and the engineer's insistence that theories give useful results.\n\nWearing the hat of the physicist, Dirac knew that, for all the mathematical elegance of quantum mechanics, it had yet to make a single prediction whose confirmation would demonstrate its superiority over Bohr's theory. Such a test of the new theory was not easy to find. The best that Dirac could do was to use the theory to describe the most-investigated example of subatomic collision - the scattering of a photon (a particle of light) by a single electron. This process always involves particles travelling at extremely high speeds, close to the speed of light, so any theory that seeks to describe it must be relativistic - consistent with Einstein's special theory of relativity. The problem was that Heisenberg and Dirac's theory of quantum mechanics was not relativistic, and it was unclear how to incorporate relativity into the theory. Dirac made a start on this by tweaking the theory to improve its consistency with relativity and then used it to make testable predictions, using the ideas he had developed at home  in Bristol soon after he received Heisenberg's original paper. The theory was rough and ready, but it enabled Dirac to make the first prediction of quantum mechanics: using a graph, he compared observations of electron scattering with his 'new quantum theory' and showed that it was in better agreement than the classical theory.\n\nQuantum mechanics was still only a rudimentary theory. Much remained to be clarified about the interpretation of its mathematical symbols: what did they really mean? And was it possible to say any more about the motion of subatomic particles? How could the theory be applied to atoms more complicated than hydrogen, containing more than one electron? In later life, Dirac liked to point out that quantum mechanics was the first physical theory to be discovered before anyone knew what it meant. He spent months on the problem of interpreting its symbols and came to see that the theory was mathematically less complicated than he had first thought. Born pointed out to Heisenberg that each array of numbers in his quantum theory was a matrix, which consists of numbers arranged in horizontal rows and vertical columns that behave according to simple rules spelt out in textbooks. Heisenberg had never heard of matrices when he discovered the theory, as Born often reminded his colleagues, adding that he was the one who had ensured that Heisenberg's egg was properly hatched and that its contents were nurtured into infancy.\n\nIt seemed to many physicists that Dirac was working in a private language, and this inaccessibility made his work unpopular. In Berlin, long the global capital of theoretical physics, the consensus was that the approach of the G\u00f6ttingen group - Heisenberg, Born and Jordan - was the most effective. In the United States, then way behind Europe in developing quantum mechanics, the practically minded theoretician John Slater later recalled his frustration with Dirac's writings. In Slater's view, there are two types of theoretical physicist. The first consists of people like himself, 'the prosaic, pragmatic, matter-of-fact sort, who [. . .] tries to write or speak in the most comprehensible manner possible'. The second was 'the magical, or hand-waving type, who like a magician, waves his hands as if he were drawing a rabbit out of a hat, and who is not satisfied unless he can mystify his readers or hearers'. For Slater and many others, Dirac was a magician.\n\nDirac's academic stock rose further in the spring of 1926, during his final term as a postgraduate. He was no longer just another of Cambridge's many brilliant but unfulfilled loners but was recognised as an extraordinary talent. Fowler arranged for him to give two series of lectures on quantum theory for his fellow students. Fowler was also in the audience, aware that his most brilliant prot\u00e9g\u00e9 had overtaken him.\n\nAlthough Rutherford affected to scorn highfalutin theory, he kept abreast of the latest news about quantum physics. At his request, Dirac gave a presentation at the Cavendish about the welter of quantum discoveries that had been made at G\u00f6ttingen, but it was a poor, hastily prepared talk. His audience almost certainly included Oppenheimer and also Kapitza and Blackett, who were - beneath a veneer of amity - increasingly at odds. The tensions were rooted in their relationships with Rutherford. Kapitza shamelessly flattered and courted him, who in return gave favours and even friendship, to the extent that Kapitza was sometimes described as the son Rutherford never had. None of this went down well with Blackett, who admired Rutherford's creative running of the laboratory but had no time for his authoritarianism. Blackett, too, was an object of envy. In the early autumn of 1925, he tutored Oppenheimer at the laboratory bench, teaching him the craft of experimental physics, for which Oppenheimer had little aptitude, as he well knew. With the peculiar logic of neurosis, Oppenheimer decided to get his own back by anonymously leaving on Blackett's desk an apple poisoned with chemicals from the laboratory. Blackett survived but the authorities were outraged and Oppenheimer avoided expulsion from the university only after his parents persuaded the university not to press charges but to put him on probation, on the understanding that he would have regular sessions with a psychiatrist. A few months later, he switched to theoretical physics - a much more congenial field for him - and worked in the same circle as Dirac, who was busy hammering out his vision of quantum mechanics. Oppenheimer recalled that 'Dirac was not easily understood, not concerned with being understood. I thought he was absolutely grand.'\n\nDirac probably did not notice the intrigues among his friends and acquaintances or their personal problems; even if he did, he would probably have ignored them. He worked all day long and took time off only for his Sunday walk and to play chess, a game he played well  enough to beat most students in the college chess club, sometimes several at the same time. Nor did Dirac take much interest in politics. He was an onlooker during the General Strike that almost brought the UK to a halt for nine days in early May 1926 and led many to fear that a Bolshevik revolution was imminent. King George V urged moderation, while in the Government, Churchill demanded 'unconditional surrender' from the workers ('the enemy') who were supporting the demands of the Miners' Union. Some students thought the strike was a national crisis, but to others it was an opportunity to drive a tram or to play at being a docker or a policeman. Almost half the university's students took part in strike-breaking activities, so the authorities had no choice but to postpone the end-of-year examinations, prolonging the merriment. Dirac heard from his mother that trams and buses in Bristol were still running, a relief to his father, so weakened by grief that he could not walk the mile between his home and the Merchant Venturers' School. Fate was about to bring Charles even more sorrow: he heard from Geneva in early March that his mother had died.\n\nThe collapse of the General Strike was important in the development of political thought in Cambridge. The strength of opposition to the strike in the university demonstrated the unwillingness of its dons to disrupt the political status quo; even some of its socialist academics had been strike-breakers. The humiliation of May 1926 was one of the main motivations of a few Marxist scientists who were determined to establish radical politics in Cambridge and then to spread the word across the country. The most effective of the proselytisers was the young crystallographer Desmond Bernal, an energetic and charismatic polymath, who had joined the Communist Party after he graduated in 1923. He had a vision of a just and well-informed collectivist society, with all policy decisions taken according to scientific principles and with the benefit of expert technological knowledge. Scientists were his ideal society's elite, to the extent that he suggested that they might be granted the freedom to form 'almost independent states and be enabled to undertake their largest experiments without consulting the outside world'. The theoretical basis for Bernal's thinking was supplied by Marxism, which seemed to him and his friends to provide a framework for the solution of every social, political and economic problem.\n\nBernal and his colleagues at first made slow progress in converting colleagues to Marxist thinking, partly because of resistance by moderates such as Rutherford, who despised Bernal more than anyone else in Cambridge for his activism and, apparently, for his open sexual promiscuity. The suspicion of card-carrying Communists was so intense that Bernal apparently decided in 1927, when he began a period of working full-time in the Cavendish, that it would be better to let his membership of the party drop. After that, it appears that none of his colleagues officially joined the party.\n\nKapitza did not make the error of alienating senior colleagues: although he shared many of Bernal's political views, he was careful not to offend Rutherford by talking politics in the laboratory. However, Kapitza will have shared his vision of society with Dirac, who had arrived in Cambridge a political innocent and so heard for the first time the claim that Marxism offered an all-embracing scientific theory that could do for society what Newton had done for science. According to this vision, every economy could be the test bed for a theory that promised a brighter future, with intelligent planning taking the place of the sometimes cruel, invisible hand of market forces. Dirac may have noted the strong support Marxists gave to education and industrialisation and the contempt they poured on religion - themes that emerged soon afterwards in his perspective on aspects of life he was discovering outside physics.\n\nDuring the General Strike, Dirac was absorbed in writing his Ph.D. thesis, a compact presentation of his vision of quantum mechanics. Confident though he was of his understanding of the theory, he knew as he wrote his thesis that it was not the whole story, for he had recently heard that an alternative version of quantum theory had appeared, one that looked completely different from Heisenberg's. The author of the new version was the Austrian theoretician Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger, working in Zurich. He was thirty-eight years old, a generation older than Heisenberg and Dirac, with a formidable reputation in Europe as a brilliant polymath.\n\nSchr\u00f6dinger had discovered his quantum theory independently of Heisenberg and a few weeks later, by building on de Broglie's wave theory of matter, which Dirac had admired but had not taken seriously. In the Christmas vacation of 1925, during an illicit weekend with a girlfriend in the Swiss mountains, Schr\u00f6dinger discovered an  equation that described the behaviour of quanta of matter in terms of their associated waves, and then applied the theory in a series of dazzling papers. His achievement was to generalise de Broglie's idea: the young Frenchman's theory applied only to the special case of matter with no overall force acting on it, but Schr\u00f6dinger's theory applied to all matter, in any circumstances.\n\nThe great virtue of Schr\u00f6dinger's theory was that it was easy to use. For the many scientists intimidated by the abstract mathematics in Heisenberg's approach, Schr\u00f6dinger offered the balm of familiarity: his theory was based on an equation that closely resembled those most physicists had mastered as undergraduates, when they were studying water and sound waves. Better still, in Schr\u00f6dinger's theory, the atom could be, at least to some extent, visualised. Roughly speaking, the energy levels of an atom correspond to the waves that can be set up on a piece of rope, held fixed at one end and shaken up and down at the other. The shaker can set up a single half-wavelength (like a crest, moving up and down) on the rope, or, by shaking more vigorously, two half-wavelengths, or three half-wavelengths, or four, or five, and so on. Each of these wave patterns corresponds to a definite energy of the rope, just as each possible Schr\u00f6dinger wave of an atom corresponds to an atomic energy level. The meaning of these Schr\u00f6dinger waves was unclear: their discoverer suggested unconvincingly that they were a measure of the spread of the electron's charge around the nucleus. Whatever the true nature of these waves, they were more intuitively appealing than Heisenberg's matrices to those who lacked mathematical confidence. They, along with everyone else, were relieved when Schr\u00f6dinger gave a preliminary proof (completed two years later by others) that his theory gave the same results as Heisenberg's. The frightened sceptics could then ignore those intimidating matrices.\n\nAt first, Dirac was annoyed by Schr\u00f6dinger's theory, as he resented even the thought of suspending work on the new quantum mechanics and starting afresh. But in late May, as he was finishing the writing of his Ph.D. thesis, he received a persuasive letter from Heisenberg urging him to take Schr\u00f6dinger's work seriously. This wise advice was ironic coming from Heisenberg, an opponent of the rival theory, who had written to Wolfgang Pauli in early June, 'The more I reflect on the physical portion of Schr\u00f6dinger's theory the more disgusting I find it. What Schr\u00f6dinger writes on the visualizability of his theory is probably not quite right. In other words, it's crap.' Schr\u00f6dinger gave as good as he got, dismissing the mathematical arcana of Heisenberg's theory and the idea of quantum jumps. The two theorists clashed unpleasantly when they first met a month later at a packed seminar in Munich, the first skirmish in what was to be a long and acrimonious dispute.\n\nDirac ignored Schr\u00f6dinger's theory in his Ph.D. thesis, 'Quantum Mechanics', the first to be submitted anywhere on the subject. The thesis was a great success with his examiners, including Eddington, who took the unusual step on 19 June of sending him a short handwritten letter on behalf of the Degree Committee of the Mathematical Board, congratulating him on 'the exceptional distinction' of his work. Dirac disliked celebrations and formality, so he was almost certainly not looking forward to the ceremony. He could have taken the degree without attending it but decided to be there in person for the sake of his proud parents, especially his father, who had given him the money that enabled him to begin his Cambridge studies.\n\nDirac's parents and his sister Betty set off at four in the morning, in good time to take the train to Cambridge via Paddington to see Paul be awarded his degree in the setting of the university's grand Senate House. Every detail of the proceedings harked back to the University's monastic origins. The ermine-collared Vice Chancellor presided and, like the other officials, spoke only in Latin, ensuring that Dirac understood scarcely a word. Wearing evening dress with a white bow tie, a small black cap and black silk gown with a scarlet-lined hood, he knelt on a velvet cushion, placed his hands together and held them out to be grasped by the Vice Chancellor, who delivered a prayer-like oration. Dirac arose, a doctor.\n\nIt was the wettest June in Cambridge for five years, but on that day the rain held off. The town was at its most relaxed, teeming with students and their families. Dirac had not learned the local practice of punting, so he and his family could only watch as others steered their flat-bottomed boats along the Cam, through the lawns and fields, past the gorgeous colleges and chapels.\n\nThe Dirac family arrived home at 4 a.m. on Sunday. It had been a happy trip, though its cost had upset Charles. Flo wrote to her son: 'Pa said it cost him \u00a38, so that will be our summer holiday.' It was to be the highlight of her summer, though she was worried that her son was looking drawn and emaciated: 'I wish you would have a nice  rest & feed up & get strong. Do try!' As usual, he took no notice. Like his father, he had no need of holidays - the long vacations were not for relaxing but for hard work. The university was about to hibernate for the summer and would be virtually devoid of social distractions for the few scholars who remained. It was the perfect environment for Dirac to concentrate even more intensively on his work. Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger had knifed a sack of gemstones, and the race was on to pick out the diamonds.\n\nDirac moved out of his lodgings and into a college room, where he worked at his desk through a sweltering July, producing what would prove to be one of his most enduring insights into nature. He realised that he had been wrong to be wary of Schr\u00f6dinger's work. Dirac saw that he could have derived Schr\u00f6dinger's equation using his theory if only he had not been quite so fixated on the links between classical and quantum mechanics. Now, having set aside his prejudice, he could proceed with new gusto. He explained how to generalise Schr\u00f6dinger's first version of his equation, which applied only to cases that stayed the same as time progressed, to situations that _did_ change with time, such as an atom in a fluctuating magnetic field. Quite independently, Schr\u00f6dinger wrote down the same general equation, which is now named - not entirely fairly - only after him.\n\nWithin a few weeks of mastering Schr\u00f6dinger's equation, Dirac used it to make one of his most famous contributions to science. It concerned the most basic particles that exist in nature, usually described as 'fundamental' because they are believed to have no constituents at all. Classic examples are photons and electrons. Today, two established experimental facts form the bedrock of studies about fundamental particles. First, for each type of fundamental particle, every single one of them in the universe is the same and identical to all other particles of the same type - every electron in every atom on Earth is indistinguishable from every electron in galaxies millions of light years away, just as all the trillions of photons given out each second from a light bulb are the same as the photons given out by the most distant star. For electrons and photons, if you have seen one, you have seen them all. Second, the types of fundamental particles fall into one of two classes, much as almost all human beings can be classified as males or females. The first class is exemplified by the  photon, the second by the electron. In 1926, no one knew that there were two such classes.\n\nThe differences between the behaviours of electrons and photons exemplify the sharp contrast in behaviour between the two known classes of particle. For a collection of electrons, say in an atom, each available energy state can usually accommodate no more than _two_ electrons. The situation is quite different for photons: each energy state can host _any number_ of them. One way to visualise this difference is to imagine a pair of bookcases with horizontal shelves arranged vertically above one another in ascending order of energy - the higher the shelf, the higher the energy to which it corresponds. The shelves of the 'electron bookcase' represent the energy states available to electrons, while the shelves of the 'photon bookcase' correspond to the states available to photons. For the 'electron bookcase', each shelf can accommodate at most two books: once the shelf is occupied, it is full and no others can join it. The 'photon bookcase' is different because its shelves can each house any number of books. It is as if electrons are unsociable, whereas photons are gregarious.\n\nPauli first realised the aversion of electrons to their own company in 1925 when he suggested his exclusion principle. This explained the puzzle of why all the electrons in an atom do not all orbit the nucleus in the same, lowest-energy orbit: it is because the electrons simply are not allowed to fit into the same state - they are forced by the exclusion principle to occupy higher-energy states. This is why the different types of atom - manifest as different chemical elements - behave so differently. In common experience, neon is a gas and sodium is a metal, yet the atoms of neon gas are very similar to the sodium atoms: outside their nuclei, they differ only in that a sodium atom contains one more electron than a neon atom. That additional electron determines the differences between the two elements, and the Pauli exclusion principle explains why sodium's extra electron does not simply join the others and form an almost identical type of atom; rather, it occupies a higher-energy quantum state that is responsible for the differences between the behaviour of the two elements. For the same reason, if there were no exclusion principle, the world around us would have none of the huge variety of forms, textures and colours that we take for granted. Not only would our senses have nothing to perceive, they would not exist. Nor, indeed, would human beings or even life itself.\n\nDirac was aware of the exclusion principle's power. But he knew that there was much more to do before theorists could understand, at an atomic level, what was going on in the chemistry experiments that he had done at Bishop Road School. There, chemistry was about describing how the elements and other substances behaved: the prize was to move beyond these descriptions to explanations in terms of universal laws. Quantum mechanics promised to do just this, but in 1926 it was not even possible to apply it to atoms that contain more than just one electron, the so-called 'heavy atoms'.\n\nIn his college room, Dirac reflected on how Schr\u00f6dinger waves might describe heavy atoms and the importance of the Pauli exclusion principle. At the back of Dirac's mind was Heisenberg's tenet that theories should be set up only in terms of quantities that experimenters can measure. He thought about the Schr\u00f6dinger waves that describe two electrons in an atom and wondered whether each wave would be any different if the electrons swapped places. No experimenter could tell the difference, he concluded, because the light given out by the atom would be the same in each case. The way to describe the electrons was, he realised, in terms of waves with the property that they change sign (that is, are multiplied by minus one) when any two electrons are switched. In a few pages of algebra, he used this idea to work out how energy is shared out by groups of electrons as they fill the available energy states. The formulae Dirac derived that summer are now used every day by researchers who study metals and semiconductors; the flows of heat and electricity in them are determined by their electrons, collectively dancing to the tunes of his formulae.\n\nYet the practical applications were of no interest to Dirac. He was concerned only with understanding how nature ticks at the most fundamental level and why there is such a sharp contrast between the waves that describe electrons and those that describe photons. He concluded that, while the wave describing a group of electrons changes sign if two electrons swap places, the corresponding wave describing a group of photons behaves in the opposite way - if two photons swap places, the wave remains the same.\n\nThis tied in neatly with the abortive work he had done on blackbody radiation and led him to explain one of the most puzzling problems of quantum mechanics, a problem that was beyond the ken of Einstein. As Dirac had first heard in Tyndall's lectures in Bristol, quantum theory had begun in the closing weeks of 1900 when Max  Planck suggested that energy is delivered in quanta. The problem was that no one understood how the new theory of quantum mechanics explained Planck's formula. In the months of grief after Felix's death, Dirac had lost the scent of the solution because his theoretical tools were inadequate. Now he had discovered the tool he needed to explain the black-body radiation spectrum: the waves that describe the photons remain unchanged when any two photons are switched. Two pages of calculations in Dirac's notebooks had brought to an end a research project that had been going on for twenty-five years. He must have known he had done something special, but he did not intend to share it with his parents. On 27 July, the message he wrote on his weekly postcard was 'There is not much to say now.'\n\nAt the end of August, Dirac sent off an account of his new theory to the Royal Society. He had every reason to be pleased with himself, but disappointment was in store, as he had again been beaten into print. At the end of October, a month after his paper was published, he received a short, typewritten letter from a physicist in Rome who had published a quantum theory of groups of electrons eight months before. The letter was from Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist a year older than Dirac. In a short note, written in Berlitz-enhanced English, Fermi drew attention to his paper, which he presumed that Dirac had not seen, and concluded without rancour: 'I beg to attract your attention to it.' But Dirac _had_ seen Fermi's paper several months before and thought it was unimportant; it had slipped his mind. Although Dirac's paper was very different in approach to Fermi's, their predictions for energies of groups of electrons were identical.\n\nIt later turned out that another physicist had also done work similar to Fermi's. In G\u00f6ttingen, Pascual Jordan had independently derived the same results, had written them up in a manuscript and had given it to his adviser Max Born to read during a trip to the USA. Born put the paper at the bottom of his suitcase and forgot all about it until he returned to Germany several months later, but it was too late. Today, physicists associate the quantum description of groups of electrons only with Fermi and Dirac - in this project, Jordan was, unjustly, a loser.\n\nIn September 1926, Dirac was preparing to leave Cambridge to spend a year in Europe funded by his scholarship from the 1851 Commission. His preference was to spend his first year as 'an 1851  man' with Heisenberg and his colleagues in G\u00f6ttingen, but Fowler wanted him to go to Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. They agreed on a compromise: Dirac would spend half the time in each, beginning with six months in Denmark.\n\nDirac arrived in Copenhagen exhausted, having spent much of the sixteen-hour voyage across the North Sea vomiting. The experience led him to a surprising resolution: he would keep sailing in stormy seas until he had cured himself of the weakness of seasickness. His colleague Nevill Mott was flabbergasted: 'he is quite indifferent to cold, discomfort, food etc. [. . .] Dirac is rather like one's idea of Gandhi.'\n**Eight**\n\nMR PRALINE: [. . .] I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased  \nnot half an hour ago from this very boutique.  \nPET SHOP OWNER: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue . . . What's,  \nuh . . . What's wrong with it?  \nMR PRALINE: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead,  \nthat's what's wrong with it!\n\n_Monty Python's Flying Circus_ , script by JOHN CLEESE and  \nGRAHAM CHAPMAN, 1970\n\nMonty Python's famous sketch uncannily resembles a parable Rutherford told Bohr soon after Dirac had arrived in Copenhagen. 'This Dirac,' Bohr grumbled, 'he seems to know a lot of physics, but he never says anything.' This will not have been news to Rutherford, who decided that the best way of answering Bohr's implied criticism was to tell a story about a man who went to a pet store, bought a parrot and tried to teach it to talk, but without success. The man took the bird back to the store and asked for another, explaining to the store manager that he wanted a parrot that talked. The manager obliged, and the man took another parrot home, but this one also said nothing. So, Rutherford continued, the man went back angrily to the store manager: 'You promised me a parrot that talks, but this one doesn't say anything.' The store manager paused for a moment, then struck his head with his hand, and said, 'Oh, that's right! You wanted a parrot that talks. Please forgive me. I gave you the parrot that thinks.'\n\nDirac did a lot of thinking in Copenhagen, mostly alone. No one at Bohr's institute had ever seen anyone quite like him - even by the standards of theoretical physicists he was profoundly eccentric, a retiring figure, happiest when he was alone or listening in silence. His predisposition to answer questions with either yes or no reminded Bohr of Lewis Carroll's description, in _Alice through the Looking Glass_ , of the frustration involved in talking to cats: 'If they would only purr for \"yes\" and mew for \"no\", or any rule of that sort, so that one could keep up a conversation! But how can one deal with a  person if they always say the same thing?' Once in a while, however, Dirac did extend his binary vocabulary of response. When Bohr or one of his friends fussed over him or pressed him to state his preference about something or other, he would bring the interrogation to an end with a curt 'I don't mind.'\n\nPerhaps surprisingly, Dirac thrived in the friendliness and informality of the institute, a world apart from the chilly formalities of Cambridge. Bohr had taken great care to nurture this congeniality since the opening of the building in 1921. Located on the Blegdamsvej, a wide straight road on the north-western edge of the city, from the outside the institute looked anonymous, much like every other new building in the city. But inside, the institute's atmosphere was unique: for most of the day, it hummed with high-minded debate, most of it free of pomposity; individuality was prized, but collaboration was supported; the administration was efficient, free of asinine bureaucracy. Bohr encouraged his colleagues to relax together - to play silly games, to commandeer library tables for ping-pong tournaments, to spend the occasional evening at the cinema, followed by boozy discussions late into the night. Quantum physics was being forged by this generation of physicists, and they knew it. Every researcher was seeking to put their own stamp on the emerging quantum mechanics, nervous of producing trivialities, hopeful that they would come up with insights that would be of lasting value. Their research articles were news that aspired to be history.\n\nBohr was a national hero in Denmark, though he scarcely looked the part. An unassuming but commanding presence, he looked as if he had absconded from the captaincy of a herring trawler. His depth and versatility enormously impressed Dirac, proving to him it was possible to be a premier-division physicist while taking an active interest in the arts, the stock market, psychology and just about any other subject. Like his mentor Rutherford, Bohr had both an eerily sound intuition about the workings of nature and a real talent for getting the best out of his young colleagues. When a special visitor arrived, Bohr would take him or her on a walk among the beech trees of the Klampenborg Forest, just outside the city, to take the measure of his new colleague and give a sense of his non-mathematical approach to physics. Most of the young physicists came under the spell of Bohr, as he had come under Rutherford's.\n\nBohr and his queenly wife Margrethe oversaw life at the institute  like the manager and manageress of a hostel, doing their best to make their guests feel at home. Bohr spent most of the day practising the art of talking and lighting his pipe at the same time, conversing with his colleagues alone or in groups, encouraging them and putting their ideas through the mill. Polite to a fault, his refrain when he cross-examined his young charges was 'Not to criticize, just to learn.' Bohr was the Socrates of atomic physics and he made Copenhagen its Athens.\n\nDirac was billeted in a boarding house in the heart of the city. As he had done in Bristol and Cambridge, he lived life according to a strict routine: every day except Sunday, he took the thirty-minute walk to the institute, past the ducks and swans on the row of artificial lakes on the north-western rim of the city, returning to his lodgings for lunch. On Sundays, he went on long strolls through the local woods or along the coast to the north of the city, usually alone but sometimes accompanied by some colleagues or just with Bohr. Among the new acquaintances he made there, he got on well with Heisenberg - as likeable in person as he was as a correspondent - but apparently not with Pauli. Although prodigiously talented, Pauli was not the most endearing character in physics: he liked the sound of his own voice and routinely meted out casual verbal violence even to his friends, though he was widely admired for his candour, even by his victims. 'You are a complete fool,' Pauli would repeatedly tell his friend Heisenberg, who later said this joshing helped him to raise his game. But Dirac had no taste for it, and Pauli repeatedly broke through the firewall of his self-confidence. However, Dirac showed no sign of discomfort: whether being praised or condemned, he looked straight ahead with his thousand-yard stare, his entire bearing powerfully radiating his unwillingness to speak or even to be approached.\n\nDirac's behaviour was apparently not a complete surprise to Bohr. A few years later, when describing Dirac's first visit to a journalist, Bohr echoed the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ : 'in Copenhagen [we] expect anything of an Englishman'.\n\nThe most pressing problem for quantum theorists remained: what did the symbols in their equations mean? During the summer, Max Born in G\u00f6ttingen had interpreted Schr\u00f6dinger's waves by abandoning the classical principle that the future state of any particle can  always, in principle, be predicted. Born had pictured an electron being scattered by a target. He argued that it is impossible to predict precisely how much the electron will be deflected and that it is possible to know only the _probability_ that the electron will be scattered around any given angle. This led him to suggest that when a particular wave describes an electron, the probability of detecting it in any tiny region follows from a simple calculation that involves, loosely speaking, multiplying the 'size' of the wave in that region by itself. According to Born, the wave is a fictitious, mathematical quantity that enables the likelihood of future behaviour to be predicted. This was a dramatic break with the mechanistic certainties of Newton's picture of the universe, apparently putting an end to the centuries-old notion that the future is contained in the past. Others had the same idea, including Dirac, but it was Born who first published it, though at first even he does not seem to have fully recognised its importance: in the paper where he introduced the concept, he mentions it only in a footnote.\n\nBorn's quantum probabilities seem to have been news to no one at the institute, least of all Bohr, who remarked, 'We had never dreamt it could be otherwise,' though it is unclear why neither he nor any of his colleagues saw fit to publish the idea. Whatever the origins of the probability-based interpretation of quantum mechanics, everyone in the physics community was talking about it in the autumn of 1926, and it was one of the themes of the first Bohr-Dirac 'dialogue'. Only weeks before Dirac's arrival, Schr\u00f6dinger had been a visitor to the institute and made it clear that he found Born's interpretation of quantum waves and the concept of quantum jumps repugnant. On one occasion, after being grilled to a crisp by Bohr, Schr\u00f6dinger retired sick to his bed, but there was to be no escape. Bohr appeared at his bedside and resumed the interrogation.\n\nDirac would not have responded well to such intense questioning, but he made an effective sounding board for Bohr during their autumnal walks. Dirac hardly said a word while Bohr struggled to articulate one point after another, resolution always lying like a phantom, just beyond his grasp. It was on a Sunday hike in October that Bohr, perhaps speculating that Dirac might be interested in classic English literature, took him to the setting of _Hamlet_ , the royal castle of Kronborg, overlooking the stretch of water between Denmark and Sweden. The Bard would have made comic hay from  their verbal exchange, both from the clash of their conversational styles and their contrasting approaches to science and every other subject. Philosophy was an important, compulsory part of Bohr's education, and he took it seriously. Whereas Bohr sought understanding through words, Dirac thought they were treacherous and believed that true clarity could be achieved only in mathematical symbols. As Oppenheimer would later remark, Bohr 'regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely as a way to make himself intelligible to other people, which he hardly needs'.\n\nThere was never any hope that the two would collaborate, as became plain early in Dirac's stay when Bohr called him into his office to help him write a paper. This was Bohr's usual practice: he often dragooned one of his young colleagues into spending a few days as his scribe. The only reward was the honour of being asked and a daily lunch with the Bohrs in their apartment. But the process was not without its frustrations: no sooner would a sentence escape Bohr's lips than he would qualify, amend or delete it in favour of another form of words that might, or might not, be a closer approximation to his intended meaning. So, the tortuous process of dictation continued, never quite reaching a coherent conclusion. Dirac had better things to do than to spend hours disentangling Bohr's fractured locutions and rendering them into prose of exemplary clarity. 'At school', Dirac announced soon after the first session with Bohr began, 'I was always taught not to start a sentence until I knew how to finish it.' His employment as Bohr's amanuensis lasted about half an hour.\n\nIn the evenings, most of the young physicists at the institute liked to relax in the cinema or in their lodgings with a plate of hot dogs and a few beers. But Dirac preferred to spend his nights taking long, solitary walks around the city. He would set out from his lodgings after dinner, take a tram to its terminus and walk the Copenhagen streets back to his digs, thinking about the problems of quantum physics. He probably did not know that he was following in the footsteps of the nineteenth-century philosopher S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, pioneer of Christian existentialism and almost as famous among his fellow Danes for his eccentricities as his ideas. Kierkegaard chewed over his ideas in his apartment, pacing back and forth for hours, and during the 'people bath' he took each day in the streets of his native city. For two decades from the mid-1830s, the people of Copenhagen saw  the hunch-backed aristocrat walking around in his broad-rimmed hat, his umbrella folded under his arm. 'I have walked myself into my best thoughts,' he said, a remark precisely echoed by the elderly Dirac. But they reacted differently to the people they passed in the street. Dirac said nothing to his fellow pedestrians, but Kierkegaard would startle some of them by interrogating them about some subject on his mind, following in the tradition of Socrates, whom he called 'the virtuoso of the casual encounter'.\n\nDuring the day, Dirac spent most of his time working in the library, occasionally pausing to read the latest publications in the adjoining 'journal room' and to attend a seminar. To Christian M\u00f8ller, one of the young Danish physicists at the institute, Dirac appeared distracted and aloof:\n\nOften he sat alone in the innermost room of the library in the most uncomfortable position and was so absorbed in his thoughts that we hardly dared to creep into the room, afraid as we were to disturb him. He could spend the whole day in the same position, writing an entire article, slowly and without ever crossing anything out.\n\nIn the library, Dirac was cooking up what would turn out to be one of his most famous insights, the connection between the Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger versions of quantum theory. Everyone knew that the theories seemed to give the same results, yet they looked as different as Japanese and English. Dirac found the rules that allow the two languages to be translated into each other, laying bare the relationship between them and giving new clarity to the Schr\u00f6dinger equation. It turned out that the Schr\u00f6dinger waves were not quite as mysterious as they seemed but were simply the mathematical quantities involved in transforming a description of a quantum - an electron, or any other tiny particle - based on its energy values to one based on possible values of its position. Dirac's theory also accommodated Born's interpretation of Schr\u00f6dinger's waves and showed how to calculate the probability of detecting a quantum. He began to realise that the knowledge an experimenter can have about the behaviour of a quantum is also limited. He wrote that 'one cannot answer any question on the quantum theory which refers to the numerical values for both [the initial position and momentum values of a quantum]', and he pointed out cryptically that one would expect to be able to answer questions in which only one of those initial values is known. He was within a split whisker of what would become the most famous principle in quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, soon to be snatched from under his nose by Heisenberg.\n\nIn the course of working out his theory, Dirac introduced a new mathematical construction that made no sense within conventional mathematics. The object, which he called the delta function, resembles the outer edge of the finest of needles, pointing vertically upwards from its base. Away from that base, the numerical value of the delta function is zero, but its height is such that the area enclosed between the perimeter and the base is exactly one unit. Dirac knew but did not care that pure mathematicians would regard the function as preposterous as it did not behave according to the usual rules of mathematical logic. He conceded that the function was not 'proper' but added blithely that one can use it 'as though it were a proper function for practically all purposes in quantum mechanics without getting incorrect results'. It was not until the late 1940s that mathematicians accepted the function as a concept of unimpeachable respectability.\n\nIn an interview in 1963, he remarked that it was his study of engineering that led him to his new function:\n\nI think it was probably that sort of training that first gave me the idea of the delta function because when you think of load in engineering structures, sometimes you have a distributed load and sometimes you have a concentrated load at the point. Well, it is essentially the same whether you have a concentrated load or a distributed one but you use somewhat different equations in the two cases. Essentially, it's only to unify these two things which sort of led to the delta function.\n\nBut Dirac's recollections may have been wrong. It may well be that he first read about the delta function from Heaviside, who introduced the function with his customary belligerence in one of the books Dirac read as an engineering student in Bristol. Today, the function is associated with Dirac's name, but he had not been the first to invent it - that appears to have been done in 1822 by Heaviside's favourite mathematician, the Frenchman Joseph Fourier, though several others later discovered it independently.\n\nBohr was indifferent to mathematical rigour, so he would not have been perturbed by the delta function when he read about it in the draft Dirac submitted to him, following the understanding that Bohr had to approve each paper submitted from the institute. However,  Bohr and Dirac were soon in disagreement, like two poets in dispute over the syntax of a stanza. Bohr cared about every word and repeatedly requested detailed changes. For Dirac, the words were there to give the clearest possible expression to his thoughts, and, once he had found the right words, he saw no need to change them. He would have agreed with T. S. Eliot: 'It means what it says and if I had wanted to say it any other way, I should have done so.'\n\nDirac was usually quick to attribute his success to luck, but not in this case - he referred to the paper as 'my darling'. He later remarked that he was pleased to have solved the particular problem he set out to tackle, of laying bare the relationship between Heisenberg's theory and Schr\u00f6dinger's. The main quality needed in its solution was technical skill and application; in his view, no special inspiration was involved. Another reason why Dirac was so fond of his 'darling' was probably that it was a success for his method of developing quantum mechanics by analogy with classical mechanics. During his reading about Hamilton's approach to classical mechanics, he had read how 'transformation theory' related different descriptions of the same phenomenon - by using this idea to find the connection between Heisenberg's theory and Schr\u00f6dinger's, Dirac had shed light on both.\n\nIf he hoped that the paper would establish him as the leader in the field, he was soon to be disappointed. In the late autumn, before he had the proofs of his paper, he heard that Pascual Jordan had solved exactly the same problem. Although Dirac's approach and presentation were more elegant and easier to use, the two papers covered substantially the same ground and featured much the same conclusions. So although Dirac had made another distinguished contribution to quantum mechanics - his second within a year - he had yet to beat all his colleagues to a key innovation in the theory. He had, however, acquired some distinguished admirers, though most of them were struggling to understand his peculiar combination of logic and intuition. One of them was Albert Einstein, who told a friend: 'I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.'\n\nOne evening in Dirac's lodgings shortly before Christmas, the telephone rang. It was Professor Bohr, Dirac's landlady told him, as she passed the receiver to him. This was a new experience for him - he  had never before used a telephone. Knowing that Dirac was about to spend the holiday alone, Bohr was calling to ask if he would like to spend Christmas with him and his family. Dirac accepted, though he did not tell his parents. They had been shivering in an unseasonably cold autumn and recovering from the upheaval of having mains electricity installed. Dirac's mother persisted with her doomed campaign to persuade him to do less work and to eat more ('I hope you will take it easy & get nice and plump like Shakespeare's Hamlet') and, for the first time, confided in her son that she was unhappy and tired of the domestic routine. Desperate for a measure of independence, when Charles was out, she and the unemployed Betty sneaked out together to evening classes in French.\n\nThe Dirac family was also preparing itself for its saddest Christmas: a year before, they had had three children at home for the holiday; now they would have only one. On 22 December, the ailing Charles wrote his son a letter, one of only two that Dirac kept from his father, possibly the only letters Dirac received from him in adult life. No longer communicating with Dirac only in French, Charles wrote the four-page letter entirely in English and on black-bordered notepaper that signalled his continuing mourning for Felix.\n\nMy dear Paul\n\nIt will be a lonely time here without you - the first time since you came to us - not so very long ago it seems, but my thoughts are with you to wish you all the happiness a father can wish his only son.\n\nIf you can any time spare a few moments to give me some details of your life there and your work - nothing could please me more, except seeing you again. I should like to feel sure you take sufficient care of yourself - and do not let your studies make you forget your health.\n\nCharles goes on to say that he would like to buy his son a Christmas present, perhaps 'a set of chessmen', and he offers to do 'anything at all' he can to help him. He signs off 'Many kisses from your loving Father'. The note is a window on his grief, his loneliness, his desperation to be closer to his unresponsive 'only son'.\n\nAt midnight on Christmas Eve, Charles and Betty went to a service at a local church, where Felix's death had first been marked. Later, on Christmas Day, Dirac's mother wrote Dirac a fragmentary letter showing that she was as lonely as the man she was living with:\n\nAll we do, as you know, is work & then more work. [. . .] I am trying to get Pa to have [the front room] re-papered. He ought to after 13 years [. . .] He and Betty went up to Horfield Church at 12-midnight for a Service [. . .] This is the first Xmas Day you have been away from home. It is lonely without you.\n\nShe then asked him an unusual favour:\n\nWould you like to send me a few pounds for a diamond ring? I want one so very much. I could wear it in the evenings & think what a darling you are. It is so monotonous doing housework all day long. I get so fed up with it.\n\nPa has pupils all the year round & gives me \u00a38 a year for clothes and everything. It is worse than a servant.\n\nFor the first time in her correspondence, she showed Dirac that he was not just her favourite son but her most intimate confidant and even a substitute for a gift-bearing lover. As her subsequent letters showed, she was in desperate straits, trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to a man who was highly regarded in the community but whom she regarded as an unsympathetic and insensitive brute. In the coming years, her life would unfold like an Ibsen tragedy.\n\nAnother of the out-of-the-blue ideas that Dirac apparently conceived in Copenhagen is now the basis of all modern descriptions of the fundamental constituents of the universe. Such descriptions are based on the nineteenth-century concept of a 'field', which had superseded Newton's vision that nature's basic particles move under the influence of forces exerted by other such particles, often over long distances. Physicists replaced the notion that the Sun and the Earth exert gravitational forces on each other by the more effective picture that the Sun, the Earth and all the other matter in the universe collectively give rise to a gravitational field which pervades the entire universe and exerts a force on each particle, wherever it is located. Likewise, an all-pervasive electromagnetic field exerts a force on every electrically charged particle. Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism and Einstein's theory of gravity are examples of classical 'field theory', each featuring a field that varies smoothly throughout space and time, not mentioning individual quanta. Such classical theories describe the universe in terms of a smooth, underlying fabric. Yet, according to quantum theory, the universe is fundamentally granular: it is ultimately made of tiny particles such as electrons and photons. Loosely speaking, the texture of the underlying fields should, according to classical ideas, be rather like a smooth liquid, whereas quantum theory suggests that it would be like a vast collection of separate grains of sand. To find a quantum version of Maxwell's classical electromagnetism was one of the theoreticians' most pressing problems, and Dirac's next innovation was to solve it.\n\nQuite what put him on to the solution is something of a mystery. Although he was probably aware of the first steps taken a few months before by Jordan, Dirac later said that he first hit on the idea when he was playing with Schr\u00f6dinger waves as if they were mathematical toys, wondering what would happen if they behaved not as ordinary numbers but as _non-commuting_ quantities. The answer began a new way of describing the quantum world.\n\nDirac found a way of mathematically describing the creation and destruction of photons, both commonplace processes. Particles of light are continually created in vast numbers all over the universe in stars and also here on Earth, when an electric light is switched on, a match is struck, a candle is lit. Likewise, photons are continually destroyed - annihilated - for example, when they disappear into human retinas and when leaves convert sunlight to life-giving energy. Neither of these processes of creation and annihilation can be understood using Maxwell's classical theory, which has no way of describing things that appear out of nowhere or disappear into oblivion. Nor did ordinary quantum mechanics have anything to say in detail about the processes of emission or absorption. Yet Dirac showed that this wizardry can be described in a new type of theory, a compact mathematical description of the creation and destruction of photons. He associated each creation with a mathematical object, a creation operator, which is closely related to but quite distinct from another object associated with annihilation, an annihilation operator.\n\nIn this picture, at the heart of modern quantum field theory, the electromagnetic field pervades the entire universe _._ The appearance of every photon is simply an excitation of this field at a particular place and time, described by the action of a creation operator. By a similar token, the disappearance of a photon is the de-excitation of the field, described by an annihilation operator.\n\nDirac had begun to set out a quantum version of Maxwell's unified field theory of electricity and magnetism. He had learned about that theory only three years before, in Cunningham's lectures in  Cambridge, and was now standing on Maxwell's shoulders. So far as Dirac was concerned, his theory put an end to the hand-wringing about the apparent conflict between two theories of light: a wave theory seemed to account for propagation, while a particle theory was needed to explain the interactions with matter. The new theory avoided the embarrassment of having to choose between the wave and particle descriptions and replaced the two sharply contrasting pictures with a single, unified theory. Evidently pleased with himself, Dirac wrote that the pictures were in 'complete harmony'. But he was not interested in sharing the good news with his parents, who read on their weekly postcard their son's familiar message: 'There is not much to say now.'\n\nIn his paper, Dirac applied his theory and compared his results with the successful predictions Einstein had made a decade before, in 1916. Einstein had used old quantum ideas to calculate the rate at which atoms can emit and absorb light, producing formulae that appeared to describe these processes successfully. The question Dirac had to answer was: does the new theory compare favourably with Einstein's?\n\nEinstein's theory had accounted for the interaction of light and matter in terms of three fundamental processes. Two of them were familiar enough: the emission and absorption of a photon by an atom. But Einstein also predicted a previously unknown way of 'persuading' an atom to jump from one energy level to a lower one, by stimulating it with another photon whose energy is exactly equal to the difference between the two energy levels. The result of this process of 'stimulated emission' is that two photons emerge from the atom: the original one and another one given out when the atom jumps to the lower energy level. This process takes place in the ubiquitous laser - there is at least one in every CD and DVD player and in every bar-code reader - and so is the most common technological application of Einstein's science. Dirac's theory produced exactly the same formulae as Einstein's and had the other advantages that it was more general and mathematically more coherent. As he probably realised, he had gone one better than Einstein.\n\nAt the end of January, as he was preparing to leave Copenhagen, Dirac posted his paper to the Royal Society. It turned out that he was the first to introduce the mathematics of creation and annihilation into quantum theory, though his results had been reached independently by John Slater, studying in Cambridge with Fowler. Slater was one of the many who admired Dirac's paper for its content but found its presentation perversely complicated: 'his paper was a typical example of what I very much distrusted, namely one in which a great deal of seemingly unnecessary mathematical formalism is introduced'.\n\nDirac's time in Copenhagen was an unqualified success. The two theories that he had nurtured there had underlined his status as a leading player on the international stage of science. Although he was still the archetypal individualist, he had come to see the value of taking different approaches to his subject and of having his views cross-examined. Apart from Bohr, the interrogator who most fascinated him was Paul Ehrenfest, an intense and disturbed theoretician based at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. Ehrenfest got on well with Dirac, who was almost half his age, the two no doubt especially comfortable in each other's company because - unusually among the Institute's members - they disliked both alcohol and smoking. Ehrenfest's aversion to smoking was in part due to his extremely sensitive sense of smell. One victim of this was the amiable Dutch graduate student Hendrik Casimir. Soon after he arrived in Leiden, Casimir had his hair cut before a meeting with Ehrenfest, who soon sniffed the perfume of the barber's dressing. Ehrenfest quickly became angry and shouted, 'I will not tolerate perfume here. Get out. Go home, get out. Get out. Get out.' A few days later, Casimir was dismissed.\n\nEhrenfest was at his best during seminars. Unafraid of ridicule, he would politely but persistently interrupt speakers, seeking clarification of every unclear point. When he first met Dirac, Ehrenfest was uncomfortable with quantum mechanics and was worried that his close friend Einstein was unhappy about the central role played in the theory by probability. Einstein had been the first to identify that when an atom spontaneously jumps to a lower energy level, quantum theory cannot predict either the direction of the emergent photon or the precise time of its ejection. This was also true of ordinary quantum mechanics and of Dirac's new quantum field theory. Einstein was sure that a satisfactory theory had to do better than just predict probabilities: 'God is not playing dice,' he wrote to Max Born. Dirac thought his hero worried too much about the philosophical  issues of quantum mechanics. All that mattered to Dirac - true to his mathematical and engineering training - was that the theory was logical and accurately accounted for the results of experiments.\n\nAt the end of January 1927, Dirac was preparing to travel to G\u00f6ttingen. Soon he would be leaving the company of Niels Bohr, whom Dirac would later describe as 'the Newton of the atom' and 'the deepest thinker that I ever met'. But it was Bohr's warmth and humanity that most impressed Dirac. At Christmas - while Charles, Flo and Betty Dirac were going through the family rituals - Dirac had been welcomed into the Bohrs' loving fold and witnessed familial joy for the first time. Dirac had seen that it was possible to be both a great physicist and a dedicated family man and that perhaps - just perhaps - there might be more to life than science.\n\nFor Bohr, Dirac was 'probably the most remarkable scientific mind which has appeared for a very long time' and 'a complete logical genius'. Also intrigued by Dirac's personality, Bohr never forgot one incident, during a visit to an art gallery in Copenhagen, of his young visitor's eccentricity. When they were looking at a French impressionist painting showing a boat sketched by just a few lines, Dirac observed, 'This boat looks as if it was not finished.' Of another picture, Dirac remarked, 'I like that because the degree of inaccuracy is the same all over.' Such anecdotes became part of scientific lore, and physicists vied with one another to relate the most amusing instances of Dirac's verbal economy, his literal-mindedness, mathematical precision and otherworldliness. With no psychological framework available to help understand him, his personality became an object of collective amusement, through a myriad of 'Dirac stories'.\n\nNo one relished telling the stories more than Bohr, who entertained visitors with them over afternoon tea in his office. Four years before he died, he told a colleague that, of all the people who had visited his institute, Dirac was 'the strangest man'.\n**Nine**\n\n[For young Germans after the great inflation they experienced in 1923] their aims were to live from day to day; and to enjoy to the utmost everything that was free: sun, water, friendship, their bodies.\n\nSTEPHEN SPENDER, _World Within World_ , 1951\n\nIn G\u00f6ttingen, Dirac made another of his unlikely friendships. This one was with Robert Oppenheimer, who had fled Cambridge and was flourishing in Max Born's Department of Theoretical Physics as a Ph.D. student of rare ability, self-confidence and superciliousness. Ever the intellectual peacock, Oppenheimer ensured that his colleagues knew he was thinking about more than physics: his eclectic reading list included F. Scott Fitzgerald's collection of short stories _Winter Dreams_ , Chekhov's play _Ivanov_ and the works of the German lyric poet Johann H\u00f6lderlin. He was also composing verse, a hobby that puzzled Dirac. 'I don't see how you can work on physics and write poetry at the same time,' he remarked during one of their walks. 'In science, you want to say something nobody knew before, in words everyone can understand. In poetry, you are bound to say something that everybody knows already in words that nobody can understand.' For decades to come, Oppenheimer liked to recount this anecdote over cocktails, no doubt having polished Dirac's original phrasing to give it the bite of one of Wilde's paradoxes.\n\nDirac kept normal working hours, while Oppenheimer was nocturnal, so the two young men could not have seen much of each other. They boarded with the Cario family in a spacious granite villa on Giesmarlandstrasse, which led from the town centre out to the local countryside. From the outside, the home appeared to be just another of the town's many lavish residences, but there was a bitterness and penury inside. During the unstable early years of the Weimar Republic, the Carios had been victims of the precipitate fall of the German currency: the number of deutschmarks that could be purchased with an American dollar rose from 64.8 in January 1920 to 4.2 trillion in November 1923. Worse, the family's breadwinner, a doctor, had been disqualified for malpractice. Now that the  Republic had stabilised, the Carios made a living by turning their home into a guesthouse for the stream of foreign visitors, many of them American students visiting the Georgia Augusta University, one of the most prestigious academic addresses in Europe. With his fellow boarders, Dirac sat down every evening to a meal based on the local fare of potatoes, smoked meats, sausages, cabbages and apples.\n\nIt took Dirac and Oppenheimer only five minutes to stroll from their lodgings to Born's department in the Second Physics Institute, located in an ugly red-brick building with all the charm of a Prussian cavalry barracks. Born - a handsome, clean-shaven man, who looked younger than his forty-four years - was reserved but warmer than most of his professorial colleagues. He cultivated a competitive environment but was sensitive to the needs of the brightest students and tolerant of their peccadilloes. Dirac and Oppenheimer were among the many students Born invited to his villa on the Planckstrasse, a quiet road on the outskirts of the town. To be invited there was always a pleasure: dinner would be followed by good-humoured conversation and a concert in the huge front room, which contained two grand pianos. Heisenberg, a close friend of the family, took every opportunity to display his pianistic skills in flamboyant renditions of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn.\n\nDirac lived just a few steps away from the historic centre of G\u00f6ttingen, one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Lower Saxony: its half-timbered houses and shops, its churches and cobbled backstreets had remained virtually unchanged for centuries. Nor was it yet overrun by the motor car. Most people got around on foot or by bicycle, many of the cyclists sporting garishly coloured caps to show their affiliation to one of the clubs and societies. Like Cambridge, G\u00f6ttingen was a tranquil academic town, dominated by the needs and whims of its academics and students. Seniority and intellectual distinction were at a premium there. Its most revered citizens were the most venerable of its distinguished professors, including the gruff David Hilbert, sixty-three years old and the most celebrated mathematician alive.\n\nAlso like Cambridge, many of G\u00f6ttingen's (mainly male) students were there not so much to be well educated as to spend a few hedonistic years in the fug and cacophony of the town's taverns and coffee bars. No doubt having left Dirac to get his sleep, Oppenheimer and his friends spent many a night on the razzle; he happily picked  up the tab after downing a few pints of _frisches Bier_ in the Black Bear pub or dining on _Wienerschnitzel_ at the four-hundred-year-old Junker Hall. The atmosphere in the pub had hardly changed in generations: most evenings, the din of the students would often dissolve into bibulous choruses of favourite folk songs, while virile young men sloped off to put on their chain mail, don their swords and do some 'academic fencing'. When the combatants returned, their faces were 'decorated' with scars, each a bloody badge of honour.\n\nAt weekends, Oppenheimer and other affluent students often took the two-and-a-half-hour train journey to Berlin, the city of Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg and Kurt Weill. But Dirac had no interest in broadening his horizons much beyond the towns and villages of Lower Saxony, where he went on long Sunday walks, if he was not snowbound. Within twenty minutes of leaving his lodgings, he was walking in the gently rolling countryside, following the fast-flowing rivers and pausing at the scattered monuments to Bismarck. By early spring, the walking conditions were perfect: almost all the winter snow had melted, and the linden trees, shrubs and flowers were scenting the air. He passed occasional groups of young men in the German Youth Movement but otherwise saw scarcely another person, which was just as he preferred - his empathies lay more with uncommunicative forms of nature than with human beings.\n\nSo G\u00f6ttingen gave Dirac everything he wanted in a town - a great university with a world-leading physics department and comfortable lodgings close to walking country, where he could escape from other people. G\u00f6ttingen was a German Cambridge, with hills.\n\nIn early February 1927, within days of Dirac's arrival in G\u00f6ttingen, he had set Oppenheimer's imagination alight. Oppenheimer was completing his Ph.D., on the quantum mechanics of molecules, and looking to the future which appeared to lay in the direction that Dirac had opened up. Near the end of Oppenheimer's life, when he looked back on his career, he remarked that 'perhaps the most exciting time of my life was when Dirac arrived [in G\u00f6ttingen] and gave me the proofs of his paper on the quantum theory of radiation'. While others found Dirac's field theory mystifying, to Oppenheimer it was 'extraordinarily beautiful'.\n\nOppenheimer had been an outsider at Cambridge and Harvard and so he was pleased at last to feel part of the small community of  G\u00f6ttingen physicists, gradually recovering from his clinical depression. Among his colleagues was Pascual Jordan, born a few weeks after Dirac and the youngest of the quantum innovators. Intense, haunted and private, his eyes stared out from behind elliptical glasses with lenses as thick as jam jars. Oppenheimer later remarked that Jordan's peculiarities may have led him to be underestimated: 'it was in part because he was really an unbelievably queer duck with tics and mannerisms and [. . .] apparent brutalities, which put people off very much.' According to Oppenheimer, Jordan had a stutter so crippling that 'it was difficult to get through', though Oppenheimer may have to some extent admired it - he began to affect a stutter, muttering 'njum-njum-njum' before some of his finely crafted declamations.\n\nAlthough Jordan and his colleagues admired Oppenheimer's quick-fire intelligence - one of them likened him to 'an inhabitant of Olympus who had strayed among humans' - they found his arrogance irritating, to the point that it became unacceptable. One morning, Born found on his desk a letter from several of his colleagues threatening to boycott seminars unless he stopped Oppenheimer from disrupting them with his continual interruptions. Always fearful of showdowns, Born chose to leave the letter - a large sheet of parchment lettered in ornamental script - on his desk for Oppenheimer to see. It did the trick. Relations between Born and Oppenheimer were superficially cordial, but Oppenheimer regarded Born as a 'terrible egotist' who continually complained that he had not been given enough credit for pioneering quantum mechanics. Born had good reason to feel slighted. He had been one of the creators of quantum mechanics, having used his battery of mathematical skills to develop Heisenberg's initial idea. Most physicists gave the lion's share of the credit to Heisenberg, but Born believed that it was he who first fully appreciated the idea's potential and he who led its development in G\u00f6ttingen.\n\nBy the time Dirac arrived there, Born was confident that he had found the right way to develop quantum mechanics, using Heisenberg's ideas, not Schr\u00f6dinger's. Although Born knew of Dirac's reputation, he was not expecting his young visitor to be so adept and knowledgeable. The American physicist Raymond Birge, then visiting G\u00f6ttingen, observed that 'Dirac is the real master of the situation [. . .] when he talks, Born just sits and listens to him open-mouthed.'\n\nAnother colleague, the German theoretician Walter Elsasser, later wrote his impressions of Dirac: 'tall, gaunt, awkward and extremely taciturn. [. . .] of towering magnitude in one field, but with little interest and competence left for other human activities'. Elsasser remembered that although Dirac was always polite, his conversations were almost always stilted: 'one was never sure that he would say something intelligible.' Another of Dirac's traits was his inability to comprehend anyone else's point of view if it didn't fit into his way of looking at things: colleagues would spend hours presenting their perspective on a physics problem, only for him to walk away after making a brief comment, apparently apathetic or bored. Oppenheimer was quite different: he would listen to a colleague's ramblings for a few minutes but would then interject with an eloquent summary of what he was probably trying to say.\n\nWhereas Oppenheimer mixed freely with his colleagues, Dirac spent most of his time working in the library or in one of the empty classrooms. But he was not a complete loner: in Copenhagen, he had come to appreciate being with other physicists, provided they didn't put pressure on him to speak. Most mornings, he walked with fellow boarders at the Carios' to the Mathematics Institute, where he attended lectures that kept them abreast of the latest experimental findings. He also took the time to go to the often-combative afternoon seminars. When Ehrenfest was in town, he was their undisputed inquisitor-in-chief, deflating egos and revealing the crux of every new argument, having cut away the underbrush. In the previous June, he had brought along a Ceylonese parrot trained to say 'But, gentlemen, that's not physics' and recommended that it should chair all forthcoming seminars on quantum mechanics.\n\nMax Delbr\u00fcck, one of the young G\u00f6ttingen physicists, was probably not exaggerating when he later described the experience of walking into one of their seminars: 'you could well imagine that you were in a madhouse.'\n\nWord spread to Berlin that Dirac was a difficult man and that his work was impenetrable and overrated. The Hungarian theoretician Jen\u020d (later Eugene) Wigner later said that, in the mid-1920s, his German colleagues were suspicious of 'the queer young Englishman who resolves [questions of physics] in his own language'. Many Germans were put off by Dirac's manner. The English were known  for their reserve - they acted as if everyone else was either an enemy or a bore, as John Stuart Mill had pointed out - but Dirac's frigidity was unlike anything they had ever seen.\n\nBorn was one of the few Germans who warmed to Dirac, but even he had trouble understanding his new field theory and apparently thought it unimportant. His lack of foresight frustrated Jordan, who had begun to develop ideas on field theory very similar to Dirac's, only to be met with indifference. It would have been fascinating to see what Dirac and Jordan could have achieved in quantum field theory, but Dirac had no interest in collaboration. He turned his attention to using field theory to understand what happens when light is scattered by an atom, normally visualised as being rather like a basketball bouncing off the hard rim of the basket. But, in the new field theory, things are not so straightforward. Dirac showed that, in the fleeting moment of a photon's scattering, it appears to pass through some strange, unobserved energy states. What makes these intermediate processes so odd is that they appear to flout the sacred law of conservation of energy. Although these subatomic 'virtual states' cannot be seen directly, experimenters were later able to detect their subtle influences on fundamental particles.\n\nDirac's calculations also threw up a more troubling artefact. He found that his new theory kept generating bizarre predictions: for example, when he calculated the probability that a photon had been emitted after a given interval, the answer was not an ordinary number but was infinitely large. This made no sense. The probability that an atom would emit a photon must surely be a number between zero (no chance) and one (complete certainty), so it seemed obvious that the prediction of infinity was wrong. But Dirac chose to be pragmatic. 'This difficulty is not due to any fundamental mistake in the theory,' he wrote with more confidence than was warranted. The root of the problem, he speculated, was a simplistic assumption he had made in applying the theory; when he had identified his error and tweaked the theory, he implied, the problem would disappear. In the meantime, he dodged the difficulties using clever mathematical tricks, enabling him to use the theory to make sensible, finite predictions. But it would not be long before he saw that his optimism was misplaced: the lamb had caught its first sight of the wolf's tail.\n\nMeanwhile, the debates about the interpretation of quantum theory had not abated, least of all in Copenhagen, where Heisenberg was struggling to understand the theoretical limits of what can be known about a quantum. He achieved this brilliantly with his uncertainty principle, which made him into the nearest the quantum fraternity had to a household name.\n\nThe principle emerged only after anguished and protracted gestation, which apparently began with a letter from Pauli during the previous October. Heisenberg believed that the correct way to think about the quantum world was in terms of particles, and that the more popular wave-based ideas were merely useful supplementaries. Somehow, Heisenberg wanted to find a way of making definite statements about the measurements that could be made on quantum particles, especially about the limitations on what experimenters can know about them. Heisenberg had talked with Einstein about this, and, when Dirac was in Copenhagen developing transformation theory, he had also discussed it with him.\n\nThe nub of what became known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is that the knowledge experimenters have of a quantum's position limits what they can know about its speed, at the same instant. The more they know about a quantum's position, the less they can know about its speed. So, for example, if experimenters know an electron's location with perfect precision, then it follows that they can know nothing whatsoever about its speed at the same moment; on the other hand, if they know the exact value of the electron's speed, they will be totally ignorant of its position. There is, Heisenberg argued, no way round this: regardless of the accuracy of the measuring apparatus or the extent of the experimenters' ingenuity, the principle puts fundamental limitations on knowledge. It turns out that even the most accurate knowledge imaginable of the location of an ordinary object puts only negligible constraints on knowledge of its speed (likewise with the location and speed reversed), so the principle is unimportant in everyday life. This is the root of the physicists' joke about the motorist who tries to con the traffic police by pleading not guilty of speeding on the grounds 'I knew exactly where I was, so I had no idea how fast I was travelling': the plea would be perfectly admissible if it were made by a sentient electron.\n\nIn his paper, Heisenberg explained his principle by picturing what  happens when an experimenter uses a photon of light to probe the behaviour of an electron, demonstrating that the very act of probing disturbs the electron. An analysis of this thought experiment led Heisenberg to a mathematical expression that encapsulated the principle. He also derived the expression mathematically, using two of Dirac's innovations: transformation theory and the relationship between the non-commuting position and momentum.\n\nAs spring set in, Dirac will probably have thought about the principle during his constitutional walks along the tree-lined path following the contours of what was once G\u00f6ttingen's outer wall. He was not especially impressed with Heisenberg's discovery, as he noted later: 'People often take [the uncertainty principle] to be the cornerstone of quantum mechanics. But it is not really so, because it is not a precise equation, but only a statement about indeterminacies. ' Dirac was similarly lukewarm a few months later when Bohr announced his principle of complementarity, apparently related to Heisenberg's principle. According to Bohr's idea, quantum physicists have to accept that a complete picture of subatomic events always involves descriptions that appear incompatible but that are actually complementary - both the wave and particle pictures are needed. In Bohr's view, this idea was part of an ancient philosophical tradition, in which truth cannot be pinned down using only one approach but needs complementary concepts: for example, a mixture of reason and feeling, analysis and intuition, innovation and tradition.\n\nThis principle was fundamental to Bohr's thinking, to the extent that he chose it in 1947 as the basis of the design of his coat of arms. The design features the Chinese yin-yang symbol, which represents the two opposing but inseparable elements of nature, and the Latin motto below reads 'Opposites are complementary'. Many physicists thought that Bohr had uncovered a great truth, but Dirac was again unimpressed: the principle 'always seemed to me a bit vague', he later said. 'It wasn't something which you could formulate by an equation.'\n\nDirac's opinion of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle was not shared by most scientists, including Eddington. In his acclaimed book _The Nature of the Physical World_ , published in November 1928, he gave a sparkling account of 'the principle of indeterminacy', describing it  as 'a fundamental general principle that seems to rank in importance with the principle of relativity'. Writing with his usual panache, Eddington introduced tens of thousands of lay readers to the new principle as one of the cornerstones of quantum mechanics.\n\nEddington writes that he is giving an outline of the theory only against his better judgement: 'It would probably be wiser to nail up over the door of the new quantum theory a notice \"Structural alterations in progress - No admittance except on business\", and particularly to warn the doorkeeper to keep out prying philosophers.' Eddington's account of the theory was the clearest account of quantum mechanics for English-speaking lay readers and was the first widespread publicity for the new theory. If Bohr or another influential figure had taken a leaf out of Eddington's book and been savvy enough to provide a dramatic presentation of the uncertainty principle's discovery to well-briefed journalists, then quantum mechanics may well have become much better known, along with its creators.\n\nWith a hint of nostalgia, Eddington pointed out that modern physicists no longer thought about the universe as a giant mechanism, as Victorian physicists such as James Clerk Maxwell had done, but framed their accounts of the fundamental nature of things in the language of mathematics. The images of cogs and gearwheels were now pass\u00e9, but Eddington believed there were dangers inherent in the new, mathematical way of thinking of fundamental physics:\n\nDoubtless the mathematician is a loftier being than the engineer, but perhaps even he ought not to be entrusted with the Creation unreservedly. We are dealing in physics with a symbolic world, and we can scarcely avoid employing the mathematician who is a professional wielder of symbols; but he must rise to the full opportunities of the responsible task entrusted to him and not indulge too freely his own bias for symbols with arithmetical interpretations.\n\nEddington had put his finger on the central conceptual challenge that made quantum mechanics so difficult for most professional physicists. The great majority of them still thought like engineers and were mathematically weak by the standards of Dirac and his peers. So, most physicists were still trying to visualise the atom as if it were a mechanical device.\n\nThe metaphor of nature as a colossal clockwork mechanism, popular since Newton's day, had long been apt for most purposes. But no longer. Quantum mechanics was based fundamentally on mathematical abstractions and could not be visualised using concrete images - that is why Dirac refused to discuss quantum mechanics in everyday terms, except in later life, when he began to use analogies between the behaviour of quanta and the way ordinary matter behaves. Yet Dirac often remarked that he did not think about nature in terms of algebra, but by using visual images. Since he was a boy, he had been encouraged to develop visual imagination in his art and technical-drawing classes, which were an ideal grounding for his studies of projective geometry. None of the other pioneers of quantum mechanics had been given an education in which geometric visualisation played such a prominent part. Five decades later, when he looked back on his early work in quantum mechanics, Dirac declared that he had used the ideas of projective geometry, unfamiliar to most of his physicist colleagues:\n\n[Projective geometry] was most useful for research, but I did not mention it in my published work [. . .] because I felt that most physicists were not familiar with it. When I had obtained a particular result, I translated it into an analytic form and put down the argument in terms of equations.\n\nDirac had a perfect opportunity to explain the influence of projective geometry on his early thinking about quantum mechanics at a talk he gave in the autumn of 1972 at Boston University. Its philosophy department had invited him to give the talk to clarify this influence and had recruited the urbane Roger Penrose, an eminent mathematician and scientist who knew Dirac well, to chair the seminar. If anyone could prise the story out of Dirac, it was he. In the event, Dirac gave a short, clear presentation on basic projective geometry but stopped short of connecting it to quantum behaviour. After Dirac had batted away a few simple questions, the disappointed Penrose gently turned to him and asked him point-blank how this geometry had influenced his early quantum work. Dirac firmly shook his head and declined to speak. Realising that it was pointless to continue, Penrose filled in the time by extemporising a short talk on a different subject. For those who wanted to demystify Dirac's magic, his silence had never been so exasperating.\n**Ten**\n\nHitler is our F\u00fchrer, he doesn't take the golden fee  \nThat rolls before his feet from the Jew's throne  \nThe day of revenge is coming, one day we will be free [. . .]\n\nFrom an early Nazi marching song, c. 1927\n\nAs a Jew, Max Born had every reason to be alarmed and frightened by the rise of anti-Semitism in G\u00f6ttingen. The atmosphere was 'bitter, sullen [. . .] discontent[ed] and angry and loaded with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster', Oppenheimer remembered, a few years before he died. The Nazis had set up one of their first branches in the town in May 1922. Three years later, the chemistry student Achim Gercke secretly began to compile a list of Jewish-born professors, to provide 'a weapon in hand that should enable the German Reich to exclude the last Hebrew and all mixed race from the German population in the future and expel them from the country'.\n\nLife among the G\u00f6ttingen researchers did have its lighter side, however. Many of them gloated that their profession was for the young, and they mocked the sclerotic imaginations of their elderly professors, paid and revered much more for doing much less. As his later comments confirm, Dirac shared this dismissiveness, and, if an improbable G\u00f6ttingen legend is to be believed, he wrote a quatrain about this for a student review:\n\nAge is of course a fever chill   \nThat every physicist must fear   \nHe's better dead than living still   \nWhen he's past his thirtieth year\n\nG\u00f6ttingen students had a penchant for silly songs and for choral renditions of American tunes, which were sung with special enthusiasm at Thanksgiving. The cosmologist Howard Robertson, who introduced Dirac to ways of describing the curvature of space-time across the universe, had brought to the taverns of G\u00f6ttingen one of their most popular new songs, 'Oh My Darling Clementine'. Dirac  probably did not join in, but he took part in the infantile games that helped to sublimate the physicists' intense competitiveness. One of the games was 'bobbing for apples', when professors and students - often woozy, after a few glasses of beer - would try to sink their teeth into an apple floating on water or beer. Another activity involved running a race while trying to balance a large potato on a tiny spoon. After one of these races in Born's home, a student saw Dirac practising surreptitiously - a sight that would have stunned his colleagues in Cambridge, including the theologian John Boys Smith, who described Dirac as being 'childlike but never childish'.\n\nDirac's stay in G\u00f6ttingen ended in early June 1927. St John's wanted him back and had been wooing him to apply for a fellowship, an honour well worth pursuing. If successful, he would benefit from free board and lodging in college, as well as a modest income to supplement the continuing funds from his 1851 scholarship, which would run out in 1928. A tenured academic post in the university's mathematics department would almost certainly follow, and he would be set up for the rest of his working life. In his letters, Dirac was even less forthcoming about his personal life than he had been when he wrote from Copenhagen. In a letter to the college official James Wordie, Dirac wrote just a single sentence about his activities in G\u00f6ttingen: 'The surrounding country is very beautiful.' Although he preferred Bohr's pullulating institute to Born's comparatively cool department, he told his mother that he preferred G\u00f6ttingen, as it gave him the best opportunities for solitary walks.\n\nIn his research, Dirac appeared to be showing signs of running out of steam. In early May 1927, he used quantum mechanics to predict what happens when light is scattered by an atom - a problem that led to no exciting conclusions. Oppenheimer later said that he was disappointed by Dirac's work in G\u00f6ttingen and could not understand why he did not press on with the development of quantum field theory. Dirac wanted to take a long rest over the summer, he told Oppenheimer, and would then turn his attention to the spin of the electron, still not understood.\n\nDirac intended to begin his break from quantum theory when he returned to England, after he had visited Ehrenfest in Leiden, a small university town in the Netherlands. Dirac stayed in the room at the top of Ehrenfest's large Russian-style house, where he signed his name on the bedroom wall that already bore the signatures of Einstein,  Blackett, Kapitza and dozens of others. The house served as a local hostel for the cream of the world's physicists, who traded anecdotes of their lively conversations with Ehrenfest's wife - a Russian mathematician - and their three children, two daughters and a son who had Down's syndrome.\n\nOppenheimer was planning to join Dirac in Leiden and began to learn Dutch so that he could give a seminar in the language of his host. But first he had to defend his Ph.D. thesis in an oral examination held by James Franck, the distinguished experimenter, and Max Born. Franck took only twenty minutes to question Oppenheimer, but that was enough. On leaving the exam room, Franck sighed, 'I'm glad that is over. He was on the point of questioning _me._ ' Born was relieved that his brilliant but troublesome student was off his hands. At the end of a typewritten letter to Ehrenfest, Born wrote a postscript:\n\nI should like you to know what I think of [Oppenheimer]. Your judgement will not be influenced by the fact I openly admit that I have never suffered as much with anybody as him. He is doubtless very gifted but without mental discipline. He's outwardly modest but inwardly very arrogant. [. . .] he has paralyzed all of us for three quarters of a year. I can breathe again since he's gone and start to find the courage to work.\n\nDirac had not been part of this departmental paralysis, nor does he appear to have been aware of it. Oppenheimer was awed by him and showed him a diffidence he granted to few of his other colleagues. Their days in G\u00f6ttingen were the beginning of a forty-year friendship.\n\nG\u00f6ttingen was too far away for Dirac's family to visit. 'Thank goodness, you are saying, I expect,' his mother wrote in a pained aside. She made it clear to her son how much she envied him: 'You are a lucky fellow to be away from home. [Here,] it is all work, work.' When her husband was out, she wore her new ring - seven diamonds set in platinum - which she had furtively bought with \u00a310 of the money Dirac had sent her, considerably more than Charles allowed her to spend on herself in a year. That piece of jewellery was a private symbol of her most important relationship. She wrote to her son: 'Don't tell Pa [. . .] I expect he would tell me to put the money in the housekeeping, but it is giving me such a lot of pleasure to look at it  and think what a darling you are.' In the evenings, she would sit in the front room with photos of her son, re-reading his postcards, trying to imagine what he would be doing at every time of day.\n\nThe twelve-year age difference between Charles and Flo had never been more plain. She still had an upright posture, smooth skin and scarcely a grey hair; he was hunch-backed, white-haired and wizened. In public, she put on the traditional show as the loyal, uncomplaining wife; in private, she was resentful of being an unpaid servant, as she often wrote to her son. At the beginning of 1927, she was surprised when her husband went on a spending spree, probably funded by his mother's legacy. Dirac often condemned the tattiness of the family home, which had not been decorated for thirteen years, so it may well have been that Charles paid for the extensive wallpapering and the installation of a gas fire in every room, with the aim of making 6 Julius Road more attractive to his son. Charles did not entirely neglect his wife - he bought her one of the new vacuum cleaners to help with the housework: 'Pa likes to see them at work on our carpets giving free demonstrations.'\n\nStill in poor health, Charles consulted a herbalist who advised him to become vegetarian, presenting endless catering problems for his wife, who worried incessantly about his nutrition. She wrote to Dirac: 'Pa is getting ever so many pupils he has scarcely time for meals. I am sure he is working his brain too hard and now he is a vegetarian, there are so many little things to cook which are not substantial enough for him.' Although she thought he was mean and ungrateful, she devoted herself to taking care of him, and her letters to Dirac betrayed no sign that the state of affairs was anything less than she should expect or deserve. But her patience was beginning to run out.\n\nCharles Dirac's work ethic had been the making of one of his sons and possibly the death of the other, but it did not have much influence on his daughter. Betty had left school and was, according to her mother, 'too shy or perhaps too lazy [. . .] to want to do anything to earn her own living & she is not fond of housework either'. Without a job, she lolled around the house mourning the death of her dog and went out with her mother to evening classes in elocution and French. In early July, the family chased out the decorators and made sure everything in their house was spick and span, ready for the return of the itinerant son. The family had not spoken to him for nine  months, but in that time had sent him weekly family bulletins, showering him with affection and pleas for news at his end. In return, he had sent his parents fewer than seven hundred words. He had not once asked after his family on his postcards, which each had the warmth of a stone.\n\nWhen Dirac arrived at the door of 6 Julius Road at lunchtime on 13 July - a dull and overcast afternoon - it is easy to imagine the tearful flutterings of his mother and sister as they hugged his unresponsive frame and the stiff handshake with his father, who was probably no less pleased to see him, even if he was unable to show it. He was soon back in his routine, shutting out his family, working alone in his room. One of Charles's students, D. C. Willis, left an anecdote that offers an insight into the domestic environment at the Diracs' that summer. Willis was sent by Monsieur Dirac 'on his errands to his home during the dinner hour [. . .] as he was concerned about his son Paul who, rumour had it, was working in his bedroom, and would not come out, except to collect his food and use the toilet'.\n\nDirac knew he had a filial duty to be with his parents but felt wretched whenever he was with them. 'When I go back to my home in Bristol I lose all initiative,' he sighed in a letter to a friend, a few years later. He felt oppressed by both his parents - by his father's high-handedness and by his mother's suffocating affection. Although Dirac was twenty-five years old and internationally successful, he still felt himself to be writhing under his father's thumb. And he saw no imminent prospect of escape.\n\nIn October 1927, Dirac returned to Cambridge to reacquaint himself with his friends in St John's and Trinity. He now had even fewer social distractions, as Kapitza had recently married. His new wife was the \u00e9migr\u00e9 Russian artist Anna Krylova, a dark-haired beauty whom Kapitza unaccountably called 'Rat', a nickname that nonplussed audiences in Cambridge theatres for years, whenever they heard him holler it across the stalls. She and Kapitza contributed to the design of the detached house that was being built for them on Huntingdon Road, near the city centre, complete with a huge back garden and a studio for her in the loft. Later, this house would become almost Dirac's second home in Cambridge but, in the early autumn of 1927, he was working hard on his project, first mooted to Oppenheimer, aiming to combine quantum theory and Einstein's  special theory of relativity in the simplest practical case: to describe the behaviour of a single, isolated electron. The quantum theories of Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger were deficient because they did not conform to the special theory of relativity: observers moving at different speeds relative to one another would disagree on the theories' equations. At stake here was the prestige of being the first to find the theory; would he be the sole winner of a scientific prize or would he, yet again, have to share it?\n\nDirac worked on the problem for the first six weeks of the term but without success. He took a break in late October to sit, for the first time, at the top table of international physicists at the Solvay Conference in Brussels. The aim of these invitation-only conferences, funded by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay, was to bring together about twenty of the world's finest physicists every few years to ponder the problems of quantum theory. The youngest star of the first conference in 1911 had been Albert Einstein, then emerging from obscurity and quick to point out the prejudices of older, more conservative minds. In 1927, Einstein was the uncrowned king of physics and entering middle age, still a popular and unassuming figure but showing signs of crustiness and disillusion. He was ploughing his own furrow, seeking a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism without assuming that quantum mechanics was correct. Now it was Einstein who seemed inflexible and backward-looking.\n\nThe conference was to become a landmark in physics - the place where Einstein first publicly articulated his unease with quantum mechanics but failed to dent the confidence of Bohr and his younger colleagues. There is no sign of the lively conference atmosphere in the famous photograph taken outside the building where the sessions took place: the twenty-nine conference delegates all look expressionless, as though they are posing for a communal passport photograph. Einstein sits at the centre of the front row, with Dirac standing behind his right shoulder. Dirac was so proud of this photograph that, for once succumbing to vanity, he prompted the University of Bristol's physics department to have it framed and mounted on one of their walls. This portrait, a dismal memento, was for decades the best visual evidence available of the meeting, but in 2005 more clues about the atmosphere of the meeting appeared, with the release of a home movie of the delegates during a break between the lectures. What is  most striking about this two-minute clip is the delegates' cheerfulness. Marie Curie, the only woman in the group, does a fetching pirouette; the beaming Paul Ehrenfest waggishly pokes out his tongue at the camera. Dirac, the youngest delegate, looks relaxed and happy as he talks with Max Born.\n\nHeisenberg later remembered that the most intense discussions took place not during the conference sessions but over meals at the delegates' nearby Hotel Britannique, near the site of today's European Parliament. At the epicentre of the debates about quantum theory were Bohr and Einstein's disagreements about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which Bohr defended successfully against Einstein's repeated onslaughts. Most of their colleagues were fascinated to hear the two men lock horns, but Dirac was an indifferent bystander:\n\nI listened to their arguments, but I did not join in them, essentially because I was not very much interested [. . .] It seemed to me that the foundation of the work of a mathematical physicist is to get the correct equations, that the interpretation of those equations was only of secondary importance.\n\nDirac and Einstein were poles apart, and neither was comfortable speaking the other's language. Dirac was twenty-three years younger, and his awe rendered him even more shy than usual. But probably the main reason why they did not engage was that their approaches to science contrasted so sharply, partly because they responded so differently to philosophical matters. They agreed that science was fundamentally about explaining more and more phenomena in terms of fewer and fewer theories, a view they had read in Mill's _A System of Logic._ Yet, whereas Einstein remained interested in philosophy, for Dirac it was a waste of time. What Dirac had retained from his reading of Mill, bolstered by his studies of engineering, was a utilitarian approach to science: the salient question to ask about a theory is not 'Does it appeal to my beliefs about how the world behaves?' but 'Does it work?'\n\nAt the conference, Dirac made his first recorded outburst on topics outside physics - religion and politics. Some four decades later, Heisenberg described the event, which took place one evening in the hotel's smoky lounge, where some of the younger physicists were lying around on the chairs and sofas. Dirac's youthful outspokenness needed to be indulged, the elderly Heisenberg said: 'Dirac was a very  young man and in some way was interested in Communistic ideas, which of course was perfectly all right at that time.' Most vivid in Heisenberg's memory was a rant from Dirac about religion, triggered by a comment about Einstein's habit of referring to God during discussions about fundamental physics. Like many of Heisenberg's accounts of incidents in the 1920s, this one is implausibly detailed - it consists of two speeches of several hundred words, quoted as if his memory were word perfect - but it is consistent with other accounts of Dirac's views. According to Heisenberg, Dirac thought religion was just 'a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination.' For Dirac, 'the postulate of an Almighty God' is unhelpful and unnecessary, taught only 'because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet'. Heisenberg wrote that he objected to Dirac's judgement of religion because 'most things in this world can be abused - even the Communist ideology which you recently propounded'. Dirac was not to be deflected. He disliked 'religious myths on principle' and believed that the way to decide what was right was 'to deduce it by reason alone from the situation in which I find myself: I live in a society with others, to whom, on principle, I must grant the same rights I claim for myself. I must simply try to strike a fair balance.' Mill would have approved.\n\nDuring Dirac's assault on religion, Pauli had been uncharacteristically silent. When asked what he thought, he replied, 'Well our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is \"There is no God and Dirac is his prophet\".' It was an old joke, but everyone laughed, including Dirac. The opinions he expressed here, with uncharacteristic forwardness, were entirely in keeping with Kapitza's views and would not have drawn comment from any of the intellectuals who were flirting with Bolshevism. Although Dirac never put any of his political views on paper, it was clear from his actions in the coming decade where his sympathies lay.\n\nDuring the Solvay Conference, Dirac gave a talk on his new field theory of light. He annotated his draft script with rewordings and other changes in every paragraph - more than any other talk he gave in his entire life - indicating that he was on edge. Afterwards, he heard that his idea had been taken up and extended in a way he could have easily foreseen. Pascual Jordan, working with Eugene Wigner,  had produced a field theory of the electron to complement Dirac's theory of the photon. Although Jordan and Wigner's mathematics was similar to Dirac's, their theory did not appeal to Dirac, who could not see how their symbols corresponded to things going on in nature. Their work looked to him like an exercise in algebra, though later he realised he was wrong; his mistake stemmed from his approach to theoretical physics, which was 'essentially a geometrical one and not an algebraic one' - if he could not visualise a theory, he tended to ignore it.\n\nThat was not the only surprise Dirac received in the lecture hall. Shortly before the beginning of a lecture, Bohr asked Dirac what he was working on. He replied that he was trying to find a relativistic quantum theory of the electron. Bohr was baffled: 'But Klein has already solved this problem,' he said, referring to the Swedish theoretician Oskar Klein. The lecture began before Dirac could reply, so the question hung in the air, where it remained: Bohr and Dirac did not have the chance to talk further about it before the conference dispersed. Another three months would elapse before Bohr appreciated his error when he read Dirac's wondrous solution to the problem.\n**Eleven**\n\n[T]he true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible.\n\nJAMES JOYCE, _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ , 1915,  \nChapter 5\n\nDirac always felt out of place at fancy college dinners. Rich food, vintage wines, antiquated formalities, florid speeches, the fetid smoke of after-dinner cigars - all were anathema to him. So he was probably not looking forward to the evening of Wednesday, 9 November 1927, when he was to be one of the toasts of a dinner to celebrate the annual election of new Fellows to St John's College. He was now certifiably a 'first-rate man', with a permanent seat at the college's high table and the freedom to gather after dinner with his colleagues in their grand, candle-lit Combination Room, completed in 1602. In Hall, beneath the portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Dirac celebrated his election to the fellowship in the traditional way, by consuming an eight-course meal that included oysters, a consomm\u00e9, cream of chicken soup, sole, veal escalope and spinach, pheasant with five vegetables and side salad, and three desserts. For him, the meal was not so much a celebration as a penance.\n\nAfter the dinner, Dirac walked to his rooms, close to the Bridge of Sighs, a Gothic stone structure that crosses the river Cam in a brief undulation, leaving just enough room underneath for the punters. He probably went straight to bed, as his aim was always to be fresh for the morning, when he did his best work. His study was devoid of decoration, with only a folding desk of the sort used by schoolchildren, a simple chair, a coal fire and 'a very ancient settee', as one visitor described it. He worked at his little desk like a schoolboy in an empty classroom, writing in pencil on scraps of paper, sometimes pausing to erase an error or to consult one of his books. Now that he was a Fellow, he had a manservant (a 'gyp') on hand during the day.\n\nIn these austere but comfortable surroundings, Dirac made his most famous contribution to science. St John's had created the best environment imaginable for him. He could work all day, taking breaks only to fulfil his modest lecturing duties, give the occasional seminar and visit the library.\n\nHe was now preoccupied with a single challenge: to find the relativistic equation that describes the electron. Dirac was pretty sure that the electron was 'a point particle' but, like other theoreticians, could not understand why it had not one but two states of spin. Several other physicists had suggested candidate equations - all of them contrived and ungainly - and Dirac was not satisfied with any of them, including the one by Klein that Bohr believed had solved the problem. Dirac was sure Klein's theory was wrong, as it predicted, absurdly, that the chance of detecting an electron in a tiny region of space-time is sometimes _less_ than zero.\n\nDirac knew that it was impossible to deduce the equation from first principles and that he would find it only through a happy guess. But what he could do was to narrow the options, by setting out the characteristics the equation _must_ have and the characteristics it _ought_ to have. Rather than tinker with existing equations, he took the top-down approach, trying to identify the most general principles of the theory he was seeking, before going on to express his ideas mathematically. The first requirement was that the equation conformed to Einstein's special theory of relativity, treating space and time on an equal footing. Second, the equation must be consistent with his beloved transformation theory. Finally, when the equation describes an electron moving slowly compared with the speed of light, its predictions must resemble extremely closely ones made by ordinary quantum mechanics, which had already proved its worth.\n\nThose were useful constraints, but there was still too much room for manoeuvre. If he stuck to them, Dirac could still have written down any number of equations for the electron, so he needed to use his intuition to narrow the possibilities. Believing that the relativistic equation would be fundamentally simple, he thought it most likely that the equation would feature the electron's energy and momentum just as themselves, not in complicated expressions such as the square root of energy or momentum squared. Another clue came from the way he and Pauli had independently found to describe the spin of the  electron, using matrices that each consisted of four numbers arranged in two rows and two columns. Might these matrices feature in the equation he was seeking?\n\nDirac tried out one equation after another, discarding each one as soon as it failed to conform to his theoretical principles or to experimental facts. It was not until late November or early December 1927 that he hit on a promising equation, consistent with both special relativity and quantum mechanics. The equation looked like nothing theorists had ever seen before, as it described the electron not using a Schr\u00f6dinger wave but using a new kind of wave with _four_ interconnected parts, all of them essential.\n\nAlthough the equation had an appealing elegance, that would count for nothing if it did not relate to real electrons. What did the equation have to say, for example, about the spin of the electron and its magnetic field? If his equation contradicted the experimenters' observations, he would have had no choice but to abandon it and start all over again. But there was no need for that. In a few pages of calculations, Dirac showed that he had conjured something miraculous: his equation described a particle not only with the mass of an electron but with precisely the spin and magnetic field measured by experimenters. His equation really did describe the electron so familiar to experimenters. Even better, the very existence of the equation made it clear that it was no longer necessary to tack on the electron's spin and magnetism to the standard description of the particle given by quantum theory. The equation demonstrated that if experimenters had not previously discovered the spin and magnetism of the electron, then these properties could have been _predicted_ using the special theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.\n\nAlthough Dirac apparently showed his usual Trappist calm, he was jubilant. In a few squiggles of his pen, he had described the behaviour of every single electron that had ever existed in the universe. The equation was 'achingly beautiful', as theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek later described it: like Einstein's equations of general relativity, the Dirac equation was universal yet fundamentally simple; nothing in it could be changed without destroying its power. Nearly seventy years later, stonemasons carved a succinct version of the Dirac equation on his commemorative stone in Westminster Abbey: _i_ \u03b3.\u2202\u03c8 = _m_ \u03c8. When set out in full, in the form he originally used, the equation looked intimidating even to many theoreticians simply  because it was so unusual, not that this would have disturbed Dirac: all that mattered to him was that it was based on sound principles and that it worked. It might even have crossed his mind that he had done something that John Stuart Mill had articulated as one of the aims of science - to unify disparate theories to explain the widest possible range of observations.\n\nWhen Dirac was an old man, younger physicists often asked him how he felt when he discovered the equation. From his replies, it seems that he alternated between ecstasy and fear: although elated to have solved his problem so neatly, he worried that he would be the latest victim of the 'great tragedy of science' described in 1870 by Thomas Huxley: 'the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact'. Dirac later confessed that his dread of such an outcome was so intense that he was 'too scared' to use it to make detailed predictions of the energy levels of atomic hydrogen - a test that he knew it had to pass. He did an approximate version of the calculation and showed that there was acceptable agreement but did not go on to risk failure by subjecting his theory to a more rigorous examination.\n\nDuring November and December, he shared with no one the pleasure he took in his discovery or his occasional panic attacks. Not a single significant letter or record of a conversation with anyone exists from those months. He broke his silence only before he set off to Bristol for the Christmas vacation when he bumped into his friend Charles Darwin, a grandson of the great naturalist and one of Britain's leading theoretical physicists. On Boxing Day, in a long letter to Bohr, Darwin wrote: '[Dirac] has now got a completely new system of equations for the electron which does the spin right in all cases and seems to be \"the thing\".' That was how Bohr learned that the remark he had made to Dirac at the Solvay Conference - that the problem of finding a relativistic equation for the electron had already been solved - was completely wrong.\n\nFowler sent Dirac's paper 'The Quantum Theory of the Electron' to the Royal Society on New Year's Day 1928, and a month later sent off a second paper that cleared up a few details. While the first paper was in press, Dirac wrote to Max Born in G\u00f6ttingen, not mentioning his new equation except in a ten-line postscript, where he spelt out the reasoning that had led to it. Born showed these words to his colleagues, who regarded the equation as 'an absolute wonder'. Jordan and Wigner, who were working on the problem that Dirac had solved, were flabbergasted. Jordan, seeing his rival walk off with the prize, sank into depression.\n\nWhen the equation appeared in print at the beginning of February, it was a sensation. Though most physicists struggled to understand the equation in all its mathematical complexities, the consensus was that Dirac had done something remarkable, the theorist's equivalent of a hole in one. For the first time in his career, he had shown that he was capable of tackling one of the toughest problems of the day and beating his competitors to the solution, hands down. The American theoretician John Van Vleck later likened Dirac's explanation of electron spin to 'a magician's extraction of rabbits from a silk hat'. John Slater, soon to be a colleague of Van Vleck's at Harvard, was even more effusive: 'we can hardly conceive of anyone else having thought of [the equation]. It shows the peculiar power of the sort of intuitive genius which he has possessed more than perhaps any of the other scientists of the period.'\n\nEven Heisenberg, more confident than ever after his recent appointment to a full professorship in Leipzig, was taken aback by Dirac's coup. One physicist later recalled Heisenberg speaking of an English physicist - unquestionably Dirac - who was so clever that it was not worth competing with him. Heisenberg was, however, concerned that despite the equation's beguiling beauty, it might be wrong: he was one of many who underlined a problem that Dirac had pointed out in his first paper on the equation - it made a strange prediction about the values of energy that an electron can have.\n\nThe background to the problem with the equation was that, like time, energy is a relative quantity, not an absolute one. The energy of motion of a free electron - one that has no net force acting on it - can be defined as zero when the particle is stationary; when the particle gathers speed, its energy of motion is always positive. Dirac's problem was that his equation predicted that, in addition to perfectly sensible positive energy levels, a free electron has _negative_ energy levels, too. This arose because his theory agreed with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which said that the most general equation for a particle's energy specifies the _square_ of the energy, _E_ 2. So if one knows that _E_ 2 is, say, 25 (using some chosen unit of energy), then it follows that the energy _E_ could be either +5 or -5 (each of them, when multiplied by itself, equals 25). So, Dirac's formula for the energy of a free electron  predicted that there were _two_ sets of energy values - one positive, the other negative. In classical physics, the negative-energy ones could be ruled out, simply because they are meaningless, but this cannot be done in quantum mechanics as it predicts that a positive-energy electron could always jump into one of them.\n\nNo one had observed such a jump, so the Dirac equation was in serious trouble. Despite this unsightly canker, however, the consensus was that his theory of the electron was a triumph. Yet Dirac seemed to take no pleasure from his success and showed none of the relief and elation that Einstein had demonstrated after he published his equation of general relativity. Dirac's younger colleague Nevill Mott later described the extent of Dirac's detachment from his fellow physicists in Cambridge. Mott was - like hundreds of other theorists - concentrating not on extending quantum mechanics but on applying it.\n\nAccording to Mott, no one in the Cambridge mathematics department knew anything about Dirac's equation until they read his paper in the library. Dirac was, Mott said, passive and forbidding, the kind of expert no one quite dares to consult. Dirac did not seem to appreciate the narrowness of his understanding of companionship: he liked to be among fellow physicists, when they were friendly - as they were in Bohr's Institute - but felt no obligation to talk to them about his work or even to disclose his first name. Charles Darwin had known him for six years before writing him a postcard asking him about his signature: 'What does P. A. M. stand for?'\n\nWhereas at Copenhagen and G\u00f6ttingen there were many premier-league quantum physicists, Fowler and Darwin were the only ones in Cambridge, so Dirac believed that it was his duty to deliver his seminars and lectures on the basics of quantum mechanics. But that, in his view, was where his departmental teaching obligations ended. But, surprisingly for a young research scientist, he did agree to write a textbook on quantum mechanics, scheduled to be the first publication in the 'International Series of Monographs on Physics', edited by Kapitza and Fowler. The series was the brainchild of Jim Crowther, the science reporter of the _Manchester Guardian_ , the unofficial writer-in-residence at the Cavendish Laboratory and the only journalist Dirac regarded as a friend. A passionate Marxist, Crowther had joined the Communist Party in 1923 and managed to be close to both Bernal and Rutherford - sworn enemies - making the most of  the talents and influence of each of them. By subtly cultivating relationships with all the finest young scientists in the Cavendish, including Dirac, Crowther became an influential bit-part player in the emerging group of radical scientists in Cambridge. One of his strengths was his sensitivity: he will have realised quickly that, to make friends with the great young theoretician, he had to overcome Dirac's reluctance to have anything to do with importuning journalists. Dirac just wanted to be left in peace.\n\nDirac's family knew nothing of his equation. For Charles, always keen to find out about Dirac's work, his son's unwillingness to share his science was cruel. In April 1928, when he read an anonymous article in _The Times_ about quantum physics, Charles may have been discouraged by the conclusion: 'Far past is the day when the scientist could talk to the layman as man to man [. . .] the world loses much when science has got into such deep waters that only a Channel swimmer can follow it.' When Charles pressed his son to explain something of his new physics - as he surely did - Dirac almost certainly gave his usual response of shaking his head or remarking unhelpfully that the new quantum theories 'are built up from physical concepts which cannot be explained in words at all'. Although Dirac used his visual imagination to think about quantum mechanics, he declined every request to describe images of the quantum world. As he would later remark: 'To draw its picture is like a blind man sensing a snowflake. One touch and it's gone.'\n\nTo judge from the letters Dirac received from his mother, relations between her and Charles had settled down now she was spending more time out of the house. She went to talks on Tennyson's poetry, saw shows at the Hippodrome theatre with Charles and Betty and visited the cinema, including a trip to see one of the last great silent films, _Ben Hur._ But the Dirac family's favourite novelty was the motor car, the most exciting of the new mass-produced technological innovations. One of Charles's private tutees owned a car and treated the Dirac family to afternoon joyrides to the coast and to countryside teashops, keeping to the speed limit of 20 mph. Images of trips like these - carefree families, cutting loose from worldly concerns for a day - symbolised the prosperity of Britain in the third quarter of the 1920s. For the majority, life had never been better.\n\nBut when Dirac was not at home, his mother's life was empty.  Always in search of a plausible excuse to visit him, she invited herself to Cambridge in mid-February to see the Lent boat races, sheepishly asking if he had the time to see her when she was in town ('I shall be dressed quite nicely & shall not be any trouble'). He often ignored such requests, but this time he agreed, and she arrived in a foggy Cambridge at lunchtime to spend a few hours talking with her son, who apparently gave no sign that he was living through one of the most exciting times of his life and that some of his peers were beginning to talk of him as the heir to Newton.\n\nDirac appeared also to resemble Newton in having no interest in forming romantic relationships with women. Many of Dirac's colleagues had the impression that he was frightened of women of his own age and they could scarcely imagine that he would ever marry. But he did have a close friendship with one woman, the fifty-six-year-old mother of his friend Henry Whitehead, a promising mathematician at Oxford University. Isabel Whitehead, a tall, solidly-built Scot, was the wife of the Right Reverend Henry Whitehead, nineteen years her senior and formerly the Bishop of Madras in India. The couple had spent almost twenty years living there, before retiring to the UK in 1923. Among her fellow expatriates, Mrs Whitehead was notorious: according to an authoritative account of the Christian community in India, she was imperious 'even by the domineering standards of the many British memsahibs'.\n\nThe Whiteheads lived in a half-wood, half-brick cottage in Pincent's Hill, near Reading, about three hours' drive from Cambridge. Always accompanied by their dogs, they led a leisurely life, taking just an hour or two each day to run a small farm with pedigree Guernsey cattle and a few chickens. Both Isabel and Henry were Oxford-educated mathematicians, but it seems from Mrs Whitehead's letters that the two of them talked less about science with Dirac than about other matters, especially Henry's enthusiasm for cricket and their adventures in India, including the week they spent in their home entertaining Gandhi. In the coming years, Mrs Whitehead's correspondence with Dirac also makes it clear that she robustly challenged his atheism and that he trusted her with his most private thoughts about his family. Pincent's Hill became a favourite weekend retreat for him and Mrs Whitehead became his second mother, giving him not only support and affection but also something his own mother could not provide - intellectual stimulation.\n\nDuring the early spring of 1928, Dirac was planning his next journey. His six-month itinerary would begin in April and take him back to Bohr's Copenhagen and Ehrenfest's Leiden, on to Heisenberg's Leipzig and Born's G\u00f6ttingen, and finally his first visit to Stalin's Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Dirac had heard much about this country; now he would be able to judge for himself.\n**Twelve**\n\nSee how physical science, which is Reason's trade  \nAnd high profession, booketh ever and docketeth  \nAll things in order and pattern.\n\nROBERT BRIDGES, _Testament of Beauty_ , 1929\n\nPaul Ehrenfest could be a moody and demanding colleague, but he was a charming and generous host. In April 1928, when he realised that he would not be able to greet Dirac at Leiden railway station at the beginning of his visit, Ehrenfest arranged for a phalanx of his assistants to be waiting for him on the platform when his train steamed in shortly after 10 p.m. The problem was that none of them knew what Dirac looked like. Ehrenfest's solution was to ensure that, outside every train door facing the platform, there was a student waving a reprint of 'The Quantum Theory of the Electron'. The plan worked.\n\nOne member of the welcoming party was Igor Tamm, a thirty-two-year-old Soviet theoretician, soon to become one of Dirac's closest companions. Tamm was famously restless: in group photographs, while others appeared in sharp definition, he would be a blur. A Marxist even before he went to university, he joined the Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1915 and, during the subsequent years in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Elizavetgrad, studied science while being a part-time activist for the Bolsheviks. He tired of their fanaticism and, when they declared all other political parties illegal in the summer of 1918, was concentrating on science. He became the first Soviet theoretician to use quantum mechanics. In January 1927, he arrived in Leiden and, a year later, electrified by the Dirac equation, was looking forward to meeting its discoverer. Tamm wrote to his wife in Moscow that he wanted to see if there was any truth in rumours that 'it costs a tremendous effort to get a word from [Dirac], and that he talks only to children under ten'.\n\nThe two men soon clicked. In Tamm, Dirac had found another intellegent and entertaining Russian extrovert; in Dirac, Tamm found a companion who was surprisingly agreeable, provided he was under  no pressure to speak. The two men spent the spring afternoons strolling around the town's cobbled streets, watching the traffic on the interlocking network of canals and occasionally walking out to the nearby tulip fields. Tamm taught Dirac to ride a bicycle, Dirac taught Tamm physics, and they talked about matters outside science, probably including politics and Tamm's favourite hobby of mountain climbing. Tamm was humbled by Dirac's erudition: 'I feel like a little child next to him,' he wrote to his wife.\n\nAs was customary for visitors to Leiden, Dirac gave a series of lectures. He had much improved his technique as a public speaker: when he strode towards the blackboard, he seemed to change from being a pitiful wallflower to the Demosthenes of quantum mechanics. Standing quite still, he looked into the eyes of his audience and talked plainly and articulately, with the force of an advocate, not letting a pause or hesitation break his rhythm. He did not read from a prepared text but knew exactly what he wanted to say; once he had decided on the clearest way of expressing an idea, he would not deviate from it, from one lecture to another. When Ehrenfest asked for further explanation, Dirac would respond by repeating what he said, almost word for word.\n\nIn mid-June 1928, Dirac moved on with Tamm to Leipzig to spend a week at a conference co-organised by Heisenberg, who was agonising about the Dirac equation. Darwin and others had demonstrated that it perfectly reproduced previously successful formulae for atomic hydrogen's energy levels, but this news cut no ice with Heisenberg. He was troubled by the equation's absurd prediction that a free electron can have negative energy - and it had become clear that no subtle tinkering with the equation could change it. For Dirac, this was simply the next problem to be addressed. For Heisenberg, it was evidence that the equation was sick. A month after Dirac departed from Leipzig, Heisenberg wrote to Bohr: 'I find the present situation quite absurd and on that account, almost out of despair, I have taken up another field, [trying to understand magnetism]. ' A month later, Heisenberg was even more depressed when he wrote to Pauli: 'The saddest chapter of modern physics is and remains the Dirac theory.' Dirac knew Heisenberg's criticisms were well founded and that the onus was on him to demonstrate that the theory was more than a beautiful mirage.\n\nAmong the scientists Dirac met for the first time in Leipzig was  Heisenberg's student Rudolf Peierls, just turned twenty-one. Wiry, bespectacled and with a pronounced overbite, Peierls oozed vitality and ambition. His professors asked him to take Dirac to the opera, a challenge that his guest's Cambridge colleagues regarded as all but impossible. They could scarcely imagine him sitting through any kind of drama: the artifice, the focus on speech or lyrics and the often contorted plotting would surely have no appeal to his literal mind. Decades later, Peierls could not remember the play or his guest's reaction to it but squirmed at the thought of Dirac's insistence on following the English custom of taking his hat with him to the performance, pointedly refusing to follow the German practice of leaving headwear in the theatre cloakroom. Peierls, whose formal Prussian education had given him a strong sense of politesse, found Dirac's behaviour mortifyingly crude. Dirac, probably oblivious of his colleague's discomfiture, often behaved like this: he was a stickler for English conventions of courtesy and saw no reason to deviate from them in other countries. Flexibility was not his forte.\n\nAfter the conference, Dirac travelled with Tamm to G\u00f6ttingen. Its theoretical physics department was losing its edge as its leader, Max Born, struggled to maintain his momentum. Overworked, worried that younger and fresher minds were leaving him behind, depressed by marital problems and the Nazis' 'blood and soil' anti-Semitism, he slid into a nervous breakdown. His colleague Jordan was openly a conservative nationalist but in private was writing reactionary articles in the journal _Deutsches Volkstrum_ ('German Heritage'), under the cover of a pseudonym.\n\nG\u00f6ttingen was, however, still on the itinerary of every young theoretician. During this visit, Dirac began his long friendship with two other visitors, who embodied his taste for the company of both introverts and extroverts and who were to lead him to his first close relationships with women of his own age. At the flamboyant extreme was George Gamow, a Russian theoretician two years Dirac's junior, destined to be the court jester of quantum physics. Variously nicknamed Johnny, Gee-Gee and (by Bohr) Joe, he was a six-foot three-inch, 220-pound giant and close to being Dirac's polar opposite: loquacious, a passionate smoker and drinker, relentlessly jocular. Shortly before his visit to G\u00f6ttingen, he had made  his name by being one of the first to use quantum mechanics to explain the type of radioactive decay in which an alpha particle can be ejected from types of atomic nuclei (impossible, according to classical mechanics). Dirac, probably to Rutherford's frustration, had attended many Cavendish seminars about new findings in nuclear physics but showed no interest in trying to understand them. As theoreticians, Gamow and Dirac were entirely different: Gee-Gee did not try to come up with fundamental new ideas but preferred to apply ones discovered by others. Yet the two men got along well and often dined together, Dirac listening expressionlessly as his new friend told of how he had learned Euclidean geometry under artillery bombardment and other such stories, most of them more impressive for their colour than their accuracy.\n\nAt the other end of the personality spectrum was Eugene Wigner, who had recently arrived in G\u00f6ttingen after spending years with Einstein in Berlin, having switched to physics after being trained as an engineer. The scion of a wealthy Jewish family, Wigner and his two sisters had been raised by a governess in a grand apartment in one of the most exclusive residential areas of Budapest, overlooking the Danube. He loved to reminisce about his boyhood home: the formal family dinners, the scurryings of the two uniformed servant girls, the scent of freshly cut roses. Unlike Dirac, the young Wigner was politically alert and acutely aware of the instability of his country. Since the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, Hungary had been through a bloody Bolshevik revolution led by B\u00e9la Kun and the White Terror organised by nationalist and anti-Semitic forces. Wigner was fearful of the future of the country, then under Admiral Horthy's authoritarian regime.\n\nDespite all the political upheavals, Wigner had an exceptionally fine school education in mathematics and science, even more thorough than Dirac's. Historians still debate why Budapest in the early twentieth century produced so many intellectual innovators, including John von Neumann, whom Dirac would later rate as the world's finest mathematician, and Wigner's friends Le\u00f3 Szil\u00e1rd and Edward Teller, both to do important research into the first nuclear weapons. The success of this cohort of Hungarians is partly due to their education, shortly after the war, in Budapest's excellent high schools and partly to the vibrancy and ambition of the city's Western-focused culture.\n\nWigner was one of the shyest and most uncommunicative of the quantum physicists but, compared with Dirac, he was gregariousness itself, so conversation during their evening meals together was probably strained. They had to find a common language - Dirac did not know Hungarian, hated to speak French and spoke fractured German with a bitumen-thick accent, while Wigner's English was weak, and he liked to converse in German or French. They probably settled on German. No record remains of the details of their early conversations, but it is likely that Wigner mentioned his politics and youthful experiences of anti-Semitism: since he was sixteen, he had followed his father in ideologically opposing Communism, and his views had hardened a year later during Kun's regime, in which his father was thrown out of his job as director of a tannery. For a few months, the Wigners had fled to Austria but returned after the Communists were overthrown.\n\nDirac would have been content to listen to as much of Wigner's life story as he was willing to tell. But when Wigner turned his attention to physics, he quickly saw that Dirac had no interest in sharing his thoughts and ideas. The moment Wigner began to probe, Dirac withdrew into himself like a frightened hedgehog. Igor Tamm knew how to avoid this kind of defensiveness: keep conversation to a functional minimum, avoid personal questions and never risk wasting breath on trivialities. Tamm and Dirac's relationship flourished partly because they had complementary talents: intellectual leadership was provided by Dirac, while the social impetus came from Tamm. It was he who introduced Dirac to what would be one of the greatest pleasures of his young life: mountain climbing. In one long trip east, the two journeyed out to the wooded Harz - ablaze with fireflies in the evenings - and they climbed the challenging peak of Mount Brocken (1,142 metres). Dirac was smitten: apart from equations, nothing did more to stir his sense of beauty than mountains.\n\nAt the end of July 1928, Dirac was preparing for his first visit to Russia, a two-month stay that combined the chores of lecturing with the pleasure of relaxing with Kapitza. Dirac's mother was fearful: 'If you go to Russia, do take care of yourself. We hear such dreadful accounts of the Bolshevists in the papers. There seems to be no law and order anywhere. I expect you know more about the facts than  we do, though, as you are so much nearer.' Since 1918, the British press had reported on the Soviet regime's growing repressiveness, which increased with the rise of Stalin to absolute power in 1926. The British Government did not officially recognise the Soviet Union, but profitable trade between the countries was easing relations between them, culminating in the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald's restoration in 1929 of full diplomatic relations.\n\nAfter his arrival in Leningrad on 5 August, Dirac's hosts introduced him to caviar, one of the few luxury foods for which he had a taste. Dirac blossomed in Russia - the scenery, the architecture, the museums and the art galleries - as he wrote in a long and chatty letter to Tamm:\n\nI spent the first two days in Leningrad with Born and his [G\u00f6ttingen colleague] Pohl and we saw the sights and visited the Hermitage and the Museum of Russian Art and the Natural History Museum and also the Roentgen Institute [for physics research] [. . .] I found Leningrad a very beautiful place, and was more impressed by it than by any other town during the journey, particularly as I came up the river in the steamer and first saw the large number of churches, with their gilded domes, quite different from anything I had ever seen [. . .].\n\nMoscow still resembled the city of Anna Karenina, with its squat wooden houses, multicoloured cupolas, horse-drawn cabs driven around the sprawl of zigzag streets by peasants in blue robes, bearded traders sipping vodka and eating cucumbers in the Slovenski Bazaar. Dirac was there to attend the no-expense-spared Congress of Russian Physicists, at his hosts' expense. Physicists in the Soviet Union had been quick to realise the importance of quantum mechanics and wanted to learn from the innovators in western Europe. Of the one hundred and twenty physicists who attended the Congress, about twenty were foreign. Dirac was the star of the occasion, but he arrived in Moscow too late to give his talk, scheduled for the opening session. When he should have been giving his presentation, he was walking around one of the royal palaces on the outskirts of the city; in the evening, he went to a performance of Japanese theatre. The next day, Dirac went with the conference delegates to the Kremlin before setting off alone to walk the streets until sundown.\n\nThe venue for the second part of the Congress was a steamer that  sailed down the Volga to Stalingrad. During the week-long cruise, Dirac gave a talk on his theory of the electron and met the leaders of Soviet physics, including his admirer Lev Landau, a twenty-year-old graduate student, soon to be his country's greatest theoretician - the most accomplished but least mature. Mangy and undernourished, he was so tall that in most company people could see his long, thin face standing out, topped with dark wavy hair that was piled on the right of his head like a burnt crest of meringue. As a critic, he was so aggressive that he made Pauli look demure; as a colleague, so socially inept that he made Dirac look suave.\n\nAfter the Congress, Dirac took a two-day train journey to the Caucasus. He stayed with Kapitza and joined a party of sightseers for a six-hour hike up a glacier near Vladikavkas. Dirac described his adventures in a letter to Tamm but did not mention that, during his time with Kapitza, he experienced an incident that was, in some way, his sexual awakening.  Forty-five years later, he remembered that he first saw a naked young woman in the Caucasus: '[she was] a child, an adolescent. I was taken to a girls' swimming pool, and they bathed without swimming suits. I thought they looked nice.' He was twenty-six years old.\n\nDirac was in no hurry to return to Bristol: the journey took him almost a month. The disparity between the excitement of his work and the dreariness of his home life had never been so stark. He was lionised by many of his colleagues, he was financially independent, and he was benefiting from international travel at a time when it was a luxury. Charles, Flo and Betty, on the other hand, were locked in their routine and left their hometown only rarely. Betty was happy to do nothing at all when she was not looking after her new dog; Charles was overworked and run down; Flo was trying to make the most of every opportunity to leave the house. At her elocution classes, she wrote and practised giving speeches, including one opposing the notion that there might one day be a woman prime minister. She rehearsed her speech on the Bristol Downs, beginning with the flourish 'I rise to oppose the motion of a woman prime minister - to oppose most decidedly and definitely.' For one thing, Flo argued, women do not have sufficiently strong constitutions to take on such a responsibility: 'As regards physique - women today are wonderful: but none can say when a woman may faint! None when  she may scream! Is it becoming for a Prime Minister to suddenly fall to the ground, or to burst into hysterics at a crucial moment?'\n\nAlthough Flo was not in the vanguard of feminism, Dirac knew that underneath his mother's apparent submissiveness lay stoicism and an independence of spirit. These qualities would, over the next three years, be tested to breaking point.\n\nWhen Dirac returned to Cambridge in October 1928, he knew that the onus was on him to cure the sickness of his theory of the electron. Somehow, he needed to find a rational explanation for the negative-energy states which were undermining confidence in the Dirac equation; some of his colleagues were becoming worried that the equation might not be right after all.\n\nThat autumn, he was, unusually, working on several projects at the same time: his hole theory, his textbook and a brief paper on one of his favourite subjects - the relationship between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. The paper was based on the ultra-rigorous work of von Neumann, who had derived one result that caught Dirac's eye. Von Neumann had found a way of describing the overall behaviour of an enormously large number of non-interacting quantum particles, when nothing is known about their individual behaviour. It turned out, surprisingly, that the statistical description given by quantum mechanics is just as simple as the account given by classical mechanics; in both, the behaviour of the individual particles averages out to a smooth overall pattern, just as the behaviour of a swarming crowd can be described without referring to any of its individuals. In this bijou paper, Dirac developed von Neumann's ideas and laid bare the precise analogy between the classical and quantum understandings of vast numbers of particles. This was a divertimento composed during a holiday from fixing his troublesome symphony.\n\nIn those politically tranquil times, the favourite topic of conversation in Cambridge was poetry. The eighty-five-year-old poet laureate Robert Bridges had written the most talked-about poem of the year, _A Testament to Beauty_ , 5,600 lines about the nature of beauty. It is now read only rarely, but then it struck a chord with tens of thousands of lay readers and some literary critics, including one in the _Cambridge Review_ who described it as 'a high philosophical explanation of Keats's \"Beauty is truth, Truth beauty\"'. To some extent,  Bridges was reacting against modernist art - such as Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg's atonal music, Picasso's cubism, Eliot's fragmented poetry. Bridges sought beauty and found it not only in music, art and nature but also in science, food and even in football matches. Dirac knew, too, that beauty was about much more than art and nature. He had seen it in Einstein's equation for the general theory of relativity and he now had an equation of his own that was no less of a contribution to aesthetics. But aesthetic judgements like that count for nothing in science if a theory fails to agree with experiment. Unless someone could explain the meaning of the negative-energy solutions to the Dirac equation, it was doomed to be remembered only as just another scientific fad.\n\nA few of Dirac's colleagues in Cambridge would not have been distraught if fortune had clipped his wings: his ascending reputation had led, inevitably, to envy. No longer were the two leading lights of the university's experimental and theoretical physics cited as Rutherford and Eddington, but as Rutherford and Dirac. Eddington's star was waning, and he knew it. Meanwhile, the old guard of Cambridge physics looked pitifully out of touch. The proud Irishman Sir Joseph Larmor, holder of the most prestigious chair in Cambridge, the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, once held by Newton, was living in the past, unable to understand relativity theory and disdainful of quantum mechanics. He and his friend J. J. Thomson wandered the streets of Cambridge, each of them wearing a bowler hat, a black three-piece suit and an immaculate white shirt, and each wagging a stick behind his back. When they peered into one of the shop windows on Trinity Street, the two superannuated professors looked like a pair of penguins.\n\nThe two men knew that their views counted for nothing among physicists who were once their admiring students and who were now running physics. No one symbolised the new generation's ascendancy more powerfully than Dirac, but he still did not have a permanent job. He had turned down Arthur Compton's offer of a post in Chicago and had later declined an offer of a professorship in applied mathematics at Manchester University, commenting that 'my knowledge of and interest in mathematics outside my own special branch are too small for me to be competent [in such a post].' If the spurned mathematicians in Manchester found his modesty hilarious, Dirac would have been uncomprehending, as he was simply being candid. As Mott said:  'He is quite incapable of pretending to think anything that he did not really think.'\n\nIf Dirac and Fowler were away, Cambridge University would struggle to teach quantum mechanics, as Harold Jeffreys virtually admitted when he wrote to Dirac in March 1929, pleading with him to set the questions on quantum mechanics for the summer examinations. Jeffreys and his fellow 'ignorant and philistine' faculty colleagues were in the embarrassing position of having to admit that 'the candidates know more than we [do]'. Fowler led the campaign to ensure that Dirac remained in Cambridge, and he soon had some success: in June 1929, St John's College awarded Dirac a special lectureship, though it was funded for only three years. Dirac's loyalty to Cambridge was to be tested, repeatedly.\n\nAs Dirac was getting nowhere with his top priority of sorting out the difficulties with his equation, he decided to devote himself to other things. In late 1929, he spent most of his time drafting his book and working on another research project, the theory of heavy atoms. This was by no means his favourite branch of physics, but it was closer to the work of the great majority of quantum theorists, who were applying the theory to complicated atoms and molecules. Dirac was, however, in no doubt that quantum mechanics would be successful:\n\nThe underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble.\n\nThose words became one of the clarion calls of reductionists, who believe that complex things can be explained in terms of their components, right down to the level of atoms and their constituents. Extreme reductionism implies, for example, that quantum mechanics lies at the bottom of an inverted pyramid of questions that begins, for example, with 'Why does a dog bark?' A reductionist seeks to answer the question by understanding the chemical reactions going on inside the dog's brain, and those reactions are ultimately understood by the interactions of the chemicals' electrons, whose behaviour is ultimately described by quantum mechanics. Although popular with many scientists, the approach does not describe _how_ to make the links between the layers of explanation.\n\nIn his paper, Dirac applied quantum mechanics to atoms that contain more than one electron, such as carbon atoms. Such atoms are much harder to describe than hydrogen atoms because, in every multi-electron atom, the complicated and unwieldy interactions between all the electrons have to be taken into account. Dirac found a way of describing these interactions approximately and investigated the consequences of the fact that it is impossible to detect experimentally if two of the electrons swapped places. As usual, Dirac left it to others to work out the theory's consequences: the American theoretician John Van Vleck, based in Minneapolis, quickly saw the potential of Dirac's ideas and spent years using them to explain the origin of magnetism, the various ways that atoms can bond to form molecules and the patterns of light emitted by multi-electron atoms. This was to be the main legacy of Dirac's excursion into atomic physics - his first paper on the subject, and his last.\n\nAt the end of term, he visited his family briefly and then, in what was becoming a ritual, set off on another long journey. At Southampton, on the freezing Wednesday morning of 13 March, he boarded the liner _Aquitania_ with his travelling companion, Isabel Whitehead's son Henry. In the crowd at quayside was Florence Dirac, who by then had got the message: her only son wanted to spend as little time at home as he could. Just as she must have dreaded, he would be away for as long as his teaching obligations in Cambridge allowed, on his first visit to the United States of America. His reputation had preceded him.\n**Thirteen**\n\n[I]n England there is something very like a cult of eccentricity. [. . .] With us [Americans], as more than one European has said, the trait is more distinguishable nationally than individually.\n\nGARDNER L. HARDING, _New York Times_ , 17 March 1929\n\nIn every branch of science, theorists vie with experimenters to set the agenda. Since Heisenberg's publication of his path-breaking paper in the autumn of 1925, theoreticians had been pointing the way ahead in physics. Yet the foundations of some of the new theoretical ideas had not even been checked experimentally: according to Schr\u00f6dinger's quantum theory, for example, every material particle has an associated wave, but no experimenter had been able to prove the idea or to refute it. So there was an almost palpable sigh of relief among quantum physicists back in early 1927 when news reached Europe that the American experimenters Clinton Davisson and his student Lester Germer had shown that the electron could indeed behave like a wave. Dirac, often believed to regard experiments with a high-minded insouciance, belied his reputation by arranging to visit Davisson's laboratory on West Street in south Manhattan, a few blocks from the meatpacking district, the first stop on his itinerary.\n\nThis was Dirac's first sight of New York, then booming with wealth and new technology. The Jazz Age was, according to the man who named it, F. Scott Fitzgerald, past its 'heady middle age', though Americans were still enjoying 'the most expensive orgy in history'. The hurried pace of American life was not at first to Dirac's taste: it was somehow fitting that during the first night Dirac spent in his hotel on Seventh Avenue, he was kept awake until the small hours by revellers in an adjacent room. As soon as he awoke the next day, shortly before four o'clock in the afternoon, he realised he had missed his appointment with Davisson. Rather than waste the late afternoon, he spent it strolling around rush-hour midtown Manhattan, teeming with four-square black automobiles navigating around the skyscrapers, each of them a powerful symbol of America's soaring prosperity.\n\nIn Davisson's laboratory the next day, Dirac saw the ingenious apparatus that first persuaded the electron to reveal its wave nature. Davisson and Germer had fired beams of electrons towards a nickel crystal and found that the number of electrons they detected at different angles had alternating peaks and troughs. These variations were impossible to understand if the electron is simply a particle: the only explanation was that the electrons behave as waves which are bent ('diffracted') by the crystal, like two waves combining on the surface of pond, forming peaks when the waves reinforce one another and troughs when they cancel each other out. Physicists had no choice but to conclude that the electron behaved sometimes like a particle and sometimes as a wave - a 'wavicle', as Eddington had dubbed it - precisely as quantum theory had supposed.\n\nDirac quickly headed off on his five-month journey across North America, travelling mainly on the railroad. He kept a record of his trip in terms of numbers, not words: his diary contains no descriptions of his experiences, just a cumulative record of the number of nights he had spent on a train and on board ship.\n\nAfter paying brief visits to Princeton and Chicago, Dirac travelled to Madison, capital of the Midwestern state Wisconsin. Like G\u00f6ttingen, Madison was his sort of town, with a good university and surrounded by countryside offering plenty of opportunities for walks. He was the first foreign guest of John Van Vleck, newly appointed to the university faculty. Slightly older than Dirac, Van Vleck excelled at applying quantum physics and had no interest in its mathematical foundations. The two men spent hours together walking in the vast fields overlooking Lake Mendota, one of the four lakes around the town. For Dirac, Van Vleck was the perfect walking companion - fit, uninterested in small talk and content to say nothing for hours. Perhaps Van Vleck mentioned his passion for railroads and his feat of memorising the passenger railway timetable for the whole of Europe and the United States. Like Dirac, Van Vleck was fascinated by technology, numbers and order.\n\nDirac's hosts were aware of his reputation for eccentricity, and they soon saw that it was well justified and that his sangfroid was extreme even by the standards of the English. He left them several Dirac stories, including a classic that appears to have been first spread around by a tickled Niels Bohr. The story begins during one of Dirac's lectures, moments after he has finished talking, when the moderator asks if anyone has any questions. Someone in the audience says, 'I don't understand the equation on the top-right-hand corner of the blackboard. ' Dirac says nothing. The audience shuffles nervously, but he remains silent, whiling away the time of day, looking unconcerned. The moderator, feeling obliged to break the silence, asks for a reply, whereupon Dirac says, 'That was not a question, it was a comment.'\n\nMadison was also the venue of what would become the most widely quoted interview that Dirac ever gave, to the journalist Joseph Coughlin, known to everyone as Roundy owing to his substantial girth. Well known in the town, he was one of Wisconsin's most popular columnists, delivering regular doses of homespun wisdom on sport and other topics in language that was often ungrammatical but always alive with quirky humour. Dirac kept a typed transcript of the four-page article, in which Roundy recounts verbatim his attempts to persuade his interviewee to utter more than one syllable at a time:\n\nROUNDY: Professor, I notice you have quite a few letters in front of your last name. Do they stand for anything in particular?\n\nDIRAC: No.\n\nROUNDY: You mean I can write my own ticket?\n\nDIRAC: Yes.\n\nROUNDY: Will it be all right if I say that P. A. M. stands for Poincar\u00e9 Aloysius Mussolini?\n\nDIRAC: Yes.\n\nROUNDY: Fine! We are getting along great! Now doctor will you give me in a few words the low-down on all your investigations?\n\nDIRAC: No.\n\nROUNDY: Good. Will it be all right if I put it this way: 'Professor Dirac solves all the problems of mathematical physics, but is unable to find a better way of figuring out Babe Ruth's batting average?'\n\nDIRAC: Yes.\n\nThe dialogue continues for another page. According to the transcript, Roundy's interview was published in the 'P. A. M. issue' of the _Wisconsin Journal_ on 31 April ( _sic_ ). However, the records of the newspaper show that no such edition was published, so it appears that this much-anthologised article is a spoof. One possibility is that the typed document was a pastiche presented to Dirac by his Madison colleagues during his farewell dinner at the University  Club, where - as Van Vleck later wrote - they played an elaborate game to tease out of Dirac the names designated by his initials P. A. M. Whatever the origins of the Roundy interview, it is an example of a probably apocryphal Dirac story that captures his behaviour so accurately that it somehow ought to be true.\n\nDirac left Madison with a cheque for $1,800, more than enough to cover his costs for the remainder of his trip. In June, he combined business and pleasure, giving a series of lectures on quantum mechanics in Iowa and Michigan, also walking down and up the Grand Canyon and hiking in Yosemite National Park and the Canadian Rockies - his introductions to grand North American scenery, which he explored on foot during several trips in the coming decades. He again demonstrated his interest in the latest experimental tools when, during a stay at the California Institute of Technology, he visited the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, whose telescope was the largest in the world and by far the most productive source of new information about the universe.\n\nA few months before, Heisenberg had proposed to Dirac that they should travel together to 'bring European life into the American hurry'. When they met in early August at their hotel near the Old Faithful geyser, Heisenberg was surprised to find that Dirac had planned a route that would enable them to see the maximum number of geysers erupt. Even his scenic walks were informed by mathematical analysis. Heisenberg had arranged for them to travel first class to Japan on the steamer _Shinyo Maru_ , sharing a roomy cabin with a sea view. Two leading theoreticians were about to spend weeks together, with every opportunity to talk and perhaps to crack the gnawing problem of how to interpret the negative-energy solutions to Dirac's equation. The clubbable Heisenberg would probably have been game for a collaboration, but not Dirac. Although he admired Heisenberg and regarded him as a friend, Dirac felt no obligation to share any of his thoughts about physics with him. His motto was: 'People should work on their own problems.'\n\nIn the middle of August, after they had each given a series of lectures in Oppenheimer's department at the University of California at Berkeley, they set off from San Francisco on their two-week cruise to Japan. On board, Heisenberg was a conventionally hedonistic  tourist, honing his technique at ping-pong and dancing with the flapper girls. Dirac looked on, probably bemused. It is easy to imagine Dirac at one of the evening balls, sitting at a table and gazing quizzically at Heisenberg as he jived on the dance floor. Heisenberg long remembered being asked by Dirac, 'Why do you dance?' After Heisenberg replied, reasonably enough, 'When there are nice girls it is a pleasure to dance,' Dirac looked thoughtful. After about five minutes of silence, he said, 'Heisenberg, how do you know _beforehand_ that the girls are nice?'\n\nAs their steamer approached Yokohama, a reporter sought an interview with the two famous theoreticians. Unfamiliar with Dirac's appearance but not with Heisenberg's, the reporter said to Heisenberg, 'I have searched all over the ship for Dirac, but I cannot find him.' Heisenberg knew how to handle this: he talked affably to the journalist, no doubt giving him the story he wanted and not mentioning that Dirac was standing next to him, looking in another direction.\n\nIn Japan, the two physicists were greeted as heroes. Leading scientists in Japan knew that their science lagged well behind that of Europe and the USA, and physicists flocked from all over the country to see and hear two of the young founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac and Heisenberg were given round-the-clock obeisance and the full VIP treatment, their first taste of international celebrity. From the official photographs, it is clear that Heisenberg slipped easily into the role of the touring dignitary, looking poised and relaxed in the light summer suit he wore to stay cool in the searing heat. Looking less comfortable than his friend, Dirac made no such changes to his wardrobe: he wore the same three-piece suit and boots that he wore in the depths of the Cambridge winter.\n\nThe itinerary was the usual one for academics making a short trip to the country: a stay in Tokyo followed by a visit to the old imperial city of Kyoto, lecturing to packed, hushed audiences of respectful men wearing Western suits splashed with _jako_ perfume, scenting the auditorium with the fragrance of geraniums. The texts of the lectures were swiftly translated into Japanese and published as the Orient's first authoritative book on quantum mechanics, a bible for Japan's next generation of physicists, destined to make a huge impact. Dirac and Heisenberg, each of them only twenty-seven, were already training their successors.\n\nAt the end of their stay in Japan, Dirac and Heisenberg parted company. Dirac wanted to return by the fastest practicable route, by traversing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. The construction of the 5,785-mile railway in Siberia - with brutal extremes of climate, little local labour available and dreadfully primitive supply routes - had been an engineering project that would have daunted even Brunel. It took twenty-five years to complete. Dirac boarded the train on 24 September at Vladivostock on the eastern coast and, nine days later, arrived in Moscow. He met up with Tamm, and they went on a long walk to see the sights of the city, including the sixteenth-century St Basil's cathedral, later converted into one of the country's many anti-religion museums. Dirac then headed back to England after taking what seems to have been his first flight, from Leningrad to Berlin. This was probably not the most agreeable of experiences: for the next few decades, he preferred to admire aviation technology from a secure vantage point on the ground.\n\nWhile he was away, his family were 'plodding along as usual', as his mother put it. The highlight of the year had been the General Election in June. For Flo, new technology had taken much of the thrill out of politics: 'The Election is being conducted mainly by \"Wireless\",' she wrote to Dirac, 'so I don't get any fun out of meetings. ' She and Charles supported Lloyd George's Liberal Party, which was trounced in Bristol by the Labour Party, consistent with the national swing that put Ramsay MacDonald back into 10 Downing Street.\n\nDirac's father, in better health than he had been for some years, was drifting further away from his wife and ever closer to Betty. While Charles and his favourite child played with the family dog in the garden, Flo was left inside, dreaming of _her_ favourite child thousands of miles away. She imagined him touring the Hollywood studios and riding a donkey down the Grand Canyon in a Panama hat, though she was disappointed to hear that he had done neither. Flo and Charles, having not seen their son for six months, were hoping to see him before the beginning of term and prepared the house for his visit. But in early October, Dirac perfunctorily informed them that he was back in Cambridge and mentioned no plans to visit Bristol.\n\nHe and other theoreticians had made virtually no progress with the problem of negative-energy electrons. Although most physicists  wanted to be rid of them, the Swedish physicist Ivar Waller had shown a few months before that they were indispensable to the theory. Waller had found a strange result when he analysed what happens when a photon is scattered by a stationary electron: Dirac's theory could reproduce the successful classical prediction at low energies only if the electron had access to negative-energy states. There could be only one conclusion for Dirac: his equation would survive only if someone could understand these negative-energy electrons.\n\nAs he settled down for the new term, Dirac was aware that the critical chorus had swelled from a whisper to a roar. In the opinion of its most dominant soloist, Pauli, the equation's sickness was incurable and its agreement with experiment was a fluke. The onus was on the equation's discoverer, refreshed after almost six months' vacation, to rescue it. So he set about the problem again.\n\nAt the end of October, news broke from New York of the event that ended the calm of late-1920s politics and began the descent into global economic catastrophe. The Dow Jones index had reached its historic peak a month before. Then panic struck when the bubble burst. On Friday, 25 October, the newspapers in the St John's common room all featured reports that made clear the scale of the crisis: the _Manchester Guardian_ wrote of 'Wild selling in record turnover of 13,000,000 shares'; _The Times_ wrote, 'a Niagara of liquidation took place on the American stock market today'. Four days later, on 'Black Tuesday', Wall Street all but melted down, and, as F. Scott Fitzgerald later noted, the decade of unparalleled prosperity had 'leapt to its spectacular death [. . .] as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed'.\n\nBritain braced itself for the aftershock. Dirac kept abreast of the news, but he was focusing mainly on solving the mystery of the negative-energy electrons. Why had no one observed jumps of the familiar, positive-energy electrons into negative-energy states? After a few weeks, he had found an answer. He imagined all the electrons in the universe gradually filling up the energy states: the states with negative energy will be populated first, because they have the lower energies. Only when they are full will electrons occupy positive energy states. Because the negative-energy states are full, there are no vacancies into which these positive-energy electrons can jump. It is ironic that the crucial idea that underpinned the theory was supplied by Dirac's harshest critic, Pauli: according to his exclusion principle, every negative-energy state can be occupied by only _one_ electron.  This prevents each negative-energy state from being filled ad infinitum with electrons.\n\nThe bizarre upshot of the theory is that the entire universe is pervaded by an infinite number of negative-energy electrons - what might be thought of as a 'sea'. Dirac argued that this sea has a constant density everywhere, so that experimenters can observe only departures from this perfect uniformity. If this view is correct, experimenters are in rather the same position as a tribe that has spent its entire life hearing the unchanging background sound of a single musical note: this would not seem like torture because people are aware only of _changes_ to their environment.\n\nOnly a disturbance in Dirac's sea - a bursting bubble, for example - would be observable. He envisaged just this when he foresaw that there would be some vacant states in the sea of negative-energy electrons, causing tiny departures from the otherwise perfect uniformity. Dirac called these unoccupied states 'holes'. They would be observed, he reasoned, only when they are filled by an ordinary electron, which would then emit radiation as it makes the transition. It should therefore be possible to detect a hole in the sea when an ordinary positive-energy electron jumps into it. But what characteristics do the holes have? They mark the absence of a negative-energy electron. Within the general scheme of the 'electron sea', the _absence_ of negative energy amounts to the _presence_ of positive energy (two negatives make a positive: when _debt decreases_ by \u00a35, _wealth increases_ by the same amount). Furthermore, a negative-energy electron is negatively charged, so its absence is equivalent to the presence of a positive charge.\n\nIt follows that each hole has positive energy and positive charge - the properties of the proton, the only other subatomic particle known at that time. So Dirac made the simplest possible assumption by suggesting that a hole _is_ a proton. What he could not explain was why the proton is almost two thousand times as heavy as the electron. That was a problem for the theory, he conceded, a 'serious deficiency'.\n\nThe provenance of the hole theory is not entirely clear. The mathematician Hermann Weyl and others suggested that protons were related in some way to the negative-energy electrons, but their thinking was too woolly for Dirac. He later remarked that 'it was not really so hard to get this idea [of the hole theory]' as he was simply  drawing an analogy with the theory of how atoms emit X-rays (high-energy light). This theory says that an electron close to the nucleus can be knocked out of the atom, leaving a gap into which another electron falls, accompanied by the emission of an X-ray. It is also possible that Dirac had acquired the germ of his idea when he was sailing down the river Volga fifteen months before. At the Russian Congress, he met the Soviet theoretician Yakov Frenkel: someone snapped a photograph of them lying on the deck of the steamer, in their dress suits. In 1926, Frenkel had produced a theory of crystals in which 'empty spaces' in the regular lattice structure of the crystal would behave like particles - again, precisely analogous to Dirac's hole theory. Frenkel may have mentioned this theory to Dirac only for him to forget it and retrieve it later from his subconscious. But Dirac had no such recollection.\n\nWhatever the origins of the theory, there is no doubting the boldness of Dirac's application of the idea. Nowhere in the paper does he pause to comment on the theory's credibility. The crucial point for him was that he now had the beginnings of a viable theory of matter, based on an appealing equation and solid principles. Who was going to accept that the universe was full of unseen negative-energy electrons, an infinite sea of negative electrical charge? Yet his short paper 'A Theory of Electrons and Protons' bears no sign that he was expecting his idea to be greeted with incredulity. He wrote the article in his uncluttered style but with fewer equations than usual, free of the windiness that would have been excusable in the first presentation of a theory that suggested a new way of looking at the material universe.\n\nAlthough Dirac never admitted to being nervous about the reception of his hole theory, he often talked of anxiety as the handmaiden of scientific daring. So it is likely that he feared his theory contained a humiliating fallacy, a concern stoked by a letter he received in late November from Bohr, who had heard about the hole idea on the grapevine. For Bohr, the existence of negative energy levels in Dirac's theory of the electron undermined confidence in the entire concept of energy, a problem that - Bohr observed - also occurred in explanations of why some types of atomic nucleus can sometimes spontaneously eject a high-energy electron, a process known as radioactive beta decay. It seemed that energy was not conserved in this process - there was less energy before the decay than there was afterwards - so  energy appeared to emerge out of nowhere. This was serious: Bohr was questioning quantum mechanics and even the law of conservation of energy. Dirac thought his mentor was overreacting and, in a roundabout way, recommended him to calm down. Dirac had already told Bohr that he believed that the law of conservation of energy had to be preserved at all costs and that, to keep it, he would be prepared to abandon the idea that matter consists of separate atoms and electrons. And Dirac thought it premature to be pessimistic about quantum mechanics, which had only just passed its fourth birthday:\n\nI am afraid I do not completely agree with your views. Although I believe that quantum mechanics has its limitations and will ultimately be replaced by something better (and this applies to all physical theories) I cannot see any reason for thinking that quantum mechanics has already reached the limit of its development. I think it will undergo a number of small changes, mainly with regard to its method of application, and by these means most of the difficulties now confronting the theory will be removed.\n\nDirac concluded by reiterating - almost word for word - his reasons for believing in his hole theory. Although his defence could be regarded as stubborn, he does make it clear that he expected his theory to be superseded; the task in hand was to develop the theory as far as it could be taken. Bohr's criticisms do not seem to have shaken him in the least - he would need this thick skin during the coming barrage of scepticism and derision.\n\nA week after he wrote to Bohr, Dirac gave his first public presentation of the hole theory to an audience in Paris, at the Henri Poincar\u00e9 Institute. He will not have taken much pleasure from giving the lecture, as he reluctantly agreed to give it in French, bringing back abhorrent memories of meals with his father. When he returned to Bristol for Christmas, he had no choice but to speak French again. After his absence for nine months, his family was desperate to see him and to show him their latest plaything - the 'Gramaphone' ( _sic_ ). But Dirac was, as always, downhearted even at the thought of returning to his enervating Bristol routine, his mother endlessly fussing over him, his father still intimidating him simply by his presence. Although Dirac appears to have told none of his physicist friends, he believed that his home life had stultified him as a child and was still grinding him down. He appears to have first shared the full extent of  his pain only a few years later with a friend who was not one of his academic associates. In a letter, he wrote, 'going to see my parents will change me very much, I am afraid, and makes me feel like a child again and unable to do anything for myself'. For now, like all his other emotions, his suffering was hidden.\n**Fourteen**\n\nO hear the sad petition we electrons make to you  \nTo free us from the dominion of the hated quantum view  \nFor we are all abandoned to its dread uncertainty.  \nExcept by you, our champion. O we pray you, set us free!  \nOnce in a pleasant order our smooth-flowing time was spent  \nAs the classical equations told us where to go, we went.  \nWe vibrated in the atom, and a beam of light was freed;  \nAnd we hadn't any structure - only mass and charge and speed.  \nWe know not if we're particles, or a jelly sort of phi,  \nOr waves, or if we're real at all, or where we are, or why,  \nTo protons - holes in ether - according to Dirac.\n\nANON.\n\nThose anonymous lines are from an ode to the electron, pinned to a noticeboard in the Cavendish Laboratory around 1930. Only the most hard-headed theorist could fail to sympathise with the poet's nostalgia. A decade before, atomic physics had been a matter of common sense: electrons were just tiny particles, and they behaved predictably, according to straightforward laws of nature - the same ones that described everything else in the universe. How quaint those ideas now seemed: the classical laws that had held sway for a quarter of a millennium were now, in the atomic domain, obsolete, as Dirac liked to point out, the idea Jonathan Swift explored in _Gulliver's Travels_ \\- that no one would notice if naturally occurring things expanded or contracted in the same proportion - was wrong. The laws of the everyday world cannot be scaled down to the atomic domain: things are different there. Theorists could now reject every attempt to picture the electron as meaningless and therefore fraudulent. The particle did not even behave predictably: physicists were calculating odds like croupiers at nature's gambling table, using waves that no one believed were real. To cap it all, Dirac had the temerity to argue that common-or-garden electrons, with positive energy, are outnumbered by negative-energy ones that cannot even be observed.\n\nIt was probably a Cavendish experimenter, one of many who were suspicious of hole theory, who wrote the anonymous poem. Only a  few theoreticians, including Tamm and Oppenheimer, took the theory seriously, and even they soon found it wanting. In February 1930, Oppenheimer showed that the average lifetime of an atom was about a billionth of a second according to Dirac's hole theory, because the atomic electron would quickly fall to its death in the negative-energy sea. Soon afterwards, Tamm and Dirac independently arrived at the same conclusion. Pauli suggested what became known as his Second Principle: whenever a physicist proposes a new theory, he should apply it to the atoms in his own body. Dirac would be the first victim.\n\nPauli's jest appealed to Gamow, who was staying in Cambridge in the first academic term of 1930, mainly to work with Rutherford and his colleagues. Dirac was charmed by Gamow's non-stop good humour and sense of fun: no one did more to show Dirac what he had missed in his youth. Gamow taught Dirac how to ride a motorcycle (and filmed him doing it), gave him a taste for Conan Doyle's detective novels and apparently introduced him to the high jinks of Mickey Mouse, who first appeared on the screen two years before, in _Steamboat Willy._ 4 Dirac adored Mickey Mouse films, the animated successors of the cartoons he had seen as a boy in the penny weeklies. A few years later, he made a point of attending a day-long festival of the films in Boston, though it seems that he kept this innocent pleasure secret from his highbrow Cambridge colleagues. He was self-aware enough to know that his standing in the St John's common room would not be increased if he were too enthusiastic in his praise of Peg-Leg Pete or Horace Horsecollar.\n\nMore respectable at High Table was Dirac's appetite for mathematical games and puzzles that served no purpose at all beyond entertainment. Once, he gave a devastating performance in a game that had been introduced at G\u00f6ttingen in 1929. The challenge was to express any whole number using the number 2 precisely four times, and using only well-known mathematical symbols. The first few numbers are easy:\n\nSoon, the game becomes much more difficult, even for G\u00f6ttingen's finest mathematical minds. They spent hundreds of hours playing the  game with ever-higher numbers - until Dirac found a simple and general formula enabling _any_ number to be expressed using four 2s, entirely within the rules. He had rendered the game pointless.\n\nOn 20 February 1930, Dirac sent his parents the usual newsless weekly postcard, consisting of a ten-word summary of the Cambridge weather. The day after his mother received it, she visited the library and was astonished to read in a newspaper that her son had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the highest honours in British science. Excited and flushed with pride, she dashed out to the post office and sent him a congratulatory telegram, keeping in check her annoyance that he had not mentioned the news on the card. Dirac was a 'naughty boy', she told him two days later in a letter, enquiring whether the society was organising a ceremony of induction. 'Do tell me,' she wrote, stressing each word in frustration.\n\nDirac could now put the initials FRS after his name, letters that render all other academic qualifications redundant. The Society, which then had 447 Fellows, usually gave the honour to scientists in their forties and fifties, after they had been nominated and passed over several times, so it was extraordinary for Dirac to be appointed the first time he had been put up for election, when he was only twenty-seven. As the news spread among the High Tables and common rooms of Cambridge, it would not have escaped the dons' notice that he had been elected a Fellow at a younger age than any of his senior colleagues.\n\nThe announcement appears to have made Dirac's parents realise how rapidly the reputation of their son had risen. 'How hard you must have worked to get to the top of the tree like that,' his mother wrote. 'No wonder you didn't take any interest in the Boat Racing.' The news was a welcome fillip for Flo, whose morale was low. Now that her husband was about to retire, her prospects were pitiable: only fifty-two years old, all she had to look forward to were years cooped up at home with a sick man whom she regarded as a browbeating ingrate and who, she knew, saw her as an inadequate nurse and servant. At school, Charles Dirac's colleagues queued up to offer their congratulations, and he received several letters to congratulate him on raising such a successful son. Paul's engineering teacher Andrew Robertson pointed out that he believed Dirac was the first  Bristol graduate to have been elected an FRS; Ronald Hass\u00e9, who first steered Dirac towards a career in theoretical physics, wrote to say how much he was looking forward to Dirac's first public speech in Bristol in September. The city was to host the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where scientists and members of the public got together to hear a week of lectures on the latest science. At the Cotham Road School - formerly the Merchant Venturers' School - they celebrated by taking a day off. Charles never quite knew when to expect the next plaudit: once, during a lesson, two complete strangers knocked on his classroom door, entered, complimented him on his son's great achievement, and left.\n\nPerhaps to celebrate his latest success, Dirac took his mother's advice and splashed out almost \u00a3200 on his first car, a Morris Oxford Tourer, capable of a then-impressive 50 mph. There was no driving test: after completing the sale, the garage owner gave him a short demonstration drive around Cambridge and then handed him the keys. He was then free to take his chances on the roads. With the scrapping of the 20 mph speed limit that year, the highways became even more dangerous, not least because of Dirac's presence. A colleague laughed that 'Dirac's car has two gears, reverse and top.' Only Mott left an account of being driven by Dirac, to London on an icy March day when 'Dirac ran - very gently - into the back of a lorry and smashed a headlamp.' Like Kapitza, Dirac was a wild driver, and this appears to have been due both to his poor handling of the vehicle - his appreciation of machines always exceeded his competence at using them - and to the virtual absence of a highway code. Dirac was a stickler for obeying rules that he believed were rational and obviously for the common good, so, in the absence of regulations, he was free to drive as he wished.\n\nDirac was, at last, showing signs of mellowing. Leisure was not reserved only for Sundays: at lunchtimes, the bulk of his day's work done, he would often motor out of Cambridge to the Gog Magog Hills, park his car near a tall tree and climb it, still wearing his three-piece suit. He wore it whatever the weather, whatever the occasion, and took it off only during his drives out to secluded sites by the river Cam and in the fens north-east of the city, where he bathed, as Lord Byron had done 125 years before. Later, when he returned to college or to his desk, he would do only the lightest of tasks. He was taking  a leaf out of the book of G. H. Hardy, who believed that the longest a mathematician can profitably spend doing serious work is four hours.\n\nOf all the months in the Cambridge academic calendar, June was the most relaxed. The examinations over, it was time for the students to leave the university, but only after the catharsis of the summer ball. The intoxicating mix of music and dancing, free-flowing champagne, gorgeous frocks and sharply cut dinner suits could cheer up the most abject examinee. Dons could put on their summer suits and wind down to the 'long vac', when they had no administrative duties and were free to spend the long, languid afternoons doing nothing except sit in a deckchair and watch a game of cricket. Dirac was nonplussed by the appeal of an activity that involved twenty-two men spending hours - sometimes days - playing a game that often ended in a draw, which devoted spectators would often deem exciting. The game had no more ardent admirer than G. H. Hardy, for whom it was akin to pure mathematics: all the more beautiful for its lack of useful purpose. A few years later, he gave pride of place in his study to a photograph of the Australian batsman Donald Bradman, one of Hardy's three greatest heroes (the others were Einstein and Lenin). Hardy was probably looking forward to Bradman's first Test appearances on English soil, but the prospect will have left Dirac unmoved; he was busy preparing to spend the summer climbing and hillwalking with friends. He needed a break and some fresh inspiration if he was to sort out the problems with his hole theory and so answer his critics, including the mocking Pauli and the privately scornful Bohr. Several of Dirac's colleagues would be lining up to attend his public lecture at the Bristol meeting at the end of the summer, he knew, to see if he had cracked the problem of negative-energy electrons.\n\nPreparing for his second trip to the Soviet Union, Dirac read in the British press that Stalin was tightening his grip, forcing through his programme of collective farming, squeezing the peasants in order to pay for a crash programme of industrialisation and persecuting political opponents and religious minorities. Some newspapers were in no doubt of Stalin's malevolence - the _Daily Telegraph_ wrote regularly of his 'Reign of Blood' and his 'war on religion' - but others, including the _Manchester Guardian_ , gave him the benefit of the doubt. The _New Statesman_ \\- the house journal of leftist intellectuals in Britain and favourite reading of Kapitza's in the Trinity common room - insisted that Stalin should be given a fair hearing. Dirac agreed: one of the few things that would draw him into conversation were comments that he perceived to be unfairly hostile to the Soviet Union. Rudolf Peierls later recalled: 'At a time when everything Russian was anathema, he questioned why each particular item was wrong, and this often caused raised eyebrows.' Wanting to see life there for himself, he again ignored the fears of his mother: 'I do hope it is safe in Russia. One hears dreadful stories about it.'\n\nDuring his trip, Dirac felt the arm of the Soviet military on his shoulder: en route to Kharkov, when he attempted to cross the Soviet border at a place not mentioned in the visa that Tamm had obtained for him, border guards held him at the crossing point for three days before releasing him. By early July, he had heard that Soviet law forbade foreigners who stayed in the country for more than a month to take out either Soviet money or foreign currency. So he left the USSR in late July, within a month of his arrival, having cancelled his plans to hike in the Caucasus. His vacation foreshortened, he soon returned to England, to what most scientists would regard as the media highlight of their life.\n\nIn September, Hardy was praising Bradman's devastating performances in the Ashes, and Bristol was preparing to host the British Association meeting. Almost three thousand delegates - including George Bernard Shaw - attended, each of them having paid a pound for the privilege. Jim Crowther told readers of the _Manchester Guardian_ that the public delegates were young and dressed informally, many of the women in sleeveless and flowered voile frocks, the men in alpaca jackets and grey flannels. The ticket price had not changed since the meetings began almost a century before, when the Association's leaders were choosing the most appropriate word to describe the participants. They considered 'savants', 'nature peepers' and 'nature pokers', but finally settled on 'scientists', coined in 1834 by William Whewell, one of John Stuart Mill's philosophical adversaries. Though many hated the new word - Michael Faraday disliked it almost as much as the triply sibilant 'physicist' - it had caught on by the time Dirac was in junior school.\n\nThe organisers, probably fearing that Dirac would give a technical talk of limited public appeal, scheduled him to speak in a modest room in one of the university's new physics laboratories, funded by the tobacco manufacturer H. H. Wills. At 11 a.m. on Monday, 8 September, Dirac stood up without fanfare to address a crowded room on the subject of 'The Proton'. Never confident when he spoke at public meetings, he may have been particularly apprehensive at this one: this was the first time he had agreed to address a lay audience and the first time he had spoken to many of the teachers who had seen him flower. If Charles was there, as is likely, he will have had a full heart as he had not heard his son speak in public before: Paul Dirac would now have no choice but to talk about his science to his father.\n\nDirac entered into the spirit of the British Association. Speaking with his usual directness, in lilting Bristol tones, he talked about his research in a way that might almost have passed as colloquial, though with none of Eddington's flair. To ensure that he was intelligible to people with no science training, he began with the statement that 'matter is made from atoms', and quickly went up the gears, ending with his idea that the proton is a hole in the negative-energy sea of electrons. This implied, he pointed out, that there is only one fundamental particle, the electron, adding that such an economy in nature was 'the dream of philosophers'. For many in his audience, this will have been an exciting revelation, but not for Gamow and Landau, who were at the back of the room, sitting on wooden benches. The two of them had roared down to Bristol on Gamow's motorbike, Landau perched behind him on the luggage carrier. They travelled to the meeting, partly as Bohr's unofficial emissaries, specifically to see if Dirac had anything new to say about his theory. During the talk, Gamow and Landau craned their necks to see the speaker, hanging on his every word, Landau, as usual, unable to resist making snide asides.  After twenty minutes of reiterating arguments he had already published, often using the same words as he had used in his papers, Dirac drew to a close, and they realised that he had said nothing new. Their trip to Bristol had been a wild goose chase.\n\nDirac's theory of negative-energy electrons nevertheless captured the imagination of journalists, and the British newspaper reports gave him more publicity than he had ever known. After his presentation, the representative from the American Science News Service wired Washington: 'This new theory may prove to be as important and interesting to the public as Einstein's theories have been.' The _New York Times_ picked up the story and reported that Dirac's 'acclaimed' theory 'upset all present conceptions of space and matter', adding that 'These physical scientists have a more exciting life than Columbus.' But Dirac's peers were unimpressed. On the way back to Cambridge, Landau and Gamow stopped at a post office. Landau sent Bohr a telegram consisting of a single word: 'Crap'.\n\nThe telegram reached Bohr soon after he received from Dirac a copy of his textbook, _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics._ Even if the author's name were not on the cover, his identity would have been obvious to Bohr from a quick flick through: the unadorned presentation, the logical construction of the subject from first principles and the complete absence of historical perspective, philosophical niceties and illustrative calculations. This was the vision of a mathematically minded physicist, not an engineer. Dirac's peers marvelled at its elegance and at the deceptively plain language, which somehow seemed to reveal new insights on each reading, like a great poem. Many of the students - especially the less able ones - were bemused, dissatisfied and sometimes even dispirited. The book had been written with no regard for his readers' intellectual shortcomings, without the slightest sign of emotion, with not a single leavening metaphor or simile. For Dirac, the quantum world was not like anything else people experience, so it would have been misleading to include comparisons with everyday behaviour. He scarcely mentioned empirical observations except at the beginning, where he described an experiment that demonstrates the failure of classical theory to account for matter on the atomic scale and, hence, motivates the need for quantum mechanics. In its 357 pages, _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ featured neither a single diagram, nor an index, nor a list of references, nor suggestions for further reading. This was, above all, a personal view of quantum mechanics, which is why Dirac - usually someone who abjured personal pronouns - always referred to it as 'my book'.\n\nPhysicists immediately hailed it a classic. _Nature_ published a rhapsodic review by an anonymous reviewer who - to judge by the eloquence and sharp turn of phrase - may well have been Eddington.  The author made it clear that this was no ordinary account of quantum mechanics:\n\n[Dirac] bids us throw aside preconceived ideas regarding the nature of phenomena and admit the existence of a substratum of which it is impossible to form a picture. We may describe this as the application of 'pure thought' to physics, and it is this which makes Dirac's method more profound than that of other writers.\n\nThe book eclipsed all the other texts on quantum mechanics written at about the same time - one by Born, another by Jordan - and became the canonical text on the subject in the 1930s. Pauli warmly praised it as a triumph and, although he worried that its abstractions rendered the theory too distant from experiment, described the book as 'an indispensable standard work'. Einstein was another admirer, writing that the book was 'the most logically perfect presentation of quantum theory'. _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ later became Einstein's constant companion: he often took it on vacation for leisure reading and, when he came across a difficult quantum problem, would mutter to himself, 'Where's my Dirac?'\n\nBut some of Dirac's undergraduate students were not pleased to find that the book was largely a transcript of his lectures: why, these students wondered, was it worth bothering to go and listen to him? Yet others found the course uniquely compelling. He would enter the lecture theatre punctually and in full academic garb, wearing the traditional uniform of gown and mortarboard. Otherwise, there was nothing else theatrical about him. He would clear his throat, wait for silence, then begin. For most of the lecture, he would stand still and erect, enunciating each word, addressing what one of his students described as his 'personal unseen world'. At the blackboard, he was an artist, writing calmly and clearly, beginning at the top left-hand corner, then methodically working downwards, writing every letter and symbol so that someone at the back of the room could see it clearly. The audience was usually quiescent. If a student asked a question, he would dispatch it with the economy of a great batsman and then move on, as if nothing had disturbed his flow. After precisely fifty-five minutes he would draw his presentation to a close and then, unceremoniously, gather his papers together and walk out.\n\nOne of the new students who were impressed by Dirac's course in the autumn of 1930 was Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, later a leading astrophysicist but then a wide-eyed student just arrived from Bombay. For him, the course was 'just like a piece of music you want to hear over and over again'. During his time in Cambridge, he attended the entire course four times.\n\nDirac probably knew he had disappointed his colleagues at the British Association meeting by failing to say anything new. He was about to go to his second Solvay Conference, aware that few of the physicists took seriously his unified theory of electrons and protons; his proposal that protons were holes in the negative-energy sea was beginning to look not just implausible but untenable. One of the blows he suffered came shortly after the Bristol meeting when Tamm wrote to tell him that Pauli had proved that the holes have the same mass as the electron. Experimenters had not detected such a particle, which is probably why Tamm added a sympathetic comment: 'I would be very much pleased to hear that Pauli is wrong.'\n\nThis Solvay meeting was later remembered for being the one where leadership of the community of theoreticians passed from Einstein to Bohr. Einstein was looking out of touch, downcast after Bohr had bested him in one of their tussles about quantum mechanics and its meaning. For Einstein, the theory was fundamentally unsatisfactory as it did not even claim to describe physical reality, only the probabilities for the appearance of a particular physical reality on which an observing experimenter's attention is fixed. Such a theory may be good at explaining experimental results, but it is certainly not complete, Einstein argued. Disillusioned, and uninterested in much of what his colleagues had to say, he consoled himself by playing after-dinner violin duets with the Queen of Belgium, one of his new friends.\n\nUnlike the previous Solvay Conference in 1927, the atmosphere at this one was heavy with forebodings about the world outside physics, where the recession was ravaging most industrialised nations and providing fertile ground for political extremists. A month before the conference, Hitler's National Socialists had taken second place in Germany's election, followed by the Communists. G\u00f6ttingen was now bedecked with Nazi flags, many of its shops displaying trinkets decorated with swastikas. Einstein was sick of the anti-Semitism in Berlin and despised Germany's emerging leader: 'If  the stomach of Germany was not empty, Hitler would not be where he is.'\n\nAs Dirac kept his politics almost exclusively to himself, most of his Cambridge colleagues mistakenly believed he had no interests at all, that he was as one-dimensional as the lines in his projective geometry. He was privately alarmed by the rise of Hitler and broadly supportive of Stalin's project in the USSR, especially its commitment to mass literacy and education. Aware of Dirac's interest, Tamm wrote to him about the radical experiment in 'brigade education', in which students studied intensively, alone and in groups, with no lectures, but with a professor on standby for consultation:\n\nI never thought it possible for a large body of students to work as hard as our students do now. Our [brigades, each of five students, work and study together] 9 days out of 10 [. . .] from 9am to 9pm with a 2-hour interruption for a meal (research work included, which is of course conducted individually by each student). Yesterday, speaking with a brigade, I found them troubled by the fact that they have 'lost without cause' six out of 270 working hours of the last month\n\nAlthough Dirac was interested in the Soviet experiment, it was of only marginal interest to him compared with theoretical physics. By late autumn, he had every reason to be dissatisfied with his progress as his hole theory was in deep trouble. Oppenheimer and Weyl had independently come to the same conclusion as Pauli - that Dirac had no theoretical justification for believing that his holes were protons. The implication was that the theory was incorrect; something was amiss with the Dirac equation. But he was convinced that it was correct - what was needed was the correct interpretation of its mathematics. The American theoretician Edwin Kemble later put his finger on the kind of faith Dirac had in his equation: '[He] has always seemed to me a good deal of a mystic [. . .] he thinks every formula has a meaning if properly understood.'\n\nTowards the end of term, Dirac went through his annual chore of refusing most invitations to Christmas parties, though he did occasionally attend the annual dinner of the Cavendish Physical Society, a boisterous evening of eating, drinking and singing. After Kapitza attended the dinner for the first time in December 1921, he wrote incredulously to his mother, observing how quickly even a moderate amount of alcohol freed the inhibitions of his English colleagues and  made their faces 'lose their stiffness and become lively and animated'.  By the end of the meal, after the cheeseboard and port had been passed round, the air was thick with cigar smoke and everyone was shouting to be heard above the din. The ritual was not yet over: the next stage was a series of facetious toasts (one had been 'To the electron: may it never be of any use to anybody') alternating with off-key renditions of popular tunes such as 'I Love a Lassie', their lyrics rewritten as a jokey commentary on the past year at the laboratory.  At the climax, the portly Rutherford, Thomson and everyone else stood on their chairs, linked together with arms crossed and belted out 'Auld Lang Syne' and then, finally, the National Anthem 'God Save the King'. After the bacchanalia ended, usually well after midnight, it was up to those left standing to take their drunken colleagues to their homes.\n\nIn 1930, Dirac did not attend the dinner but will probably have heard later that Kapitza was the focus of attention that night. Rutherford, then President of the Royal Society, had secured a professorship for his favourite colleague and funding for the construction of a new building to accommodate him and his laboratories. At the end of the seven-course dinner, while the sixty guests were chewing their mince pies, Darwin reminded them of the experience of entering Kapitza's laboratory: 'you had to ring to be admitted by a \"flunkey\" and became confronted not with men working in their shirt sleeves, but with Prof Kapitza seated at a table, like the arch criminal in a detective story, only having to press a button to do a gigantic experiment'.\n\nThe laughter at this image of Kapitza, apparently a forerunner of a James Bond villain, will have been hearty, and it is safe to guess that knowing glances will have passed among his colleagues, many of them envious of his relationship with their laboratory's director. Blackett was not there. Rutherford had no time for petty jealousy but was not above making a thinly disguised attack on his recently retired colleague Sir James Jeans, whose _The Mysterious Universe_ had been a best-seller since it first appeared in the bookstores the month before. Rutherford was as down to earth and, at the same time, as snobbish as anyone in science. As the recorder of the dinner wrote: Sir Ernest Rutherford 'deplored the writing of popular books by men who had been serious scientists, to satisfy the craving for the mysterious exhibited by the public'. This was a common opinion  in Cambridge. A few months later, his idoliser C. P. Snow - a scientist about to become a writer - sneered at science popularisers for doing a job that was just too easy: 'there is no argument and no appeal, just worshipper and worshipped'. The result was, Snow declared, a 'great evil'. Within three years, Snow published his semi-autobiographical novel _The Search_ , the first fiction to bring to a wide audience the atmosphere of Rutherford's laboratory, and to feature Paul Dirac.\n\nA week after Christmas, Rutherford was ennobled at the end of his five-year stint as President of the Royal Society. But the pleasure the honour gave him was eclipsed by a family tragedy: his daughter and only child, Fowler's wife, died in childbirth two days before Christmas. Lord Rutherford, grieving as he approached his sixtieth birthday, must have thought his years of glory were over. He was not doing much research of his own, so his remaining hopes of being involved in more of the ground-breaking discoveries that he longed for were in the hands of his 'boys'.\n\nDirac showed none of the confidence that might be expected of a young man at the top of his game. Chandrasekhar wrote home to his father that he was disappointed that Dirac did not show a bit more swagger: '[Dirac is a] lean, meek shy young \"Fellow\" (FRS) who goes slyly along the streets. He walks quite close to the walls (like a thief!), and is not at all healthy. A contrast to Mr Fowler [. . .] Dirac is pale, thin, and looks terribly overworked.'\n\nWork was not Dirac's only concern. Having read his mother's letters, he may have sensed that his parents' relationship, tense and unstable, was fast approaching a flashpoint. Charles Dirac, dreading retirement, was pleading with the Bristol education authorities to be allowed to stay on in his job, but they were resisting. Betty, now with a car of her own, was doing little except chauffeur him three times a day to and from Cotham Road School. Dirac was watching his sister become another of his father's servants.\n\nMeanwhile, Flo knew that, in only a few months, she would be spending most of her life at home alone with her husband: 'It simply won't bear thinking about.'\n**Fifteen**\n\nRussian politics like opium seems infallibly to provoke the most fantastic dreams and imaginings on the part of the people who study them.\n\nE. A. WALKER, British Embassy, Moscow, 1931\n\nIn Cambridge, during the spring of 1931, Dirac happened upon a rich new seam of ideas that would crystallise into one of his most famous contributions to science. In the thick of this project, he received a letter from his mother, beginning:\n\n27 April 1931\n\nMy dear Paul\n\nPa and I had quite a row yesterday all about some wine upset on some cheap stamps. He got in the most awful rage for a few minutes & then said he had had enough of me & should _go_ if I did anything more to upset him.\n\nI apologised most humbly as usual but on thinking it over, I am pretty certain he meant it.\n\nIn three pages of brief, matter-of-fact sentences, she described to Dirac - apparently for the first time - the charade of her marriage. She told him of a young woman who had visited the family when he was a baby, stayed to supper and had been escorted home by Charles to Bedminster. Flo had written to her that she 'wouldn't have it any more and thought it was all finished'. But she was deluding herself, as she realised when she visited Charles's Esperanto exhibition at Bishop Road School and saw that the woman who was presenting it with him, wearing a huge pair of tortoise-shell glasses, was the young woman who had visited them decades before. 'Fancy if they have kept up the acquaintance for 29 years,' Flo wrote. By this account, his father had been cheating on the woman who had spent most of her life looking after him. Her conclusion was: 'She has nothing to do but humour him, I have to keep the house clean, dress him, bath him & worst of all find something to feed him on.'\n\nAs usual, Dirac appears to have said nothing of this to anyone, even to his close friends. In the early months of 1931, a quiet time for  his fellow theoreticians, he was working on the most promising new theory he had conceived for years. The theory broke new ground in magnetism. For centuries, it had been a commonplace of science that magnetic poles come only in pairs, labelled north and south: if one pole is spotted, then the opposite one will be close by. Dirac had found that quantum theory is compatible with the existence of _single_ magnetic poles. During a talk at the Kapitza Club, he dubbed them magnons, but the name never caught on in this context; the particles became known as magnetic monopoles.\n\nThe idea arose accidentally, he later said, when he was playing with equations, seeking to understand not magnetism but electrical charge. The American experimenter Robert Millikan had demonstrated that this charge exists only in discrete amounts, each of them exactly equal to a whole number multiplied by the size of the electron's charge, usually denoted by _e._ So the electrical charge of a piece of matter can be, for example, five times the charge of the electron (5 _e_ ) or minus six times its charge (-6 _e_ ), but _never_ two and a half times its charge (2.5 _e_ ). The question Dirac wanted to answer was: _why_ does electric charge come only in discrete amounts?\n\nAt first, Dirac worked in traditional ways, with quantum mechanics and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. Then, like a jazz musician working with two intertwining melodies, he began the riff that led to the monopole. Dirac pictured the magnetic lines of force that end on a quantum particle, much like the ones that terminate on the pole of a bar magnet, usually displayed by patterns of iron filings, each of them obediently aligned to the magnetic force acting on it. He asked: if quantum mechanics and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism are assumed to be true, what can be said about the magnetic field associated with a quantum particle? To answer the question, he used an innovative combination of geometric thinking - picturing the possible waves in space and time - with powerful algebraic reasoning. He found a way of building on the existing structure of quantum theory, without changing any of its essential foundations and preserving all the rules that governed the interpretation of the theory. If quantum mechanics can be likened to a house of playing cards - with a fragile balance between its interconnected parts - then Dirac can be said to have added a few more cards, preserving the structure's balance, while extending its  range to include a new type of particle. The theory furnished a new connection between electricity and magnetism, an equation that relates the smallest-possible electrical charge with the weakest-possible magnetic charge.\n\nThe equation enabled him to draw some startling conclusions. First, the strength of the magnetic field of a monopole is quantised - it can have only certain allowed values, whole-number multiples of the minimum quantity, whose value he could easily calculate. It turned out that two monopoles of opposite sign are hard to separate: the force pulling them together is almost five thousand times the force that attracts an electron to a proton. This, Dirac suggested, might be why magnetic poles of opposite sign have never been separated and therefore appear in pairs.\n\nHis second conclusion was still more striking: the observation of just one monopole anywhere in the universe would explain why _electrical_ charge is quantised - the very thing Dirac had set out to understand. Having checked his final calculations and having found no errors, he came to a bold conclusion: if an experimenter happens on a single monopole anywhere in the universe, the new theory can explain why nature had chosen to apportion electric charge _only_ in discrete amounts.\n\nDirac's theory did not guarantee the existence of monopoles but did show that quantum mechanics can describe such particles _if_ they occur in nature. Centuries earlier, other scientists had speculated that monopoles might exist, but those ideas were just hunches, with no logical underpinning. Dirac was the first to give clear reasons _why_ such particles might be observed. He may well have thought that the idea was too beautiful to be wrong, but he followed the convention of presenting his conclusion as an understatement: 'one would be surprised if Nature made no use of it'. And he chose not to go the whole hog by trumpeting the magnetic monopole as a prediction of his theory. Like all physicists at that time, he accepted that experimenters had found the need for only two fundamental particles - the electron and the proton - and that it was not the job of theorists to complicate matters by proposing new ones. Ironically, the first physicist to buck the trend was an experimenter, Rutherford, when he proposed in 1920 that most atomic nuclei contain a hitherto undetected particle, roughly as heavy as the proton. He called the new particle 'the neutron'.\n\nYet, in his paper on the monopole, Dirac implied for the first time that he no longer believed there are only two fundamental particles. In the introduction, he declared that he had suggested that a proton is a hole in the negative-energy sea of electrons: Oppenheimer and Weyl had convinced him that the hole must have the same mass as the electron (he did not mention Pauli, who had also come to the same conclusion). So Dirac followed the logic of Sherlock Holmes: 'When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' The conclusion was that each hole corresponded to a new, hitherto undetected type of particle with exactly the same mass as the electron:\n\nA hole, if there were one, would be a new kind of particle, unknown to experimental physics, having the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. We may call such a particle an anti-electron. We should not expect to find any of them in nature, on account of their rapid rate of recombination with electrons, but if they could be produced experimentally in high vacuum they would be quite stable and amenable to observation.\n\nAgain, Dirac is surprisingly circumspect. Although he states the properties of his new particle and even names it, he seems less keen to stress the inevitability of its existence than the difficulty of detecting it. If Dirac had been confident, he would have included a plain-spoken sentence such as 'According to this version of hole theory, the anti-electron should be detectable,' but he held back. Paradoxically, he did underline a radically new interpretation of protons: they were nothing to do with electrons, he suggested, but have their own negative-energy states, 'an unoccupied one appearing as an antiproton'. Within twenty lines of prose, he had foreseen the existence of the anti-electron and the anti-proton.\n\nThough chary about predicting new particles, Dirac showed no timidity at all when he introduced what amounted to a new way of doing theoretical physics. In two paragraphs, consisting of 350 words and no equations, he argued that the best way to make progress was to seek ever-more-powerful mathematical foundations for fundamental theories, not to tinker with existing theories or look to experiment for inspiration. He envisaged the future of physical science as an unending series of revolutions, driven by mathematical imagination, not by opportunistic responses to the latest announcements from experimenters. This was tantamount to a new style of  scientific investigation: seeking laws of ever-greater generality - as Descartes, John Stuart Mill and others had recommended - but relying on mathematical inspiration to find them, rather than taking their cues mainly from observations.\n\nHe began by pointing out that before Einstein used non-Euclidean geometry as the basis of the general theory of relativity and before Heisenberg used non-commutative algebra in quantum mechanics, these branches of mathematics were 'considered to be purely fictions of the mind and pastimes for logical thinkers'. The solution to the hardest problems in fundamental physics, Dirac inferred, will 'presumably require a more drastic revision of our fundamental concepts than any that have gone before'. He set out his manifesto with the blazing confidence of a young scientist at the height of his powers:\n\nQuite likely these changes [to our fundamental concepts] will be so great that it will be beyond the power of human intelligence to get the necessary new ideas by direct attempts to formulate the experimental data in mathematical terms. The theoretical worker will therefore have to proceed in a more indirect way. The most powerful method of advance that can be suggested at present is to employ all the resources of pure mathematics in attempts to perfect and generalise the mathematical formalism that forms the existing basis of theoretical physics, and after each success in this direction, to try to interpret the new mathematical features in terms of physical entities . . .\n\nHis message was clear: theorists should concentrate much more on the mathematical foundations of their subject and much less on the latest bulletins from the laboratories - to abandon centuries of tradition. No wonder Dirac became known as 'the theorist's theorist'.\n\nEarly in May 1931, when Dirac was writing his paper, Tamm arrived in Cambridge to spend a few months in St John's College, having left his wife and children in Moscow. He had no trouble securing permission to work in the UK, as Dirac was officially a favoured scientist in the Soviet Union, having been elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences three months before.\n\nFor once, Dirac was willing to share his ideas and briefed Tamm on his magnetic monopole theory, suggesting that he use the new theory to calculate the energy values and quantum waves that describe an electron in the vicinity of a monopole. Apart from when  he was asleep, Tamm worked non-stop for three and a half days and finished just in time for Dirac to include his results - less exciting than Dirac had hoped - in the paper. In college, Tamm fraternised easily with the dons, including a few who had become friends with Dirac, having broken through his crust of reserve. Among them were the mathematician Max Newman and the Cavendish experimentalist John Cockcroft, both five years older than Dirac. The Yorkshire-born Cockcroft was a trained engineer and a natural manager, intensely focused to the point of near silence and with a flair for helping Kapitza and his other colleagues to solve technical problems. He was 'a sort of scientific dogsbody of genius', Crowther said.\n\nOnly four days after Tamm arrived, Dirac organised a breakfast in his room to talk about Russia with Tamm and the classicist Martin Charlesworth. Dirac's gyp will have delivered the food, probably plates of bacon, eggs and fried bread, served with a pot of tea, toast and marmalade. The three men talked for four and a half hours. Dirac wanted to learn about the Soviet economy, but he was uneasy when there was any sign that Tamm might present his Marxist views in public, as he showed when Tamm told him that he had been invited to speak on 'Higher Education in the Soviet Union' in London. Dirac remarked pointedly to him that he hoped the talk would be on education, not politics.\n\nFrom the tone of the letters he wrote to his wife in Moscow, Tamm was surprised that so many Cambridge dons were interested in the Soviet experiment. When he had lived in Britain eighteen years before, the university was known for its conservatism, but around the time he arrived there this time, the Marxist Bernal and his colleagues had established a nucleus of left-wing thought and activity among the academics. As Dirac will have heard, it was standard Marxist practice to praise the successes of the Soviet Union and not to dwell on its failures, but to draw attention to the millions of victims of unemployment and imperialist wars and the economic waste that could allegedly be prevented by a properly planned cooperation.  The comments Tamm makes in his letters give the impression that Dirac was then no more than an interested observer of the Marxist proselytisers; his passion was physics, though he was now more relaxed about taking time off to pursue other interests. After lunch, Dirac would often drive Tamm out into the countryside,  sometimes pausing by a roadside tree so that Tamm could teach Dirac the elements of rock climbing and help him to overcome his fear of heights; in return, Dirac taught Tamm to drive and even helped him pass the recently introduced driving test.\n\nIn late June, near the end of Tamm's visit, he and Dirac headed north to the more challenging terrain of Scotland, where they spent a week in the mountains of the Isle of Skye with the industrial chemist James Bell. An expert climber, he had been a friend of Tamm's since their student days in Edinburgh and was a close follower and sceptical supporter of the Soviet experiment, steering a moderate course between Soviet propaganda and the anti-Soviet articles in the British press. Skye provided just the kind of scenery and company Dirac loved, and his vacation gave him an excuse to delay his return to Bristol.\n\nThat year, the summer days of Cambridge did not have their usual languor. They were rudely interrupted by a political frisson whose unlikely source was the Science Museum in London, the location of the second International Congress on the History of Science and Technology. For a few days in early July 1931, a red flag flew over South Kensington. Such gatherings usually attracted no attention, but this one was special: it was attended by a high-powered Soviet delegation that included Nikolai Bukharin - formerly one of Lenin's closest associates, now a colleague of Stalin's - and by several leaders of the Soviet scientific community, notably Boris Hessen. A few weeks before, Stalin had announced the end to almost eighteen months of political warfare between the Soviet state and its intelligentsia, so this conference offered an opportunity to present the Soviet outlook on science and technology in a favourable light. Bukharin had been the darling of the Bolshevik Party but had been pilloried in 1929 when he opposed forced collectivisation of farming and the crash industrialisation of the economy. A year later, he was sacked as the editor of _Pravda_ , but remained loyal to Stalin and gave a full-throated presentation of the Marxist view of science to his audience in the museum. Bukharin stressed the historical context of science and the influence of social and economic conditions on scientific development, dismissing the traditional emphasis on the achievements of outstanding individuals, such as Newton and Darwin. The Soviets knew the right way forward, Bukharin concluded \\- by developing science as part of a unified plan for the whole of society:\n\nThe building of science in the U.S.S.R. is proceeding as the conscious construction of the scientific 'superstructures': the plan of scientific works is determined in the first instance by the technical and economic plan, the perspectives of technical and economic development. But this means that thereby we are arriving _not only at a synthesis of science, but at a social synthesis of science and practice._ 18\n\nAt the end of Bukharin's lecture, there was silence, followed by coughs and shufflings. But the talk was a success: it was reported in several British newspapers and magazines and made an indelible impression on many of the delegates. Desmond Bernal called the gathering 'the most important meeting of ideas [. . .] since the [Bolshevik] Revolution'. Dirac did not participate in the meeting but will have heard about it from Tamm, who accompanied the Soviet party to visit Marx's grave in Highgate Cemetery, and from Kapitza, who organised a lunch in their honour at Trinity College.\n\nThat MI5 was carefully monitoring Bukharin's activities during his visit to Britain would not have surprised Kapitza, but he would surely have been taken aback if he had known that, since January, Special Branch had been opening, checking and sometimes copying mail sent to him from Moscow and Berlin. Armed with folders bulging with vaguely incriminating reports - all of them scientifically inaccurate, sometimes to the point of illiteracy - MI5 were concerned that he had access to sensitive military information and suspected 'that he may be sending [it] abroad'. The search revealed nothing and the government warrant to intercept his mail was suspended on 3 June. But MI5 kept its tabs on him.\n\nDirac was shortly to travel to the United States for another hiking vacation and a sabbatical term in Princeton, but he was duty-bound to visit Bristol first. He disliked confrontations, so he must have been steeling himself in late July as he prepared to spend a week in 6 Julius Road. Everyone was even more unhappy than they had been when he had last seen them, as Dirac knew from his mother's letters. Betty, unable to afford to run her car, sold it for a knockdown price. Charles, bitter that he was being forced to retire, consoled himself by spending the evenings with his friends Mr and Mrs Fisher at their  bungalow in Portishead. Flo, suspicious that Mrs Fisher was one of his mistresses, was hoping he would leave to set up home with her or his girlfriend in the Esperanto group: 'I can't help it anyhow, he is tired of me and likes someone younger.'\n\nDirac thought his family home was a disgrace - it was in a state of seedy disrepair, as his father refused to have maintenance work done and his mother disliked housework more every year. According to Flo, the atmosphere inside was toxic, thick with resentment. She despised Charles, and it would not be surprising if he were upset that she had exploited their marital problems by thickening the wedge between him and his son. It would have been out of character for Dirac to do anything other than to keep his head down and to depart after putting in a token appearance. He did just that, driving back to Cambridge after a few days to give a talk. But he could not escape quite so easily: on the day before the seminar, another harrowing letter from his mother arrived:\n\n19 July 1931\n\nMy dear Paul,\n\nI don't know if this will surprise you but your father & I are going to part (as his own father & mother did.)\n\nIt is his own idea; he says he has hated me for 30 years. I know I could never please him but didn't know it was quite so bad as that.\n\nHe will give me \u00a31 a week or more (it will have to be more) & I am to clear out.\n\nI don't mind, if I have never pleased him. I sent one of his lady friends away when you were just born because she came in every night & he took her home to Bedminster & returned nearly 12 P.M. She has kept in with him ever since & he says he wishes he had married her. She is a nurse now & I suppose will come & look after him.\n\nOtherwise, he sits in the waiting room at Zetland Road with Mrs Fisher from Portishead & she comes up here pretty often, or he is always out. Betty says she will stay with him as they are both after his money.\n\nI am going to see a lawyer Fred [my brother] knows, to-morrow morning & will get it settled before he leaves school on Friday or he may clear out.\n\nDo you know of a tiny cottage or bungalow near the sea up your way? It would be a complete change & I love the sea. I expect Louie or Nell would come along occasionally & I should not meet anyone I know.\n\nIf you could find me a tiny place anywhere I should be so grateful. I wouldn't interfere with you in the least but you could come & see me in your car whenever you had time.\n\nWe are not having any row about it - it is not dignified so you need not stay away if you care to come along earlier. I'll post this while they are at Church.\n\nWith love from Mother\n\nDirac could now understand a scene that had haunted him since he was a child: his parents bawling at each other in the kitchen while he, Felix and Betty were locked outside in the garden. The phrase 'he has hated me for 30 years' probably struck home in Dirac's mind, constantly in search of numbers to process: as he was only twenty-nine years old, she had, in effect, told him that he had not been conceived in a loving relationship, let alone raised in one.\n\nFlo did not wait for her son's advice. She went straight to her lawyer, who advised that Charles could not legally throw her out unless she was with another man, otherwise he would lose his pension. As soon as she was alone, she wrote to Dirac: '[Charles and I] don't speak, but never did much, but I guess it better to stick to Betty. Two of us ought to manage him.'\n\nTen days after he received his mother's most recent letter, on 31 July 1931, Dirac sailed from Liverpool to North America, then in the tightening grip of economic depression. He took his mother with him for the first part of the journey, apparently to give her a short break from the acrimony in 6 Julius Road (she appears to have returned home immediately). After another long hiking vacation with Van Vleck, in the Glacier National Park, Dirac arrived in Princeton - a little over an hour's drive from both New York and Philadelphia - then stirring after the long torpor of the summer vacation. The mathematician Malcolm Robertson, who arrived there at the same time, later remembered being overwhelmed when he drove through the town for the first time at dusk:\n\nThis was my first glimpse of the charming college town that was to play such a large part in my life, and a joyful and exhilarating experience it was indeed. I have never forgotten that first encounter, and my feeling of excitement and awe at the lovely stately homes among the old trees, the magnificent university campus with both new and old stone buildings, acres of well-kept lawns, and even a lake and a peaceful golf course.\n\nSoon after Dirac arrived there at the end of August, he was given a handsomely appointed office in Fine Hall, home of the university's  mathematics department, the newest building on the campus. It was largely the initiative of the tweed-suited Princeton mathematician Oswald Veblen, who oversaw every detail of the building's opulent design, right down to the locations of the electrical sockets. Almost a third of its budget for internal decorations had been allocated to rugs woven from seamless Scottish chenille. Throughout the new building, there was other evidence of his Anglophile tastes, with a firm nod to the ambience in G\u00f6ttingen: the hall's faux Oxbridge architecture and furnishings, its freshly varnished oak-panelled walls, even the ritual of taking afternoon tea. In the common room used for special occasions, Veblen had arranged for Einstein's aphorism _Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist Er nicht_ (God is cunning, but He is not malicious) to be engraved in German on the rim of the huge stone fireplace.\n\nOn the morning of Wednesday 1 October, Dirac walked to Fine Hall from his lodgings near the town centre through the blaze of red and orange foliage, dried-out leaves crackling underfoot. A few hours later, for the first time in his career, he was to co-present a seminar, and with the least likely of his colleagues, Wolfgang Pauli. For Princeton University's physicists, walking to the hall through the connecting corridor, and other faculty members, crossing the campus in the biting chill of the late afternoon, this was an exciting start to the new academic term, an opportunity to see two of the subject's luminaries talking about some of their freshest ideas. The occasion was, Pauli wrote to Rudolf Peierls, 'a first national attraction'.\n\nEach speaker was going to present what amounted to a prediction of a new particle: Dirac presented the monopole, Pauli another hypothetical particle, later called the neutrino. The event marked the dawn of a new culture in physics, in which theory could pre-empt experiment. The figures and demeanours of the two speakers contrasted comically. Dirac was thin as a reed, distant and serene, with the smooth and unblemished skin of a young man but, incongruously, with a pronounced stoop. The overweight Pauli was two years Dirac's senior but his waistline made him look older. When sitting, he looked like a judge deep in reflection, his arms folded over his belly, his bulbous torso rocking rhythmically back and forth. At the seminar, he probably looked troubled and in some pain, having broken his left shoulder when he fell downstairs a few months before, the worse for drink.\n\nMany in the audience will have read about Dirac's prediction, but Pauli's had not appeared in an academic journal, though attentive readers of the _New York Times_ read about it in an article published a few months before. Pauli had first proposed the existence of his new particle in a private letter to a meeting of experts on radioactivity.  There, he tentatively suggested that the existence of the particle could explain the problem that Bohr had identified with energy conservation when a radioactive nucleus ejects an electron. The essence of the problem was that electrons from these nuclei did not all have the same energy; rather, the electrons had a continuous range of energies. Pauli put forward a 'desperate' explanation for this spectrum of energies: the electron in each radioactive decay was ejected with another particle - hitherto undetected - so that the two particles shared their total energy in proportions that varied from one decay to the next. According to Pauli's theory, the new particle should have no electrical charge, the same spin as the electron and only a tiny mass. Few of Pauli's peers liked the idea: for Wigner it was 'crazy', for Bohr it was implausible and Dirac thought it was simply wrong. Pauli later described the neutrino as 'that foolish child of the crisis of my life', referring to his troubled psychological state. His problems had begun earlier in the year, following a series of tragedies - the suicide of his mother three years before, the remarriage of his father to a woman Pauli loathed, and the ending of his brief first marriage, when his wife had the impertinence to leave him for a scientific mediocrity ('such an average chemist').\n\nThe next day, Pauli left Princeton to return to Europe, but Dirac stayed to give a six-lecture course on quantum mechanics, ending with a presentation of his hole theory. In the closing few minutes, he affirmed more clearly than ever in public that anti-electrons should be detectable because:\n\n[they] are not to be considered as a mathematical fiction; it should be possible to detect them by experimental means.\n\nDirac repeated his suggestion that the idea could be tested experimentally by arranging for pairs of ultra-energy photons to collide: if the theory were correct, in some of these collisions the photons would disappear and an electron would appear with an anti-electron. But he was pessimistic. So far as he could see, it would not be feasible for experimenters to test the idea in the next few years.\n\nHe did not realise that the solution to his problem lay in the columns of the _New York Times._ Dirac read it regularly and must have seen the articles on the investigations of cosmic rays being carried out by Millikan, who had given them their catchy name in 1925. The rays had been discovered in 1912 but were still a mystery: all that was known for sure was that they had extremely high energy, typically thousands of times higher than particles ejected from atomic nuclei on Earth. Millikan developed a religion-based theory of the cosmic rays and, by 1928, regarded it as 'fairly definite' that they were the 'signals broadcast throughout the heavens [. . .] the birth cries of infant atoms', clear evidence for divine benison.\n\nDirac must have known that high-energy cosmic rays could produce anti-electrons if the rays collided with other particles on Earth. Yet it seems that he was never much interested in these particles, perhaps because he was influenced by modish opinion in the Cavendish Laboratory in the mid-1920s, when no one there studied the rays. Rutherford's deputy James Chadwick had sighed when he came across another of Millikan's research articles on cosmic rays: 'Another cackle. Will there ever be an egg?' But that was six years before, and by the autumn of 1931 the attitude to the rays at the Cavendish was changing. The first of its scientists to latch on to their importance was Blackett, who was at a crossroads in his career, casting around for a new research topic. This subject must have had a special appeal to the independent-minded Blackett as it would distance him from Rutherford, whose ego was becoming overweening.\n\nBlackett was in the audience at a special Cavendish seminar on Monday, 23 November, when Millikan presented the latest photographs of cosmic rays to be taken at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The photographer was Carl Anderson, until recently Millikan's Ph.D. student, only twenty-six years old and already touted as one of the brightest experimenters in the United States. Three weeks earlier, he had pointed out to his boss that the new photographs showed 'Very frequent occurrence of simultaneous ejection of electron and positive particle'. Anderson was trying to take images of the charged particles produced by cosmic rays using a cloud chamber, which enables the tracks of electrically charged particles to be photographed as they travel through a cloud of water vapour. Anderson had built his own cloud chamber and, at Millikan's suggestion, arranged for the entire chamber to be bathed  in a strong and uniform magnetic field, which would deflect the paths of the charged particles as they hurtled through it. Each track contained crucial information: from the density of droplets along each track, Anderson could determine the particle's electric charge, and he could calculate the particle's momentum from the deflection caused by the magnetic field.\n\nIt required great skill for Anderson to take any photographs at all. Most of his images were blank, but by early November he had obtained some 'dramatic and completely unexpected' images, which he sent to Millikan in Europe. The photographs made no sense in terms of the theory they were using. In a puzzled letter to Millikan, Anderson remarked that many of the photographs featured the track of a negatively charged electron with a positively charged particle, two particles appearing at the same time, presumably when a cosmic ray strikes an atomic nucleus in the chamber.\n\nWhen Millikan presented Anderson's inexplicable subatomic images in his seminar at the Cavendish, Blackett was fascinated. Here was a cloud-chamber expert with a talent that everyone knew was great but unfulfilled. Here was a new field in a mess. And here was the perfect opportunity for him to make his name.\n\nMillikan's audience in the Cavendish seminar did not include Dirac, who was still in Princeton. Many of his colleagues, including Martin Charlesworth in St John's, feared they were about to lose him to one of the higher-paying American universities. Charlesworth wrote to Dirac saying how much he missed his 'kindly irony', imploring him 'Don't let them persuade you to stay in the USA _._ Here is your home.' Charlesworth was right to be concerned, for Veblen was energetically wooing Dirac. Even before the carpenters and decorators had put the finishing touches to Fine Hall, Veblen had begun to work with the educator Abraham Flexner, who was trying to set up an institute for advanced study, where world-class thinkers could study in peace, free of all distractions. Einstein was at the top of their wish list, but they were competing with others, including the wily Millikan, at Caltech.\n\nCharlesworth may have worried, too, that Dirac might not be looking forward to returning home. From newspaper and radio reports, Dirac knew that his homeland was plunging into difficult times. On 21 September, the Government removed the pound from  the gold standard and allowed the currency to settle down to whatever price the money-market dealers were prepared to pay for it. It was a national humiliation. The economy plunged deeper into crisis: unemployment continued to escalate, and soon the pound had been devalued by 30 per cent, making Dirac's $5,000 fee for his single-term stay look even more generous. The inevitable General Election returned a stabilising coalition government, but the economic privations continued: that year, one in every two British industrial workers had been unemployed for over four months.\n\nYet the depression was still more serious in the United States, even in affluent Princeton. At the university, many students struggled to pay their fees. Around the town, young vagrants were walking the streets, some of the two million roaming the country in search of work. About thirty million Americans, a quarter of the population, had no income at all. Many people who had money were so frightened of losing it that they hoarded their dollars under mattresses or buried it in the garden. Even President Hoover - long in denial about the extent of the depression - realised that ordinary people were losing faith in the American way of life.\n\nAs Dirac will have been aware, unemployment was said to be zero in the USSR. The admirers of Stalin's Five Year Plan in the press included the _New York Times_ 's Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, who called the plan a 'stroke of genius' and won the Pulitzer Prize the next year for his reports. Yet Dirac's friends in the Soviet Union suffered terribly when Stalin's attitude towards science changed abruptly, from a subject worthy of study for its own sake to a weapon for fighting capitalism. Tamm and Kapitza supported the new Soviet line, at least in public, but Dirac heard the other side of the story from Gamow, who had been exasperated by the change in the Government's attitude when he returned to Russia in the spring of 1931. The Communist Academy had declared Heisenberg's version of quantum mechanics anti-materialistic, incompatible with the state's increasingly rigid version of Marxist philosophy. During a public lecture at the university on the uncertainty principle, Gamow experienced the full force of state censorship when a commissar, responsible for supervising moral standards, interrupted him and told the audience to leave. A week later, Gamow was forbidden to speak again about the principle in public.\n\nSince the mid-1920s, Gamow and Landau had been two leaders of the informal group of young Soviet theorists nicknamed the 'Jazz Band'. In its seminars, the group discussed new physics, the Bolshoi Ballet, Kipling's poetry, Freudian psychology and any other subject that took their fancy. The Jazz Band was mastering the new quantum physics much more quickly than their professors - 'the bisons' - whom they teased unmercifully, while taking care to remain within the bounds of decorum. The Band overstepped the mark in 1931, however, when they ridiculed a new encyclopedia article on relativity theory, edited to conform to the Party's views on the subject. The butt of the Jazz Band's barbs was the Director of the Physics Institute in Moscow, Boris Hessen, a thoughtful Marxist who had fended off several of the Government's attempts to make orthodox theories of physics conform to 'dialectical materialist' principles, the philosophical basis of Stalinist Marxism, which accords much higher priority to concrete matters than to abstractions. Hessen had only a meagre knowledge of quantum mechanics and general relativity, so he was ill equipped to defend them against ideological interference from Stalin's officials. This ignorance led him to write a ludicrous article in the _Greater Soviet Encyclopedia_ about the ether, declaring it to be 'an objective reality together with other material bodies', contrary to Einstein's teaching. Gamow, Landau and three colleagues sent a mocking note to Comrade Hessen and were put on trial as saboteurs of Soviet science. Landau was temporarily banned from teaching at the Moscow Polytechnic, and the miscreants were banned from living in the five largest cities of the USSR, though the ban was not enforced. According to Gamow, the offending physicists had been found guilty by a jury of machine-shop workers.\n\nEven Dirac fell foul of the censors when the Russian translation of his book was being edited, when his publishers objected that his quantum mechanics was in conflict with dialectical materialism. The book eventually appeared in bookstores after an uneasy deal between the publisher and the editor, Dmitry 'Dimus' Ivanenko, a Jazz Band leader and another of Dirac's effervescent Russian friends. In the awkward opening to the book, it is easy to see reflections of the delicacy of the deal: Ivanenko's preface is conventionally laudatory, but it is preceded by an apologetic note from the 'Publishing House', arguing feebly that although the material in the book is ideologically unsound, Soviet scientists need to use its methods to  advance dialectical materialism. A 'counterflow' of ideologically correct science will then follow, the publishers hoped. In a simpering conclusion, Ivanenko thanked Dirac, 'a sincere friend of Soviet science'.\n\nCensors were also scrutinising science in Germany, where the Depression was wreaking economic mayhem. Scruffy buskers, match-sellers and bootlace salesmen walked the streets in the hope of being paid a few _pfennig_ to buy a loaf; tens of thousands of the unemployed queued outside Nazi offices, waiting for the storm troopers to reward them with a mug of hot soup. The once-peaceful G\u00f6ttingen, where Born was Dean of his faculty, was now seething with political tensions: in the physics library he saw Communist leaflets, while outside the Nazis greeted each other ostentatiously with a click of their heels and a 'Heil Hitler' salute. The Nazis, the majority party in the local government and student congress, were insisting that Einstein's 'Jewish physics' was wrong and pernicious. Born was beginning to think that he had no alternative but to emigrate.\n\nTo most people who came across Dirac, he seemed to be no more engaged with world affairs than an automaton. With no need to share his thoughts with others, unless they were close friends, he gave the impression that he was indifferent to the fate of others. He appeared to have none of the usual need to be warmed by the good opinion of other human beings.\n\nAt work in his office in the new Fine Hall, he was putting into practice the philosophy that he had preached earlier in the year, learning advanced topics in pure mathematics in the hope that they would find application in theoretical physics. He had also returned to field theory, a subject he had co-founded four years before. The theory seemed fated to generate predictions that were not ordinary numbers but infinitely large. While Dirac was preoccupied with his ideas, Heisenberg and Pauli had been developing a full-blown theory of how electrons and photons interact with one another, a quantum theory that accounted for the spontaneous creation and destruction of particles, consistent with the special theory of relativity. Heisenberg and Pauli's theory was also consistent with both quantum theory and experiment, but it was ugly and unwieldy. Oppenheimer later described it as 'a monstrous boo-boo'. Unconvinced that this was the right way to describe nature at a fundamental level, Dirac sought a superior description, one that was logically sound and not plagued with infinities. The more Dirac looked into the Heisenberg-Pauli theory, the more he disliked it. In his view, it was not even consistent with the special theory of relativity because it describes processes throughout space using time measured by a single observer, whereas Einstein had taught that no single time could suffice for all observers, as they make different measurements of time. Dirac spent hours in Fine Hall examining the Heisenberg-Pauli theory and coming to terms with the problem of curing the sickness of field theory. The challenge would obsess him for the rest of his life.\n\nBy the end of the autumn, as Dirac's sabbatical was ending, it was clear that the industrialised world was sliding into its worst-ever economic crisis, and there was a disturbing new militarism in Germany, Japan, Italy and throughout much of east-central Europe. In Britain, everyone was talking about the possibility of another war. The spirit of the age was no longer caught in the freewheeling, life-affirming bravura of _Rhapsody in Blue_ but in the headlong, ominous prelude to _Die Walk\u00fcre._\n\nIn Bristol, it had been a sombre autumn at 6 Julius Road. In her letters, Dirac's mother told him that she and his father had recovered from their climactic row and were back to their routine: she waited on him almost full-time, feeding him his vegetarian meals, washing his clothes and spending hours helping him dress. Each Sunday, she would give him - in silence - the 'ninety-degree' bath that he insisted was good for his rheumatism. After one of them, he had a heart attack. The family doctor told her soon afterwards that her husband 'is a man accustomed to his own way & will not take advice [. . .] He may live 20 years or he may go suddenly.'\n\nBy September, the family were feeling the pinch of the economic crisis: Charles cut his tuition fees and insisted that they could no longer afford to run the car. When Betty told the family's bank manager this, he laughed, Flo told her son. She believed Charles had plenty of money stashed away, although he was spending virtually nothing. Earlier, when Flo tried to claim the small amount of money Felix had left six years before, the authorities sent her a form for her husband to sign as the law specified that the funds must be paid to him. She told Dirac: 'I tore up the form.'\n\nDirac did not return in time for Christmas. Three days before the holiday, his mother wrote to him: 'I am always so grateful that you broke away from our narrow little life.'\n\nDirac was about to have one of his most exhilarating years. The word on the physicists' street was that Chadwick was on to something important at the Cavendish Laboratory. Chadwick - a lean, severe figure - was usually busy overseeing his colleagues' work, dispensing the paltry annual budget for equipment. But he had temporarily put administration to one side. Soon after the Christmas vacation, Chadwick had read an article that he suspected might lead to the neutron, a particle whose existence Rutherford had predicted.  In the article, two French experimenters - Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Joliot and Madame Curie's daughter Ir\u00e8ne - reported from their Paris laboratory that they had fired helium nuclei at a target made of the chemical element beryllium and found that particles with no electrical charge were ejected. They argued that these particles were photons, but Chadwick believed they were wrong and that the particles were Rutherford's elusive neutrons. Rutherford agreed. Having just turned forty, Chadwick may have sensed that this could be the last chance for him to make his name, to emerge from the shadow of his imperious leader. He hungrily grabbed the opportunity, working alone night and day, borrowing apparatus and radioactive samples from colleagues all over the laboratory, making new equipment, filling his notebook with data and calculations. Oblivious of the freezing Cambridge midwinter, he was in a world of his own, as his colleagues saw. After three exhausting weeks, he had nailed the neutron. He proved to his satisfaction, and Rutherford's, that his results made sense only if a particle with no charge and about the same mass as a proton is ejected in the nuclear collisions he observed. But when he wrote a report on his work for the journal _Nature_ , he gave it the cautious title 'Possible Existence of the Neutron'.\n\nOn 17 February, Chadwick sent off his paper to _Nature_ , which rushed it into print. Six days later, after a good dinner in Trinity College with Kapitza, he presented his results to his colleagues at the Kapitza Club. Relaxed and emboldened by a few glasses of wine, Chadwick confidently described his experiments, giving appropriate credit to his colleagues, and finally set out the powerful arguments for the existence of the neutron. It was a coup for Chadwick and for  the Cavendish Laboratory, which had at last come up with the kind of ground-breaking result that Rutherford longed for - one that put nature into fresh focus, clarifying the very nature of matter. The audience gave him the unusual accolade of a spontaneous ovation. After the meeting, he asked 'to be chloroformed and put to bed for a fortnight'.\n\nThe discovery gave fresh impetus to the notion that new types of subatomic particle might be predicted before they were detected. The ability to foresee the different types of grain in nature's fabric was a challenge to even the greatest scientists: Einstein had, in effect, predicted the existence of the photon but occasionally lost confidence in his idea before he was proved right; Rutherford - the experimenter's experimenter - had actually been more consistent, never wavering in his belief in the reality of neutrons. Perhaps Dirac's anti-electron and Pauli's neutrino were worth taking seriously, after all?\n**Sixteen**\n\nI hope it will not shock experimental physicists too much if I say that we do not accept their observations unless they are confirmed by theory.\n\nSIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON, 11 September 1933\n\nThe character of Paul Dirac first appeared on stage in a special version of _Faust_ , the _Hamlet_ of German literature. Goethe's drama is the literary antithesis of Agatha Christie's penny-plain narratives that Dirac wolfed down in the evenings. He had no taste for epic plays, but he will have been absorbed in this _Faust_ , a forty-minute musical parody of the twenty-one-hour play, written as a physicists' entertainment.\n\nThe authors, the cast and the audience were the physicists at Bohr's spring meeting in April 1932, and Dirac was there. In the oasis of the institute, physics had not looked more exciting for years, in hideous contrast to the world outside. Chadwick's discovery had revitalised interest in the atomic nucleus, whose detailed structure was a mystery to theoreticians. They had a wealth of other problems to solve, too, including the status of quantum field theory and of the predicted anti-electron, monopole and neutrino - each controversial, none yet detected. As Bohr liked to point out, science often flourishes quickest when it faces problems and contradictions; the Princeton physicist John Wheeler once went so far as to spell out the central idea of the institute as 'No progress without paradox'.\n\nThe version of _Faust_ performed at the Institute was in the tradition of office Christmas parties, with their licensed burlesque and private jokes that stay close to the boundaries of good taste but carefully avoid crossing them. The journalist Jim Crowther was among the audience of twenty-odd conference delegates who entered into the spirit of the occasion, happily indulging the manifold crimes against artistic taste. Bohr, represented in the play by the Lord Almighty, sat in the middle of the front row of the audience, convulsed with laughter as one of his colleagues mimicked his tortured oratory.\n\nIn Goethe's original play, the sharp-tongued Mephistopheles seduces Faust, discontented with his limited wisdom, into a bargain  that grants him universal insight and the love of the beguiling virgin Gretchen. The main theme of the Copenhagen version is the story of the neutrino and of Pauli's attempts to persuade Ehrenfest of its existence. Pauli (not at the meeting) was represented by Mephistopheles, Ehrenfest by Faust, and the neutrino by Gretchen, whose songs Heisenberg accompanied at the piano. The original version of the play opens with speeches from three archangels, and the Copenhagen version began in the same way, except that the trio was represented by the English astrophysicists Eddington, Jeans and Milne, who stood on the almost room-wide desk of the main lecture theatre, declaiming in rhyming doggerel about the latest theories of the universe.\n\nEhrenfest's leg was pulled unmercifully. He was played as a character who lay on the couch with his trousers in disarray, meditating on the vanity of science and life. This probably struck some participants, including Dirac, as being too close to home: Ehrenfest was morose, deeply uneasy about the state of physics and losing his spark. At the meeting, when Darwin approached him with a question, he rebuffed him, saying only, 'I'm bored with physics.'\n\nIn the second half of the playlet, Dirac comes under the spotlight. His monopole is a singing character, treated with respectful curiosity, in contrast to his hole theory, portrayed as bizarre and not wholly serious. In a few revealing lines, the character of Dirac describes the state of his subject:\n\nA strange bird croaks. It croaks of what? Bad luck!   \nOur theories, gentlemen, have run amuck.   \nTo 1926 we must return;   \nOur work since then is only fit to burn.\n\nThese few words accurately capture Dirac's despondency about the state of quantum field theory. He had tried to produce an improved version of Heisenberg and Pauli's relativistic version of quantum field theory but had found out during the meeting that his theory was no improvement at all: both field theories were shot through with infinities. The root of the problem appeared to lie in 'singularities', particular points in the theory where the mathematics become ill defined or even incomprehensible. It was a deft decision of the authors of the Copenhagen _Faust_ , headed by Max Delbr\u00fcck, to arrange for Dirac to exit the stage chased by the actor playing a bit part, Singularity.\n\nThe jibes about hole theory were not confined to the entertainment; throughout the meeting, Dirac had to put up with Bohr's hostile questioning and the taunts of other colleagues. Dirac appeared to take it all on the chin; according to one colleague, during the meetings that week he did not utter a word. In the final session of the meeting, Bohr lost patience and put him on the spot: 'Tell us, Dirac, do you really believe in that stuff?' The room went silent, and Dirac stood briefly to intone his twelve-word reply: 'I don't think anybody has put forward any conclusive argument against it.' Although outwardly loyal to his interpretation of hole theory and to his proposal of the anti-electron, the absence of the particle was sapping his morale. Soon, even he stopped believing in his hole theory, he later told Heisenberg.\n\nJust less than three weeks after the Copenhagen meeting, news broke from the Cavendish of another experimental sensation: the atom had been split. It was the work of John Cockcroft and the dishevelled Irishman Ernest Walton, an expert in engineering hardware. Together, the two men had built the largest machine ever constructed in the Cavendish, capable of accelerating protons through 125,000 volts and smashing them into a metal target. Quantum mechanics predicted that the accelerated protons should have enough energy to break up the nuclei at the heart of the lithium atoms, but it was a challenge to prove it. Cockcroft and Walton increased the intensity of their beam until it was high enough to stand a chance of splitting some of the atoms in their lithium target. After eight months of work, when the beam was delivering a hundred trillion protons per second, telltale flashes on the detector in Cockcroft and Walton's darkened laboratory told them that they had split lithium nuclei into two nuclei of a different element, helium. Here, on the nuclear scale, Cockcroft and Walton realised the dream of alchemists by transforming one type of element into another. For the second time in three months, Rutherford was overseeing the announcement of a great experiment. He was not best pleased when Crowther's news-management skills faltered and the story leaked to the press and broke in the popular Sunday newspaper _Reynolds's Illustrated News_ , which trumpeted the latest Cavendish finding as 'Science's Greatest Discovery'. Other newspapers soon followed, including a nervous _Daily Mirror:_ 'Let it be split, so long as it does not explode.'\n\nWhen the discovery was announced, Einstein happened to be in Cambridge to give a lecture. On 4 May, at the height of public interest in the experiment, an intrigued Einstein paid a private visit to the Cavendish Laboratory for a demonstration. He must have been gratified to see that Cockcroft and Walton's results were consistent with his most famous equation: the total energy of the particles involved in the nuclear reaction is conserved only if energy and mass are related by _E_ = _mc_ 2. Cockcroft and Walton had been the first to verify the equation.\n\nEddington - ready, as ever, with a down-to-earth analogy - linked Cockcroft and Walton's fragmentation of the nucleus to what appeared to be the fissuring of society. He observed that splitting the once-indivisible atom had become the ordinary occupation of the physicist since 1932 and that the social unsettlement of the age seemed to have extended to atoms. By 1932, Cambridge University's political centre of gravity had moved sharply to the left. Only six years before, the great majority of students worked to break the General Strike; by May 1932, the Cambridge Union - bellwether of student opinion - supported the motion that they saw more hope in Moscow than in Detroit. The students were fearful of another war, angry that the spirit of the Locarno Treaty was being mocked by events. Another war was beginning to look all but inevitable.\n\nThe Cavendish triumphs demonstrated the quality of Rutherford's leadership of experimental physicists in Cambridge. By comparison, the university's theoreticians were embarrassingly unproductive - their titular head was the Lucasian Professor Sir Joseph Larmor, then seventy-five and about to retire, not before time. To no one's surprise, the authorities announced in July that his successor was Dirac, who was not quite thirty and just a few months older than Newton's age in 1669 when he took the Chair. As soon as the authorities announced his appointment, he left Cambridge for a while to escape the clamour of congratulations.\n\nDirac knew that the Chair was more than an accolade: it was a vote of confidence but also a challenge. He was expected to continue to be a leader, to set the pace in his field, to leave a legacy that scientists would talk about for centuries. By no means all the holders of the Lucasian Chair had justified their promise: William Whiston, John Colson and Isaac Milner are in no one's list of great mathematicians or scientists. Dirac still had more to prove. He was confident in the durability of his early work on quantum mechanics, though he had good reason to fear that his later ideas - field theory, hole theory, the monopole - might one day be regarded as honourable failures. Worse, he worried that he was becoming too old to come up with original theoretical ideas: earlier in the year, soon after Heisenberg's thirtieth birthday, Dirac told him: 'You are now past 30 and you are no longer a physicist.'\n\nRutherford wrote to congratulate Dirac, hoping that he 'will still continue to be a frequent visitor to the Cavendish', probably an allusion to Larmor, who rarely set foot in the Laboratory. One of Dirac's colleagues summed up the mood when he told the new professor: 'I don't think any recent election to a professorship can have been more popular.' Only Larmor was sniffy about his successor's appointment, later cattishly remarking that Dirac was 'an ornament of the German school [. . .] though a minor one.'\n\nDirac did not look the part of the distinguished Cambridge professor. Shy as a mouse, he had so little gravitas outside the lecture theatre that in the streets of Cambridge he passed for a tyro graduate student. He was nervous in the company of women of his own age, so many of his colleagues assumed he was gay, that he would die a bachelor and had no interest in having children. Yet Kapitza knew better. He came to know Dirac well during their relaxed conversations in the Kapitzas' house, a noisy den that always seemed to be teetering on the edge of familial anarchy. Dirac was at ease there, talking with Kapitza and Rat over a Russian-style meal, playing chess and larking about with their two rumbustious sons. The contrast between the dysfunctional household of 6 Julius Road and the happiness he saw in the Kapitzas' home could scarcely have been plainer. Perhaps Dirac was already longing for the vibrant family life that Kapitza and Bohr had shown him, an environment in which sourness and unkindness were rare, not the norm.\n\nBy the standards of British academics, Dirac was wealthy. When he took up the Lucasian Chair, his annual salary rose sharply, from \u00a3150 to \u00a31,200, supplemented by his annual college 'dividend' of \u00a3300. The modern value of his salary at the end of 1932 is \u00a3256,000. He had seen the last of penury, though for him frugality was too ingrained to be anything other than a way of life. So far as he was concerned, a suit and a tie were all he needed, and he wore them  indoors and outdoors, rain or shine, until most men would regard them as being fit only for the bin. His mother, perpetually chivvying him to smarten up, thought it was high time she bought some new clothes for herself and asked him to pay for them: 'If you have a really substantial salary in the autumn you may be able to treat your mother to a winter coat.'\n\nCharles and Flo were the toast of the city for producing its most famous scientist, but the old quarrels continued. Worried that Charles was planning to convert their daughter into a nun, Dirac's mother suggested that he pay for Betty to take a degree in French at the university. There was not much chance that Charles would pay for it as he believed that higher education should be a male preserve. Betty sensed this, as she told her brother in a letter: 'I haven't actually asked Pa for financial assistance, but he takes no interest in it and doesn't seem willing to help in any way.' But Betty was not resentful: she accepted it as part of her father's character and, besides, most other men felt the same way.\n\nIn Betty's letters to Paul around this time, she seems conventionally affectionate to him, but nothing of substance is known about their relationship. It seems safe to conclude that he thought well of her, however, because in July 1932 he generously offered to pay for his sister's fees and expenses for the next four years. Although she struggled before successfully crossing the first hurdle of gaining a mandatory pass in Latin, she was a contented student. In a touching letter to her brother she assured him, 'I will do my best to give you value for your money, and I am honestly working, for the first time in my life, I believe.' Her educational liberation seems to have disheartened Charles, now a stooped and tottering invalid. He was slowly losing his grip on his family, Flo reported to her son: during a routine domestic stand-off about the use of their car, he huffily agreed to give in to her and Betty, but only after an hour's sullen reflection. It was a momentous moment, the first time in thirty-two years of marriage that she could remember him backing down. He may well have wondered how his life had come to such a pass. Perhaps he would have sympathised with Fatty Bowling, the narrator of _Coming Up for Air_ , George Orwell's satire on 1930s suburbia. Like Charles, Bowling was a hostage to his ungrateful family, tied by convention and financial convenience to a slattern he despised. Unlike Bowling, however, Charles took pleasure from his friends and  his work: language students still traipsed up to 6 Julius Road for his tutorials, and he was still active in the local Esperanto Society.\n\nBy early August, Charles was planning to visit his family in Geneva. As usual, he did not tell his wife about his travel plans but disclosed them to his son, in a letter written almost entirely in French (only the final line was in English). He trod carefully:\n\n7 August 1932\n\nMy dear Paul\n\nI suppose that you are very busy so I will only take a few minutes of your time to tell you how happy and proud I am of your great success. All the newspapers have given us the details. Several friends and acquaintances have asked me to congratulate you on their behalf.\n\nWill this new position change your plans to go to Russia? I would like to know the date when you have decided because as soon as I am strong enough to undertake the journey I should go to Switzerland to sort out some family matters and I do not want to be away from Bristol when you are here.\n\nObviously if you could come with me that would please me more.\n\nMy fond good wishes and may God prosper you.\n\nFather\n\nBut Charles was to be disappointed. His son was planning another vacation in the Soviet Union, this time with Kapitza in Gaspra, a mountainous coastal resort in the Crimea. In Stalin's time, it was a place for the scientific elite to take breaks, away from the forced migrations of peasant farmers, the food shortages and rationings and all the other disasters of the Five Year Plan and collectivisation.\n\nDirac had begun his trip at a conference in Leningrad, where he spoke about his field theory of electrons and photons. After Boris Podolsky - an American of Russian-Jewish blood - and Vladimir Fock told him that they were studying the same problem, Dirac agreed to work with them. During his stay in Kharkhov, Dirac collaborated with his Russian colleagues, and, after a long exchange of technical correspondence, they produced a surprisingly simple proof that Dirac's field theory is equivalent to Heisenberg and Pauli's and more transparently consistent with the special theory of relativity.  This project was another sign that Dirac was no longer quite so insular: early in the year, he had written a modest paper on atomic physics with one of Rutherford's students and now here he was, working on quantum fields in equal harness with Soviet  theoreticians. But Dirac remained wary of collaboration: visiting theoreticians who were not previously acquainted with him found him distant, utterly uninterested in sharing his ideas. When Dirac was visited by one of them, Leopold Infeld, the young Pole found him friendly and smiling but unwilling to respond to any statement that was not a direct question. After twice receiving a reply of just 'No', Infeld managed to phrase a technical query that drew from Dirac an answer consisting of five words. They took Infeld two days to digest.\n\nWhen Dirac was relaxing on the Crimean coast, he was unaware that the story of the anti-electron was approaching its conclusion more speedily than he had dared to believe possible. Many of the characters in this strange denouement, including Dirac, behaved in ways that are now barely comprehensible, even bearing in mind that hardly any physicists in 1932 took Dirac's hole theory seriously and few were even vaguely aware of his prediction of the anti-electron.\n\nThe end of the story began shortly before Dirac's vacation, at the end of July 1932 in Pasadena, not far from the Hollywood Bowl, where the Los Angeles Olympic Games were just beginning. It would be a welcome opportunity for the people of the city and millions of radio listeners to have some respite from the economic gloom and political manoeuvrings in advance of the coming presidential election.  At Caltech, many of the scientists were on vacation. But in a comfortably warm room on the third floor of the aeronautics laboratory, Carl Anderson was hard at work on the effects of cosmic rays within his cloud chamber. By the end of the first day of August, a Monday, all he had to show for his latest experiments were blank photographs, but, on the following day, he struck lucky.\n\nAnderson managed to take a photograph of a single track, just five centimetres long. It looked rather like a hair. The density of bubbles around the track seemed to indicate that it had been left by an electron, but the curvature of the path suggested otherwise - it had been left by a _positively_ charged particle, so it could not possibly have been an electron. Still not quite believing his eyes, Anderson spent an hour or two checking that the poles of his magnet were correct and that they had not been switched by jokesters.  Convinced he was not the victim of a prank, he was elated, though his euphoria was cooled by an icy trickle of panic: was this really a discovery or some  stupid mistake? To clinch the existence of the positive electron Anderson needed more evidence, but by the end of the month he had found only two more examples of his unusual tracks, neither as cut and dried as the first. Millikan was not persuaded.\n\nAfter the Olympic pageant had folded and the Caltech staff had returned after the summer break, Anderson wrote a short description of his experiment for the journal _Science._ Like Chadwick's presentation of his apparent discovery of the neutron, Anderson's account was cautious: he examined every conceivable reason why the track might not be a new particle. Even more circumspect than Chadwick had been, Anderson couched his claim to a discovery in a paper that he entitled 'The Apparent Existence of Easily Deflectable Positives', hardly an eye-catching phrase. Readers who reached the end of the article were rewarded with a sentence that qualifies as a masterpiece of scientific conservatism: 'It seems necessary to call upon a positively charged particle having a mass comparable with that of an electron.' According to one report, Anderson was so worried by his failure to find more good examples of the track that he thought of writing to _Science_ to withdraw his paper. But it was too late: the article was at the printers.\n\nHere, under Anderson's nose, was clear evidence for Dirac's anti-electron - a particle with the same mass as the electron but with the opposite charge. Anderson had earlier spent several evenings a week struggling through Oppenheimer's evening lectures on Dirac's hole theory, so it is practically certain that he knew about the part played by the anti-electron within it. Yet he did not make the connection, probably because he was directing his attention almost exclusively to the cosmic-ray theory of his boss.\n\nAnderson sent off his paper on 1 September, and it appeared in the libraries of American physics departments about eight days later, to be greeted with indifference and disbelief. His finding was 'nonsense', one of his Caltech friends told him. Millikan still believed that something was wrong with Anderson's experiment and so did almost nothing to promote it. Anderson, worried that he had not found another track like the one he detected in early August, spoke publicly about the need to be cautious. Oppenheimer was almost certainly among the thousands of physicists who read the article, and he wrote soon after to his brother that he 'was worrying about [. . .] Anderson's positive electrons'. But Oppenheimer failed to put two  and two together. Perhaps he was blinkered by a narrow interpretation of Dirac's sea of negative-energy electrons: Dirac had always believed that this sea would contain some holes, whereas Oppenheimer assumed that the electron sea was always completely full, so that the concept of the hole was redundant. It beggars belief that Oppenheimer never pointed out the connection between Dirac's theory and Anderson's experiment to Dirac, to Anderson or to anyone else. Yet that appears to be what happened.\n\nOne of Anderson's colleagues did, however, take his result seriously. Rudolph Langer - a Harvard-trained mathematician, talented but not noteworthy - had read Dirac's work on the anti-electron and talked with Anderson and Millikan about the new cosmic-ray photographs. The day after _Science_ published Anderson's paper, Langer sent a short paper to the journal, making connections between the new observations and Dirac's theories. Showing none of Anderson's restraint, Langer concluded that Anderson had observed Dirac's anti-electron. He did not stop there; he went on to build an imaginative new picture of matter, suggesting that the photon is a combination of an ordinary electron and a negative-energy electron, that the monopole is built from a positive and negative monopole and that the proton 'of course' comprises a neutron and a positive electron. The paper looks impressively imaginative today, but it made no impact in 1932, probably because Langer was not sufficiently respected to command attention and because it was simply not done to speculate with such abandon. His insight left no trace in Anderson's memory and was soon forgotten.\n\nBy early autumn, Anderson's 'easily deflected positive' appears to have been a minor query in the minds of most Caltech physicists, a rogue result to be refuted or possibly a puzzle to be solved. In Cambridge, no one seems to have been aware of Anderson's experiment or of Langer's article. The journal _Science_ arrived in the Cambridge libraries by early November, but neither Dirac nor any of his colleagues appear to have read it. But, by then, Blackett was hot on Anderson's trail.\n\nRutherford had agreed that Blackett could begin a new programme of research into cosmic rays. But Blackett's patience with his boss's despotic style had worn thin, as a graduate student saw when Blackett returned from Rutherford's office white-faced with rage and  said, 'If physics laboratories have to be run dictatorially [. . .] I would rather be my own dictator.' Blackett carved out a niche in the Cavendish, working with an Italian visitor, Giuseppe Occhialini, a light-hearted Bohemian commonly known by his nickname 'Beppo'. Ten years younger than Blackett, Occhialini was an expert experimenter who tended to rely on his intuition, rarely pausing to write down an equation, preferring to spell out the steps in his reasoning with an impressive range of accompanying gesticulations. When Occhialini arrived in Cambridge the year before, in July 1931, he had already been involved in experiments to detect cosmic rays and brought to the Cavendish years of experience working with Geiger counters, only recently introduced to Cambridge. These counters were delicate and unreliable, Blackett later remembered: 'In order to make it work you had to spit on the wire on some Friday evening in Lent.' For Occhialini, Blackett was a jack of all trades in the laboratory:\n\nI remember his hands, skilfully designing the cloud chamber, drawing each piece in the smallest detail, without an error, lovingly shaping some delicate parts on his schoolboy's lathe. They were the sensitive yet powerful hands of an artisan, of an artist, and what he built had beauty. Some of my efforts produced what he called 'very ugly bits'.\n\nOcchialini often visited Blackett at home in the evening. The two of them would relax in the front room and review their day's work over glasses of lemonade and a plate of biscuits, while Blackett fondled the ears of his sheepdog. During their conversations at home and in the Cavendish, they came up with a clever way of getting cosmic rays to take photographs of themselves: the trick was to place one Geiger counter above their cloud chamber and another counter below it, so that the chamber was triggered when a burst of cosmic rays entered both the upper and lower counters. By the autumn of 1932, Blackett and Occhialini had used this technique to take the art of photographing cosmic rays from a time-wasting matter of pot luck to a new era of automation. Soon, word circulated round the Cavendish corridors that something special was emerging from the Anglo-Italian duo. Even the reserved Blackett, the quintessence of the upper-crust Englishman, was excited.\n\nSoon Blackett and Occhialini were ready to treat their colleagues to the clearest batch of cosmic-ray photographs ever taken. At their seminar, Dirac was in the audience. This was surely his moment: he could quite reasonably have suggested that Blackett and Occhialini had discovered the anti-electron and, therefore, vindicated his hole theory. But he stayed silent. The mention of the possible presence of positive electrons drew Kapitza to turn to the new Lucasian Professor, sitting in the front row, exclaiming, 'Now, Dirac, put that into your theory! Positive electrons, eh! Positive electrons!' Kapitza had spent hours talking with Dirac but had evidently not even heard of the anti-electron. Dirac replied, 'Oh, but positive electrons have been in the theory for a very long time.' Here, unless electrons really were shooting upwards from the Cavendish basement, the anti-electron seemed to be showing its face. Yet Dirac's colleagues so mistrusted his theory that none of them was prepared to believe that it could predict new particles. Nor, it seems, did Dirac try hard to persuade them, perhaps because he believed that there was still a chance that every positive electron in his colleagues' photographs was in some way a mirage. This was reticence taken to the point of perversity.\n\nAt that time, Dirac was not concentrating on his hole theory but on one of his favourite subjects: how quantum mechanics can be developed by analogy with classical mechanics. In the autumn of 1932, he found another way of doing this, by generalising the property of classical physics that enables the path of any object to be calculated, regardless of the nature of the forces acting on it. Newton's laws could also do this job, and gave the same answer, but this technique - named after the French-Italian mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange - was more convenient in practice. Dirac had first heard about this method when he was a graduate student, from lectures given by Fowler: it had taken some six years for the penny to drop.\n\nAlthough the technique is usually easy to use, it sounds complicated. At its heart are two quantities. The first, known as the Lagrangian, is the difference between an object's energy of motion and the energy it has by virtue of its location. The second, the so-called 'action' associated with the object's path, is calculated by adding the values of the Lagrangian from the beginning of the path to its end. In classical physics, the path taken by any object between two points in any specified time interval turns out, regardless of the forces acting on it, to be the one corresponding to the smallest value of the 'action' - in other words, nature takes the path of least action. The method enables physicists to calculate the path taken by any  object - a football kicked across the park, a moon in orbit around Saturn, a dust particle ascending a chimney - and, in every case, the result is exactly the same as the one predicted by Newton's laws.\n\nDirac thought that the concept of 'action' might be just as important in the quantum world of electrons and atomic nuclei as it is in the large-scale domain. When he generalised the idea to quantum mechanics, he found that a quantum particle has not just one path available to it but an infinite number, and they are - loosely speaking - centred around the path predicted by classical mechanics. He also found a way of taking into account all the paths available to the particle to calculate the probability that the quantum particle moves from one place to another. This approach should be useful in relativistic theories of quantum mechanics, he noticed, because it treats space and time on an equal footing, just as relativity demands. He sketched out applications of the idea in field theory but, as usual, gave no specific examples; his concern was principles, not calculations.\n\nNormally, he would submit a paper like this to a British journal, such as the _Proceedings of the Royal Society_ , but this time he chose to demonstrate his support for Soviet physics by sending the paper to a new Soviet journal about to publish his collaborative paper on his field theory. Dirac was quietly pleased with his 'little paper' and wrote in early November to one of his colleagues in Russia: 'It appears that all the important things in the classical [. . .] treatment can be taken over, perhaps in a rather disguised form, into the quantum theory.'\n\nEven if Crowther had wanted to publicise this idea, he would have found it hard to get his article published in the _Manchester Guardian_ : it was too technical, too abstract. The 'little paper' appears to have been too abstruse even for most physicists and so remained on library shelves for years, a rarely read curiosity. It was not until almost a decade later that a few young theoreticians in the next generation cottoned on to the significance of the paper and realised that it contained one of Dirac's most enduring insights into nature.\n\nIn the closing months of 1932, the news from Germany was that Hitler stood a fair chance of being elected chancellor in the impending elections: if Dirac's later comments on the F\u00fchrer are anything to go  by, he will have been uneasy at the prospect. Einstein, sick of the political climate and the violent anti-Semitism, fled to the USA and agreed to join Abraham Flexner's Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, while Born hung on in G\u00f6ttingen, where the Nazis were the largest single party: half its voters now supported them. In the USSR, Stalin was showing ever-greater intolerance of academic freedom. In the USA, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been elected by a landslide, but the country remained in desperate economic straits. In the UK, unemployment rose to unprecedented levels, and there were mass demonstrations about unemployment benefits all over the country.\n\nIn the normally calm centre of Bristol, near the Merchant Venturers' College, hundreds of protestors were baton-charged by the police. A mile away, the Dirac household was again a battlefield. With Betty spending most of her time at university, her parents were left to explore every crevasse of their fractured marriage. Flo told Dirac that his father, becoming more aggressive, was still trying to throw her out of the house. Charles was incensed when he heard that she had given a pupil wrong information about his tuition fees and threw a glass of hot cocoa at her, she reported to Dirac. Yet, to most of the people he knew, Charles looked like a model of the contented retiree. At the Cotham School prize-giving, the Headmaster praised him for his son's success, and they talked over tea and cakes about Dirac's recent trip to Russia. Flo wrote to her son, 'Really, he is quite a gossip outside his own home, where he only condescends to scold.'\n\nThe Dirac family was together for what promised to be a torrid Christmas. But Charles and Flo ceased hostilities, and the family had what Flo described as 'quite the best Xmas we have had for years'. Part of the reason for this may have been that Dirac was in a good mood, as news he had wanted to hear for eighteen months had just arrived.\n**Seventeen**\n\nEinstein says that he considers Dirac the best possible choice for  \nanother chair in the Institute [for Advanced Study]. He would like to  \nsee us try for D[irac] even if the chance of getting him is very small.  \nHe rates him ahead of everyone else in their field. He places Pauli of  \nZurich second, apparently.\n\nLetter from OSWALD VEBLEN to ABRAHAM FLEXNER, 17 March 1933\n\nIt seems that it was not until mid-December 1932 that Dirac was confident that the anti-electron exists. Later, memories were too hazy for the date to be made precise: Dirac recalled that he 'probably' heard the news from Blackett, who never said publicly when he was sure of the new particle's existence. It may be that he discovered it independently of Anderson, though Blackett was always careful to give credit to his American rival for being the first to put his observation into print. Blackett and Occhialini probably learned of Anderson's photographs in the autumn through the grapevine, but they read his article on 'easily deflectable positives' only in January, three months after its publication, when they were taking cosmic-ray photographs by the dozen every day. In this bitterly cold Cambridge winter, Blackett and Occhialini had to trudge each morning to the entrance of the Cavendish through snow, slush and ice; inside, the laboratory was buzzing with the thrill of the new cosmic-ray photographs. It seemed that another success was in the offing, but there was a problem: no one was sure precisely what the images were showing.\n\nThe photographs featured a 'shower' of cosmic rays, with tracks that curved both to the left and to the right, emanating from a single location. In several of the snaps it was plain that Blackett and Occhialini had observed positively and negatively charged particles of about the same mass as they zipped through the cloud chamber: these appeared to be electrons and anti-electrons. Blackett asked Dirac to help interpret the data, and soon he was in the laboratory, doing detailed calculations using his hole theory. The most likely explanation was, they concluded, that incoming cosmic rays were  breaking up nuclei and that in the vicinity of some of these breakups, pairs of positive and negative electrons were being created. It was a classic application of Einstein's equation _E_ = _mc_ 2: the energy of the collision was converted into the masses of the particles. Dirac's calculations persuaded the hyper-cautious Blackett that the photographs were strong evidence for anti-electrons that behaved just as the Dirac equation predicted.\n\nWhen Blackett and Occhialini were preparing to make their results public, Dirac was also reading about events in Berlin. In the November election, the Nazis had lost over two million votes and had seen their representation in the Reichstag fall, but on 30 January, after weeks of chicanery by Hitler and his supporters, he was appointed Chancellor. The following night, G\u00f6ttingen was ablaze with torchlight as a procession of uniformed Nazis wended its way through the streets of the old town, singing patriotic songs at the tops of their voices, waving their swastikas and making anti-Semitic jokes. Hitler dashed naive hopes that he would moderate his policies on coming to power, swiftly implementing a dictatorship. On 6 May, the Nazis announced a purge of non-Aryan academics from universities, and, four days later, book-burning ceremonies were held all over Germany, including G\u00f6ttingen and Berlin. Even before Hitler rose to power, Einstein had left Germany, and he quickly announced that he would not return.\n\nHundreds of other Jewish scientists were desperate to emigrate. Dozens were rescued by Frederick Lindemann, Rutherford's counterpart at Oxford University, a prickly and sarcastic snob who had toured universities in Germany in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce offering threatened academics a safe haven in his laboratory. Cambridge University did not openly recruit potential refugees but waited for them to apply: from scientists, it received thirty such applications every day. One of them was Max Born, who was given a short-term academic appointment and - partly as a result of Dirac's support - an honorary position at St John's. In November, his colleague Pascual Jordan became one of three million storm troopers and proudly wore his brown uniform, his jackboots and his swastika armband.\n\nAlthough Heisenberg never joined the Party, he remained in Germany and was pleased that Hitler had come to power, if an anecdote related by Bohr's Belgian student L\u00e9on Rosenfeld is correct. Soon after Hitler became Chancellor, Bohr commented to Rosenfeld  that the events in Germany might bring peace and tranquillity, insisting that the situation 'with those Communists' was 'untenable'. When pressed by Rosenfeld, Bohr remarked: 'I have just seen Heisenberg and you should have seen how happy [he] was. Now we have at least order, an end is put to the unrest, and we have a strong hand governing Germany which will be to the good of Europe.'\n\nAlthough Dirac was privately appalled by Hitler's appointment, his outward response was so discreet as to pass unnoticed except by a few colleagues, including Heisenberg: Dirac vowed never again to talk in German. He had learned two foreign languages but now wanted to speak neither of them.\n\nInternational politics were not Dirac's only distraction. He was also turning his attention to moral philosophy, probably as a result of talking with the formidable Isabel Whitehead. 'Don't despise philosophers too much,' she had counselled him after one of his visits, 'a great deal that they say may be useless, but they are after something which matters.' Mrs Whitehead had been on the receiving end of one of Dirac's tirades against the only academic discipline he openly disdained. One of his _b\u00eates noires_ was the internationally admired Trinity College philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, regarded by many as one of the cleverest academics in Cambridge. Several decades later, Dirac remarked that he was an 'Awful fellow. Never stopped talking.'\n\nDirac's disenchantment with philosophers had degenerated into hostility when he read the ignorant comments several of them made on quantum mechanics; in a book review, he had already noted that it had taken the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to awaken the dozy philosophers to the revolutionary implications of quantum mechanics.  The philosophers who least offended Dirac and other theoretical physicists were the logical positivists, who held that a statement had meaning only if it could be verified by observation. There are traces of this philosophy in three pages of notes Dirac wrote out by hand in mid-January 1933, the raw and unpretentious jottings of a young man who wants to take stock and clarify his thinking about religion, belief and faith. He had recently told Isabel Whitehead, 'I am mainly guided in my philosophical belief by Niels Bohr', but these notes indicate that mainstream philosophers influenced Dirac more than he knew.\n\nDirac begins by considering belief. Some of the things a person believes in, he remarks, are not based on evidence but simply because they promote happiness, peace of mind or moral welfare. Such things constitute a person's faith or religion. In the only example he gives to illustrate this, he considers suicide, pointing out that most people believe that it 'is not a good thing, although there is no logical reason against it'. He was still haunted by Felix's demise and by the feeble purchase of logic on grief.\n\nWhen Dirac focuses on the transience of life, he is driven to an important moral conclusion: 'A termination of one's life is necessary in the scheme of things to provide a logical reason for unselfishness _._ [. . .] The fact that there is an end to one's life compels one to take an interest in things that will continue to live after one is dead.'\n\nThis, he says, is quite different from the unselfishness preached by orthodox religion, which he characterises as sacrificing one's interests in this life for one's interests in the next. Although he regards such a sacrifice as wrong-headed, he concedes - with uncharacteristic condescension - the argument made by many an imperial missionary that 'Orthodox religion would be very suitable for a primitive community whose members are not sufficiently developed normally to be taught true unselfishness.'\n\nAlthough Dirac rejects religious faith, he accepts that another faith is needed to replace it, something to make human life, effort and perseverance worthwhile. This leads him to his credo, one that would later influence his thinking on cosmology:\n\nIn my case this article of faith is that the human race will continue to live for ever and will develop and progress without limit _._ This is an assumption that I must make for my peace of mind. Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress.\n\nAt the end of his notes, Dirac turns to belief in God. This notion is so vague and ill defined, he says, that it is hard to discuss with any rigour. He first gave his views on the subject in his diatribe at the 1927 Solvay Conference, and is no less scathing here: 'The object of this belief is to cheer one up and give one courage to face the future after a misfortune or catastrophe. It does this by leading one to think that the catastrophe is necessary for the ultimate good of the people.'\n\nPerhaps Dirac had at least partly in mind his father's rediscovery of his childhood Catholicism after the death of Felix. Dirac himself had  no such solace and had to try to cope with the tragedy entirely without a spiritual crutch. Unable to fathom what he takes to be the religious justification for how a benevolent deity could condone natural disasters - they are part of God's plan, ultimately to the good of humanity - Dirac concludes by dismissing the idea that religion has any place in modern life: 'Any further assumption implied by belief in a God which one may have in one's faith is inadmissible from the point of view of modern science, and should not be needed in a well-organized society.'\n\nThe entire document reveals that Dirac's thinking about morality and religion is suffused with two principal concerns: how these types of knowledge square with scientific observations and how they can be used as a guide to living. This is consistent with the approach of John Stuart Mill, who would have applauded Dirac's suggestion that a personally rewarding faith was sometimes needed to replace the untenable belief in eternal life and for everyone to feel that they are contributing in some way to human progress. Some of Dirac's turns of phrase - his reference to 'a well-organized society' in particular - might be a result of the influence of Mill's French colleague and friend Auguste Comte, the founder of positivism. More likely, Dirac was taking the Marxist line that religion is 'the opium of the people'.\n\nOn Thursday 16 February, dozens of scientists made their way through the London fog in the fast-fading light of the late afternoon. They were heading for the grand Piccadilly home of the Royal Society, in the East Wing of Burlington House, on the site of today's Royal Academy of Arts. This was the headquarters of British science, a stone's throw from many of the city's finest shops and restaurants, a few minutes' walk from the West End theatres.  The audience, including Cockcroft and Walton, probably hoped that the first of the five talks that they would hear would be more exciting than its title: 'Some Results of the Photography of the Tracks of Penetrating Radiation'. Unusually for formal presentations like this, the audience included a posse of journalists - no doubt tipped off by Crowther - most of them probably wondering whether they were wasting their time. If there really was a good story here, why announce it so close to their deadline? It is likely that the newshounds hoped, too, that the handsome speaker at the front of the room was more excited than he looked. Shortly after four-thirty, Blackett rose.\n\nHis talk was sensational. He described his experiment and showed vivid photographs of the showers of charged particles that continually rain down on the planet and yet, until these experiments, had never been recorded on film. Blackett had almost no sense of theatre, but when he projected the photographs of cosmic-ray showers - revealing the hitherto unnoticed showers of particles bombarding the planet from outer space - mouths fell open in disbelief. Although cautious in his interpretation of his pairs of positive and negative particles, Blackett said that they fitted 'extraordinarily well' with the Dirac hole theory. Here, in front of the audience's eyes, was plain evidence for particles emerging out of nothing and for the opposite process, in which electrons and anti-electrons annihilate one another as soon as they meet. Blackett described this as their 'death compact'.\n\nAfter the talk, when the applause had faded, Blackett agreed to give interviews to journalists. Always the perfect gentleman, he stressed that the discoverer of the positive electron was Carl Anderson and that the best theoretical interpretation of the photographs had been given by Dirac. Where, then, was Dirac? He was giving a seminar in another part of Burlington House, unavailable for comment.\n\nThe newspaper reports reflected the excitement of the briefing. Of all the London newspapers, the _Daily Herald_ featured the story most prominently: the headline 'Science Shaken by Young Man's Researches' and 'Greatest Atom Discovery of the Century' was followed by a breathless account of the experiment. It made no mention of Dirac's theory. The anonymous writer excised Occhialini from the story, as did Crowther in the same morning's _Manchester Guardian_ , where he interpreted the discovery using Dirac's theory and used Millikan's colourful term 'cosmic rays'. The _New York Times_ also featured the story on the Friday morning and included a wary quote from Rutherford: 'there seems to be strong evidence of the existence of a light positive particle corresponding to the electron. But the whole phenomenon is exceedingly complex and a great deal of work will have to be done on it.' The reporter did well to extract this quote, as Rutherford did not attend the meeting, having made clear that he mistrusted Blackett and Occhialini's use of Dirac's ideas, which Rutherford believed were nonsense.\n\nNot since Eddington's solar-eclipse announcement thirteen years  before had a talk at the Society made such a splash in the international press. Eddington's shrewd handling of the press had made Einstein an international star, but Blackett's presentation was never going to do the same for Dirac. He had no wish at all to be a celebrity; the very thought of it would have revolted him. And, after Rutherford's guarded comments, few journalists will have been motivated to draw Dirac out of his carapace.\n\nAfter the press reported Blackett's announcement, Anderson was on edge. Most physicists had not read or even heard of his paper on the 'easily deflectable positives', and he had not yet published his photographs in a professional journal. He had not even given the new particle a name. For several months, he and his Caltech colleagues had considered contracting the term 'positive electron' to 'positron' and, at the same time, suggested that the ordinary, negatively charged electron might be renamed the negatron. Other names were forthcoming, too: the astrophysicist Herbert Dingle in London recalled that Electra in Greek mythology had a brother Orestes and so suggested that the positive electron should be called the oreston. It was Anderson, hurriedly completing a long paper on his discovery, who chose the name that stuck: the positron.\n\nThe debate about the positron rumbled on for months. Bohr thought the particle might not be real but caused 'by air current drift' in the cloud chamber. Only after Heisenberg and colleagues went on a skiing vacation in Bavaria with Bohr and took one of Anderson's cloud-chamber photographs did Bohr begin to believe that the positron existed. In California, Anderson wavered and Millikan refused to believe that electrons and positrons were produced in pairs, because the observations did not agree with his theory of cosmic rays. Even in Cambridge, the question was controversial for several months. Rutherford, uncomfortable with the idea that abstract theory could predict a new particle, liked his physics done bottom-up: 'I would have liked it better if the theory had arrived after the experimental facts had been established.'\n\nAlthough few theoreticians accepted Dirac's hole theory, many interpreted the positron's detection as another personal triumph, some once again wearily despairing that it was impossible to compete with him. Tamm, writing to Dirac from Moscow, was unstinting in his praise and even implied that Dirac had given up hope that his prediction would be verified: 'your prediction of the existence of  the [positron] [. . .] seemed so extravagant and totally new that you yourself dared not cling to it and preferred to abandon the theory.' Dirac, privately pleased that his controversial theory had been vindicated by experiments, showed no emotion. He remarked thirty years later, with a detachment that went beyond the Olympian, that he derived his greatest satisfaction not from the discovery of the positrons but from getting the original equations right. In case Dirac should be in the least pleased with himself, Pauli was as ready as ever to bring him down to earth: 'I do not believe in your perception of \"holes\" even if the anti-electron is proved.'\n\nIt was only by the end of 1933 that the majority of quantum physicists accepted that the positron existed, that electron-positron pairs could be created out of the vacuum that the positron had figured in Dirac's hole theory before its detection. Only Millikan, almost alone in standing by his 'birth cry' theory of cosmic rays, held out against the pair-creation idea. But by early 1934, the evidence for the new particle was incontrovertible: the number of positrons detected annually had risen, owing mainly to Blackett and Occhialini's technique, from about four in the previous year to a new annual total of thirty thousand. More importantly, experimenters at the Cavendish and at other laboratories had demonstrated that positrons could be produced at will using radioactive sources on the laboratory bench rather than only as a consequence of showers of cosmic rays bombarding the Earth. Again, Dirac monitored the experimenters' results to see if they agreed with his theory's predictions.\n\nIn hindsight, it was clear that if physicists had taken the Dirac hole theory seriously, the positron would have been detected several months earlier. Anderson later remarked that any experimenter who took the theory at face value and who was working in a well-equipped laboratory 'could have discovered the positron in a single afternoon' using radioactive sources. Blackett agreed. As Dirac appeared to realise later, he must shoulder most of the responsibility for this, as he never advocated strongly that experimenters should hunt for the anti-electron or suggested how they might detect it using apparatus readily available to them. Thirty-three years later, when asked why he did not speak out plainly and predict the anti-electron, Dirac replied: 'Pure cowardice.'\n\nAlthough Dirac believed he had predicted the positron, and talked about it publicly from 1933 onwards, some commentators have  objected that 'prediction' is too strong a word. Even Blackett wrote in 1969 that 'Dirac nearly but not quite predicted the positron,' words that will probably have stung Dirac if he read them. The consensus among today's scientists, however, is that Dirac's role in foreseeing the existence of the positron is one of the greatest achievements in science. In 2002, shortly after the centenary of Dirac's birth, the theoretical physicist Kurt Gottfried went further: 'Physics has produced other far-fetched predictions that have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. But Dirac's prediction of anti-matter stands alone in being motivated solely by faith in pure theory, without any hint from data, and yet revealing a deep and universal property of nature.'\n\nDuring the past seven years, theoreticians had driven most of the progress in physics, but there were now clear signs - particularly from the Cavendish and Caltech discoveries - that experimenters were in the driving seat. Disillusioned with quantum field theory, and having worked for two years without coming up with what he regarded as a strong new idea, Dirac joined Kapitza in his laboratory. It was another unlikely pairing: the most reserved, cerebral theoretician working with the most outgoing, practically minded experimenter. Yet they were like brothers at play.\n\nThey were among the first users of the state-of-the-art facilities in the Mond Laboratory, which Rutherford had arranged to be built for Kapitza in the courtyard of the Cavendish, with funds from the Royal Society. Its opening in early February 1933 was a grand occasion, dozens of trilby-hatted journalists scribbling on their notepads as the procession passed, adding flashes of colour to the grey midwinter afternoon. Dirac was there, in his scarlet gown, watching the proceedings led by Stanley Baldwin, the university's Chancellor and Deputy to the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. During one of the ceremonies, Kapitza pointed to the body of a crocodile carved into the brickwork of the laboratory's main entrance by the modernist sculptor and typographer Eric Gill. Inside the laboratory foyer there was another Gill commission, a bas-relief of Rutherford, a carving that exaggerated the size of Rutherford's nose, making him look like a brother of Einstein. Some artistically conservative authorities in Cambridge were so upset by Gill's depiction that they spent three months trying to have it removed; their anger was diffused only  after Bohr declared the carving to be 'most excellent, being at the same time thoughtful and powerful'. During the furore, Rutherford remained indifferent, claiming that he did 'not understand anything about art'.\n\nDirac and Kapitza conceived a new and potentially revealing experiment to look at how electrons and light interact with each other. As Dirac had seen for himself in Davisson's Manhattan laboratory, when a crystal is struck by a beam of electrons, their paths are bent, demonstrating that electrons can behave as waves. Thus, electrons and light resemble one another in that both behave sometimes as waves, sometimes as particles. Dirac and Kapitza hit on the idea of replacing the crystal with light. Their idea was to reflect light back and forth between two mirrors so that only a whole number of half-wavelengths of light can exist between the mirrors, analogous to the number of half-wavelengths on a rope that is held down at one end and swung at the other. Just as the crystal consists of a regular three-dimensional arrangement of atoms, the reflected light has a regular pattern of allowed wavelengths, so both should be able to bend the path of a beam of electrons. Such an experiment should be a unique probe of the wave-like and particle-like behaviour of both electrons and light. Dirac's calculations showed that it should be possible to detect the electron beam's bending but only if the reflected light is extremely bright, brighter than the best-available lamps. So the state of lighting technology had thwarted the first plans of Dirac and Kapitza to do experiments together. It would not be long, however, before they were back in the laboratory.\n\nIn spring 1933, the _Cambridge Review_ , sober chronicler of the university's affairs, published an anonymous article pointing out that 'the young are now more concerned [with politics] than they have been for a long time past'. The hedonism of the late 1920s had all but disappeared, giving way to alarm about the national economic malaise and the threat of war. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were shaking the English out of their indifference to political extremes. Winston Churchill, in the political wilderness, repeatedly warned of the need to rearm, but he was ignored.\n\nAt the Cambridge Union in late February, despite a barnstorming performance from the Fascist Sir Oswald Moseley, the motion 'This House Prefers Fascism to Socialism' was heavily defeated, another  sign that the students favoured Stalin over Hitler. The dons were also turning left, many of them dissatisfied with the unscientific approach taken by politicians to social issues and revolted by the harsh treatment meted out to the unemployed. A few political leaders emerged among the academics, egged on by Jim Crowther, who cleverly promoted his Marxist views without ruffling the feathers of the many scientists who were wary of political commitment. The ones who emerged as the socialist leaders were all workaholic males, able to combine high-flying academic careers with an energetic commitment to politics and, in some cases, effective popularisation. Quietest among them was Blackett, not a Communist but a firm supporter of the Labour Party. He was horrified to see that 'the whole structure of liberalism and free trade is collapsing all over the world', and was struck by 'the paradoxical situation in which so many starve in the midst of so much plenty'. Scientists and engineers had, in Blackett's view, 'produced the technical revolution which has led to this situation', and so ' _must_ therefore be directly concerned with the great political struggles of the day'.\n\nMost influential of all was Bernal, 'the Saint Paul of the science and society movement of the thirties', as one of his colleagues later described him. He later remembered how he was inspired by the Soviet experiment:\n\n[T]here was no mistaking the sense of purpose and achievement in the Soviet Union in those days of trial. It was grim but great. Our hardships in England were less; theirs were deliberate and undergone in an assurance of building a better future. Their hardships were compensated by a reasonable hope.\n\nAlthough Dirac talked politics with Kapitza and Blackett, he seems to have been one of the fellow travellers with the socialist and Communist scientists, never in the vanguard. The political activists were becoming impatient with Dirac's indifference to sharing new knowledge with people outside science: in a short article 'Quantum Mechanics and Bolshevism' in the _Cambridge Review_ , the anonymous author reported on Soviet displeasure with the 'completely non-political character of his work, and its detached tone, divorced from problems and questions of the present day'. In the summer, Bernal included Dirac in his list of intellectual 'culprits' - including Joyce, Picasso and Eliot - who were 'tending to a private dream world', indifferent to the popular accessibility of their work. Dirac  would have pleaded guilty as charged as he regarded it as his job to seek better theories of fundamental particles, not to inform the public about the search. Although he did not attend the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in September 1933, he agreed with its conclusion: scientists have a duty to contribute to public debate and should promote the importance of science and technology in getting the country back on its feet. The community was leaning on Dirac and other scientists of his soloist ilk to speak out.\n\nDirac appears not to have bothered to tell his parents about his success with the positron. Their first excitement that year was a spring visit to Paris, where Betty was studying for her degree. She did not write to her mother but sent regular letters to her father, who was so thrilled when he heard that she might be heading for Geneva that he decided to drop everything and join her. Soon after 5 a.m., on the day after Betty's letter arrived, Charles and Flo headed down to the railway station via the tram, Flo carrying her husband's laden suitcase. She returned home to receive a letter from Dirac inviting her to spend a day with him in Cambridge, and he later paid for her to take a ten-day cruise round the Mediterranean. 'Won't it be funny', she wrote to him from her cabin like a truant schoolgirl, 'if I get home and Pa doesn't know anything about it?' So it turned out: Charles and Betty arrived back at 6 Julius Road in the middle of September, having cabled her in advance, the first communication Flo had received from her husband in eight weeks. This act of abandonment seems to have annoyed Dirac. For at least eight years, he had addressed his postcards home to both parents but, from then on, he addressed them only to his mother.\n\nDirac had spent the summer in Cambridge, trying to understand the infinities that plagued his field theory of photons and electrons and reflecting on the work he had done during the previous year. He had proved the equivalence of his theory to Heisenberg and Pauli's, had discovered the action principle in quantum mechanics, had seen his prediction of the positron verified and had begun a promising laboratory project with Kapitza. This was one of the most distinguished years of work by any scientist in modern times, but Dirac was disappointed. He wrote to Tamm, who had complained that he was going through lean times: 'I am like you in feeling dissatisfied with my  research work during the past year, but unlike you in having no external reasons to blame it on.' He needed a vacation.\n\nAfter hiking and climbing in Norway, Dirac was to attend a conference at Bohr's institute before moving on to Leningrad for the first Soviet Conference on Nuclear Physics, where he was sure to be feted as a star. But it turned out that he would be in no mood to savour the acclaim.\n\nThe atmosphere at Bohr's annual meeting in 1933 was tense and uneasy. It hardly felt right to enjoy a spirited debate about the positron or a cathartic game of ping-pong while Jewish colleagues in Germany were being hounded out of the country. But, with most physicists now convinced of the existence of the positron, Dirac could feel that his confidence in hole theory had been rewarded. Pauli, not wanting to be there to see it, skipped the meeting and went on vacation to the south of France.\n\nBohr organised the usual week-long programme, combining talks at the institute and gatherings at his new home, a mid-nineteenth-century mansion in the south-west of Copenhagen, in the grounds of the local Carlsberg brewery. Set in hundreds of acres of immaculate gardens, this was a grace-and-favour residence, a gift of the Government, who offered it, whenever it became vacant, to the person considered the most distinguished living Dane.\n\nThe physicists at the meeting were in buoyant mood, though Ehrenfest was in poor spirits. Pudgy-faced and overweight, he was losing his grip on physics; for him, the succession of research reports were now a dispiriting agglomeration of detail. Convinced that his own work was worthless, he was looking for a new, less prominent academic position where he could motor in the slow lane. But he had not given up completely: during the discussions, he was still the unselfconscious inquisitor, pressing every speaker towards complete clarity, helping to draw attention away from irrelevancies and towards the saliencies of the new ideas. He was especially close to Dirac at this meeting, and they spent hours talking, keeping a few breaths away from the smokers' fug.\n\nAfter the closing speeches in Bohr's home, the physicists put their luggage in the entrance hall and said their goodbyes. It was the usual bitter-sweet parting, but one delegate seemed especially out of sorts: Ehrenfest, about to catch a waiting taxi, looked flustered and  unhappy. When Dirac thanked him for his contributions to the meeting, he was speechless and, apparently to avoid responding, hurried over to Bohr to say farewell. When he returned, Ehrenfest was bowing and sobbing: 'What you have said, coming from a young man like you, means very much to me because, maybe, a man such as I feels he has no force to live.' Ehrenfest should not be allowed to travel home alone, Dirac thought, but he changed his mind. Abandoning his usual assumption that people mean exactly what they say, he concluded that Ehrenfest meant to say not 'maybe' but 'sometimes' - he _sometimes_ felt that life is not worth living. Trying to say the right thing, Dirac stressed that his compliment was sincere. Still weeping, Ehrenfest held on to Dirac's arm, struggling for words. But none came. He climbed into the taxi, which speedily made its way round the small grassy roundabout in front of the mansion, through the gardens, under the arch of the Carlsberg building and on towards the railway station.\n\nA few days later, Dirac was sailing to Helsinki, playing deck games and relaxing in the sun, en route to the Soviet Union. Since Hitler came to power, the attitude of the USSR towards scientists from other countries had changed: Stalin no longer encouraged his own scientists to mix with foreign colleagues, and such liaisons became a crime, except for Dirac and a small number of other friends of the Soviet Union. Dirac was keen to make light of this when he wrote an ambassadorial letter to Bohr a month before, assuring him of a 'warm welcome from Russian physicists' and noting that the economy there was not depressed: 'the economic situation there is completely different from everywhere else'. Like many other gullible guests, Dirac had virtually no idea of the extent of the starvation and economic tribulations in the Soviet Union since the beginning of the Five Year Plan and the adoption of the collectivisation programme: people went round with string bags in their pockets on the off chance that they should come across a queue. In 1933, the privations were at their worst: the Soviet diet included little milk and fruit, and only a fifth of the meat and fish consumed thirty years before. Almost the only people to eat well were state officials and visiting dignitaries, such as Dirac, who was almost certainly unaware of the cost of the collectivisation programme: about 14.5 million lives during the previous four years, a higher death toll than the Great War. But Dirac knew that times were hard and that even basic items of clothing were  not in the shops: when Tamm said that he would not be able to buy a heavy coat he needed for the coming months of freezing cold, Dirac gave his own coat to him and spent the next winter in England without one.\n\nThis conference was shaping up to be a highlight in Dirac's career, until he heard some appalling news from Amsterdam. Lunchtime in the city's Vondelpark on the last Monday in September had been like any other on an early autumn weekday: the mothers teaching their little children to feed the ducks, the cyclists whooshing past the strolling pedestrians, a few picnickers in the last of the bright afternoon light. But suddenly the calm was shattered by gunshots. A few onlookers gathered round a horrifyingly violent scene: a young boy with Down's syndrome, fatally wounded but still breathing, lying next to a man in his fifties, dead, part of his head blown away. The man was Paul Ehrenfest. Moments before, he had shot his son Wassik but had not quite summoned the will to kill him. Two hours later, the boy died.\n\nIn countless confused seminars on the new quantum ideas, he had done more than anyone else to pick out the diamonds from the mud. He had now been drowned by the wave he had helped to create. Dirac, needing to clarify his own thoughts and feelings, wrote Bohr a four-page letter, describing his last moments with Ehrenfest . Of all Dirac's surviving letters, this is among the longest and most emotionally direct. With the fluency of a novelist, he recalls every detail of his last meeting with Ehrenfest, more sensitive to emotional nuance than most of his colleagues would have believed. He lamented to Mrs Bohr that he should have taken Ehrenfest's last words to him more literally - a shortcoming of which no one thought Dirac capable - and that he should have advised her husband to keep Ehrenfest in Copenhagen. Dirac concluded that he 'could not help blaming himself for what happened'. Mrs Bohr replied with consoling words, thanking him for doing 'so much to make Ehrenfest's last days here as happy as his sad mood allowed'. She added, 'he loved you very much.'\n\nEhrenfest had written a suicide note a month before the Copenhagen meeting - to Bohr, Einstein and a few other close colleagues, though not to Dirac. After declaring that his life had become 'unbearable', he concluded:\n\nIn recent years it has become ever more difficult for me to follow developments [in physics] with understanding. After trying, ever more enervated and torn, I have finally given up in DESPERATION [. . .] This made me completely 'weary of life' [. . .] I did feel 'condemned to live on' mainly because of economic cares for the children [. . .] Therefore I concentrated more and more on ever more precise details of suicide [. . .] I have no other 'practical' possibility than suicide, and that after having killed Wassik. Forgive me.\n\nEhrenfest never sent this terrible note. It was tragic that he did not live to take his place a few weeks later at the Solvay Conference, the climax of almost a decade of research into matter at its most elementary level. Originally scheduled to be about the applications of quantum mechanics to chemistry, the organisers had decided in July 1932 - in the wake of the Cavendish discoveries that year - to switch the theme to the atomic nucleus. It was probably expected that Rutherford would be the cock of the walk at the meeting, but by autumn 1933 nuclear physics had moved on and was aflame with new discoveries, new ideas, new techniques. Rutherford, never one to avoid the limelight, may well have felt eclipsed as he saw the focus of attention turn to others: to America's most flamboyant young experimenter, Ernest Lawrence, and his invention of a high-energy particle accelerator so compact that it fitted on a desktop; to Enrico Fermi and his discovery that slow neutrons could induce some nuclei to undergo radioactive decay artificially; to Heisenberg and his new picture of the typical atomic nucleus as a combination of protons and neutrons, but no electrons.\n\nDirac's intuition was not as sure-footed in this subatomic realm: he disagreed with Heisenberg's view of the nucleus - soon to be in textbooks - just as he did not believe in the existence of Pauli's neutrino. Dirac was most at home when he was teasing out the implications of quantum mechanics, and he was able to do so at the conference, but only after the organisers had been pressed to give him a slot by Pauli.\n\nThis was to be another of Dirac's seminal talks. Having pointed out that the discovery of the positron had renewed interest in the existence of a sea of negative-energy electrons, he argued that the presence of these background particles forces physicists to rethink the concepts of the vacuum and of electrical charge. As Oppenheimer and one of his students had independently suggested, the vacuum  was not completely empty but was seething with activity, vast numbers of particle-antiparticle pairs continually bubbling up out of nothing and then annihilating each other, in fractions of a billionth of a second. These processes of creation and destruction are so brief that there is no hope of detecting them directly, but their existence should cause measurable changes in the energies of atomic electrons. Likewise, Dirac suggested that the charge of an ordinary positive-energy electron should be affected by the presence of the negative-energy sea: the electrical charge of an ordinary electron should be slightly less than the value it would have if the background were absent.\n\nBut the theory was still replete with infinities. Dirac suggested ways of coping with this, using special mathematical techniques to make testable predictions. The audience could see that this was the work of a master, if one who was too clever by half. Pauli despaired of the theory ('so artificial'), while for Heisenberg it was 'erudite trash'.\n\nDirac probably agreed with Pauli and Heisenberg more than he let on, for he knew as well as anyone that his techniques involved the sort of procedures results-hungry engineers would be happy to use but that would make any self-respecting mathematician blanch. Convinced that any fundamental theory worth its salt must make perfect mathematical sense, he was becoming seriously disenchanted with quantum field theory. This Solvay talk would be the last time he used the theory to probe the inner workings of the atom: he would go on to make other fundamental contributions to science, but this presentation marks the end of his golden creative streak, which he had sustained for eight years.\n\nMidway through the autumn term in Cambridge, on Thursday, 9 November, Dirac received the telephone call that most first-rate physicists hope for, if only in secret. A voice from Stockholm told him that he was to share the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics with Schr\u00f6dinger for 'the discovery of new and productive forms of atomic theory'; the deferred 1932 prize went to Heisenberg. Dirac was surprised by his own award but not by the other two, certainly not by the one given to Heisenberg - the principal discoverer of quantum mechanics, in Dirac's opinion. Nervous of the inevitable press attention, Dirac considered refusing the prize, but he soon took  Rutherford's advice: 'A refusal will get you more publicity.' The Dirac family first heard the news on the day of the announcement, soon after ten at night, when a note was slipped through their letter-box by Charles's friend Mrs Fisher.\n\nThe Nobel Prize for physics had been instituted in 1901, when it was awarded to the German experimenter Wilhelm R\u00f6ntgen for his discovery of X-rays. The institution of the prize for physics - and also for chemistry, literature and physiology - was the idea of the Swedish inventor, Alfred Nobel, whose legacy funded the prize in perpetuity. Since the first year, the status of the prizes had grown, and, by 1933, the annual announcements of the winners were featured in newspapers all over the world. As some of the reports noted, Dirac was a special winner: at thirty-one, he was the youngest theoretician ever to win the prize for physics.\n\nMost English national newspapers mentioned Dirac's prize on the day after it was announced. The _Daily Mail_ squeezed in a short report about the award to the 'silent celebrity' next to a long article on 'Hitler's homage to fallen Nazis'. Readers of _The Times_ also read of Dirac's award alongside a report from Germany, where Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, had issued regulations to ensure that electioneering is 'conducted in a dignified manner'. None of the hurriedly prepared articles mentioned the discovery of the positron or captured Dirac's personality; it was left to the _Sunday Dispatch_ later in the month to publish an overheated but insightful description of Britain's newest Nobel laureate. The anonymous author noted that 'more than publicity, [Dirac] fears women. He has no interest in them, and even after being introduced to them, cannot remember whether they are pretty or plain.' Dirac was 'as shy as a gazelle and modest as a Victorian maid'.\n\nThe first congratulatory note to arrive in Dirac's pigeonhole was a telegram from Bohr. Dirac replied with forgivable sentimentality:\n\nI feel that all my deepest ideas have been very greatly and favourably influenced by the talks I have had with you, more than with anyone else. Even if this influence does not show itself very clearly in my writings, it governs the plan of all my attempts at research.\n\nIn the Cavendish, the announcement of the prizes was welcomed by everyone except Max Born, bitter that he had been passed over in favour of Dirac. Others in Cambridge were preoccupied with the  most dramatic event to take place in the town for years: on Armistice Day, three days after Dirac heard from Stockholm, the Socialist Society organised a march of hundreds of students through the centre of Cambridge, seeking 'to provoke clashes, to make a stir [. . .] to put politics on the map and into university conversation; to bounce, startle, or shock people into being interested'. In a normal Armistice Day march, a carnival of several hundred undergraduates walked through the city centre, selling blood-red paper poppies to passers-by in order to raise money for survivors of recent wars and to commemorate the lives of soldiers who had fallen in battle. The tragic aspect of the proceedings was often lost in hilarity, making the occasion ripe for subversion. On that grey Sunday afternoon, the pavements of Cambridge were lined with crowds, jeering as they were passed by marchers, some of them holding the banner pole of the Socialist Society, others bearing a wreath inscribed 'To the victims of the Great War, from those who are determined to prevent similar crimes of imperialism'. The second phrase should be removed, the police escorts insisted, as it might provoke a breach of the peace. By the time the marchers reached the entrance to Peterhouse College, an eruption was inevitable. Onlookers threw flour and white feathers over the students and pelted them with rotten eggs, tomatoes and fish; the marchers retaliated by using a car as a battering ram to push back their tormentors.\n\nThe university authorities panicked. Away from the public posturing, students and dons debated round college firesides whether the marchers had desecrated the day of remembrance or had restored seriousness to what had become a maudlin carnival. The event had marked the beginning of a militant student socialist movement in Cambridge.\n\nIn his rooms in St John's, the Lucasian Professor probably watched the events carefully and pondered how he could make his feelings heard.\n**Eighteen**\n\nFew misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother.\n\nW. SOMERSET MAUGHAM, _A Writer's Notebook_ , 1896\n\nIt has often been said that Dirac hated his father so much that he denied him an invitation to attend the Nobel ceremony. Plausible though the story sounds, it is probably untrue. The Nobel Foundation invited the laureates each to bring only one guest, but they could bring others if the prize-winner paid for their travel and accommodation. Heisenberg took his mother, and Schr\u00f6dinger brought his wife, having left behind his pregnant mistress (the wife of his assistant). So it did not look odd that Dirac went with only his mother. She gave her husband a dose of his own medicine by not telling him about her trip until a few days before she set off, determined to make the most of her time away. She knew that, in only eleven days, she would back at the kitchen sink, the Cinderella of 6 Julius Road.\n\nEarly on the Friday evening of 8 December 1933, Dirac and his mother were in the Swedish port of Malm\u00f6, waiting for the night train that would take them to Stockholm in time for breakfast. A few reporters spent several hours hunting for them all over Malm\u00f6 and eventually tracked them down to a station caf\u00e9, which became the unlikely scene of a press conference. The journalists' persistence was rewarded with a newsworthy interview with two prize eccentrics, 'a very shy and timid boy' and 'a lively and talkative lady'.\n\n'Did the Nobel Prize come as a surprise?' asked one journalist. 'Oh no, not particularly,' Dirac's mother butted in, adding, 'I have been waiting for him to receive the Prize as hard as he has been working.' She was so curious about Sweden that one reporter found himself answering her questions rather than asking his own - here was a woman who revelled in the attentions of the press. Dirac did not stay silent but was unusually forthcoming when the journalist from _Svenska Dagbladet_ asked him how quantum mechanics applies to everyday life and was rewarded with a stream of insights into his unapologetic philistinism:\n\nDIRAC: My work has no practical significance.\n\nJOURNALIST: But might it have?\n\nDIRAC: That I do not know. I don't think so. In any case, I have been working on my theory for eight years and now I have started developing a theory that deals with the positive electrons. I am not interested in literature, I do not go to the theatre, and I do not listen to music. I am occupied only with atomic theories.\n\nJOURNALIST: The scientific world that you have built during the past eight years, does it influence the way you look at everyday occurrences? DIRAC: I am not that mad. Or rather, if it did [have such an influence] then I would go mad. When I rest - that is when I am at sleep of course also when I am taking a walk or when I am travelling - then I make a complete break with my work and my experiments. That is necessary so that there is no explosion here. ( _Dirac points to his head_ ).\n\nThe story of the interview was on the news-stands in Stockholm station when the Diracs arrived shortly before eight o'clock in the morning. A quarter of an hour later, Heisenberg, Schr\u00f6dinger and their guests stepped off the train and were met by a posse of dignitaries, all of them concerned that Dirac and his mother were nowhere to be seen. But when the photographers asked for the laureates and guests to pose, Dirac and his mother stepped forward into the flashes of the awaiting cameras. The welcoming committee was apparently too stunned to ask where they had been and only later heard what had happened: after Dirac's absent-minded mother had failed to wake up when the train reached the station, she had been ejected by a guard, who had thrown her clothes, hairbrush and comb out of the carriage window. After the kerfuffle, the Diracs had made their way to the warm waiting room and had sat apart from the party of officials. When the group left the room, the Diracs followed them like a pair of ducks, without saying a word.\n\nHeisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger obliged the press with interviews, but Dirac wanted to escape to the hotel as quickly as politeness allowed. He and his mother were accompanied on the short chauffeur-driven journey to their hotel by the Nobel Foundation's attach\u00e9 Count Tolstoy, a grandson of the novelist and a polished diplomat. His first challenge was to sort out the Diracs' accommodation in the 500-room Grand Hotel, overlooking the harbour. The staff must have thought they had done Dirac a favour by putting him and his mother in the bridal suite, but Flo was having none of that and demanded a room of  her own. Dirac - about to pocket his prize money, approximately \u00a3200,000 in today's money - took the cost on the chin.\n\nWhile Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger were relaxing in their baths, Dirac escaped the gaggle of journalists by leaving the hotel surreptitiously, taking his mother with him. They were then free to walk anonymously around the chilly city, in its best suit for the Nobel celebrations, a pre-Christmas festival unique to Stockholm. It looked like fairyland when darkness fell, the firs and Christmas trees lit up with coloured electric lights, the murmurings of the crowd accompanied by the tinkling of lounge pianists and the occasional cry of a seagull overhead.\n\nFlo was not going to be deprived of press attention for much longer. While Dirac was resting, she held court with four journalists, inviting them separately to her suite to talk about her son and to show them the frocks, furs and jewellery he had bought her. The reporters already knew she was a colourful character, but they were not prepared for her torrent of maternal ardour, delivered in words that resembled 'shattering beads of quicksilver', as the _Svenska Dagbladet_ put it. In the interviews, her eyes darted around as she delivered a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness lecture, as if she had been given two minutes to convince them that her son was Superman. One of her targets was the Nobel authorities, who had shamefully credited her son only as 'Dr Dirac' when he is 'the top professor in the world!'\n\nAsked about life at home, Mrs Dirac laid into his father, 'the domestic tyrant', a man who hated wasting time and whose motto was 'work, work, work'. Not mentioning Felix, she described how Charles leant heavily, and unnecessarily, on the young Paul to study, not allowing him to play with other boys: 'If the boy had shown any other tendencies they would have been stifled. But that stifling was not necessary. The boy was not interested in anything else.'\n\nAs a result, Dirac had never known what it was to be a child. None of the journalists appears to have asked her if she took any responsibility for this; it was all the fault of her husband, she thought. When a reporter enquired whether Dirac's father was happy about his son's success, Flo replied disingenuously: 'I would not say so. The father has been surpassed and he doesn't like it.' What of her son's interest in the opposite sex? 'He is not interested in young women [. . .] despite the fact that the most beautiful women of England are in  Cambridge.' The only women he cares for are his mother, his sister and 'perhaps ladies with white hair' (she may have been referring to Isabel Whitehead). Since Flo had vetoed the visit of Felix's girlfriend a decade earlier, possibly before, Dirac had known that his mother feared that young women would be attracted to him, and her attitude had not changed.\n\nOn the following day, the Stockholm news-vendors sold newspapers with headlines that included 'Thirty-One-Year-Old Professor Dirac Never Looks at Girls'.\n\nEarly on Sunday evening, hundreds of coiffed men and women packed the galleries at the Stockholm Concert Hall to witness the King's presentation of the prizes. At 5 p.m. sharp, a blazing chorus of trumpets silenced the crowd before the opening of the two huge doors into the room where the prizes would be awarded. Each of the laureates, escorted by one of the Swedish hosts, marched to their separate armchairs by the platform, covered in red velvet and decorated with banks of pink cyclamen, maidenhair ferns and palms. The national flags of the new laureates hung overhead alongside Sweden's. The prize-winners were in the customary starched white shirt and bow tie, and all of them wore dinner suits, except Dirac, who won the sartorial booby prize by wearing a pitifully old-fashioned dress suit. He bowed low to the King before accepting his medal and certificate and then bowed several times to the crowd amid tumultuous applause. Compared with Heisenberg, Dirac looked pallid and sickly: he looked 'far too thin and stooping', one reporter worried, adding that 'All the motherly ladies warmly hoped that he should feed up and get the time to exercise and enjoy himself a bit.'\n\nAfter the ceremony, the laureates were driven back to the Grand Hotel to attend the Nordic midwinter feast of the Nobel Banquet, in the winter garden of the Royal Salon. Even by the standards of Cambridge this was a spectacular setting for a dinner: the tables, lit with hundreds of bright-red candles in silver holders, were arranged in a horseshoe shape around the water fountain in the centre of the room. There were three hundred guests, every woman in her most scintillating gown, every man in a dinner jacket, except Dirac. At the top table, men were seated alternately with women. On a balcony above, liveried musicians played, in competition with canaries chirruping in their cages near the glass roof.\n\nAfter the speeches, a silent toast to the memory of Alfred Nobel and the singing of the Swedish national anthem, a fleet of waiters began to deliver the first course from a menu that featured game consomm\u00e9, sole fillets with clams and shrimps and fried chicken with vegetable-stuffed artichokes. The climax was the chef's _pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance_ dessert: ice-cream bombes that shone in the dark after they had been doused in alcohol and set alight. Afterwards, each laureate was expected to make a short speech, customarily a few pieties of gratitude and reflection, laced with self-deprecating wit. After the first speech - given by Ivan Bunin, winner of the prize for literature - Dirac rose from his seat and walked to the rostrum, where, as usual, he shed his shyness. After paying his compliments to the hosts, he declared that he was not going to speak about physics but, instead, wanted to outline how a theoretical physicist would approach the problems of modern economics. This was just the kind of applied thinking that Bernal and his colleagues had been urging Dirac to do, but they might have expected him to choose a different venue for his first public comment on social and economic affairs. Nervous glances were exchanged round the great hall as he leaned over the rostrum and presented an argument that all the economic troubles of the industrialised world stemmed from a fundamental error:\n\n[W]e have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value. These two things are the receipt of a certain single payment (say 100 crowns) and the receipt of a regular income (say 3 crowns a year) through all eternity. The course of events is continually showing that the second of these is more highly valued than the first. The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods. May I ask you to trace out for yourselves how all the obscurities become clear, if one assumes from the beginning that a regular income is worth incomparably more, in fact infinitely more, in the mathematical sense, than any single payment?\n\nWithout bothering to suggest how his explanation could be tested, he concluded with a Rutherfordian swipe at science popularisers, informing the diners that once they had done their homework, they will have 'a better insight into the way in which a physical theory is fitted in with the facts than you could get from studying popular  books on physics'. After thanking the audience for its patience, he returned to his seat. A spatter of clapping gradually gathered into firm applause, many of the diners laughing nervously and apparently wondering what to make of Dirac's speech. Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger did not follow suit by talking about economics and politics; speaking in German, they gave speeches that followed the convention of steering clear of anything that might be politically controversial.\n\nDirac's reasoning puzzled Schr\u00f6dinger and his wife, and Anny described it as a 'tirade of communist propaganda'. But if the written record of Dirac's speech is accurate, she was being unfair: Dirac was addressing a topic of theoretical economics that transcended politics. He was also wrong: his theory is approximately correct only when interest rates are always low, but he had not taken into account that it makes good sense to take the lump sum if interest rates are high and remain so. If Dirac had bothered to consult a professional economist, such as his Cambridge colleague John Maynard Keynes, he would have been spared posterity's judgement that in his first foray outside his own field he had talked nonsense. And he had done so in the glare of the Nobel spotlight.\n\nDirac's fallacy seems to have gone unnoticed or, at least, unremarked in the after-dinner levity. Flo watched Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger closely as they laughed and joked with the other guests, while Dirac strained to make conversation and occasionally disappeared from gatherings, as if vanishing into thin air. Flo kept a sharp eye on Schr\u00f6dinger, not caring much for his braggadocio: by far the oldest of the trio of physics prize-winners, he kept trying to assert himself as their leader, though Heisenberg and Dirac declined to follow him. She also noticed that Schr\u00f6dinger and his wife 'terribly resent' that he had to share his prize with her son. More to her liking was the genial Heisenberg and his mother, dressed like a Dresden shepherdess. Flo admired Heisenberg for having 'no swank at all', although she thought him a 'terrible flirt', like her son, and she complained that both of them cruised the circles of adoring ladies before they ran 'back to [their] poor, tired mother[s] whenever they have had enough'. She had not previously seen Dirac in the company of admiring young women, and she did not like it: whether or not she noticed, he was drifting away from her.\n\nThe lavish hospitality continued for four days, unabated. Dirac's  only task was to give his Nobel lecture on the Tuesday afternoon, traditionally an opportunity for the laureates to present their work to other academics. Dirac spent most of his twenty-minute presentation on 'The Theory of Electrons and Positrons', describing how quantum mechanics and relativity made possible 'the prediction of the positron'. This was the first time he had referred to his speculation about the positron as a prediction, and he went on to repeat another of his speculations, with more confidence than usual: 'It is probable that negative protons can exist.' Finally, after pointing out the apparent symmetry between positive and negative charge, he hinted that the universe might consist of equal amounts of matter and anti-matter:\n\n[W]e must regard it as an accident that the Earth (and presumably the whole solar system), contains a preponderance of negative electrons and positive protons. It is quite possible that for some of the stars it is the other way about, these stars being built up mainly of positrons and negative protons. In fact, there may be half the stars of each kind.\n\nHe had glimpsed a universe made from equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in which, for some unknown reason, human experience is confined almost entirely to matter. But was this a speculation or a prediction? The audience had good reason to be unsure.\n\nDirac appears to have been unaware that he was not the first to imagine a universe made of both matter and anti-matter. In the high summer of 1898, soon after J. J. Thomson had discovered the electron, the Manchester University physicist Arthur Schuster had hatched a similar idea. In a light-hearted article in a summer edition of _Nature_ , he conceived a universe made of equal amounts of 'matter and anti-matter', based on the bizarre idea that atoms are sources of invisible fluid matter that flow into sinks of anti-atoms.  But Schuster's whimsy lacked substantial underpinnings from reason or observation and so remained a 'holiday dream', as he termed it. Within a decade, it was forgotten.\n\nAfter the Nobel festivities, most of the prize-winners usually return home. But Dirac, Heisenberg and their mothers moved on to yet more celebrations, in Copenhagen. Bohr, probably wanting a piece of the action, threw a grand party in their honour on the Saturday evening at his mansion. Schr\u00f6dinger, not a member of Bohr's inner  circle, declined his invitation and returned to Oxford, where he was living, having fled Germany a few months before. His colleagues in England looked askance at his personal life - he lived with his wife and his mistress - and he, in return, despised the colleges as 'academies of homosexuality'.\n\nDirac's mother had heard many stories about the agreeable life at the court of Bohr, and she was not disappointed. Bohr's was a 'commanding' presence, Flo observed, and she was charmed by his wife Margrethe, whose donnish air was lightened by her daring dress, a green morning frock trimmed with leopard skin and yellow beads. The Bohr residence was looking resplendent: the sprays of winter flowers and ferns, the statues, the cubist painting hanging above the grand piano, the huge windows overlooking acres of garden and woodland. For Flo, this opulence had done nothing to spoil the family, least of all the Bohrs' five playful but well-behaved boys.\n\nBohr was out during the guests' first evening at the house and returned to find that Dirac had been the first to retire to bed. Unwilling to lose precious time, Bohr bounded up to Dirac's room and brought him downstairs for a discussion that lasted into the small hours. She could now see why Dirac held Bohr in such affection: here was an older man, authoritative but not authoritarian, forceful but not intimidating, able to bring out the best in everyone. It may well have crossed Flo's mind that Bohr would have been the perfect father for her son.\n\nThe Bohrs' party would not have disgraced one of the Nobel Foundation's receptions. In the mansion's main hall, three hundred guests sat at tables under the huge glass roof, drinking the endless supplies of champagne, beer and wine and eating the food from the generous buffet. When everyone had eaten, Bohr stood in the centre of the hall and gave a speech in English, subtly ensuring that no one overlooked his contribution to the achievements of his 'young pupils'. Heisenberg replied, in German, but Dirac said nothing; throughout the speeches, he stood behind a pillar. After the toasts, Bohr steered the party into the drawing room for a cabaret from a pink-frocked American singer accompanied by the Danish virtuoso Gertrude Stockman and, inevitably, by Heisenberg at the piano.\n\nDirac will probably have found the celebrations a chore and will have been relieved to spend the next day only with people he knew, a relaxed family Sunday. The many in Cambridge who saw Dirac as a shadow of a man, with no sense of fun, would have been surprised to  see him at ease in the Bohrs' nest, playfully squirting water from an indoor fountain over his mother and Margrethe, both of them laughing and protesting as they tried hopelessly to shield themselves from the dousing. Dirac's Cambridge acquaintances would not have expected, either, that he would happily spend a day larking around with Bohr, his boys and Heisenberg, playing badminton and sleighing on the hills near Copenhagen. In the evening, Dirac reverted to his usual stand-offishness: he sloped off to bed early, not bothering to wish anyone goodnight. But Bohr wanted Dirac to talk shop and so yanked him back downstairs.\n\nOn her return to Bristol late on Monday, Flo was met at the railway station by Betty, who was up until the small hours listening to her mother's account of her 'great and wonderful adventure'. Charles was nowhere to be seen.\n\nFor the rest of his life, Dirac was curious about how he came to win the prize with Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger. The Nobel Foundation, always the essence of discretion, releases the papers concerning each year's prize only after keeping them under lock and key for fifty years. Dirac never did find out about the political machinations that led to the first prizes for quantum mechanics; he eventually learned only that the English crystallographer William Bragg had nominated him and that Einstein had not. Only after Dirac died did it come to light that he had been fortunate to win the prize so young.\n\nIn the first three decades of the prize, the committee that decided the Nobel Prize for physics was biased against theoretical contributions, probably because of Alfred Nobel's wish that his prizes should reward practical inventions and discoveries. The committee, not always well informed about theoretical physics, issued a statement in 1929 that the theories of Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger 'have not yet given rise to any discovery of a more fundamental nature'. Behind the scenes in Stockholm, a long and involved battle was being fought about when to award a prize for the new theory and who should receive it. The Foundation was still arguing about this in 1932, when nominations for Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger were accumulating by the month. By early 1933, the pressure to award a prize for the theory was overwhelming, but there were still disagreements about how to share it. Dirac's name had barely registered with the committee.\n\nBy the time the committee met in September 1933, after the discovery of the positron had become widely accepted, his name was much more prominent. The Swedish physicist Carl Oseen, the most influential member of the committee, had heard from his student Ivar Waller of the quality of Dirac's work. More important, the positron's discovery was viewed as 'an actual fact', an observation that illustrated the utility of Dirac's theory. At the end of the meeting, the consensus was that Heisenberg, Schr\u00f6dinger and Dirac were head and shoulders above the other candidates, including Pauli and Born, and that Heisenberg deserved special recognition for being the first to publish the new theory.\n\nToday, the committee's judgements appear capricious. It would, perhaps, have been fairer to award Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger individual prizes in 1932 and 1933, leaving Dirac to win his own prize a year later, an outcome that Dirac himself would almost certainly have regarded as just. None of this really matters; today, no one doubts that the three physicists honoured in Stockholm in December 1933 deserved their Nobel status. Dirac, Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger are now among the select group of winners that give all Nobel Prizes their special lustre.\n**Nineteen**\n\nTo fast, to study, and to see no woman -  \nFlat treason 'gainst the kingly state of youth.\n\nWILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, _Love's Labour's Lost_ ,  \nAct IV, Scene III\n\nAt the age of thirty-two, Dirac appeared to have everything he could wish for. He was in excellent health, was recognised as one of the best theoretical physicists in the world, had plenty of money and could not have been in a more agreeable job. Apart from worries about his home life, his only problem was that all his friends were men. Most people seemed to take it for granted that Dirac would spend the rest of his life being cosseted in the all-male bastion of St John's College and would die a bachelor. Over the next three years, he would surprise them all.\n\nAs several theoretical physicists guessed, their subject was coming to the end of a golden age. The toolkit of quantum mechanics was now available to solve almost all the practical problems encountered by scientists studying atoms and nuclei. In that domain, the theory worked wonderfully well. But for Dirac and others at the forefront of research, the subject was far from finished: most pressing was the need to find a field theory of electrons, positrons and photons - a theory known as quantum electrodynamics - that is free of infinities.\n\nBased in California, Oppenheimer was an international leader in the field, which he studied when he was not immersed in the _Bhagavad Gita_ and a dozen other books. Early in 1934, Oppenheimer and one of his students had dealt a heavy blow to Dirac's hole theory when they proved that quantum field theory accommodates the existence of anti-electrons without assuming the existence of a negative-energy sea. Oppenheimer sent Dirac a copy of his paper, but heard nothing in reply. In Europe, Pauli and his young student Vicki Weisskopf proved that particles with no spin also have anti-particles, flatly contradicting Dirac's theory, which implied that spinless particles should not have anti-particles because they do not obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Pauli was proud of what he called his 'anti-Dirac  paper' and pleased that he was 'able again to stick one on my old enemy - Dirac's theory of the spinning electron'. Pauli and Weisskopf rendered the concept of the negative-energy sea redundant, and it gradually fell into disuse, as physicists became inured to the idea that each positron was just as real as the electron - there was no need to treat the positron as the absence of anything. But Dirac did not accept this - there are no spinless fundamental particles, he noted unconvincingly, so Pauli and Weisskopf's arguments were academic. For this reason, he continued to use the hole theory, which yielded precisely the same results as theories that dispensed with the sea. His authority ensured that many other physicists followed him, and the hole theory continued to be used, if only as a heuristic device.\n\nWhichever version of quantum electrodynamics physicists used, it was plain that the theory was in trouble. However hard Dirac and his fellow physicists tried, they could not find a way of removing the infinities in the theory, to make rigorous calculations possible. Theoretical physics was 'in a hell of a way', Oppenheimer groaned, though he remained optimistic that either Pauli or Dirac would find a way of rescuing the theory by the following summer. If not, they would have to agree with many others that the theory was beyond salvation.\n\nVisitors to Cambridge, including Heisenberg and Wigner, found that Dirac was not working on quantum field theory but doing experiments with Kapitza in his new laboratory. Dirac was trying to solve a practical problem for some Cavendish colleagues, who needed pure samples of chemical elements. Each atom of every element contains the same number of electrons and protons, but the nuclei do not all have the same number of neutrons: the different varieties of nuclei, each with a characteristic number of neutrons, are known as the element's isotopes. There are, for example, three isotopes of hydrogen: most hydrogen nuclei contain no neutrons at all, but there exist others with one and two neutrons. Rutherford's colleagues needed pure samples of some isotopes for their experiments, but this was difficult, as atoms of naturally occurring samples of elements are a mixture of isotopes, extremely difficult to separate because they behave almost identically in chemical reactions. Dirac thought of a neat way of separating a mixture of two isotopes in a gas, using apparatus with no moving parts. His idea was to force a high-pressure jet of gas to follow a spiral path: the heavier, more sluggish molecules should tend to aggregate on the outside of the  rotating mass of gas, while the lighter ones should hog the inside track. Dirac designed his apparatus for this 'jet stream method of isotope separation', then rolled up his sleeves and built it, having borrowed one of the compressors in Kapitza's store. Once again, he was trying his hand at being an engineer.\n\nHe was surprised by the results. The apparatus did not separate the isotopes efficiently but produced what he later described as 'something like a conjuring trick'. When he pumped gas at six times ordinary atmospheric pressure into a small copper pipe, he found that, after the gas had undergone its spiral motion, it separated into two streams with very different temperatures - one stream was hotter than the other by about one hundred degrees Celsius. During a visit to Cambridge in May 1934, Wigner saw the apparatus and asked Dirac questions about it, but Dirac's replies were terse and unhelpful, causing the mannerly Wigner to take umbrage. Wigner understood that Dirac did not want to speak about the apparatus until he knew what he was talking about and that Dirac was unaware of the convention of parrying ignorance with a polite remark. Dirac thought the temperature difference was caused by the differences in the resistance to flow of the two gases, though it is more likely that the rotational motion tends to separate the faster gas molecules from the slower ones. Dirac spent months collaborating with Kapitza under the approving eye of Rutherford, who thought it augured well for theoretical physics that the Lucasian Professor was soiling his hands in the laboratory.\n\nDuring his discussions with Dirac, Kapitza will have talked a good deal about his friends at Trinity College High Table and the interdisciplinary wanderings of their conversations. What Kapitza did not know was that, from March 1934, one of his acquaintances, whom he and Anna often welcomed to their home, was an MI5 informant. Codenamed 'VSO', the colleague was convinced that 'it would be impossible for a Soviet citizen to go backwards and forwards to Russia unless his value to the Soviet authorities in this country were greater than his value in Russia'. The reports submitted by VSO, flecked with jealous asides about Kapitza's scientific reputation, contained no proof that he was a spy but enough circumstantial evidence to worry the security services. Why was Kapitza so sheepish about admitting, even to a friend, that he held a Soviet passport? The rest home for scientists in the Crimea was open only to Communist Party members, so why was Kapitza allowed to stay there if, as he claimed,  he was not a member? Most suspicious were the clandestine meetings Kapitza had near Cambridge with the new Soviet Ambassador in London, Ivan Maysky. So far as MI5 were concerned, Kapitza was now one of their top suspects.\n\nYet Dirac seems to have aroused no suspicion at all, probably because - to most people - he seemed to be a perfect embodiment of the apolitical, head-in-the-clouds don. If VSO had been as diligent as he was suspicious, he might have wondered why Dirac was able to join Kapitza in the exclusive rest home in the Crimea. But Dirac appears to have entirely escaped the attention of MI5; if they kept a file on him, there remains no public record of it.\n\nThe brutality of Hitler's regime was now clear from press reports, though it seems that Heisenberg made light of them when he visited Cambridge in the spring of 1934 for what turned out to be a fruitless attempt to engage Dirac on the future of quantum electrodynamics. Heisenberg stayed in Born's home and tried to persuade him to return to his homeland. During an afternoon walk in the garden with his host, he mentioned that the Nazi Government had agreed that Born could return to Germany to continue his research but not to teach. His family would not be allowed to go with him. Born, indignant that a close family friend could even contemplate conveying such a message, was furious and broke off the conversation. Only much later could Born bear to listen to Heisenberg describing the privations of trying to be a decent citizen amid the Nazi barbarities.\n\nConditions were no better in the USSR for scientists unwilling to toe the Stalinist line. George Gamow, worried that his support of orthodox quantum mechanics would result in his deportation to a Siberian concentration camp, used his invitation to the 1933 Solvay Conference as a way to escape. He persuaded the Soviet Prime Minister Vyacheslav Molotov to grant him and his wife Rho exit visas and then fled, leaving the Soviet authorities livid. The Gamows arrived in Cambridge in early 1934 and were soon a popular couple, delighting all comers with their friendly vivacity. Rho was a strikingly attractive brunette, with a Garboesque presence that could light up a roomful of the dourest dons. Stylishly dressed with smart accessories, all colour-coordinated with her lipstick, she sometimes looked as if she had walked off a photo shoot for _Vogue._ 9 She smoked one cigarette after another, but this did not put Dirac off; he adored her. The  feeling was mutual, and they soon found ways of doing things together that entailed being alone with each other: she would teach him Russian in exchange for his teaching her to drive. Dirac made steady progress with learning his fourth language, as Rho recorded in the coming months by plotting a graph showing a gradual fall in his 'error index', an undefined concept, Dirac could not help noting. After spending just a few weeks in Cambridge, the Gamows departed for Copenhagen, leaving Dirac bereft.\n\nAccording to private comments Dirac made a few years later, he was not in love with Rho. Nonetheless, their affectionate notes bounced back and forth across the North Sea for months, in a rally of infatuation. 'Please read my letters alone,' she pleaded. She returned the letters he had written in Russian, each one marked with a grade and with his errors neatly corrected in red ink. Hoping that he would approve of her cutting down on her smoking, she asked how many times each day he would like her to think of him; he worried that her memories of him were even slightly harmful to her. They were like cooing teenagers, each desperate not to offend the other and constantly seeking forgiveness. When Rho apologised if she had appeared to be insolent, Dirac reassured her that he was not in the least upset and that, in any case, he 'was not expecting Russian women to be as boring as English ones'. Impatient to see each other again, it would not be long before their wish was fulfilled.\n\nIn the meantime, Dirac continued to learn Russian with a woman teacher who gave him hour-long lessons on Saturday mornings in Cambridge. Her name was Lydia Jackson, a Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 poet known as Elisaveta Fen before her ill-fated marriage to Meredith Jackson, a Fellow at St John's. Romantic and strong-willed, she felt out of place in Cambridge - no place for assertive women, she thought - and made a living by teaching the language of her homeland. At a gathering of one of London's literary circles, she introduced George Orwell - probably one of her lovers - to the woman who became his first wife.  Jackson liked to talk about the Soviet Union with Dirac, and, by her tantalisingly vague account, it seems that she was more sceptical than he was about Stalin's regime. He rarely spoke about science but did once exchange a few words with her about mathematics: she thought it was a human invention, while Dirac maintained it had 'always existed' and had been 'discovered' by humans. 'Doesn't that mean that it was created by God?' she  asked. He smiled and conceded, 'Perhaps animals knew a little mathematics. '\n\nHer familiarity with Dirac is clear from her letters to him. In one, she commends him for being down to earth, not one of his most lauded qualities: 'I know that you are not as absent-minded as all professors and mathematicians are supposed to be: there must be quite a large chunk of an engineer still in you.' After referring teasingly to a spot of nude bathing she had done in a pond on Hampstead Heath, she gives him some stout advice for the sabbatical he was about to take in Princeton:\n\nBy the way, will you try and _not_ forget all your Russian in the barbarous United States. Please try and read a little from time to time. [. . .] And do remember what I told you about not marrying an American: it would be a fatal mistake! An English girl, of firm but tactful disposition will be most suitable for you. As for a Russian - they are a handful under any circumstances [. . .].\n\nDetermined that no one else would read Dirac's letters to her, she routinely burned them. Their opinions about the Soviet Union, as well as the evidence of whether the relationship became physically intimate, were probably destroyed in those flames.\n\nDirac arrived in Princeton at the end of September, after another hiking vacation with John Van Vleck, this time in the mountains of Colorado. Once again, Dirac provided his friend with more stories of his strangeness, including one in Durango where he was wandering around the town at night, probably wearing what might be kindly described as functional clothing, and was mistaken for a tramp. This would not be the last time Americans would mistake the Lucasian Professor for a vagrant.\n\nIn Princeton, Dirac was working at the Institute for Advanced Study, then a suite of offices in Fine Hall. He and his colleagues in Fine Hall liked to eat at one of the modest restaurants in Nassau Street, the rod-straight road that separates the university buildings on one side from the shops on the other. A faculty favourite was the Baltimore Dairy Lunch, known locally as the Balt, which served wholesome food at low prices, though only to white customers.\n\nOne of Dirac's preferred dining companions was his new colleague Eugene Wigner, the courtly Hungarian who was on a mission to bring  modern quantum mechanics into Princeton. Inexplicably parsimonious, he declared proudly to visitors to his two-bedroom apartment that its furnishings had set him back less than $25, as if it were not obvious. On the day after Dirac arrived in Princeton, neither Wigner nor any other Fine Hall colleague was free for lunch, so Dirac set off alone on the five-minute walk into the town centre. When he entered the restaurant, probably the Balt, he saw Wigner sitting with a woman. Well-groomed and slightly younger than Wigner, and with an infectious cackle of a laugh, she looked rather like him, her face similarly long and angular. She spoke faltering English with the same thick accent, though with none of his reserve, and smoked her cigarettes using a long black holder.\n\nThe woman was Wigner's sister Margit, known as Manci to her friends and family. She was struck by the sight of the slender, vulnerable-looking young man who walked into the restaurant, later remembering that he looked lost, sad and disconcerted. 'Who is that?' she asked her brother. Wigner told her that he was one of the town's most distinguished visitors, one of the previous year's Nobel laureates. When he added that Dirac did not like to eat alone, she asked, 'So why don't you ask him to join us?' Thus began a lunch that changed Dirac's life. His personality could scarcely have contrasted more sharply with hers: to the same extent that he was reticent, measured, objective and cold, she was talkative, impulsive, subjective and passionate - she was the kind of extrovert Dirac liked. They occasionally had dinner together but were not officially dating, perhaps partly because he was distracted by Rho Gamow, who was staying in Princeton, having been left in the care of Dirac by her evidently trusting husband. But these social matters were a sideline: he spent most of his time hard at work in his office in Fine Hall and in the rooms he rented in a grand house on one of the leafy avenues close to Nassau Street. So far as his colleagues could see, for all the interest he showed in women, he could have been a eunuch.\n\nIn Fine Hall, Dirac was accommodated on the same corridor as Einstein, their offices separated only by Wigner's. Einstein was the town's most famous celebrity, after Veblen the first faculty member of the institute. He and his wife had arrived in October 1933 and lived in an apartment before settling in a modest detached house in Mercer Street, about five minutes' walk from the centre of the town, which he  described as a 'quaint ceremonious village of puny demigods on stilts'. Although grateful to be in a safe haven and 'almost ashamed to be living in such peace while all the rest struggle and suffer', he could see his new home town was not free of racism and may have discussed this in his meetings with Paul Robeson, the town's most famous son.\n\nThen fifty-four, Einstein looked older: he shambled around the town in his plain raincoat and woolly hat, avoiding eye contact with fellow pedestrians, especially ones who recognised him. On the day he arrived in Fine Hall, newspaper photographers and a crowd of hundreds gathered to catch a glimpse of him through an open library window. The authorities had to smuggle him in and out of the hall through a back entrance.\n\nVeblen and his colleagues were licking their lips at the thought of Einstein and Dirac working together, but it soon became clear that this was only a dream. The two men respected each other, but there was no special warmth between them, no spark to ignite collaboration. They were studying the same subject, but their approaches were quite different: Dirac was developing quantum theory and was deaf to its alleged philosophical weaknesses; Einstein admired the success of the theory but mistrusted it (during the spring of 1935 he completed his collaboration with his younger research associates Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen on a paper that cast serious doubts on the conventional interpretation of the theory). Whereas Einstein was a conservative scientist, Dirac was always ready to discard well-established theories, even ones he had helped to create. Language was another barrier: with only weak English, Einstein preferred to talk in his native tongue, which Dirac spoke only with difficulty (in the company of refugees from Hitler's regime, Dirac relaxed his rule of not speaking German). And Dirac tended to avoid smokers, although Einstein temporarily removed that barrier in late November when he gave up his pipe for a few weeks, to demonstrate his willpower to his wife, who disapproved of the habit. 'You see,' he complained to a neighbour, 'I am no longer a slave to my pipe, I am a slave to dat vooman!'\n\nDirac spent much of this sabbatical writing the second edition of _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ , making it less mathematical and less intimidating. The completed version preserved the structure of the original and was more accessible than the first edition, though for all but the most gifted students it was aspirational reading. Most students who wanted to use quantum mechanics to do actual calculations used more practically minded texts, secure in the knowledge that the underlying beauty of the subject was nowhere clearer than in this book, sometimes described as 'the bible of modern physics'.\n\nStill believing that mathematics offered the royal road to the truth about the fundamental workings of nature, Dirac spent much of his time in Princeton learning more mathematics. This led him to find a new way of writing his equation for the electron, by describing its behaviour in a space-time whose geometry is not the standard Euclidean type (in which the sum of the angles of a triangle is one hundred and eighty degrees) but is of a more exotic variety developed by the Dutch mathematician Wilhelm de Sitter. Perhaps this would enable the quantum theory of the electron to be harmonised with the general theory of relativity? The result was a sumptuous piece of mathematics, though one that failed to yield new insights into nature. Dirac had yet to show that his idea - that fundamental physics could be gleaned from promising mathematics - was fertile. No other leading theoreticians had taken much notice of it: they remained pragmatic, taking cues from experiment and trying to learn from the weaknesses and loose ends of the best-available theories.\n\nOne of the most intriguing topics for theorists was radioactive beta decay, in which an unstable nucleus spontaneously ejects a high-energy electron. Early in 1934, Fermi underlined his talent as a theoretician once again, this time by setting out the first quantum field theory of beta decay and giving a clearer understanding of the role of the neutrino. He gave a clear mathematical description of how an atomic nucleus undergoes beta decay, one of its neutrons transmuting into a proton, which remains in the nucleus, while two other particles - an electron and a massless neutrino - are simultaneously created and ejected. This decay was caused by the weak force, a previously unidentified type of force that acts only over extremely short distances, unlike the familiar forces of gravity and electromagnetism. Although Dirac admired Fermi's theory, he did not follow him into the nucleus and its complexities. Dirac was adamant that the best way of making progress was to focus on nature's simplest particles, taking inspiration from the most beautiful mathematics. Time would decide whether such purism was wise.\n\nDirac's colleagues in Fine Hall saw that his fanatical dedication to work was on the wane. He spent most afternoons playing games in the two common rooms, each of them furnished in the style of the best-appointed Oxford University common rooms - plush curtains framing every window, deep-pile carpets on the floor, capacious leather armchairs and imitation-antique tables. During the ritual of afternoon tea, he fruitlessly searched for a way that a king could pass eight opposing pawns and got thrashed by his colleagues in their favourite game, Wei Chi (also known as Go), which he had introduced into Fine Hall a few years before. He was relaxed enough to channel some of his intellectual energy away from the toughest problems in science to games that had no point beyond personal pleasure. The impasse in quantum electrodynamics appears to have sapped his morale: he may have feared that he had fallen victim to the alleged 'Nobel disease', said to prevent prize-winners from repeating the quality of their best work after their return from Stockholm.\n\nOver ice-cream sodas and lobster dinners, Dirac's friendship with Manci deepened. She was a lively, big-hearted conversationalist, and, although she often struggled to find the right words in English, she had the rare ability to make him thaw. Between the long - but gradually shortening - silences, he told her of the pain of his youth, of his brother's suicide, of the father whom he believed had tyrannised him into his defensive silence. Manci also had plenty of private unhappiness to share, telling him that she was an unwanted child, less attractive than her sister, intellectually worthless compared with her brother. Mainly to get out of her parents' house, she married when she was only nineteen. Her Hungarian husband, Richard Bal\u00e1zs, turned out to be a playboy and philanderer, and the marriage was an eight-year calamity mitigated only by the birth of her son Gabriel and daughter Judy. She took the bold step of instigating divorce proceedings and had finally become single again two years before she set sail for Princeton. There had been other men after Bal\u00e1zs, but none of them were around for long, and she was lonely and unfulfilled. She was staying with Eugene for a change of scenery, having promised her children - in Budapest with their governess - that she would be home for Christmas. At thirty years old, she had never felt so free in her life.\n\nAlthough a self-declared 'scientific zero', Manci took a lively interest in international ethics, morals and politics, often impressing  experts with her knowledge but at the same time affronting them with her shameless lack of objectivity. Once she had made up her mind, facts alone were rarely enough to budge it; she seemed to think not just with her brain but with her heart. Religion caused her special anguish. Until 1915, when she was eleven, her family had subscribed half-heartedly to the Jewish faith, visiting the synagogue twice a year, but then had become Lutherans. By the time she met Dirac, she was no longer devoutly religious but appears to have somehow yearned to believe in some kind of deity and did not like to hear religion slighted. She would probably not have welcomed Dirac's view that his religion was simply that 'the world has to improve'.\n\nManci was a keen follower of the arts, and she chivvied Dirac into taking more interest in music, literary novels and ballet. In the evenings, like many people during the Depression, they joined the long cinema queues ready to pay their quarters for a few hours' harmless escapism. They may well have seen some films featuring one of Hollywood's new stars, Cary Grant, rapidly establishing himself as a versatile actor with a gift for playing both comedy and - having thoroughly suppressed his Bristol vowels - the charming, all-American gentleman.\n\nAbout ten days before Christmas 1934, during a journey on the New York subway, Dirac read an unexpected and chilling piece of news. He was in the city to buy an overcoat, to replace the one he had given Tamm fifteen months before. Dreading the Christmas throng of Manhattan and its noisy, bullying traffic, he did not hesitate when Manci offered to go along to keep him company. They agreed to meet in Fine Hall, before driving to Princeton Junction, where they would catch the train to Penn Station. After arriving first at the hall, she took a moment to look in his mailbox and found an airmail letter, which she hurriedly put in her handbag and forgot in the excitement of what was her first trip to the shopping capital of America. When she was sitting next to Dirac in a subway car, clattering and squealing its way towards the Midtown stores, she opened her bag to look for a handkerchief and saw the envelope, which she handed to Dirac. It was from Anna Kapitza in Cambridge, he saw, but it was not just another family chronicle. Manci watched Dirac as he read the typewritten letter, a little over a page long. He turned to her with alarming news - the Soviet Government had detained Peter Kapitza in Moscow.\n\nAnna was desperate. She wrote that her husband's detention was 'a terrible blow to him, almost the severest he ever had in his life', and she pleaded with Dirac for help:\n\nI am writing to you as a friend of K and of Russia and you will understand the impossible situation [. . .] People will talk and the last thing I want is the press to get hold of it. [. . .] I wonder if you could write a letter to the Russian Ambassador in Washington, I feel that is the only way to do anything [. . .].\n\nEarlier, Kapitza had boasted that he was the only Soviet citizen who had unrestricted passage across his country's borders. He had scoffed at his colleagues' warnings that he was courting disaster by returning home each summer for his vacation. Irritated by the defection of Gamow and other Soviet scientists, Stalin's authorities were determined to secure the country's best brains to help build its future. During a trip to the USSR in late September with his wife and children, officials in Leningrad told Kapitza that he must stay in the Soviet Union for the foreseeable future, though his family was free to return to Cambridge. Furious, Kapitza tried to talk his way out of it, pleading unsuccessfully that he could not break faith with his colleagues in England, and was dispatched to Moscow, where he lived in a sparsely furnished room at the Hotel Metropole, with little to do except read, write desperate letters to Anna and go for walks - always under the surveillance of the security police. Rutherford and the Foreign Office had kept the matter secret, in the hope that his detention could be resolved diplomatically. No one, certainly none of the officials in the security services, had expected this: not for want of trying, MI5 had not found any hard evidence that he was a spy.\n\nDirac was still digesting the news when he was trying on overcoats in Lord and Taylor, one of the exclusive stores on Fifth Avenue. Manci had an uphill struggle to persuade him, devoid of dress sense, to take the purchase of the coat seriously. No doubt seeing an opportunity to refurbish his entire wardrobe, the salesman asked Manci discreetly whether Sir would also like a new suit, but Manci smiled and shook her head: to press him to buy more than he needed would be futile. The coat he bought there turned out to be a good investment - it lasted him to his death, a memento of the day he heard about Kapitza's plight and was moved to take political action for the first time in his life. Though he knew that he had none of the interpersonal skills and tact needed to be an effective diplomat, he became the de facto coordinator of the American-based campaign for Kapitza's release.\n\nIn Princeton the next day, Dirac urgently sought advice from the well-connected Abraham Flexner and from Einstein, who promptly agreed to help. Dirac was confident enough to write to Anna Kapitza in Cambridge to assure her that matters would 'all come right in the end'. After the Christmas vacation, he would begin his campaign for Kapitza's release, but first he wanted to take a vacation in Florida. He was planning to go on his own, but Manci had other ideas: seeing an opportunity to spend some time alone with her new friend, she postponed her return to Hungary until after Christmas, breaking the promise she had made to her children.\n\nDirac and Manci motored down in early January from freezing Princeton to the warmth of St Augustine, a resort on the north-east coast of Florida. No one - except, possibly, Wigner - knew that they were together. The vacation appears to have been platonic. Their letters before and after the trip show that they were not yet close and still viewed each other differently - he regarded her only as an agreeable companion, but she saw him as a potential husband. They spent their week dodging the rainstorms and taking trips to the local tourist destinations, including a farm where Dirac spent a few dollars buying a baby alligator that he mailed anonymously to the Gamows in Washington, DC. As Rho opened the package in their hotel room, the alligator jumped out and bit her hand - one of her husband's less amusing practical jokes, she thought. Gamow protested that he had nothing to do with the prank; he thought it was a crocodile, a symbol of his favourite experimenter, sent by someone with more playfulness than common sense. A month later, Dirac owned up, and the poor alligator languished, and a few months later died, in the Gamows' bath.\n\nBy the spring of 1935, the campaign for Kapitza's release was not going well. In Cambridge, Anna could see the vultures circling: several of her husband's colleagues in the town privately wanted to see Kapitza get his comeuppance after the years he had spent shamelessly fawning on the Crocodile. There were whispers that Kapitza was merely an engineer, that his experiments were leading nowhere and that he had received financial rewards in return for spying for the  USSR. Anna's reports drew from Dirac some uncharacteristically direct advice: 'You should not pay attention to stupid stories that no one believes in.'\n\nKapitza's Marxist friends sat on their hands, while Rutherford led a discreet campaign for his release. Seeking advice from colleagues all over Europe and working closely with Soviet officials and with the British Foreign Office, Rutherford wanted a face-saving solution. He sought to give Kapitza the option of working wherever he liked, though he confided in a letter to Bohr that he was certain Kapitza wanted to return to Cambridge, adding that he found the Soviet authorities particularly mendacious. The first Cambridge scientist to visit Kapitza was Bernal, accompanied by his lover Margaret Gardiner, and they spent long afternoons trying to cheer him up over pancakes with caviar and soured cream, washed down with wine. 'I feel like a woman who has been raped when she would have given herself for love,' Kapitza sulked. He used the phrase repeatedly.\n\nGardiner had mixed feelings about Moscow, disturbed by the giant posters of Stalin all over the city and the quarter-mile queues that formed outside the shops the moment new supplies arrived. The Moscow hotels were just as bad as their reputation had led her to believe: rooms heated to a tropical swelter, shabbily dressed waiters pretending to be in a hurry, many of them cadging illegal gratuities. The Muscovites walked around their grey, freezing city wrapped in their padded jackets and fur coats, wearing their derigueur galoshes. Gardiner believed that the country's hopes lay in mass education, always an attractive vision for the English left. Decades later, she recalled seeing a platoon of young soldiers marching towards the Military Academy with exercise books under their arms. Her tour guide explained: 'They are having their illiteracy liquidated.'\n\nAfter Manci's departure in mid-January 1935, Dirac's routine in Princeton was unchanged. Each morning, he trudged through the snow from his rented home near Nassau Street to his room in Fine Hall, worked alone all morning, and had lunch at Newlin's restaurant with Wigner and with one of Princeton's most unusual visitors, the Belgian theoretician Abb\u00e9 Georges Lema\u00eetre. He was an amateur scholar of the playwright Moli\u00e8re, an accomplished interpreter of Chopin and the only member of the physics department to wear a  dog collar. Dirac had first seen him, but had apparently not met him, in October 1923, when he began his studies and when Lema\u00eetre was one of Eddington's postgraduate students. Four years later, Lema\u00eetre had introduced into science the idea that the universe had begun when a tiny egg, a 'primeval atom', suddenly exploded into the matter of the universe. Quite independently, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann had applied Einstein's general theory of relativity to the universe as a whole and demonstrated that some mathematical solutions of the equations correspond to an expanding universe, though his work was published only in Russian and at first went unnoticed.\n\nThe Friedmann-Lema\u00eetre picture of the universe's birth seemed to be at odds with the account of creation in Genesis, but this did not bother Lema\u00eetre, who believed that the Bible teaches not science but the way to salvation. The science-religion controversy 'is really a joke on the scientists', he said: 'They are a literal-minded lot.' Dirac found Lema\u00eetre 'quite a pleasant man to speak with - not strictly religious as one might expect from an Abb\u00e9'. It was probably during these conversations in Princeton's diners that Lema\u00eetre reawakened Dirac's interest in cosmology, the study of the entire universe and its workings, soon to become one of his main interests. For now, he focused on mathematics and quantum physics, which he studied during the day, and he took it easy in the evening. After dinner, he would read one of the books Manci had recommended to him (including _Winnie the Pooh_ ) or go out, perhaps to a movie with the von Neumanns.  Probably as a result of Manci's encouragement, he had become much more interested in music: a highlight of the term for him was a university concert, where he heard a searching performance of Beethoven's last piano sonata by the Austrian virtuoso Artur Schnabel, another Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany.\n\nManci was with her children in Budapest. About once a week, in her spidery hand, she wrote several pages of news and gossip for Dirac, urging him to keep in close contact. Unaccustomed to receiving warm and attentive letters, he struggled to respond: 'I am afraid I cannot write such nice letters to you - perhaps because my feelings are so weak and my life is mainly concerned with facts and not feelings.'\n\nManci, 'very much upset' by this statement, knew that she would have to take the initiative if she were to stir in him the first quantum of romance. Always wearing her heart on her sleeve, she wrote to  Dirac about her family and bombarded him with questions about his life in Princeton in all its minutiae. His reply was chilling: 'You ought to think less about me and take more interest in your own life and the people around you. I am very different from you. I find I can very quickly get used to living alone and seeing very few people.'\n\nHe sent her lists of corrections to her English and answered her queries as tersely as a speak-your-weight machine. When she sent him photographs of herself, he was grateful but critical: 'I do not like this picture of you very much. The eyes look very sad and do not go well with the smiling mouth.' After she complained that he did not answer all her questions, he re-read her letters, numbered them and sent her tabulated responses to every question he had ignored, including:\n\nLetter number| Question| Answer  \n---|---|---  \n5| What makes me (Manci) so sad?| you have not enough interests.  \n5| Whom else could I love?| You should not expect me to answer this question. You would say I was cruel if I tried.  \n5| You know that I would like to see you very much?| Yes, but I cannot help it.  \n6| Do you know how I feel like?| Not very well. You change so quickly.  \n6| Were there any feelings for me?| Yes, some.59\n\nWhen Manci received the list, she thought Dirac was jeering at her but eventually decided that it was 'quite funny'. Beginning to realise that Dirac did not understand rhetorical questions, she seethed: 'Most of them were not meant to be answered.' It is easy to imagine her tearing out her hair in frustration. But his answers gave her an opportunity to engage with his feelings, and she did not hold back: for his statement that she changed so quickly, she told him he should get 'a second Nobel Prize, in cruelty'. Manci was tough, but she made sure that Dirac was aware of her vulnerable and sensitive side: 'I am only a stupid little girl.' With each letter, she flirted more  audaciously, but Dirac made no comment until he realised that he was being targeted. He snapped: 'You should know that I am not in love with you. It would be wrong for me to pretend that I am. As I have never been in love I cannot understand fine feelings.'\n\nBut Manci was not to be deflected. Although Dirac parried her repeated requests to join him during his forthcoming trip to Russia, she was determined to see him before the summer was over.\n\nThe news of Kapitza's detention first appeared in the British _News Chronicle_ on 24 April 1935, after a leak. Soon, Kapitza's case was well known in the British media, and the newspapers featured long reports on the experiments he had been doing in Cambridge. In interviews with journalists, Anna Kapitza was distraught. 'The whole affair has caused great mental pain to both my husband and myself,' she complained, adding that she was concerned about the effect of the upheaval on her highly strung husband: 'in his present state of mind he is not in a position to do any serious work'. Yet she was underplaying his distress: 'Sometimes I rage and want to tear out my hair and scream,' he had written to her. Life in the Moscow science community was dismal for him as most of his former friends there were shunning him until they knew officially, from Stalin's office, whether Kapitza was one of the 'enemies of the people'. His country's reward for his scientific success and for not making a fuss was, he wrote to Anna, to treat him 'like dog's excrement, which they try to mould in their own way'. He knew his letters would be intercepted and read by the police, so he lambasted the agents of his captivity, not the Soviet system that employed them:\n\n'Not only am I sincerely loyal, but I have deep faith in the success of the [plans for] new construction [in the Soviet Union] [. . .] But even in spite of my cursing, I do believe that the country will come out of all these difficulties victorious. I believe it will prove that the socialist economy is not only the most rational one, but will create a State answering to the world's spiritual and ethical demands. But, for me as a scientist, it is difficult to find a place during the birth pangs.\n\nBut the Soviet Government had plans to keep Kapitza busy and to give him all the material goods he could wish for. It decided to set up a new Institute for Physical Problems, to make him the founding director, to give him a salary most academics would envy and then to  throw in some generous perks, including an apartment in Moscow, a summer house in the Crimea for his family and a brand new Buick. From the vantage point of the sofa in his hotel room, however, the future looked so bleak to Kapitza that he considered suicide. His depression was relieved only by trips to the theatre and the opera and by colour reproductions of his favourite modern art pinned to the blank walls. But C\u00e9zanne, Gogol and Shostakovich offered only meagre consolation: he longed to return to his experiments in the Mond Laboratory, to be with his family and friends in Trinity College.\n\nOn the day news of Kapitza's detention broke in the UK, Dirac was relaxing with the Gamows in Washington, DC. On a fine warm day, the three of them took a forty-minute trip in an airship over the city and looked down on the cherry blossoms in the fullness of their second bloom and on Capitol Hill, where FDR was pushing through his controversial New Deal. Dirac was about to tread the streets of the capital as an unlikely lobbyist, having accepted Anna's suggestion that he should approach the first Soviet Ambassador to the USA, Stalin's friend Aleksandr Troyanovsky.\n\nDirac was officially in Washington to attend three consecutive conferences, where he spent most of his time publicising Kapitza's difficulties and collecting signatures to petition for his release. Every delegate approached by Dirac agreed to sign, including L\u00e9o Szil\u00e1rd, who hatched a ludicrous plan to smuggle Kapitza out of Russia by submarine.\n\nBefore Dirac could present the petition, some groundwork had to be done. He arranged for a letter to be written to the Ambassador from Karl Compton, brother of the famous experimenter and President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Compton declared that Kapitza's absence from Cambridge 'is universally considered by scientists to be a major catastrophe' but suggested that his return 'would be universally acclaimed in the scientific world'. The letter did its job: Troyanovsky quickly agreed to receive both Dirac and Millikan. Dirac later explained to Anna Kapitza why he wanted to be accompanied by Millikan: '[he] is known to be rather opposed to the Soviets but that would be counterbalanced by my being known to be rather in favour.'\n\nThus, on the last Friday afternoon of April 1935, Dirac - for a decade regarded as an asocial misfit, out of touch with world affairs  \\- found himself walking to the Soviet Embassy with America's pre-eminent scientist-diplomat. The embassy, just north of the White House, was looking magnificent: Moscow museums had supplied antique furniture, paintings and rugs as contributions to its renovation.  After waiting in the reception room, dominated by a statue of Lenin, Dirac and Millikan shook hands with the lantern-jawed Troyanovsky, whose charm and accommodating manner had made him popular on the city's social circuit. The half-hour meeting was cordial and relaxed. Over a cup of tea, the Ambassador admitted that he had heard of Kapitza's case only when he read Compton's letter and described the Soviets' hurt when some of its most eminent citizens had failed to return home after travelling abroad. Millikan told him that Kapitza's health was deteriorating and suggested that the Soviet Union should bear in mind public opinion in other countries as well as its own. The continued detention of Kapitza would seriously damage relations between Soviet and American scientists, Millikan concluded. As the meeting drew to a close, Dirac spoke up and pleaded for Kapitza's release, in words he recalled the next day in a letter to Anna Kapitza: 'I have known Kapitza very well for a long time and I know him to be thoroughly reliable and honest [. . .] If he were let out under a promise to return he could be depended on to keep that promise.' The Ambassador ended with an assurance that he would raise their concerns with the Soviet Government, so, Dirac told Anna, he left the meeting feeling hopeful.\n\nYet there was more to do. After the meeting, Millikan wrote to the Ambassador to reiterate the points he and Dirac had made, ratcheting up the diplomatic pressure. Dirac collected the last of the petition's sixty signatures, which included those of almost all the leading physicists in the USA, including Einstein. Flexner had agreed to send another petition, addressed to the American Ambassador in Moscow, who would be asked to present it to the Government. Dirac concluded his letter to Anna: 'I feel sure the Soviet Government will do something about it when they see how widespread is the feeling against them. If they don't, you may rely on me to do all I can when I am in Russia to get Kapitza out in any way.'\n\nA few days later, at the beginning of June, Dirac left Princeton. Compared with his most successful stays in Copenhagen and G\u00f6ttingen, this sabbatical had been largely a scientific washout, but for good reasons. He had invested some time in his relationship with  Manci, but it was small compared with his commitment to secure Kapitza's release. Even at the cost of stalling his work, Dirac was not going to abandon his surrogate brother.\n**Twenty**\n\nSTALIN: You, Mr Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men.\n\n'A Conversation between Stalin and [H. G.] Wells', _New Statesman_ , 27 October 1934\n\nMoscow was beckoning again. For the following four months, Dirac's diary was empty, and he was determined to spend most of that time with Kapitza. Dirac knew that the secret police read his letters to Anna Kapitza and that he would probably be followed when he was in Moscow. He told her, 'If anyone follows me around in Moscow he will get some long walks.'\n\nDirac and Tamm had intended to spend the summer hiking and climbing together in the Caucasus, and Dirac hoped to see one of the allegedly productive factories and the new Dneproges hydroelectric power station, one of the proudest achievements of Soviet engineering. But when Anna Kapitza asked Dirac to cancel the trip in order to support her husband, Dirac shelved his plans and declared himself to be at the service of her and her husband: 'I am ready for anything. ' He travelled to Moscow via Berkeley, where Oppenheimer found that Dirac was as tight-lipped as ever about physics. Two of Oppenheimer's students were elated when he told them that their British guest was prepared to hear their ideas about quantum field theory, which built on his work. During their fifteen-minute presentation, Dirac said nothing. Afterwards, the students braced themselves for his perceptive comments, but there was an agonisingly long silence, eventually broken by Dirac when he asked them, 'Where is the post office?' The students offered to take him there and suggested that he could tell them what he thought of their presentation. Dirac told them, 'I can't do two things at once.'\n\nOn the afternoon of 3 June 1935, Dirac waved goodbye to Oppenheimer and boarded the Japanese MS _Asuma Bura._ 4 He settled into his private cabin and prepared to sail through the mist to San Francisco - catching sight of the half-constructed Golden Gate Bridge - and then on to Japan, China and the USSR. Manci,  meanwhile, was lounging around in Budapest, awaiting the arrival of her first car, a six-cylinder Mercedes Benz bought for her by her father. She had persuaded Dirac to visit her in Budapest at the end of his trip. Her complaints that he didn't respond to her questions drew another tabulated response:\n\nHaveyou played ping-pong with pretty girls? ping-pong| With one pretty girl. Most of the passengers were Japanese, and Japanese girls do not play ping-pong.  \n---|---  \nHave you flirted?| No. She was too young (15 years old). But you ought not to mind if I did. Should I not make the most of what you taught me?  \nWhy were you so derisive?| I am sorry, but I cannot help it at times.\n\nSix weeks after he had set sail from the USA, Dirac arrived in Moscow railway station. Even he, with his Gandhian indifference to his surroundings, must have been struck by the contrast between the fresh, early summer air of Princeton and the stench of rotten eggs that hung over the Soviet capital. It was no longer the city that he had seen four years before but a reeking, overcrowded metropolis. The playwright Eugene Lyons described the 'viscous ooze of [Moscow's] dung-coloured people, not ugly but incredibly soiled, patched, drab; the odour and colour of ingrained poverty, fetid bundles, stale clothes'. Dirac stayed there only briefly: he had arranged to spend most of his time in the more agreeable ambience of the Kapitzas' _dacha_ (summer home) in the village of Bolshevo, thirty-five miles south of the city. Kapitza was looking forward to seeing his English friend, though the tone of his comments to his wife indicates that he did not fully reciprocate the intensity of Dirac's affection. But a day after Dirac's arrival, Kapitza appeared to have changed his mind. He wrote to her:\n\n[We] came here with Tamm and have been walking, boating and talking ever since. I haven't had such a pleasant time with anyone up to now. Dirac treats me so simply and so well that I can feel what a good and loyal friend he is. We talk about all sorts of things and this has been very refreshing. [. . .] Dirac's arrival has revived my memories of the respect and reputation I enjoyed in Cambridge [. . .]\n\nThe two friends relaxed together for almost three weeks. Kapitza's abject morale had not improved when he heard that the Soviet authorities had, for unknown reasons, sent 'Dimus' Ivanenko into exile. It was a familiar story, though no one dared to question Stalin's policy in public. Kapitza was considering giving up physics and changing the subject of his research to physiology so that he could work with Russia's most senior scientist, the elderly but still active Ivan Pavlov. Within the modest compass of Dirac's verbal skills, he tried to lift Kapitza's spirits, and in return Kapitza - evidently knowing nothing of Dirac's friendship with Manci - tried to fix him up with a young girl they met, a good-looking, English-speaking language student. Dirac did not respond.\n\nDuring his stay, he met the Trinity College physiologist Edgar Adrian and other British colleagues asked by Rutherford to assess Kapitza's situation and his psychological state. The Soviet Government supported this visit, presumably to demonstrate their flexibility. But, by the time Adrian and his colleagues met with Kapitza, the die was cast: Kapitza had been forbidden to return to Cambridge, and it remained only to secure the best terms for him to work in his new institute. When Dirac left Moscow at the beginning of September, he knew that he had lost his first diplomatic battle; he would have to become accustomed to living in Cambridge without the man he thought of as his closest friend.\n\nThe final stage of his trip was an antidote to his disappointment: he was to visit Manci in Budapest. She was living with her children in an apartment in what had been Archduke Frederick's house, a short stroll from her parents' sumptuous residence opposite Count Batthy\u00e1ny Park. This was a world of plenty - fine food, exquisitely cut clothes, attentive servants and private concerts in the living room. Dirac's modest origins in Bishopston were part of another world. Manci took her material comforts for granted, but she was unhappy and longed to get away from her parents, who must have been taken aback by the arrival on their doorstep of an unkempt Englishman who knew hardly a word of Hungarian. They knew next to nothing about him and surely cannot have expected that their feisty, outspoken daughter would choose such a diffident man. But they liked him and could see that Manci and Dirac clicked during their nine days together, driving around the city in her new car, sightseeing and soaking in the famous indoor public  baths. When he returned to Cambridge, he wrote to Manci: 'I felt very sad when leaving you and still feel that I miss you very much. I do not understand why this should be, as I do not usually miss people when I leave them. I expect you spoil me too much when I am with you.'\n\nManci was making progress. But three weeks later, her heart sank when she read the final entry in Dirac's latest table of unanswered questions: to her query 'Do you miss me a little?', he responded, 'Sometimes.'\n\nWhen Dirac returned to England in the early autumn of 1935, the country was still disfigured by unemployment and worried by Hitler's aggressive rearmament, Mussolini's sabre-rattling in East Africa and Japan's occupation of Manchuria. 'I would like to kill the politicians of middle Europe,' Manci fumed. Dirac was soon back in his Cambridge routine, but the thrill had gone. Although he had not given up on quantum electrodynamics, he seemed to be getting nowhere. Dirac thought a revolution was needed and probably wondered whether he, now thirty-three, might be too old to be one of its leaders.\n\nRutherford had negotiated a deal that involved moving almost every item of Kapitza's equipment to the Institute for Physical Problems, enabling him to resume all his experiments there. Anna had made Dirac a guardian of the Kapitzas' sons, and he took his duties seriously, taking the boys out at the weekends for rides in his crumbling car and organising his first fireworks display for them on 5 November.  These were good times for Dirac, but he was preparing for yet more loneliness: the Blacketts had left for London, Chadwick for Liverpool, Walton for Dublin, and now the Kapitzas were about to depart for good. Dirac was not the self-sufficient eremite that many people believed him to be: he needed new companionship, and he knew it. Manci was eager to oblige, but he was wary of her forwardness, as he showed when she telephoned him one night late in November as he was preparing to go to bed. She thought he would be delighted to receive an unexpected call from her but he was angry and shaken. The college telephone system was arranged so that the porters heard their stilted conversation, as he explained to her in a brusque note. Surely it was sufficient to communicate only by letter, he wrote, with all the warmth of a tax  inspector. She swiftly replied, making clear what she thought of his secretiveness: 'ridiculous'.\n\nIncidents like that rattled him: could he live with someone who had so little sympathy with his need for privacy? He will have had no wish to be party to a disastrous marriage, like his parents', which he had seen in all its unpleasantness two months before, during another rain-soaked visit to Bristol. Charles and Flo were living out their marriage contract in an unwinnable endgame of squabbles and recriminations. Divorce was out of the question for the born-again Catholic Charles, but when he read his copy of George Bernard Shaw's _Getting Married_ , he may well have sympathised with the author's recommendation: 'Make divorce as easy, as cheap, and as private as marriage.' Flo would probably have welcomed a divorce, but the shame would have been too much for her. So they both remained unhappily shackled to each other, with nothing to look forward to except more arguments. Flo told her son that her pleasures were limited to taking long walks on the Downs, sitting alone in the parks and attending meetings of the new Bristol Shiplovers' Society. 'I have made an awful mess of my life somehow,' she wrote, adding that she blamed herself: 'What we sow, we reap.'\n\nDirac's mother appears to have had no more than a passing interest in his work, but his father struggled hard to understand it. Charles looked through the journals in the library, searching for readable accounts of quantum theory, hoping to absorb some of their content by writing out paragraphs of difficult technical prose, verbatim. He kept a record of his findings in a small, red notebook, on whose front cover he had written a two-inch-high letter P. The desultory references and notes inside are heart-rending records of a keen but confused amateur, unable to make any headway in a subject he longed to understand. Charles had written, in his rheumatic hand, some of the most complimentary comments about his son, highlighting some of the most generous ones: 'Dirac stands out amongst his contemporaries in this field for his originality.' Apart from a summary of one of Crowther's articles on 'New Particles', Charles had not tracked down any of the lively and accessible accounts of quantum mechanics by Eddington or any of the other accomplished popularisers. It seems that his son was giving him no help at all.\n\nWith Bristol's long tradition of adult education, it was easy for the city's citizens to find out about new science. Arnold Tyndall, who  gave Dirac his first introduction to quantum theory, was a popular performer at the night classes on science organised by the university. During one of his courses, a male student caught the eye of the genial Tyndall. Much older than the other students, he always sat at the front, taking careful notes. At the end of the final lecture, he shuffled up to Tyndall to thank him. 'I am glad to have heard all this. My son does physics but he never tells me anything about it.' The student was Charles Dirac.\n\nIn the early summer of 1935, Betty had finished her French course and had come bottom of her class, taking a third-class honours degree, as Felix had done. She wanted to be a secretary and to get out of Bristol as quickly as she could. Charles was now open about his relationship with Mrs Fisher, Flo told Dirac: 'I wish he would go and live with her, folks are always seeing them about together and tell me [. . .] He has always had someone ever since I've been married: Betty says it is French.'\n\nDirac's mother, preparing to go on another Mediterranean cruise alone, sensed that her daughter was growing away from her. In a few weeks, she would temporarily move to London, not leaving her mother a forwarding address. But first Betty went on an August vacation with her father, keeping their destination secret. They were travelling with a group of Catholic priests on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, where Charles may, to try to rid himself of his ailments, have bathed in its reputedly miraculous waters. He knew that his daughter would pray for him but that his wife and son were, at best, indifferent to his fate.\n\nDirac would probably have been happiest if, like Einstein, he had never supervised a graduate student. It was not until the 1935-6 academic year that Dirac first officially became a research supervisor, taking on two students Born left behind when he moved to Edinburgh to take up a professorship. Dirac had almost none of the skills that he had seen in Fowler: the ability to set problems pitched at the right level for his students, to motivate them in lean times and to support them in the early stages of their career. Dirac believed his only obligation was to point his students towards an interesting theoretical concept and then to look over any work they produced in consequence; it was up to the student to take almost all the initiative. Only the cleverest and most independent-minded students could  flourish under such a regime, as the Cambridge authorities knew. Dirac knew it, too, and showed no interest in recruiting apprentices. But several of the finest young minds sought his guidance, including the Indian mathematician Harish-Chandra and the Pakistani theoretician Abdus Salam, both part of a pattern - the great majority of Dirac's successful students were foreign.\n\nDirac encouraged his students to keep abreast of the latest publications in theoretical physics and also to keep an eye on the experimenters' latest findings. But his faith in the veracity of new experimental results was badly shaken by an incident that began in the autumn of 1935. Dirac heard that the Chicago experimenter Robert Shankland had found evidence that sometimes energy is not conserved, contrary to one of the fundamentals of science: when photons are scattered by other particles, he found the particles' total energy before the collision is not the same as it is afterwards. Setting aside his preference to be led by mathematics rather than experiment, Dirac smelt an impending revolution and in December wrote to Tamm, spelling out the consequences of Shankland's findings. First, the neutrino would no longer be needed, as Pauli had based his entire argument for its existence on the energy-conservation law. Second, and more important, as Shankland's experiment involved light, his results might be a hint that energy is not conserved whenever particles collide at speeds close to the speed of light. If so, Dirac pointed out, it would be reasonable to retain the basic theory of quantum mechanics, which applies to comparatively slow-moving particles, though the relativistic extensions of the theory, such as quantum electrodynamics, would have to be abandoned. A few days later at the Kapitza Club - still meeting despite its founder's absence - Dirac gave a talk on the implications of Shankland's results. To most physicists, the experiments looked unreliable, and it seemed wise to wait for the results to be checked independently. But Dirac could not wait: in January 1936, he set out the implications of Shankland's results in a short, equationless article in the journal _Nature_ , addressing his comments to the entire scientific community. If Shankland was right, Dirac said, quantum electrodynamics would have to be abandoned, adding, 'most physicists will be very glad to see the end of it'. Coming from one of the discoverers of relativistic quantum mechanics and field theory, these were striking words. Heisenberg privately dismissed Dirac's thoughts as 'nonsense'. Einstein did not  conceal his glee: 'I am very happy that one of the real experts now argues for the abandonment of the awful \"quantum electrodynamics\". ' Schr\u00f6dinger, disillusioned with the conventional interpretation of quantum theory, was pleased that Dirac had apparently joined the malcontents. Bohr, who in 1924 had been among the first to suggest that energy might not be conserved in every atomic process, was publicly less critical, though he took Shankland's results with a pinch of salt.\n\nExperimenters, including Blackett in London, downed tools, changed their plans and began programmes of experiments to investigate Shankland's claims. A few months later, however, it became clear that he had been wrong and that energy was indeed conserved. The false alarm made a deep impression on Dirac. A year later, he wrote ruefully to Blackett: 'After Shankland, I feel very sceptical of all unexpected experimental results. I think one should wait a year or so to see that further experiments do not contradict the previous results, before getting worried about them.' Dirac's inclination to believe exciting new observations had been irreversibly undermined.\n\nAfter another secret Christmas vacation with Manci and her children in Austria and Hungary, marriage was now on the cards. But Dirac could not bring himself to commit. No one knew of his inner turmoil; all they saw was the familiar meditative Dirac, the prince of asceticism, going wordlessly about his business. But in private he was not quite as cold and detached as he seemed to be. On his mantel-piece, he kept a photograph of Manci in a swimsuit, but no one saw it: when there was a knock on the door of his college rooms, he took the photograph down and hid it in a drawer. When many of his associates thought he was working, he was sloping off to see Mickey Mouse films, taking the Kapitza boys out for runs in his new car and reading T. E. Lawrence's _Seven Pillars of Wisdom._ In a bid to make Dirac more self-aware, Manci recommended that he read Aldous Huxley's _Point Counterpoint_ as she thought Dirac resembled the novel's character Philip Quarles: brilliant, solitary, emotionally 'a foreigner' and entrenched 'in that calm, remote, frigid silence'. Not seeing the likeness, he wrote to Manci: 'I doubt whether I am really like Philip Quarles, because his parents are not really like mine,' underlining - perhaps unconsciously - the importance of his mother and father to his sense of identity.\n\nDirac wrote his letters to Manci before he went to bed, 'the best time for thinking about you'. He never mentioned his work, nor did she enquire about it, and he rarely referred to his colleagues, but he did make an exception in February, shortly before he was due to meet Bohr and his wife in London. It was not long before Manci tired of the praise Dirac heaped on his elderly friend in one letter after another; 'Bohr, Bohr, Bohr,' she yawned. Dirac was surprisingly sensitive to these complaints and showed that he appreciated that her hair-trigger jealousy needed to be handled with care by toning down the complimentary references to colleagues he admired. His tact was tested again shortly before the Easter vacation, when Manci was hoping to see him. He explained to her that he felt duty-bound to visit his parents, as he had not seen them for several months; the problem was that after his visit to Bristol he would be in no fit psychological state to meet her:\n\nIt really will change me very much when I go home; it will make me afraid to do anything for my own pleasure. I shall probably be afraid to think of you [. . .] I find it satisfies me to be able to think of you whenever I wish. Why cannot you be satisfied in the same way? You should cultivate your imagination [. . .] It would be no use for me to see you for one or two days because, as you know, I am never kind to you the first day or two when I meet you.\n\nDirac pleaded with her to understand the paralysis that overcame him whenever he set foot in 6 Julius Road: 'If you cannot understand this, you will never understand me.' But Manci showed no sympathy; he was selfish, she told him. She had no interest in cultivating her imagination - she was not asking the Earth; all she wanted was to see her man in the flesh:\n\nYou do not consider anything but from your point of view. We are very different in [that] you never think to help people or to make them happy in spite [of the fact] that you are in the lucky situation where it would be easy to do so . . . I like you less.\n\nShe got her way. Shortly before Easter, Dirac returned to Bristol for a few days and, after taking a few days to recover, organised a vacation with Manci in Budapest. 'I cannot imagine being happier than I was with you,' she wrote to him. Finding it hard to express his joy, he assured her that the vacation left him 'not wanting feminine society at all'.\n\nAfter Easter, Dirac's colleagues in St John's were surprised to see him so sunburnt, and when they asked him where he had been, he replied, 'Yugoslavia.' The first casualty of Dirac's secret love was his commitment to literal truth.\n\nDuring the first week of June 1936, Dirac was gathering together his rucksack, sleeping bag, ice axe, rope and crampons, preparing for his next climbing vacation in the USSR with Tamm. Besides visiting Kapitza, he wanted to be in the Caucasus on 19 June to see a solar eclipse, the first he will have seen. Before leaving, he wrote to Manci, asking her not to write to him because if Tamm and Kapitza 'notice [that] you and I write very much to each other, then very quickly the news would spread to physicists all over the world and they would all gossip about us'.\n\nKapitza was in better spirits, reading his subscription copies of the _New Statesman_ and supervising the building of his new institute. Many of its rooms were replicas of ones in the Mond Laboratory, though Kapitza ensured that his new director's office was even grander, with an even larger footprint. After he demanded that every item of his laboratory equipment should be transferred, Rutherford complained that it seemed Kapitza would not be happy until the paint of the Mond Laboratory had been scraped off the walls. The Soviet Union was still the talk of the Cambridge common rooms, and the _Cambridge Review_ abounded with articles about it, including a sceptical review of Crowther's _Soviet Science_ , a whitewash that declared the Stalinist state's interference in science to be minimal. The Trinity College scholar Anthony Blunt, later a distinguished art historian, wrote an article on how a gentleman traveller might make the most of Russian hospitality - the champagne and the caviar, if not the bed bugs. Unknown to his colleagues, Blunt had recently become a Soviet spy.\n\nShortly before Dirac set off for Russia, he heard from his mother that his father was severely ill with pleurisy: every breath was painful and liable to be accompanied by a stabbing pain in his midriff. Flo wrote that the family doctor had ordered her husband to stay in bed for ten days but assured her that 'I'm not to worry as Pa is the kind of man to make the worse of anything just to keep me busy.' From the tone of his mother's letter, Dirac sensed that his father was not seriously ill, and he knew his parents were supported by Betty, about  to move permanently to London to become a secretary. So he decided to set off on vacation and arrived in Moscow on Saturday, but within hours received a telegram from his mother, telling him that his father was dying. He decided to head home, perhaps hoping to make one last effort to make his peace with his father, to achieve a reconciliation that had not been possible with Felix. Having left his hiking gear with Tamm, he caught the 7 a.m. flight from Moscow: he had twenty-two hours to find the right parting words.\n\nCharles grumbled that he did not want to be confined to bed at home because his wife was not taking proper care of him. So his doctor arranged for a professional nurse to take up residence in 6 Julius Road at night and to supervise Charles's care during the day. But that was not enough: after a few days, he demanded to be moved to a nursing home on the perimeter of the nearby St Andrew's Park, where he chose a comfortable room whose bay window looked out on the beds of early summer flowers. The staff soon realised that they had an awkward customer on their hands: the matron told Flo that Charles 'was an awful fidget so restless and fussy', and the nurses were instructed to leave him alone and to look into his room every half an hour. Struggling against pleurisy and the onset of pneumonia, he suddenly decided that he wanted to go home, but his doctor forbade it. Flo stopped visiting him, leaving him alone with his stabbing chest pains, his quarrels with the nurses and his reflections on the past sixty-nine years. One of his bitterest regrets must surely have been his estrangement from his son, 'Einstein the second', as the _Daily Mirror_ had described him three months before. This adulatory article, which Charles is almost certain to have read, concluded by telling its readers that their greatgrandchildren might one day talk about him, having forgotten No\u00ebl Coward, Henry Ford and Charlie Chaplin. One sentence in the piece will have taken Charles by surprise: the anonymous author wrote that Paul Dirac is only happy when he is in the lecture room, at the wheel of his sports car and 'in his home in Bristol, where he can talk with his father'.\n\nAt the end, the only member of Charles Dirac's family to be standing by him was his daughter, and she was about to break his heart by moving to London. On the day she was due to start work, Monday 15 June, he died. The end came a few hours before his son  arrived in Bristol: any hope of a deathbed reconciliation had been extinguished.\n\nTwo days later, on a warm and cloudy summer afternoon, Dirac was among the mourners at the funeral. It was a civic occasion, held in St Bonaventure's, the handsome Catholic church at the end of Egerton Road, near the family home. A few hours before, at eight in the morning, the choir had sung a requiem mass over Charles's open coffin near the altar. The funeral was scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. Shortly before, dozens of mourners made their way through the Bishopston streets - representatives from the Esperanto Society, the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, the French Circle and Cotham Road School, including several schoolchildren. Also there was elderly Arthur Pickering, the man who had introduced Dirac to Riemannian geometry, still telling stories of how he had struggled to find challenges for the most precocious student he ever had.\n\nThe eulogy, the weeping, the sacred music, the lowering of Charles's coffin into the grave - together, they may have stirred Dirac to reflect on the good things his father had done for him. Charles had ensured that his younger son had an excellent education and had encouraged him to study mathematics. And it was Charles who had given him the money he desperately needed in order to begin his studies in Cambridge.\n\nStraight after the funeral, Dirac gave vent to his feelings in a single-page letter to Manci. In the most expansive handwriting he ever used in his life, he wrote that he would return to Moscow after he had spent a week with his mother: 'I think that in Russia I can best get used to my new situation.' He wanted to see Manci again, he told her, but gave her firm instructions not to contact him: 'I would rather you did not wire me while I am in Bristol because my mother would probably open it.' Dirac concluded with some simple words of relief: 'I feel much more free now; I feel I am my own master.'\n\nCharles Dirac had left no will - he probably did not want to leave much to his wife and possibly could not face the thought that his true wishes would be known to all the people who revered him as a family man. Flo had long suspected that he had been squirreling his money away, but even she was stunned by the amount he had hoarded: the net value of his estate was worth \u00a37,590 9s 6d, about fifteen times his final annual salary. Half of the legacy was shared by Paul and Betty, and the rest went to Flo, who quickly headed off on a restorative holiday in the Channel Islands, where she wrote to her son: 'I've won my liberty and shall keep it.' Betty, apparently finding her mother's relief unseemly, departed for London and never lived in Bristol again but occasionally corresponded with her mother. Betty was piqued when she read that Flo had destroyed most of her father's papers in a bonfire in the back garden; the remainder of the papers she gave to Paul. From them we know that, somehow, several of his parents' love letters survived.\n\nDirac family, 3 September 1907\n\nPaul Dirac, 17 August 1907\n\nLeft to right: Felix, Betty and Paul Dirac _c_.1909. A French grammar book rests on Paul's lap.\n\nTechnical drawing by Paul Dirac at Bishop Road School, Bristol, 9 December 1913\n\nBristol University Engineering Society's visit to Messrs Douglas' Works, Kingswood, 11 March 1919. Dirac is in the front row, fourth from the right.\n\nCharles Dirac, _c_.1933\n\nFelix Dirac, 1921\n\n6 Julius Road, Bristol, where Dirac lived with his family from April 1913 until he left for Cambridge in 1923. He regularly returned home and began his work on quantum mechanics in his bedroom here.\n\nMax Born (seated, central) with several younger colleagues at his home in G\u00f6ttingen, spring 1926. Dirac is, as usual, diverted. Oppenheimer is in the back row, fourth from the left.\n\nSome members of the Kapitza Club, after a meeting _c_.1925, in the room of Peter Kapitza, Trinity College, Cambridge. Kapitza is directly beneath the drawing of a crocodile on the easel.\n\nPatrick Blackett and Paul Ehrenfest, _c_.1925\n\nIsabel Whitehead with her husband Henry, and their son Henry, 1922.\n\nDirac (standing close to the doorway) at a meeting in Kazan, Russia, 12 October 1928\n\nLeft to right: Heisenberg's mother, Schr\u00f6dinger's wife, Flo Dirac, Dirac, Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger. They have just arrived at Stockholm railway station, 9 December 1933, for the Nobel celebrations.\n\nExtract from a letter from Dirac to his friend Manci Balazs, 9 May 1935\n\nDirac and Manci on their honeymoon, Brighton, January 1937\n\nThe Dirac family in the garden of their Cambridge home, _c_.1946. Left to right: Dirac, Monica, Manci, Gabriel, Mary and Judy.\n\nDirac and Manci (on the far left) with a party during a crossing of the Atlantic on the SS _America_ , 2 April 1963\n\nDirac and Richard Feynman at a conference on relativity, Warsaw, July 1962\n\nDirac at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, _c_.1958\n\nThe Diracs' home in Tallahasse, 223 Chapel Drive\n\nKapitza and Dirac at the Hotel Bad Schachen, Lindau, summer 1982\n\nOne of the last photographs taken of Dirac, Tallahassee, _c_.1983\n\nWhen Flo returned to Bristol, she arranged for Charles's gravestone in Canford Cemetery to be engraved with the words Paul had written for her:\n\nIn loving memory of   \nOur dear son   \nReginald Charles Felix Dirac, B.Sc.   \n\u2605 Easter Sunday 1900   \n= March 5th 1925   \nAnd of my dear husband   \nCharles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, B.\u00e8s.L   \nFather of the above   \n\u2605 July 31st 1866   \n= June 15th 1936\n\nDirac was obviously determined that the tone of family memories of his father should owe more to propriety than honesty. His mother wrote to him: 'One doesn't mind after a few months.'\n\nWhen Dirac resumed his visit to Russia, he celebrated by attempting to climb Mount Elbrus, 5,640 metres above sea level, the highest peak in the Caucasus, a near wilderness. With Tamm and a small party of his Russian colleagues, Dirac hiked through the forest to reach a base camp and then scaled the eastern side of the mountain, fearful of injury, sweat dribbling down his back and sunburned face during the day, shivering in the tent at night. Mount Elbrus yielded its rewards only grudgingly, as hundreds of defeated mountaineers had found, some as they fell to their deaths. After several days, Dirac and his fellow climbers saw Russia's most majestic glacial scenery, sights all the sweeter for the pain that must be suffered to win them. He only just made it; after reaching the  top, he was spent and had to rest for a day before he could begin the journey back to base. Never again would he attempt such an ambitious climb.\n\nAfter recuperating, Dirac joined Kapitza, who was back to his buoyant best. The building of the institute was progressing well, and the first consignments of his equipment were about to arrive from the Cavendish. The authorities were taking care of him: although most Soviets suffered food shortages, Rutherford heard from Kapitza that he was eating oysters, caviar and smoked sturgeon of a quality that would make even the Trinity College 'gourmands at the high table dribble'. In under three years, the Soviet authorities had won him round.\n\nIn the next stage of Dirac's hedonistic trip, he visited the two people he most wanted to see: Manci and Bohr. Having contemplated his bereavement for a few weeks, when Dirac saw Manci in Budapest, he confided his worries that he and his father were so similar: both devoted to work, both extremely methodical, both lacking in empathy. Apparently for the first time, he described how his father had treated his family so unspeakably. After he left Budapest, she urged him to put his resentments behind him: 'One has to try to understand and forgive.' He will have been mulling over Manci's advice towards the end of September when staying with Bohr and his wife in their country retreat. The Bohrs were also recovering from grief, less complicated and probably much more painful than Dirac's: their eldest son Christian had died two years before, at the age of seventeen, in a freak yachting accident. Bohr had been on the deck with him and had been helpless as he watched him drown.\n\nAt Bohr's suggestion, Dirac stayed in Denmark longer than he originally intended, to attend a special conference at the institute about a branch of science that Dirac knew almost nothing about: genetics. He learned, he wrote in a letter to Manci, that this 'is the most fundamental part of biology' and that there are 'laws governing the way in which one inherits characters from one's parents'. There was no escape from his father's genetic legacy - it was in Dirac's blood .\n\nWhen Dirac returned to Cambridge, his adventurous spirit was intact, and he changed his research topic from quantum physics to cosmology, refocusing his imagination from scales of a billionth of a  centimetre to thousands of light years. Einstein's general theory of relativity provided the sturdy theoretical foundations of modern cosmology, but the subject was handicapped by a dearth of reliable data. As a result, theoretical cosmologists had more room for manoeuvre than was good for them and had to rely heavily on intuition.\n\nWithout question, the most successful observational astronomer was the former lawyer Edwin Hubble, an Anglophile American in his mid-forties, given to declaiming on conference platforms in a strangely affected English accent, akin to Oppenheimer's. Hubble had created a public sensation in 1929 when he suggested that galaxies (aggregates of stars and other matter) do not stay still with respect to one another but are always rushing apart. In what became known as Hubble's law, he used the data in his charts and tables to propose that the further a galaxy is away from the Earth, the faster the galaxy is moving away from it. This picture of galaxies dashing away from each other was consistent with Lema\u00eetre's 'primeval atom' theory of the origin of the universe, a precursor of the modern theory of the Big Bang.\n\nDirac's perspective on the subject emerged after a few months' gestation, when he was also contemplating one of the most important decisions of his life: should he marry Manci? Here was a warm, caring and cultured woman, the kind of extrovert he liked, one of the few with the patience to draw out his humanity. On the other hand, she was impulsive, hot-headed and overbearing. Could he be happy with a woman who had something of the controlling personality of his father? He knew it would be pointless to ask his mother, who wanted no competition for his loyalty. It would not be wise to seek the counsel of Wigner, as his loyalties would be divided; besides, he had problems of his own. Having felt undervalued at Princeton, Wigner had moved to the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and was contemplating marriage to his colleague Amelia Frank, one of the few female quantum physicists. When Wigner asked Manci to visit him and to size up his girlfriend, she jumped at the opportunity to sail from Southampton on the _Queen Mary_ , the world's most luxurious liner, whose maiden voyage had taken place five months before. When Manci asked Dirac if she could visit him in Cambridge before she sailed, he fobbed her off but quickly relented. Still unsure whether he should commit to the relationship, he drove Manci over to see Isabel Whitehead for what Manci knew  was an informal grilling. When he returned to Cambridge, he felt confident enough to forward some of Mrs Whitehead's views to Manci, excising points that might upset her:\n\nMrs Whitehead said she liked you. You are very unusual and have the simplicity of a child. I think this is what she meant by your being charming. [. . .] she said that I ought to make up my mind quickly, also that you and I would find it very difficult to get on together because we are so different.\n\nYet Mrs Whitehead had second thoughts. Worried that Dirac was contemplating marriage without the spiritual commitment she believed was essential, she wrote Dirac a long and anguished letter, thundering like Lady Bracknell:\n\nWould it be useful to go and talk to Prof. Eddington about spiritual things? I feel sad that you should have this limitation that you do not seem [?] to believe in God; and I am always afraid that I have failed to help you, how and when you need help.\n\nMrs Whitehead pleaded with him not to make his decision when he was 'in a mood', a phrase he had used when they last met. This stung him into a rare candour about his state of mind. On 6 December, when Manci was preparing to sail from New York, he replied to Mrs Whitehead that he did not believe his decision depended on whether or not he believed in God. She had misunderstood his reference to his state of mind when he took his decision:\n\n[By 'in a mood'] I meant only that I would need to be in a courageous mood to take an irrevocable step, after I had made up my mind what I ought to do. I think I err on the side of trying to be guided too much by reason and too little by feeling, and this makes me feel helpless when it comes to problems that cannot be solved by the clear-cut reasoning that one has in science [. . .] I have felt very favourably inclined to [Manci] for several months, with occasional relapses, which get less and less as time goes on.\n\nBut Mrs Whitehead was not to be deflected; she wrote straight back to Dirac, insisting that 'married love comes to its highest perfection between people who know and love God'. But these words were wasted on Dirac, for whom the concept of God had no precise meaning.\n\nBy the time he was among the dockside crowds at Southampton, waiting for Manci to arrive, he had made up his mind. During the  drive to London in his sporty drop-head Triumph coup\u00e9, he steered his car to the kerbside and asked Manci, 'Will you marry me?' She accepted immediately. When he told his mother the news, she was predictably shocked but summoned the grace to wish him and Manci well, offering to travel to London on the day before Christmas Eve to meet her future daughter-in-law. Dirac accepted, perhaps inadvertently giving his mother one last chance to persuade him to stay single.\n\nManci was staying in the smart Imperial Hotel in Bloomsbury, overlooking Russell Square. During their few hours together, Flo and Manci found a few moments to talk privately, leaving Manci puzzled.  As soon as Flo arrived home, she wrote to Dirac with a detailed account of the conversation:\n\nFLO: You will be having twin-beds soon.\n\nMANCI: Oh no, I must have a room to myself. I cannot allow Dirac to come in my bedroom.\n\nFLO: What are you marrying him for?\n\nMANCI: I like him very much and want a home.\n\nFlo was astute enough to avoid outright condemnation. 'Manci was very nice indeed,' she wrote, before the inevitable qualification: 'I suppose you know she is only contracting a \"marriage of convenience\". ' His mother knew how to unsettle him. She had just seven days to make him reconsider the balance he had struck between reason and feeling.\n**Twenty-one**\n\nPythagoras says that number is the origin of all things; certainly, the law of number is the key that unlocks the secrets of the universe.\n\nPAUL CARUS, _Reflections on Magic Squares_ , 1906\n\nOn the morning of Saturday 2 January 1937, Dirac and Manci married in Holborn Registry Office in central London. He had wed his anti-particle, a woman almost opposite to him in character and temperament, as his father had done thirty-eight years before. That had proved disastrous, resulting in something akin to mutual annihilation, so Dirac may have feared - at least at the back of his mind - that history would repeat itself.\n\nIt was an overcast day, the crowds in London going about their business after the Christmas holiday, girding themselves for the harshness of winter. The wedding was a simple civil ceremony, with only a few guests, including Dirac's mother and sister, the Blacketts, Isabel Whitehead and her husband. After lunching with them in a restaurant near by, the couple returned to their hotel and drove to Brighton. Dirac could not have picked a more conventional place for his honeymoon: for decades, it had been the most popular seaside venue in Britain for romantic trysts. It was a peculiarly raffish town, famous for its two Victorian piers jutting imperiously out to sea, for the pale green domes of its faux-oriental pavilion, its future-telling robot and a host of other tacky attractions.\n\nIt appears that no photographs were taken of the wedding, but Dirac took reels of them during the vacation, the best of them showing the newlyweds on a pebbled beach, smiling broadly, looking coy and love-struck. Dirac looks comfortable lying on the beach in his ill-fitting three-piece suit, pencils still protruding from the pocket of his jacket. In some of the snaps, it is possible to see a string-operated device that he devised to enable him and Manci to photograph themselves with no one else present.\n\nAfter the honeymoon, while Manci was in Budapest with Betty, Dirac looked around Cambridge for a permanent home and discharged his duties as Lucasian Professor. Three weeks after Manci's  departure, rain lashing against the windows of his rooms in St John's, he was overcome with loneliness, sheltering from the wind and drizzle of the Cambridge winter. He wrote to his wife 'the first love letter I have ever written [. . .] Rather late to begin is it not?' In the two passionate letters he wrote in as many days, he revealed an almost Byronic expressiveness:\n\nI realize more and more as time goes on that you are the only girl for me. Before we were married, I was afraid that getting married would cause a reaction, but now I feel that I will go on loving you more and more as I get to know you better and see what a dear, sweet girl you are. Do you think you will go on loving me more and more, or is it now as much as it can be?\n\nHe had, at last, fallen in love. In the evenings, he read Bernard Shaw's _Getting Married_ \\- retrieved from his father's library - and some books recommended by Manci, including John Galsworthy's sprawling _Forsyte Saga._ 3 But Dirac was spending most of his time in a Manci-obsessed reverie, counting the days to when she was due to return, dreaming of embracing her in bed under a new moon. It was now Manci's turn to be sensitive about what others might think: brushing aside her worries that the censors in Hungary might be intercepting their mail, Dirac was uninhibited: 'You have a very beautiful figure, my darling, so round and charming - and to think that it all belongs to me. Is my love too physical, do you think?' Struggling to find words equal to his passion, he continued:\n\nManci, my darling, you are very dear to me. You have made a wonderful alteration to my life. You have made me human. I shall be able to live happily with you, even if I have no more success in my work. [. . .] I feel that life for me is worth living if I just make you happy and do nothing else.\n\nManci appears to have been no less intoxicated: 'If by any reason a war or anything would prevent me to see you again, I could never love anybody else.' She and Betty were getting on well in Budapest, at the Moulin Rouge, skating on the rinks and doing the Charleston on the dance floor after a few glasses of champagne. 'I am very very happy and being thoroughly spoiled,' Betty wrote to Dirac. But she was depressed and mourning her father: 'he was the finest man I ever knew', she wailed. In Betty's view, her parents had each been the victim of an unfortunate marriage, and she gave Manci a reason why her parents disliked each other, though this was too personal for Manci to spell it out explicitly in a letter to her husband.\n\nManci decided to take Betty in hand and to find her a husband: '[Despite] her little faults, a bit of untidiness and unpunctuality, I shall try to [. . .] improve her and she will be a very good wife.' Within days, Manci had decided that her Hungarian friend Joe Teszler was just the man for her sister-in-law: kind, gentle and - an essential requirement for Betty - a Roman Catholic. This was one of Manci's most effective pieces of social engineering: after a brief courtship, Betty married Joe - six years her senior - in London on 1 April 1937. In Bristol, Flo was now quite alone.\n\n'Some say that I got married rather suddenly,' Dirac wrote to his wife. One of the dons who were surprised by Dirac's marriage was Rutherford, who wrote to Kapitza: 'Our latest news is that Dirac has succumbed to the charms of a Hungarian widow with two children,' adding cryptically, 'I think it will require the ability of an experienced widow to look after him.' A few days later, Dirac wrote to tell Kapitza the news: 'Have you heard that I was married during the vacation [. . .]?' Kapitza was probably surprised as he thought he knew Dirac well but had not even known he was seeing a woman. Anna Kapitza quickly wrote to Manci, though she too had not met her:\n\nDear Mrs Dirac (it sounds very official but he did not even write us your name!)\n\nI hope you will be very happy with that strange man, but he is a wonderful creature and we all love him very much. Do come to see us in the summer.\n\nYours, Anna K\n\nAfter a second honeymoon in Brighton - only a month after the first - Dirac returned to Cambridge with Manci, who had left her children in Budapest. By late April 1937, they were still looking for a permanent home and living in a rented house in Huntingdon Road, a short stroll from the Kapitzas' former home. It is not recorded how Dirac referred to her when he introduced her to his university colleagues, but it is quite possible that he described her not as 'my wife' but by his favourite appellation as 'Wigner's sister' (this was a surprising choice of words for Dirac, usually fastidious in his choice of words to the point of pedantry: Manci was Wigner's _younger_ sister). She quickly established herself as one of the most colourful women in the university, holding dons spellbound as she passed on outrageous gossip about life in Princeton. Dirac looked on, adoringly.\n\nFor all her assertiveness, Manci was happy to be part of what she liked to call 'a very old-fashioned Victorian marriage'. She regarded it as her duty to ensure that her husband's meals were ready on time, to put her husband's used clothes in the laundry basket every night, before laying out freshly ironed clothes for the next day. She allowed Dirac to set out a few ground rules of the relationship, including an understanding that French must never be spoken conversationally in their home - he wanted to put to rest all memories of his father's linguistic regime. Perhaps surprisingly, she accepted that nothing in their domestic routine should ever interfere with Dirac's work. This apparently caused no friction when they were alone but it did, on at least one occasion early in their relationship, lead to an embarrassing tiff: Dirac had agreed to go with her to visit friends for afternoon tea but refused to leave his study because he had not finished thinking. Manci went alone, made excuses for her husband and had to put on a brave face when her host took offence.\n\nThe wary British welcome given to Manci was made no more congenial by the inclement weather. The first few months of 1937 were one of the wettest periods Cambridge had seen for years. She felt unwelcome in the university, which seemed to be a place for men; spouses were meant to be agreeable ornaments - decorative but not obtrusive. Colleges did not allow wives to attend dinners, except on special occasions, so she had to sit alone with her novels and magazines while Dirac fulfilled his duty of dining in college at least once a week. Some of his colleagues thought that his marriage had lightened his character, though he was still as uncommunicative as ever, as the archaeologist Glyn Daniel found when he sat next to him at dinner in St John's:\n\nThe soup came and went in silence; halfway through the Sole V\u00e9ronique I decided the effort must be made - the silence must be broken. But how? Not the weather. Not politics. Not the simple approach, 'My name is Daniel. I study megalithic monuments. Have you any views on Stonehenge?' I turned to Dirac, who was examining the grapes on his sole. 'Have you been to the theatre or the cinema this week?' I asked, innocently. He paused, turned to me with what I supposed was meant to be a kindly smile and said 'Why do you wish to know?' The rest of the meal was eaten in silence.\n\nBy early September, the Diracs had moved into their grand new home, 7 Cavendish Avenue, a detached red-brick house south of the town, built sixty years before. It was in a quiet district - he had  checked carefully that they would not be disturbed by the ringing of church bells - was a twenty-minute cycle ride from St John's College and had 'a beautiful garden' of almost two thirds of an acre. In May, Dirac had written out a cheque for \u00a31,902 10s. 0d., which paid for the property in a single transaction; unlike most newly married couples, they were unencumbered by a mortgage. The interior decor of the house reflected Hungarian tastes in the late 1920s. Manci imported much of the furniture from her Budapest apartment - heavy, dark wood sideboards and cabinets, capacious living-room chairs, gaudy side tables - though Dirac vetoed her most ornate items. Patterned, deep-pile carpeting and conventional landscape paintings helped to set the sober decorative tone.\n\nManci's children joined them in Cambridge and began to study at local schools, where they - with their uncertain, thickly accented English - had to work hard to integrate with other pupils. Although Dirac never legally adopted Judy and Gabriel, he raised them as if they were his own children and never referred to them as his stepchildren. But he also wanted biological children of his own.\n\nA few days after Dirac returned from his honeymoon, he completed his first contribution to cosmology. Had physicists known that he was working on this subject, they would probably have predicted a surprising new insight into the structure of the universe, or perhaps a fresh perspective on Einstein's theory of gravity. But he did neither. In a 650-word letter to _Nature_ that included almost no mathematics, he set out a simple idea about the numbers that describe the universe on the largest scale. As soon as Bohr finished reading the letter for the first time, he walked into Gamow's room in the Copenhagen Institute and said, 'Look what happens to people when they get married.'\n\nDirac's cosmological idea was not completely original, as it bore signs of having been strongly influenced by Eddington. Now perceived by many of his peers as a cocksure eccentric, Eddington had largely abandoned research in conventional cosmology and was spending his time trying to derive some of the most important numbers in science - such as the number of electrons in the universe - not by systematic reasoning but by pure thought. Most theoreticians, including Einstein, thought this was hokum: theoretical physics was  about finding general principles, not about explaining numbers that arise in the search. In Rutherford's scabrous words, Eddington was 'like a religious mystic and [. . .] not all there.'\n\nIn his _Nature_ article, Dirac pointed out that the universe is characterised by several numbers that seem to be connected in a simple way. He focused on three numbers, each of them estimates:\n\n1. The number of protons in the observable universe. Experimentally, this number is roughly 1078 (that is, 10 multiplied by itself 77 times).\n\n2. The strength of the electrical force between an electron and a proton divided by the strength of the gravitational force between them. This turns out to be about 10.\n\n3. The distance across the observable universe divided by the distance across an electron (according to a simple classical picture of the electron). Its value is approximately 10.\n\nThe first striking point about these numbers is that they are so much larger than any number that occurs anywhere else in science: 10, for example, exceeds the number of atoms in a human body by a factor of a hundred billion. The second point is that the largest estimated number, 1078, is the square of the smaller one. This, Dirac believed, may not be a coincidence and suggested that these numbers might be related by extremely simple equations such as\n\nHaving noted that in both of these cases the linking number is about one, Dirac proposed a generalisation: this is always the case - _any_ two of the huge numbers occurring in nature are connected by very simple relationships and linking numbers close to one. This is Dirac's large numbers hypothesis, a consequence of his faith that the laws underlying the workings of the universe are simple.\n\nThe suggestion has an intriguing consequence: because the size of the observable universe continuously increases as it expands, it follows that the ratio of this size to the radius of an electron cannot have always had its present value, 10, but has been increasing throughout time. If Dirac was correct to surmise that this number is connected to the ratio of the electrical force and the gravitational force between an electron and a proton, it followed that the relative strengths of these forces must have been changing as time progressed, as Milne had suggested a few years before. Dirac argued that one consequence of this is that the strength of the gravitational force withers proportionately as the universe ages: when the age doubles, the strength of gravity halves.\n\nDirac's decision to introduce his idea in such a short paper suggests that he believed he had hit on an important new principle and did not want to be beaten into print. If he was expecting the reception that greeted most of his papers, he will have been disappointed: this one was given a frosty reception. Yet none of the sceptics went public with their criticisms, with one prominent exception, the eccentric philosopher-astrophysicist Herbert Dingle. For him, the job of the theorist was to find laws based on experimental measurements, just as Dirac had done in quantum mechanics. Dingle spoke for many a more timid colleague when he wrote an article in _Nature_ that condemned 'the pseudo-science of invertebrate cosmythology', and regretted that Dirac was the latest 'victim of the great Universe mania'. Stung into a quick reply, Dirac repeated his earlier reasoning almost word for word, after prefacing his remarks with an uncontroversial comment about the nature of science: 'The successful development of science requires a proper balance to be maintained between the method of building up from observations and the method of deducing by pure reasoning from speculative assumptions.'\n\nIn the same issue of _Nature_ , Dingle resumed his offensive, stressing that he was not attacking Dirac personally: 'I cited Prof. Dirac's letter not as a source of infection but as an example of the bacteria that can flourish in a poisoned atmosphere; in a pure environment it would not have come to birth, and we should still have the old, incomparable Dirac.'\n\nDirac was not deterred. However, after he had written at length about the implications of his hypothesis in a long paper - completed shortly after Christmas 1937 - he returned to quantum mechanics and did not revisit the hypothesis for another thirty-five years.  Although his idea influenced astronomers in the late 1930s, many of Dirac's peers regarded it as an aberration, joining Bohr in believing that Dirac had made a wrong move towards Eddington and Milne's quasi-mystical cosmology. But his status did not suffer significantly. In October, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, still seeking to recruit the world's best theoretical physicists, put Dirac at the top of the list of the scientists they wanted to recruit, just above Pauli.\n\nBack in Bristol, Charles Dirac had left a surprise for his family: solicitors found, after months of delving through his accounts, that he had been a serial tax evader. The authorities required Flo to pay six years of Charles's tax debt, the maximum they were allowed to reclaim, after making her swear affidavits that she knew nothing of his deception. 'No one knows how Pa managed to elude income tax on so many items,' she wrote to Dirac, who heard that his father had claimed \u00a350 a year tax relief for educating Betty at university, while his son paid the bills. But the nastiest revelation for Dirac was still to come, when he learned that the funds that enabled him to begin his studies at Cambridge had been provided not by his father but by the local education authority. Charles had pretended that he had stumped up the money. This petty and unpleasant deception was, for Dirac, the final straw. It negated everything that his father had done to nurture his career and revealed Charles in his true colours. This was why Paul Dirac told his closest friends, including Kurt Hofer, that he owed his father 'absolutely nothing'.  It was an understandable, if harsh, judgement.\n\nAfter her marriage, Betty left England to live with her husband Joe, who owned and ran a flourishing camera shop in Amsterdam. Within a year they had a son, but their happiness was soon blighted by the news from Berlin, where Hitler was seeking 'living space' outside Germany and was thirsty for Jewish blood. It would not be long before the Teszlers would feel the full force of Hitler's ambitions.\n\nAt the High Table in St John's, everyone was talking about the German Chancellor and the pell-mell rush towards another global conflict. The only European country then openly at war was Spain, where Hitler supported Franco's fascist army; the British Government refused to take sides, outraging socialist opinion, particularly in  Cambridge, from where many idealists journeyed to support Franco's opponents. Dirac's eyes were, as usual, focused on the Soviet Union. That the country was suffering from an unconscionably bloody purge was clear to newspaper readers in Britain, but it appears that Dirac - like many others on the left - thought the reports were exaggerated. In Moscow, Kapitza was not aware of the extent of Stalin's murderous rampage; even so, he knew that several of his colleagues were being harassed and that he risked deportation to a labour camp if he complained, though the censors did not allow him to mention this in his letters.\n\nIn the early summer of 1937, when the Diracs were in Budapest to see her family, Manci wrote to Oswald Veblen and his wife. 'Paul would like very much to go to Russia, but everybody advises him not to.' Dirac insisted on making the visit and wanted to take his family, but Hungarian regulations allowed only Manci to accompany him. Kapitza confirmed the arrangements in a telegram intercepted by MI5, still checking mail he was sending to Cambridge.\n\nAt the end of July, during an oppressively hot summer, the Diracs arrived at the Kapitzas' summer home days before Stalin authorised the torture of suspected enemies of the people. Only a short drive away, his henchmen were gouging out the eyes of their victims, kicking their testicles and forcing them to eat excrement. On the roads around Bolshevo, some of the trucks marked 'Meat' and 'Vegetables' hid prisoners on their way to be shot and buried in the forests to the north of the city which Dirac admired through his binoculars. For many years, Soviet people would refer darkly to 'the year 1937', the height of the Great Purge, Stalin's chaotic and brutal campaign of mass intimidation, imprisonment and murder. By the end of the year, the purge had claimed about four million lives. As Kapitza knew, one of the victims was Boris Hessen, a member of the delegation that had visited London and Trinity College six years before. Five of his fellow visitors would also soon be executed. Now confined to the Soviet Union at Stalin's behest, Kapitza had received all his equipment from the Cavendish Laboratory and had resumed his research.\n\nThe Diracs spent three idyllic weeks in Bolshevo with the Kapitzas in their modest summer house in the heart of a pine forest, with wild strawberries ripe for gathering and a fast-flowing river close by. They spent one languorous day after another lounging around on the covered veranda, telling off-colour jokes, the Diracs bringing the latest  news on the Crocodile and his departing 'boys', the Kapitzas gossiping about life under Stalin. The two men took advantage of the cool mornings to do some manual labour - chopping down trees and clearing shrubs close to the house - and messing around with the boys. Manci, always as _soign\u00e9e_ as a duchess, wanted nothing to do with physical exercise and avoiding cooking anything more complicated than a boiled egg. Dismayed by the _dacha_ 's lack of creature comforts, including toilet paper, she could scarcely believe that, for the first time in her life, she had to sleep outside, in a tent. But she was too polite to gripe: she shone in conversation and won over Kapitza, who saw that she had opened Dirac up. He wrote to Rutherford: 'It is great fun to see Dirac married, it makes him much more human.'\n\nKapitza will almost certainly have enthused about the new institute being built for him. He was dealing adroitly with the authorities, bombarding them with complaints but always avoiding confrontation and keeping on the right side of the power brokers. In return, he was given unusual leeway to employ the staff he wanted and to allocate funds as he saw fit, with a minimum of bureaucracy. In the following year, he was even able to hire Lev Landau as the institute's resident theoretician after he had been arrested in Moscow, having fled the Kharkov police, in fear of his life.  Kapitza had resumed the experiments he had begun in the Mond Laboratory and had successfully liquefied helium the previous February. Exciting new results were afoot.\n\nKapitza persuaded Dirac to demonstrate his support of the Russian experiment by sending his next paper to the _Bulletin of the Soviet Academy of Sciences_ , in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. In the article, he investigated the symmetries underlying classical and quantum descriptions of matter, following the lead given by his brother-in-law Wigner. It was another elegant piece of work, though it produced no useful results and appeared to be more evidence that Dirac was losing his touch.\n\nThe Diracs and Kapitzas knew they were in uncertain times but could scarcely have guessed that they would not sit around the same dinner table again for another twenty-nine years.\n\nAt noon on 25 October 1937, Dirac stood among two thousand mourners in Westminster Abbey, probably wondering whether to  join in the prayers and hymns or stay silent. He was at the memorial service for Rutherford. Nine days before, two weeks after the beginning of the autumn term, he had died after complications arising from surgery on his umbilical hernia: Cambridge was rife with rumours of a botched operation. Within days, government officials agreed that he was eligible to be commemorated in the 'science corner' of Westminster Abbey, alongside Newton, Darwin and Faraday. The funeral service was a national event, attended by a representative of the King, members of the cabinet, the former prime minister Ramsay MacDonald, eighty Cambridge scientists, and several foreign guests. Bohr stayed with the Diracs and joined the Rutherford family party for the event, which ended when an official placed a small urn of the great experimenter's ashes a few inches from Newton's grave.\n\nTwo days after the service, Dirac wrote a consoling note to Kapitza, also grieving from the recent death of his mother. In his reply, Kapitza did not mention that the Crocodile's death occurred just as he was making his most exciting discovery - at sufficiently low temperatures, liquid helium could flow entirely without resistance to its motion. Such 'superfluid' helium could climb spontaneously up the walls of its container and behave in other strange ways that were beyond classical mechanics but which later were explained by applying quantum mechanics to the constituents of the fluid. _Nature_ published Kapitza's results in a December issue, alongside a paper by two Mond experimenters who also announced the discovery of superfluidity: although Kapitza had spent two years without laboratory equipment, he had already caught up with the leaders in his field. It was no longer so easy for his detractors to sneer that he was really just a self-promoting lightweight.\n\nWorried that the future of the Cavendish was in danger, Kapitza wrote to Dirac to enjoin him to take an active interest in securing the laboratory's future: 'I think that you who are now the leading personality in physics in Cambridge, you must take some serious interest in upkeeping the great traditions of the Cavendish Laboratory, so important for all the world.'\n\nBut such a role was beyond Dirac - and, besides, he had no interest in it. The directorship of the Cavendish passed to the crystallographer Sir Lawrence Bragg, who steered the laboratory away from studies of the innermost structure of matter, partly because it could  no longer keep up with the competition from the United States. With Rutherford's passing, the Cavendish had seen the last of its glory days as a place where experimenters probed atoms with the finest possible probes, though Bragg steered the laboratory's agenda into productive territory, culminating in Watson and Crick's discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953.\n\nBy the end of 1937, Dirac was bereft of the company of experimenters with similar interests in physics, and some of his most valued colleagues among the Cambridge theoreticians were in decline. Following a debilitating stroke, Fowler's health was failing, and, by early 1939, he had 'faded out', as he told Eddington. In the sometimes gory seminars in the mathematics department, Eddington was timorous and unable to defend himself against pillory by his younger colleagues. Dirac looked on, unmoved and dissatisfied with his own research. Quantum field theory was virtually at a standstill, and even the best minds were finding it hard to make progress. Dirac often reflected on the contrast with only a decade before, when quantum mechanics had just been discovered: 'It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work; it is very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.' These words resonated with the theoretician Fred Hoyle, an independent-minded Yorkshire man who had attended Dirac's undergraduate lectures and who had struggled in the late 1930s to find a subject ripe for development. Hoyle's bottom-up approach to physics was the antithesis of Dirac's style, but they got on well: the trick was, Hoyle said, to ask Dirac fewer questions than he asked you. Hoyle was amused by Dirac's conversational eccentricities, though even he was stunned when he called Dirac to ask him a straightforward administrative question, only for Dirac to reply, 'I will put the telephone down for a minute and think, and then speak again.' A few months later, Hoyle was told that he needed to find a supervisor, and Dirac took him on, partly because he was amused by the prospect of a relationship between a supervisor who did not want a student and a student who did not want a supervisor.\n\nCompared with many of the new ideas in quantum physics, the energy of an electron sounds a simple concept, but it was anything but simple to understand. This was because the energy that an electron has purely by virtue of its existence - its self-energy - turns out  to be infinite. According to classical physics, the source of this embarrassment is the electric field of the electron (in some ways analogous to the gravitational field of a planet): the smaller the size of the particle, the stronger its field near by and the higher its energy. So if the electron were an infinitely small point, as it is usually assumed to be, its self-energy must be infinite. This makes no sense: how can a completely natural quantity have such an immeasurably huge value?\n\nThe theory of quantum electrodynamics, based on hole theory, had the same weakness: the self-energy of the electron was infinitely large. The most likely reason for this failure, Dirac believed, was that there was a fault in the classical theory on which his quantum theory was based: Maxwell's classical theory of electromagnetism. Dirac hoped that if he could remove the errors in the classical theory, he would be able to deduce a quantum theory of the electron that did not suffer from the disease of infinite self-energy. This was an unpopular view: most of his colleagues thought the classical theory was fine and that the challenge was to solve the problems with quantum theory. But Dirac, as usual, was unperturbed by popular opinion and spent several months in late 1937 and early 1938 working out a new classical theory and finding equations to describe an electron with a tiny but non-zero size. It was an immaculate theory but failed at its first hurdle: when Dirac tried to use it to find an infinities-free quantum version of the theory, he failed.\n\nHe may have wondered whether he had lost his edge. Besides his work, he was now a family man with other priorities: a wife and two bickering children, the employment of a cook and several domestic helpers, and his dependent mother, now sixty, living a hundred and twenty-five miles away and with no telephone. Flo was, however, in good spirits: she was pottering around in her house, writing verse in bed, occasionally packing her suitcase and taking a Mediterranean vacation funded by her now healthy bank account.\n\nManci still found it hard to settle and never felt completely comfortable in 7 Cavendish Avenue, a damp house that somehow always seemed cold, even in high summer. Disappointed that Dirac had turned down Princeton University's offer of a well-paid professorship, she thought Cambridge had nothing to commend it except its academic status and was beginning to dread the prospect of spending her life there. She resented the snobbery of the Cambridge academics who patronised her from the moment they heard she did not have  a degree. The Kapitzas were her sort of people - respectful, plain-spoken, full of life - but they were fifteen hundred miles away and in touch only irregularly. Always a thoughtful and generous friend, Manci inundated them with supplies to help them overcome shortages; Anna tactfully requested her to send only English books, coffee beans and good-quality pipe tobacco for her husband. She also encouraged Manci to be more positive about Cambridge: 'do you still feel lonely without your gay Budapest? If so, you are naughty and must not feel like this any more, because it worries people who like you and live with you (I mean Paul of course!)'\n\nIncessantly gloomy news bulletins on BBC radio about Hitler's increasingly transparent intentions did nothing to improve Manci's mood. In the spring of 1938, he had annexed Austria, where soldiers were welcomed with flowers and swastikas as they goose-stepped into towns. In late May, Dirac read an item in _Nature_ that will probably have disturbed him: his friend Schr\u00f6dinger was in Austria and appeared to be on Hitler's side. The article reported that Schr\u00f6dinger had written to a local newspaper in March 1938, 'readily and joyfully' affirming his loyalty to the new regime, having 'misjudged up to the last the real will and true destiny of my land'.\n\nDirac wanted to take his summer vacation in the Soviet Union, but this time the embassy in London refused his application and all others, in response to the British Government's denial of visas to Soviet citizens. So Dirac made more modest plans: in August 1938, he travelled to the Lake District in the north-west of England and went walking and climbing with his friend James Bell and with Wigner, still recovering from the tragically early death of his wife almost a year before, barely eight months after their marriage. From their correspondence, it seems that Bell agreed with Wigner that the recent trials in the Soviet Union were frame-ups, though Bell thought they were no worse than ones organised by the English in their colony of India. Meanwhile, Manci took her children and Dirac's mother to Budapest, where anti-Semitism was making her parents' life intolerable: they were beginning to see that they had no future in Hungary.\n\nSoon, the Diracs' home became a popular hostel for physicists and their families fleeing Nazism. Among the first to arrive were the Schr\u00f6dingers, who later settled in Dublin, after Schr\u00f6dinger accepted a post at the newly created Institute for Advanced Studies. During the stay, Schr\u00f6dinger will have explained to the Diracs why he had  earlier declared his support for the Nazis - he had been forced to make public his approval of the Nazi regime, he said, and had done this as ambiguously as he could. Dirac appears to have accepted this explanation and not to have questioned that his friend's integrity had wavered for a minute.\n\nThe house guest whose courtesy Manci most admired was Wolfgang Pauli, en route to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he spent most of the war. Dirac told Kapitza: '[Pauli] has got much milder after his second marriage.'\n\nDirac agreed with the political left that the British Government had been weak and negligent in failing to tackle Hitler after his armies had invaded the Rhineland in March 1936. The left also, however, opposed rearmament and defence expenditure, a policy it would later regret. When Neville Chamberlain became British Prime Minister in 1937, he tried to mollify Hitler and waved away the warnings of his despised colleague Winston Churchill from the back-benches that the ambitions of the F\u00fchrer would have to be opposed by force. The mood in Cambridge alternated from hope that a war could be avoided to fear that a conflict was inevitable. Chamberlain brought about the most famous of these swings on 30 September 1938 when he returned from talks in Munich with Hitler, Mussolini and the French Prime Minister \u00c9douard Daladier to declare 'peace for our time', having agreed that Hitler's troops would be free to enter Czechoslovakia. Crowds cheered Chamberlain's return until they were hoarse; the entire country was euphoric even after it became clear that Czechoslovakia had been betrayed. But Churchill thought the agreement was a travesty: '[The] German dictator, instead of snatching his victuals from the table, had been content to have them served course by course.'\n\nAs he spoke those words, two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman, were making a discovery that would change the course of history. The experiment they had done superficially looked recondite: when neutrons were fired at compounds of uranium, the new chemical elements that were formed were much lighter than had previously been thought. Within a few weeks, by the beginning of January 1939, it was clear that Hahn and Strassman had observed individual uranium nuclei breaking apart into two other nuclei, each with roughly half the mass of the original nucleus, as if a stone had  split into two parts of about the same size. Analogous to cell division in biology, the process came to be called 'nuclear fission'. The key point was that the amount of energy released in the fission of a nucleus exceeds the energy produced when atoms change partners during the burning of gas, coal and other fossil fuels by a factor of about a million - this is energy release on a huge scale.\n\nEddington had long foreseen the possibility of harnessing nuclear energy and in 1930 looked forward to the time when there would be no need to fuel a power station with 'load after load of fuel' but that 'instead of pampering the appetite of our engine with delicacies like coal or oil we shall induce it to work on a plain diet of subatomic energy'. Just over three years later, at the 1933 annual meeting of the British Association, Rutherford had ridiculed his colleague's vision as 'moonshine'. On the following day, after Le\u00f3 Szil\u00e1rd read about the prediction in _The Times_ , it occurred to him as he traversed a pedestrian crossing in Bloomsbury that it might be possible to capture nuclear energy more easily than Rutherford had imagined: 'If we could find an element which is split by neutrons and which would emit _two_ neutrons when it absorbs _one_ neutron, such an element, if assembled in sufficiently large mass, could sustain a nuclear chain reaction.'\n\nWhen Szil\u00e1rd heard about the discovery of fission, he realised that the chemical element he had in mind could be uranium. If more than one neutron was emitted when the uranium nucleus fissioned, those neutrons could go on to fission other uranium nuclei, which would emit more neutrons, and so on. Szil\u00e1rd later recalled that 'All the things which H. G. Wells predicted appeared suddenly real to me.'\n\nThe discovery of nuclear fission on the eve of a catastrophic conflict is one of history's most tragic coincidences. What made the prospect of nuclear weapons worrying for Dirac and other scientists who understood the implications of the discovery was that it had been made in Berlin, Hitler's capital.\n\nPhysicists and chemists were about to be drawn from the tranquillity of their offices and laboratories into a world of warfare, secrecy and power politics. The stakes could not have been higher, nor could the new work have been more troubling to their consciences. Scientists who regarded it as their duty to be open about their findings found themselves worrying that their results were too sensitive to be made  public. Szil\u00e1rd believed that if uranium was in principle capable of sustaining a nuclear chain reaction, then the results should be kept secret from Hitler's scientists, including Heisenberg and Jordan.\n\nThe sometimes bad-tempered exchanges about whether to keep the fission properties of uranium secret involved most of the leading nuclear scientists, including Bohr, Blackett, Fermi, Joliot-Curie, Szil\u00e1rd, Teller and Wigner. By early summer 1939, the campaign to keep the new science secret had failed. It was now public knowledge that uranium should be able to sustain a nuclear chain reaction: nuclear weapons were a practical possibility.\n\nDirac was only peripherally concerned with these discussions, having been asked by Wigner to support Blackett in the campaign to keep sensitive results confidential. In Cambridge, the euphoria of Chamberlain's Munich agreement had faded into despair by the spring of 1939, when Hitler contemptuously absorbed previously unoccupied parts of Czechoslovakia into Nazi protectorates and client states. War now looked inevitable. During those grim early weeks of 1939, Dirac prepared his first lecture as a self-styled philosopher of science who professed no interest in philosophy. Although the two living scientists he most admired - Einstein and Bohr - were both accomplished at talking about science to wide audiences, Dirac had shown no interest in following their lead until the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded him their Scott Prize and invited him to give the Scott lecture on their favoured theme of the philosophy of science to an audience that included many who knew little or no science. Late on a Monday afternoon early in February 1939, he spoke for an hour on the relationship between the mathematician, who 'plays a game in which he invents the rules', and the physicist, 'who plays a game in which the rules are provided by Nature'.\n\nDirac's themes were the unity and beauty of nature. He identified three revolutions in modern physics - relativity, quantum mechanics and cosmology - and hinted that he expected them one day to be understood within a unified framework. Although he did not mention John Stuart Mill, Dirac was seeking to answer the same question posed in _A System of Logic:_ 'What are the fewest general propositions from which all the uniformities existing in nature could be deduced?' Whereas Mill never used the beauty of a theory as a criterion of its success, an appreciation for the value of aesthetics had  been part of Dirac's education. He now gave vent to his feelings by proposing the principle of mathematical beauty, which says that researchers who seek the truly fundamental laws of nature in mathematical form should strive mainly for mathematical beauty. Ignoring centuries of philosophical analysis about the nature of aesthetics, he declared that mathematical beauty was a private matter for mathematicians: it is '[a quality that] cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating'.\n\nThe success of relativity and quantum mechanics illustrates the value of the principle of mathematical beauty, Dirac said. In each case, the mathematics involved in the theory is more beautiful than the mathematics of the theory it superseded. He even speculated that mathematics and physics will eventually become one, 'every branch of pure mathematics having its physical application, its importance in physics being proportional to interest in mathematics'. So he urged theoreticians to take beauty as their principal guide, even though this way of coming up with new theories 'has not yet been applied successfully'.\n\nThe physicists in the Edinburgh audience heard Dirac's enthusiasm for the discovery that the universe is expanding, which he said 'will probably turn out to be philosophically even more revolutionary than relativity or the quantum theory'. Focusing on how the universe developed from its birth, he suggested that classical mechanics will never be able to explain the present state of the universe because the conditions at the very beginning of the universe would be too simple to seed the complexity we now observe. Quantum mechanics might provide the answer, he believed: unpredictable quantum jumps early in the universe should be the origin of the complexity and 'now form the uncalculable part of natural phenomena'. Cosmologists rediscovered this idea forty years later, when it became one of the foundations of the quantum origins of the universe. While the world was heading into the gutter of war, Dirac was looking up at the stars.\n\nIn Cambridge, the students could not bring themselves to face the consequences of the expected war. In April, the students' sixpenny magazine _Granta_ looked forward to another summer of croquet on the lawns, cucumber sandwiches, paprika salad and cr\u00e8me br\u00fbl\u00e9es washed down with chilled Bollinger. For students wanting to wind  down after the examinations, there were performances of Mozart's _Idomeneo_ and more opportunities to see Disney's _Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs._ 68 The captain of the university cricket team knew that the party was soon to be over, though he said that he hoped to God that Hitler would not start a war before the end of the cricket season. But he was disappointed: after Hitler's invasion of Poland, Chamberlain declared war on 3 September, before the final overs had been bowled.\n\nTen days before, Dirac - on holiday with his family on the French Riviera - read that Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, a moment that George Orwell called 'the midnight of the century'. Stalin's opportunism was incomprehensible to Dirac. He still tended to expect politicians to practise with the consistency of mathematicians, and it is probably no coincidence that Dirac's disillusion with politics and politicians began that summer. From then on, he turned away from public affairs and concentrated on his family, which was about to expand - Manci was pregnant.\n**Twenty-two**\n\nAs I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty' [. . .].\n\nGEORGE ORWELL, _The Lion and the Unicorn_ , 1941\n\nAdvances in aviation technology had made the aerial bombing of Britain inevitable, though some people in Cambridge could not believe the Germans would ever bomb a town of such beauty. Nuclear weapons were being discussed, too, in newspapers and popular magazines, but most of the public and national leaders seem not to have noticed. Dirac, aware of the potential of nuclear fission, had an inkling of what might be in store: like many scientists, he would soon have to decide whether to drop his research and participate in the largest military programme the world had ever seen.\n\nSoon the conflict would disperse Dirac's extended family across two continents. He waited every day for news of Betty in the Netherlands. Manci was worried about her Jewish relatives, especially her parents and sister, who had left Budapest and settled in New York State, assisted by Wigner and his new wife Mary. Although she strongly supported the war, Manci knew the pain of being suspected as an alien and smarted at the subtle signs of disapproval from strangers when she revealed her thick accent, which many took to be German. In her adopted country, she felt like a 'bloody foreigner'.\n\nWhen the Diracs ventured into the centre of Cambridge on the freezing nights of January 1940, they saw that much of the town looked just as it did in Newton's day. Under the moonlight, the architecture of the city - the College buildings, King's Parade, Senate House - had never looked more sublime. The mood of the town was, however, becoming more apprehensive: thousands were bracing themselves for an attack, ready to flee to the new bomb shelters. Dirac and his family stayed indoors, carefully observing the 'blackout', preventing every shard of light from escaping into the night by covering their windows with black paper. By six o'clock each night,  the town was as quiet as a village on a Sunday morning; by ten, it was almost deserted. The church bells had been silenced, the streetlamps switched off.\n\nAt the beginning of the war, the population of the town had swelled by almost a tenth, to about eighty thousand. At the beginning of September 1939, trainloads of children had arrived from London and other towns that were expected to be the targets of enemy bombers. The evacuees, many with their home addresses written on luggage labels tied around their necks, were billeted with local families, many of which received them less warmly than sentiment now recalls. The Diracs did not take in any of these children, though in the coming months they saw them virtually overrun the town.\n\nEveryone, including the dons, carried around a foul-smelling rubber gas mask. For the time being at least, academics in their gowns had lost their special status and were no more important than the thousands of volunteers and part-time workers who were preparing for war. The texture of day-to-day conversations changed: people talked more loudly, endlessly repeating catchphrases such as 'I'm doing my bit' and 'Don't you know there's a war on?' All over the town, posters warned that 'Careless talk costs lives', words that looked comically alarmist, as there were no signs of an imminent conflict: by March 1940, nothing much had happened since the collapse of Poland, and the restless public called it the Phoney War or, sometimes, the Bore War. Most of the evacuated children drifted home.\n\nThe university ticked over, though there were fewer dons as many of them had left to take up posts in government, the armed forces and war research establishments. There were fewer students, too, but a skeleton programme of teaching continued, and Dirac gave his lectures on quantum mechanics as usual. A regular visitor to the college, he saw how much its atmosphere had changed: it now accommodated not only its staff and students but also uniformed members of the Army, Navy and Royal Air Force, who worked in the new buildings completed shortly after the outbreak of war. The college was one of the national centres of the Air Force, and hundreds of its cadets were trained there, mixing uneasily with the undergraduates, who had different catering facilities. The menus for college members were now much more modest: at High Table, about all the Fellows could expect was a ladleful of mutton stew and vegetables grown on college land. Gardeners had dug up the lawns to grow onions and potatoes.\n\nAt home, the Diracs lived like most others in Britain. They queued for their ration books and food coupons and took pots and pans to local collecting points to be melted down and turned into weapons. Dirac had chopped down a tree in the garden for firewood, cultivated potatoes and carrots in a nearby allotment, and grew giant mushrooms in his cellar. But Manci, well into her pregnancy, wanted support. She would not dispense with her servants, and she fretted at the thought of losing even one of them. Dirac's mother in Bristol was counting the days to the birth of her second grandchild, hoping that the child would be a boy and that his parents would name him Paul. But she was to be disappointed: the child was a girl, Mary, born on 9 February 1940, at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital. As Manci wrote in her notebook, Mary was a 'daddy's girl', as she would remain. Dirac was a doting father, in his reserved way, dandling her on his knees, trying to entice her to play with a new doll sent by her godmother, Schr\u00f6dinger's wife Anny.\n\nDesperate to see her first granddaughter, Flo made a flying visit to see the baby and her mother. Flo's manner with the baby did not impress Manci, who complained to Dirac the next day:\n\nIt is awful of me to write about her, you never criticize my parents. But I never felt as much that she has neither heart nor feelings . . . She has no notion of how to handle a tiny thing as a baby but she picked her up. It was quite terrible to me.\n\nDirac may have sensed that this would not be the last clash between the two women closest to him, each jealous of the other's place in his affections. But their disputes appear not to have spoiled his first few months of paternity. He now had the domesticity he craved, but it was soon disrupted by an urgent request to do something he had hoped to avoid: to join the scientists' war effort.\n\nRudolf Peierls was now in Birmingham, a professor of physics by day and volunteer fireman by night, equipped with a uniform, a helmet and an axe. Peierls had settled in England after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933 with his Russian wife Genia, a former member of the Jazz Band of Soviet physicists. Like most scientists who had lived under Hitler, Peierls wanted him crushed, but the British authorities were slow to accept his offers of assistance: in early February 1940, Peierls and his wife were officially classified as 'enemy aliens'. The couple's  naturalisation papers came through later that month so he was eligible to work on secret projects, though the authorities still looked at him with suspicion and denied his request to work on the new radar technology.\n\nIn early February 1940, when Dirac was cradling his newborn daughter in his arms, Peierls was thinking about nuclear weapons. Like most scientists who were following the debate, he believed that such a weapon would not be possible after all. Niels Bohr and John Wheeler had apparently provided the clinching argument by proving that the fission of uranium by slow neutrons was due entirely to the rare isotope of uranium 235U, containing a total of 235 nuclear particles, not to the much more common uranium isotope 238U, which contains 238 particles. A little less than one part in a hundred of a typical sample of natural uranium is 235U, and the rest is almost entirely 238U. It followed that if a nuclear bomb were made using naturally occurring uranium, very few nuclei would undergo fission, so any chain reaction that started would soon fizzle out. But a loophole was spotted by one of Peierls' Birmingham colleagues, Otto Frisch, the scientist who had given fission its name and been the first to explain it, in collaboration with his aunt, Lise Meitner. Frisch was one of an almost unbroken string of bachelors who lodged with Rudolf and Genia Peierls and became part of the household, helping with the washing up and keeping their children amused during the blackouts.\n\nThe crucial question Frisch asked was: 'Suppose someone gave you a quantity of the pure 235 isotope of uranium - what would happen? ' When Frisch and Peierls did the calculations, they found the amount of 235U needed was about a pound, about the volume of a golf ball. Although it would be difficult and expensive to produce much of this rare isotope, the resources required, compared with the costs of running the war, would be chickenfeed. Frisch later recalled that when he and Peierls tumbled that the purification process could, in principle, be completed in weeks, 'we stared at each other and realized that an atomic bomb might after all be possible'. Even more terrifying was the thought that the Germans might already have done their calculation and Hitler might be the first to have the bomb.\n\nFrisch and Peierls secretly typed up two memos on the properties of a 'Super-Bomb' and the implications of building one, setting out  their conclusions in a total of six foolscap pages, which they sent to the British Government, keeping just one carbon copy. The authorities were grateful but asked them to understand that, as Peierls later recalled, 'henceforth the work would be continued by others; as actual or former \"enemy aliens\", we would not be told any more about it'. If the Government wanted scientists to build a nuclear weapon, they would need to find a way to distil pure 235U from mined uranium ore, which contains the mixture of 238U and 235U. Several groups were set up in the UK to investigate ways of separating the uranium isotopes, including ones at the universities of Liverpool and Oxford. Scientists in these groups knew that Dirac had invented one method of doing it: the centrifugal jet stream method of isotope separation, which he had investigated in the spring of 1934 but abandoned after the Soviets had detained his collaborator, Kapitza. By the late autumn of 1940, Dirac had heard that his long-discarded experiment might, after all, have important applications in developing material to make a nuclear bomb. Soon he would be under pressure to resume his studies of the technique.\n\nIn the United States, Le\u00f3 Szil\u00e1rd - a close friend of Manci's brother Eugene Wigner - was trying frantically to persuade the Government to develop a nuclear bomb before the Germans. He was working at Columbia University in New York with his fellow refugee Enrico Fermi, the experimentalist best qualified to build a nuclear weapon if it were feasible. Progress was slow and funds were short, partly because few government officials took Szil\u00e1rd's hectoring seriously. In the summer of 1939, Wigner, Szil\u00e1rd and Teller persuaded Einstein to write to President Roosevelt, drawing his attention to the possibility of nuclear weapons and the danger that the Germans might produce one first. After a long delay, Roosevelt invited Einstein to join a committee of government advisers but he brusquely declined and sat out the war at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where word spread that the Nazis were indeed working on a bomb. In the spring of 1940, Dirac's friends Oswald Veblen and John von Neumann wrote to the director Frank Aydelotte, urgently seeking his assistance to fund investigations into the chain reaction. In their letter, they mentioned a recent conversation with the Dutch physical chemist Peter Debye, who had led one of Berlin's largest research institutes until  the German authorities sent him abroad in order to free his laboratories for secret war work.\n\n[H]e made no secret of the fact that this work is essentially a study of the fission of uranium. This is an explosive nuclear process which is theoretically capable of generating 10,000 to 20,000 times more energy than the same weight of any known fuel or explosive [. . .] It is clear that the Nazi authorities hope to produce either a terrible explosive or a very compact and efficient source of power. We gather from Debye's remarks that they have brought together in this Institute the best German nuclear and theoretical physicists, including Heisenberg, for this research - this in spite of the fact that nuclear and theoretical physics in general and Heisenberg in particular were under a cloud, nuclear physics being considered to be 'Jewish physics' and Heisenberg a 'White Jew'.\n\nThere is a difference of opinion among theoretical physicists about the probability of reaching practical results at an early date. This, however, is a well-known stage in the pre-history of every great invention. The tremendous importance of the utilisation of atomic energy, even if only partially successful, suggests that the matter should not be left in the hands of the European gangsters, especially at the present juncture of world history.\n\nAydelotte responded by helping Szil\u00e1rd with his search for funding. The prime responsibility of Aydelotte and Veblen, however, was the Institute for Advanced Study, and they dreamt of setting up a wartime haven for the most eminent quantum physicists, including Bohr, Pauli, Schr\u00f6dinger, Dirac and even Heisenberg. But when the war intensified, it became unthinkable for most of them to concentrate on anything other than the war. The pursuit of the fundamental laws of physics was set aside.\n\nIn April 1940, the Nazis overwhelmed Norway and Denmark and launched a blitzkrieg on Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands a few weeks later: the Phoney War was over. Dirac's sister Betty and her family were now living in an occupied country. Joe, like all the other Jews, lost much of his freedom: he was subjected to a curfew, forbidden to ride in trams or cars and forced to wear a yellow star when outside his house. A month before, the German forces had conquered Denmark unopposed and had invaded Norway, swatting aside the British Government's naval campaign to repel them. Chamberlain was forced out of office and replaced by Churchill - the man regarded by many as a belligerent class warrior soon became the  saviour of his country and the embodiment of bulldog spirit, a national hero.  The Diracs gathered round their radio to listen to his broadcasts and to reports of his speeches. Three days after he entered 10 Downing Street he told the House of Commons in his first speech as Prime Minister that the aim was 'Victory - victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.' Manci was star-struck: she sent Churchill a note consisting of just two words - 'God's blessings' - after a broadcast he had made a few days after the Luftwaffe dropped its first bombs on Cambridge on 18 June 1940.\n\nAt 11.30 p.m. on that night, the air-raid sirens began to wail, and the Diracs scurried down to the shelter of their cellar. Moments before midnight, they heard a Heinkel bomber dive low overhead and, after a piercing whistle, a huge explosion when the plane dropped two high-explosive bombs about a mile away. Ten people were killed, a dozen were injured, and a row of Victorian houses was laid waste. The following night, the bombers struck Bristol for the first time, targeting the British Aeroplane Company's factory in Filton. Dirac's mother was desperate to speak to her son but, with no telephone, the best she could do was to write to him:\n\nThe awful raiders pay a midnight call every night. The first was a downright shock on Monday. I flew down with all my dressing gowns, collected all the green cushions from the big chairs & made myself warm & comfortable propped against the kitchen door [. . .] To my surprise I got intensely angry at their cheek & impudence in disturbing my night's rest & daring to visit our Island in such a manner.\n\nChoosing not to take drams of whisky and play poker with her neighbours in their cellars, Flo spent most nights alone, crouched in the cupboard under the stairs with cotton wool in her ears, trying to sleep during the hours of 'fireworks'. At five in the morning, when the sirens and steamers in the docks roared their 'all clear', she went up to Betty's room to catch up on her sleep. Flo was lonely, sick with rheumatism and gout, anxious about her family and disappointed that her son was such a poor correspondent: 'I am sure you can spare five minutes for a few lines if you try very hard.'\n\nBy August 1940, the 'Battle of Britain' was underway. The Luftwaffe was pummelling London and fighting over the skies of England with  the Royal Air Force, helped by the early warnings made possible by the new radar technology. Despite the widespread fear of an imminent Nazi invasion, daily life in Britain continued normally. Food and everyday supplies were in the shops, the trains and buses were running, and there were queues outside cinemas showing _Gone with the Wind ._ 26 It was a summer of almost uninterrupted glorious weather, and the more prosperous Britons, including Dirac, saw no need to forgo their annual vacation. Dirac and Gabriel took a four-week break in the Lake District, renting a cottage in Ullswater with Max Born and his family - his wife, their nineteen-year-old son Gustav, their daughter Gritli and her new husband Maurice Pryce, a theoretical physicist at the University of Liverpool. The outdoor life, primitive facilities and the prospect of communal cooking were not for Manci, who remained in Cambridge with Judy, baby Mary and her nurse, after Dirac had assured her that the danger of air raids in Cambridge had been exaggerated ('you should not let the air raid warnings worry you, dear').\n\nWhile Gabriel stayed in the cottage, his head buried in a book, Dirac and Pryce headed off early to the mountains with a vacuum flask of hot tea and a packed lunch. With Pryce and Gustav Born, Dirac climbed the highest peak in England, Scafell Pike, rowed on the lakes, climbed up several rock faces and followed some of the paths trodden by Wordsworth, who had lived in nearby Grasmere. At night, the party dined on the balcony, overlooking a lake as still as a pond: it scarcely seemed possible that they were in a country fighting for its life until they switched on their radio and heard the news from London.\n\nBarely four days after Dirac's vacation began, Manci was in the cellar with Mary and Judy, following the first of several air raids. 'I am very sorry to be away during these air raids,' Dirac wrote to his wife, though he was not worried enough to return home. Feeling abandoned and dejected, Manci dropped her usual affectionate tone when she wrote to him:\n\nI know very well that you never do or did what people happened to ask you for. So I am not asking you anything; it is but a question. Would you return to Cambridge if I was not here? Because if you would not, then do not come home please.\n\nAs usual, her wrath soon abated. Dirac was habituated to her outbursts and fended them off by remaining silent. It was a singular marriage, not one most people could endure, but it was working.\n\nDirac's climbing partner Maurice Pryce - formerly a colleague of Dirac and Born in Cambridge - was studying isotope separation with the Liverpool team and had recently asked Dirac's advice about his centrifugal jet method. But it seems that Dirac did not think seriously about developing the method until several months later. This delay is surprising, as many of his peers were talking urgently of the need to develop a nuclear weapon ahead of the Nazis. Perhaps part of the explanation for his tardiness is that he was preoccupied with his stepchildren, constantly quarrelling and consuming more of his energy than he would have liked. Gabriel, then an introverted fifteen-year-old, was developing into a talented mathematician. Encouraged by Manci, he revered his stepfather as a hero, looked to him for advice and even copied his handwriting, down the last detail of the curl on the capital D. Judy, two years his junior, was growing into an attractive young woman and quite different from her brother: she was lazy, headstrong and not at all frightened of provoking her mother. Manci's high-handedness sometimes alarmed Dirac, who privately warned Gabriel that he should not take too much notice of her tantrums.\n\nDirac agonised about his sister and her family, behind enemy lines. She had written to him from Amsterdam via the Red Cross mail service on 3 July to report that she was safe, and the letter took three months to arrive. Shortly after he read it, Dirac heard that Dutch citizens would be fined \u00a315,000 if they were caught listening to British radio transmissions. He was also concerned about his mother, who occasionally visited Cambridge but spent most of her time alone in 6 Julius Road, going out only occasionally to the shops, the cinema and to volunteer for the emergency canteen service. Bristol was the fourth most heavily bombed city in the UK (after London, Liverpool and Birmingham): almost every night, the planes attacked the city and, though Julius Road was two miles from the worst of the attacks, Flo was in fear of her life. She went to bed early and tried to sleep through the seven-hour barrages, until the sirens blasted the 'all clear' signal into the dawn.\n\nThese were among the darkest days of the war. Peierls in Birmingham was one of many who believed that the fight against Hitler was then 'hopeless', as he recalled fourteen years later. Although Germany had failed to win the Battle of Britain, the war was going its way, as Hitler well knew: he told his ally Mussolini in October 1940 that the war had been won.\n\nIn mid-December, Dirac's mother was admitted to a nursing home, suffering from concussion, after a stone had fallen on her when she was out walking. Dirac rushed to Bristol and, between visits to Julius Road, walked around the bombed-out heart of the city. At the Merchant Venturers' College, he saw that many of the buildings he had known since he was a child had been pulverised into smouldering piles of rubble. Several of the homes on his route had been bombed out, their once-private spaces now embarrassingly on show for all to see. 'The middle of Bristol is terribly damaged [. . .] most of the best shopping areas are in ruins [. . .] and many beautiful churches have gone,' he wrote to Manci. She was too angered by being left alone to feel much sympathy:\n\nYou know that envy is not in me but I am a little revolted that you had to go, and have to stay. After all 60 years ought to have been enough for anybody to make friends [. . .] she is only interested in people as far as what she will be able to talk about them.\n\nUnmoved, Dirac helped his mother to return home and stayed with her until she could resume her routine, returning to Cambridge shortly before the year's end. All over the UK, the New Year celebrations were subdued, for the country was pinned to the wall.\n\nMost scientists in Britain had put themselves at the service of their country but, as usual, Dirac did not swim with the shoal. In peace-time, he was part of the mainstream of physics but always one step from it, so that his individuality was not constrained. He now had the same relationship with the scientists working for the military: he supported them but only to an extent that neither his daily routine nor his intellectual independence was compromised. One of the first invitations to participate in war work that Dirac received had come, surprisingly, from the mathematician G. H. Hardy, who was contemptuous of the applied mathematics involved in war work as unworthy of 'a first-rate man with proper personal ambitions'. He wrote to Dirac in May 1940, asking him to join a team of twelve mathematicians to code and decode messages at the Civil Defence offices in St Regis, in the event of a Nazi invasion. Dirac appears to  have declined, probably because he would not consider moving from Cambridge and because teams, to him, were anathema.\n\nThe journalist Jim Crowther did not, however, stop trying to involve his retiring friend in public affairs: in mid-November 1940, he tried to persuade Dirac to attend a meeting of the Tots and Quots dining club, an informal gathering of academics who were interested in exploring how their expertise might be useful to society (the name of the club is a reference to the Latin _quot homines, tot sententiae:_ 'so many men, so many opinions'). Its twenty-three members in 1940 - including Bernal, Cockroft and Crowther - were often joined by guests, such as Frederick Lindemann, H. G. Wells, the philosopher A. J. Ayer and the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark. The location of the club's political centre of gravity, well to the left, was reflected in the outcome of their debates, most of them held over a few bottles of wine and an indifferent meal in London's Soho. The meeting Crowther wanted Dirac to attend, on Saturday, 23 November 1940, was scheduled to discuss Anglo-American scientific cooperation and was to take place in Christ's College, Cambridge. Crowther knew the best way to encourage Dirac to attend: 'It would be quite unnecessary for you to join in the discussion if you did not wish to.' Crowther succeeded, and Dirac listened to a wide-ranging discussion about ways of promoting scientific cooperation with American scientists, until shortly after midnight. Bernal opposed the suggestion that British research projects should be transferred to the United States, arguing that the best way forward was to promote personal contacts between British and American scientists. It was important, he stressed, not to give up too easily on preserving the independence of British science.\n\nThe record of this special Tots and Quots meeting makes no mention of any contribution from Dirac. So far as records show, he attended no other social gathering of scientists during the war.\n\nAt about the time of the meeting, Dirac began to think again about his method of separating mixtures of isotopes.  Seven years earlier, he had demonstrated that the technique might work; he now turned to a theoretical analysis of the process, to help engineers investigate ways of separating a mixture of 235U and 238U. His original idea was to deflect a gaseous jet of the mixture through a large angle, so that the heavier and therefore slower-moving isotopes would be deflected less than the lighter ones, and the two components would separate.  He tried to find a general theory of all processes that might separate isotopic mixtures in this way, aiming to deduce the conditions that would most effectively separate them. To solve the problem, he had to use all his talents: the mathematician's analytical skills, the theoretician's penchant for generalisation and the engineer's insistence on producing useful results.\n\nHe gave his first account of the theory in a confidential, three-page memorandum. Dirac wrote it for Peierls and his colleagues, probably in early 1941, between the incessant bombing raids, and typed it at home. He wrote the paper in his usual spare style but taking care to highlight the most important conclusions so that they would be clear even to engineers allergic to complicated mathematics. The memo does not focus on his own jet separation method but concerns every conceivable way of separating isotopes in a liquid or gaseous mixture by causing a variation in the isotopes' concentration. The separation might be achieved, for example, by subjecting the mixture to a centrifugal force or by carefully arranging for the temperature to change across the container. To make the calculations tractable, he made the reasonable assumptions that the fluid mixture contains only two isotopes (each made of simple atoms) and that the concentration of the lighter one is small compared with the concentration of the other. In a short calculation, he derived a formula for what he called the 'separation power' of the apparatus, a measure of the minimum effort needed to cream off a given amount of the lighter isotope. He found that every part of such an apparatus, irrespective of how it is built, has its own maximum separation power, and he showed how to calculate it.\n\nDirac often drove to Oxford to talk with the experimenters who were developing ways of separating isotopes, under the impish Francis Simon, another German refugee physicist. Dirac surprised many of the experimenters by participating vigorously in their meetings and by making practical suggestions about the design of their apparatus. During these discussions, he conceived several other ways of separating isotopes, each of them based on his original centrifugal jet stream method.\n\nThe Oxford group built one of Dirac's designs, and it worked, but his method was less efficient than the competing technique of gaseous diffusion, which exploits the fact that the atoms of two isotopes in equilibrium and with the same energy have different average speeds: the lighter, swifter atoms are more likely to diffuse through a membrane than heavier ones, enabling the mixture to be separated. Consequently, at this stage in the development of nuclear energy, resources were diverted to gaseous diffusion, and Dirac's idea was set aside.\n\nLate at night on 9 May 1941, a bomb fell opposite the Diracs' home, damaging two houses and causing small fires that Judy helped the fire fighters to extinguish. This was the most frightening moment for the Diracs in the worst year of bombing in Cambridge, and it was relentless where they lived, close to the strategic target of the railway station. But the Diracs' everyday life was much the same as it was before the war. Part of this routine involved welcoming visitors; Dirac was determined not to follow his father's example of virtually barring the family home from others, apart from paying students. One of the most frequent visitors to 7 Cavendish Avenue was Jim Crowther, 'the newspaper man'. A one-man clearing house of information about the activities of leftist scientists, he was a favourite of Manci's, who entertained him and his wife Franciska as royally as rationing allowed: she could stretch to a cup or two of tea, but biscuits and cakes were luxuries. After one get-together, Crowther lent her Somerset Maugham's _On Human Bondage_ to help her improve her English and her understanding of British foibles. Still worried that people in Cambridge thought of her as an outsider, she even sensed disquiet that she might be an enemy agent. Suspicions of aliens intensified in the town in the spring of 1941, when an innocent-looking Dutch seller of second-hand books in Sidney Street was unmasked as a spy. When he heard that military intelligence was on to him, he broke into an air-raid shelter on Jesus Green and shot himself.\n\nDuring the Diracs' conversations with the Crowthers, Dirac heard Crowther's bulletins on the scientists' war work, delivered with his subtle political colouring, though almost certainly without the political edge that he reserved for conversations with more committed colleagues. Crowther knew that this was time well spent: Dirac would never commit himself to the cause of the left, but he was a powerful ally, if only because no other British physicist came close to his intellectual prestige.\n\nAlthough Dirac spent most of his time on war work, he was still thinking about quantum mechanics. In one project, he collaborated with Peierls and Pryce to refute accusations made by Eddington that  experts in relativistic quantum mechanics, including Dirac, were persistently misusing the special theory of relativity. This disagreement had been rumbling for years: in the summer of 1939, Sir Joseph Larmor had heard that 'Eddington has lately come to blows with Dirac.' Dirac, Pryce and Peierls tried to make Eddington see reason but, by the early summer of 1941, their patience had run out, and they prepared what Pryce dubbed 'the anti-Eddington manuscript'. The paper appeared a year later, and Eddington's arguments were crushed to the satisfaction of everyone except Eddington himself, who never accepted defeat.\n\nWhen the Royal Society conferred on Dirac the honour of giving its annual Baker Lecture, he took the opportunity to present his latest thinking about quantum physics. In the early afternoon of 19 June 1941, when Dirac arrived at Burlington House, he saw that central London had suffered surprisingly little in the Blitz; most of the damage had been done in the City and the East End. Giving the lecture was in keeping with the spirit of the hour - Londoners were going about their business as usual, and that included attending lectures about matters of no practical importance.\n\nDirac rose to the podium at 4.30 p.m. to describe why he was so unhappy with the current state of quantum mechanics: why is it, he wondered, that the first version - set out by Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger - is so beautiful whereas the relativistic version is so diseased?  It might be possible, he showed, to remove one of the pathologies of the relativistic theory - negative-energy photons - using a technical device later dubbed the 'indefinite metric'. Although not a panacea, the technique demonstrated to the standing army of quantum physicists that Dirac was still one of their generals. Even Pauli was impressed and wrote to Dirac to say so.\n\nDirac's conclusion to the lecture was that the 'present mathematical methods are not final' and that 'very drastic' improvements were needed. He knew, however, that they were unlikely to be made at a time when most of the best scientific brains were working on top-priority projects for the military. Only rarely did the scientists on opposing sides communicate. One such encounter took place in late September 1941, when Heisenberg travelled to Nazi-occupied Denmark to see Bohr (who knew nothing of the Anglo-American project to build a nuclear bomb) in a fraught meeting that was remembered and interpreted quite differently by the two men. The  playwright Michael Frayn dramatised their discussions six decades later in _Copenhagen_ , a metaphor for the uncertainty principle: the more the intentions of the participants at the meeting are probed, the murkier they appear to be. Although it will never be possible to know precisely what the two men said, one consequence of their meeting is now clear: their friendship was damaged beyond repair.\n\nDirac, in touch with neither Bohr nor Heisenberg, knew nothing of the meeting. When it took place, he was in Cambridge, preparing for the new term, no doubt anxiously reading the news of the Nazis' invasion of the USSR, which had begun when Hitler unilaterally broke the pact with Stalin three months before. Kapitza was now in Hitler's sights. On 3 July, a few days after the pact collapsed and Stalin joined the Allies, Kapitza sent Dirac a telegram, one of the few communications that Dirac received from him during the war:\n\nIn this hour of stress when our two countries fight against a common enemy I want [ _sic_ ] send you a friendly word. The united strength of all men of science will help the victory over the treacherous enemy who by brutal force destroyed the liberty and crushed the freedom of scientific thought in Germany and is trying to do the same in all the world. My greetings to all friends united in their will for fighting to complete victory for the freedom of all people for the freedom of scientific thought so dear to our two countries.\n\nLater during the conflict, Dirac was moved to similarly grand words in a rare letter to Kapitza. After offering his 'hearty congratulations' to Kapitza on his second Stalin Prize, Dirac wrote that he hoped 'that the great Hitler menace which now darkens this world will soon be obliterated'.\n\nFlo was also thinking about Kapitza and his compatriots: 'Those plucky Russians are putting up such a grand fight!', she wrote to her son. By the summer of 1941, Bristol appeared to have seen the worst of the bombing; about 1,200 people had been killed.  She was ailing and desperate to stay at 7 Cavendish Avenue, where Manci was struggling to cope after her maid and cook had departed. In early October, Flo arrived with her luggage and hatbox, having declared that she wanted to help with the housework, though her doctor wrote privately to Dirac: 'I want you to see that she does not do extra work' as 'her heart is overstrained and she is rather run down'. She stayed longer than the month she had planned, working under  Manci's direction as a kitchen maid and house cleaner, helping the servants and Mary's nurse. Soon after the Americans entered the war, following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, Flo wrote to one of her neighbours: 'Paul says it will take two years to conquer the Japs.' But she was homesick and tired of being Manci's charlady: 'I really am afraid I will be quite ill if I stay on. Manci imposes on me too much.'\n\nFlo never sent the note as, four days before Christmas, she had a fatal stroke. Dirac seems to have taken her death with his usual almost-inhuman stoicism: his sliver-thin vocabulary of emotions did not include conventional expressions of grief. Manci saw no tears. Yet he knew better than anyone the tragedy of her unfulfilled life: the suicide of her first-born; her servitude during a sham marriage and its horrible final years, when she was like a rabbit domiciled with a bear. Dirac knew that his mother had her flaws: she was absent-minded and disorganised, selfishly determined to keep her younger son to herself. But Dirac knew that life had not been generous to his mother and that he had been her greatest love.\n\nHer funeral took place two days after Christmas. Dirac threw away most of her belongings but not the Christmas card on which she had written her feelings about Manci. He kept that among his papers.\n**Twenty-three**\n\nThere is no room now for the dilettante, the weakling, for the shirker, or the sluggard. The mine, the factory, the dockyard, the salt sea waves, the fields to till, the home, the hospital, the chair of the scientist, the pulpit of the preacher - from the highest to the humblest tasks, all are of equal honour; all have their part to play.\n\nWINSTON CHURCHILL, speech to the Canadian Parliament, 30 December 1941, later broadcast on the BBC\n\nTo Dirac's neighbours, it appeared that the war had little impact on his life: he remained another professor going quietly about his business, his civic duties involving nothing more than an occasional night on fire watch at the Cavendish. But none of his neighbours knew that he spent most of 1942 and 1943 working on nuclear weapons. Even Manci had only a vague idea of what he was doing: she told the people she knew in Cambridge that he was working on 'decoding'.\n\nMost leading scientists did more to support the military than Dirac. Patrick Blackett was one of several of Dirac's friends who took his place at the top table of the Government's scientific advisers and attended dozens of interminable policy meetings. He joined his former Cavendish colleagues Cockcroft and Chadwick on a special committee set up to consider the implications of Frisch and Peierls' prediction of the small amount of uranium needed to make a bomb. They consulted Dirac, but he had no wish to be part of the proceedings.\n\nBy August 1941, Churchill authorised the manufacture of a nuclear weapon, following the advice of the committee and approving comments from his friend and chief scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann. The British Government allocated the resources its scientists requested to begin to build the bomb and set up the 'Tube Alloys' project, a name chosen to be dull enough to escape the attention of prying eyes and ears. Blackett, the one dissenting voice on the committee, believed that the British could not build the bomb alone: the project would be successful only if it were pursued in  collaboration with the Americans. He would soon be proved right. Blackett was no happier in his other dealings with the Government. He was one of the pioneers in the use of science to inform decisions about the management of the war; for example, in weighing the risks and benefits of different military strategies. The hard-headed application of this new discipline of 'operational research' brought Blackett and his colleagues, including Bernal, into disagreements with the military and the politicians, who both preferred to take decisions with their hearts as well as their heads. Blackett insisted that Churchill's policy of aerial bombing enemy civilians - supported by the military and the public - was ineffective, the misguided result of a failure to identify the enemy's key industrial and military targets. It would be better to bomb the enemy's fleet of U-boats, he told an unmoved Lindemann. Churchill persevered with his policy and kept his scientific committees at a distance: for him, 'Scientists should be on tap, not on top.'\n\nLike many mathematicians, Dirac was invited to work at the Government's research station in Bletchley Park. In late May 1942, he was approached by the ancient-history scholar Frank Adcock, who had been charged with recruiting the best Cambridge brains. Adcock wrote to Dirac, 'There is some work concerned with the war which is itself important and would, I believe, be of interest to you. I am not free to say just what the work is.' When Dirac asked to know more, a Foreign Office official wrote to clarify: 'The work would be a full-time job [nominally nine hours a day] and would require you to leave Cambridge.' With Manci four months pregnant, this was too much disruption for Dirac to contemplate, so he never did work in the huts of Bletchley Park with Max Newman and Newman's former student Alan Turing. This would have been one of the most intriguing collaborations of the war.\n\nIn Cambridge, Dirac supervised graduate students and gave his quantum-mechanics lectures to about fifteen students on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday mornings. In 1942, his audience included Freeman Dyson, an exceptionally talented student, then nineteen years old. Dyson was disappointed: in his view, the course lacked all sense of historical perspective and made no attempt to help students tackle practical calculations. Not one to suffer in silence, Dyson amused his fellow students by bombarding Dirac with questions, sometimes catching him off-guard and once causing Dirac to end a lecture early so that he could prepare a proper response. Almost twenty years before, the young Dirac had pressurised Ebenezer Cunningham in one of his lecture courses; now it was Dirac's turn to be shown the drawn sword of youth.\n\nBy early 1942, Dirac was thinking more about technology than quantum mechanics. He was a consultant to the Tube Alloys project and worked closely with Rudolf Peierls. One of the first reports that Dirac wrote for him concerned another way of separating a mixture of isotopes, using a simple method that involves injecting the mixture into the base of a hollow cylinder spinning rapidly about its long axis. The centrifugal force generated by the rotation causes the heavier isotope to move towards the outer rim and the lighter one to accumulate closer to the central axis, thus effecting a separation. When Dirac sent his report to Peierls in May 1942, he wrote that he had 'written up [his] old work' and did not mention its provenance.  It is clear from the manuscript that Dirac wanted to investigate the motion of the gases in the tube, to find how far up the spinning cylinder the injected gas will reach. Using classical mechanics, he found that the device would be a stable source of separated isotopes and calculated that, if the cylinder had a radius of one centimetre and rotated almost five thousand times a second, its length should be about eighty centimetres. This confidential report, declassified in 1946, proved to be seminal for the designers of centrifuges. Dirac's calculations provided the theoretical underpinning of the counter-current centrifuge, invented three years earlier by the American scientist Harold Urey. This technique was not used during the manufacture of the first nuclear bombs - other methods made less onerous engineering demands - but later became the nuclear engineer's preferred choice as it gives a particularly efficient way of separating uranium isotopes.\n\nDirac's other work for Peierls and his group in Birmingham consisted of theoretical investigations into the behaviour of a block of 235U if a nuclear chain reaction took place inside it. These calculations probed in detail the energy changes going on inside such a block of material and investigated whether the growth of neutrons would change if the uranium were enclosed in a container. Dirac was happy for his results to be shared with the American scientists who were working on the bomb, including Oppenheimer, who by the end of 1942 had been appointed the Scientific Director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer excelled at nurturing  young theoreticians in Berkeley, but most of his colleagues were surprised when General Leslie Groves - the Project Director, appointed by Roosevelt - asked him to take on responsibility for building the bomb. One of Oppenheimer's Berkeley colleagues chortled, 'He couldn't run a hamburger stand.' Just as surprising was the authorities' decision to appoint someone who, although a brilliant researcher and teacher, was well known to be a fellow traveller of the Communist Party.\n\nDirac worked mainly in his study, the one room in 7 Cavendish Avenue for which only he had the key, allowing in cleaners on the strict condition that they did not move any of his papers. If he saw any sign at all that his desk had been disturbed, he flew into a wordless rage.\n\nThe children were proving to be a handful. Dirac and Manci may well have been alarmed when Gabriel, soon after he began his mathematics degree in Cambridge, joined the Communist Party, though he kept up his membership for only six months. Judy was less academic and more rebellious: when she was sixteen, in 1943, Manci furiously ordered her out of the house and threw her clothes out of her bedroom window.  Although she was allowed home a few days later, relations with her parents did not improve. Manci, always trying to enforce strict discipline, was frustrated by the feeble support she was given by Dirac - when she needed him to back her up in some altercation with one of the children, he retired sheepishly to his study or escaped to his garden. He spent hours tending his rhododendrons and gardenias, pruning his apple trees, sewing seeds and digging up asparagus, carrots and potatoes to help fill the larder. In the summer, he would shield his balding head from the sun by wearing a handkerchief knotted at each of its four corners. Friends noticed that he practised horticulture using the same top-down methods that he used in theoretical physics, trying to base every decision on a few fundamental principles. He stressed that the best way of ripening apples was to place them in linear rows, each item of fruit separated from its neighbour by precisely the same distance. In one project, he coated pea seeds with dripping and rolled them in red lead oxide powder to discourage birds from eating the newly emerged seedlings, a practice that would today induce palpitations in any self-respecting health and safety inspector.\n\nDirac's heart remained in quantum mechanics. In July 1942, he took time off from war work, left his family at home and travelled with Eddington to attend a conference in Dublin organised by Schr\u00f6dinger, who tried to tempt Dirac to accept a job alongside him. 'There is plenty of food here - ham, butter, eggs, cakes, as much as one wants,' he wrote in one of his fond letters to Manci. The Irish Prime Minister \u00c9amon de Valera, a trained mathematician who had helped bring Schr\u00f6dinger to Ireland, took the two guests on a joyride around the local countryside, having met them during the conference. Dirac had been amazed to see him there, attending lectures and taking detailed notes.\n\nOn 29 September, six weeks after his return to Cambridge - still under attack from Nazi bombers - Manci gave birth to a daughter, Florence, named after Dirac's mother, though she was always called by her second name, Monica. Two days after her birth, Dirac received a letter from Peierls gently enquiring, at the request of the project directorate, if he would be prepared to move from Cambridge to work full-time on the war effort. Predictably, Dirac refused.\n\nHis family was now complete. He never had a son of his own, a disappointment Manci later described as one of the saddest of his life.\n\nDirac saw in Cambridge evidence of the prominent role the USA was now taking in the war. Every day, hundreds of uniformed American servicemen - on leave from the nearby airbases - walked the streets of Cambridge, with plenty of money to spend. They organised baseball games and, in November 1942, were visited by the stately Eleanor Roosevelt. At home, Dirac received intelligence reports of the American-led experiments to build a nuclear bomb and, towards the end of the year, heard that a key experiment in the programme had been completed. In a makeshift laboratory built in a disused squash court in Chicago, Enrico Fermi and his team had built a nuclear reactor, and, in the mid-afternoon of 2 December 1942, they got it working for the first time. They had arranged a self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, releasing energy at a rate of half a watt. Wigner presented Fermi with a bottle of Chianti, which he shared in silence with his team, who had good cause to celebrate but also to be nervous: for all they knew, Hitler's scientists were ahead of them. A member of Fermi's team, Al Wattenberg, later recalled: 'The thought  that the Nazis might get the bomb before us was too terrifying to contemplate.'\n\nShortly before, Peierls asked Dirac to study a sheaf of technical papers written by Oppenheimer and his Manhattan colleagues describing the explosion of a sample of uranium undergoing fission. Early in January, Dirac pointed out inconsistencies in the papers and discussed how a nuclear bomb might be constructed, including the optimal shapes of the two masses of uranium that could be propelled together to make the bomb. During the next six months of 1943, Dirac investigated theoretically the passage of neutrons in a fissioning block of uranium and presented his results in two reports, one of them in collaboration with Peierls and two of his younger Birmingham colleagues. One of them was Peierls' lodger, Klaus Fuchs, a Bristol-educated refugee from Nazi Germany, an inept but courteous young man in his early twenties. When he and Peierls visited 7 Cavendish Avenue to talk about their secret research with Dirac, they all adjourned to the middle of the lawn in the back garden to ensure that they were out of earshot of everyone near by. Manci, asked to stay inside the house, resented what she knew was the implication: she was a potential eavesdropper. During some of these al fresco discussions, Dirac and Peierls noticed that Fuchs sometimes behaved oddly, complaining that he was unwell and leaving them for surprisingly long periods before returning. It would be another seven years before Dirac and Peierls understood Fuchs' behaviour.\n\nThe collaboration between the scientists working on the bomb in the USA and their counterparts in Britain was tense and difficult, but the problems were apparently resolved in the late summer of 1943, after peace-making conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill. It was obvious to most of the British scientists that they should join the Manhattan Project, and about two dozen of them - including Peierls, Chadwick, Frisch and Cockcroft - joined Oppenheimer and his team in their Los Alamos headquarters in the New Mexico desert. Through Chadwick, Oppenheimer asked Dirac to join the Manhattan team, but he declined. About a year later, he stopped working on the project, but never fully explained why. Peierls later suggested, probably correctly: 'I believe this was because he was beginning to feel that atom bombs were not a matter he wanted to be associated with, and who could blame him?'\n\nDirac may have come to believe that the Nazis could be defeated without nuclear weapons. Or perhaps Dirac was influenced by Blackett, who protested that American scientists on the Manhattan Project were given access to all the research done by their British colleagues but did not reciprocate, except with Chadwick, the only Briton to be given full security clearance. Blackett felt so strongly about this that he tried to persuade his British colleagues to take no part in the Manhattan Project.\n\nOn the night of 5 November 1943, the Luftwaffe dropped their bombs on Cambridge for what turned out to be the last time. Since the outbreak of the war, the sirens had sounded 424 times to warn of the bombings that had killed thirty people and destroyed fifty-one homes. As the nights closed in, Dirac and his family were hoping that the blackout would end soon, but the authorities did not lift it until September in the following year. By then, he was worrying constantly about his sister Betty and her family. At Dirac's request, Heisenberg had attested to the occupying Nazis that she was not Jewish, but Joe and their son were still in grave danger. When Dirac last heard from them, in early September 1943, they had recently fled their home in Amsterdam - a short tram ride from Anne Frank's secret annex - after the Nazis told Joe that he could either be sterilised or interned in Poland. He probably knew that internment was tantamount to a death sentence, so the family headed for Budapest, hoping that it would quickly be liberated by the Allies.\n\nPowerless to help Betty, Dirac sat out the end of the war at home. Several of the family photographs taken around this time show him in his back garden, sitting in a deckchair, teaching Mary to read from _The Wizard of Oz._ One of her earliest memories was of her father spelling out the letters D-o-r-o-t-h-y. She and Monica were given a disciplined upbringing, following the motto of English family life, 'Children should be seen and not heard,' but without any exposure to religious ideas.  Yet Dirac appears to have had at least some regard for religion as he and Manci followed the convention of having both their daughters christened. Probably as a result of his wife's influence, the hard-line atheist had softened his line.\n\nTry as Dirac might to concentrate on quantum physics when he was in college, the continuing presence of the military reminded him that although victory over Hitler was in sight, it could not be taken  for granted. Royal Air Force officials still occupied much of the college, and the military had taken over the Combination Room for purposes they kept secret. Only much later did the Fellows of St John's find out that the room contained a huge plaster model of the stretch of the Normandy coastline on which Allied troops landed on 6 June 1944. Churchill's leading general, Montgomery, believed the end of the war was in sight and didn't believe the Germans could go on much longer. Yet still Dirac could not walk over the Bridge of Sighs without being challenged. When the sentry asked, 'Who goes there?', he was satisfied with only one reply: 'Friend.' Dirac knew the threat still posed by the enemy better than most. Even when victory looked inevitable, from June 1944, Dirac was aware that German scientists, including Heisenberg, might already have developed a nuclear weapon. About a year before, he had heard from the refugee Norwegian chemist Victor Goldschmidt that Heisenberg was working on the Germans' counterpart of the Allies' Tube Alloys project. Dirac knew that the fate of hundreds of potential victims could depend on the scientific success of his closest German friend.\n\nWhile he waited for the war to end, Dirac began work on another edition of his book. His main innovation this time was to introduce a new notation he had first invented shortly before the war broke out. This system of symbols enabled the formulae of quantum mechanics to be written with a special neatness and concision: just the sort of scheme that Dirac had learned to appreciate in Baker's tea parties.\n\nThe centrepiece of the notation was the symbol <q for a quantum state labelled q and the complementary q>; together they can be combined to form mathematical constructions such as <q | q>, a bracket. With his rectilinear logic, Dirac named each part of the 'bracket' after its first and last three letters, _bra_ and _ket_ , new words that took several years to reach the dictionaries, leaving thousands of non-English-speaking physicists wondering why a mathematical symbol in quantum mechanics had been named after an item of lingerie. They were not the only ones to be flummoxed. A decade later, after an evening meal in St John's, Dirac was listening to dons reflecting on the pleasures of coining a new word, and, during a lull in the conversation, piped up with four words: 'I invented the bra.' There was not a flicker of a smile on his face. The dons looked at one  another anxiously, only just managing to suppress a fit of giggling, and one of them asked him to elaborate. But he shook his head and returned to his habitual silence, leaving his colleagues mystified.\n\nThe war in Europe ended in anti-climax on 8 May 1945. The relief felt like a national exhalation. In the centre of Cambridge, thousands gathered in Market Square in the blazing heat of the afternoon, dozens of Union Jacks fluttering limply in the breeze. After the Lord Mayor's speech, two bands marched separately round the town, each followed by hundreds of people, with dozens of couples dancing cheek-to-cheek in the streets. The authorities in St John's College abandoned all formalities for the day: the Combination Room swelled not only with Fellows but with dozens of normally excluded undergraduates raising their glasses to the new peace. Dirac and his family celebrated with neighbours at an impromptu tea party in a local street, munching on scones and spam sandwiches served from trestle tables.\n\nIf Dirac believed that science would quickly return to normal, he was mistaken. In the spring of 1945, he and seven colleagues - including Blackett and Bernal - applied for visas to enable them to attend the June celebrations of the 220th anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences; for Dirac, the trip would give him the opportunity to see Kapitza and other Russian friends again. But Churchill refused to allow visas to be issued on the grounds, it was later revealed, that Dirac and his colleagues might share with Stalin's scientists some of the nuclear secrets kept from the Soviets during the war. During a discussion about the matter at the Admiralty in London, Blackett lost his temper and strutted magnificently out of the building, furious that the Government had dared to impugn his integrity. Dirac was angry, too, but showed his emotion only by withdrawing into complete silence and taking a long, solitary walk.\n\nFor several weeks after the end of the war in Europe, news had been seeping out about the Nazi concentration camps. Manci was outraged not only with the Germans but also with 'these dirty Poles' - she was sure they had connived in the atrocities. She wrote to Crowther that she had one of her rare rows with Dirac, apparently because his reaction to the revelations of unconscionable cruelty was too restrained for her taste. The Diracs knew that several of  Manci's relatives had probably been murdered in the camps and that Betty's husband Joe might also be dead. News of him arrived in a telegram delivered to the Diracs' home at the beginning of July, when they were preparing to visit the Schr\u00f6dingers in Dublin. Joe was alive. In Budapest, he had fallen into the hands of the Nazis, who dispatched him to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in Austria, where he was one of thousands forced to work in the Wiener Graben quarry, mining granite with a pickaxe and carrying the slabs up the hundred and eighty-six steps to the top. Many of his fellow prisoners perished from the freezing cold, were worked to death or were summarily shot through the neck by SS guards after being injured or collapsing from exhaustion. After the camp was liberated in the summer of 1945, he emerged looking close to death - desperate for a morsel of food and with a broken wrist, a seriously infected kidney and missing a finger. While recuperating in an American military hostel in France, desperate for news of Betty and their son Roger, he wrote to Manci to suggest that Kapitza might help to find her, as the Russians had taken over Hungary. He did not have to wait long to hear the denouement: in early September, he heard from Manci that Betty and Roger were safe.\n\nOn 6 August, Dirac heard the news he had been dreading: with the tacit agreement of the British Government, the Americans had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, killing about forty thousand Japanese civilians. At nine o'clock that evening, Dirac was in his front room listening to the radio news bulletin: 'Here is the news: it's dominated by the tremendous achievement of Allied scientists - the production of the atomic bomb. One has already been dropped on a Japanese army base. It alone contained as much explosive power as two thousand of our great ten-tonners.'\n\nAfter reading official statements, including one from Churchill and President Truman, the BBC announcer ended with almost comic bathos: 'At home, it's been a Bank Holiday of sunshine and thunder-storms; a record crowd at Lords has seen Australia make 273 for five wickets.' All was well again - cricket had resumed. The national press rushed to praise the achievement of the leading British scientists, including Cockcroft and Darwin, who had helped to design the bomb. None mentioned Dirac, probably to his relief. One of the few civilians who were not shocked by the destructiveness of 'the atomic bomb' was the seventy-nine-year-old H. G. Wells, who first coined  the term in 1914. On 9 August, just as President Truman ordered the dropping of another nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, the _Daily Express_ published a weary personal perspective on the age he had foreseen. He died a year later.\n\nOn 14 August, when news reached Britain of Japan's surrender, public euphoria resurged, and, in Cambridge, Market Hill swelled with an encore of the VE Day celebrations . In the USA, the press showered Oppenheimer with praise and likened him to Zeus. He was the triumph of physics personified.\n\nDirac had no idea that, only fifteen miles from Cambridge, Heisenberg had been interned by the British Secret Service with nine other German scientists in Farm Hall, a red-brick Georgian House on the outskirts of the village of Godmanchester.  They were treated well - given the run of the house, provided with daily newspapers and allowed to walk freely around the grounds, though they were warned that their liberties would be curtailed if any of them tried to escape. A few days after their arrival, Heisenberg wondered why the authorities were keeping him and his colleagues interned without making it public: 'It may be that the British Government is frightened of the communist professors, Dirac and so on. They say \"If we tell Dirac or Blackett where they are, they will report it immediately to their Russian friends, [like] Kapitza\".'\n\nWhen Heisenberg and his colleagues heard about the dropping of the first nuclear bomb, soon after the news was broadcast on BBC radio, they were both perplexed and incredulous. One detainee, Otto Hahn, observed sourly: 'If the Americans have a uranium bomb then you're all second raters. Poor old Heisenberg.' Not knowing that the British were recording their conversations - it was unthinkable, Heisenberg chuckled - the Germans talked freely about their feelings. The British authorities declassified their conversations only in 1992; ever since, historians have pored over the transcripts and have come to a variety of conclusions. Some experts believe that Heisenberg never came close to an understanding of how to make a nuclear bomb; others that he could have made one but slow-pedalled his research in order to prevent the Nazis from acquiring the device. It is, however, indisputable that, during the conversations recorded at Farm Hall, neither Heisenberg nor any of his colleagues expressed any serious qualms about working for the Nazi regime.\n\nBy October 1945, Dirac's life in Cambridge had almost returned to normal. A few weeks before, he had been surprised by the high number of students attending his quantum-mechanics course, several of them still in uniform. At the beginning of the first lecture he announced to the audience, 'This is a lecture on quantum mechanics, ' evidently believing that many of the students were in the wrong room. When none of them got up to leave, he repeated his announcement, this time more loudly. But still no student left.\n\nA few weeks later, Betty and her son Roger - both hungry, traumatised and anxious - returned to stay in 7 Cavendish Avenue before they were reunited with Joe. Betty and her son had almost starved to death in Budapest, and she had seen that the liberation was not as joyous as many journalists reported; in her opinion, the Russian troops who liberated the city were far more brutal than the Nazi army they had ousted. In Betty's later years, her memories of the conflict were too painful to share, though she often remarked that she regarded the survival of her family as a miracle: 'Everything afterwards was a bonus.' Best of all was the birth of her daughter, Christine, just over nine months after Betty and Joe were reunited.\n\nFor the sake of tact, Betty may not have mentioned during her stay in Cambridge that she despised most of the Hungarian acquaintances she had met. Her memories of the double-dealing and inhospitable citizens of Budapest were to become a running sore in her relationship with Manci, with Dirac the embarrassed and ineffectual peace-maker.\n\nThe university and St John's College were settling back into their clockwork routine. Dirac preferred this way of life, free of distractions, but he had a few other duties to discharge: during the war, Crowther had persuaded him to support their French colleagues behind Nazi lines by taking on the undemanding role of the British presidency of the Anglo-French Society of Sciences, working with an informal committee whose members included Blackett, Cockcroft and Bernal. After the war, Crowther decided to relaunch the Society with a prestigious series of talks about scientific developments during the conflict, and he persuaded Dirac to give the first presentation, on 'Developments in Atomic Theory'. The venue for the occasion - a red-letter day in French science - was Le Palais de la D\u00e9couverte, a public science centre that stands like a Greek temple  on a dark side road in the seventh arrondissement. Soon after sundown on Tuesday 6 December, hundreds of the city's leading scientists made their way to Le Palais to hear Dirac talk. Two thousand people clamoured for a seat in the lecture theatre, expecting to hear the secrets of the atomic bomb.\n\nMinutes after Dirac began to speak, the audience realised that it was not going to hear about the latest in nuclear technology but a presentation on the state of quantum mechanics. Dozens tried to leave, but there was no escape: the exit was jammed with the overflow crowd of hundreds, listening to the lecture via loudspeakers. For the physicists who were interested, a treat was in store: they heard Dirac coin two of the best-known technical terms that he introduced: 'fermions', quantum particles that obey the laws that he and Fermi had set out in 1926, and 'bosons', the other type of quantum particles, which obey laws set out by Einstein and the Indian theoretician Satyendra Bose. For most of the audience, this was not much consolation for a wasted evening: at the end of the lecture, several of them bolted for the door.\n\nAt the dinner party afterwards, embarrassment was no doubt still in the air, but Dirac was probably oblivious to it. During six bleak years for science, in which he had contributed more to engineering than to quantum physics, he was relieved that life was returning to normal. But he was now well past thirty, the age he once believed marked the end of the theoretician's productive career: was he now too old to have radically new ideas?\n**Twenty-four**\n\nIn America, the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.\n\nOSCAR WILDE, _The American Invasion_ , 1887\n\nIn September 1946, Dirac was scratched again by the next generation's talons. He was at a conference on 'The Future of Nuclear Science' at Princeton's Graduate College, half a mile from the campus. Nestled among trees at the top of a grassy hill, the college looked like a Gothic abbey, its majestic tower dominating the surrounding countryside - a picture of English arcadia. Many visitors thought the college had been a landmark in Princeton for centuries, but it had stood there for only thirty-three years.\n\nThe conference was the first of a series of international events during the university's bicentennial celebrations - months of ceremonial glad-handing, sybaritic dinners and colourful parades. The conference organiser Eugene Wigner, fresh from the Manhattan Project, had put together an impressive guest list, including Blackett, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Van Vleck and the Joliot-Curies, all ready to put the war behind them and begin the next chapter of physics.\n\nAt 9.30 a.m., at the beginning of the conference's second day, Dirac was introduced by one of the most exciting scientific talents in America, Dick Feynman (he called himself Dick rather than Richard). Brought up in the New York suburb of Far Rockaway, he was a clean-cut twenty-eight-year-old, brimming over with ideas and sophomoric humour but still grieving after the death of his first wife fourteen months before, from tuberculosis. He was afraid he was already burnt out, he later admitted. When he introduced Dirac, Feynman seemed unburdened by self-doubt but felt 'like a ward-heeler [machine politician] in the 53rd district introducing the President of the United States'. Feynman was not expecting to be impressed: a few weeks before, he had been disappointed by his hero's handwritten script, which Feynman thought was backward looking, stale and 'unimportant'.\n\nDirac discussed how elementary particles could be described using his favourite mathematical device, the Hamiltonian: for Dirac, this  was the only way to proceed, and he did not spare his audience - many of them non-specialists - the technical details. As Feynman feared, the talk fell flat. Worse, Dirac was bereft of new ideas. After the applause, Feynman tried to give lay members of the audience a sense of what Dirac was saying, not hiding his disappointment and remarking that Dirac was 'on the wrong track'. He cracked even more than his usual quota of jokes, prompting Bohr to stand up and ask Feynman to take the proceedings more seriously.\n\nA few hours later, Feynman looked out of the window of the lecture room and saw that Dirac had excused himself from the conference programme and was 'paying no attention to anybody', lying on a patch of grass, leaning on an elbow, gazing lackadaisically at the early-autumn sky. Here was Feynman's opportunity to talk informally with Dirac about a matter that had intrigued him for the past four years. When Feynman was a graduate student, he had studied Dirac's 'little paper' on how the classical least-action principle can be applied in quantum mechanics, demonstrating that it could be used to build another version of quantum mechanics, different from Heisenberg's and Schr\u00f6dinger's but giving the same results. In his paper, Dirac had cryptically remarked that a critical quantum quantity is 'analogous' to its classical counterpart, but Feynman believed that the correct phrase was 'proportional to' (that is, if the quantum quantity changes, the classical one always changes proportionately). Here, at last, was Feynman's chance to find out what Dirac meant.\n\nFeynman described his problem to Dirac and came to the crunch:\n\nFEYNMAN: Did you know that they were proportional?\n\nDIRAC: Are they?\n\nFEYNMAN: Yes they are.\n\nDIRAC: That's interesting.\n\nDirac then got up and walked away. Feynman subsequently became famous for his new version of quantum mechanics but thought the credit was undeserved. The more closely he looked at the 'little paper', the more he realised that he had done nothing new. He later said, repeatedly, 'I don't know what all the fuss is about - Dirac did it all before me.'\n\nFeynman knew he had much to do if he was to prove himself a great physicist. When the conference photograph was taken, he appeared to hint at the extent of his ambition by standing behind  Dirac, just as Dirac had done in the 1927 Solvay Conference photograph, when he stood directly behind Einstein. Within a few years, Feynman's power as an analyst and intuitionist made him, in the eyes of many, the finest theoretician in America. Wigner agreed with that judgement: 'Feynman is a second Dirac, only this time human.'\n\nThe next five years saw the emergence of a new theory of electrons and photons, in some ways the climax of fifty years of theoretical physics. This was largely an American success, the accomplishment of hungry young scientists who had suspended their academic careers during the war to work on nuclear weapons, radar and other projects.  Physicists had worked in lavishly funded, goal-driven international teams, having set aside the elitist traditions of European academia and collaborated in the less formal, can-do social environment of the United States. Now it was time for payback.\n\nOn Capitol Hill, the physicists argued that they deserved the support of the government's tax dollars to pursue curiosity-driven research. It is a fair bet Willy Loman and the other struggling bread-winners of middle America would have baulked at the physicists' case if they had been aware of it, but the politicians were persuaded and gave unheard-of levels of federal support for basic physics research and training. The US Government and private institutions funded theoretical physics. At much greater expense, Uncle Sam equipped experimenters with machines that could probe the structure of matter even more finely, using beams of subatomic particles accelerated to within a whisker of the speed of light in a vacuum. The pursuit of 'high-energy physics' had flourished in Europe in similar ways, though there was no doubt that in this branch of science - and many others - America led the world.\n\nThe first conference of leading subatomic physicists to take place in the USA after the war, at the beginning of June 1947, set their subject's agenda for the next thirty years. Twenty-three carefully selected scientists - all of them men - gathered at an inn on Shelter Island, a small and secluded spot near the eastern tip of Long Island, to review their subject. The gathering could scarcely have had a more spectacular opening: in the first two presentations, experimenters announced that the Dirac equation made predictions that disagreed with new experimental results. The first speaker, Willis Lamb, had the air of a cowboy who had strayed into a physics laboratory.  But his appearance was deceptive: he was a deep thinker, an accomplished experimentalist who could hold his own with the best theorists. He got the meeting off to a flying start by announcing a serious flaw in Dirac's theory: two energy levels of atomic hydrogen that, according to the theory, should have the same energy turn out to be slightly different. Photons emitted by hydrogen atoms when they jump between the two energy levels had been detected by Lamb and his student Robert Retherford, at the Columbia Radiation Laboratory. In a masterly experiment using microwave technology developed during the war, they studied these photons and showed that each of them has only about a millionth of the energy of a quantum of visible light.\n\nIn the next presentation, given by the experimenter Isidor Rabi, of Columbia University in New York, the audience heard yet more unexpected news: the strength of the electron's magnetism appeared to be weaker than the Dirac theory had predicted. The audience was euphoric: here were two observations that heralded the end of the reign of Dirac's beautiful theory and provided crucial tests for any theory that presumed to succeed it. Oppenheimer steered the conference, incisively cross-examining the speakers and interspersing the proceedings with his elegant, if ostentatious, editorial arias. By the end of the meeting, it was clear that the main challenge was to explain Lamb's result. But Dirac knew nothing of all this: he had declined an invitation to attend and read about the wounding of his theory on an autumn Sunday in Princeton, on the front page of the _New York Times._ 10\n\nWithin two years of the Shelter Island Conference, Lamb and Retherford's results had been explained by two of the youngest theorists in the audience. One of them was Feynman, the other was a fellow New Yorker, Julian Schwinger, a loner with the manners of a prince and the self-belief of a boxer. Feynman and Schwinger were both the same age and had read Dirac's book when they were precocious teenagers, and both based their theories on Dirac's 'little paper'. Yet the two versions appeared to be quite different: Schwinger's mathematical approach was hard to understand, but Feynman's approach was intuitive and involved special diagrams that made the underlying science easy to visualise, at least superficially. The two methods gave the same results, and everyone except Schwinger agreed that Feynman's methods were quicker and easier.\n\nIt turned out that the same results had been obtained several years earlier by the Japanese theoretician Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, who had based his ideas on Dirac's version of quantum field theory. As a student, Tomonaga had been a fanatical student of Dirac's book and was in the Tokyo audience when Dirac and Heisenberg gave their lectures during their tour of Japan in 1929. This pioneering work had been completed in Tokyo, where Tomonaga was one of the tens of thousands of starving citizens who were trying to rebuild the city after American bombers had flattened it towards the end of the war.\n\nSo there were now three versions of quantum electrodynamics that looked quite different and yet seemed to give the same results. It was Freeman Dyson, the student who had snapped at Dirac's heels during his wartime lectures, who first demonstrated that the three theories were versions of the same underlying theory. Now, at last, physicists could claim they understood the interactions of the photon and the electron in terms of a theory that agreed with observation to within a few parts in ten thousand - roughly a human hair's breadth compared with the width of a door. Four decades later, when much more accurate measurements were still in excellent agreement with the theory, Feynman referred to it as 'the jewel of physics'. As he often stressed, its fundamental concepts had been set out by Dirac in his 1927 theory: Feynman, Schwinger, Tomonaga and Dyson had, in essence, introduced a collection of ingenious mathematical tricks and techniques that made the theory viable and showed how to remove the embarrassing infinities.\n\nThoroughly pleased with himself for becoming 'a big shot with a vengeance' after his triumph, Dyson was keen to hear Dirac's opinion on the new theory. He was expecting a few words of congratulation from his former teacher, but was disappointed:\n\nDYSON: Well, Professor Dirac, what do you think of these new developments in quantum electrodynamics? DIRAC: I might have thought that the new ideas were correct if they had not been so ugly.\n\nThe feature of the new theory that Dirac most loathed was the technique of renormalisation.  According to this theory, the observed energy of an electron is the sum of its self-energy - resulting from the interaction between the electron and its field - and the bare  energy, defined to be the energy the electron is supposed to have when completely separate from its electromagnetic field. But the bare energy is a meaningless concept because it is actually impossible to switch off the interaction between the electron and its field; only the _observed_ energy can be measured.\n\nThe virtue of renormalisation is that it enables every mention of bare energies in the theory to be removed and replaced with quantities that depend only on observed energies. Using this technique, theorists could use quantum electrodynamics to calculate - to any degree of accuracy - the value of any quantity the experimenters cared to measure. Despite the success of the technique, Dirac abominated it, partly because he could see no way of visualising its mathematics but mainly because he felt that the process of renormalisation was artificial, an inelegant way of sweeping the fundamental problems of theory under the carpet. In his opinion, a fundamental theory of nature must be beautiful, whereas renormalisation seemed to Dirac's taste to be as devoid of beauty as the dissonances of Arnold Sch\u00f6nberg.\n\nEngineers, schooled to worry more about the reliability of their results and less about the rigour of their mathematics, might be expected to be happy with renormalisation, as the process gives answers that always tally with observations to extremely high accuracy. But, paradoxically, Dirac believed his engineering training was at the root cause of his hostility to the technique. At the Merchant Venturers' College, he had learned the engineer's art of using well-chosen approximations to simplify complicated, real-life problems so that they can be analysed mathematically. Dirac made this the theme of his 1980 lecture 'The Engineer and the Physicist': 'The main problem of the engineer is to decide which approximations to make.' Good engineers make wise choices, often based on physical intuition, about the mathematical terms they can ignore in their equations: 'The terms neglected must be small and their neglect must not have a big influence on the result. He must not neglect terms that are not small.'\n\nRenormalisation entails a practice that no self-respecting engineer would countenance, Dirac pointed out: the neglect of large terms in an equation. To neglect infinitely large quantities in an equation was, for an engineer, anathema. Most physicists had no such compunctions, and leading theorists paid little heed to Dirac's objections. As  Dyson pointed out, although the infinities in the theory had not been eliminated, they were isolated in mathematical expressions that were quite separate from formulae representing the effects experimenters actually observe. Dirac was unconvinced. He, Schr\u00f6dinger, Heisenberg, Pauli, Born and Bohr - the 'old gang', as Dyson dubbed them - had now joined Einstein in the wings of theoretical physics, while the next generation took centre stage. Of the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ , only Pauli kept closely abreast of new developments in their subject; the rest withdrew into their own private worlds. Dyson and his friends were contemptuous of their elder colleagues:\n\nIn the history of science there is always a tension between revolutionaries and conservatives, between those who build grand castles in the air and those who prefer to lay one brick at a time on solid ground. The normal state of tension is between young revolutionaries and old conservatives [. . .] in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the revolutionaries were old and the conservatives were young.\n\nIn a sense, Dirac was the Trotsky of theoretical physics: he envisioned his subject progressing through one revolution after another, each an improvement on its predecessor. But new quantum electrodynamics did not constitute progress so far as Dirac was concerned: the theory offended the aesthetic sensibilities he had first developed in Bristol, when he was an Eton-collared cherub at junior school, a greasy-aproned engineering student - moonlighting in general relativity - at college, and a budding mathematician at university. Whether this unique aestheticism would be a dependable guide remained to be seen.\n\nWhen Dirac was a young man, he had been uninterested in human companionship, but he had come to value it. The result was that, after the war, Cambridge seemed to him like a ghost town - Fowler and Eddington had died, and all of Rutherford's former 'boys' had left. Manci also felt the pain of the exodus, complaining to her brother Wigner in Princeton that 'Life here is utterly and completely different.'\n\nWith the ascendancy of American physics, Cambridge looked to Dirac to give leadership in the new era, but to no avail. Concerned only with his own research and in doing a modicum of teaching, he did nothing to improve the primitive facilities for students of theoretical physics in Cambridge: there were no offices for them in the department, and they even had to organise the programme of seminars.  Dirac now preferred to work at home, as he had done during the war. Manci ensured that the children did not disturb him: woe betide them if they tried to attract his attention by banging on his study door.\n\nBy late 1950, Gabriel and Judy had left home. Gabriel was pursuing his career, and Judy - apparently settling down after her tempestuous adolescence - had married, leaving the Diracs to bring up their two youngest daughters. According to Manci, Dirac 'kept himself too aloof' from them, and she had to encourage him to kiss them. Neither Mary nor Monica recalled having any sense that their father was a famous or distinguished man - only that he was exceptionally quiet and good-natured, although unemotional and extremely slow to anger. Monica cannot recall seeing him laugh. But in many ways Dirac was a typical father, taking an interest in their hobbies, helping them do their homework and encouraging them to have pets, though he forbade them to bring dogs into the house because, as Monica recalls, 'he did not like being startled when they barked'. Animal welfare was one of his concerns: when designing a flap for the girls' cat, he measured the span of its whiskers to ensure that the animal would not be incommoded as it passed through the hole.\n\nAmong the visitors to the Diracs' home were Esther and Myer Salaman. Esther, born and raised in the Ukraine, had been a student of Einstein's in the early 1920s, joined the Cavendish in 1925 and married Myer, a physiologist, a year later. She was the kind of fine-looking, self-assured woman Dirac admired. He listened carefully to her effusions on the leading nineteenth-century Russian novelists, including her favourite, Tolstoy, whose _War and Peace_ took Dirac two years to complete, having digested every word of it. He brought this same attention to detail to Dostoevsky's _Crime and Punishment_ , which he thought was 'nice', though he pointed out that 'In one of the chapters the author makes a mistake: he describes the sun as rising twice on the same day.'\n\nManci was still feeling out of place in Cambridge, contemptuous of its drab provincialism and despondent at the thought that she might have to spend the rest of her life in colourless England. Every day, newsreaders delivered discouraging news of the sluggish economy, continued rationing and product shortages; there was no sign of an end  to the austerities of wartime. Manci, feeling the pinch, complained to Monica that 'Uncle Eugene pays his cleaner more every week than your father gives me in housekeeping.' These were grim times, accurately summarised by the worldly-wise senior civil servant Bob Morris as 'a right, tight, screwed-down society walled in in every way'.\n\nThe treatment of the dons' wives by the colleges and university was still a sore point with Manci, though she saw a few hopeful signs. In 1948, the authorities symbolically enrolled Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) as the first woman to take a bona-fide degree, albeit an honorary one. A year later, under this legislation, women students at Cambridge first graduated. Slowly, much more slowly than Manci wanted, women in Cambridge University were making progress towards equality.\n\nTo the emerging generation of physicists, Dirac was a cool and wary stranger, but for Heisenberg and other fellow pioneers of quantum mechanics, he was an attentive friend. After the war, Heisenberg knew he had to justify the work he had done for the Nazis, but this was an enervating struggle - several of his former colleagues, including his former friend and student Peierls, wanted nothing to do with him, and Einstein treated him with contempt. In 1948, when Heisenberg returned to Cambridge - at a time when Dirac was absent - he looked haggard and anxious but was excellent company, delighting his hosts one evening with an unrehearsed performance of Beethoven's _Emperor Concerto._ He discreetly explained to everyone who would listen that he was never a Nazi and had stayed in Germany out of loyalty to his colleagues and to mitigate the worst of Hitler's intentions. Determined to leave a good impression in Cambridge, as a gesture of remembrance he bought forty-eight rose bushes from a plant centre in nearby Histon and made it known he would plant them in his garden in G\u00f6ttingen.\n\nWhen Dirac first met Heisenberg after the war, he accepted Heisenberg's explanation of his wartime conduct at face value and believed Heisenberg had behaved reasonably in an extremely difficult situation. 'It is easy to be a hero in a democracy,' Dirac would observe, as Manci laughed at his naivety. She scorned Heisenberg as a tricky character: 'That Naaaaazi.'\n\nDirac was supportive of Heisenberg even when he was working for Hitler. Max Born had been startled when Dirac asked him to support  Heisenberg for foreign membership of the Royal Society. 'Heisenberg's discovery will be remembered when Hitler is long forgotten, ' Dirac commented. Dirac also strongly supported Schr\u00f6dinger's election to a reluctant Royal Society. The consensus among its officials was that 'one hunch, however good and however important [. . .] needed more following up with sustained evidence of ability', an insider told Dirac. Probably incredulous, Dirac took up Schr\u00f6dinger's cause and helped to ensure his election in 1949. Schr\u00f6dinger was profuse in his thanks, telling Dirac, 'You really are very nearly a saint.' Dirac showed no such conscientiousness when it came to supporting his former peers for the Nobel Prize: strong candidates for the award - Pauli, Born, Jordan or even Dirac's Cavendish friends Blackett, Chadwick, Cockcroft and Walton - received no support from him. The only physicist Dirac nominated was Kapitza.\n\nDirac had heard little from Kapitza during the war, though he had read in his copy of _Moscow News_ of Kapitza's invention of a method of liquefying oxygen that did much to raise the productivity of the hard-pressed steel manufacturers and several branches of the Soviet chemical industry. Stalin never met Kapitza but showed every sign of having a soft spot for him, telephoning him occasionally and showering him with awards, including the USSR's highest civil title 'Hero of Socialist Labour'. By the end of the war, Kapitza had proved himself the scientist best able to work with the Government and with Stalin, whom he flattered shamelessly: 'The country has always been fortunate to have leaders [such as you and Lenin].'\n\nTwo weeks after Americans dropped the bomb on Japan, Kapitza's fortunes took a turn for the worse when Stalin set up a special committee to develop nuclear technology and weapons, headed by his first lieutenant Lavrentiy Beria. Of all Stalin's courtiers, Beria was the most feared - a bully, a serial rapist and a casual murderer - but he was a consummate manager, the kind of man who would have no trouble running an industrial conglomerate. At Stalin's request, Beria took over leadership of the Soviets' nuclear project and soon fell out with Kapitza, who complained to Stalin in the autumn of 1945 about Beria's scientific ignorance and incompetence. When Kapitza realised that he could not oust his boss, he asked to be released from the project. Stalin agreed and, though apparently ensuring that Kapitza's life was not in danger, did nothing when all  his responsibilities were removed. By early 1946, Kapitza was in disgrace. Dirac knew nothing of this - he did not know that Kapitza had survived the war until the summer of 1949.\n\nIn September 1947, Dirac began his most productive year for a decade. Accompanied by his family, he was on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study, which had relocated eight years before to Fuld Hall, a four-storey red-brick building with a spire like a New England church. It stood, symmetric as a crystal, in almost three hundred acres of meadows, fields, woods and wetlands, about half an hour's walk from the centre of Princeton. This was a realisation of Abraham Flexner's vision of a small academic institution focusing on a few disciplines and with a world-class faculty, all of them unencumbered by administration and unwanted students. The Institute was, for Dirac, a 'paradise'.\n\nManci felt at home in Princeton and thrived in its prosperous academic milieu and - compared with Cambridge - its liveliness and informality. The community treated her with the respect she wanted, not just as Dirac's wife but as a bright woman in her own right. The institute had become even more attractive to Dirac in 1946, when Oppenheimer became its director and gave him an open invitation to visit. Fresh from the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was 'ablaze with power', though ill at ease: 'I feel I have blood on my hands,' he had told President Truman.\n\nIt was a relief for Dirac and his family to be far away from the austerities of post-war Britain, and they took away from Princeton an album of memories: their young daughters scurrying around in the empty tea room at the weekend, their yells shattering the institute's chapel-like quiet; Einstein, visiting the Diracs for afternoon tea, signing a portrait of himself for Manci; Oppenheimer showing off his van Gogh; setting off with Veblen at the weekends, axes slung over their shoulders, to clear a path in the local woods. Freeman Dyson recalls meeting the Diracs during their visit to the institute in early September 1948:\n\nEveryone loved Manci: she was a real character, always full of life, always ready to chat. Dirac was more communicative than he had been in Cambridge. He was not terribly difficult to talk to. If you asked him a serious question, he would ponder it and give a reply that was always short and to-the-point.\n\nHowever, he still had no time for strangers who tried to lure him into small talk. Louise Morse, wife of one of the institute's mathematicians, remembers that when she asked Dirac how he was settling in at Princeton, he looked dumbfounded and leaned sharply away from her, as if she were a leak in a sewer. She remembers: 'Without saying a word, his whole body seemed to ask \"Why on earth are you talking to me?\"'\n\nAt the Institute, Dirac worked in a modest office on the third floor of Fuld Hall, next door to Niels Bohr. One of Dirac's main projects in his 1947-8 stay was to develop the theory of the magnetic monopole he had conceived sixteen years before. During the war, he heard reports of the particle's discovery and, although they turned out to be false, they probably rekindled his interest in the idea.  He produced an exquisitely crafted theory predicting how monopoles might interact with electrically charged particles, but the theory failed to make a splash. One of the few who followed it closely was Pauli, who was prompted to give one of his more polite nicknames to Dirac: 'Monopoleon'.\n\nIn another project, he returned to the roots of quantum field theory. Unhappy with the new theory of electrons and photons, he looked afresh at the application of quantum theory to quantities such as electric and magnetic fields that describe physical conditions at each point in space-time. This was another piece of research that failed to strike a chord at the time but was appreciated later. The same is true of the review he wrote in 1949 about how Einstein's special theory of relativity could be combined with Hamilton's description of motion. Its deceptively straightforward presentation led most physicists to pay no attention to it, a mistake several of them would rue.\n\nDirac still believed that modern quantum electrodynamics was wrong because it was based on a classical theory of electrons that was fundamentally flawed. So, in 1951, he produced a new theory, quite different from the one he had developed thirteen years before. This time, his classical theory described a continuous stream of electricity, flowing like a liquid - individual electrons emerged only when the classical theory was quantised. The theory was the dampest of squibs. No one disputed Dirac's technical ingenuity but it seemed that he had lost his intuition for productive lines of research. He demonstrated this yet again when, as a by-product of his new theory  of electrons, he reintroduced a concept that most scientists believed Einstein had slain: the ether.\n\nDirac's ether was quite different from the nineteenth-century version: in his view, all velocities of the ether are equally likely at every point in space-time.  Because this ether does not have a definite velocity with respect to other matter, it does not contradict Einstein's theory of relativity. Dirac's imagination slipped through this loophole and reinvented the ether as a background quantum agitation in the vacuum; later, he went further and speculated that it might be 'a very light and tenuous form of matter'. The press were more interested than scientists in the idea, which appeared to go nowhere: the logic was impeccable but it seemed to have no connection with nature.\n\nBy the time Dirac reached his fiftieth birthday, he seemed to be following the path Einstein had taken, towards isolation from mainstream physicists. In Princeton, Einstein was a lonely figure, uninterested in the latest research headlines and absorbed by his quixotic project to find a unified field theory without introducing quantum mechanics from the outset. He was still active in politics and annoyed J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), by supporting several leftist and anti-racist organisations. In 1950, Hoover ordered a secret campaign to 'get Einstein', aiming to have him deported. Unaware that he was being watched, Einstein strolled to his office in the institute from his nearby home on Mercer Street, his briefcase under his arm, pausing only to pick up and sniff discarded cigarette butts. On his favourite route, he walked down the straight section of Battle Road, towering sycamores lining each side, their overarching branches entangled like the swords of a guard of honour.\n\nAt the Institute for Advanced Study, he was free to work and ignore the day-to-day trivia of politics. But this tranquillity was about to be disturbed by the FBI agents and journalists who were sniffing around the past of the institute's director. Oppenheimer's former Communist sympathies - and Dirac's - were about to return to haunt them.\n**Twenty-five**\n\nThe former Communist was guilty because he had in fact believed the  \nSoviets were developing the system of the future, without human  \nexploitation and irrational waste. Even his naivet\u00e9 [. . .] was now a  \nsource of guilt and shame.\n\nARTHUR MILLER, _Time Bends_ , 1987\n\n'What happened to daddy's brother?' Dirac's daughters would ask their mother. 'Shhh! Don't talk about it,' was Manci's stock reply. Dirac spoke about Felix's suicide only with her and even then he could not bring himself to go into any details. She knew that he still had not come to terms with it. On one occasion, when Mary and Monica persisted, Dirac took out from a drawer a small tin and prised it open to reveal some photographs of his late brother, before hurriedly snapping the tin closed and putting it back. More than twenty-five years after his brother's death, a brief look at Felix's face was all he could bear.\n\nFrom Dirac's behaviour at home, it appears that he tried to avoid what he regarded as the worst mistakes his father had made in bringing up his children. Unlike Charles, Paul encouraged his daughters to bring their friends home; he did not lean on them to study science or any other subject, nor did he offer them any career advice. They knew that there is more to life than work. The family always ate together, but the mealtimes were not what most people would regard as normal: Dirac would sit at the head of the table, eating slowly, sipping regularly from his glass of water and making it clear that he preferred to eat in silence. If one of his daughters pressed him to speak, he would point to his mouth and mutter irritably, 'I'm eating.' He was quite fussy about food - for example, refusing to eat pickles on the grounds that they were always bad for digestion - and would not allow Manci to use a drop of alcohol in any food, especially if it might be eaten by the girls. There was trouble in the kitchen if he sniffed or tasted in the Christmas pudding so much as a drop of brandy.\n\nMary and Monica were growing into sharply contrasting personalities that, as Dirac noticed, resembled those of their parents. Mary  was rather like him - quiet, trusting and literal-minded - while Monica bore a resemblance to her mother - confident, questioning and assertive. The girls did not get on well: Mary was intimidated by Monica and their mother, while Monica felt psychologically manipulated by Mary. Dirac and Manci, perhaps trying to atone for Mary's vulnerability, treated her as their favourite and often left Monica feeling angry and resentful. Monica still recalls that her parents organised only two birthday parties for her when she was a child, while they gave one to Mary every year.\n\nWorried that these tensions were getting out of hand, Dirac and Manci separated their daughters using the classic English institution of boarding school, sending Mary to a strict and devoutly religious school near Cromer, in East Anglia. On the first weekend she was away, Dirac went on a Sunday morning cycle ride with Monica, who was hoping to begin a new stage in her relationship with her father. But this time he did not stop and chat as he had always done when Mary was with them: during the three-hour ride, he said not a word to her. She was devastated.\n\nNo one in Cambridge counted Dirac and Manci as among the most attentive parents: as soon as the Cambridge term was over, they usually headed off on a foreign trip, leaving their children with friends. But the family did take vacations together. In the summer, Dirac would take two days to motor to their favourite destination, Cornwall, driving like a caricature vicar. During the Christmas vacation, shortly after the New Year, the family would stay for a few days in the pea soup of London fog. While Manci lunched with friends or went shopping, Dirac took the girls to South Kensington and walked them round the Science Museum, where they pushed the buttons on the interactive displays and filed past the relics of the Industrial Revolution. In the evening, the family headed to the West End for entertainment - Mary recalled that her father's favourites included the musical _The Pajama Game_ and T chaikovsky's ballet _The Sleeping Beauty._ 4\n\nDirac's taste in the arts defies conventional classification, ranging from high culture to catchpenny trivia. On Saturday mornings, he raced his daughters to the front door to pick up the latest edition of their favourite comics, the _Dandy_ and the _Beano_ , which he would study as if they were works of literature. Mostly, he pursued his leisure interests alone, reading a Sherlock Holmes story, listening to  a classical concert at full blast on the radio or sitting impassively watching the television he had first rented so that the family could watch the Queen's coronation. But pageantry was not for him: he preferred the new variety shows and, with millions of other male viewers, sat agog as lines of feathered young women high-kicked their way through their risqu\u00e9 dance routines. This was rather unbecoming, Manci thought, though she happily accompanied him on at least one discreet trip to a London production of the Folies Berg\u00e8re.\n\nLike Einstein, Dirac was a modernist in science but not in art. His favourite music was the classical canon of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, and he had no time for the experiments of contemporary composers. He also had no taste for the extremes of abstract art: the nearest he came to liking a modern artist was a fondness for the surrealism of Salvador Dal\u00ed. When he visited his sister Betty and her family in Amsterdam, two minutes' walk from where Ehrenfest shot himself and his son, Dirac would set off in the morning with a compass - but not a map - on the six-mile walk to the Rembrandts of the Rijksmuseum.\n\nIf Cambridge colleagues knew anything of these interests, Dirac would have been more engaging than the desiccated figure he cut in the early 1950s, rather like a prototype for Bertrand Russell's fictional don, Professor Driuzdustades. Dirac no longer seemed at home in the mathematics department, though he remained a loyal Fellow of St John's, observing all its rituals without complaint. Every Tuesday night during term, he would don his gown and eat at High Table, while Manci - not allowed to eat with him - ate at a cheap Indian restaurant with Monica on St John's Street, Manci grumbling over her curry and samosas that the college made her feel like an impostor.\n\nSensing that the university no longer held her husband in the highest regard, she blamed him for not insisting on the respect that was due to him. But he was too self-effacing to assert himself: he had no interest in status for its own sake and was indifferent to the baubles handed down by the establishment. In the early 1930s, he declined an honorary degree from Bristol University because he believed degrees should be qualifications, not gifts, and later declined honorary degrees, replying to offers with 'regretfully, no'. In 1953, he refused a knighthood, infuriating Manci, mainly because his decision deprived her of the chance to become Lady Dirac. He did not want  people outside the university to call him Sir Paul but to address him by the name he used on the rare occasions he answered the telephone at home: 'Mr Dirac'.\n\nHe did not oppose honours on principle, but he believed that they should be awarded on merit, and not be awarded to athletes and show-business celebrities. When the jockey Gordon Richards was awarded a knighthood by the Queen, Dirac shook his head: 'Whatever next?'\n\nFundamental physics appeared to be in a mess, just as bad as the one in the early 1920s when Bohr's theory was the creaky framework for atomic physics. Having seen theory swept aside by quantum mechanics, he believed that nothing less than a similar revolution was needed now to replace quantum electrodynamics. Dirac wanted the initiative to come from theorists: since he was a boy, they had been setting the agenda of physics, but now experimenters were ensconced in the driving seat.\n\nResults from cosmic-ray projects and from the new high-energy particle accelerators had shown that the subatomic world was much more complicated than any theoretician had imagined. By the mid- 1950s, it was plain that there were many more than two subatomic particles - there were dozens or even hundreds, most of them living for no longer than a billionth of a second, before they fall apart into stable particles. All these decay processes obeyed the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity, but no one knew how to apply them. Fermi had set out the first theory of the weak interaction, which acts only over very short distances, within the ambit of a nucleus, about a ten-thousandth of the distance across an atom. By then, another fundamental type of interaction had emerged, the strong interaction, which also extends only over distances on the scale of the atomic nucleus. Much stronger than the electromagnetic force, the strong force binds the protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus and prevents the protons from repelling each other. Without this force, stable atomic nuclei could never have formed, and ordinary matter would not exist.\n\nNature seemed unwilling to disclose its deepest secrets: when experimenters probed strong interaction, they found it all but incomprehensible. But, like Einstein, Dirac did not trouble himself with the complications introduced by the new interaction. In his opinion,  there was no point in paying much attention to them until electrons and photons had been properly understood in the context of a mathematically defensible theory. While most others moved on, he remained - in their view - transfixed by an obsolete view of physics, hidebound.\n\nOppenheimer had also retreated from the front line of research. He was a prominent adviser to the Eisenhower administration on nuclear policy, uneasy that so many aspects of the research were kept secret under the pretext of national security; he preferred Bohr's view that superpowers should, like scientists, share their knowledge as a matter of principle. In a perceptive speech in February 1953, Oppenheimer startled a closed meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations by likening the USA and the USSR to 'two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life'. He believed that, despite the superpowers' posturing and bluster, reason would prevail.\n\nShortly before midnight on 14 April 1954, Dirac arrived home in Cambridge after spending a month with his stepson Gabriel in Vienna. Dirac had visited him every afternoon at the Viktor Frankl Institute, where he was being treated for psychiatric disorders, including a persecution complex and schizophrenia. Dirac had written to tell Manci of the doctors' assessment: Gabriel had been 'badly brought up'. Soon after he arrived home that night, Dirac would have told his wife of her son's progress, and they may well have discussed the news that had broken in European newspapers that day: the American Government had withdrawn Oppenheimer's security clearance.\n\nThe Oppenheimer case was the climax of the anti-Communist paranoia in 1950s America. It had begun with the start of the Cold War and intensified in the late summer of 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon at least two years earlier than the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) expected from its intelligence reports. The USA, terrified that its technological primacy would be eclipsed by the Soviet Union, feared that Communists held important positions in public life. An early victim was Oppenheimer's popular brother Frank, an experimental physicist who had been fired in 1949 by the University of Minnesota when it found out that he was a card-carrying Communist (a few weeks afterwards, Dirac tried to find him  a post at the University of Bristol). In early February 1950, there was a national outcry when Klaus Fuchs - Dirac and Peierls' collaborator during the war, later a member of the Manhattan team - confessed to having passed critical secrets to the Soviet Union, an act of espionage that had been responsible for the unexpectedly early detonation of the Soviet nuclear weapon. J. Edgar Hoover called Fuchs' treachery 'the crime of the century'. After the revelation, Dirac and Peierls came up with an explanation of Fuchs' peculiar behaviour during his conversations with them in the back garden of 7 Cavendish Avenue - he had been passing notes on the conversation to a Soviet intermediary. Eighteen days after Fuchs had been unmasked, the Wisconsin Republican Joseph McCarthy stoked up the febrile anti-Soviet rhetoric in the press when he claimed, in a six-hour speech on the Senate floor, that Communists infested the entire government apparatus. When Bohr complained about the apparently unending deluge of insults in the newspapers, Dirac told him not to worry as it would end in a few weeks because, by then, the reporters would have used up all the invective in the English language. Bohr shook his head, incredulous.\n\nIn June 1952, the Senate passed an Immigration Act that obliged applicants for US visas to list all their past and current memberships of organisations, clubs and societies. Decisions about whether to grant visas were usually left to consuls, most of them nervous of being seen as 'soft on Commies'. No record of Dirac's submission survives. It is most likely that he would have been open with the American authorities about his relatives behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary and his association with left-leaning organisations before the war. He may also have mentioned that he signed a petition two years before to deplore Bernal's expulsion from the Council of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, after Bernal had made a scathingly anti-Western speech in Moscow.  That signature had been noted by MI5.\n\nSoon after Oppenheimer's hearing began, on the rainy Monday morning of 12 April in Washington DC, he realised that he was being subjected not to an enquiry but to a kangaroo court. The FBI had illegally tapped his and his attorneys' phones, forwarding transcripts to the prosecuting lawyers to help them prepare for the next day's proceedings.  During the second weekend break in the hearing, Oppenheimer read a pessimistic note from Dirac, who was planning  to visit the institute for a year, beginning in the following summer. There was, Dirac believed, little chance that the US Government would grant him a visa.\n\nThe enquiry closed on 5 May, and Oppenheimer returned to Princeton tired, depressed and irritable. He knew that it had gone badly: under ferocious cross-examination he had been evasive, mendacious and sometimes even disloyal to his friends. One of the most damning testimonies had been delivered by Edward Teller, who had been angry with Oppenheimer for not making him head of the Manhattan Project's theory group and, in his opinion, for delaying his pet programme to build the first hydrogen bomb. Teller declared that, 'if it is a question of wisdom and judgement, as demonstrated by actions since 1945, then I would say that it would be wiser not to grant [Oppenheimer] security clearance'. Immediately after Teller left the witness stand, he offered his hand to a stunned Oppenheimer, who took it. 'I'm sorry,' Teller said.\n\nWhen Oppenheimer was waiting for the board's verdict, he received a letter from Dirac: 'I regret to have to tell you that my application for a US visa has been refused.' On both sides of the Atlantic, news of the refusal broke on 27 May 1955, most of the articles declaring or hinting that Dirac's Russian connections had been the cause. Among the journalists who called at 7 Cavendish Avenue was Chapman Pincher, the well-connected _Daily Express_ security correspondent. Manci told him, with more pith than accuracy, 'My husband has no political interests,' a phrase that Pincher included in a brief article in the _Express_ ('US-Barred Scientist \"Not Red\"'). A reporter from the _New York Times_ somehow managed to interview Dirac and was told that his application had been 'turned down flat': the American Consul had told him he was ineligible for a visa under Regulation 212A, without specifying which of the points specified in its five pages he had transgressed. Dirac was uncharacteristically decisive: he asked the British Government to release him from all defence work and started to make arrangements to change the location of his sabbatical to the Soviet Union. This alteration to his plans was certain to provoke the American authorities, as he must surely have known.\n\nAmerican authorities, as he must surely have known.\n\nA month later, Oppenheimer heard the outcome of his 'hearing': the Board voted two to one that he was a loyal American, though nevertheless a security risk. To ram home their victory, his enemies in the Atomic Energy Commission withdrew his security clearance a day before it was due to expire. Oppenheimer was shattered, and he considered emigrating to England to take up a professorship in physics at Cambridge University, an offer that he discussed with Dirac. His fiercely loyal wife, who had given one of the powerfully supportive testimonies during the hearing, became an alcoholic and remained one for the rest of her life. After a family vacation in the Caribbean, where he was watched by FBI agents suspicious that a Soviet submarine might whisk him back to Russia, he returned to the institute. His eloquence and appetite for his work were undiminished, though many of his colleagues thought his spirit was broken. He looked less like the blazingly confident scientist, an American hero after the Manhattan Project's success, than a scientific martyr, the Galileo of the McCarthy era.\n\nThree days after the _New York Times_ announced the Oppenheimer verdict as the lead story on its front page, it printed a short report on Dirac's case, featuring quotes from an interview with Dirac, printed below a photograph that made him look like a criminal. Embarrassed and angry, senior American physicists seized on this latest of many rejected visa applications from top scientists, and it became a cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. Two days after the report was published, John Wheeler and two Princeton colleagues fired off a letter to the newspaper, deploring the Government's action: '[we] believe this action is exceedingly unfortunate for science and this country', adding that the Act that led to the refusal of Dirac's visa 'seems to us a form of organized cultural suicide'. Dozens of other physicists turned the screws on the State Department and the American Consulate in London, who blamed each other for the outcome of the decision, which had been 'close', they told journalists. Within two weeks, the _New York Times_ reported that the State Department was reviewing the ban; a humiliating climb-down looked certain and was duly announced on 10 August. But it was too late: Dirac had made other arrangements.\n\nDirac's plans for a sabbatical in Russia fell through, so he accepted a  long-standing invitation to visit India. At the end of September 1954, Dirac and his wife set sail for Bombay, the first stage of their round-the-world trip, scheduled to last almost a year. The Diracs arranged for their friends Sol and Dorothy Adler to stay in 7 Cavendish Avenue to look after Mary and Monica, both anxious and dreading their parents' long absence. Monica, then twelve years old, cannily observed one important reason why her parents were going far away: Manci believed that Dirac had a female admirer who was showing him rather too much affection, so she wanted him away from Cambridge for as long as possible. Dirac may well have wanted to see something of the country described to him in the fireside reminiscences of his confidante Isabel Whitehead, who had died in the previous year, six years after her husband.\n\nThe Diracs' four-month stay in India was organised by the physicist Homi Bhabha, Dirac's former colleague in Cambridge and founding director of the Tata Institute in Bombay. He was exceptionally cultured, an exhibited artist and a connoisseur of poetry in several languages. Bhabha made sure that the Diracs were treated like royalty from the moment they arrived on 13 October, though he could do nothing about Bombay's unbearable heat and humidity, which quickly drove them to depart for the comparative cool of the Mahabaleshwar Hills nearby. Manci disliked much more than the climate: she hated the spicy food and the chauffeur-driven rides through vast, stinking vistas of destitution and squalor; nor did she appreciate being treated as a second-class celebrity, her husband's consort. The experience did, however, give her a glimpse of the respect and reverence that she would later expect, and a little of this taste for glamour later appeared to have rubbed off on Dirac. For the first time in his life, he felt the adulation of a mass crowd when he gave a public lecture during the evening of 5 January 1955 as part of the Indian Science Congress in Baroda, near Vadodara. In a special enclosure at Baroda cricket ground, he delivered his talk to thousands of wide-eyed spectators, many of them watching the presentation on a cinema screen outside the ground.\n\nPerhaps having learned from the debacle at Le Palais in Paris, Dirac had found a way of talking to people who wanted to learn about quantum physics but who knew nothing about it. Shedding his dislike of metaphor and visual imagery in descriptions of the subatomic domain, he spoke in simple, equation-free language and  introduced a simile, later given wide currency, to link subatomic particles with his favourite game:\n\nWhen you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave - how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what a chessman is, the answer would be [that] it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, [or anything whatever]. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game of chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen [. . .]\n\nThe physicists in the front row as well as the non-experts in the audience gave a warm reception to Dirac's forty-minute summary of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Though he had none of Eddington's verve as a populariser, it was clear that he had somehow acquired the skill vital to scientists who detest administration and who are well past their peak as researchers: the ability to share his work with the public.\n\nMost eminent among the politicians Dirac met in India was its charismatic Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had led India since its independence from Britain in 1947. Although he had the politician's talent for casting broad-brush thinking in colourful, populist language, Nehru was also a cultured thinker who would lighten a quarrel by quoting the poetry of Robert Frost. During the meeting in Delhi with Dirac on 12 January 1955, Nehru asked him if he had any recommendations for the future of the new republic of India. After his usual reflective pause, Dirac replied: 'A common language, preferably English. Peace with Pakistan. The metric system.' The men apparently did not discuss nuclear weapons, though the subject was on their minds. Eleven days before, at the Science Congress in Baroda, Dirac heard Nehru lecture scientists about the imperative to help with the reality of the new weapons, commenting that 'We are not playing with atomic bombs at present.' With Nehru's support, Bhabha would later spearhead plans for India's programme and become his country's Oppenheimer.\n\nTwo weeks after the Diracs sailed from Bombay on 21 February 1955, the trip turned unpleasant. After contracting jaundice, Dirac  spent eight days in hospital in Hong Kong, where his doctor agreed to allow him to sail on to Vancouver, though with a litany of health warnings and dietary instructions.  Manci thought he should not travel, but he insisted and paid dearly for his obstinacy by spending most of the voyage in bed, sick with jaundice, vomiting every few hours, plagued by itches, sometimes unable to sleep through the night. When the Diracs sailed into Vancouver in mid-April, he was exhausted and dispirited, his skin a pale shade of yellow. The University of British Columbia accommodated them on one storey of a finely appointed mansion, where he immediately took to his bed.\n\nTwo days later, he heard the news from Princeton that broke his heart: Einstein had died. For the first time, Manci saw him weep - a sight she had never seen before and would never see again.  It was for a hero, not a friend, that Dirac shed those tears. During those first hours of grief, he may have recalled his student days in Bristol when he first became acquainted with relativity theory, which inspired him to be a theoretician. What mattered most to Dirac were Einstein's science, his individualism, his indifference to orthodoxy and the ability he demonstrated later in life to ignore his critics' catcalls, muted only by timidity and cowardice. After Einstein's ashes had been scattered into the New Jersey winds, Dirac succeeded him as the most famous loner in theoretical physics, an elderly rebel with a cause that no one else could quite understand.\n\nSick, depressed and believing he was dying, Dirac told Manci that he had just one request: to see Oppenheimer. She quickly succeeded in bringing together the two friends in the Vancouver apartment, each of them broken, each at their nadirs, each looking fifteen years older than when they last met. No record of their conversation remains, but it is likely that Dirac's main wish was to commiserate with Oppenheimer over the outcome of the trial and, perhaps, over the conduct of Teller and the prosecutors. Teller, a pariah to many of his former friends, had become one of the few physicists Dirac disliked and would criticise, if only to those close to him. Oppenheimer was at his considerate best: he advised Dirac to get treated in the USA and to recuperate for a few weeks in one of the apartments at the Institute for Advanced Study.\n\nColleagues at the institute noticed the change in Dirac's gait. No longer lissom, he walked slowly and deliberately, as if recovering from surgery, but his vigour was returning. He spent the mornings  preparing lectures for a forthcoming meeting in Ottawa, the afternoons sleeping, the early evenings on long, restorative walks round the grounds of the institute, alone except for the squirrels, rabbits and the occasional deer. But misfortune struck: during a visit by Judy and her baby girl, he fractured a metatarsal bone in his right foot - he was an invalid again. In Ottawa, for the first time in his life, he gave his lectures sitting down and looked, as he approached his fifty-third birthday, like an old man.\n\nWhen the Diracs arrived home in Cambridge at the end of August 1955, to see their daughters for the first time in almost a year, Manci wrote a gushing thank-you note to Oppenheimer, passing on from Dirac a suggestion to help him come to terms with his tormentors. Dirac recommended Oppenheimer read the new Somerset Maugham novel, _Then and Now_ , set in fifteenth-century Florence, about the intrigues and deceptions in the relationship between Cesare Borgia and Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli.\n\nIn the first seminar Dirac gave in Cambridge at the beginning of the next term, he announced to his students: 'I have just done this work. It could be important. I want you to learn it.' This was an extremely rare instance of Dirac publicly pointing the way ahead. His enthusiasm for research had been rekindled.\n\nDirac's new theory suggested that the universe might not fundamentally consist of point-like particles but of tiny, one-dimensional things that he called 'strings'. The theory, first outlined in his Ottawa lectures, was a new approach to quantum electrodynamics that dispensed with one of the foundations of renormalisation theory that Dirac most disliked - the 'bare electron', the idea that the theory could be built from the fictional notion of an electron that had no surrounding field. In his new approach, he concentrated on one of the theory's underlying symmetries, known as gauge invariance. Long familiar to theorists, this symmetry implies that the theory makes identical predictions if a quantity known as the electromagnetic potential, closely related to the electromagnetic field, is changed at every point in space-time, but only if the changes across the whole of space-time are orchestrated by a governing formula known as a gauge transformation. Dirac found a way of rebuilding quantum electrodynamics in terms of gauge-invariant quantities so that, whenever the electron features in a calculation, it is inseparable from its  field. The result was a theory that gave the same results as the renormalised version but that was, for him, superior.\n\nDirac disliked the concept of bare electrons so much that he wanted 'to set up a theory in which they] are not merely _forbidden_ but _inconceivable_ ' _._[ 47 He found a way of doing that using the equations of his theory, by applying them to the lines of force describing the electric field of the electron, which resemble the field lines of a magnet. In the classical picture of the electron, the particle is surrounded by continuously varying lines of force: each set of lines of force is, in a sense, infinitesimally close to the next. This led Dirac to imagine a quantum version of the field and to picture the electron not as a particle but as a string:\n\nWe may assume [that] when we pass over to the quantum theory the lines of force become all discrete and separate from one another. Each line of force is now associated with a certain amount of electric charge. This charge will appear at each end of the line of force (if it has ends) with a positive sign at one end and a negative sign at the other. A natural assumption to make is that the amount of charge is the same for every line of force and is just the [size of the charge of the electron]. We now have a model in which the basic physical entity is the line of force, a thing like a string, instead of a particle. The strings will move about and interact with one another according to quantum laws.\n\nDirac had found what he was seeking: 'a model in which a bare electron is inconceivable, because the end of a piece of string is inconceivable without the string'. But it was only the germ of an idea, not a complete new theory. Several of his students examined it but soon set it aside, as Dirac did soon afterwards. Years later, it would transpire that he had once again been ahead of his time.\n\nDirac was about to reach the low point of his career: apart from wartime, 1956 was the first year since he had begun research that he had published nothing at all . Now semi-detached from the physics community, he had lost touch with many of his closest friends, including Kapitza - they had not been together for almost twenty years. Dirac will have wanted to know how Kapitza was faring in Nikita Khrushchev's regime, which began soon after Stalin's death in March 1953. British newspapers had reported a new mood in the country after the Soviet public heard that Khrushchev had, in a speech to stony-faced party bosses in February 1956, denounced the  personality cult of Stalin and the cruelty of his regime.\n\nIn the early autumn, Dirac arrived in Moscow to find it very different from the city he and Manci had seen in 1937: it was now focusing on consolidation, not revolution, and the paranoid, inwardly focused nationalism of the late 1930s had been superseded by a dread of a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the USA. Dirac found Kapitza as self-confident as he had ever been and just as full of colourful stories: in one, he told Dirac of how his arch-enemy Beria had sidelined him after he had refused to work on nuclear weapons. Kapitza believed that 'It is a horrible thing for scientists to engage in secret war work,' and he probably mentioned this to Dirac, who may have flinched, at least inwardly. While most other leading Soviet physicists had given their services to the nuclear project, Kapitza worked on ways to destroy incoming nuclear weapons using intense beams, apparently a precursor to the American Strategic Defence ('Star Wars') Initiative. Stalin's good opinion had saved him from execution by one of Beria's henchmen, Kapitza was sure. When Stalin died, Lev Landau danced for joy, but Kapitza knew his own life was in danger if Beria was the country's next leader. Khrushchev outmanoeuvred Beria, but Kapitza's life was still in peril: on what seemed to be an ordinary summer morning, towards the end of the official discussions about Stalin's succession, Kapitza told Dirac, two state officials visited him in his small laboratory and asked for a guided tour. Their questions revealed that they knew little about science and cared even less, yet they insisted on prolonging their visit beyond its natural duration, until their departure on the stroke of noon. According to Kapitza's account of the story, the two men had been deputed - probably by Khrushchev or his associates - to protect him from a last-minute reprisal while Beria was being arrested and taken into custody. A few weeks later, Beria and six of his accomplices were tried and sentenced to death; he was executed by one of Khrushchev's three-star generals, who fired a bullet into his forehead.  Kapitza heard the news on Christmas Eve, a joyous moment for him.\n\nDirac never tired of praising Kapitza's refusal to work on the nuclear-bomb project. This was the story Kapitza told Dirac and everyone else, but it is almost certainly untrue. Kapitza's letters to Stalin - published several years after Dirac's death - make it plain that Kapitza wanted to work on the project, and he shows no hint of  any moral scruples; he declined to work on the bomb only because he would not work under Beria's heel. It is also possible that he did not command support from his colleagues, as some of them believed he was contemptuous of scientists outside his cosmopolitan circle. A much stronger case for Kapitza's heroism can be made by pointing to the case of Landau, Stalin's outspoken enemy, whom Kapitza repeatedly defended, often putting his life in grave danger. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were executed for showing only a fraction of Kapitza's insubordination.\n\nDirac spent most of his visit to Moscow in October 1956 sightseeing - he saw that Lenin was then sharing his tomb with Stalin - as well as reacquainting himself with his old Russian friends, including Tamm, Fock and Landau. It is surprising that Dirac was allowed to meet Tamm, as he was leading the secret project to build the hydrogen bomb (Tamm's participation in this work may have been one reason why his friendship with Dirac fizzled out in the next decade). Landau, the permanent juvenile, was by then in the front rank of theoreticians and still flaunting his irreverence: he replaced the toilet roll in his bathroom with pages from Stalin's autobiography.\n\nLandau was in the audience of Dirac's lectures at Moscow University, where Dirac responded to the request made to some of their guests to summarise their philosophy of physics. He wrote on the blackboard: PHYSICAL LAWS SHOULD HAVE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY. In public, Landau was respectful of Dirac's aestheticism, but in private he was cutting, once remarking to the physicist Brian Pippard, 'Dirac is the greatest living physicist and he has done nothing of importance since 1930.' Overstated to the point of cruelty, this was typical Landau. He was, however, only giving voice to what many leading physicists in the mid-1950s thought but dared not say in public. Yet, as events were about to prove, Dirac's detractors had been too hasty in writing him off.\n**Twenty-six**\n\nHow some they have died, and some they have left me,  \nAnd some are taken from me; all are departed;  \nAll, all are gone, the old familiar faces.\n\nCHARLES LAMB, 'The Old Familiar Faces', 1798\n\nIn early December 1958, when Pauli was approaching his fifty-eighth birthday, he was looking sallow and unwell. He complained of stomach pains during a lecture at his university in Zurich in the afternoon of Friday 5 December and took a taxi home. On the following day, he went to the city's Red Cross Hospital, where he was admitted for tests which proved inconclusive, so doctors decided there was no alternative but to operate. A week later, a surgeon cut into the hillock of his midriff and found a pancreatic tumour so large and advanced as to be inoperable. Within forty-eight hours of the operation, he was dead.\n\nThe final year of Pauli's life had not been among his happiest - a quarrel with his friend Heisenberg over an ambitious theory they were developing had turned nasty and had suppurated. But the end of Pauli's career had also seen the seal put on one of his finest contributions to physics: during an early summer morning in 1956, he received a telegram from two experimenters in the Los Alamos laboratory to confirm that they had discovered the neutrino, the particle that Pauli had predicted, though Dirac and others had doubted that his arguments held water. Just as Pauli had foreseen, the neutrino has no electrical charge, the same spin as an electron and apparently no mass. The newly discovered particle interacts with matter primarily through the weak interaction, which is extremely feeble: of the ten thousand trillion trillion neutrinos zipping through planet Earth every second, all but a few pass straight through without deflection.\n\nThe discovery was a triumph for Pauli but, two years later, nature put him firmly in his place when his intuition about the weak interaction was shown to be quite wrong. The story began at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1956, when a duo of young Chinese theoreticians - C. N. 'Frank' Yang and T. D. Lee  (usually known as 'TD') - suggested what Pauli and almost all other theorists regarded as ridiculous: when particles interact weakly, nature might choose to break the perfect symmetry between left and right, the so-called parity symmetry. At a fundamental level, gravity and electromagnetism are ambidextrous: every experiment that investigates this type of interaction would give the same result if the configuration of the particles involved were swapped left to right, in their mirror image. At Columbia University in New York, experiments (suggested by Lee and Yang) to investigate whether weak interactions are left-right symmetric were carried out by two groups, one led by the aggressively confident Chien-Shiung Wu, born in Shangai, the other by Leon Lederman, a wisecracking New Yorker. The experiments each came to a climax in the bitter cold of New York in mid-January 1957, when they confirmed that Pauli had been wrong and that the suspicions of Lee and Yang were right: in weak interactions, nature _does_ distinguish between left and right.\n\nThe result was a sensation, and not only among physicists - it even featured prominently on the front page of the _New York Times._ But the observation was no surprise to Dirac. He had foreseen the possibility that parity symmetry might be broken, in the introduction to the review of relativity he wrote in 1949. There, he considered whether quantum descriptions of nature would remain the same if the positions of the particles are reversed in a mirror (a left-right swap) and, separately, if time runs backwards instead of forwards. In his conclusion, he took the unusual step in a technical article of using a personal pronoun: 'I do not believe that there is any need for physical laws to be invariant under these reflections [in space and in time], although all the exact physical laws of nature so far known do have this invariance.'\n\nDirac had realised that although the laws of gravity and electromagnetism had left-right symmetry and time-reversal symmetry, the laws of other fundamental interactions may not have this property. No leading physicist had remembered reading these words, and even Dirac himself forgot that he had written them. After 1949, he was aware of the possibility of quantum asymmetries in space and time but apparently said nothing about it, except once during a cross-examination of a Ph.D. student. A few years later, when he heard colleagues talk of the shock of parity violation, he would calmly  draw attention to this passage in his paper. To students who asked him about it, he said simply, 'I never said anything about it in my book.' He knew, however, that he could not expect many plaudits for his contribution: the winners-take-all rule of scientific conduct entitled Lee and Yang to take the credit for fully appreciating the importance of the breaking of parity symmetry. Theirs was one of the great discoveries of the modern era.\n\nThe death of Pauli had removed from the fraternity of senior theoreticians the one member Dirac disliked. Although they did not overtly compete with one another, undercurrents of rivalry swirled beneath their superficial rapport. Their approaches to theoretical physics were different, as Pauli was a conservative analyst, while Dirac was a revolutionary intuitionist. But that need not have divided them. Most of Pauli's peers thought that his scabrous insults were a small price to pay for the high quality of his insights. But Dirac demurred; he often went out of his way to remind lecture audiences that Pauli 'very often bet on the wrong horse when a new idea was introduced', including the time he 'completely crushed' the idea of spin when it first hatched. Nor, it appears, could Dirac forgive Pauli's pitiless strafings. When Pauli stood over him, damning hole theory, demanding that he recant, perhaps Dirac could see the ghost of his father?\n\nDirac's daughters never saw him show much interest in politics except perhaps when he watched the television news, with the inscrutability of a sphinx. Manci was quite different: she closely followed international events and had strong opinions about many of them, which she spent afternoons discussing on the telephone with friends. In November 1956, she and her family - including her brother Wigner - looked on sadly when Soviet tanks and troops crushed the uprising in Hungary against its government, a puppet of Moscow, and killing some twenty thousand Hungarians. Landau condemned Khrushchev and his Politburo as 'vile butchers'. In the UK, the _New Statesman_ , usually a moderate critic of the Soviet Union, denounced the invasion as 'loathsome', 'indefensible' and 'unforgivable'. Soon, the Communist Party haemorrhaged, and the hard-left core of Cambridge academics was reduced to an ineffectual rump, including Bernal, one of the few whose loyalty to the cause was undiminished. Dirac appears to have said nothing about the  Hungarian invasion even to his closest friends: by the mid-1950s, he appears to have lost every vestige of his youthful idealism. He took the rare step of giving vent to this distaste when he first met Tam Dalyell, an Eton-educated Tory who switched allegiance to the Labour Party in 1956 after the disastrous British invasion of Egypt, following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. Dirac indicated that he welcomed the maverick Dalyell's change of political heart, but added pointedly, 'I don't _like_ politicians.'\n\nYet Dirac was still following reports from the Soviet Union. 'We're all very excited by the sputniks,' he wrote to Kapitza at the end of November 1957. Dirac had first heard about the launch of the artificial satellite, apparently to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, on the morning of 5 October.  That evening, he and Monica went to the back garden of 7 Cavendish Avenue shortly after dusk hoping to see the twinkling satellite pass over in the night sky. Newspaper reports of the orbiting 'Red Moon', a beach-ball sized sphere girdling the Earth in ninety-five minutes, made front-page headlines for a week, and Dirac wolfed the reports down. Sputnik's success transformed the West's view of Soviet technology from condescension to fearful admiration. For Americans, the Sputniks were frightening wake-up calls, even more disturbing after the attempt to launch their own satellite in early December ended in fiasco, when it exploded a few seconds after lift-off (one jeering journalist suggested that it should have been called 'Stayputnik'). The Sputnik missions demonstrated that the Soviets were well on the way to developing intercontinental ballistic missiles and to launching a human being into space. The missions panicked the media and politicians into believing that the Soviet Union - which many Americans believed was a backward, agrarian country - was way ahead of the USA in science education. Edward Teller went on television to pronounce that 'The United States has lost a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.' _Life_ magazine pointed out that three in four American high-school students studied no physics at all. As a result of all this pressure, President Eisenhower ordered a renaissance in school science and, between 1957 and 1961, Congress doubled federal expenditure on research and development, to $9 billion. An unlikely beneficiary of this largesse was high-energy physics: a new generation of subatomic particle accelerators were, in a sense, the Sputnik's progeny.\n\nDirac was as interested in the technology of space flight as in any scientific benefits it might bring. He watched television footage of the launches with the same enthusiasm that he had shown when observing from the back garden of 6 Julius Road the launches of some of the first aeroplanes. But he was puzzled: why were the space rockets launched vertically rather than horizontally? So far as he could see, the challenge of propelling a rocket into space is much the same as that of launching a heavily loaded aeroplane, and vertical take-off is extremely inefficient as much of the fuel is used before the rocket is clear of the launch pad; it would therefore be best to launch the rocket horizontally, at high speed. Dirac was fascinated by this question. In May 1961, soon after the Americans put an astronaut into space - less than a month after the Soviets had beaten them to it - Dirac took aback his two fellow diners over lunch at St John's College by sitting not in his habitual silence but, instead, talking about rocketry non-stop for almost an hour.\n\nIn the coming decades, he followed reports of the Soviet and American space programmes and attended specialist meetings on them at the Royal Society. Even after talking with several experts, he remained unconvinced that the rockets were being launched in the most economical way, so he took the unusual step of asking NASA for an explanation. Its officials informed Dirac that he was wrong because he was underestimating the importance of the 'drag' effect of the atmosphere on a space rocket and the performance of the rocket's engine, which improves with altitude.  Such rockets are launched vertically so that they can climb quickly, enabling them to reach altitudes where the inhibiting aerodynamic pressures on the rocket are much lower than they are at ground level. As the air thins with height, the engine's exhaust can impart greater thrust. These advantages together make it much more economical to launch the rockets vertically, as several experts explained to Dirac, though it seems that he never quite believed them.\n\nSince Dirac's arrival in Cambridge in 1923, his working environment had hardly changed. But, towards the end of the 1950s, there was a concerted drive in the Cambridge science departments to manage themselves more efficiently, partly so that they could compete more successfully with other international centres of science and, indeed, with other parts of the university. In Dirac's bailiwick, the leader of  the drive was George Batchelor, an Australian-born mathematician with an uncompromising manner that made clear the extent of his ambition to anyone who doubted it. Then in his late thirties, Batchelor was an expert in fluid mechanics, the branch of applied mathematics concerned with the flow of gases and liquids, a subject for which Dirac had little time - he regarded it as the small fry of theoretical physics. Nor did he like Batchelor, one of the few people who could bring out the snob in him; their colleague John Polkinghorne recalls that Dirac once offended the rhino-skinned Batchelor by dismissing George Stokes, one of the pioneers of fluid mechanics, as 'a second-rate Lucasian professor'.\n\nFrom the beginning of the autumn term in 1959, Dirac officially worked in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, headed by Batchelor. Polkinghorne admired Batchelor as an effective, congenial leader, but Dirac and his colleague Fred Hoyle - now a top-flight cosmologist and a popular broadcaster - both declined offices in the new department and disliked virtually every change he wanted to make. One of the proposed changes was to adopt a more communal approach to research, a notion that could not have been more inimical to Dirac, who looked like a refugee from another age on the rare occasions he attended the new social gatherings. In seminars, he often appeared to be catching up on his sleep but would sometimes give the lie to that by asking a pertinent question. But he would also embarrass senior colleagues by showing how little he knew about the latest research discoveries, even about new particles familiar to greenhorn students.\n\nAlthough Dirac was not one to stand on his dignity, he was stung when Batchelor ejected him from the office he had occupied for some twenty-five years and 'volunteered' him to give additional lectures. Having been wounded by a series of such slights, he snapped when an officious parking attendant in the Cavendish told him that he had no right to leave his car there. John Polkinghorne recalls Dirac's response: 'He was furious. He told the attendant that he had parked there for twenty years.' He accepted Batchelor's executive decision, but Manci was less compliant and wrote a scathing letter to the Vice Chancellor, who wrote back soothingly and then forgot about her. The authorities no longer felt obliged to keep Dirac happy, and he knew it.\n\nPerhaps in part because of his unhappiness at work, Dirac's marriage was for the first time under strain. The wife of one of the Fellows at St John's briefly caught sight of this when Manci light-heartedly accosted her outside Woolworth's: 'Let's go for a coffee - he hasn't spoken to me for a week and I'm _so_ bored.' Stories like this did not surprise the Diracs' acquaintances in Cambridge as most of them had never fully understood how such different people could be happy together. But this happiness was partly an act. Behind their front door, her attitude towards him swung from one extreme to another: one day, she would throw her arms round him and enquire coquettishly whether he loved her; the next, she would tell him angrily: 'I'd leave if I had somewhere to go.' Such threats left Dirac unmoved. According to one story, she once snapped at him when he was eating his dinner, 'What would you do if I left you?' only for him to reply - after a half-minute pause - 'I'd say \"Goodbye dear\".'\n\nAlthough he sometimes gave the impression that his research had dried up, Dirac was still thinking hard about his physics. When he gave Manci the signal that he was at work, she ordered the girls to be quiet: Monica would retire to her room, while Mary switched off the gramophone, endlessly blaring out the soundtrack of _Oklahoma!_ Now in their teens, the girls had realised that their father was a distinguished scientist and that he was exceptionally quiet and self-effacing.  'I was lucky,' he told Monica. 'I went to good schools, I had excellent teachers. I was in the right place at the right time.'\n\nGabriel, recovered from his illness, was acutely aware of his stepfather's status: his surname drew amused comments from his mathematical colleagues and did him no harm at all. Dirac was close to Gabriel and went out of his way to promote his career, often exchanging letters with him to chew over chess problems they had read in newspapers (G. H. Hardy had described such problems as 'the hymn tunes of pure mathematics'). Judy and her family - by the summer of 1960, she had three children - were more distant, and she was in one long fight with her mother, who had all but lost patience with her. As many family friends confirm, Manci was a much better wife than a mother, always supportive and loyal to her husband but often insensitive to her children. It seems that Mary suffered most from her mother's tongue: Manci repeatedly browbeat her, told her she was 'ugly' and also 'lazy', a word she used to describe everyone in the family who did not earn a wage, including  Dirac's sister Betty. No one, least of all Dirac, dared to remind Manci that she had yet to do a day's paid work.\n\nBy the late 1950s, Mary was back at home and working in Cambridge, contemplating emigration; Monica was preparing to study geology at university. The girls were rapidly becoming independent, and the Diracs wanted to make the most of their new freedom by travelling even more. For someone so friendly, Manci had surprisingly few friends in Cambridge - she was close only to Sir John Cockcroft's wife Elizabeth - and she was continually planning trips to see her family and friends abroad, the further from Cambridge the better. Dirac felt much the same way: an outsider in his own department and resentful of Batchelor's machinations, he preferred to be where he was appreciated. The result was that, in the dozen years before his retirement in 1969, the Diracs were away from Cambridge almost as much as they were there.\n\nSoon after the neutrino was discovered, Dirac had the idea that the particle's existence might be explained by Einstein's general theory of relativity. This was at the back of his mind in September 1958, when he began another sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, intending to develop a new version of Einstein's theory based on his favourite way of setting out fundamental theories, using Hamiltonians to describe the interactions. His aim was to find a general classical description of every basic type of field - electromagnetic, gravitational and so on - preparing the ground for their quantisation.\n\nAlthough his project failed, his method of analysing the general theory of relativity gave new insights into gravity. He described some of them in his lecture at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, held in New York in the grip of a bitterly cold spell, at the end of January 1959. Always averse to large gatherings, Dirac was probably not looking forward to his stay as he walked the two blocks from Penn Station to the huge, overheated New Yorker hotel, to join the five thousand delegates, most of them in a starched white shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up. Without Dirac's scientific celebrity, he would have been just another of the meeting's invisible men, but his renown made his attendance one of the talking points in the bars and lounges. Many of the audience arrived early after lunch to secure a seat in the huge ballroom, between the imitation Ionic columns  reaching to the ceiling, and below the three giant chandeliers decorating the room like cheap jewellery.\n\nDirac began his talk by making it clear that he was not going to comment on the particle physics in fashion but about the electromagnetic and gravitational interactions, both known for centuries but still not fully understood. Everyone in the audience knew that Maxwell's field theory of electromagnetism predicted the existence of electromagnetic waves, including visible light, and that the energy of the field comes in quanta, known as photons. By a similar token, Einstein had shown that the general theory of relativity predicts the existence of gravitational waves. Dirac announced that his study of the gravitational field's energy indicated that it is delivered in separate quanta, which he called 'gravitons', a long-neglected term first introduced a quarter of a century before in the journal _Under the Banner of Marxism._ 33 After Dirac reintroduced the name, it stuck. These particles will be much harder to detect than photons, he pointed out, but experimenters should lose no time in beginning the hunt for them. He gave the impression to the _New York Times_ journalist Robert Plumb that this was an important prediction; the next day, Plumb's report appeared on the front page: '[Dirac] believed that his postulation at this time was in the same category as his postulation of positive electrons a quarter of a century ago.'\n\nDirac did not succeed in quantising the general theory of relativity, but his Hamiltonian method turned out to be his most influential contribution to the theory. His approach, and similar techniques developed independently by other physicists, enabled Einstein's equations to be conveniently set out in a comparatively simple form, especially in situations when gravitational fields change rapidly. This excursion by Dirac into relativity theory looked odd to most physicists. In the late 1950s, the development of the general theory of relativity was a cottage industry by comparison with the industrial scale of particle physics. Relativity was an unfashionable subject for theorists, and Dirac was one of the few who thought it important to develop it and to find a single theoretical framework to understand gravity and electromagnetism. The main topic at the conference was the strong interaction and the particles that feel it, including the newly discovered mesons. One of the leaders in the field was Feynman, who met Dirac again in the autumn of 1961 at the Solvay meeting, where they had another of their Pinteresque exchanges:\n\nFEYNMAN: I am Feynman.\n\nDIRAC: I am Dirac. [ _Silence_ ]\n\nFEYNMAN ( _admiringly_ ): It must have been wonderful to be the discoverer of that equation.\n\nDIRAC: That was a long time ago. [ _Pause_ ]\n\nDIRAC: What are you working on?\n\nFEYNMAN: Mesons.\n\nDIRAC: Are you trying to discover an equation for them?\n\nFEYNMAN: It is very hard.\n\nDIRAC ( _concluding_ ): One must try.\n\nDirac's reticence had surprised even his former student Abdus Salam, sitting next to him: from the conversation, Salam concluded that Feynman and Dirac had not previously met. One explanation for Dirac's behaviour, strange even by his standards, is that he did not recognise Feynman: Dirac had an unusually poor memory for faces, which is why he rarely remembered physicists he had met only once, even if their characters were as memorable as Feynman's.\n\nDirac was convinced that the best way to understand strongly interacting particles was to describe their behaviour with equations, just as he had done when he discovered the electron equation. But most theoreticians were not now thinking along those lines: some were exploring new types of field theory; others gave up all hope of finding equations to describe the particles' motion and sought only to describe in broad terms what can happen when they interact. In this approach, a 'scattering matrix' gives, for every possible initial state of the particles, the likelihood that it will lead to each of the possible final outcomes. Dirac rejected it as 'a fa\u00e7ade'.\n\nApart from the strongly interacting particles, experimenters had also discovered another family in the subatomic zoo. The first hint had arrived from experiments on cosmic rays in 1946, when Carl Anderson identified a particle later to be called the muon. It was some two hundred times as heavy as the electron and unstable, but in other respects it bore a close resemblance to the electron: it had the same spin and did not feel the strong interaction. But there was one crucial difference: in 1962, experimenters showed that the muon is associated with its own variety of neutrino, different from the familiar neutrino linked with the electron. All four particles - the electron, the muon and their neutrinos - appeared to have no constituents and  to be part of a family, later known as leptons, following Leon Lederman's introduction of the term, taken from the Greek word for something small and delicate, _leptos_.\n\nThe arrival of new particles normally did nothing to excite Dirac - he still had not come to terms with the photon and electron. But in late 1961, Dirac broke his rule of not working on new problems until he had solved the ones already on his plate: he tried to understand the muon, which he believed might simply be an excitation of the electron. He abandoned the usual image of the electron as a point particle and pictured it as a spherical bubble in an electromagnetic field: 'One can look upon the muon as an electron excited by radial oscillations,' he suggested. Dirac described the bubble using a relativistic theory whose equations described its motion in space-time. It was a sublime piece of applied mathematics but most physicists ignored it, apparently because its account of the electron was so unconventional: it gave a geometric account of a particle usually assumed to have no size and paid no attention to its spin. Nor did the theory's predictions do much to win over doubters - Dirac calculated that the mass of the first quantum excitation of his electron accounted for only a quarter of the measured mass of the muon.\n\nDirac first presented his theory of 'the extended electron' to his colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on the warm autumn afternoon of 16 October 1962. Oppenheimer was sitting in the front row, his deep-blue eyes still alert and penetrating, his complexion as fragile as an eggshell. Still a master inquisitor, after making one of his smart comments, usually at the speaker's expense, he would sometimes turn round and survey the audience, to check that everyone had appreciated it. When Dirac was the speaker, however, Oppenheimer was on his best behaviour.\n\nAn hour after Dirac's audience had dispersed, at 6.30 p.m., President Kennedy met his officials in the White House to discuss urgent intelligence reports: the Soviets were building secret missile bases in Cuba, ninety miles from Florida and therefore potentially a threat to the USA. Six days later, Kennedy went public with the intelligence, announcing a naval blockade of Cuba and demanding that the Soviets remove the missiles. Khrushchev angrily refused to back down. Oppenheimer's scorpions were staring straight into each other's eyes.\n\nThe tension dropped on 28 October, when the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles in return for concessions from the Americans; it  seemed to many - including Dirac, watching the crisis unfold on his television in Princeton and possibly wondering whether he was about to see his third world war - that humanity had been lucky to survive. The planet seemed to be at the mercy of its Dr Strangeloves.\n\nBohr lived just long enough to see the Cuban missile crisis. Three weeks later, after Sunday lunch at home with his wife Margrethe, he went upstairs for a nap and died of heart failure. In a letter of condolence to Margrethe, Dirac said that he was 'excessively sorry' to hear of 'the loss of one of my closest friends' and recalled his first stay with the Bohrs in Copenhagen in 1926: 'I was greatly impressed by the wisdom that Niels showed, not only in physics but in all branches of human thought. He was the wisest man I knew, and I did my best to absorb some of the wisdom he imparted.'\n\nThis was the latest of a series of blows to Dirac, who was seeing his closest colleagues die off one by one. In Princeton, von Neumann had died in 1957, followed by Veblen in 1960. And only eleven months before Bohr's death, Dirac had written the obituary in _Nature_ for Schr\u00f6dinger, who had died in his Vienna home of heart disease. In his article, Dirac went out of his way to defend Schr\u00f6dinger's apparent welcoming of Nazism in May 1938: 'He was forced to express his approval of the Nazi regime, and he did this in as ambiguous a way as he could.' Many of those who had read Schr\u00f6dinger's article joyfully pledging support for 'the will of the F\u00fchrer' will not previously have noticed that it contained many ambiguities. But, as Heisenberg and Kapitza had seen, Dirac could not be faulted on his loyalty.\n\nUntil 1962, Dirac had shown no interest in publicly discussing his recollections of the beginnings of quantum mechanics. But that year, when he turned sixty, he changed his mind. He agreed to be interviewed by the American philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, a former student of Van Vleck. Kuhn persuaded Dirac to help compile the archive for the history of quantum physics. Kuhn knew that Dirac was nervous of talking to strangers in unusual environments, so he held the first interview in Wigner's home in Princeton, with Wigner present and often chipping in with tactfully phrased questions to draw him out. During the forty-minute session, Dirac spoke quietly and clearly, often sounding tentative and mildly amused that anyone would be interested in what he would have to say.\n\nFor almost forty years, Dirac had hardly spoken a word to his physicist colleagues about his upbringing, but Kuhn and Wigner heard childhood memories pour out of him, including a torrent of domestic detail. About ten minutes into the interview, Dirac began to talk about his brother. It is clear from Wigner's delicately phrased questions and from his mild incredulity at Dirac's responses that the two men had scarcely broached the subject in the thirty-five years they had known each other. During this part of the interview, Dirac speaks as gently as usual, but each of his carefully articulated words seems to bear a heavy burden of sadness and regret, especially when he responds to Wigner's question about why Felix took his own life:\n\nI suppose he was just very depressed. And, well . . . that kind of life where we were brought up without any social contacts at all must have been very depressing to him as well as to me and having a younger brother who was brighter than he was must have depressed him also quite a lot.\n\nDirac left much unsaid, but Kuhn and Wigner were wise not to press him; if they had, he would almost certainly have clammed up and perhaps even refused further interviews.\n\nPrivately, Dirac was in no doubt why his brother killed himself. Dirac told Kurt Hofer that he was sure his father was primarily responsible for the tragedy: Charles had denied Felix a normal upbringing, forced him to speak French against his will and crushed his ambition to be a medical doctor. But, even after decades of reflection, Dirac could not understand the depth of his father's grief after Felix's suicide: his father was still a mystery to him and still, as he told his closest friends, the only person he had ever 'loathed'.\n\nThree months after the interview, Kuhn wrote to thank Dirac for his participation and informed him that his taped disclosures about Felix's death would be removed from the published version and 'filed separately for future use'. The material was made public only after Dirac's death.\n\nIn 1962, Dirac was about to enter the final stage of his career in Cambridge. His family circumstances were changing rapidly: his daughter Mary was preparing to emigrate to the USA; Monica had gone off to university 'to discover the Beatles'. Shortly before leaving, Monica had been thrown out of the house by her mother, just as she ejected Judy in her teenage years. Now Judy and her family were  settled in the USA and Gabriel was pursuing his academic career in Europe.\n\nDirac imagined that he would spend the rest of his life at home in Cambridge, tending his garden and working in his study. But Manci had other plans.\n**Twenty-seven**\n\n[Some critics] act as if Flaubert, or Milton, or Wordsworth were some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair, who smelt of stale powder, was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody's living in it rent free; but even so, surely it is, well, you know . . . time?\n\nJULIAN BARNES, _Flaubert's Parrot_ , 1984\n\nBy the mid-1960s, Dirac was spending most of the week working at home. At the department he looked increasingly out of place: 'He was irrelevant,' his young colleague and former student John Polkinghorne remembers. Other Cambridge physicists thought the same but followed the scientists' unwritten code of chivalry: when great researchers go to seed and speak out against modern trends in their subject, they should be ignored and even mocked in private, but be heartily praised in public for their past achievements.\n\nOutside the university, too, Dirac cut the lonely figure of a misfit from another age, uncomfortable with the new popular culture and its irreverence. It was unthinkable to him that serious critics could treat a painting of a soup tin as a mainstream work of art and that many of the defining songs of a generation were written by cheeky, working-class Liverpudlians who could not read music. What, Dirac wondered, was he to make of a group whose lead vocalist claimed to be a walrus?\n\nDirac was beginning to fear old age and the prospect of being effectively abandoned by his colleagues: all the signs were that Batchelor was going to bundle him out of his Lucasian Chair at the statutory retirement age of sixty-seven. The threat led Dirac to make a brief venture into the poisonous netherworld of university politics in the spring of 1964, when he joined Hoyle and a few others to seek Batchelor's removal after his first five-year stint as head of their department. Outmanoeuvred, they failed miserably. With no wish to be part of Batchelor's empire, and with his child-rearing responsibilities behind him, Dirac - encouraged by Manci - resumed his travels and spent even more time in his garden, trimming his immaculate  lawn, pruning his roses and growing far more vegetables than Manci needed for her larder. His bookshelves heaved with horticultural magazines and books, making his study look as if it belonged not to a research physicist but to a landscape gardener. He still did research but knew that he had next to no chance of coming up with a radically new idea. He was enduring the fate of all ageing theoretical physicists: his spirit was outliving his imagination.\n\nThough marginalised in Cambridge, he was treated kindly at his favourite academic address in the USA. In the spring of 1963, Dirac heard from Oppenheimer that he had arranged for a framed photograph of him to be mounted on a wall at the Institute for Advanced Study, next to a snapshot of Einstein: 'You two are alone on that wall.' This simple gesture symbolised the generosity of the American academic system, much more willing than British universities to find room for leading scholars to spend their unproductive twilight years in dignity. Mainly for this reason, Dirac spent more time in the USA. From 1962 to his retirement in 1969, Dirac visited the United States every year, for at least a couple of months, twice for almost an entire academic year (1962-3 and 1964-5). For much of the rest of the time, he and Manci were visiting conferences or on vacation in Europe and Israel (the USSR was no longer on their itinerary, apparently because even they could not get a visa). During these seven years, Stephen Hawking - a colleague of Dirac's and a rising star - did not see him in the department.\n\nManci had set her heart on escaping from Cambridge. Dirac disliked change and wanted to be loyal to his university but eventually agreed that it was time to emigrate, preferably to the USA. He did not have the initiative to secure a new position: that task fell to Manci, who assumed a new role as the pushy manager of a tongue-tied talent, chasing royalties and upgrades, insisting on sea-facing cabins and the room with the finest view. He was her Elvis, and she was his Colonel Parker.\n\nLecturing had become Dirac's forte. Although his voice was weakening, he could be relied on to keep his audience hooked, not through wit and humour but through clarity and humility. At the podium, he looked and sounded like an elderly preacher from Bristol but had the innocence of a young lad reading an essay on Prize Day, clipping his vowels, emphasising his consonants with the force of a stab. It was  often a surprise to people in the audience that such a taciturn man was so fluent, hardly ever hesitating with an 'er' or an 'um' and rarely showing a sign of even approaching a grammatical tangle. His most unnerving idiosyncrasy was a propensity to go silent in mid-sentence: when he needed to think or find the right words, he would suddenly stop talking, typically for ten seconds but sometimes for over a minute, before resuming without comment.\n\nHe presented fewer specialist talks but occasionally gave guest lectures, including a series on quantum field theory at Yeshiva University in New York in the spring of 1964. In these lectures, later recognised as classics, he developed the theory logically from its beginnings and, unusually for him, spelt out in detail the calculations that led to the prediction of the energy shift of the hydrogen atom, measured by Lamb in 1946. Although the theory and experiment agree to within experimental uncertainties, Dirac left his audience in no doubt that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is profoundly flawed: 'If one is a research worker, one mustn't believe in anything too strongly; one must always be prepared that various beliefs one has had for a long time may be overthrown.'\n\nA year earlier at Yeshiva, he gave his lecture 'The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature', which he adapted into an article for the May 1963 edition of _Scientific American_ , the only article he ever wrote for a popular-science magazine. The style and content of the talk foreshadowed dozens of similar presentations: he explained in plain, stripped-down language why fundamental physics was in crisis, drawing lessons from an often simplistic overview of the history of physics. In the article, he dwelt on one of his favourite anecdotes: Schr\u00f6dinger claimed that he had discovered a mathematically beautiful relativistic version of his equation a few months before the famous non-relativistic version but did not publish the relativistic equation because it failed to account for observations on the hydrogen atom (the disagreement arose because it was not known at that time that the electron has spin). Schr\u00f6dinger published his non-relativistic version only when he was sure it was in good agreement with the data, but if he had been bolder he would have been the first to publish a relativistic quantum theory. For Dirac, this story had a moral: 'It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.'\n\nDirac suggested to his readers that 'God is a mathematician of a  very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe,' having apparently forgotten that he first encountered the God-beauty link forty years before in the writings of his colleague Sir James Jeans. In his positivist youth, Dirac would have regarded the link as unverifiable and therefore meaningless, but he had changed his tune: after spending decades on the _terra firma_ of experiment-based science, he was ready to take pleasure trips on the seas of metaphysical philosophy.\n\nThe physicist in Dirac now seemed to prefer the past to the present. Uncomfortable in the company of the leading young physicists, he was most at ease when he was reminiscing with his old friends. He missed none of the triennial meetings of Nobel Laureates at Lindau, a relaxed town in southern Germany, where he talked with physicists and, with rather more reserve, to the students invited to join them. _Horizon_ , the flagship science series of the new British television channel BBC2, made a film at the 1965 meeting, produced by Peter Lo\u00efzos. He saw that the two Nobelists most lionised by the students were Dirac and Heisenberg, who attracted swarms of admirers like Hollywood stars, and that, away from the m\u00eal\u00e9e, Dirac followed Heisenberg like a butler.\n\nLo\u00efzos knew it was not going to be easy to persuade Dirac to talk, as several BBC radio and television producers had asked him for interviews but had been turned down firmly. But Dirac agreed to be filmed in conversation with Heisenberg and the result is a unique recording of Dirac in relaxed conversation. Always with an agreeable smile, Heisenberg was as smartly dressed and easy-going as he had been thirty years before, but Dirac had changed rather more. His comically ill-combed hair helped to maintain his reputation for peerless dishevelment, but he was more relaxed than he had been as a young man, constantly smiling with his eyes and his mouth, speaking with a surprising assertiveness. Most striking about the encounter is that Dirac led the discussion, especially after he steered the subject towards beauty, via his anecdote about Schr\u00f6dinger's premature shelving of the relativistic version of his equation. When Heisenberg gently remarked that beauty is less important than agreement with experiment - the conventional view - Dirac took up the cudgels for aestheticism, forcing Heisenberg on to the defensive:\n\nHEISENBERG: I do agree that the beauty of an equation is a very important point and that one can get already a lot of confidence from the beauty of an equation. On the other hand, you have to check whether it fits or whether it doesn't. It's only physics when it really fits with nature. But that may turn out much later.\n\nDIRAC: And if it doesn't fit you'd hold up publication would you? Just like Schr\u00f6dinger?\n\nHEISENBERG: I'm not sure whether I would. In at least one case I have not done so.\n\nSmiling beatifically, Heisenberg appeared to concede the point: thirty years before, he would have persisted with the tenacity of a terrier, but his appetite for competition had been weakened by years of post-war humiliation. Delighted to have won the argument, Dirac's face lit up with the broadest of smiles, revealing two rows of rotting teeth.\n\nDirac still had faith in the large numbers hypothesis, though he knew most physicists regarded it as a blot on his CV after Edward Teller had published an apparently damning refutation of it in 1948. Teller pointed out that the hypothesis implied that because the universe is expanding, gravitational forces were greater millions of years ago than they are today. Teller showed that Dirac's idea implied that the Earth's oceans would have boiled and evaporated away 200-300 million years ago, contrary to the geological evidence that life had existed on the planet for at least 500 million years. Interest in the hypothesis had flickered again in 1957, when the American cosmologist Robert Dicke demonstrated that the large numbers hypothesis is a consequence of the fact that human life occurs after stars were formed and before they die. If the hypothesis were wrong, astronomers, and all other life forms, would not exist. Dirac was unimpressed with Dicke's reasoning and would not budge: he believed in the importance of the hypothesis 'more than ever'. In November 1961, Dirac wrote his first public comment on cosmology in twenty-two years:\n\nOn Dicke's assumption habitable planets could exist only for a limited period of time. With my assumption they could exist indefinitely in the future and life need never end. There is no decisive argument for deciding between these assumptions. I prefer the one that allows the possibility of endless life.\n\nDirac's vision of the fate of the universe was consonant with one of the articles of faith he wrote in his philosophical jottings of January 1933: 'the human race will continue to live for ever', a subjective assumption he had to make 'for his own peace of mind'. Evidently, this most detached of theoreticians could not bear to think of a universe without human beings.\n\nOne of the few cosmologists who still believed that it was worth spending time on Dirac's hypothesis was the vodka-swilling giant George Gamow. In 1965, he took a sabbatical in Cambridge, accompanied by his new wife Barbara, whom he had married shortly after his divorce from Rho in 1956 'on mental grounds'. The Gamows stayed at the new Churchill College, whose first Master, Sir John Cockcroft, had been chosen by the Prime Minister after whom it was named.\n\nOne topic of discussion between Dirac and Gamow was the beauty of the 'steady state' theory of the universe, which says that the universe has no beginning or end, but goes on for ever like a film with an endlessly repeated plot. That summer, this was a topical question because the steady-state theory seemed to have been discredited by one of the most telling astronomical observations to have been made in decades. Two astronomers at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey had detected an all-pervading background bath of low-energy radiation. It was only after the astronomers made their observations that they heard that just such a bath of radiation had been predicted long before by Gamow and others, using the Big Bang theory. For most cosmologists, the theory afforded a beautifully simple description of the development of the universe, compatible with the general theory of relativity and all the other great theories of science. Fred Hoyle, who had given the Big Bang theory its name in 1949 during one of his BBC radio broadcasts, was the most vocal of the diminishing number who did not give up on the steady-state theory. Hoyle found the idea of the Big Bang distasteful and compared the notion of the universe emerging out of nothing to a 'party girl' jumping out of a cake: 'it just wasn't dignified or elegant'.\n\nAfter one of his discussions with Dirac, Gamow wrote to ask if he had heard of a tongue-in-cheek summary of the role of aesthetics that appears to have dated from their days in Copenhagen (Gamow uses the word 'elegant' where Dirac would use 'beautiful'):\n\nCase I Trivial statement\n\nIf an elegant theory agrees with experiment, there is nothing to worry about.\n\nCase II Heisenberg's postulate\n\nIf an elegant theory does not agree with experiment, the experiment must be wrong.\n\nCase III Bohr's amendment\n\nIf an inelegant theory disagrees with experiment, the case is not lost because [by] improving the theory one can make it agree with experiment.\n\nCase IV My opinion\n\nIf an inelegant theory agrees with experiment, the case is hopeless.\n\nDirac believed that if observations agree with an ugly theory - such as quantum electrodynamics - it is little more than a coincidence. He had a fundamentalist belief in beauty, as Heisenberg found when he produced a new theory of particle physics and pressed Dirac for 'specific criticism', only for Dirac to give the thumbs down to the theory because its basic equation had 'insufficient mathematical beauty'.\n\nKapitza was one of the few who understood Dirac's passion for beauty, perhaps because he had helped to foster it in their early conversations in the Cavendish and in Trinity College. Dirac may have feared that he would never again feel the thrill of Kapitza's company in Cambridge, but he heard in the spring of 1966 that both Kapitza and his wife had secured exit visas to enable them to return for a short stay. In late April, as the Kapitzas' arrival drew near, Dirac and Manci were like children on the eve of a royal visit, so excited that they could barely concentrate on the preparations.\n\nBy 1966, Kapitza was the Soviet Union's most famous scientist, in the address books of most of the country's leading artists and a licensed critic of the Government. The British Ambassador wrote in advance to Cockcroft to warn him that Kapitza was still 'a bit of a rebel' and suggested that 'the public relations aspect of the visit will require rather careful watching'. But the Ambassador need not have worried; Kapitza was on his best behaviour, having learnt from Rutherford how to balance irreverence and propriety so that he could be seen as both close to the establishment and fiercely independent. In his interviews he was always careful to stress that he had played no part in the development of nuclear weapons and that he was as patriotic as ever, as he demonstrated in his lecture 'The Training of the Young Scientist in the USSR' in the Hall of Trinity College.\n\nWhen the Kapitzas visited the Diracs for lunch, Manci made a special effort in the kitchen, poaching a salmon and serving it with home-made mayonnaise and a chilled Burgundy: Mary recalled that it was the closest her parents ever came to giving a banquet. For just that one afternoon, the front room had the warmth of a jacuzzi - their reminiscences darted around from the summer they spent in the Kapitzas' _dacha_ to their days in the Cavendish, with Kapitza telling wedding-night jokes so blue that Anna left the room, leaving Dirac and Manci to giggle their way to the punchline.\n\nThey will also have talked about Kapitza's Club, which had ceased to exist in the spring of 1958, superseded by programmes of seminars. The Club was, however, reconvened on 10 May for its 676th meeting, so that some of its surviving members - including Dirac and Cockcroft - could meet one last time and so that Kapitza could close it. The venue was a smart common room in Gonville and Caius College, where the participants sipped fine dessert wines, in contrast to the meetings forty years before, when they would drink dishwater coffee. A photograph of the occasion shows Kapitza and a forlorn-looking Dirac, his left elbow leaning on the table, his left hand supporting his head. He gives the impression of being bored out of his mind.\n\nThe highlight of the meeting was a joint presentation by Dirac and Kapitza on the effect they had identified in 1933, a year before Kapitza had been detained in the Soviet Union: the possibility that electrons could be bent (diffracted) by light. When they first predicted the effect, it was impossible to observe because the available sources of light were too weak and the electron-detectors were too insensitive. But now detection looked possible, following improvements to the sensitivity of the detectors and the invention of lasers, devices that had become familiar to the public since they featured in the 1964 James Bond film _Goldfinger._ The barrel-chested Kapitza, standing by a blackboard and easel, pointed out that it was now odds-on that experimenters would soon observe the effect; the question was: would Dirac and Kapitza be alive to see it?\n\nA few days after the Kapitzas left Cambridge, Dirac switched his attention from the past to the future. He attended an entire course of lectures on modern particle physics given by the American theoretician Murray Gell-Mann, a source of many of the most productive new ideas in particle physics since the early 1950s. Then thirty-six and still at the height of his powers, he was admired for his imagination and technical brilliance but feared for his waspish tongue and disliked for his egoism, not least by Dirac. In the 1960s, Gell-Mann and others suggested that strongly interacting particles could be classified in mathematical patterns, and he used one of them in 1963 to predict the existence of a new particle. When experimenters detected it in the following year, it was a signal success for theoretical physics. Gell-Mann and his colleague George Zweig, working independently, also proposed that strongly interacting particles might consist of different combinations of three varieties of a new type of fundamental particle that Gell-Mann called quarks (he took the word from James Joyce's _Finnegans Wake_ : 'Three quarks for muster mark!') But Gell-Mann himself was sceptical: he remarked in his lectures that quarks were probably not real particles but mathematical artefacts that help to explain the symmetries among the properties of the strongly interacting particles. A year later, Gell-Mann recalled that he was surprised that Dirac 'loved' quarks, despite their having - in Gell-Mann's opinion - 'many annoying properties', including their apparently permanent confinement inside strongly interacting particles, such as protons and neutrons. When Gell-Mann asked Dirac why he thought quarks are so 'marvellous', Dirac replied that they have the same spin as the electron, the muon and the neutrino. Perhaps Dirac had seen that it was possible that all fundamental constituents of matter have the same spin - the spin of the electron. And perhaps he had sensed that it might soon be possible to set out a description of strong interactions in terms of a field theory, as he had hoped.\n\nGell-Mann's lectures taught Dirac a lesson: the bottom-up way of doing theoretical physics - drawing inspiration from experimental observations - was proving much more productive than the top-down style - taking cues from beautiful mathematics - that Dirac practised and preached. Dirac privately admitted this, though he had no intention of changing his approach.\n\nIn mid-September 1967, the Diracs heard that Sir John Cockcroft, one of their closest friends, had died suddenly of a heart attack in the Master's Lodge of Churchill College. Several of his friends believed that his death had been hastened by his anxiety over a classic Cold War melodrama that had taken place two days before: Soviet Embassy officials abducted his colleague Vladimir Tkachenko - a student prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Kapitza - on the Bayswater Road in London and  had whisked him off to Heathrow, where they put him on a plane bound for Moscow. But, just as his plane was setting off, it was surrounded by squad cars of airport police and MI5 agents, who boarded the plane and found him looking sick and bleary-eyed, apparently under sedation. They forcibly removed him, outraging Soviet authorities, who protested that he was leaving Britain of his own volition, having been blackmailed and intimidated by British agents. Cockcroft died on the morning after the incident became public, when the story was on the front page of _The Times._ 33\n\nHis wife Elizabeth knew she would soon have to leave the Lodge to make way for the next Master, and the College assisted her in making the move. In the opinion of the Cockcrofts' children, the authorities treated her sensitively and with a good deal of generosity, but Manci disagreed: she told everyone who would listen that the College was shooing Lady Cockcroft out of the Lodge with despicable haste. Manci's patience with Cambridge finally ran out, and she made up her mind that Dirac must move to an institution that behaved better towards its senior academics. She also vowed to take her revenge on Churchill College.\n\nDirac and Manci began making plans to settle in the USA. Some of its universities were certain to offer Dirac a professorship, and Mary and Monica, both married by the summer of 1968, now lived there. Manci's brother Eugene Wigner was also in the USA and was one of the elder statesmen of American science, an adviser to the Government, and - to Manci's irritation - moving politically further to the right each year. From his letters to the Diracs, it is plain that Wigner was a thoughtful and caring member of his family but, in the public eye, his humility had become something of an affectation: he was now so self-deprecating that many of his acquaintances thought he was using it as a subtle form of mockery. Ideally, the Diracs would have liked to have settled in Princeton, but that was no longer an option: after Oppenheimer's retirement in June 1966 - seven months before he died of throat cancer - the Institute for Advanced Study was unlikely to offer Dirac an academic home, nor could Princeton University be expected to accommodate a physicist so far past his best.\n\nTwo branches of Dirac's family remained in Europe. Betty was a contented housewife in Amsterdam, doing the chores to the soundtrack of the BBC Home Service (now Radio 4) and going regularly to  the highest Catholic mass she could find. In 1965, Gabriel was appointed to the mathematics faculty at the University of Swansea soon after the US Government rejected his application for a visa, apparently because of his brief membership of the Communist Party in Cambridge. Two years later, he and his family moved to the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and Dirac and Manci visited them during their summer vacations.\n\nOf all their children, Dirac and Manci were most concerned about Judy, who had lost custody of her children after an acrimonious divorce in 1965. Soon afterwards, she moved to Vermont and spent several lonely months each year in the Wigners' summer cottage on the shore of Lake Elmore. Wigner feared for her mental health. He wrote to Manci, telling her that Judy was desperate for her mother's affection and pleading with her to support her troubled daughter: 'You must not abandon her,' he told Manci in September 1965. Two and a half years later, Judy was holed up in a motel near Lake Elmore, lonely, penniless and delusional. She desperately needed psychiatric help, Wigner believed, and he begged his sister to intervene, but Manci told him that she would have nothing to do with Judy until she got a job and that he should stop interfering. Manci felt no responsibility for her daughter's plight, she wrote to Wigner:\n\nWhy should I in the name of heaven feel guilty? . . . I DID my duty, and who can throw a stone at me? J is an expert in hurting deeply, and may be she does this to those she loves. In that case she must seek a remedy.\n\nManci's indignation was suddenly punctured on 17 September 1968, when she read a telegram from her brother: 'JUDYS CAR FOUND ABANDONED DO YOU KNOW WHEREABOUTS LOVE.' This was the worst day of Manci's life, she later said. Manci had no idea where Judy was, as they were no longer in touch. In the following days, the Diracs heard nothing from Vermont or from the Wigners. Manci was distraught, lurching between wildly different accounts of Judy's disappearance, always refusing to believe that her depression had led her to take her life. It was most likely, Manci believed, that Judy had been murdered . Dirac's reactions to all this were known only to Manci, who appears to have shared them with no one.\n\nThe Diracs decided not to travel to Vermont but to stay in Britain and monitor events from there: they left it to the Wigners to deal with the authorities in Vermont. In early October, after visiting the site  where Judy's car was found - a country lane near Morrisville, Vermont - Wigner and his wife wrote to the Diracs with details of the police hunt for her in the surrounding countryside and ponds. The search parties found nothing. Gradually, the Wigners, tearful and depressed, came to believe that Judy would never be seen again, but the Diracs clung to every last hope. For three years, they tried to imagine scenarios in which Judy might suddenly reappear, but the weight of probability gradually crushed what remained of their optimism. They accepted that it was practically certain that Judy was dead .\n\nMary later recalled that her mother was inconsolable, 'insane with grief'. The Diracs kept the pain of their loss private, but two of his later acquaintances, the sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld and her husband Yorrick, the _Newsweek_ journalist, glimpsed deeper feelings. The Blumenfelds recall that, two years after Judy went missing, Dirac and Manci were still losing sleep over her fate and talked about it endlessly. From Dirac's comments about her, the Blumenfelds assumed that he was her biological father - he was as sad and bereft as if he had lost his own daughter.\n\nIn the early weeks of 1969, the Diracs were in Miami, pondering life after Cambridge. Of the American universities wanting to employ Dirac, one of the most tempting offers had been made by his former student Behram Kur\u015funo\u011flu at the University of Miami. A wheeler-dealer Turkish theoretician - always smart in his Stetson hat, jacket and tie - Kur\u015funo\u011flu had spent his career searching for a unified theory of fundamental interactions, following Einstein's agenda. Kur\u015funo\u011flu had founded the annual Coral Gables conferences, which gave several leading theorists a good reason to leave their home cities in the depths of January and spend a few days in the bright, warm sun of south Florida. Kur\u015funo\u011flu employed Dirac at the university on a temporary contract and tried hard to persuade him to accept a permanent post, making him and Manci as welcome as family, taking them out on trips round the area and giving Dirac a taste for coconuts, alligators and exotic birds. Manci was embarrassed by the time Dirac took to weigh Kur\u015funo\u011flu's offer, but he was not to be hurried - he disliked Miami's oppressive heat and felt uncomfortable in a place where recreational walkers are regarded as perverse.\n\nThe most memorable of Kur\u015funo\u011flu's outings was a trip to the cinema on New Year's Day. Kur\u015funo\u011flu and his wife asked Dirac to go with them to see Stanley Kubrick's _2001: A Space Odyssey._ The film had divided critics and audiences since its release eight months before: it inspired Steven Spielberg and a new generation of film-makers, but it left John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom bemused and sent his wife to sleep. Firmly on Spielberg's side, Dirac was enraptured: he had seen hundreds of movies, but had never imagined it was possible for a film to have such a powerful impact and enable him 'to see his dreams', as he told Mary's husband Tony Colleraine. Dirac disliked opaque and open-ended narratives, so his love of _2001_ was not predictable. It is easy, however, to imagine him being moved by Kubrick's use of Johann Strauss's 'Blue Danube' and the rest of the classical soundtrack and by the appeal of a story told mainly through visual images rather than words. Dirac's opinion that a good deal of quantum mechanics can be expressed accurately only through mathematics, not words, is echoed by a comment Kubrick made about _2001_ : 'I don't like to talk about [it] much, because it's essentially a non-verbal experience.'\n\nStill excited two days later, Dirac saw the film again at a matinee with Tony Colleraine and also with Manci and Mary, who spent most of the two and a half hours in the theatre whispering to each other. Dirac suggested to Tony that they see it again 'without the running commentary'. Without telling Manci, they stayed to watch the next two screenings and returned home to find their hot dinner left to get cold on the table. But Dirac was too excited to care about food: he was like a child after three consecutive rides on a roller coaster. Several of the scenes had possessed him, especially the Star Gate sequence and the emergence of the grizzled astronaut into the eighteenth-century bedroom: 'I would not be able to sit alone through that scene,' he later told Colleraine. Manci was not interested in Dirac's observations on 'that weird film'; her idea of a good movie was the romantic epic _Dr Zhivago_ , not one whose most memorable character was a talking computer.\n\n_2001_ stoked Dirac's interest in the Apollo space programme. During the evening of 20 July 1969, he sat open-mouthed in front of the television in the Kur\u015funo\u011flus' front room when Neil Armstrong prepared to set foot on the moon. He sat up all night watching the coverage. Kubrick's images were sharper and his soundtrack was  clearer, but the grainy television pictures and the muffled sound of that first moon landing had a compelling reality of their own. And for Dirac, the former engineer, reality mattered most: the first moon-walk was the culmination of aeronautic technology, whose beginnings he had seen as a boy and which now enabled human beings to set foot on a landscape a quarter of a million miles away. The Apollo team, having achieved the most impressive technological feat Dirac had seen in his lifetime, may well have given him a twinge of regret that he had chosen science rather than engineering: he had been a leader of a scientific revolution that, in his opinion, had led to a dead end, whereas the Apollo engineers could declare 'Mission Accomplished' and move on.\n\nIn the summer of 1969, Dirac prepared to leave his post and say his goodbyes to the few friends left in Cambridge, including Charlie Broad, the philosopher who gave him his first proper introduction to the theory of relativity. Broad, aged eighty-one, still lived in Trinity College, where he died two years later.\n\nOn Tuesday 30 September, Dirac spent his final day in Cambridge as its Lucasian Professor, the most distinguished holder of the Chair since Sir Isaac Newton. Dirac's retirement passed without ceremony, probably because the university authorities assumed that Dirac would feel uncomfortable if he was the cynosure of a leaving party. This was an error, though an understandable one: Dirac would have liked his contribution to the university to be marked officially as his sense of propriety was, contrary to the impression he gave, stronger than his aversion to ceremony. Manci was disgusted. But she was gratified by the sensitivity of St John's College, which extended Dirac's fellowship for life so that he could return there whenever he wished. Batchelor wanted to be generous, too, and offered Dirac the use of a room in the department whenever he was passing through the town, but he declined. His true home in the university was his college, not his department.\n\nFor two years, the Diracs divided their time between the UK and the United States, and, by March 1971, Manci could hardly wait another day to leave Britain, 'that lazy impossible island'. Labour unrest, steadily increasing since the war, had become critical: in the first year of Edward Heath's government, more working days had been lost to  withdrawals of labour than in any year since the General Strike. Postal workers had gone on strike and slowed down communications in the country for seven weeks. Even Rolls Royce had gone bankrupt.\n\nThe Diracs were about to move to a country that was no less troubled. The USA's prosecution of the war in Vietnam was as controversial in the extended Wigner family as it was in thousands of others: the doveish Manci seethed over 'young American lives mutilated fighting for a bastard government' and argued with her hawkish brother Eugene, who believed that the war was essential to stem the spread of Communism. She did not know that the FBI had opened a file on her and was seeking evidence that she was a subversive.  Dirac knew that his past political sympathies would raise eyebrows in some American institutions, as he noted when he declined an invitation to the University of Texas at Austin because he was technically ineligible: 'I do not have strong political views, but [. . .] I am a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and this makes me, according to [the university's] definition, a member of the communist party.'\n\nWhenever he left the USA in the late 1960s and 1970s, he was nervous that the authorities might forbid him to re-enter it. As he probably suspected, the FBI was still watching him .\n\nDirac, a dissenter from America's foreign policy in south-east Asia, followed the fierce opposition to the war in American universities through the newspapers and the television news. Although Miami University was one of the less volatile campuses, its students harassed the authorities almost every day, condemning the Vietnam War, demanding free contraception and more support for civil rights. The protestors would talk only to the university's President, Henry King Stanford, who stood on 'The Rock' - a stage-like stone structure in the centre of the campus - making conciliatory speeches to the students and trying to avoid further trouble. On the periphery of these crowds, Stanford often saw the slender, inquisitive figure of Dirac.\n\nOn Wednesday, 6 May 1971, the students were especially angry. It was two days after the Ohio State Guard had opened fire on student demonstrators at Kent State University, during a protest triggered by the American invasion of Cambodia. Thirteen seconds of gunfire had killed four students, wounded nine others and brutally curtailed the flower-power hedonism that had flourished only briefly since the  Sgt Pepper summer of love in 1967. The mood of America turned ugly. Even the usually sober campus of Princeton University was unstable: Wigner thought many of the students were 'selfish and nihilistic', behaving 'like the Hitler Youth'. Miami University teetered on the edge of anarchy, when its students - supported by many staff - began a four-day strike, joining two hundred and fifty other campuses across the country. After lunch, at the beginning of a warm afternoon, Stanford made his way to The Rock to address a volatile rally of over a thousand students, many of them with their arms folded aggressively or holding banners with messages such as 'U$ out of S.E. Asia'. Earlier, the crowd had made an effigy of President Nixon out of newspapers, old clothes and firecrackers and then set fire to it. Dirac had seen nothing remotely like it since the Cambridge demonstrations in the 1930s.\n\nDuring Stanford's walk towards the crowd, he saw an elderly man on the periphery and was quite taken aback to be approached by him. It was Dirac, who asked gently, 'Are you afraid?' Stanford, his heart pumping hard in his chest, replied, his tongue firmly in his cheek, that he was quite looking forward to addressing the students. It seems that Dirac saw that the President was anxious and could use a little reassurance, as he took what was, for him, the unusual step of offering him advice: 'Tell them what you think and listen to what they have to say.' The tone of Dirac's voice gave the impression that he had a 'spiritual kinship' with the protestors, as Stanford later wrote, perhaps identifying a faint echo from the days when Dirac was on the fringe of left-of-centre radicalism. In his emollient address, Stanford described the Kent State incident as 'One of the saddest chapters in the history of higher education', adding that the students' deaths 'dramatise the deterioration of reason' in the USA. Shortly after the speech, the protest ended peacefully, though the university remained on edge for weeks. Dirac probably wondered what future lay ahead of him.\n\nA few weeks later, the Diracs took a break and drove up to Florida's state capital of Tallahassee. Compared with tense, crime-ridden Miami, it was as friendly and safe as a village. Dirac knew that he was being wooed by Florida State, known best not for its physics department but for its student parties and the high quality of its football team. Joe Lannutti, the physics department's ambitious leader, saw an opportunity to persuade the dithering Dirac to become  a 'professor at large' at the university, a mascot for the physics department's aspiration to be a 'centre of excellence'. Lannutti had already invited the Diracs to Tallahassee in March 1969, when the Holiday Inn welcomed them with banners fluttering over the entrance, and the physics department had given tenure to Mary's husband Tony a few months later. For the Diracs, the prospect of spending their final years near Mary was attractive, and the warm climate would be good for the worsening arthritis in Manci's hands, but Dirac wanted to delay his decision until he could see how he coped with the fiercest of Tallahassee's heat and humidity and with the barking dogs that ruined his walks. Swimming was now his favourite form of exercise so, in his spare hours, he visited the local lakes and sinkholes, usually taking a thermometer to check the temperature of the water. If it was above precisely sixty degrees Fahrenheit, he would dive in; if not, he would return home.\n\nIn early January 1971, Florida State University formally offered Dirac the post of Visiting Eminent Professor, to be renewed annually.  The FBI had found no evidence that either Manci or Dirac was a subversive, so there was to be no official barrier to their emigration. After reflecting on the offer for five months, Dirac accepted and shortly afterwards returned briefly to Cambridge with Manci to pack up their belongings. During one of their conversations with the Blumenfelds, Helaine asked Dirac whether he was excited about moving to Tallahassee; he replied, gesturing to Manci, 'She is, that's why we're going. I would like to stay here.'\n**Twenty-eight**\n\nOld men have a weakness for generality and a desire to see structures whole. That is why old scientists so often become philosophers [. . .].\n\nEUGENE WIGNER, _The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner,_ 1992\n\nThe advice Barbara Walters, doyenne of celebrity interviewers, gave in her 1971 book _How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything_ did not quite extend to making conversation with Dirac. Yet the Director of Publicity at the Miami Museum of Science, Dorothy Holcomb, wished she had read the book when she was trying to wrest a few words from him during a buffet reception in his honour on the evening of 8 March 1971. After he replied to her 'Hi!' with a blank 'Hello,' she realised that the only way to get him to speak more than a few words at a time was to ask him to pick the topic of conversation. He chose comic strips. For several minutes, he talked with surprising fluency about the merits of two strips he had been reading since the 1930s: the fifth-century adventurer 'Prince Valiant' and 'Blondie', a carefree flapper girl who settled down to family life in suburbia. Holcomb was charmed. When Dirac admitted that he could not make head or tail of the quirkier humour of 'Peanuts', she suggested he should try a little harder to understand American humour; he agreed. Afterwards, Holcomb made up her mind to buy a copy of _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ and also of _How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything._ As Holcomb will have seen, if she got to the end of Walters' book, it concludes with good advice for everyone who had tried vainly to draw Dirac into conversation: 'You can't win 'em all.'\n\nBefore this conversation, Dirac had given a lecture entitled 'Evolution of Our Understanding of Nature', which ranged well beyond physics. Still haunted by the early scenes in _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , he began by discussing how early humans understood the mechanics of growing grain, graduating from beliefs based on superstition to ideas based on theories grounded in observations. He opposed critics of the Apollo space programme who believed that the money should be spent instead on social programmes: 'People who  equate all the different kinds of human activity to money are taking too primitive a view of things.' The solution to social problems was not, he argued, to be cheese-paring with the space programme and fundamental research but to avoid 'the great waste that we see around us', especially the unemployment of people who want to work. Look at the hippies in California, he said: they welcome the challenge to help fight forest fires rather than just laze around.\n\nDirac's reputation as a speaker enabled him and Manci to sate their appetite for international tourism. Florida State gave him the freedom to travel and everything else he needed, in addition to a modest income: an office, companionship, financial support for his research and - most important - respect. The university officials treated him with a reverence that often cloyed into obsequiousness, and they regarded Manci as his queen. She whiled away hours chatting and exchanging risqu\u00e9 jokes with the university's clubbable President, Bernie Sliger, knowing that he would always take her phone calls and be sympathetic to her every request. In return, the university asked only that Dirac be available when they wanted to display their most illustrious professor to visiting dignitaries; he played along and had some success in disguising his boredom. Only once, when his compliance was taken for granted, did his patience run out: he locked himself in his house and Kurt Hofer had to persuade him to come out, just in time to meet an important visitor.\n\nBeyond the light supervision of a few graduate students, Dirac had no teaching responsibilities. But in 1973, he agreed to present a series of lectures on the general theory of relativity, aiming to develop the theory from its fundamental principles and to lay bare its logical structure. One of the physics students in the audience, Pam Houm\u00e8re, recalls:\n\nThe first lecture was 'standing room only'. He began so simply that the office cleaners could have understood it: what is meant by position, what we mean by time, and so on. Later, he built on these foundations brick by brick, making every step of the construction look inevitable. The funny thing was, he never compared the theory with experiment, he just kept stressing how beautiful it was. Only a few students made it to the end of the course, but for those who did, it was an unforgettable experience.\n\nDirac presented the lectures most years until 1980 and used them as the basis of his short book _General Theory of Relativity_ , a minor  classic of exposition, describing the theory in sixty-nine pages, without a single diagram.\n\nIn Tallahassee, the Diracs' home was about twenty minutes' leisurely walk from Dirac's office on the third floor of the university's Keen Building, in the heart of the campus. Each weekday morning after breakfast, he would link his hands behind his back and walk slowly to his office across a local field, the route that ensured minimum contact with the neighbourhood dogs. In summer, when he wore his baseball cap, he looked like an all-American retiree, but on the coldest days of winter, when he put on the heavy overcoat he had bought almost fifty years before in Lord and Taylor, he looked every inch the venerable English professor. He often carried a forty-year-old umbrella: 'It was my father's,' he told colleagues.\n\nIn his office, he worked at his desk for three hours, pausing occasionally to visit the library. To unexpected visitors who knocked on his office door, he had a simple message: 'Go away.' When the phone rang, he would often lift the receiver off the hook and immediately drop it, without bothering to listen to the caller's voice. At noon, he would join a few colleagues for a brown-bag lunch. Dirac usually said nothing but would occasionally interject with a comment, perhaps on the impenetrability of American football or about the wisdom of trying to educate so many undergraduates in science when so few of them had an aptitude for the subject or even took much pleasure from studying it. He was fond of jokes, especially ones dependent on the interpretation of a single word and ones with a slight sexual edge. This was one of his favourites:\n\nIn a small village, a newly appointed priest decided to call on his parishioners. In one modest home, teeming with children, he was greeted by the lady of the house. He asked her how many children she and her husband had. 'Ten,' she replied. 'Five pairs of twins.' The priest asked, 'You always had twins?' to which the woman replied, 'No, Father, sometimes we had nothing.'\n\nAfter lunch, he would return to his office for a nap on his sofa and sometimes attend a seminar, often appearing to sleep through most of it, before returning home for late afternoon tea with Manci. After dinner, he would relax. He and Manci might go to a classical concert, or he might read a novel - Edgar Allen Poe mysteries, Le Carr\u00e9 spy thrillers and Hoyle's science-fiction stories were among his favourites  \\- or watch television with Manci in the family room, dominated by a painting of Judy when she was a child. Dirac watched most of the _Nova_ science documentaries, but the programmes that he and Manci regarded as unmissable were period dramas: _The Forsyte Saga_ \\- Dirac was spellbound by the leading lady, Nyree Dawn Porter - and _Upstairs, Downstairs_ , dramatising the class divisions between the servants and their masters in an Edwardian household. On the night an episode of the programme was broadcast, the Diracs would accept dinner invitations with friends only if their hosts agreed in advance to watch it with them in silence. One dispute about the evening television schedule threatened to get out of hand, when there was a clash between Cher's Sunday-night television show - a highlight of Dirac's week - and the live broadcast of the Oscar ceremony, which Manci was desperate to see. The dispute was resolved several days later, but at a price: they bought a second television.\n\nThe couple did not always resolve their differences so amicably. In August 1972, they had what may have been the worst row of their marriage, when they were visiting the recently widowed Betty at her apartment in Alicante, on the south-east coast of Spain. The relationship between the sisters-in-law had long been brittle: part of the problem was that Manci made no secret that she found Betty dull and idle, while Betty was vexed by Manci's unrelenting bossiness. Tempers flared during a conversation on the apartment balcony when Dirac backed up his sister after she made a sly comment about the behaviour of Hungarians in Budapest at the end of the war. Manci stormed out of town and wrote to Dirac in a rage:\n\nYou looked at me, then did all you could to hurt, scare & humiliate me, & embarrass me greatly [. . .] It is a fact that most mental inmates have been driven there by their families. On that 5th floor balcony I felt your presence whenever I was there alone, urging me to jump [. . .] You cruelly, unjustly uncaringly completely identified yourself with my tormentor, and this I did not earn or deserve. I do not feel you are a husband as it is understood by millions. Yes, keep your loyalties to the one so similar to you in lacking human emotions, & I learn not to care or want to die.\n\nA few days later, she wrote to him again, in a rather different tone:\n\nThank you for your loving care. For your love, warm & affectionate. For your taking notice when sick or in pain. For heeding for needs I have. For allowing me to read your wishes from unspoken words. For allowing me  near you when ill or depressed. For forgiving my ills and extravagances. For never making me anxious and panicky. For treating me as an equal: always justly & fairly. For trying your best to make us around you happy and cheerful. I thank you.\n\nIn Trieste a month later, at a symposium organised by Abdus Salam to mark Dirac's seventieth birthday, Heisenberg and all the other guests saw the Diracs on their best form, the model of the contented elderly couple. But Dirac apparently did not want to put the unpleasantness of the previous few weeks completely behind him: he clipped Manci's two notes together and filed them among the papers in his office. He appeared to regard all her attacks - and the makings-up that always followed - with an equanimity bordering on indifference; whether he suffered more deeply than others saw we shall probably never know, as he appears not to have discussed her behaviour - still less to have complained about her - with anyone.\n\nTo the Diracs' acquaintances in their later years, Manci was a controversial figure. No one questioned that her gift for friendship hugely enriched his social life and that she was devoted to her husband, 'my little Mickey Mouse'. Many colleagues attest to the care she took to look after him and make him look presentable; one visitor was touched to see her adjusting his clothes when he returned home one evening looking like a scarecrow. 'She takes such _good_ care of me,' Dirac beamed as Manci adjusted his tie. Without her, he would probably have spent almost his entire adult life living alone in college, like Charlie Broad.\n\nYet many friends could not help flinching when she shouted at him, 'Are you listening to me?' and wondered how he felt when he silently bore her tirades against 'nigger' doctors and Jews (that Manci was both Jewish and occasionally anti-Semitic was one of the most baffling paradoxes of her personality). Yorrick Blumenfeld gives a bleak summary of the state of their thirty-four-year-old marriage: 'She was tired of hen-pecking him, and he just wanted to live in his dream world.' Helaine Blumenfeld is surprised that he could tolerate her: 'He was a lovely man. She was simply an awful person.' But Lily Harish-Chandra, a frequent visitor to the Diracs' home and a family friend, disagrees: 'Manci was extremely warm and loyal, a great listener and a very caring woman. Paul cannot have been easy to live with. Their marriage worked because they gave each other what they wanted: he gave her status and she gave him a life.'\n\nIn the early 1970s, Dirac was briefly optimistic about his research on particle physics. He had happened on a way of describing isolated elementary particles with a spin equal to a whole number, using an equation that he believed had a special mathematical beauty. Better yet, it described only _positive_ energies - the mathematics yielded no embarrassing negative-energy solutions. But his excitement waned after he found it impossible to use the equation to describe how a particle interacts with other particles or with a field - the real-world case. Mathematical beauty had again proved a treacherous beacon.\n\nDirac then wound down his work on the theory of fundamental particles and returned to general relativity and his still-unproven large numbers hypothesis. He knew that Einstein's theory and the hypothesis were incompatible because general relativity requires - in the language of Newtonian mechanics - that the strength of the gravitational force between two identical masses separated by the same distance has always had the same value, contrary to the hypothesis. So he tried to reconcile them using ideas set out by a former colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, the German mathematician Hermann Weyl, whose approach to theoretical physics resembled Dirac's. Weyl once said: 'My work always tried to unite the truth with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.' In 1922, Weyl had produced a prototype theory that gave a tantalising glimpse of how a mathematical account of gravity and electromagnetism might be given with a unified set of equations. Enthralled by their beauty, Dirac believed Weyl's approach might furnish a link between the general theory of relativity and the large numbers hypothesis, in a way that involved a gradual weakening of gravity over time.\n\nDirac was assisted in the project by Leopold Halpern, a general relativity specialist who arrived in Tallahassee in 1974, a year short of his fiftieth birthday. Born and raised in Austria, he and his family had fled, on Hitler's invasion in 1938, when he was thirteen years old. He spent twenty-seven years working in several European research institutions, including a spell with Schr\u00f6dinger, and Dirac had first met him at a conference in 1962. Halpern was a homoeopath and a certified African medicine man, a twenty-four-carat eccentric who slept outdoors all year round, sliced baked potatoes with karate chops and refused to wash with soap. He was not  always popular in elevators. Colleagues with conventional manners were often disconcerted by the prickliness that disguised his shyness: when his phone rang, he would answer with a rasping, impatient 'Hello', his voice softening into a lilt the moment he realised that he was talking to a friend.\n\nThe oddities and coarse manners of Halpern grated on Manci, but they endeared him to Dirac, and the two men became close friends. At least once a week, they went swimming in Silver Lake and Lost Lake, two of Dirac's favourite spots near Tallahassee, mainly because the waters there were so quiet. Dirac did not like to swim anywhere near motorboats, but on one trip, when he was seventy-six years old, he hailed one and asked the owner if he could have a go at water-skiing. The owner obliged. When Halpern told Manci, she was horrified: 'Paul is still _very_ immature!'\n\nMost weekends, the two men headed off in Halpern's Volkswagen Super Beetle - his sixteen-foot canoe and a pair of paddles tied to the roof rack - on the hour-long drive to the Wakulla river. Minutes after setting off from the shore, they were alone in one of Florida's most pleasant microclimates, a near wilderness. They would row for some two hours upstream on the slow-flowing river, through forests of sassafras and American beech trees, draped with Spanish moss. The alligators made scarcely a sound: the silence was broken only by the rhythmic sloshing of the paddles, the cry of a circling osprey, the occasional shuffling of wind passing through shoreline gaps in the forest. After a snack lunch at Snake Point, Dirac and Halpern would strip off and go for a swim, before they rowed back to their starting point, scarcely exchanging a word. These were idyllic, private hours. Occasionally, they would invite a visitor to join them - but it had to be someone who could be relied on to stay silent most of the time. One of the visitors was Kurs\u015funo\u011flu, who went along dressed in his three-piece suit, tie and Stetson. Halfway through the trip, he stood up in the canoe to admire the scenery only for Dirac to dump him in the river and then collapse in a fit of laughter.\n\nDirac and Halpern often arrived home several hours late, half-heartedly suppressing shame - like a pair of errant schoolboys - when they were explaining themselves to a frantic Manci. Halpern assured her week after week that the Wakulla wildlife posed no danger at all: 'If you leave the snakes and alligators alone, they will do  nothing to harm you.' Halpern could not understand what she was so worried about.\n\nIn the 1970s, particle physics underwent what amounted to a revolution. After decades of uncertainty, physicists achieved a new clarity about the workings of the universe at the finest level: everything in the universe is made of a few basic particles - a handful of leptons and quarks and a small number of particles that mediate their interactions - and described by a quantum field theory simple enough to be spelt out on a T-shirt. The Dirac equation describes the electromagnetic interactions of all the leptons and quarks, each with the same spin as the electron.\n\nIn the past fifty years, physicists had come up with quite a few attention-grabbing labels for their new concepts, but they allowed this description of weak, electromagnetic and strong interactions - one of the supreme syntheses of twentieth-century thought - to be given the most prosaic of names: the Standard Model. One of the first important steps towards the consensus was taken by Dirac's former student Abdus Salam and by the American theorist Steven Weinberg, who independently suggested in 1967 that the weak and electromagnetic interactions might be understood in a unified way, by describing them in terms of a special type of gauge theory whose underlying mathematical symmetry is broken. For several years, the Weinberg-Salam theory was not taken seriously as it appeared to suffer an even more serious infestation of unwanted infinities than quantum electrodynamics, the theory of photons and electrons. All this changed in the early 1970s. After the Dutch theoreticians Gerard 't Hooft and Martin Veltman proved that the infinities in the theory - and in all other gauge theories - could be removed by renormalisation, the Weinberg-Salam theory quickly commanded wide interest and support. Also at around this time, theorists improved their understanding of renormalisation so that it was much more rigorous than the 'sweeping under the carpet' dodge that Dirac deplored. Renormalisation was now widely accepted as a rigorous branch of mathematical physics, with no sleights of hand; Dirac vehemently disagreed.\n\nSoon physicists found a gauge theory of strong interactions, called quantum chromodynamics, with the same underpinnings as the Weinberg-Salam theory. It turned out that it was possible to describe  the strong interaction between quarks, mediated by massless particles which Gell-Mann named gluons. Quarks are never observed in isolation, the theory says, because the strong force prevents them being separated, though when quarks are close together they behave as if they were free. So the neutron, first observed by Chadwick just over thirty years before, could be re-envisaged as a compassionate prison for quarks - they cannot escape their confinement, but they are free when inside.\n\nRutherford's vision of a typical atom as electrons orbiting a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons ('a gnat in the Albert Hall') had been superseded. Now, the most fundamental way of imagining an atom was in terms of relativistic quantum field theory: the quarks in the nucleus were quantum excitations of the field associated with the strong interaction, just as the orbiting electrons were the quantum excitations of the electron field. Everything in an atom can be described in terms of such fields. Rutherford would have choked on such abstractions, yet they were the apparently inevitable consequence of a century of labour by his fellow experimenters and their theoretical colleagues.\n\nAlthough the Standard Model left many questions unanswered - no one fully understood the particles' masses, for example - its setting out in the 1970s was a high point in the history of science. But Dirac was unmoved: ensconced with Halpern in their Tallahassee redoubt, the new discoveries left him cold, and he appeared to take no great pleasure to see other theoreticians find a way of describing strong interactions using field theory, which he had pioneered, as scattering matrices fell into disuse. He no longer kept up to date with the latest physics journals and was beginning to make errors in his science, though no one was ungracious enough to say so in public. By the mid-1970s, Dirac had lost interest in particle physics, and Halpern noticed that he was less interested in news about field theory than the renewed public debate about the origin of the Turin Shroud, believed by some to be the burial shroud of Jesus Christ.\n\nAlthough Dirac was impressed by the best young particle theoreticians, he thought they were deluded. Through his talks and occasional publications, he urged them to devote all their time to clearing and disinfecting the Augean stables of renormalisation, a job almost all physicists believed had already been done. By contrast, Heisenberg in Munich kept an open mind about new theoretical  developments until liver cancer took his life in February 1976, six years after his former teacher and friend Max Born had died in G\u00f6ttingen. All Dirac's friends among the pioneers of quantum mechanics were now dead.\n\nAt one time, the historical perspective on atomic physics was not important to him, but now he was keen to put his side of the story to historians and other physicists. In these talks, he always took pains to emphasise the excitement of the early years of quantum mechanics - an emotion that, by all accounts, he rarely showed when he was living through them. He even included a reference to his feelings in the account that was the nearest he ever came to writing a scientific memoir: _Recollections of an Exciting Era._ 31\n\nIn May 1980, while suffering from a bad dose of flu, Dirac travelled to Chicago to attend a conference on the history of particle physics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), where he spoke about the origins of quantum field theory. In a round-table session, he went out of his way to criticise the destructiveness of Pauli's opposition when the idea of spin and the positron were first conceived. In another session, he presented his versions of the history of anti-matter in a talk that Leon Lederman recalled as 'quintessential Dirac' - clear, fluent and modest: 'the content poured out of him like heavy cream'. When he had finished speaking, Vicki Weisskopf commented that Einstein had suggested the existence of a positive electron in 1925, some six years before Dirac's prediction.  But Dirac was unperturbed; he waved a hand dismissively, remarked, 'He was lucky,' and moved on. Even for Dirac, modesty had its limits.\n\nManci was a generous hostess, able to make everyone in the room feel special and at ease. She often threw dinner parties, attentively filling her guests' glasses, serving generous portions of her favourite dishes, ensuring that the conversation kept moving. Dirac, sitting at the head of the table, would apparently spend most of the evening asleep. He could, however, be drawn into conversation if he were approached by a young woman, especially if she was friendly and attractive. His advice was often sought but he usually declined to offer any; however, when pressed, he would sometimes offer a few words. One of his favourite replies was: 'Think about yourself first. If nobody gets hurt, do it' - a slightly egoistic summary of the view  of the individual's moral responsibility in the opinion of John Stuart Mill.\n\nManci would point out to guests a favourite photograph of Dirac warmly shaking hands with Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. 'Paul and the Pope get on so well,' Manci would beam, as if the two men met every weekend for a round of golf. The photograph was taken at one of several meetings between Dirac and the Pope at the Papal Academy, a group of distinguished scientists that offers the Pope disinterested scientific advice. Dirac had been elected to the Academy in 1961, the year after his friend the cosmologist George Lema\u00eetre became President. The Diracs' friend Kurt Hofer recalls Manci's pride in her husband: 'After showing guests the papal photograph, she unpacked a collection of postal stamps from all over the world, each bearing a portrait of Paul. He pretended to be embarrassed, but he never did anything to prevent her.'\n\nIt was during one of Hofer's weekly visits to 223 Chapel Drive that Dirac unexpectedly disgorged his recollections of his father. Dirac trusted only his closest friends with these unexpurgated memories, although the circumstances of Felix's death were still too distressing for him to share with anyone, even with Manci. Dirac did, however, speak of his happiest memories of Felix's life to Betty in October 1969 when she was in an Amsterdam hospital, lying in a coma after a stroke and a seven-hour brain operation. Alone at her bedside, he tried to coax her back into consciousness by telling her stories of their childhood - playing on the Downs with Felix, the three of them bathing on Portishead beach, sharing each other's books and comics. She regained consciousness a few weeks later and gradually made a partial recovery.\n\nHofer recalls that Dirac thought organised religions were primitive and socially manipulative 'myths'. Once, as he walked past a local Mormon church with a huge satellite dish, he scoffed that the church needed such a large dish 'so that it can communicate directly with God'. Yet Dirac was now much more willing to introduce the concept of God into discussions about science. In June 1971, he had startled his audience at the Lindau meeting by considering 'Is there a God?' to be one of the five most important questions in contemporary physics. He said it would be useful to approach the question scientifically:\n\nA physicist would need to make this question precise by understanding what is meant by a universe with a God and what is a universe without a God, having a clear distinction between the two types of universes, and then looking at the actual universe and seeing which class it belongs to.\n\nThe audience laughed nervously and went quiet when he suggested a way of detecting the presence of a God. If future scientists demonstrated that the creation of life is overwhelmingly unlikely, then, in his opinion, this would be evidence for the existence of God. Until that time, the hypothesis must be regarded as unproven. Dirac was taken to task by the press for these speculations but he was not to be deflected and often returned to the topic, in public and private. He took a dim view of any religion declaring itself to offer the only hope of salvation, Hofer remembers: 'Paul believed it was the height of arrogance for any group of people to claim that they alone know the truth. He often pointed out there are hundreds of religions on this planet and that it is impossible to know which one, if any, is correct.'\n\nThere was 'no trace of religiosity' in Dirac, Halpern later wrote. He remembered that Dirac was especially critical of Catholicism and other religions that acknowledged miracles, because, in his view, the existence of a miracle implies a temporary breaking of the underlying laws of nature, whose beauty he regarded as sacred. Like Einstein, and largely following the philosopher Spinoza, Dirac appeared to take the pantheist view that the universe is either identical with God or in some way an expression of God's nature, a view that - though vague almost to the point of tautology - appears to rule out the notion of a God that can influence human affairs. Dirac's pantheism was an aesthetic faith: that observations on nature at the most fundamental level will be described perfectly by theories whose mathematical beauty is also perfect. If he had a religion, this was it.\n\nDirac's modesty was genuine, but he was not above a little vanity. The Danish sculptor Harald Isenstein, a specialist at portraying leading physicists, made two busts of Dirac, and both are good likenesses, if lacking in character: the first in 1939, which Dirac displayed in his home, the next thirty-two years later. He offered the first Isenstein bust to St John's College, who accepted it and displayed it in their library, where it stands today. The college also  wanted a painting of Dirac in oils to be displayed in their Hall, and Dirac went out of his way to oblige. In the early summer of 1978, he sat several times for Michael Noakes, portrait painter of the British royal family and, the year before, of Frank Sinatra. In the first session, Noakes tried to help Dirac relax by drawing him into conversation:\n\nNOAKES: Can you put into layman's terms what you're working on, Professor?\n\nDIRAC: Yes. Creation.\n\nNOAKES: Wow! Tell me more.\n\nDIRAC: Creation was one vast bang. Talk of a steady state is nonsense.\n\nNOAKES: But if nothing existed beforehand what was there to bang?\n\nDIRAC: That is not a meaningful question.\n\nDirac would say no more. Though unsettled by Dirac's reticence and apparent lack of interest, Noakes captured his abstracted gaze to infinity, Dirac looking as innocent as a five-year-old, as detached as an oracle. A comparison between this portrait and the first to be painted - by his friend Yakov Frenkel in 1933, shortly after they heard of Ehrenfest's suicide - shows how much Dirac's confidence had drained away in the ensuing forty-five years. His personality is perhaps best caught in the drawing made in 1963 by Robert Tollast, whose portrait expertly catches Dirac's childlike innocence. Less accomplished, but nevertheless competent, is the drawing of Dirac made two years later by Feynman, whose portrait shows signs of reverence ('I'm no Dirac,' Feynman often said). Dirac kept his drawing in his filing cabinet.\n\nTwenty years after Dirac declined a knighthood, he accepted the most prestigious honour of all, membership of the Order of Merit, which did not oblige him to call himself anything other than 'Mr Dirac'. The order is limited to twenty-four members of the British Commonwealth judged by the sovereign to have given exceptional service (previous members had included Florence Nightingale, Winston Churchill and William Walton). Manci deplored that her husband was the last of his generation of Cambridge scientists to be honoured - J. J. Thomson, Eddington, Rutherford, Cockcroft and Blackett had been admitted long before.\n\nIn June 1973, the Diracs returned to the UK so that he could collect his award. A chauffeur drove them in a Rolls Royce to  Buckingham Palace, where he received the award in private from the Queen for a few minutes, while Manci waited in an ante-room. A few weeks later, he shared with Esther and Myer Salaman his discussions with the Queen about the challenges faced by a female scientist who is also the mother of young children:\n\nI said it was difficult for a woman who had to choose between her career and her family and there could not be real equality between the sexes. The Queen said she did not press for equality of the sexes.\n\nOn his return to the USA, Tallahassee colleagues quizzed Dirac about his impression of the Queen, but he would say very little. His description of her consisted of two words: 'Very small.'\n\nThat summer, Dirac visited CERN in Geneva to see its newest particle accelerator, capable of increasing the energy of protons to some fifty thousand times the energy reached by Cockcroft and Walton's device. During his visit, he walked to the rue Winkelried, a side street near the lake and close to the main railway station, to see the apartment owned until the mid-1920s by his paternal grandmother, where he and his family stayed in 1905. As he strolled around the nearby statue of Rousseau, Dirac may have thought of the time he spent running around in the lakeside park with Felix, watched by his father and mother, baby Betty in her arms. Dirac had not visited Switzerland since then, despite many invitations. The pain of the country's association with his father had been so deep that Dirac had not been able to bring himself to visit it until he was seventy years old.\n\nIn 1979, the centenary of Einstein's birth, Dirac was feeling weak and listless. But he was determined to speak at as many of the celebratory meetings as he could, so that he could 'make clear what a great scientist Einstein was', as Halpern recalled. During that year, Dirac achieved one of his ambitions - of flying across the Atlantic on Concorde, the first supersonic passenger aircraft. The aircraft, developed by an Anglo-French collaboration in the 1960s, was noisy, a prodigious guzzler of fuel and hopelessly uneconomic, but it symbolised the best and most exciting in contemporary engineering. It was also the apogee of the aviation industry in Dirac's native city: the Bristol Aeroplane Company had led the first British design team to work on the aircraft and build the first British prototype in Filton, a few miles from Julius Road.\n\nSomehow, Manci persuaded UNESCO to fund transatlantic flights on the aircraft for Dirac and herself as a condition of his attending the organisation's Einstein celebration in Paris, as guest of honour. He and Manci took the flight on 5 May 1979, cruising at almost 60,000 feet - the nearest he would ever get to outer space. During the flight, he probably read on the front page of the _New York Times_ the news from Britain that Margaret Thatcher had just become Prime Minister. He may have wondered whether his mother's fears about the notion of a woman prime minister would be realised, whether Mrs Thatcher would, in Flo's words, 'vacillate in her feminine way' so that 'her supporters would fall off right and left'.\n\nBy spring 1982, when Dirac and Kapitza were tired of travel, three opportunities to meet that summer arose, and they seized them. Accompanied by their wives, they met first at the Lindau meeting at the end of June. Kapitza had been eligible to attend the meeting only since he received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1978, after Dirac had lobbied for him for almost forty years. During that time, Dirac had seen the honour awarded to almost all of Rutherford's most able 'boys' - Blackett, Chadwick, Cockcroft and Walton - and virtually all the pioneers of quantum mechanics from the 1920s and 1930s had received the prize, including Born, Fermi, Landau, Pauli, Tamm and Van Vleck, but not Jordan, whose Nazi past probably cost him the honour.\n\nAt the Lindau meeting, Dirac mounted one of his last attacks on renormalisation in front of an audience of some two hundred students and Nobel laureates. Looking as fragile as a cut-glass figurine, Dirac stood at the rostrum giving a speech almost identical to ones he had been giving for almost fifty years; he had no praise for the Standard Model or any other successes of particle physics. A microphone amplified his trembling voice, each letter 's' accompanied by a whistle from his ill-fitting dentures. Current theories were 'just a set of working rules', he said; physicists should go back to basics and find a Hamiltonian description of nature free of infinities. ' _Some_ day', he said with a gentle and weary defiance, 'people will find the correct Hamiltonian.' But he was preaching a lost cause: physicists no longer based their descriptions of fundamental particles on Hamiltonians, as other methods were much more convenient. But the audience listened respectfully to Dirac's twenty-five-minute speech, partly, perhaps, in  anticipated sadness that his lone voice would soon be silent. Here was someone, like Einstein, who was unafraid of bucking contemporary trends and taking the consequences, to be his own man.\n\nThe Diracs and Kapitzas met again a few days later in G\u00f6ttingen. Kapitza had pleasant recollections of the town, as did Dirac - it was, in his opinion, the birthplace of quantum mechanics, where he had first become acquainted with Born and his group, where he became friends with Oppenheimer and probably where he first saw a Nazi in uniform. The Diracs stayed in Gebhard's Hotel overlooking G\u00f6ttingen railway station, where Dirac had first arrived in the town from Copenhagen fifty-five years before. Then, his journey from the station to his room in the Carios' home was a luggage-laden walk; now, he and Manci were met by a welcoming party that whisked them in a taxi to the town's most luxurious accommodation.\n\nThere are photographs of Kapitza and Dirac sitting at a table in the garden of the hotel, looking exhausted and a little dispirited. Physics, once one of their main topics of conversation, was now much less important than international affairs, the preoccupation of Kapitza. He will almost certainly have spoken with Dirac about the recently ended Falklands War between Argentina, led by General Galtieri, and the United Kingdom, led by Mrs Thatcher, over the disputed island territory in the South Atlantic. Dirac was in two minds about Thatcher: he feared the impact of her radicalism on British education and science but sympathised with her determination to protect the Falkland Islanders' wish to remain British. He thought, however, that the dispute should have been resolved through negotiation: at the beginning of the war, it had seemed absurd to him that the number of people likely to die would exceed the number whose British citizenship would be protected. In politics, if not in physics, Dirac was now a pragmatist.\n\nThe Falklands War was a trivial matter compared with nuclear proliferation, a subject Dirac and Kapitza talked about at length when they met again a few weeks later, at the Erice summer school in Sicily, organised by the physicist Antonino Zichichi. Dirac took risks in the subject matter he addressed there: during the previous summer, he had given a presentation on 'The Futility of War', an uncomplicated statement of an argument that few would oppose. In the summer of 1982, he collaborated with Kapitza and Zichichi to write the one-page 'Erice Statement', which urged governments to be less  secretive in defence matters (one of Bohr's favourite themes), to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to help non-nuclear powers feel more secure. The well-intended phrasing of the document, later signed by ten thousand scientists, was so bland that its first signatories at the Erice meeting included not only opponents of nuclear weapons but also the right-wing Eugene Wigner and the obdurately pro-nuclear Edward Teller, who had done more than almost any other American to fuel the arms race.\n\nOn the last stages of the Diracs' 1982 European tour, they visited Betty in Amsterdam and Gabriel in Aarhus, before travelling to Cambridge. Dirac returned to St John's College, which, as he was to tell the Master soon afterwards, 'has been the central point of my life and a home to me'. That summer, the talk of the Combination Room was the imminent arrival of the college's first women undergraduates: another all-male bastion of Cambridge was about to fall. Earlier, the theoretical physicist Peter Goddard asked Dirac whether he thought women students should be admitted to the college, and, after a long pause, Dirac replied, 'Yes, provided we don't admit fewer men.'\n\nBefore he left St John's, Dirac left his gown at the Porters' Lodge, where he had first registered as a student almost sixty-nine years before. He wrote a label: 'Professor Dirac's Gown. Please take it to the Master and ask him to keep it until the next time I come to Cambridge.' But he would not see the city again.\n**Twenty-nine**\n\nI bade, because the wick and oil are spent  \nAnd frozen are the channels of the blood,  \nMy discontented heart to draw content  \nFrom beauty that is cast out of a mould  \nIn bronze, or that in dazzling marble appears,  \nAppears, but when we have gone is gone again,  \nBeing more indifferent to our solitude  \nThen 'twere an apparition. O heart, we are old;  \nThe living beauty is for younger men:  \nWe cannot pay its tribute of wild tears.\n\nW. B. YEATS, 'The Living Beauty', 1919\n\nThe confidence Dirac displayed when he spoke about physics hid a despair that he apparently revealed only once, to someone he hardly knew - Pierre Ramond, a theoretical physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville. A courteous and articulate man, Ramond is an American who speaks in a richly musical voice whose accent is a constant reminder to his listeners that he was born and raised in France. After lunch one Wednesday in the early spring of 1983, he drove from Gainesville to give a colloquium at Florida State University, hoping that his 'hero and guiding light' Dirac would be in the audience. Sure enough, when Ramond arrived in the seventh-floor seminar room, overlooking the campus, he saw in his audience the daydreaming figure of Dirac, slight as a pixie.\n\nIn his presentation, speculative but assured, Ramond discussed the possibility of setting out fundamental theories not in the usual four dimensions of conventional space-time but in a higher number of dimensions. Throughout, Dirac appeared to be snoozing, and, during the questions afterwards, he said nothing. But when the seminar broke up, he - unusually - lingered until he was with the speaker, alone, and the door was shut.\n\nRamond had met Dirac twice before, but had not been able to draw him into anything resembling a normal conversation. 'I had heard that the only way to persuade Dirac to talk was to ask him a non-trivial question that required a direct answer,' Ramond recalls.  So he asked Dirac directly whether it would be a good idea to explore high-dimensional field theories, like the ones he had presented in his lecture. Ramond braced himself for a long pause, but Dirac shot back with an emphatic 'No!' and stared anxiously into the distance. Neither man moved, neither sought eye contact; they both froze in a silent stand-off. It lasted several minutes. Dirac broke it when he volunteered a concession: 'It _might_ be useful to study higher dimensions if we're led to them by beautiful mathematics.' Encouraged, Ramond saw an opportunity: doing his best to sound understanding, he invited Dirac to give a talk on his ideas at Gainesville any time he liked, adding that he would be glad to drive him there and back. Dirac responded instantly: 'No! I have nothing to talk about. My life has been a failure!'\n\nRamond would have been less stunned if Dirac had smashed him over the head with a baseball bat. Dirac explained himself without emotion: quantum mechanics, once so promising to him, had ended up unable even to give a proper account of something as simple as an electron interacting with a photon - the calculations ended up with meaningless results, full of infinities. Apparently on autopilot, he continued with the same polemic against renormalisation he had been delivering for some forty years. Ramond was too shocked to listen with any concentration. He waited until Dirac had finished and gone quiet before pointing out that there already existed crude versions of theories that appeared to be free of infinities. But Dirac was not interested: disillusion had crushed his pride and spirit.\n\nDirac said goodbye and walked off, looking impassive, but Ramond was shattered. He took the elevator to the ground floor and walked alone in the fading light of the afternoon back to his car. Twenty-five years later, he could still recall how upset he was: 'I could hardly believe that such a great man could look back on his life as a failure. What did that say about the rest of us?'\n\nRamond cannot recall whether he had explicitly mentioned to Dirac the idea that nature is fundamentally built not of point-like particles but of tiny pieces of string. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ramond was one of the small band working on the idea, then a backwater of theoretical physics. Dirac had tentatively suggested in 1955 that electrons and other quanta might be pictured as lines rather than points, but the mathematical form of Dirac's idea was completely different to  that of the modern string theory, itself still only embryonic. The theory had, however, used contributions Dirac had made in the late 1950s and early 1960s, including his methods of describing two- and three-dimensional objects in ways consistent with both quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity. The mathematics he used to describe a small sphere - his model of a muon - resurfaced in a different context, to describe the motion of a string moving through space and time.\n\nAmong the encouraging features of the new string theory was a pleasing absence of the infinities of conventional field theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, the best-available description of electrons and photons. Most impressive was that string theory made the existence of gravity inevitable: if the theory is correct, gravity _must_ exist. Although there was no experimental evidence to favour string theory over other field theories, to its supporters it looked too beautiful to be entirely wrong. Dirac will have heard about the theory in seminars at Florida State but he gave it no credence - his curiosity was spent. A few months after his eightieth birthday, the local journalist Andy Lindstrom had found him 'a painfully spare man [. . .] stoop-shouldered and frail'. His once-black hair had 'retreated to a wispy cowl at the very fringes of his forehead, as though worn away by the great thoughts fermenting below . . . A web of wrinkles etches his gentle, lonely face, outlining eyes that seem to be forever questing. '\n\nSince overcoming his digestive trouble in late 1980, Dirac had become more relaxed about his health, but his anxieties returned three years later when he started to suffer from apparently unrelated problems - night sweats and occasional fevers. He consulted Hansell Watt, a local doctor and lay preacher whose calm, comforting words were all the more reassuring for being spoken with a rich southern drawl. Dirac took to him, and, for Manci, he could do no wrong. Watt diagnosed the source of Dirac's medical problems to be his right kidney, which X-ray photographs showed to have been infected by tuberculosis, probably when he was a child. This was a surprise to Dirac, who had never suspected that he had been infected, having been assured by his mother: 'T.B. runs in families and it is absolutely not in ours.'\n\nWhen Dr Watt advised Dirac that his tubercular kidney should be removed, Halpern was outraged. Wary of surgical cures and wanting only to try herbal remedies, Halpern opposed Watt's strategy and - to Manci's anger - did all he could to undermine it. Manci, fighting Halpern's influence over Dirac like a tigress guarding her wounded cub, did not tell him when she arranged the operation at the Tallahassee Memorial Hospital on 29 June 1983, a month after what would be his final talk. The surgeon found that Dirac had only the last remains of a right kidney with a cyst the size of a hockey ball.\n\nThe operation was technically successful but it left Dirac an invalid. Weak and dispirited, he spent the summer recuperating at home, watching television and playing Wei Chi and other board games but unable to do serious work. After several weeks, he could walk a few steps but did not have the strength to venture out of his air-conditioned home into the heat and humidity outside. For the first time in decades, he could not spend the summer walking in the countryside - especially cruel for someone who had trodden a distance comparable with Wordsworth's total of about 180,000 miles. One of Dirac's most frequent visitors was Halpern, who sat at his bedside several times a week, chatting about their work and anything else that took their fancy, including politics. Dirac said that he could not help liking President Reagan, though he disagreed with most of his policies; at heart, Dirac remained a liberal, though with no loyalty to the Democrats or any other political grouping.\n\nHalpern's relationship with Manci became more fraught by the week. Upset by what he saw as her unending nagging, he often found himself leaving the Diracs' home red-faced and purse-lipped with anger. Whenever Dirac mentioned his discomfort at Tallahassee's oppressive summer climate, she would shoot back with her favourite rejoinder, 'It's better than Cambridge,' Halpern recalled. For her part, Manci thought Halpern was a rude, interfering busybody who was shamelessly taking advantage of his helpless friend by foisting quack medicine on him. Aware of her hostility, Halpern decided that subterfuge was the only hope. When Manci was out shopping, he instituted a secret programme of homoeopathic treatment, furtively dropping herbal essences into Dirac's drinking water when the nurse was not looking. According to Halpern, Dirac's energy resurged like Popeye's after he had downed a can of spinach. As soon as Manci found out about 'the herbal conspiracy', she returned Dirac to his usual diet, whereupon he slipped back into lethargy and indifference, if Halpern's testimony is correct.\n\nDirac spent most of his waking hours in a wheelchair, talking to visitors, including his daughter Mary and her dashing new husband, Peter Tilley. After a few months, Dirac was fit enough to return occasionally to his office in Florida State University, to supervise his final graduate student Bruce Hellman and to oversee what would be his final publication. Halpern drafted the text of 'The Inadequacies of Quantum Field Theory' for Dirac, who wanted his final published words to execrate renormalisation, the technique born of one of his most profound contributions to science. For the last time, he refused to accept that, as Feynman had advised him in 1946, he was on 'the wrong track'. Feynman might as well have counselled a train to depart from its rails.\n\nEarly in April 1984, Dirac heard that Kapitza was dead. The Soviet Union knew it had lost one of its most loyal subjects: the entire Politburo and many of the country's scientific leaders signed _Pravda_ 's announcement of his death. Dirac had lost his dearest friend, his surrogate brother, but he showed only resignation. More sad news followed a few weeks later: the Diracs' son Gabriel had a skin cancer so aggressive that his doctors gave him only a few months to live. In June, Manci flew to Europe to see her son, leaving Dirac in the care of friends. A few weeks after her return, Gabriel died on 20 July, aged fifty-nine. Three days later, Dirac was too ill to put himself to bed. Halpern was away in Europe, so Manci had her husband to herself and had to cope with his sinking morale and hardening stubbornness.  Dirac's spirits rallied during a visit by Gabriel's daughter Barbara, a radiantly attractive young woman and a special favourite of the Diracs. ('You look like Cher,' he told her a few years before.) In sharp contrast to Halpern, Barbara's view of Manci was that she was a sensitive and humane nurse - there were occasional quarrels between her and Dirac but they would dissolve swiftly into an affectionate holding of hands. Dirac's energy had all but ebbed away, Barbara observed, but his love of physics still flickered: he returned to his papers and whispered resolutely, 'I have work to do.' His greatest fear, of losing his mind, was never realised.\n\nAt the beginning of October 1984, after Barbara had returned to Europe, Manci hired nurses to be with Dirac round the clock: he was hanging on to the last thread of life. But he still received the occasional visitor, including Mary's husband Peter Tilley, who sat for  hours at Dirac's beside, mostly in silence. During his final visit, Tilley recalls, Dirac leant over to him and said firmly, in a matter-of-fact tone: 'The biggest mistake of my life was marrying a woman who wanted to get out of the house.' Dirac sounded neither bitter nor regretful, Tilley remembers, but was making a factual statement in a way that invited no further discussion. Perhaps Dirac was thinking of what Manci had said to him soon after they met - that she had married her first husband only to get out of her parents' home - and of the veiled warnings his mother had given him about marrying Manci forty-seven years before.\n\nThe battle of wills between Manci and Halpern resumed. When he knew she was out, Halpern sneaked into the house and stirred his fortifying herbs into Dirac's drinking water. The nurse had almost given up trying to interest him in food, and it was left to Halpern to feed his friend, who took his food like a baby. All Dirac wanted to do was to talk about Kapitza. Dirac spent many of his last conscious hours recounting favourite stories about his friend's colourful life - over and over again, Dirac told the story of how Kapitza refused to work on the bomb, standing alone among lesser mortals who did not have the moral courage to make a stand. It was a tape loop of delusion.\n\nOn Thursday 18 October, as Halpern was leaving the Diracs' home, he bumped into Manci. He was expecting a telling off for visiting his friend, but Manci did not mention it; she told him calmly that she had just been to the mortician to reserve Dirac's grave. But the next day Halpern received the phone call he had feared for weeks: Manci forbade him from setting foot in the house again - Dr Watt had told her, she said, that Dirac was too weak to see anyone except close family. Angry, bitter and tearful, Halpern heard nothing until four days later, when he read on the front page of the _Tallahassee Democrat_ : 'FSU physicist is dead at 82'. On the Saturday evening, with Manci and his nurse at his side, Dirac's heart had failed and stopped beating at five minutes before eleven.\n\n'I want to be put down like a horse,' Manci told Dr Watt. But in public she showed her usual spirit and fortitude, informing friends and relatives of Dirac's passing with business-like calm and attending to every detail of the funeral arrangements. She took great pains to ensure that Dirac was remembered as she wanted: the day after his  death, she told friends that he was 'a very religious man' and that he would have wanted a high-Episcopalian funeral.\n\nThe ceremony took place in the open air at the Roselawn cemetery in Tallahassee, on 24 October, under an overcast sky, rain threatening. When the guests arrived, shortly before 11 a.m., they saw Dirac's coffin was on a plinth beside his freshly dug grave, under a bright blue marquee-like roof mounted on four wooden poles, in the shade of a group of conifers swaying slightly in the breeze. Among the mourners was Dirac's one-time confidant, Pierre Ramond, who was surprised when he saw the congregation: 'Considering how famous he was, there were very few people there.' There were about ninety mourners, including dozens from Florida State University but - as Manci bitterly noted - no one from Cambridge. Several in the congregation were uneasy to see that they were not alone: they had been joined by scribbling journalists and a flotilla of television crews. Manci had decided that her husband should be buried under the encircling gaze of TV cameras.\n\nThe rector Dr W. Robert Abstein read slowly from the oldest-surviving version of the Anglican Bible, the text Manci had insisted on. She had forbidden Halpern to speak, and there was no eulogy. After half an hour, as the sky brightened, Abstein crumbled soil on the coffin and traced the sign of the cross in the dirt. The place of Dirac's burial was marked a few weeks later with a neat white-marble stone, engraved with words he had used, chosen by Manci: 'because God said it should be so'.\n\nA few days after Dirac's funeral, Manci had to take another blow. She heard from the police in Vermont that they now presumed that Judy was dead and that they had called off the hunt for her. The pain for Manci was terrible: in just four months, she had suffered the grief of losing her best friend in Russia, two of her children and her husband. Life seemed to hold little for her - but she was a fighter.\n\n'Dirac was a militant atheist,' objected the Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, when he was asked if Dirac might be commemorated in the Abbey's science corner. The Oxford physicist Dick Dalitz led a group of scientists that began to press for Dirac to be remembered alongside Newton and Rutherford. For someone to be worthy of a place in such company, the Abbey authorities had to be sure that he or she was a Christian - or at least not inimical to  religion - and was judged, after a decade's reflection, to be of 'millennial significance'. Carpenter was easily persuaded of Dirac's status, but Dalitz found it hard to demonstrate that Dirac passed the religious test, especially after the Dean found out about Pauli's comment 'There is no God and Dirac is his prophet.' Pauli could make things difficult for Dirac even when they were both dead.\n\nDuring the stalemate, Dalitz found an unanswerable way to counter the objection: if Dirac's parents had christened him, then - regardless of any derisive comments he had made about religion - he was officially a Christian. Dirac would have been amused by the absurdity. In the late 1980s, Dalitz spent weeks trawling through parish records in Bristol but could find no evidence that Charles and Flo Dirac had christened their children, and this line of investigation drew a blank. However, the church authorities were impressed to hear that Dirac was a member of the Papal Academy and that he had made no antireligious comments during its meetings. Dalitz and his colleagues kept up their pressure on the authorities, and, in early 1990, after six years of lobbying, the new Dean of Westminster declared himself 'very sympathetic' to their cause. It was finally won in early 1995.\n\nThe commemoration took place in Westminster Abbey on Monday, 13 November 1995, beginning with Evensong at 5 p.m. Though much less well publicised, the ceremony was on a scale as grand as Rutherford's fifty-eight years before: the Abbey looked gorgeous, the choir sounded magnificent, and the congregation was in good voice. After tributes to Dirac's scientific work had been read, the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, President of the Royal Society, unveiled the commemorative stone in the nave of the Abbey, next to Newton's gravestone and just a few paces from Darwin's. Stonemasons in Cambridge had used a piece of Burlington Green slate quarried from the Lake District to produce a two-foot square slab of stone and etch into it the inscription 'P. A. M. Dirac OM physicist 1902-84', with a statement of his equation.\n\nStephen Hawking gave the final address, using his voice synthesiser to speak through the Abbey's antiquated public-address system.  He began with his usual arresting clarity and humour:\n\nIt has taken eleven years for the nation to recognise that he was probably the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton, and belatedly to erect a plaque to him in Westminster Abbey. It is my task to explain why. That is, why he was so great, not why it took so long.\n\nHis final words consisted of another barb: 'It is just a scandal that it has taken so long.' Dalitz threw anxious glances at his fellow organisers; evidently, Hawking did not know that at least a decade had to elapse after a subject's death before he or she could be commemorated - Dirac's ceremony was at most only a year late. Afterwards, Dalitz sought out the Abbey authorities and apologised.\n\nAfter the organist had played Bach's _Prelude and Fugue in A Major_ , Dirac's daughter Monica and her two children laid flowers on the memorial plaque, before the congregation sang the hymn 'Lord of Beauty, Thine the Splendour'. The music had been well chosen.\n\nAngry that Westminster Abbey had questioned Dirac's suitability for commemoration, Manci did not attend the ceremony: 'The English are hypocrites,' she fumed. 'Lord Byron is buried in the Abbey, [and] he was the greatest rogue of the century.' After Dirac's death, Manci become the keeper of his flame, firing off affronted notes to obituarists and chroniclers of her husband's life who cast any doubt on her view that he was a scientific saint. Abraham Pais was startled when he received a letter from her, insisting that Dirac was not an atheist. 'Many times did we kneel side by side in Chapel, praying. We all know, he was no hypocrite.' Friends of Dirac, certain that he was agnostic, were puzzled: did he join her at prayer out of politeness? Or had Dirac privately practised a religion he had mocked among friends? Or was Manci fantasising?\n\nAfter she had come to terms with Dirac's death, Manci remained lively and active for ten years, travelling in Europe and the USA, and entertaining an almost unbroken stream of guests, including Lily Harish-Chandra, Leon Lederman and his wife Ellen, and Wigner's daughter Erika Zimmermann. When she was alone, Manci's idea of a perfect day was to spend it shopping, playing with her dog, hobnobbing with Florida State officials, adjusting her investments and driving out with her pals for lunch at a local Marriott hotel, where she traded gossip while munching on cheese blintzes. She was in close touch with her daughters, constantly worrying about Mary, who lived nearby and was often in poor mental health. In the evening, Manci would settle down in front of the television with a glass of sherry to watch public-service documentaries and her favourite game shows, _Jeopardy!_ and _The Price Is Right._ Through letters and endless phone calls, she kept in touch with friends and  family all over America and Europe, though not with her sister-in-law Betty, who died in 1991.\n\nStill angry with Churchill College for what she regarded as their terrible treatment of Elizabeth Cockcroft, Manci took her revenge when she withdrew Dirac's archive from the college. She arranged for it to be transferred to Florida State University, where the archive is now stored in the Dirac Science Library, which Manci formally opened in December 1989. Outside the library, she unveiled a statue of Dirac by the Hungarian sculptor Gabriella Bollob\u00e1s, showing him in old age, reading _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics._ The statue is peculiarly lifeless, with no sign of the energy and imagination that propelled him to greatness.\n\nManci never mellowed: she would still switch in an instant between mean-spiritedness and generosity. After railing at Halpern for an entire morning, she would spend the afternoon trying to sweet-talk Florida State officials into giving him a permanent position in the physics department. She behaved no more consistently towards her brother Eugene, suffering from Alzheimer's disease: in public, she adored him but in private she described him witheringly as 'a third-rate physicist'. On the telephone, she argued with him for hours about family matters, haranguing him for his politics and for associating with 'the Moonies'. On New Year's Day 1995, she called Leon and Ellen Lederman hours after Wigner's death, and said to each of them in turn: 'Thank God the monster is dead.'\n\nEven in her ninth and tenth decades, Manci kept abreast of the news. In late 1989, she was jubilant when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet-backed Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party abdicated its monopoly power and agreed to free elections. Soon afterwards, during the presidency of George Bush Senior, she considered applying for American citizenship so that she could vote against him if he stood for re-election. Delighted when Bill Clinton first won the presidency, in late 1995 she wrote supportively to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sent a courteous reply on White House notepaper ('Dear Ms Dirac [...]'). No letter ever gave Manci more pleasure.\n\nShe spent her last few years in pain with arthritis and suffering grievously from asthma. Friends and family urged her to move into a care home, but she would hear nothing of it: she was going to live out her days at home, no matter what the cost of round-the-clock home  assistance. Early in 2002, after she tripped over her dog and broke her hip, she had no choice but to be admitted to hospital, where she died a few days later. Mary and Monica arranged for her to be buried with Dirac under a joint gravestone; his epitaph was unchanged, hers was 'Let her generous soul rest in peace.'\n**Thirty**\n\nThen she showed me this picture \u263a and I knew that it meant 'happy', like when I'm reading about Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world.\n\nCHRISTOPHER BOONE, narrator in Mark Haddon's _The Curious_  \n_Incident of the Dog in the Night Time_ , 2003\n\nBristol has never taken Dirac to its heart. Today, the few reminders in the city of its association with Dirac include a little-noticed abstract sculpture, the name on a grimly functional building and a few plaques. During my many visits to Bristol over the past five years, I have met scarcely half a dozen people outside the university who have heard of him. A few minutes after I first walked through the front door of the Bristol Records Office, in May 2003, I enquired of the bracingly confident assistant if she had any material on Paul Dirac; she looked at me quizzically and asked, 'Who's he?'\n\nIn the Records Office, the best way of finding out about Dirac's early school years is to ask to see the well-fingered documents about his fellow pupil at Bishop Road School, Cary Grant. Local journalists and television crews were always ready to record Grant's sojourns in the city, a prospect that would have frightened off Dirac; his visits were always anonymous. In the 1970s, however, he welcomed the campaign led by the local Member of Parliament William Waldegrave to celebrate the city's association with him, an initiative that led to the founding of a mathematics prize in local secondary schools. Waldegrave had noticed that while Dirac is not well known by the people of Bristol, they were proud of their association with the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, though he had not been born in the city or even lived there.\n\nIn 2006, Bristol's veneration of Brunel was clear during a five-month celebration of the bicentenary of his birth. Local businesses and cultural organisations collaborated to present 'Brunel 200', an eight-month festival of exhibitions, theatrical events, concerts, art installations and poetry readings. Some forty thousand people -  most of them from Bristol and the surrounding towns - attended the opening weekend in April. Four years before, the centenary of Dirac's birth was marked in Bristol rather more modestly. The main event, organised by the University's physics department, was an afternoon of lectures to celebrate Dirac's life and legacy, followed by a formal dinner on Brunel's SS _Great Britain._ Following an interview about the Dirac equation on Radio 4's _Start the Week_ , I was called by one of the organisers who asked me to give a lecture on Dirac's life and work. This was a special moment for me as I had been fascinated by Dirac since I was a teenager.\n\nI first heard his name on a suburban doorstep, when I was hawking subscriptions for a weekly raffle in aid of the Liberal Party in Orpington, a suburb in south-east London. When I was closing a sale on a spring evening in 1968, my new customer - a distracted, oddly engaging man by the name of John Bendall - mentioned perfunctorily that he was a theoretical physicist. We became friends, and, during several Sunday-morning chats in his front room, I realised that he was a Dirac fanatic: Bendall would find an excuse to introduce his hero's name in every conversation lasting longer than a few minutes. I found out that it was no coincidence that the younger Bendall daughter, playing with her dolls at our feet, had been named Paula. Every Christmas, he would take a plate of mince pies from the kitchen, sit back in his armchair with a glass of sherry and read _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ , savouring every sentence. Minutes after I first browsed through his copy, I knew I too wanted to be a theoretical physicist.\n\nA few months later, it dawned on me that, when Dirac was a boy, he lived just a few miles from my Bristol-born paternal grandmother Amelia ('Mill') Jones. She was fond of telling me about that time in her life, when she worked in a corset factory. At weekends, she and her fianc\u00e9 Charley - a docker, later my grandfather - would promenade arm in arm around the centre of the city, her expansive skirt almost touching the ground, his moustache daringly trimmed. 'I wonder if we ever saw Cary Grant before he 'opped it to Americal?' I heard her ask. She may well have set eyes on him around the city, perhaps around the Hippodrome, one of her haunts. It is also possible that she and my grandfather knew the high reputation of Charles Dirac and almost certain that they saw at least some members of the Dirac family, perhaps the two French-speaking brothers walking together.\n\nIn middle age, Dirac made several trips back to the city. In 1956, after a summer holiday in his mother's home county of Cornwall, he returned through Bristol with his family and stopped outside 6 Julius Road to point out to his daughters Mary and Monica where he had lived since he was ten. But he said nothing about his memories of the twenty-five years he spent there. During my visits to Bristol, I lurked several times outside this unremarkable home, trying unsuccessfully to imagine my way into it. My problem was solved during a visit in the early summer of 2004, when the owner of the property generously invited me inside, allowing me to enter the theatre of Dirac's most traumatic memories.\n\nOverlooking the front garden is Charles's tiny study, where he taught his private students, away from the gaze of the tax inspectors. Under the stairs is the tiny cupboard where Flo crouched during the German bombing raids, cotton wool in her ears. Above is the little bedroom where, a few months after Felix killed himself, Dirac first read Heisenberg's path-breaking paper and realised that it contained the key to quantum physics. Felix's bedroom, for many years a shrine, is now scattered with the toys and games of the children who occupy the room. Flo's tiny kitchen overlooks the back garden, where Dirac had looked up at the stars and had watched some of the first British-made aeroplanes take off, and where he had begun to learn gardening during the Great War. It seemed barely possible that this suburban home had seen events that had left Dirac, as Manci had described him, 'an emotional cripple'.\n\nHer words might sound cruel, but Dirac would probably have agreed that they were accurate. He always attributed his extreme taciturnity and stunted emotions to his father's disciplinarian regime; but there is another, quite different explanation, namely that he was autistic. Two of Dirac's younger colleagues confided in me that they had concluded this, each of them making their disclosure _sotto voce_ , as if they were imparting a shameful secret. Both refused to be quoted. Yet one should be extremely careful about making this diagnosis: rather too often, people are labelled autistic on the flimsiest of evidence except that they are exceptionally reserved, focused and unsociable. Besides, it is not easy to psychoanalyse someone who is dead.\n\nBefore one can say whether there is a strong case that Dirac was a person with autism, it is important to be clear about the nature  of the condition. For someone to be diagnosed as autistic, he or she must have all three of the following characteristics since early childhood:\n\n1. Social skills are poorly developed compared with the development of other 'classroom' skills, such as reading and arithmetic.\n\n2. The development of verbal and non-verbal communication is impaired compared with the development of other 'classroom' skills. Behavioural signs of repetitive or stereotyped movements, a delay in the acquisition of language and a lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play.\n\n3. An unusually narrow repertoire of activities and interests that are abnormally intense .\n\nA few days before the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1933, Flo told journalists that Dirac was a precocious, industrious and unusually quiet child. There is not nearly enough detail in her comments or in reports of Dirac's behaviour at school to justify a diagnosis that he was then autistic. His behaviour as an adult, however, had all the characteristics that almost every autistic person has to some degree - reticence, passivity, aloofness, literal-mindedness, rigid patterns of activity, physical ineptitude, self-centredness and, above all, a narrow range of interests and a marked inability to empathise with other human beings. Extremes of these characteristics are at the root of the humour in almost all the tales about Dirac that physicists have been telling each other for decades: almost all of these 'Dirac stories' might also be called 'autism stories'.\n\nThe word 'autism', derived from the Greek word _autos_ for self, covers a wide spectrum of conditions, spanning people with mental retardation through to those like Dirac who are gifted in their specialist fields and often described as 'high functioning'. An unusual case was dramatised in the Hollywood film _Rain Man_ , where Dustin Hoffman portrays the autistic character Raymond Babbitt, who also has the much more rare Savant Syndrome, manifested in his prodigious arithmetic skills and in his amazing memory for baseball statistics and telephone numbers.\n\nClinicians believe just over half a million people in the UK are autistic to some degree, almost one in a hundred, and it is clear that it is predominantly a male condition. Statistical studies also show that depression is especially common among people with autism and that about 20 per cent of children with the condition speak fewer  than five words a day. About one person with autism in ten has a special talent - for example, in drawing, working with computers or rote-memory learning. Another characteristic, yet to be properly quantified, is that young people with autism are exceptionally fussy about the food they are prepared to eat.\n\nThere is currently a good deal of speculation of a modern-day epidemic of autism, especially in the USA, where, as _Nature_ put it in 2007, the condition is the 'golden child of the fundraising circuit'.  But talk of a sudden rise in the number of people with autism is probably ill founded because diagnoses often differ from one doctor to another, with the result that the data have large uncertainties. Reliable information has been available only since the mid-1960s, when high-quality empirical studies began, long after Leo Kanner, an Austrian-born child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, first identified and named the condition in 1943. A year later, the Viennese psychiatrist Hans Asperger independently described a condition now known as Asperger's Syndrome, part of the spectrum of autistic behaviour.\n\nAlthough the study of autism is developing rapidly, it is still in its infancy: like atomic physics in the early 1920s, there is a huge amount of observational information about the condition, but the experts know that their understanding of the data is only fragmentary. But some firm conclusions have emerged. A few decades ago, scientists believed that people with autism had some disorder of the mind, but it is now plain that this is incorrect: there is now overwhelming evidence that the condition is a disorder of the tissue in the _brain._ 14 Using modern brain-imaging techniques - including positron emission tomography - clinicians have demonstrated that the regions linked with the process of 'reading other people's minds' in the brains of people with autism are noticeably less active than in most other people.\n\nSome of the most productive research into autism is now being done in Cambridge at the Autism Research Centre. Its director, Simon Baron-Cohen, is a pioneer of the idea that autism is a manifestation of the extreme male brain - comparatively weak in the typically female characteristic of empathy but strong in the typically male characteristic of systemising, such as working out how mechanical devices function, solving mathematical puzzles, poring over  league tables and filing CDs. In one of Baron-Cohen's research projects, he and his colleagues are studying the behaviour of leading mathematicians and scientists, many of whom - including Newton and Einstein, some believe - exhibit at least some of the traits of autism. The great majority of top mathematicians and physical scientists are undoubtedly male; this may indicate a predisposition of the male brain, though critics point out that it may also be a consequence of rearing children in ways that perpetuate sexual stereotypes.\n\nWhen I visited Baron-Cohen in his rooms in Trinity College, I was struck by two remarks that seemed especially relevant to Dirac. First, he said that he had noticed the high proportion of autistic men who were in a stable marriage with a foreign wife, perhaps because the women were more tolerant of unusual behaviour in foreign men than in men from their own culture. Baron-Cohen had no idea that Dirac was married for almost fifty years to a Hungarian. That, of course, could be a coincidence. I was taken aback again by another remark he made a few minutes later, however, when he pointed out that although people with strongly autistic personalities appear to be detached from most other people, when they believe that a friend has suffered an injustice, they are often so indignant that they will disrupt or abandon their almost invariable daily routines to rectify it. Baron-Cohen knew nothing of Dirac's one venture into international politics when he spent a few months concentrating on the campaign to free Kapitza from his detention in the Soviet Union. Heisenberg, pilloried by many of his former colleagues after the war, had cause to regard Dirac as one of his most loyal friends. Again, these may be coincidences.\n\nBut Baron-Cohen argues that it is not happenstance that the young Dirac bloomed in 1920s Cambridge:\n\nCambridge was a niche where his eccentricity would have been tolerated and his skills valued. College life provided him with a regular daily routine and everything he needed. His bed was made for him, food was provided for him. High Table in College would have provided social contact if he wanted it, with its own rules and routines to render it highly predictable. In the mathematics department, he would have been free to do as he wished, he was surrounded by like-minded people, with no pressure to socialise. An environment like this would have been optimal for someone like Dirac.\n\nA fruitful source of insights into autism is the American business executive and teacher Temple Grandin, who describes herself to be 'a high-functioning person with autism'. In her books and articles, Grandin stresses two particular aspects of her personality that she shares with most other autistic people; both are characteristics that Dirac shared. First, she is hypersensitive to sudden sounds, bringing to mind the great care Dirac always took to ensure that he would not be disturbed by chiming bells or by the sudden barks of neighbourhood dogs. Second, she points out that she thinks visually and that, in several respects, her brain does not function like those of most people she has met.\n\nHere's how my brain works: It's like the search engine Google for images. If you say the word 'love' to me, I'll surf the Internet inside my brain. Then, a series of images pops into my head. What I'll see, for example, is a picture of a mother horse with a foal, or I think of _Herbie the Lovebug_ , scenes from the movie _Love Story_ or the Beatles song . . . 'All you need is Love'.\n\nLike Temple Grandin, Dirac was certain that his mind was 'essentially a geometrical one'. He was always uneasy with algebraic approaches to physics and with any mathematical process he could not picture - one of the reasons why he was so uncomfortable with renormalisation.\n\nYet again, it is possible that this correlation between autistic characteristics and Dirac's behaviour is a coincidence, but, in the light of other such correlations, this seems unlikely. I believe it to be all but certain that Dirac's behavioural traits as a person with autism were crucial to his success as a theoretical physicist: his ability to order information about mathematics and physics in a systematic way, his visual imagination, his self-centredness, his concentration and determination. These traits certainly do not explain his talent but they give some insight into his unique way of looking at the world.\n\nOne of the strongest clues about the true nature of autism is that the condition has a genetic component - it runs in families. The theory, although powerful, cannot predict with the precision of a theory in physics how most characteristics are passed down the generations, especially for conditions such as autism, associated with several genes. Observational studies show that it is rare for families to have more than one child with autism, though the probability that a second child will be autistic is about one in twenty, almost eight  times the usual likelihood. This raises the question of whether Felix Dirac was autistic. Again, it is impossible to say one way or the other because too little information about his personality survives. I was, however, given pause for thought one evening during my visit to the family's genealogist, Gisela Dirac. As she surveyed the family tree, she remarked, 'It's amazing how many people in the family had acute depression. And how many killed themselves.' At my request, she later sent me a family tree annotated with such instances: in the previous century, there had been at least six.\n\nCharles Dirac also showed signs of autistic behaviour. Most of the descriptions of him by his colleagues and students refer to his self-centredness, his dedication to work and his rigid teaching methods. Like his son Paul, Charles appears to have had only a modest ability to understand other people's feelings, but whereas lack of empathy in Paul was manifest in his reserve, in Charles it seems to have appeared as a tendency to behave like a human bulldozer. Neither man was ever going to be the easiest of husbands to live with: Flo's teenage infatuation with the charming Swiss man she met in the library had led to a wretchedly unhappy union, whereas Manci somehow found ways of living stably with a man few women would contemplate as an acceptable partner for a second.\n\nDirac was aware that he was in some ways similar to his father. Three months after Charles died in June 1936, Manci suggested to Paul that he thought too much about these similarities and that he might unconsciously be seeking to emulate some of his father's habits. Shortly afterwards, Paul had pondered on his father's biological inheritance when he attended Bohr's conference on genetics and heard in detail about genetic characteristics and how they are passed from one generation to the next. Sitting on one of the wooden benches in the lecture theatre of Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, listening to the lectures, Dirac may well have wondered which of these heritable characteristics were written into his own genes.\n\nWhatever their genetic profiles, there is no doubt that Dirac and his father were incompatible. Having heard so much about the harrowing mealtimes together, I found myself shuddering when I first walked into the dark dining room of 6 Julius Road overlooking the back garden. The original fireplace is still there. It was easy to imagine Flo passing bowls of steaming porridge from the kitchen through the hatch in the dividing wall and urging the worryingly thin Paul not  to leave a morsel uneaten. Although he had a weak appetite, one of the symptoms of tuberculosis, his parents seem not to have suspected that he had the disease and so had no reservations about putting him under pressure to consume much more food than he wanted to eat.\n\nThe elderly Dirac remembered this dining room as a torture chamber. It was here, he said many times, that his father drove him into a life of silence and inhibition - the young Dirac, forced to speak French, found it easier to say nothing than to make errors that his father would punish unmercifully. No one else in the family left an account of these mealtimes, so we shall probably never know if he was exaggerating. Nor are we ever likely to know what his parents felt about the problems of bringing up a child who was both precociously clever and emotionally withdrawn. From a modern perspective, Charles and Flo were coping with a challenge they did not know they faced, one that may well have made their marital problems even worse. If they were living in Bristol today, the city council would - like most local authorities in the UK - give them support and enable their son to go to a special school.\n\nI for one accept the testimony of Paul Dirac and his mother that Charles Dirac was a domineering and insensitive father, though I don't believe he bullied his younger son into taciturnity. Much more likely, it seems to me, is that the relationship between Paul and Charles was doomed by nature rather than nurture: the young Dirac was born to be a child of few words and was pitiably unable to empathise with others, including his closest family. He laid all the blame for this at the feet of his father, though he disliked him for other reasons, too, with a bitterness that surprised the few people - including Kurt Hofer - who saw the extent of it. 'Why was Paul so bitter, so obsessed with his father?,' Hofer wondered after hearing his outburst. Perhaps the main reason was that Dirac knew in his heart he was not just his own man but, inescapably, his father's.\n**Thirty-one**\n\nDirac told physics students they should not worry about the meaning of equations, only about their beauty. This advice was good only for physicists whose sense of purely mathematical beauty is so keen that they can rely on it to see the way ahead. There have not been many such physicists - perhaps only Dirac himself.\n\nSTEVEN WEINBERG, Dirac Centenary Meeting, University of  \nBristol, 8 August 2002\n\nAll scientists, even the most eminent, are dispensable to science. Although inspired individuals influence it in the short term, the absence of any of them would be unlikely to make much difference to it in the long run. If Marie Curie and Alexander Fleming had never been born, radium and penicillin would have been discovered soon after the dates now in the textbooks.\n\nEvery scientist can hope, however, that posterity will judge him or her to have revealed more than a typical share of nature's secrets. By this criterion, there is no doubt that Dirac was a great scientist, one of the few who deserves a place just below Einstein in the pantheon of modern physicists. Along with Heisenberg, Jordan, Pauli, Schr\u00f6dinger and Born, Dirac was one of the group of theoreticians who discovered quantum mechanics. Yet his contribution was special. In his heyday, between 1925 and 1933, he brought a uniquely clear vision to the development of a new branch of science: the book of nature often seemed to be open in front of him. Freeman Dyson sums up what made Dirac's work so unusual:\n\nThe great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed than Dirac's. His great discoveries were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought - it was this purity that made him unique.\n\nDirac's book _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ was one of these statues, Dyson points out: 'He presents quantum mechanics as a work of art, finished and polished.' Never out of print, it remains the most insightful and stylish introduction to quantum mechanics and is still a  powerful source of inspiration for the most able young theoretical physicists. Of all the textbooks they use, none presents the theory with such elegance and with such relentless logic, a quality of Dirac's highlighted by Rudolf Peierls in 1972: 'The thing about Dirac is that he has a way of thinking logically [. . .] in a straight line, where we'd all tend to go off in a curve. It's this absolutely straight thinking in unexpected ways that makes his works so characteristic.'\n\nMost young physicists, however, are concerned not with the internal logic of quantum mechanics but with using the theory as a way of getting quick and reliable results. In effect, it gives scientists a completely dependable set of practical tools for describing the atomic and molecular world. Every day, tens of thousands of researchers in the microelectronics industry routinely employ the techniques developed by Dirac and his colleagues: ideas that took years to clarify are now used without a thought for the headaches they once caused their creators.\n\nThe modern trend to miniaturisation is making quantum mechanics even more important. In the growing field of ultra-miniature technology - usually called nanotechnology (from the Greek word for dwarf, _nanos_ ) - quantum mechanics is as indispensable as classical mechanics was to Brunel. In one branch of this new technology, spintronics (short for spin-based electronics), engineers are trying to develop new devices that rely not only on controlling the flow of the charge of electrons - the way conventional devices work - but also the flow of the electrons' _spins._ Because these can be flipped from one state to another much more quickly than charge can be moved around, spintronic devices should operate faster than conventional ones and produce less heat. If, as engineers hope, they can produce a spin-based transistor to replace conventional transistors in memory and logic circuits, it may be possible to continue the trend towards ever-more compact computers beyond the currently feasible limits.\n\nIt could be that, just over a century after Dirac first brought electron spin into the logical structure of quantum mechanics, his equation - once seen as mathematical hieroglyphics with no relevance to everyday life - becomes the theoretical basis of a multi-billion dollar industry.\n\nGreat thinkers are always posthumously productive. By this criterion, Dirac can be counted as one of the greatest of all scientists -  many of the concepts he introduced are still being developed, still instrumental in modern thinking. The Dirac equation, for example, is still a fecund source of ideas for mathematicians, who have long been fascinated by spinors, mathematical objects that first appeared in the equation. In Sir Michael Atiyah's opinion:\n\nNo one fully understands spinors. Their algebra is formally understood but their geometrical significance is mysterious. In some sense they describe the 'square-root' of geometry and, just as understanding the concept of the square root of -1 took centuries, the same might be true of spinors.\n\nDirac's influence is felt most strongly by scientists studying the universe's tiniest constituents. Experimenters can now smash particles together with energies so high that even Rutherford would have been impressed: at the Large Hadron Collider, the huge particle accelerator at CERN, they can recreate the conditions of the universe to within a millionth of a millionth of a second of the beginning of time. During the subatomic collisions produced in this and other accelerators, experimenters routinely see subatomic particles created and destroyed, processes that can be explained only using relativistic quantum field theory. Dirac's hand is all over this theory - he was one of its co-discoverers and the author of the action-principle formulation of quantum mechanics, now a crucial part of modern thinking about fields.\n\nOver the past twenty-five years or so, the gap between the energies accessible by particle accelerators and the energies needed to test the latest theories has widened alarmingly. The building of the accelerators is increasingly difficult and expensive for the international collaborations needed to fund and operate them, so new devices come on stream only slowly. One consequence has been that the theory of subatomic particles has run ahead of the supply of data from experiment, producing a scenario of the type Dirac envisaged in his landmark paper of 1931 where he set out an agenda for theoretical physics led by mathematics rather than experiment. One physicist who believed this was prescient was C. N. Yang: at a Princeton meeting they both attended in 1979, Yang suggested that when Dirac set out this idea, he had hit on a 'great truth'. In the same 1931 paper, Dirac suggested the existence of the anti-electron and the anti-proton and developed a quantum theory of magnetic monopoles using a geometric approach that has influenced generations of theoreticians. As experimenters  were unable to detect monopoles, Dirac regarded this project as another disappointment, and he died believing it unlikely that monopoles occur in nature. But, today, many physicists disagree, as monopoles are predicted by some simple generalisations of the Standard Model (the 'modern' monopole is a mathematically better-defined relative of Dirac's). Moreover, according to cosmologists, monopoles should have been created during the Big Bang in vast quantities and should now be detectable; that they are not is known as 'the monopole problem'.\n\nThe detection of Dirac's monopole would raise a question in virtual history: what would have been the effect on his reputation if the monopole had been detected around the time the positron was first observed? Such a pair of successes would have further bolstered his reputation among his colleagues and may well have made him much better known to the public. But there was never any chance that he would become a media celebrity like his most recent Lucasian successor, Stephen Hawking: it seemed not to have occurred to Dirac to write a popular book, nor would he have contemplated making the kind of forays into the media spotlight undertaken by Hawking, such as his appearances on _Star Trek_ , _The Simpsons_ and on the dance floor of a London nightclub. Yet Dirac admired such boldness more than most of his colleagues knew.\n\nDirac left his mark on several other fields besides quantum mechanics. One of his least typical contributions was his invention of a new way of separating different isotopes of a chemical element. He developed the method during the Second World War but it seemed that the idea was impracticable; it was soon forgotten, only to be independently rediscovered thirty years later by engineers in Germany and South Africa. His method still does not appear to be economically viable, but the development of new, ultra-strong materials still leaves open the possibility that the method could be used in the nuclear industry.\n\nAnother of Dirac's less characteristic pieces of work was his exploration of the wave and particle nature of electrons with Kapitza in 1933. Modern improvements in laser technology provided fresh opportunities to verify the existence of the Kapitza-Dirac effect, the diffraction (bending) of a thin beam of electrons by a standing wave of light. Kapitza and Dirac had themselves discussed the new  possibilities at the final meeting of the Kapitza Club in 1966. Several groups attempted to demonstrate the effect, but none was successful until, in the early spring of 2001, a team at the University of Nebraska observed it with a high-powered laser and a fine beam of electrons, using apparatus that would have fitted on a dining-room table. The Kapitza-Dirac effect is now used as a subtle probe of the wave-like and particle-like behaviours of both electrons and light.\n\nDirac also left a legacy in general relativity, if one not quite equal to his talent. It is a mystery that he showed so little interest in following up the discovery - made by Oppenheimer and his colleagues in 1939 - that Einstein's theory predicted the existence of black holes, objects with such a strong gravitational field that not even light can escape them. In Dirac's most important contribution to the theory of relativity, he set it out in analogy to his favourite Hamiltonian version of quantum mechanics and devised a set of complementary mathematical techniques (other physicists did similar work at about the same time). These methods have proved useful to astronomers studying closely spaced pairs of rotating neutron stars (usually called pulsars), orbiting each other, slowly losing energy. This gradual loss of energy can easily be explained by Einstein's general theory of relativity, especially if it is interpreted using the methods Dirac co-invented: the pulsars emit gravitational radiation, in much the same way as accelerating electrons emit electromagnetic radiation. The study of gravitational waves is now one of the most promising areas of astronomy.\n\nDirac's intuition for the workings of the universe on the largest scale was not nearly as strong as it was when he was focusing on atoms. There is, however, no denying the far-sightedness he showed when he reviewed the state of cosmology in the Scott Lecture he delivered shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, when the subject was in its infancy. In one of a string of astute remarks he makes in passing, he hazarded an inspired guess that the complex structure of everything around us has its seeds in a quantum fluctuation in the initial state of the universe. 'The new cosmology', Dirac suggested, 'will probably turn out to be philosophically even more revolutionary than relativity or the quantum theory,' perhaps looking forward to the current bonanza in cosmology, where precise observations on some of the most distant objects in the universe are shedding light on the nature of reality, on the nature of matter and on the most advanced quantum theories. In the view of Nathan Seiberg, Dyson's colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, 'The lecture would look just as impressive if the date on the front were not 1939 but 1999.'\n\nAlthough Dirac was, towards the end of his life, often defensive about his large numbers hypothesis, he always had faith in its truth. The modern view about the large numbers that fascinated him for decades is that only one of them is a mystery: the ratio between the strength of the electrical force and that of the gravitational force between an electron and a proton (1039). The fundamental problem is to understand why the gravitational force is so feeble compared with the other fundamental forces. All the other huge numbers that puzzled Dirac now follow from the standard theory of cosmology, so there is no need to guess links between them - the coincidences he spotted are illusory.\n\nDirac was convinced that the strength of the gravitational force had fallen since the beginning of time, and he invested many of his later years in trying to prove it, though observations made by astronomers on nearby planets in the solar system have now all but ruled it out. Although it is still just possible that Dirac's intuition was correct, the subject is currently low on today's research agenda. One scientist who always believed in his bones that Dirac was right was Leopold Halpern, who left Florida State University in 2004 and became a resident theoretician with a satellite-based experimental programme run by NASA and Stanford University, aiming to check some of the unverified predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity.  Halpern hoped to compare the predictions of his theory with the satellite's observations but he was unable to complete his work before he died of cancer in June 2006.\n\nRegardless of how Dirac's predictions about the gravitational force fare in the future, his name will always be associated with the role of anti-matter at the beginning of the universe. According to modern Big Bang theory, matter and anti-matter were created in exactly equal amounts, at the very beginning of the universe, about 13.7 billion years ago. Soon afterwards, the decay of some of the heavy particles formed from the quarks and anti-quarks led to a small but crucial surfeit of matter over anti-matter, by just one part in a billion. The first scientist to analyse this difference in detail was Tamm's student  Andrei Sakharov - later a courageous human-rights activist in the Soviet Union - who discussed in 1967 how this excess came about and why the universe was left with an overwhelming preponderance of matter. Without that imbalance, the matter and anti-matter formed at the beginning of time would have annihilated each other immediately, so that the entire universe would only ever have amounted to a brief bath of high-energy light. Matter would, in that case, never have had the opportunity to discover anti-matter.\n\nThe surplus of matter over anti-matter at the beginning of the universe is still not understood, and thousands of physicists are working to understand it. Their main sources of experimental information are particle accelerators, where anti-matter is produced by smashing ordinary particles into each other and then quickly 'separating off' the anti-matter, before it is annihilated by matter. By comparing the decays of particles with those of their anti-particles, experimenters hope to get to the bottom of the matter-antimatter imbalance.\n\nEvery day, particle accelerators now generate about a hundred thousand billion positrons and five thousand billion anti-protons - a total of roughly a billionth of a gram. Although this quantity is only tiny, the ability to produce it at will demonstrates that _Homo sapiens_ now - a million years after our species evolved - uses anti-matter as a tool. Today, positrons are routinely generated in mass-produced equipment all over the world: doctors use positron emission tomography (PET) to see inside their patients' brains and hearts, without the need for surgery. It is a simple technique: the patient is injected with a tiny amount of a special radioactive chemical that spontaneously emits positrons, which interact with electrons in the tissue where the chemical settles. The photograph is a record of the radiation given off in the electron-positron annihilations.\n\nWithin just a few decades, positrons changed in the eyes of scientists from appearing outlandish novelties to being just another type of subatomic quantum; the public has become more familiar with anti-matter, too, from the fictional treatments of it in, for example, _Star Trek_ and Dan Brown's _Angels and Demons._ But what is most remarkable about the story of anti-matter is that human beings first understood and perceived it not through sight, smell, taste and touch but through purely theoretical reasoning inside Dirac's head.\n\nLike Einstein, Dirac was always in search of generalisations - theories that explain more and more about the universe, in terms of fewer and fewer principles. Both men believed, too, that the best way of achieving this was through theories expressed in terms of beautiful equations.  As a physicist, Dirac had been well served by mathematics, as he wrote in an unusually candid passage in 1975:\n\nIf you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until [this happened]. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.\n\nAlthough he never acknowledged it in public, the guiding hand of beauty had led Dirac not only to some rich new pastures of research but also into the deserts that yielded no fruit at all. In his talks, he was an ambassador of mathematical beauty, repeatedly underlining the triumphs of theories with this quality but not mentioning the years he had spent trying in vain to use sensually appealing mathematics to describe nature. It is striking that he put forward the principle of mathematical beauty several years after he had done his best work, and we have to suspect that some of his accounts of his greatest discoveries - usually portrayed as successes for his type of aestheticism - were reinterpreted in the light of his faith in the principle. In his pioneering papers on quantum mechanics, he never explicitly says that beauty was his guide; he recalled its value only in the tranquillity of his least productive years.\n\nDirac first made it clear that he was using the principle of mathematical beauty in the late 1940s, when he dismissed the renormalised theory of photons and electrons on the grounds that it was too ugly. He was, however, unable to use his principle constructively, to build new theories. It could therefore be argued that Dirac's passion for beauty was to some extent destructive, but he knew no other way: he was temperamentally unable to focus on any other subject in particle physics until he had found a truly beautiful theory of electrons and photons, without the disfiguring infinities.\n\nA way out of this alleged flaw in quantum field theory arrived, tragically, just too late for him: a particularly promising, infinity-free theory of electrons and photons began to circulate among theoreticians in the autumn of 1984, as he lay dying. Michael Green, of the University of London, and John Schwarz, of Caltech, had written a crucial paper showing that string theory might be able to form the basis of a unified theory of fundamental interactions. Previously, the theory appeared to say that the weak interactions must have perfect left-right mirror symmetry, contrary to experimental evidence. By proving that the theory can naturally describe the _breaking_ of this symmetry, and by resolving other embarrassing anomalies in the theory, Green and Schwarz began a revolution. Within weeks, string theory was the hottest topic in theoretical physics. Although the theory was far from complete - it was really a collection of inchoate concepts, all in need of development - there were strong signs that it contained the seeds of an exciting new framework for giving a unified account of all the fundamental interactions, encompassing the Standard Model and Einstein's general relativity.\n\nThe new theory describes nature not in terms of point-like particles but of pieces of string, so small that if they could be aligned end to end, it would take a billion billion of them to span a single atomic nucleus. In this picture of the fundamental constituents of the universe, there is only one fundamental entity - the string - and every type of particle, including the electron and the photon, is simply an excitation of the string, analogous to a mode of vibration of a tuning fork. The mathematics of the theory is fearsome, but underneath the complexities is a modern version of John Stuart Mill's desideratum of fundamental physics: a unified description of all the fundamental interactions.\n\nWhat would surely have impressed Dirac is that modern string theory has none of the infinities he abhorred. He would have revelled in the mathematical beauty of the theory, which delights not only the physicists who use it but also many mathematicians who have mined it for new concepts. It has turned out that string theory, much like the Dirac equation, is a fertile source of purely mathematical ideas that have a value for their own sake, not just as tools to understand nature. Dirac often said that he was interested in theories only as ways of accounting for nature, but he would probably have been intrigued to see, at the heart of string theory, mathematics known as complex projective geometry, a generalisation of his favourite branch of geometry.\n\nNo one has done more to shed light on string theory than the mathematical physicist Edward Witten, at the Institute of Advanced Study. In 1981, when he was a lecturer at the Erice summer school and thirty years old, he met Dirac briefly and heard his familiar condemnation of renormalisation but chose not to follow his advice. Dirac followed Witten's work and, in 1982, wrote - in his trembling hand - to the Papal Academy, supporting Witten's nomination for a special award and describing his mathematical work as 'brilliant'. From the early 1980s, Witten's reputation among string theorists has been comparable to Dirac's among quantum theorists half a century before.\n\nWitten believes that string theory seems to be the kind of theory that Dirac had in mind when he argued that a revolution was needed to produce a new theory free of infinities so that renormalisation was not needed:\n\nIn some ways Dirac's reaction to renormalization was vindicated because the better theories he said he wanted were eventually developed, with the advent of string theory. But by far the most progress towards the new theory was made by physicists who used and studied renormalization. So you'd have to look at the outcome for Dirac as bittersweet: he was partly right, but his approach was not entirely pragmatic.\n\nIt is hard to disagree with this tactfully expressed judgement about Dirac's principled but counterproductive attitude to renormalisation. If he could have shed some of the insistence on rigour that he learned as a student of pure mathematics and been able to retain some of the pragmatism he learned when training to be an engineer, his achievement would, in all likelihood, have been even greater. Perhaps, if he had been more active in quantum field theory, it would have advanced more quickly, and modern string theory would have arrived sooner.\n\nAlthough string theory is the only strong candidate for a unified theory of the fundamental interactions, by no means all theoreticians are convinced of its value. A substantial number of physicists worry that the theory makes sense only in more than four dimensions of space-time (it is easiest to formulate in ten or even eleven dimensions). More worrying, it has received little support from experiment: string theory has yet to make a clear-cut prediction that experimenters have been able to test. These are among the key signals, several physicists have argued, that the theory is absurdly overvalued and that it would be better to pursue other avenues. One of the most vocal sceptics is the Standard-Model pioneer Martin Veltman: 'String theory is mumbo jumbo. It has nothing to do with experiment.'\n\nBut it is clear from the comments Dirac repeatedly made in his lectures on the way theoretical physics should be done that he would have disagreed with these criticisms: he would have counselled string theorists to let the theory's beauty lead them by the hand, not to worry about the lack of experimental support and not to be deterred if a few observations appear to refute it. But he would have cautioned string theorists to be modest, to keep an open mind and never to assume that they are within sight of the end of fundamental physics. If past experience is anything to go by, another revolution will follow eventually.\n\nSuch was the advice this extraordinarily unemotional man offered to his colleagues: be guided, above all, by your emotions.\n**Abbreviations in Notes**\n\nAHQP Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, multiple locations, provided by Niels Bohr Library & Archives, American Institute of Physics, College Park, Maryland., USA (<http:\/\/www.amphilsoc.org\/library\/guides\/ahqp\/>).\n\nAIP American Institute of Physics, Center for the History of Physics, Niels Bohr Library, Maryland, USA.\n\nAPS Archive of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, USA.\n\nBOD Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, UK.\n\nBRISTU Bristol University archive, UK.\n\nBRISTRO Bristol Records Office, UK.\n\nCALTECH California Institute of Technology, archive, USA.\n\nCHRIST'S Old Library, Christ's College, Cambridge University, UK.\n\nCHURCHILL Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge University, UK. DDOCS Dirac letters and papers, property of Monica Dirac.\n\nEANGLIA Tots and Quots archive, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK.\n\nFSU Paul A. M. Dirac Papers, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. All of the letters Dirac's mother wrote to him are in this archive.\n\nIAS Institute for Advanced Study, archive, USA.\n\nKING'S King's College, Cambridge; unpublished writings of J. M. Keynes.\n\nLC Library of Congress, Collections of the Manuscript Division.\n\nLINDAU Archive of Lindau meetings, Germany.\n\nNBA Niels Bohr Archive, at the Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen.\n\nPRINCETON Eugene Wigner Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, USA.\n\nROYSOC Archives of the Royal Society, London, UK.\n\nRSAS Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Center for History of Science, Stockholm.\n\nSOLVAY Archives of the Solvay Conferences, Free University of Brussels, Belgium.\n\nSTJOHN St John's College archive, Cambridge, UK.\n\nSUSSEX Crowther archive, Special Collections at the University of Sussex, UK (the university holds the copyright of the archive).\n\nTALLA Dirac archive at the Dirac Library, Florida State University, USA, <http:\/\/pepper.cpb.fsu.edu\/dirac\/diracFA(HTML)_011.htm>.\n\nUCAM University of Cambridge archive, UK.\n\nUKNATARCHI National Archives of the UK, Kew.\n\nWISC University of Madison, Wisconsin, archives, USA.\n\n1851COMM Archives of the Royal Commission of 1851, Imperial College, London, UK.\n**Notes**\n\n#  **Prologue**\n\n A version of the 'more people who prefer to speak than to listen' remark, one of Dirac's favourites, is cited by Eugene Wigner in Mehra (1973: 819).\n\n Dirac made the 'God is a mathematician' remark in his _Scientific American_ article in May 1963.\n\n The quote from Darwin is taken from Part VII of his autobiography. The words were written on 1 May 1881.\n\n The author of the quote relating to Shakespeare was the late Joe Lannutti, a leading member of the Physics Department at Florida State University when Dirac arrived. The source of the quote is Peggy Lannutti, interview 25 February 2004. Lannutti also tells the story in J. Lannutti (1987) 'Eulogy of Paul A. M. Dirac' in Taylor (1987: 44-5).\n\n This account is taken from interviews with Kurt Hofer on 21 February 2004 and 25 February 2006, and many subsequent e-mails. The account was checked in detail via e-mails on 22 September 2007. Hofer's recollections are consistent in every detail with the account given by Dirac in Salaman and Salaman (1986), in his interview, AHQP, 1 April 1962 (pp. 5-6), and in the account he gave of his early life to his friends Leopold Halpern and Nandor Bal\u00e1zs. I spoke to these former colleagues of Dirac on 18 February 2003 and 24 July 2002, respectively. Dirac's wife gives her recollections of his experiences at the dining table in her letter to Rudolf Peierls, 8 July 1986, Peierls archive, additional papers, D23 (BOD).\n\n#  **Chapter one**\n\n Letter from Andr\u00e9 Mercier to Dirac and his wife, 27 August 1963, Dirac Papers 2\/5\/10 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 5.\n\n Dirac Papers 1\/1\/5 (FSU), see also the records of the Merchant Venturers' School in BRISTRO.\n\n See, for example Jones (2000: Chapter 5).\n\n Pratten (1991: 8-14).\n\n Although Flo lived in Cornwall only briefly, she would later insist that she was not English but Cornish. Source: interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004.\n\n Flo Dirac mentions this in an undated letter to Manci Dirac, written in early February 1940 (DDOCS). By 1889, when Richard Holten was fifty, he was captain of the 547-ton _Augusta._\n\n Richard Holten was aware that official documents often name his wife as the head of the family. His sailing record is in _'They Sailed Out of the \"Mouth\"'_ by Ken and Megan Edwards, microfiche 2001, BRISTRO, FCI\/CL\/2\/3. See also Holten's Master's certificates, stored in the archives at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, UK.\n\n The details of Charles and Flo's early life together are in Charles's documents in Dirac Papers 1\/1\/8 (FSU).\n\n Louis Dirac was the illegitimate son of the recently widowed Annette Vieux, who  gave him her maiden name Giroud. Only later, when the baby's parents settled down together, did he take the surname of his father, Dirac; otherwise, his physicist grandson would have been called not Paul Dirac but Paul Giroud. Source: civil records in St Maurice, Switzerland. Louis Dirac's paeans to the beauty of the Alpine countryside are still in print, though rarely read. His poetry is published in Bioley (1903).\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 140).\n\n The pine cones are against a blue background; the leopard and clover are against a silver background (<http:\/\/www.dirac.ch\/diracwappen.html>). After the first member of the Dirac family obtained citizenship in the town of Saint Maurice, Swiss law accorded the same rights of citizenship to succeeding generations.\n\n This letter was written from Flo to Charles on 27 August 1897. This and the other extant letters from their correspondence are in Dirac Papers 1\/1\/8 (FSU). I am taking the arrival of e-mail for the UK public to be c. 1995.\n\n Felix's full name was Reginald Charles F\u00e9lix. His mother always anglicised his name, so I shall use that version of it here.\n\n The Diracs' address was 15 Monk Road, Bishopston, Bristol. The house still stands. The date of the Diracs' move are in UKNATARCHI HO\/144\/1509\/374920.\n\n The details of Dirac's birth are given in a letter from Flo to Paul and Manci, 18 December 1939, Dirac Papers, 1\/5\/1 (FSU). The description of Dirac as 'rather small' and the colour of his eyes is given in the poem 'Paul', Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/12 (FSU). Charles gave his children names used in his mother's family, the Pottiers. The origins of his children's names are as follows: Reginald Charles Felix was named after himself and after his grandfather Felix Jean Adrien Pottier; Paul Adrien Maurice's second name was that of Charles's maternal grandfather Pottier, and Maurice is probably in memory of his native town, Saint Maurice; Beatrice Isabelle Marguerite Walla's last name came from Charles's mother Julie Antoinette Walla Pottier, and she was probably named after Flo's sister Beatrice.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 18 December 1939, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/9 (FSU).\n\n _Sunday Dispatch_ , 19 November 1933 (p. 17).\n\n On 16 May 1856, the _Bristol Times and Mirror_ called the area 'the people's park' soon after the council had taken the popular step in the early 1860s of acquiring it from its owners, who included the Merchant Venturers' Society.\n\n Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 7n). The authors point out that Dirac checked the information they included about his early life.\n\n Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/12 (FSU).\n\n Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/9 (FSU).\n\n In the Dirac family archive, there is a copy of one of these postcards, marked by Charles Dirac on the back with the date 3 September 1907, presumably the date on which the photograph was taken (DDOCS).\n\n The friends were Esther and Myer Salaman, see Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69). The Salamans comment that Dirac read their account of his memories and verified them. For the earlier interview with AHQP on 4 April 1962, see p. 6.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 4 April 1962; Salaman and Salaman (1986).\n\n Dirac told his daughter Mary that his parents always denied him a glass of water at the dinner table: interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci Bal\u00e1zs, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci Bal\u00e1zs, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n The school-starting age of five was introduced in the 1870 Education Act. Dirac's mother was in the first generation to benefit from compulsory education in England. Woodhead (1989: 5).\n\n Detail about the late serving of breakfast from Manci Dirac to Gisela Dirac in August 1988 in Caslano, Ticino. Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Details of the Bishop Road School in this period are available in the Head Teacher's report, in the BRISTRO archive: 'Bishop Road School Log Book' (21131\/SC\/BIR\/L\/2\/1).\n\n The source of these comments is family photos of the Dirac brothers and data on the boys' heights obtained when they were at school (see Felix's records in Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/1, FSU). In November 1914, Felix's height was five feet four inches, and his weight was one hundred and ten pounds, whereas Paul's height was four feet ten inches and his weight was sixty-six and a half pounds. Two years earlier, when Felix had the same age as Paul in late 1914, he was about the same height as his brother but was some twenty pounds heavier.\n\n Felix's school reports (1908-12) are in Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/1 (FSU).\n\n The description of Dirac as 'a cheerful little schoolboy' is given in his mother's poem 'Paul' in Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/12 (FSU).\n\n See 'Report cards' in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/2 (FSU).\n\n Quoted in Wells (1982: 344). As an adult, Dirac did not add a letter L to the ends of words that end in the letter A, but he did have the characteristic practice among Bristolians of warmly accentuating the letter R; for example, in his pronunciation of 'universe'.\n\n Dirac's school reports are in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/2 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Flo Dirac, _Svenska Dagbladet_ , 10 December 1933.\n\n The technique, applied to engineering, became popular in Renaissance Florence. The architect 'Pipo' Brunelleschi used such drawings to help his clients visualise the buildings and artefacts and to give his assistants a set of instructions so that they could do their work in his absence.\n\n In 1853, the first report of Sir Henry Cole's Department of Practical Art urged teachers to give the students exercises that 'contain some of the choicest elements of beauty, such as elegance of line, proportion and symmetry' (minutes of the Committee of the Council of Education [1852-3], HMSO, pp. 24-6). Aesthetic recommendations like this continued unabated in reports and guides to teaching for decades. In 1905, the Government's Board of Education stressed to junior school-teachers that 'the scholar should be taught to perceive and appreciate beauty of form and colour. The feeling for beauty should be cherished, and treated as a serious school matter.' See Board of Education (1905).\n\n Gaunt (1945: Chapters 1 and 2). The Aesthetic Movement was not the first flowering of the importance of beauty in British cultural life. For example, in the eighteenth century, it was important for people of taste to refer to the concept of beauty to demonstrate that they were cultured and intellectually distinguished. See Jones (1998). In 1835, Gautier defined the essence of aestheticism in the preface to one of his novels: 'Nothing is beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need and the needs of a man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and weak nature. The most useful place in the house is the lavatory.' Quoted in Lambourne (1996: 10).\n\n Hayward (1909: 226-7).\n\n Examples of Dirac's early technical drawings are in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/2 (FSU). In one drawing, he gives an idealised image of a small building, showing two of its four vertical sides, this time taking full account of the perspective. Dirac underlines his understanding of perspective by showing that parallel lines on each side all meet at a single point in the far distance.\n\n The Government's Board of Education had recommended: 'No angular system of handwriting should be taught and all systems which sacrifice legibility and a reasonable degree of speed to supposed beauty should be eschewed,' Board of Education (1905: 69).\n\n Government report on inspection on 10-12 February 1914, reported in the log book of Bishop Road School, stored in BRISTRO: 'Bishop Road School Log Book' (21131\/SC\/BIR\/L\/2\/1).\n\n Westfall (1993: 13).\n\n Betty refers to her skating at the Coliseum rink in her letter to Dirac, 29 January 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n 'Paul', a poem by his mother, Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/12 (FSU). The relevant lines are: 'At eight years old in quiet nook \/ Alone, he stays, conning a book \/ On table high, voice strong and sweet \/ Poems of length he would repeat.'\n\n Interview with Flo Dirac in _Svenska Dagbladet_ , 10 December 1933.\n\n 'Recollections of the Merchant Venturers', 5 November 1980, Dirac Papers 2\/16\/4 (FSU).\n\n Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69).\n\n Dirac's scholarship covered his expenses at his next school, rising from \u00a38 in the first year (1914-15) to \u00a315 in the final year (1917-18). BRISTRO, records of the Bishop Road School, 21131\/EC\/Mgt\/Sch\/1\/1.\n\n Winstone (1972) contains dozens of photographs of Bristol during the period 1900-14.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 14 February 2004.\n\n Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/6 (FSU). The lectures were held at the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, where Dirac would later study.\n\n Testimony of H. C. Pratt, who attended Bishop Road School from 1907 to 1912, to Richard Dalitz in the mid-1980s.\n\n#  **Chapter two**\n\n Words by H. D. Hamilton (School Captain, 1911-13). This is the second verse of the song.\n\n Lyes (n.d.: 5).\n\n Pratten (1991: 13).\n\n The following recollections were given to Richard Dalitz. Leslie Phillips attended the Merchant Venturer's School from 1915 to 1919. Some of Charles's codes are extant in Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/5 (FSU). In 1980, Dirac described his father's reputation in Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/4 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n These comics, named after the 'penny stinker' (a cheap and nasty cigar), first became popular in the 1860s and were still popular in Dirac's youth. They were widely frowned upon for their lack of seriousness.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Bryder (1988: 1 and 23). See also Bryder (1992: 73).\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2004.\n\n Dirac's reports when he was at the Merchant Venturers' School are in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/7 (FSU).\n\n See, for example, the reports of the Government's Department of Science and Art, from 1854, London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office.\n\n Stone and Wells (1920: 335-6).\n\n Stone and Wells (1920: 357).\n\n Stone and Wells (1920: 151).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 1.\n\n Testimony to Richard Dalitz of J. L. Griffin, one of Dirac's fellow students in the chemistry class.\n\n _Daily Herald_ , 17 February 1933, p. 1.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.\n\n Dirac remarked that he 'was very interested in the fundamental problems of nature. I would spend much time just thinking about them'. See Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 2.\n\n Dirac (1977: 11); interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, pp. 2-3.\n\n Wells (1895: 4).\n\n See, for example, Monica Dirac, 'My Father', in Baer and Belyaev (2003).\n\n Pratten (1991: 24).\n\n Dirac (1977: 112).\n\n Testimony of Leslie Roy Phillips (fellow pupil with Dirac at Merchant Venturers' School, 1915-19) given to Richard Dalitz in the 1980s.\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/4 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.\n\n Later, Dirac received more books as prizes at the Merchant Venturers' School, including _Decisive Battles of the World_ and Jules Verne's _Michael Strogoff_ , an adventure story set in tsarist Russia. Some of the books Dirac won for school prizes at the Merchant Venturers' School are stored in the Dirac Library at Florida State University. Other information about Dirac's reading choices is from his niece Christine Teszler.\n\n Letter from Edith Williams to Dirac, 15 November 1952, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/8 (FSU).\n\n From Merchant Venturers' School yearbooks 1919, BRISTRO 40659, 1.\n\n Stone and Wells (1920: 360).\n\n In the spring of 1921, Dirac planned the planting of vegetables on what looks like a geometric drawing of the garden in 6 Julius Road, with some annotations by his father. The plan, dated 24 April 1921, is in Dirac Papers, 1\/8\/24 (FSU).\n\n The Bishopston local Norman Jones told Richard Dalitz in the mid-1980s that his most vivid memory of Charles was 'seeing him always carrying an umbrella, struggling up the hill, often with his daughter, of whom he was very fond', interviews with Richard Dalitz, private communication.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962. Felix's reports when he was at the Merchant Venturers' School are in Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/4 (FSU).\n\n Quoted in Holroyd (1988: 81-3).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003; interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.\n\n The Merchant Venturers' School used the facilities during the day, and the college used them during the evening.\n\n See Felix's university papers in Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/8 (FSU); the scholarships are recorded in BRISTRO 21131\/EC\/Mgt\/sch\/1\/1.\n\n Dirac took the qualifying examinations for the University of Bristol in 1917, three years earlier than most other applicants. He then spent a year studying advanced mathematics and finally qualified in 'physics, chemistry, mechanics, geometrical and mechanical drawing and additional mathematics', enabling him to take a degree in any technical subject. See Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/13 (FSU); details of Dirac's matriculation are also in a letter to him from his friend Herbert Wiltshire, 10 February 1952, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/7 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 7.\n\n Interview with Flo Dirac, _Svenska Dagbladet_ , 10 December 1933.\n\n#  **Chapter three**\n\n Stone and Wells (1920: 371-2).\n\n _Bristol Times and Mirror_ , 12 November 1918, p. 3.\n\n 'Recollections of Bristol University', Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/3 (FSU).\n\n Lyes (n.d.: 29). At the Dolphin Street picture house, for example, Fatty Arbuckle starred in _The Butcher Boy._\n\n Quoted in Sinclair (1986).\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/3 (FSU).\n\n The list of textbooks that Dirac studied as an engineering student is in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/13 and 1\/12\/1 (FSU).\n\n BRISTU, papers of Charles Frank. '[N]ot the faintest idea' is the testimony of Mr S. Holmes, a lecturer in electrical engineering, given to G. H. Rawcliffe, who, in turn, passed it to Charles Frank on 3 May 1973.\n\n Papers of Sir Charles Frank, BRISTU. 'Even as an engineering student, he spent much time reading in the Physics Library,' wrote Frank in a note in 1973.\n\n The college had classes on Saturday mornings as well as during weekdays (as was traditional, Wednesday afternoons were usually free for sporting activities). Information on Dirac at the Merchant Venturers' College is in the college's Year Books (BRISTRO 40659\/1). Dirac's student number was 1429.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Wiltshire, 4 May 1952, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/7 (FSU). The first two names of Wiltshire, known to most people as Charlie, were Herbert Charles.\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/3 (FSU).\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/3 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Leslie Warne, 30 November 2004.\n\n Records of the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, BRISTRO.\n\n The photograph shows the visit of the University Engineering Society's visit to Messrs. Douglas' Works, Kingswood, 11 March 1919, Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/13 (FSU).\n\n 'Miscellaneous collection, FH Dirac', September 1915, Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/2 (FSU).\n\n Testimony to Richard Dalitz by E. B. Cook, who taught with Charles from 1918 to 1925.\n\n Testimony to Richard Dalitz by W. H. Bullock, who joined the Cotham Road School staff in 1925 and was later Charles's successor as Head of the French Department.\n\n Charles Dirac's letter is reproduced in Michelet (1988: 93).\n\n See Charles Dirac's Certificate of Naturalization, Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/3 (FSU). The papers concerning Charles Dirac's application for British citizenship are in UKNATARCHI HO\/144\/1509\/374920.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 6.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Wiltshire, 10 February 1952, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/7 (FSU).\n\n Dirac (1977: 110).\n\n Sponsel (2002: 463).\n\n Dirac (1977: 110).\n\n Five shillings (25 pence) secured a copy of _Easy Lessons in Einstein_ by Dr E. L. Slosson, a guinea (\u00a31.05) _The Reign of Relativity_ by Viscount Haldane.\n\n Eddington (1918: 35-9).\n\n Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/14 (FSU).\n\n Testimonies of Dr J. L. Griffin, Dr Leslie Roy Phillips and E. G. Armstead, provided to Richard Dalitz.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, undated but written at the beginning of his sojourn in Rugby, c. 1 August 1920, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/1 (FSU).\n\n _Rugby and Kineton Advertiser_ , 20 August 1920.\n\n Letters to Dirac from his mother, August and September 1920, especially 30 August and 15 September (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 7.\n\n Letter from G. H. Rawcliffe, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Bristol to Professor Frank on 3 May 1973. BRISTU, archive of Charles Frank.\n\n Broad (1923: 3).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 4 and 7.\n\n Schilpp (1959: 54-5). I have replaced Broad's archaic term 'latches' with 'laces'.\n\n Broad (1923: 154). This book is based on the course of lectures that Broad gave to Dirac and his colleagues. Broad prepared all his lectures meticulously and wrote them out in advance, making it easy for him to publish them. What we read in this book is therefore likely to be the material that Broad presented to Dirac.\n\n Broad (1923: 486).\n\n Broad (1923: 31).\n\n Dirac (1977: 120).\n\n Dirac (1977: 111).\n\n Schultz (2003: Chapters 18 and 19).\n\n Galison (2003: 238).\n\n Skorupski (1988).\n\n Mill (1892). His most important comments about the nature of science are in Book 2 and in Book 3 (Chapter 21).\n\n Dirac (1977: 111).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 6.\n\n See <http:\/\/www.uh.edu\/engines\/epi426.htm> (accessed 27 May 2008).\n\n Nahin (1987: 27, n. 23). Heaviside never completed his autobiography.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 4. Another example of the kind of neat tricks that engineers use and that Dirac read about as an engineering student is featured in the appendix to one of his set textbooks (Thom\u00e4len, 1907).\n\n The two books that Dirac used to study stress diagrams were Popplewell (1907) (see especially Chapter 5) and Morley (1919) (see especially Chapter 6).\n\n Dirac (1977: 113).\n\n The 'spoilsport' taught Dirac in the autumn of 1920. Dirac's reports are in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/16 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 13. Dirac's lack of a qualification in Latin was not a bar to his admission to postgraduate study at Cambridge, but it would have made him ineligible to study there as an undergraduate.\n\n Warwick (2003: 406 n.); Vint (1956).\n\n Letter from Charles Dirac, 7 February 1921, STJOHN.\n\n Dirac took the examination on 16 June 1921. The examination papers are in Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/11 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to the authorities at St John's College, 13 August 1921, STJOHN.\n\n Boys Smith (1983: 23). A much higher estimate of the amount needed to live as a student in Cambridge at the time is given in Howarth (1978: 66): about \u00a3300.\n\n Letter from Charles Dirac, 22 September 1921, STJOHN.\n\n Unsigned letter from St John's College to Charles Dirac, 27 September 1921, STJOHN. The signatory concludes his letter: 'Perhaps before deciding [what to do] you would be so kind as to let me know the sum total of means that he would have at his disposal, I could then better advise what he can do.'\n\n#  **Chapter four**\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 9.\n\n Recollections of Dirac's first term in the mathematics class are from the testimony of E. G. Armstead in a letter to Richard Dalitz. The lecturer concerned was Horace Todd.\n\n Dirac (1977: 113); interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 10.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 3.\n\n It is likely that Dirac learned this subject from _Projective Geometry_ by G. B. Matthews (1914), published by Longmans, Green and Co. This book apparently meant a lot to him as it was one of the few books from his youth that he kept until his death. His copy is kept in his private library, stored in the Dirac Library, Florida State University.\n\n Dirac studied four courses in pure mathematics: 'Geometry of Conics; Differential Geometry of Plane Curves', 'Algebra and Trigonometry; Differential and Integral Calculus', 'Analytical Projective Geometry of Conics' and 'Differential Equations, Solid Geometry'. See Bristol University's prospectus for 1922-3, BRISTU.\n\n Dirac studied four courses in applied mathematics: 'Elementary Dynamics of a Particle and of Rigid Bodies', 'Graphical and Analytical Statics; Hydrostatics', 'Dynamics of a Particle and of Rigid Bodies' and 'Elementary Theory of Potential with Applications to Electricity and Magnetism'. See Bristol University's prospectus for 1922-3, BRISTU.\n\n Testimony of Norman Jones (who attended the Merchant Venturers' School from 1921 to 1925) to Richard Dalitz in the 1980s. Private communication from Dalitz.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 8, and 6 May 1963, p. 10.\n\n The inclusion of the lectures on special relativity can be deduced from the presence of examination questions on the subject. See Dirac Papers, 1\/10\/15 and 1\/10\/15A (FSU).\n\n The term 'non-commuting' was introduced by Dirac later in the 1920s.\n\n Cahan (1989: 10-24); Farmelo (2002a: 7-12).\n\n Letter from Hass\u00e9 to Cunningham, 22 March 1923, STJOHN.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 14. During Dirac's first visit to Cambridge, he had met Cunningham.\n\n Warwick (2003: 466, 467, 468, 493 and 495).\n\n Stanley (2007: 148); see also Cunningham (1970: 70), STJOHN.\n\n Letter from Ebenezer Cunningham to Ronald Hass\u00e9, 16 May 1923, and letter from Dirac to James Wordie, 21 July 1923, STJOHN. The grant from the Department of Science and Industrial Research was technically a maintenance allowance for research. Wordie became Dirac's tutor in his early years in Cambridge. Postcard from Dirac to his parents, 25 October 1926 (DDOCS).\n\n Dirac often spoke to close friends of the significance of this gesture by his father. Among those to attest to this: Kurt Hofer in an interview on 21 February 2004, Leopold Halpern in an interview in February 2006 and Nandor Bal\u00e1zs in an interview on 24 July 2002.\n\n#  **Chapter five**\n\n Gray (1925: 184-5).\n\n Boys Smith (1983: 10).\n\n See contemporary issues of the Cambridge students' magazine _The Granta_ ; for example, the poem 'The Proctor on the Granta', 19 October 1923.\n\n Boys Smith (1983: 20).\n\n Dirac kept the lodging accounts for the digs where he stayed as a student. See Dirac Papers, 1\/9\/10 (FSU). Dirac's landlady at 7 Victoria Road was Miss Josephine Brown, and he resided with her from October 1923 to March 1924. From April to June 1924, he stayed at 1 Milton Road. In his final postgraduate year, he lived at 55 Alpha Road.\n\n College records attest that he took his meals there: his bill for food in college during his first term was \u00a38 17s 0d, about the same as other students who ate there (STJOHN). The bill from Miss Brown includes no charges at all for either 'cooking' or 'food supplied'.\n\n From documents in STJOHN. A typical example of a menu that Dirac would have been offered is the following, served on 18 December 1920: 'Hare soup \/ Boiled mutton \/ Potatoes, mashed turnips, carrots au beurre \/ Pancakes \/ Ginger mould \/ Hot and cold pie \/ Anchovy eggs'. He will not have gone hungry.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003. Dirac's words were 'give myself courage'.\n\n Interview with John Crook, 1 May 2003.\n\n Boys Smith (1983: 7).\n\n See contemporary issues of the Cambridge students' magazine _The Granta._\n\n Werskey (1978: 23).\n\n Snow (1960: 245). See also Dirac (1977: 117).\n\n Needham (1976: 34).\n\n Stanley (2007: Chapter 3), especially pp. 121-3; Earman and Glymour (1980: 84-5).\n\n Hoyle (1994: 146).\n\n de Bruyne, N. in Hendry (1984: 87).\n\n This description is taken mainly from Snow (1960), and from Cathcart (2004: 223).\n\n Wilson (1983: 573).\n\n Oliphant (1972: 38).\n\n Mott (1986: 20-2); Hendry (1984: 126).\n\n Oliphant (1972: 52-3).\n\n Carl Gustav Jung introduced the words 'extrovert' and 'introvert' into the English language in 1923.\n\n 'Naval diary, 1914-18. Midshipman', by Patrick Blackett, pp. 80-1. Text kindly supplied by Giovanna Blackett.\n\n Nye (2004: 18, 24-5).\n\n Boag et al. (1990: 36-7); Shoenberg (1985: 328-9).\n\n Boag et al. (1990: 34).\n\n Chukovsky's first book, _Crocodile_ , was published in 1917. I am indebted to Alexei Kojevnikov for this information. Chadwick later recalled Kapitza's first explanation of the nickname: when discussing his work with Rutherford, Kapitza was always afraid of having his head bitten off. (Chadwick papers, II 2\/1 CHURCHILL). Chadwick dismissed other explanations (e.g. Boag et al. 1990:11).\n\n Letter from Keynes to his wife Lydia, 31 October 1925, Keynes archive, JMK\/PP\/45\/ 190\/3\/14 to JMK\/PP\/45\/190\/3\/16 (KING'S \u00a9 2008).\n\n Spruch (1979: 37-8); Gardiner (1988: 240). See also _The Cambridge Review_ , 7 March 1942; Boag et al. (1990: 30-7).\n\n Parry (1968: 113).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to V. M. Molotov, 7 May 1935, translated in Boag et al. (1990: 322).\n\n See Hughes (2003), Section 1.\n\n Childs, W., Scotland Yard, to Chief Constable, Cambridge, 18 May 1923, KV 2\/777, UKNATARCHI.\n\n Werskey (1978: 92); Brown (2005: 26, 40).\n\n I am grateful to Maurice Goldhaber for his recollections of the meetings of the Kapitza Club, moderated by Kapitza, in 1933 and the first two terms of 1934.\n\n Blackett (1955).\n\n Postcard from Dirac, 16 August 1925 (DDOCS).\n\n See, for example, letters to Dirac from his mother, 26 October and 16 November 1925, 2 June 1926, 7 April 1927: Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/5 and 1\/3\/6 (FSU).\n\n Ramsay MacDonald's Labour Government was a minority one, whose survival depended on support from at least one of the other two parties. This partly explains the Government's moderate agenda.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 9 February 1924, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/3 (FSU).\n\n In one letter, c. 1924, Felix requests a weekly wage of \u00a32 10s 0d. Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/3 (FSU).\n\n The spelling of the Reverend's name is not completely clear. His letters to Felix, including one dated 25 September 1923 and another dated 21 September, are in Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/6 (FSU). I am grateful to Peter Harvey for his advice on the theosophy of Felix's correspondent and to Russell Webb for pointing out the tone of the Reverend's letters, from the point of view of a follower of Eastern philosophy.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, pp. 5-6.\n\n Cunningham (1970: 65-6).\n\n Description of Compton is from the article 'Compton Sees a New Epoch in Science', _New York Times_ , 13 March 1932.\n\n Einstein (1949), in Schilpp (1949: 47).\n\n Hodge (1956: 53). Details of Dirac's early mathematical and scientific influences in Cambridge are in the final section of Darrigol (1992).\n\n Cunningham, E., 'Obituary of Henry Baker', _The Eagle_ , 57: 81. Dirac (1977: 115-16).\n\n _Edinburgh Mathematical Notes_ , 41, May 1957.\n\n Quoted in Darrigol (1992: 299-300).\n\n Moore (1903: 201); Baldwin (1990: 129-30). Moore's conception of the role of art in relation to morality is prefigured in Hegel and thence by his successors. Moore adapts this position to the utilitarian scheme that he took over from the Victorian thinker Henry Sidgwick. John Stuart Mill anticipates Moore through the conception of the great value of the 'higher' pleasures.\n\n As Budd describes Kant's conception of the experience of beauty, it was 'the facilitated play of imagination and understanding, mutually quickened (and so made pleasurable) by their reciprocal harmony' (2002: 32).\n\n Boag et al. (1990: 133).\n\n Letter from Einstein to Heinrich Zangger, 26 November 1915.\n\n This, and all of Dirac's publications until the end of 1948, is reproduced in Dalitz (1995).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 7 May 1963, p. 7.\n\n Orwell (1946: 10).\n\n#  **Chapter six**\n\n Reference for Dirac by Cunningham, April 1925, provided for Dirac's application for a Senior Studentship, 1851COMM.\n\n Undated to Dirac from his mother, c. May 1924.\n\n Dirac was in room H7 on the first floor of New Court in Michaelmas (autumn) term. Later, he moved into other rooms: in Lent (winter) and Easter term 1925, he was in New Court room E12; from Michaelmas term in 1927 to Easter term 1930, he was in New Court room A4; in Michaelmas term in 1930, he was in Second Court room C4; from Michaelmas term 1936 to Michaelmas 1937, he was in New Court room I10.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Max Newman, 13 January 1935, Newman archive in STJOHN.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, undated, c. November 1924, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/3 (FSU).\n\n Letter from 'Technical Manager' (unnamed) at W & T Avery Ltd, 10 January 1925, Dirac Papers, 1\/6\/3 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 5; Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69). I am assuming that the date of Felix's death on his gravestone, 5 March 1925, is correct; on his death certificate, the date of his death is given as the day after.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his Auntie Nell, 9 March 1925, Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/1 (FSU).\n\n _Express and Star_ (local paper in Much Wenlock), 9 March 1925; _Bristol Evening News_ , 27 March 1925.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003; interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003. In an interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003, Halpern commented that Dirac found the suicide of Felix too painful to talk about.\n\n _Bristol Evening News_ , 9 March 1925.\n\n _Bristol Evening News_ , 10 March 1925.\n\n Dirac often remarked on this. His feelings are recorded in Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69). His close friend Leopold Halpern also mentioned that Dirac had mentioned this to him, quite independently (interview on 18 February 2002).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 May 1925, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/4 (FSU). Dirac always mentioned this when he opened his heart to friends and even mentioned it to his children.\n\n Flo wrote her poem 'In Memoriam. To Felix' on 5 March 1938. The poem is in Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/12 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 22 March 1925, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/4 (FSU).\n\n Death certificate of Felix Dirac, registered 30 March 1925.\n\n Interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004.\n\n The problem that Dirac addressed was: if light consists of photons, as Compton had argued, how would these particles be affected by collisions with electrons swirling around on the surface of the Sun?\n\n Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 96).\n\n Dirac (1977: 118).\n\n C. F. Weizs\u00e4cher, in French and Kennedy (1985: 183-4).\n\n Pais (1967: 222). Pais gives a vivid description of Bohr's strange oratory, noting 'Bohr's precept never to speak more clearly than one thinks.'\n\n Letters from Bohr to Rutherford, 24 March 1924 and 12 July 1924, UCAM Rutherford archive.\n\n Elsasser (1978: 40-1).\n\n In his AHQP interview on 1 April 1962 (p. 9) and in an interview on 26 June 1961 (Van der Waerden 1968: 41), Dirac says he was not present, whereas elsewhere he says he was there (Dirac 1977: 119).\n\n Heisenberg recalls his experience at the Kapitza Club, and of staying with the Fowlers, in the BBC _Horizon_ programme 'Lindau', reference 72\/2\/5\/6025. The recording was made on 28 June 1965, in Dirac's presence.\n\n The application is held by the 1851COMM.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, with a contribution from his father, June 1925, in Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/4 (FSU). The application was advertised in the _Times Higher Education Supplement_ , his mother says.\n\n This proof copy is in Dirac Papers, 2\/14\/1 (FSU).\n\n An English translation of this paper, together with other key papers in the early history of quantum mechanics, are reprinted in Van der Waerden (1967).\n\n Dirac (1977: 119).\n\n Interview with Flo Dirac, _Stockholms Dagblad_ , 10 December 1933 _._\n\n Darrigol (1992: 291-7).\n\n Dirac (1977: 121).\n\n Letter from Albert Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, 20 September 1925, in Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 276).\n\n Dirac (1977: 121-5).\n\n Dirac (1977: 122).\n\n Here, X and Y are mathematical expressions of a type known as partial differentials. What is important is the superficial similarity between the form of the Poisson bracket and the difference AB - BA.\n\n Eddington (1928: 210).\n\n Elsasser (1978: 41).\n\n Reference for Dirac, written by Fowler in April 1925, for the Royal Commission of the Exhibition of 1851, 1851COMM.\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 147). The student was Robert Schlapp, who was studying under the veteran Sir Joseph Larmor.\n\n Van der Waerden (1960).\n\n Letters from Oppenheimer to Francis Fergusson, 1 November and 15 November 1925; in Smith and Weiner (1980: 86-9).\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 44).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 16 November 1925 (she repeats the image of 'the block of ice' in another letter to Dirac, written on 24 November), Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/4 (FSU).\n\n Heisenberg later remarked that when he read Dirac's first paper on quantum mechanics, he assumed that its author was a leading mathematician (BBC _Horizon_ programme, 'Lindau', reference 72\/2\/5\/6025).\n\n Frenkel (1966: 93).\n\n Born (1978: 226).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Heisenberg, 23 November 1925, Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/1 (FSU).\n\n All these letters from Heisenberg to Dirac at this time are in Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/1 (FSU).\n\n Beller (1999: Chapter 1); see also Farmelo (2002a: 25-6).\n\n#  **Chapter seven**\n\n Letter from Einstein to Michel Besso, 25 December 1925, quoted in Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 276).\n\n Letter from Einstein to Ehrenfest, 12 February 1926, quoted in Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 276).\n\n Bokulich (2004).\n\n Dirac (1977: 129).\n\n Slater (1975: 42).\n\n Jeffreys (1987).\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 46).\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 18 November 1963, p. 18.\n\n 'The Cambridge Review', 'Topics of the Week' on 14 March and 12 May 1926.\n\n Letters to Dirac from his mother, 16 March 1926 and 5 May 1926, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/5 (FSU).\n\n Morgan et al. (2007: 83); Annan (1992: 179-80); Brown (2005: 40 and Chapter 6); Werskey (1978: 93-5).\n\n Quoted in Brown (2005: 75).\n\n Wilson (1983: 564-5).\n\n Morgan et al. (2007: 84).\n\n Morgan et al. (2007: 80-90).\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/2 (FSU).\n\n This description follows the one given by Kapitza of his Ph.D. graduation ceremony three years before, when the proceedings were the same. See Boag et al. (1990: 168-9).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 28 June 1926, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/5 (FSU).\n\n The Cambridge newspapers reported a wave of heat deaths in July. See the _Cambridge Daily News_ , 15 August 1926, the hottest day in the town for three years.\n\n Dirac had carefully studied a derivation of the radiation spectrum produced by the previously unknown Satyendra Bose, a student in Calcutta. No one had understood quite why his derivation worked. Einstein developed Bose's ideas to produce a theory that is now named after both men.\n\n Postcard from Dirac to his parents, 27 July 1926, DDOCS.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Fermi, Dirac Papers 2\/1\/3 (FSU).\n\n Greenspan (2005: 135); Sch\u00fccking (1999: 26).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 2 October 1926, Dirac Papers 1\/3\/6.\n\n Mott (1986: 42).\n\n#  **Chapter eight**\n\n Wheeler (1998: 128-9). On 24 April 1932, Jim Crowther wrote of hearing a similar anecdote from Bohr over afternoon tea (Book I of Crowther's notes from his meeting with Bohr, pp. 99-100 [SUSSEX]).\n\n Book I of Crowther's notes from his meeting with Bohr, 24 April 1932, pp. 96-101, SUSSEX. See also the article on Dirac by John Charap in _The Listener_ , 14 September 1972, pp. 331-2.\n\n Book I of Crowther's notes from his meeting with Bohr, p. 99, SUSSEX.\n\n Dirac (1977: 134).\n\n Bohr's words ( _Nicht um zu kritisieren aber nur um zu lernen_ ) are quoted in Dirac (1977: 136).\n\n Postcard from Dirac to his parents, 1 October 1926 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to James Wordie, 10 December 1926, STJOHN; Dirac (1977: 139).\n\n The phrase 'liked the sound of his own voice' is taken from the letter John Slater wrote to John Van Vleck on 27 July 1924, John Clarke Slater papers APS. See also Cassidy (1992: 109).\n\n Crowther notes, p. 99, SUSSEX.\n\n The wave is what is known mathematically as a complex function, which means that the wave at any point has two parts: one real, the other imaginary. The 'size' of the wave at any point, related to both parts, is called its modulus. According to Born, the probability of detecting the quantum in a tiny region near a point is related to the _square_ of the modulus of the wave.\n\n Pais (1986: 260-1).\n\n Heisenberg (1967: 103-4).\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963.\n\n Weisskopf (1990: 71).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 14 May 1963, p. 9.\n\n Garff (2005: 308-16, 428-31).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 3 May 2006.\n\n Quoted in Garff (2005: 311); interview with Dirac, AHQP, 14 May 1963, p. 9.\n\n M\u00f8ller (1963).\n\n Dirac had also seen the need for the function when he was studying Eddington's _The Mathematical Theory of Relativity_ (1923). On page 190, Eddington uses non-rigorous mathematics, and he drew attention to this in a footnote, which Dirac read. This was an example of the case where the delta function is needed to make some sense of a scientific equation which would otherwise be mathematically unintelligible. See interview with Dirac, AHQP, 14 May 1963, p. 4.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 4.\n\n Heaviside (1899: Sections 238-42).\n\n L\u00fctzen (2003: 473, 479-81).\n\n Interview with Heisenberg, AHQP, 19 February 1963, p. 9.\n\n Dirac (1962), report of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, KFKI-1977-62.\n\n Letter from Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest, 23 August 1926, see Pais (1982: 441).\n\n Dirac mentioned this in a press release issued by Florida State University on 24 November 1970; Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/9 (FSU).\n\n Letters to Dirac from his mother, 19 November, 26 November, 2 December, 9 December 1926, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/6 (FSU).\n\n It is possible that Charles wrote other letters to Dirac. If so, Dirac did not keep them - uncharacteristically, as he appears to have kept most of his family correspondence. Moreover, the frequent letters from Dirac's mother often send messages from his father, indicating that his father was communicating to his son via her, a common arrangement in family correspondence of this type.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his father, 22 December 1926, Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 25 December 1926, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/6 (FSU).\n\n Mehra (1973: 428-9).\n\n Postcard from Dirac to his parents, 10 January 1927, DDOCS.\n\n Slater (1975: 135).\n\n Elsasser (1978: 91).\n\n Born (2005: 88).\n\n 'The deepest thinker': Dirac (1977: 134).\n\n 'The most remarkable scientific mind . . .': Crowther notes, p. 21, SUSSEX. The 'logical genius' comment is in the interview with Bohr, AHQP, 17 November 1962, p. 10.\n\n Both quotes from the Crowther notes, p. 97, SUSSEX.\n\n 'PAM Dirac and the Discovery of Quantum Mechanics', Cornell colloquium, 20 January 2003, available at <http:\/\/arxiv.org\/PS_cache\/quant-ph\/pdf\/0302\/0302041v1.pdf> (accessed 24 September 2007).\n\n#  **Chapter nine**\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 62).\n\n Bernstein (2004: 23).\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 65).\n\n The address of the Carios' home was Giesmarlandstrasse 1. See interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963, p. 4.\n\n Michalka and Niedhart (1980: 118).\n\n Frenkel (1966: 93).\n\n Interview with Gustav Born, 6 April 2005.\n\n Frenkel (1966: 93).\n\n Weisskopf (1990: 40).\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 56, 58).\n\n See Frenkel (1966: 94) for a reference to the practice of Mensur in G\u00f6ttingen. See also Peierls (1985: 148).\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963, p. 6.\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963, p. 11.\n\n Delbr\u00fcck, M. (1972) 'Homo Scientificus According to Beckett', available at <http:\/\/www.ini.unizh.ch\/~tobi\/fun\/max\/delbruckHomoScientificusBecket1972.pdf>, p. 135 (accessed 13 May 2008).\n\n Greenspan (2005: 144-6).\n\n Elsasser (1978: 71-2).\n\n Letter from Raymond Birge to John Van Vleck, 10 March 1927, APS.\n\n Elsasser (1978: 51).\n\n Frenkel (1966: 96).\n\n Delbr\u00fcck (1972: 135).\n\n Wigner (1992: 88).\n\n Mill's comment is in Mill (1873: Chapter 2).\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963, p. 11.\n\n During his time in G\u00f6ttingen, Dirac successfully applied his theory to the light emitted by atoms when they make quantum jumps, apparently after discussions with Bohr. See Weisskopf (1990: 42-4).\n\n Letter from Pauli to Heisenberg, 19 October 1926, reprinted in Hermann et al. (1979). See also Beller (1999: 65-6); Cassidy (1992: 226-46).\n\n Heisenberg (1971: 62-3).\n\n Heisenberg demonstrated that the principle also applied to energy and time and to other pairs of quantities known technically as 'canonically conjugate variables'.\n\n This was a popular walk with students. See, for example, Frenkel (1966: 92). On 5 April 1927, Dirac referred to the walk in a postcard of the path to his parents (DDOCS).\n\n Lecture by Dirac, 20 October 1976, 'Heisenberg's Influence on Physics': Dirac Papers, 2\/29\/19 (FSU); see also the interview with Dirac, AHQP, 14 May 1963, p. 10.\n\n See the article on complementarity in French and Kennedy (1985), e.g. Jones, R.V. 'Complementarity as a Way of Life', pp. 320-4; see also the illustration of Bohr's coat of arms, p. 224.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 10 May 1969, p. 9.\n\n Eddington (1928: 211). This book is an overview of the latest ideas in physics based on a series of lectures he gave between January and March 1927.\n\n Eddington (1928: 209-10).\n\n Dirac (1977: 114).\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/28\/35 (FSU). The seminar took place on 30 October 1972. See Farmelo (2005: 323).\n\n#  **Chapter ten**\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963, p. 5.\n\n Greenspan (2005: 137).\n\n Goodchild (1985: 20). Even if Dirac did not write these words, he agreed with their sentiment; see interview with von Weizs\u00e4cher, AHQP, 9 June 1963, p. 19.\n\n Dirac (1977: 139); Greenspan (2005: 141).\n\n Greenspan (2005: 142), and von Meyenn and Sch\u00fccking (2001: 46). The student was Otto Heckmann. Boys Smith's comment is from a conversation with his former colleague at St John's College, Cambridge, Peter Goddard, 5 July 2006.\n\n Information on scholarship from Angela Kenny, archivist, Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 (e-mail, 10 December 2007).\n\n Letter from Dirac to James Wordie, 28 February 1927, STJOHN.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 28 June 1928, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/8 (FSU).\n\n Greenspan (2005: 145).\n\n Greenspan (2005: 146).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 7 April 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 20 May 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 6 January 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 10 February 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 20 May 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, _c_. 26 March 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Flo enjoyed the company of several men in her classes and even put Dirac in touch with one of them, a German-speaking insurance clerk Mr Montgomery ('Monty'). Letter to Dirac from his mother, 18 March 1927, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n These recollections were given to Richard Dalitz in the 1980s.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci Bal\u00e1zs, 7 April 1935, DDOCS.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci Bal\u00e1zs, 17 June 1936, DDOCS.\n\n Their address was 173 Huntingdon Road. Fen (1976: 161); Boag et al. (1990: 78).\n\n The conference was held at L'Institut de Physiology Solvay au Parc L\u00e9opold, from 24 to 29 October 1927.\n\n Letter from John Lennard-Jones (of Bristol University) to Charles L\u00e9fubure (Solvay official), 9 March 1928, SOLVAY.\n\n See <http:\/\/www.maxborn.net\/index.php?page=filmnews> (accessed 13 May 2008).\n\n Heisenberg (1971: 82-8); interview with Heisenberg, AHQP, 27 February 1963, p. 9. The location of the hotel is specified in a letter to Dirac from the conference administrator on 3 October 1927: Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/4 (FSU).\n\n Dirac (1982a: 84).\n\n Interview with Heisenberg, AHQP, 27 February 1963, p. 9.\n\n Heisenberg (1971: 85-6).\n\n In the early 1850s, the _Punch_ humorist Douglas Jerrold quipped about the controversial feminist writer Harriet Martineau, 'There is no God, and Harriet Martineau is her prophet.' See A. N. Wilson (2002), _The Victorians_ , London: Hutchinson, p. 167.\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/26\/3 (FSU).\n\n Dirac (1977: 140).\n\n Dirac (1977: 141).\n\n#  **Chapter eleven**\n\n Menu from College records, STJOHN.\n\n Crowther (1970: 39) and Charap (1972).\n\n Interviews with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 15; 7 May 1963, pp. 7-8.\n\n Dirac gave contradictory accounts of the goal he was pursuing at that time. In one account, he stated that he was seeking the answer to the question 'How could one get a satisfactory relativistic theory of the electron?' (Dirac 1977: 141). In another account, he says that 'my dominating interest was to get a satisfactory relativistic theory of a particle, of the simplest possible kind, which was presumably a spinless particle.' Dirac wrote the latter words on a single sheet of paper headed 'Sommerfeld Atombau un Spektralinen II 539.18' in Dirac Papers, 2\/22\/15 (FSU). I prefer to use the 1977 account as it is the nearest thing we have to a carefully prepared history of Dirac's thinking in his own hand.\n\n Farmelo (2002a: 133).\n\n See the notes for Dirac's lectures in the 1970s and 1980s: 2\/28\/18-2\/29\/52 (FSU).\n\n Huxley's 1870 Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Huxley (1894). Dirac uses similar words: 'The originator of a new idea is always rather scared that some development may happen which will kill it' (1977: 143).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 7 May 1963, p. 14; Dirac (1977: 143).\n\n Letter from Darwin to Bohr, 26 December 1927 (AHQP).\n\n Interview with Rosenfeld, AHQP, 1 July 1963, pp. 22-3.\n\n Mehra (1973: 320).\n\n The talented young physicist Rudolf Peierls remarked that, even after a few days studying the equation, 'I have begun to have an inkling of what it deals with, but I haven't understood a single word.' Letter from Peierls to Hans Bethe, 4 May 1924, quoted in Lee (2007b: 33-4).\n\n _Florida State University Bulletin_ , 3 (3), 1 February 1978.\n\n Slater (1975: 145).\n\n Postcard from Darwin to Dirac, 30 October 1929, Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/9 (FSU).\n\n Dirac gave courses on quantum mechanics in the Michaelmas and Lent terms of 1927-8 and was paid \u00a3100 for the pair: see the letter from the Secretary to the Faculty of Mathematics, 16 June 1927, Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/4 (FSU).\n\n Crowther later affirmed that he had left the Communist Party by 1950, but it is not clear when he left it. I thank Allan Jones for this information.\n\n Clipping, annotated by Charles Dirac, in Dirac Papers, 1\/12\/5 (FSU).\n\n _The Times_ , 5 October 1931, p. 21. This well-briefed article was written by a journalist who appears to have succeeded in persuading Dirac to speak about his work.\n\n 'Mulling over the Universe with Paul Dirac', interview by Andy Lindstrom, _Tallahassee Democrat_ , 15 May 1983.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 26 January 1928, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/8 (FSU). See also postcard from Dirac to his parents, 1 February 1928 (DDOCS).\n\n See the entry for Bishop Whitehead in _Crockford's Clerical Dictionary_ , 1947, p. 1,416. See also Billington Harper (2000: 115-26, 129-33, 293-5). The quoted description of Mrs Whitehead is on p. 145. I thank Oliver Whitehead and the late David Whitehead, grandsons of Isabel Whitehead, for the information in the description of Isabel Whitehead's home.\n\n#  **Chapter twelve**\n\n Kojevnikov (1993: 7-8).\n\n Peierls (1985: 62-3).\n\n Kojevnikov (2004: 64-5).\n\n Letter from Tamm to his wife, 4 March 1928, in Kojevnikov (1993: 7).\n\n 'The tulip fields are all in flower now': postcard from Dirac to his parents, 29 April 1928 (DDOCS). '[Leiden] is below sea level and there are nearly as many canals as streets': postcard from Dirac to his parents, 29 June 1927 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Tamm to his wife, undated, Kojevnikov (1993: 8).\n\n Casimir (1983: 72-3).\n\n Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 128).\n\n Letter from Heisenberg to Pauli, 31 July 1928, in Kronig and Weisskopf (1964).\n\n Peierls (1987: 35). In this account, Peierls remembers going to the theatre, but it seems from his letter to Dirac of 14 September 1928 (Lee [2007: 50]) that they went to the opera. I am grateful to Professor Olaf Breidbach for his comments on early twentieth-century Prussian politesse.\n\n Born (1978: 240) and Greenspan (2005: 151-3).\n\n Sch\u00fccking (1999: 27).\n\n Bohr nicknamed Gamow 'Joe' after the standard name for cowboys in western movies, which Bohr especially liked (interview with Igor Gamow, 3 May 2004). See also Reines (1972: 289-99; see pp. 280); Mott (1986: 28).\n\n The only exception is the paper that Dirac co-authored with Rutherford's student J. W. Harding, 'Photoelectric Absorption in Hydrogen-Like Atoms', in January 1932.\n\n Gamow (1970: 14).\n\n Wigner (1992: 9-15).\n\n Letter from Gabriel Dirac to Manci Dirac, 5 September 1940: 'It may interest you to know that everybody (Prof [Max] Born, Morris [Pryce] and Daddy [Paul Dirac]) says that Johnny von Neumann is the world's best mathematician' (DDOCS).\n\n Fermi (1968: 53-9).\n\n Wigner (1992: 37-43).\n\n Interview with Pat Wigner, 12 July 2005.\n\n Dirac wrote to his parents on 18 July 1928: 'The woods here are full of fireflies in the evening. I have been to the top of the Harz mountains' (DDOCS).\n\n Dirac's wife would later write to him: 'It seems the beautiful scenery has the same effect on you as a beautiful book has on me', 12 August 1938 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 12 July 1928, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/8 (FSU).\n\n Sinclair (1986: 32-3).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 4 October 1928, Kojevnikov (1993: 10). The conference lasted from 5 August to 20 August.\n\n Brendon (2000: 241).\n\n Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69). In this article, Dirac is quoted as giving 1927 as the date of the experience; this is impossible as he did not visit Russia that year.\n\n He first took a boat to Constantinople (renamed Istanbul in the following year), then sailed on to Marseilles via Athens and Naples, before travelling across France and then home. He planned to arrive in Bristol on Monday, 10 September (letter from Dirac to his parents, 8 September 1928, DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 28 October 1928, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/8 (FSU). A copy of the speech is in this file of the archive.\n\n In mid-December, Dirac read a paper by Klein showing that the Dirac equation predicted that if a beam of electrons is fired at a barrier, more electrons will be reflected than were present in the original beam. It was as if a tennis ball struck a player's racket and not one but several balls flew off it.\n\n Howarth (1978: 156).\n\n _Cambridge Review_ , 29 November 1929, pp. 153-4. See also the rhapsodic review in the _Times Literary Supplement_ , 24 October 1929.\n\n Draft letter to Dirac from L. J. Mordell, 4 July 1928, Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/7 (FSU).\n\n Mott (1986: 42-3).\n\n Letter from Jeffreys to Dirac, 14 March 1929, Dirac Papers, 2\/1\/8 (FSU).\n\n St John's awarded Dirac a praelectorship in mathematical physics, which enabled him to devote himself entirely to research, apart from the presentation of his lecture course.\n\n#  **Chapter thirteen**\n\n Letter from Dirac to Oswald Veblen, 21 March 1929, LC, Veblen archive.\n\n Scott Fitzgerald (1931: 459).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Veblen, 21 March 1929, LC (Veblen archive).\n\n Diaries of Dirac (DDOCS).\n\n Fellows (1985); see the introduction (p. 4) and the conclusion.\n\n Comment made by Bohr to Crowther, recorded by Crowther on 24 April 1932 in the Crowther archive, SUSSEX, Book II of his notebooks, pp. 96-7. For one of many retellings of this anecdote, see Infeld (1941: 171).\n\n See the article on Roundy in the _Wisconsin State Journal_ on the day after his death, on 10 December 1971.\n\n The article is reproduced in its entirety in Kragh (1990: 72-3). The original is in Dirac Papers, 2\/30\/1 (FSU).\n\n A check of the microfilm records of the _Wisconsin State Journal_ reveals that the article was not published between 1 April and 29 May 1929 (the microfilm for 30 May is missing).\n\n Van Vleck (1972: 7-16; see pp. 10-11).\n\n Record of Dirac's payment as 'Lecturer in physics April and May 1929' is in WISC. Early in his stay, from 10-16 April, Dirac had spent almost a week based at the University of Iowa.\n\n Dirac left Madison on 27 May and travelled to the Grand Canyon via Minneapolis, Kansas City and Winslow, Arizona.\n\n Quoted in Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 134). This article gives much detail about Dirac and Heisenberg's preparations for their 1929 trip and the trip itself.\n\n Mehra (1973: 816).\n\n Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 136-7).\n\n Interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.\n\n Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 139-41).\n\n Heisenberg returned from the 1929 trip to be the best ping-pong player in the quantum community: interview with von Weisz\u00e4cher, AHQP, 9 July 1963, p. 11.\n\n Mehra (1973: 816).\n\n Mehra (1972: 17-59).\n\n The _jako_ was commonly used to scent clothes in Japan at that time. Hearn (1896: 31n).\n\n Dirac gives his timetable in his letter to Tamm on 12 September 1929, Kojevnikov (1993: 29); Brendon (2000: 234).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 6 July 1929, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/11 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 6 May 1929, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/10 (FSU).\n\n Postcards from Dirac to his parents, autumn 1929, DDOCS.\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, 20 November 1963, p. 23 (AHQP).\n\n Fitzgerald (1931: 459).\n\n Dirac (1977: 144).\n\n Kojevnikov (2004: 56-9).\n\n Pais, A. (1998: 36).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 9 December 1929, NBA.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 11 October 1929, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/10 (FSU). The spelling is the one used by Flo Dirac. Dirac expected to arrive home on 19 December (postcard from Dirac to his parents, 27 November 1929, DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 26 February 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n#  **Chapter fourteen**\n\n Cavendish Laboratory Archive, UCAM. The poem was apparently written as a Valentine's card to the electron.\n\n Dirac, 'Symmetry in the Atomic World', January 1955. The draft, which features this analogy, is in Dirac Papers, 2\/27\/13 (FSU).\n\n Cited in Kragh (1990: 101).\n\n Gamow (1970: 70); letter from Dirac to Tamm, 20 March 1930, in Kojevnikov (1993: 39).\n\n On Saturday, 16 February 1935, Van Vleck took D to 'A Disney Day' at a cinema in Boston. The documents, marked with Van Vleck's comment 'Dirac loved Mickey Mouse', are in the Van Vleck papers at AMS.\n\n Dirac's formula is _n_ = - log2 [log2 (2\u221a(\u221a . . . \u221a2))], where the ellipsis (. . .) denotes the taking of _n_ square roots. The story is related in Casimir (1984: 74-5), where the author asserts that Dirac killed the game using only three 2s. Each symbol in the formula is very common in mathematics, so Dirac's solution is within the rules of the game.\n\n Postcard from Dirac to his parents, 20 February 1930 (DDOCS).\n\n Telegram to Dirac from his mother, 22 February 1930, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/12 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 24 February 1930, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/12 (FSU).\n\n The certificate of Dirac's election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society is available on the Society's website. The names of the 447 Fellows of the Society on 31 December 1929 are given in the Yearbook of the Royal Society 1931.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 24 February 1930, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/12 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Hass\u00e9 to Dirac, 28 February 1930, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/1 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Arnold Hitchings to the _Bristol Evening Post_ , 14 December 1979.\n\n In 1935, Dirac traded in this car. Dirac Papers, 1\/8\/2 (FSU).\n\n Interview with John Crook, 1 May 2003.\n\n Mott (1986: 42).\n\n Dirac was well known for this practice. It is described explicitly by his climbing tutor Tamm in the course of the letter to his wife on 27 May 1931, Kojevnikov (1993: 55). See also Mott (1972: 2).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003; see also M. Dirac (2003: 42).\n\n Letter from Taylor Sen (1986: 80). Howarth (1978: 104).\n\n See, for example, _Daily Telegraph_ , 12 February 1930, _Manchester Guardian_ , 12-18 February 1930.\n\n Peierls (1987: 36).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 12 June 1930, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/12 (FSU).\n\n Kojevnikov (1993: 40), note on letter from Dirac to Tamm, 6 July 1930.\n\n The _Guardian_ , 'World Conference of Scientists', 3 September 1930. Crowther was probably the author of this report.\n\n Ross (1962).\n\n The venue and the time of the talk are in the records of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, BOD.\n\n Delbr\u00fcck (1972: 280-1).\n\n The report of the Science News Service is in Dirac Papers, 2\/26\/8 (FSU).\n\n _New York Times_ , 10 September 1932.\n\n I have translated the German word _quatsch_ as 'crap'. Another, similar version of this anecdote is given in the interview with Guido Beck, AHQP, 22 April 1967, p. 23.\n\n Among the most able students who were dissatisfied by Dirac's talks was Freeman Dyson, who recalls: 'I read Dirac's book hoping to learn quantum mechanics from it, and found it totally unsatisfactory.' E-mail from Dyson, 19 August 2006.\n\n _Nature_ , Vol. 127, 9 May 1931, p. 699.\n\n Pauli's review is in Kronig and Weisskopf (1964: 1,397-8).\n\n Einstein (1931: 73).\n\n Leisure reading anecdote: Woolf (1980: 261); 'Where's my Dirac?' anecdote is from _Tallahasse Democrat_ , 29 November 1970.\n\n Hoyle (1994: 238).\n\n Freeman (1991: 136-7).\n\n Quoted in Charap (1972: 331).\n\n Letter from Tamm to Dirac, 13 September 1930, in Kojevnikov (1993: 43).\n\n Einstein (1931: 73).\n\n Comment made by Einstein on his arrival in New York on 11 December 1930, reported in the _LA Times_ , 12 December 1930, p. 1.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Tamm, 29 December 1930, Kojevnikov (1993: 48-9).\n\n Letter from Kemble to Garrett Birkhoff, 3 March 1933 (AHQP).\n\n Dirac attended the dinner on 17 December 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/79\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to his mother, 16 December 1921, in Boag et al. (1990: 138-9).\n\n Da Costa Andrade (1964: 48).\n\n Da Costa Andrade (1964: 162).\n\n Records of the Cavendish dinners (CAV 7\/1) 1930, p. 10 (UCAM).\n\n Records of the Cavendish dinners (CAV 7\/1) 1930, p. 10 (UCAM).\n\n Snow (1931).\n\n Snow (1934). Dirac features in the book, and some of his opinions also appear, unattributed. See Snow (1934: 97-8 and 178-83).\n\n Letter from Chandrasekhar to his father, 10 October 1930, quoted in Miller (2005: 96).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 8 November 1930, Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/13 (FSU).\n\n#  **Chapter fifteen**\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 27 April 1931, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/1 (FSU). Dirac appears to have left Bristol on 15 April (postcard from Dirac to his parents, 15 April 1931, DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Van Vleck, 24 April 1931, AHQP.\n\n Kapitza Club, 21 July 1931. See the Kapitza Club notebook in CHURCHILL.\n\n Dirac (1982: 604); Dirac (1978).\n\n The size of the force between two attracting monopoles separated by a millionth of a millimetre - roughly the distance between the electron and the proton in a hydrogen atom - is about a ten-thousandth of the weight of a medium-sized apple.\n\n Heilbron (1979: 87-96).\n\n Sherlock Holmes used these words in the novel _The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier_ (1926), and used extremely similar words in several other stories.\n\n The phrase 'theorist's theorist' is often applied to Dirac. See, for example, Galison (2000).\n\n Tamm arrived in Cambridge on 9 May and left on 25 June.\n\n Fen (1976: 181).\n\n Crowther (1970: 103).\n\n Letter from Tamm to his wife, undated c. May 1931, in Kojevnikov (1993: 54).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Tamm, 18 May 1931, in Kojevnikov (1993: 54-5).\n\n Werskey (1978: 92).\n\n Annan (1992: 181).\n\n James Bell (1896-1975) was one of Scotland's leading climbers and was fascinated by the Soviet Union. He stayed in contact with Dirac for decades.\n\n Wersley (1978: 138-49).\n\n Bukharin (1931).\n\n Brown (2005: 107).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Tamm, 11 July 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n Home Office Warrant 4081, 27 January 1931, KV 2\/777, UKNATARCHI.\n\n Postcard from Dirac to his parents, 13 July 1931 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 8 July 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n The most direct comment on this from Dirac was reported by his mother in her letter to Betty from Stockholm in December 1933: '[Dirac] says it is awful and time we made an improvement.' In her letters to Dirac, she often mentions the disrepair of the family home.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 19 July 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 20 July 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n Postcard from Flo to Betty Dirac, 1 August 1931: 'Having a sea voyage with Paul. The weather is fine and it is lovely. Back 6.35am Sunday. Hope you are both looking after each other' (DDOCS).\n\n The area was officially named the Glacier National Park only in the following year.\n\n Robertson (1985).\n\n The furniture budget was $26,000; the budget for rugs was nearly $8,000. Batterson (2007: 612). Fine Hall is now called Jones Hall.\n\n Jacobson, N., 'Recollections of Princeton' in Robertson (1985).\n\n Letter from Pauli to Peierls, 29 September 1931, in Hermann et al. (1979).\n\n Enz (2002: 224-5).\n\n _New York Times_ , 17 June 1931.\n\n Pais (1986: 313-17).\n\n Brown (1978).\n\n Enz (2002: 211).\n\n 'Lectures on Quantum Mechanics', Princeton University, October 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/26\/15 (FSU). These notes were transcribed by Banesh Hoffman and checked by Dirac.\n\n 'Dr Millikan Gets Medal', _New York Times_ , 5 September 1928.\n\n Kevles (1971: 180); Galison (1987: Chapter 3, pp. 86-7).\n\n Interview with Robert Oppenheimer, AHQP, 18 November 1963, p. 16.\n\n De Maria and Russo (1985: 247, 251-6).\n\n Letter from Anderson to Millikan, 3 November 1931, quoted in De Maria and Russo (1985: 243). In this letter, Anderson describes data taken over the previous 'very few days'.\n\n Interview with Carl Anderson, 11 January 1979, p. 34, available at <http:\/\/oralhistories.library.caltech.edu\/89> (accessed 13 May 2008), p. 34.\n\n De Maria and Russo (1985: 243).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Martin Charlesworth, 16 October 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU). Charlesworth was Dirac's personal tutor during his postgraduate years and was evidently fond of him. Later, on 19 March 1935, he wrote a letter to Dirac 'to send my [i.e. his] love' - a remarkably forward phrase in that cultural milieu, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/1 (FSU).\n\n Batterson (2006: Chapter 5).\n\n Brendon (2000: Chapter 4).\n\n _New York Times_ , 14 June 1931.\n\n Letter from Gamow to Dirac, written in June 1965, Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/13 (FSU). See also Gamow (1970: 99).\n\n Gorelik and Frenkel (1994: 20-2). See also Kojevnikov (2004: 76).\n\n Gorelik and Frenkel (1994: 50-1). Gamow gives a partially inaccurate account of this incident in his autobiography (1970).\n\n The first Soviet edition is discussed in detail in Dalitz (1995), which includes a translation of the prefaces to the book.\n\n Ivanenko had ensured that the book had been translated with no changes, but the Russian edition does include an additional chapter on applying quantum mechanics to practical problems. It is not clear whether Dirac added the section as a result of ideological pressure.\n\n Greenspan (2005: 161).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 21 January 1932, in Kojevnikov (1993: 60). Dirac was learning the branches of mathematics known as group theory and differential geometry.\n\n Interview with Oppenheimer, AHQP, 20 November 1963, p. 1.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 9 October 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, dated 28\/31 September 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 22 December 1931, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/4 (FSU).\n\n Brown (1997: Chapter 6).\n\n Cathcart (2004: 210-12); Chadwick (1984: 42-5).\n\n Brown (1997: 106).\n\n#  **Chapter sixteen**\n\n Eddington made this remark in Leicester, at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science: 'Star Birth Sudden Lema\u00eetre Asserts', _New York Times_ , 12 September 1933.\n\n An English translation of the play, by Gamow's wife Barbara, is given in Gamow (1966: 165-218). For comments on the production: von Meyenn (1985: 308-13).\n\n Wheeler (1985: 224).\n\n Crowther (1970: 100).\n\n Letter from Darwin to Goudsmit, 12 December 1932, APS.\n\n Interview with Beck, AHQP, 22 April 1967, p. 23.\n\n Interview with Klein, AHQP, 28 February 1963, p. 18. Klein recalled that 'Heisenberg once told me that when Dirac got the Nobel Prize some years later - in 1933 - he asked Dirac if he believed in his own theory. Dirac answered, in his very precise way, that a year before the positive electron was discovered he had ceased to believe in the theory' (interview with Klein, AHQP, 28 February 1963, p. 18).\n\n Cathcart (2004: Chapters 12 and 13).\n\n _Reynolds's Illustrated News_ , 1 May 1932.\n\n _Daily Mirror_ , 3 May 1932.\n\n Cathcart (2004: 252). Einstein's lecture took place on 6 May; see the _Cambridge Review_ , 13 May 1932, p. 382.\n\n Howarth (1978: 187).\n\n Howarth (1978: 224).\n\n Report in _Sunday Dispatch_ on 19 November 1933.\n\n Interview with von Weizs\u00e4cher, AHQP, 9 June 1963, p. 19.\n\n Note from P. H. Winfield to Dirac, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/5 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Sir Joseph Larmor to Terrot Reaveley Glover (1869-1943), the classical scholar and historian, 20 February 1934, STJOHN.\n\n Infeld (1941: 170).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 27 July 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his sister, 14 October 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his sister, 11 July 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his sister, 15 October 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 21 April 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU). See also the letter of 1 June 1932.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his father, Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/10 (FSU).\n\n The paper combined several parts, one mostly from Dirac, the other mostly from Fock and Podolsky, and also a part that developed during the process of writing in correspondence between the three authors. One snapshot of the collaboration is in the letter written to Dirac by Podolsky in Kharkov on 16 November 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU). I thank Alexei Kojevnikov for this information.\n\n Weisskopf (1990: 72-3).\n\n Infeld (1941: 172).\n\n Article in the _Los Angeles Times_ by Harry Carr, 30 July 1932.\n\n For more detail on the discovery of the anti-electron, see Anderson (1983: 139-40), and Darrow (1934).\n\n Interview with Louis Alvarez by Charles Weiner, 14-15 February 1967, American Institute of Physics, p. 10.\n\n Von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n (1967: 150).\n\n Von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n (1967: 150).\n\n Interview with Carl Anderson, 11 January 1979, available online at <http:\/\/oralhistories.library.caltech.edu\/89> (accessed 13 May 2008).\n\n Galison (1987: 90).\n\n _New York Times_ , 2 October 1932.\n\n Letter from Robert Oppenheimer to Frank Oppenheimer, autumn 1932, in Smith and Weiner (1980: 159).\n\n Nye (2004: 54). The incident, recalled by Blackett's student Frank Champion, probably took place during the 1931-2 academic year. I am grateful to Mary Jo Nye for this information.\n\n See <http:\/\/www.aps-pub.com\/proceedings\/1462\/207.pdf> (accessed 13 May 2008).\n\n De Maria and Russo (1985: 254).\n\n Contribution of Occhialini to the Memorial Meeting for Lord Blackett, _Notes and Records of the Royal Society_ , 29 (2) (1975).\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 167). The anecdote is due to Maurice Pryce.\n\n Dirac's notes on Fowler's lectures on 'Analytic Dynamics' are in Dirac Papers, 2\/32\/1 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Fock, 11 November 1932, passed to me by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Greenspan (2005: 170).\n\n _Bristol Evening Post_ , 28 October 1932.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 26 October 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 9 January 1933, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/8 (FSU).\n\n#  **Chapter seventeen**\n\n IAS Archives Faculty Series, Box 32, Folder: 'Veblen, 1933'.\n\n De Maria and Russo (1985: 266 and 266 n.). Anderson's paper had been available in the university library from the mid-autumn of 1932.\n\n Archie Clow, contributing to Radio 3 programme _Science and Society in the Thirties_ (1965). Script stored in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.\n\n Sch\u00fccking (1999: 27).\n\n Interview with L\u00e9on Rosenfeld, AHQP, 22 July 1963, p. 8.\n\n Halpern (1988: 467).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Isabel Whitehead, 20 July 1932, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/6 (FSU).\n\n Taylor Sen (1986).\n\n Dirac, book review in the _Cambridge Review_ , 6 February 1931.\n\n Interview with von Weizs\u00e4cher, AHQP, 9 June 1963, p. 19.\n\n Private papers of Mary Dirac. Dirac wrote the notes on 17 January 1933.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Isabel Whitehead, 6 December 1936, STJOHN.\n\n Compte remarked that 'The greatest problem, then, is to raise social feeling by artificial effort to the position which in the natural condition is held by selfish feeling.' See <http:\/\/www.blupete.com\/Literature\/Biographies\/Philosophy\/Comte.htm> (accessed 14 May 2008).\n\n The headquarters of the Royal Society were then at Burlington House.\n\n Bertha Swirles, Dirac's former student colleague, described the talk as 'sensational' in her letter of 20 February 1933 to Dirac's colleague Douglas Hartree. Hartree archive, 157, CHRIST'S.\n\n Dirac was giving a technical talk at the London Mathematical Society on his favourite topic, 'The Relation Between Classical and Quantum Mechanics', at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House, Dirac Papers, 2\/26\/18 (FSU).\n\n The word was used in the 15 March issue of the _Physical Review._\n\n Quoted in Pais (1986: 363).\n\n Interview with von Weizs\u00e4cher, AHQP, 9 July 1963, p. 14.\n\n Letter from Tamm to Dirac, 5 June 1933, in Kojevnikov (1996: 64-5).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 14 May 1963, p. 31.\n\n Letter from Pauli to Dirac, 1 May 1933, see Pais (1986: 360).\n\n Galison (1994: 96).\n\n Darrow (1934: 14).\n\n Roqu\u00e9 (1997: 89-91).\n\n Brown and Hoddeson (1983: 141).\n\n Blackett (1955: 16).\n\n Gell-Mann (1994: 179).\n\n See the lecture Dirac gave in Leningrad on 27 September 1933 (Dalitz 1995: 721), Dirac's Nobel Prize lecture in December 1933 and most of Dirac's subsequent lectures on the positron.\n\n Blackett (1969: xxxvii).\n\n Gottfried (2002: 117).\n\n Bohr's support was sought by Kapitza. See the correspondence quoted in Kedrov (1984: 63-7).\n\n The quote from Rutherford is from Kapitza's letter to Bohr of 10 March 1933, quoted in Kedrov (1984: 63-4).\n\n Anon., 'Conservatism and the Young', _Cambridge Review_ , 28 April 1933, pp. 353-4.\n\n The debate was held on 21 February 1933 and was reported in the _Cambridge Evening News_ on the following day. See also Howarth (1978: 224-5).\n\n Anon (1935); essay by Blackett (based on a radio broadcast in March 1934), pp. 129-44, see p. 130.\n\n Werskey (1978: 168).\n\n Werskey (1978: 148).\n\n The _Cambridge Review_ , 20 January 1933. The article alerted the Cambridge University community to the reservations expressed by the translators of Dirac's book into Russian.\n\n Anon. (1933) 'The End of a Political Delusion', _Cambridge Left_ , 1 (1): 10-15; p. 12.\n\n _Daily Herald_ , 15 September 1933, p. 10. McGucken (1984: 40-1).\n\n Letters to Dirac from his mother, 20 July and 22 July 1933, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/3 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 8 August 1933, Dirac Papers 1\/4\/3 (FSU).\n\n Postcards from Dirac to his mother, from September 1933 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 19 June 1933, in Kojevnikov (1993: 67); see also the letter from Tamm to Dirac on 5 June 1933 (Kojevnikov 1993: 64).\n\n Interview with Beck, AHQP, 22 April 1967, APS, p. 23.\n\n The mansion was awarded to Bohr in December 1931, whereupon Bohr and his family moved in during the summer of 1932. The Bohrs' first sleeping-over guests were Ernest Rutherford and his wife, who stayed there from 12 September to 22 September 1932. I thank Finn Aaserud and Felicity Pors for this information.\n\n Parry (1968: 117).\n\n Casimir (1983: 73-4). Letter from Dirac to Margrethe Bohr, 24 September 1933, NBA.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Margrethe Bohr, 24 September 1933, NBA.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 20 August 1933, NBA.\n\n Fitzpatrick (1999: 40-1).\n\n Conquest (1986: Epilogue).\n\n M. Dirac (1987: 4).\n\n Anne Kox, 'Een kwikkolom in de Westertoren: De Amsterdamse natuurkunde in de jaren dertig', available online at <http:\/\/soliton.science.uva.nl\/~kox\/jaarboek.html> (14 May 2008).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 28 September 1933, NBA.\n\n Letter from Margrethe Bohr to Dirac, 3 October 1933, NBA.\n\n Letter from Ehrenfest to Bohr, Einstein and the physicists James Franck, Gustave Herglotz, Abram Joff\u00e9, Philipp Kohnstamm and Richard Tolman, 14 August 1933, NBA. Another suicide note, written on the day before Ehrenfest killed himself was unearthed in 2008: see _Physics Today_ , June 2008, p. 26-7.\n\n Roqu\u00e9 (1997: 101-2).\n\n Letter from Heisenberg to Pauli, 6 February 1934, in Hermann et al. (1979).\n\n Dirac mentioned his surprise to a reporter from the _Daily Mirror._ See the article on 13 November 1933.\n\n Taylor (1987: 37).\n\n The youngest experimenter to win the prize was, and remains, Lawrence Bragg, who won it when he was twenty-five. Dirac's record as the youngest theoretician to win the prize was broken (by a margin of three months) in 1957 by T. D. Lee.\n\n Reports on 10 November 1933 included the _Daily Mail_ , _Daily Telegraph_ , _Manchester Guardian_ ; the _Daily Mirror_ reported on the following day.\n\n _Sunday Dispatch_ , 19 November 1933.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 28 November 1933, NBA.\n\n Greenspan (2005: 242). Maurice Goldhaber remembers that when he remarked that Dirac's award was 'great news', Born scowled. Interview with Maurice Goldhaber, 5 July 2006.\n\n _Cambridge Review_ , 17 November 1933; Brown (2005: 120). See also Stansky and Abrahams (1966: 210-13). A few days before the march, a few socialists and pacifists clashed with audiences leaving the Cambridge cinema Tivoli, after an evening showing of the patriotic movie _Our Fighting Navy._ The fight was the talk of the town and therefore guaranteed interest in the Armistice Day march.\n\n#  **Chapter eighteen**\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 146).\n\n Information from RSAS, 14 September 2004.\n\n The main sources of the material in this chapter are in the Dirac Papers (FSU): Letter to Dirac from his mother, 21 November 1933 (2\/2\/9). Florence Dirac's account of her trip is in 'My visit to Stockholm' (1\/2\/9) and in a long, descriptive letter to Betty (2\/2\/9).\n\n Reports in _Svenska Dagbladet_ and _Dagens Nyheter_ , both on 9 December 1933.\n\n This was one of Dirac's favourite stories about his absent-minded mother. It is well recounted in Kur\u015funo\u011flu (1987: 18).\n\n Reports in the Stockholm newspapers _Nya Dagligt Allehanda_ , 9 December 1933, _Stockholms Dagblad_ , 10 December 1933.\n\n Reports in the Stockholm newspapers _Nya Dagligt Allehanda_ , 9 December 1933, _Stockholms Dagblad_ , 10 December 1933.\n\n Report in _Dagens Nyheter_ , 11 December 1933.\n\n _Dagens Nyheter_ , 11 December 1933; _Svenska Dagbladet_ , 11 December 1933.\n\n Women guests were first invited to the banquet in 1909, when the female Swedish wirter Selma Lagerl\u00f6f won the Nobel Prize for Literature.\n\n _Dagens Nyheter_ , 11 December 1933; _Svenska Dagbladet_ , 11 December 1933; _Stockholms Tidningen_ , 11 December 1933.\n\n See <http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/physics\/laureates\/1933\/dirac-speech.html> (accessed 14 May 2008).\n\n Annemarie Schr\u00f6dinger notes 'Stockholm 1933', AHQP. Letter from Schr\u00f6dinger to Dirac, 24 December 1933.\n\n I thank Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta for identifying this error and clarifying its nature.\n\n Flo Dirac, Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/9 (FSU) and 2\/2\/9 (FSU).\n\n See <http:\/\/nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/physics\/laureates\/1933\/dirac-lecture.html> (accessed 14 May 2008).\n\n Schuster (1898a: 367); see also Schuster's follow-up article (1898b).\n\n Born (1978: 270). See also 'Eamon de Valera, Erwin Schr\u00f6dinger and the Dublin Institute' (McCrea 1987).\n\n Flo Dirac, Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/9 (FSU) and 2\/2\/9 (FSU).\n\n Dirac read Abraham Pais's book _Subtle is the Lord_ , and remarked 'Most interesting for its revelation of the working of Nobel Committee', Dirac Papers, 2\/32\/12 (FSU). The book mentions that Einstein did not nominate Dirac for a Nobel Prize.\n\n Nobel Committee papers, 1929 RSAS.\n\n Apart from Bragg, only the comparatively little-known Polish physicist Czeslaw Bialobrzeski nominated Dirac in 1933. No other leading theorist had nominated him.\n\n#  **Chapter nineteen**\n\n Letter from Pauli to Heisenberg, 14 June 1934, reprinted in Hermann et al. (1979).\n\n Schweber (1994: 128-9).\n\n Letters from Oppenheimer to George Uhlenbeck, March 1934 and to Frank Oppenheimer, 4 June 1934, in Kimball Smith and Weiner (1980: 175, 181).\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 8, Salam and Wigner (1972: 3-4). See also Peierls (1985: 112-13).\n\n Letter from Rutherford to Fermi, AHQP, 23 April 1934.\n\n 'Peter Kapitza', 22 June 34, KV 2\/777, UKNATARCHI.\n\n 'Note on interview between Captain Liddell and Sir Frank Smith of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Old Queen Street', 26 September 1934, KV 2\/777. Jeffrey Hughes speculates that 'VSO' might be the Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9 I. P. Shirov (Hughes 2003).\n\n Born (1978: 269-70).\n\n I am grateful to Igor Gamow for making available home movies, shot in the 1920s, which show his mother dressed in this way.\n\n The correspondence between Dirac and Rho Gamow is in Dirac Papers, 2\/13\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Rho Gamow, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/10 (FSU).\n\n Conversation with Lydia Jackson's literary executor Rosemary Davidson, 8 January 2006.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 20 March 1934, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/10 (FSU).\n\n Fen (1976: 182).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 25 June 1934, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 5 February 1936, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/3 (FSU).\n\n Van Vleck (1972: 12-14).\n\n The visitor was his sister Manci. M. Dirac (1987: 3-8; see p. 3).\n\n The account of Dirac's early courtship of Manci is taken mainly from M. Dirac (1987).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Van Vleck, June 1936, Dirac Papers, 2\/2\/11 (FSU).\n\n Dirac was living at 8 Morven Street. See the Dirac archive in IAS (1935).\n\n Quoted in Jerome and Taylor (2005: 11).\n\n Jerome and Taylor (2005: Chapters 2 and 5).\n\n Blackwood (1997: 11).\n\n Testimonies of Malcolm Robertson and Robert Walker, 'The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s', available at <http:\/\/www34.homepage.villanova.edu\/robert.jantzen\/princeton_math\/pm02.htm> (accessed 14 May 2008).\n\n The _Physical Review_ received the paper on 25 March 1935: Pais (1982: 454-7).\n\n Blackwood (1997: 15-16).\n\n Infeld (1941: 170).\n\n See 'The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s', in particular the interviews of Merrill Flood, of Robert Walker and of William Duren, Nathan Jacobson and Edward McShane.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Max Newman, 17 March 1935, Newman archive STJOHN.\n\n Dirac alludes to his memories of ice-cream sodas and lobster dinners with Manci in his letters to her of 2 May and 25 May 1935 respectively (DDOCS).\n\n Manci was divorced from Richard Bal\u00e1zs on 20 September 1932. See Budapest's archive of marriages, microfilm repository no A555, Inventory no 9643, Roll no 155. These papers tell us that Manci married Bal\u00e1zs on 27 February 1924.\n\n Manci told her friend Lily Harish-Chandra of these relationships. Interview with Lily Harish-Chandra, 4 August 2006.\n\n Wigner (1992: 34, 38-9).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n M. Dirac (1987: 4-5).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Anna Kapitza, dated beginning December 1937, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Hendry (1984: 130).\n\n A detailed account of Kapitza's detention is in: Internal MI5 memo, signed GML, 11 October 3KV 2\/777 (UKNATARCHI). See also the letters from Kapitza to his wife in Boag et al. (1990: Chapter 4).\n\n For a full account of Rutherford's campaign to secure Kapitza's release, see Badash (1985), notably Chapter 2. See also Kojevnikov (2004: Chapter 5).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 19 December 1934, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Dirac wrote of his vacation, without mentioning Manci, to Max Newman in a letter written on 13 January 1935 (Newman archive, STJOHN). The story of the alligator, which Gamow named Ni-Nilich, is related in letters from Dirac to Manci on 2 February, 29 March, 22 April and 2 May 1935 and in the letter from Manci to Dirac on 5 April 1935 (DDOCS). See also the letter from Gamow to Dirac, 25 March 1935, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/1 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 14 March 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Letter from Rutherford to Bohr, 28 January 1935, Rutherford archive, UCAM.\n\n Gardiner (1988: 240-8).\n\n Gardiner (1988: 241).\n\n Gardiner (1988: 242).\n\n Kragh (1996: Chapter 2).\n\n 'Lema\u00eetre Follows Two Paths to Truth', _New York Times_ , 19 February 1933.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 February 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Dirac had heard Lema\u00eetre speak at the Kapitza Club in about 1930. Dirac commented on this in a note he wrote on 1 September 1971: 'There was much discussion about the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Lema\u00eetre emphasised his opinion that he did not believe God influenced directly the cause of atomic events': Dirac Papers, 2\/79\/2 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 March 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 May 1935 (DDOCS). Schnabel gave the concert on 7 March 1935.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 10 March 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 28 March 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 29 March 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 May 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 May 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 30 May 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 4 March 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Badash (1985: 29).\n\n Badash (1985: 31).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 13 April 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 235).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 23 February 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 225).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 23 February 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 225, 226).\n\n Kojevnikov (2004: 107).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 May 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Lanouette (1992: 151); see also letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 31 May 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Letter from K. T. Compton to the Soviet Ambassador, 24 April 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 27 April 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n 'Embassy Occupied by Troyanovsky', _New York Times_ , 7 April 1934.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 27 April 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 27 April 1935.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty**\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, written from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 14 May 1935. Copy of letter held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, written in Pasadena, 31 May 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.\n\n Crease and Mann (1986: 106); Serber (1998: 35-6).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 4 June 1935 and 10 June 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 1 August 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 22 June 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Quoted in Brendon (2000: 241).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 30 July 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 251).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 August 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 30 September 1935 (DDOCS). See also Dirac, M. (1987: 6).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 22 September 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 23 October 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 9 October 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letters from Dirac to Manci, 3 October 1935 and 8 November 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 22 November 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 3 October 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n In Dirac's letter to Manci on 6 February 1937, Dirac mentions that his father owned a copy of Shaw's plays.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 15 July 1934, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/4 (FSU).\n\n Dirac's father's notebook is in Dirac Papers, 1\/1\/10 (FSU). Charles dates his first entry September 1933. The latest date he referenced was 4 November 1935, so he  probably ceased compiling the notes in early 1936.\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 146).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 August 1935, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/5 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 August 1935, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/5 (FSU).\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 155-7).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 6 December 1935, in Kojevnikov (1996: 35-6).\n\n One of the physicists who thought that Dirac was over-excited by the Shankland result was Hans Bethe, who wrote 'What has happened to him?' in a letter to Rudolf Peierls on 1 August 1936, in Lee (2007b: 152).\n\n Dirac (1936: 804).\n\n Letter from Heisenberg to Pauli, 23 May 1936, Vol. II, p. 442.\n\n Letter from Einstein to Schr\u00f6dinger, 23 March 1936, AHQP.\n\n Letter from Schr\u00f6dinger to Dirac, 29 April 1936, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/3 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Bohr to Kramers, 14 March 1936, NBA.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Blackett, 12 February 1937, Blackett archive ROYSOC.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 15 January 1936. Other details in this paragraph are in his letters to Manci of 25 January 1936, 2 February 1936 and 10 February 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Huxley (1928: 91) ('Emotionally, he was a foreigner') and p. 230 ('a mystic, a humanitarian and also a contemptuous misanthrope'). See also Huxley (1928: 90, 92-6).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 February 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 23 February 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 13 March 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letters from Dirac to Manci, 23 March 1936 and 29 April 1936, and letter to Dirac from Manci, 24 April 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 5 May 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Dirac had also fibbed to Kapitza in the previous year. Dirac makes this plain to Manci in his letter to her of 23 June 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 June 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 5 June 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Sinclair (1986: 55).\n\n A. Blunt, 'A Gentleman in Russia', and a review of Crowther's _Soviet Science_ by Charles Waddington, both in the _Cambridge Review_ , 5 June 1936.\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 7 June 1936, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letters to Dirac from his sister, 6 June, 8 June and 9 June 1936, Dirac Papers, 1\/7\/1 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 June 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 11 June 1936, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/6 (FSU).\n\n _Daily Mirror_ , 21 May 1934, p. 14. The article concluded: 'Dirac. Our great grand-children may be repeating that name when the Chaplins, Fords, Cowards and Cantors are forgotten.' Cantor is the American writer and entertainer Eddie Cantor.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 June 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, July 1936, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 27 August 1936, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/6 (FSU).\n\n Feinberg (1987: 97).\n\n Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 151).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to Rutherford, 26 April 1936, quoted in Badash (1985: 110).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Pais (1991: 411).\n\n Both preceding quotes are from the letter from Dirac to Manci, 7 October 1936 (DDOCS). Dirac commented to an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded the conference, that he was 'genuinely enthusiastic', quoted in Aaserud (1990: 223).\n\n In Dirac, M. (1987), Manci recalls that she was on the _Queen Mary_ 's maiden voyage. At that time, however, she was in Budapest.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 19 October 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Isabel Whitehead, 29 November 1936, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/4 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Isabel Whitehead, 6 December 1936, STJOHN.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Isabel Whitehead, 9 December 1936, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/4 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003. Manci often related this story of Dirac's proposal to her. The description of the car is in the letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1935 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 29 January 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 24 December 1936, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/6 (FSU).\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-one**\n\n Dirac, M. (1987: 4).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 18 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 6 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 20 February 1937 (DDOCS). Dirac writes 'How soon after the new moon comes will I be alone with my beloved, and have her in my arms [. . .]'.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 19 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 20 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 16 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letters to Dirac from Manci, 25 January and 16 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Betty, 29 January 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 29 January 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n One reading of Manci's cryptic comments in her letter to Dirac of 16 February 1937 is that his parents were sexually incompatible (DDOCS): 'Betty told me today the reason why probably your parents did not like each other. Your father could not help it, don't blame him dear, nor do [ _sic_ ] your mother.'\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 18 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 28 January 1937 (DDOCS). Dirac's 'unexpected' marriage was noted in the _Cambridge Daily News_ , 7 January 1937.\n\n Letter from Rutherford to Kapitza, 20 January 1937, in Boag et al. (1990: 300).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Kapitza, 29 January 1937, Dirac Papers 2\/3\/5 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Manci from Anna Kapitza, 17 February 1937, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/5 (FSU).\n\n Dirac's use of 'Wigner's sister' became famous in his community. Both Dirac's daughters confirm that he used this term of introduction.\n\n Manci often used this expression. See, for example, Dirac (1987: 7).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Salaman and Salaman (1996: 66-70); see p. 67.\n\n Daniel (1986: 95-6).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 19 February 1937 (DDOCS).\n\n Dirac's wish to have children appears obvious from his delighted reaction to the news  of Manci's later pregnancies.\n\n Gamow (1967: 767).\n\n Christianson (1995: 257).\n\n Dingle (1937a).\n\n Untitled supplement to _Nature_ , Vol. 139, 12 June 1937, pp. 1001-2; p. 1001.\n\n Dingle (1937b).\n\n Report on Theoretical Physics to the Institute for Advanced Study, 23 October 1937, in the IAS Archives General Series, 52, 'Physics'.\n\n Estate of Charles Dirac, prepared by Gwynn, Onslow & Soars, who prepared the document on 7 October 1936 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 21 January 1937, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/7 (FSU). See also the letter of 1 February 1937 in the same file of the archive.\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004.\n\n Kojevnikov (2004: 119).\n\n Postcard from Manci Dirac to the Veblens, 17 June 1937, LC Veblen archive.\n\n Telegram from Kapitza to Dirac, 4 June 1937, KV 2\/777, UKNATARCHI.\n\n Service (2003: 223).\n\n Fitzpatrick (1999: 194).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to Rutherford, 13 September 1937, in Boag et al. (1990: 305-6).\n\n Kojevnikov (2004: 116).\n\n Before Landau fled Kharkov, he had worked at the Ukrainian Physico-technical Institute. He was arrested on 28 April 1938 in Moscow, and Kapitza wrote to Stalin seeking his release. His letter is quoted by David Holloway (1994: 43).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Kapitza, 27 October 1937, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Kapitza, 7 November 1937, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Fowler to Dirac, 25 January 1939, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/8 (FSU).\n\n This was one of Dirac's favourite observations. See R. Dalitz, _Nature_ , 19 Vol. 278 (April) 1979.\n\n Hoyle (1992: 186).\n\n Hoyle (1994: 131).\n\n Hoyle (1994: 133).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 5 December 1938, NBA.\n\n At least two of Flo's poems were published in newspapers: 'Cambridge' appeared in the _Observer_ on Saturday, 23 July 1938, and 'Brandon Hill' was published in the local _Western Daily Press_ on Saturday, 12 March 1938.\n\n On 2 February 1938, Princeton University sent Dirac a letter offering him tenure with an annual salary of $12,000, beginning 1 October 1938, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Anna Kapitza to Manci Dirac, 9 March 1938, Dirac Papers, 1\/8\/18 (FSU).\n\n _Nature_ , 21 May 1938, No. 3577, p. 929. Schr\u00f6dinger's well-publicised letter was published in _Graz Tagepost_ , 30 March 1938. See Moore (1989: 337-8).\n\n Letters from Dirac to Manci in August 1938 (DDOCS). Wigner married Amelia Frank on 23 December 1936 in Madison, and she died on 16 August 1937. See 'The Einhorn Family', compiled by Margaret Upton (private communication).\n\n Bell wrote to Dirac on 15 March 1938: 'I had already and for a year or two reached the conclusion the Soviet trials were probably of the frame-up type. After all, that is not new. The Tom Mooney case in California in 1918 was such and the victim has been in prison ever since [. . .] also the Sacco & Vanzetti case. Moreover, we seem to do it ourselves to a great extent in India. However, the \"confession technique\" is  peculiarly Russian, on its present scale at least.' Letter to Dirac from J. H. Bell, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Moore (1989: 347); letter from Schr\u00f6dinger to Dirac, 27 November 1938, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Dirac gives these reasons in his obituary of Schr\u00f6dinger in _Nature_ , 4 February 1961, 189, p. 355-6.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Kapitza, 22 March 1938, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/7 (FSU).\n\n Howarth (1978: 234-5).\n\n _The Times_ , 6 October 1938.\n\n 'Eddington Predicts Science Will Free Vast Energy from Atom', _New York Times_ , 24 June 1930. He was speaking at the World Power Conference. He suggested that such energy could be released by arranging for particles to annihilate or to make hydrogen nuclei fuse to form a helium nucleus.\n\n Rhodes (1986: 28).\n\n Weart and Weiss Szilard (1978: 53).\n\n Weart and Weiss Szilard (1978: Chapter II).\n\n Weart and Weiss Szilard (1978: 71-2).\n\n The event took place in the Society's house, 24 George Street, beginning at 4.30 p.m. Max Born was present.\n\n Mill (1892: Book 2, Chapter 12).\n\n This quote is from the text of the lecture, _Proceedings of the Royal Society_ (Edinburgh), 59 (1938-9: 122-9); p. 123.\n\n _Granta_ , 48 (1): 100, 19 April 1939.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-two**\n\n Bowyer (1986: 51).\n\n This was one of Manci's favourite expressions about how the British treated her. Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Boys Smith (1983: 44).\n\n _Cambridge Daily News_ , 2 September 1939, p. 5.\n\n _Cambridge Daily News_ , 1 September 1939, p. 3. I am grateful to my mother, Joyce Farmelo, for her recollections of her time as an unhappy evacuee and her other wartime experiences.\n\n E-mail from Mary Dirac, 5 March 2006.\n\n 'Cambridge During the War; the Town', _Cambridge Review_ , 27 October 1945; 'Cambridge During the War; St John's College', _Cambridge Review_ , 27 April 1946. See also 'Thoughts Upon War Thought', _Cambridge Review_ , 11 October 1940.\n\n Barham (1977: 32-3).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 26 January 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Manci spent the final months of her pregnancy in the Mountfield Nursing Home in London. Information about Mary's birth from her baby book. Further clarification in an e-mail from Mary Dirac, 16 January 2006.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 20 February 1940 (DDOCS). Manci's exact words are ungrammatical: 'I never felt as much that she has nor heart nor feelings whatsoever as yesterday.'\n\n Peierls (1985: 150, 155).\n\n Rhodes (1986: 323).\n\n Facsimiles of the memos are in Hennessy (2007: 24-30).\n\n Peierls (1985: 155).\n\n The earliest extant letter about this, from Peierls to Dirac, is dated 26 October 1940, AB1\/631\/257889, UKNATARCHI.\n\n Rhodes (1986: 303-7); F\u00f6lsing (1997: 710-14).\n\n Letter to Aydelotte from Veblen and von Neumann, 23 March 1940, IAS Archives Faculty Series, Box 33, folder: 'Veblen-Aydelotte Correspondence 1932-47'. The words omitted, marked by the ellipsis, are 'There are considerable deposits of uranium available near Joachimsthal, Bohemia, as well as in Canada.'\n\n Letter to Adyelotte from Veblen, 15 March 1940: IAS Archives General Series, Box 67, folder: 'Theoretical Physics 1940 Proposals'.\n\n Cannadine (1994: 161-2).\n\n Letter from Manci to Crowther, 28 June 1941, SUSSEX.\n\n Barham (1977: 54); Bowyer (1986: 51).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 27 June 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letters to Dirac from his mother, 16 August and 31 August 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 12 May 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 21 June 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 27 August 1940 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 23 August 1940. Four days later, he wrote to her: 'I am sorry to be away from you these days, but do not think there is any real danger in Cambridge' (DDOCS).\n\n Gustav Born later recalled that Dirac on this vacation was 'a twinkling-eyed, kindly, distant man', happiest when on his own. Interview with Gustav Born, 12 February 2005.\n\n 'The ladies do the cooking, and the men take it in turns to do the washing up,' Dirac told Manci: letter, 23 August 1940 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 September 1940 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 8 September 1940 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Pryce to Dirac, 18 July 1940, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 21 January 1940 (DDOCS).\n\n Letter from Gabriel to Dirac, 30 August 1945, and another undated later in the same month, Dirac Papers, 1\/8\/12 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from his mother, 31 August 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Peierls to Oppenheimer, 16 April 1954, LC, Oppenheimer archive.\n\n The first part of this quotation is from the letter Dirac wrote to Manci on 18 December 1940; the second and third parts are from the letter he wrote to her the next day.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 22 December 1940 (DDOCS).\n\n Werskey (1978: 23); see also the foreword by C. P. Snow to Hardy (1940: 50-3).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Hardy, May 1940, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/10 (FSU).\n\n Attendance register of Tots and Quots in 1940, Zucherman archive, wartime papers, SZ\/TQ, EANGLIA.\n\n Letter from Crowther to Dirac, 15 November 1940, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/10 (FSU).\n\n Brown (2005: Chapter 9).\n\n The first letter to Dirac, from Peierls, in connection with war work is dated 26 October 1940, UKNATARCHI.\n\n Bowyer (1986: 181). Manci often spoke of Judy's role in the firefighting (e-mail from Mary Dirac, 23 April 2006). Manci refers to an earlier near-miss on 15 February 1941 in her letter to Crowther on 17 February 1941, SUSSEX.\n\n Dirac often referred to Crowther as 'the newspaper man'. See, for example, letter from Dirac to Manci, 4 May 1939 (DDOCS).\n\n The spy was Jan Willen der Braak. 'The Spy Who Died Out in the Cold', _Cambridge Evening News_ , 30 January 1975.\n\n Letter from Harold Brindley, 7 August 1939, STJOHN; Dirac refers calmly to discussions with Eddington in a letter to Peierls, 16 July 1939, Peierls archive (BOD).\n\n Letter from Pryce to Dirac, 11 June 1941, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/11 (FSU).\n\n The time of the lecture is recorded in the Royal Society's Meeting Notices. Afternoon tea began at 3.45 p.m.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Pauli (then at the Institute for Advanced Study), 6 May 1942, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/12 (FSU).\n\n Bohr did not find out about the project until he escaped occupied Denmark in autumn 1943: see Bohr (1950).\n\n Telegram to Dirac from Kapitza, 3 July 1941, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/11 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Kapitza, 27 April 1943, Dirac Papers, 2\/14\/12A (FSU).\n\n Penny (2006: 'Fatalities in the Greater Bristol Area').\n\n Letter to Dirac from Dr Strover, 2 October 1941, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/11 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Flo Dirac to her neighbour Mrs Adam, written shortly before Christmas 1941, Dirac Papers, 1\/2\/1 (FSU).\n\n Flo was buried in the Borough Cemetery (now the City Cemetery) in grave space 7283.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-three**\n\n Article by Lannutti in Taylor (1987: 45).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 1 May 2006.\n\n The committee was called MAUD, possibly short for Ministry of Aircraft production Uranium Development committee: Gowing (1964: Chapter 2).\n\n Gowing (1964: 53n.).\n\n Nye (2004: 73-4).\n\n Nye (2004: 75-85).\n\n The quote is from Churchill (1965: epilogue).\n\n Letter to Dirac from F. E. Adcock, 24 May 1942, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/12 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Nigel de Grey of the Foreign Office in London, 1 June 1940, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/10 (FSU).\n\n Copeland (2006: Chapter 14).\n\n Letter from Sir Denys Wilkinson, who was one of Dyson's fellow students in Dirac's lecture course, 15 January 2004; also phone call, 16 January 2004. 'I went to Dirac's lectures in Cambridge in 1942\/3. Freeman Dyson, a year junior to us but very precocious, was also in the class. He was very disruptive because he asked questions. Dirac always took a long time to answer them and on one occasion ended a class early so that he could prepare a proper response' (interview, 15 January 2004).\n\n Sir Denys Wilkinson, letter, 15 January 2004; phone call, 16 January 2004.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Peierls, 11 May 1942, UKNATARCHI.\n\n See Thorp and Shapin (2000: 564).\n\n Letter from Wigner to the US Office of International Affairs, 1 September 1965, Wigner archive, PRINCETON.\n\n Anecdotes from interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003 and 1 May 2006; and with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Hoyle (1987: 187).\n\n Dirac, M. (2003: 41).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, 13 July 1942 (DDOCS).\n\n With his usual understatement, Dirac wrote to Manci, 'It seems a little strange to have a prime minister at these very specialized lectures. I wonder how he can spare the time.' Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 July 1942, DDOCS.\n\n Letter from Peierls to Dirac, 30 September 1942, AB1\/631\/257889.\n\n Letter from Manci to Dirac to 'Anna', 15 October 1986, Wigner archive in PRINCETON.\n\n 'Mrs Roosevelt's Village Hall Lunch', _Cambridge Daily News_ , 5 November 1942.\n\n Wattenberg (1984).\n\n Interview with Al Wattenburg, 30 October 1992.\n\n One of their meetings probably occurred on 31 July 1943, as Dirac proposes this date for a meeting in his letter to Fuchs of 19 August 1943 (BOD). Dirac wrote another letter to Fuchs on 1 September 1943 (BOD).\n\n Peierls (1985: 163-4).\n\n Szasz (1992: xix and 148-51).\n\n Gowing (1964: 261).\n\n Peierls, 'Address to Dirac Memorial Meeting, Cambridge', in Taylor (1987: 37).\n\n Brown (1997: 250).\n\n A further seventy people in Cambridge had been injured and 1,271 homes in the town had been damaged (Barham 1977: 53).\n\n 'Cambridge Streets Light-Up at Last!', _Cambridge Daily News_ , 26 September 1944.\n\n Joe wrote of his family's 'threatening situation' to Heisenberg on 25 March 1943 and sought his assistance. Four months later, Heisenberg replied to say that he was not able to offer specific help but hoped to make contact with Joe during a later visit to Holland (this meeting does not seem to have taken place). Joe wrote again to Heisenberg on 2 February 1944 from Budapest urgently requesting confirmation of Betty's Aryan descent. See Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 156).\n\n Letter from Betty to Dirac, 20 July 1946, Dirac Papers, 1\/7\/2A (FSU).\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Gabriel later recalled that Dirac declared that there 'was no God and no Heaven or Hell'. Letter from Gabriel Dirac to the Diracs, 18 January 1972, Dirac Papers, 1\/8\/14 (FSU).\n\n E-mail from Mary Dirac, 17 February 2006. Monica confirms that both daughters were christened.\n\n Boys Smith (1983: 44).\n\n Letter from Lew Kowarski to James Chadwick, 12 April 1943 (CHURCHILL).\n\n Interview with the late John Crook, 1 May 2003. Professor Crook was present when Dirac made this remark.\n\n 'Happy Crowds Celebrate VE-Day', _Cambridge Daily News_ , 9 May 1945.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 1 May 2006.\n\n Pincher (1948: 111). The account of this event by Chapman Pincher implied that Dirac lied. Pincher remarks, 'Dr PAM Dirac, one of the scientists involved, told me at the time that he was not then engaged on vital war research. But, as the British White Paper on atomic energy states, he had been helping the British atom-bomb project by theoretical investigations on chain reactions.' Pincher had not allowed for Dirac's literal-mindedness.\n\n Brown (2005: 266).\n\n Interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006. Dirac told Halpern that he was disappointed with the actions of the British Government and that he went on long solitary walks in order to cool his anger. Dirac heard of the refusal of his application  for an exit visa from the Home Office official C. D. C. Robinson (letter to Dirac, 13 June 1945, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/15 [FSU]). Two days later, Nevill Mott wrote to Dirac to inform him of the protests that would be made by the disappointed scientists. Mott makes it plain that he does not expect Dirac to be an active member of the protesting group (letter to Dirac from Mott, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/15 [FSU]).\n\n Letter from Manci Dirac to Crowther, 18 May 1945, SUSSEX.\n\n Telegram from Joe Teszler to the Diracs, 1 July 1945, Dirac Papers, 1\/7\/5 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004.\n\n Letters from Joe Teszler to Manci, 19 July, 2 August, 23 August, 31 August, 6 September and 27 September 1945, Dirac Papers, 1\/7\/5 (FSU).\n\n Cornwell (2003: 396).\n\n The team playing at Lord's was not an official Australian side, but was called 'The Australian Services' team.\n\n Smith (1986: 478).\n\n 'How Cambridge Heard the Great Victory News', _Cambridge Daily News_ , 15 August 1945.\n\n See, for example, _Time_ , 20 August 1945, p. 35.\n\n Cornwell (2003: 394-400).\n\n Anon. (1993: 36).\n\n Anon. (1993: 71).\n\n Dalitz (1987a: 69-70). Also, interview with Dalitz, 9 April 2003.\n\n Interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004.\n\n Letter from Betty to Dirac, 20 July 1946, Dirac Papers, 1\/7\/2A (FSU).\n\n Brown (2005: 173).\n\n Crowther (1970: 264).\n\n The official report on the lecture is in the UKNATARCHI (Dirac Papers. BW83\/2\/257889).\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-four**\n\n Osgood (1951: 149, 208-11).\n\n Interview with Feynman by Charles Weiner, 5 March 1966, 27 March 1966, AIP. Interview with Lew Kowarski by Charles Weiner, 3 May 1970, AIP.\n\n The typed manuscript of Dirac's talk is in the Mudd Library, PRINCETON.\n\n In Feynman's theory, the probability that a quantum such as an electron will make a transition from one point in space-time to another can be calculated from a mathematical expression related to the action involved in moving between the two points, summed over all possible routes between them.\n\n Interview by Charles Weiner of Richard Feynman, 27 June 1966 (CALTECH). See also Feynman's Nobel Lecture and Gleick (1992: 226) and its references.\n\n Interview with Freeman Dyson, 27 June 2005. Dyson noted that Feynman made the point repeatedly.\n\n Quoted by Oppenheimer in Smith and Weiner (1980: 269). Wigner was one of the examiners of Feynman's Ph.D. thesis; the other was Wheeler. The oral examination was held on 3 June 1942, and the examiners' report is held in the Mudd Library, PRINCETON.\n\n See Kevles (1971: Chapter 12) and Schweber (1994: Section 3).\n\n Schweber (1994: Chapter 4); Pais (1986: 450-1); Dyson (2005).\n\n Lamb (1983: 326). 'Radar Waves Find New Force in Atom', _New York Times_ , 21 September 1947.\n\n Ito (1995: 171-82).\n\n Feynman (1985: 8).\n\n Dyson (1992: 306). Interview with Dyson, 27 June 2005. Dyson's description of himself as a 'big shot with a vengeance' is in Schweber (1994: 550).\n\n Dyson (2005: 48).\n\n Dirac took no pleasure in abstract art or in Sch\u00f6nberg's music and found neither beautiful.\n\n 'The Engineer and the Physicist', 2 January 1980, Dirac Papers, 2\/9\/34 (FSU).\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/29\/34 (FSU).\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/29\/34 (FSU).\n\n Dyson (2006: 216).\n\n Letter from Manci to Wigner, 20 February 1949, PRINCETON.\n\n Interview with Richard Eden, 14 May 2003.\n\n M. Dirac (1987: 6).\n\n M. Dirac (2003: 41).\n\n I am grateful to the Salamans' daughter Nina Wedderburn for supplying me with biographical information on her parents. Fen (1976: 375).\n\n Gamow (1966: 122); Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Quoted in Hennesey (2006: 5).\n\n It took centuries for women students to win equality with males at Cambridge University. The first women's colleges in Cambridge, Girton and Newnham Colleges, were founded in 1869 and 1871 respectively. From 1881 women were allowed to sit tripos exams but they did not receive any formal qualifications from the university for passing them. From 1882, women's results were published with the men's, but on separate lists. In 1921, a report proposing full admission for women was defeated. Statutes allowing the admission of women to full membership of the university finally received Royal Assent in May 1948, and the first woman to graduate at Cambridge was the Queen Mother in the following October. Under this legislation, women students at Cambridge first graduated in January 1949.\n\n Reasons for Heisenberg's post-war depression are suggested by Cassidy (1992: 528).\n\n R. Eden, unpublished memoirs, May 2003, p. 7a.\n\n Dirac first met Heisenberg after the war in 1958. 'Hero' quote from interview with Antonio Zichichi, 2 October 2005.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Greenspan (2005: 253, 263-4). Dirac supported Heisenberg's nomination, having remarked earlier that his election to a foreign membership of the Royal Society should take precedence over that of Pauli. Cockcroft writes to Dirac in his 15 February letter, 'I agree that he [Heisenberg] is more eminent than Pauli,' Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/7 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Douglas Hartree, 22 December 1947, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/2 (FSU).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Schr\u00f6dinger, 18 May 1949, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/4 (FSU).\n\n Soon after Blackett won the prize in 1947, Dirac sent to him 'heartiest congratulations', remarking, 'You ought to have had it long ago': letter from Dirac to Blackett, 7 November 1948, Blackett archive, ROYSOC. Yet Dirac had not nominated him.\n\n Dirac nominated Kapitza twice before 1953, on 16 January 1946 and 25 January 1950. It is clear from Dirac's records that he later nominated Kapitza several times (RSAS).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Kapitza, 4 November 1945, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/12 (FSU); See also  letter from Kapitza to Stalin, 13 October 1944, reproduced in Boag et al. (1990: 361-3).\n\n Boag et al. (1990: 378).\n\n Letter from Kapitza to Stalin, 10 March 1945, cited in Kojevnikov, A. (1991) _Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences_ , 22, 1, pp. 131-64.\n\n Letters from Kapitza to Stalin, 3 October 1945 and 25 November 1945, reprinted in Boag et al. (1990: 368-70, 372-8).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 12 July 1949 (DDOCS).\n\n _Tallahassee Democrat_ , 29 November 1970.\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 332).\n\n Sources of anecdotes: 'young daughters scurrying', interview with Freeman Dyson, 27 June 2005; 'welcoming Einstein for Sunday tea', interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003, interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003; the 'early evening drinks parties', one of the social rituals at the institute during Oppenheimer's tenure as Director; 'amateur lumberjacks', interview with Morton White, 24 July 2004.\n\n Interview with Freeman Dyson, 27 June 2005. E-mail from Dyson, 23 October 2006.\n\n Interview with Louise Morse, 19 July 2006.\n\n Dirac received several importunate letters from the maverick Austro-Hungarian experimenter Felix Ehrenhaft, who asserted that he had evidence for the existence of the magnetic monopole, Dirac Papers, 2\/13\/1 and 2\/13\/2 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Pauli to Hans Bethe, 8 March 1949, Hermann et al. (1979).\n\n The new theory made little impact, though it did interest scientists - including Dennis Gabor at Imperial College in London - who were studying electron beams in television sets. The correspondence between Dirac and Gabor (1951) is in the Gabor archive at Imperial College, London.\n\n Dirac (1954).\n\n Dirac (1954).\n\n 'The Ghost of the Ether' was published in the _Manchester Guardian_ article on 19 January 1952; the _New York Times_ published 'Briton Says Space Is Full of Ether', 4 February 1952. In Dirac's talk to the 1971 Lindau meeting (for former Nobel Prize winners), he said that the ether appeared not to be useful to quantum mechanics, though he did not rule out that the concept might one day be useful.\n\n Jerome (2002: Chapter 12, 278-82).\n\n Interview with Einstein's acquaintance Gillett Griffen on 20 November 2005, and with Louise Morse on 19 July 2006. The anecdote about Einstein picking up cigarette butts and sniffing them is from Kahler, A. (1985), _My Years of Friendship with Albert Einstein_ , IX, 4, p. 7.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-five**\n\n The information in this section is mainly from interviews with Monica Dirac (7 and 8 February 2002) and Mary Dirac (21 February 2002 and 17 February 2006). See also M. Dirac (2003: 39-42). Information about Dirac and Betty from interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004.\n\n The boarding school was Beeston Hall School in West Runton, near Cromer. E-mail from Mary Dirac, 30 October 2006.\n\n The Diracs often stayed at the Barkston Gardens Hotel, Kensington, for a week or two.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 5 September 1949 (DDOCS): 'We can have a quiet weekend in London where the Folies Berg\u00e8re is showing the full Paris show.'\n\n Professor Driuzdustades appears in Russell's 1954 short story 'Zahatopolk' (see  Russell 1972: 82-110).\n\n Manci and Monica often ate at the Koh-I-Noor restaurant in St John's Street. Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Dalitz (1987b: 17).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Tony Colleraine, 15 July 2004.\n\n Bird and Sherwin (2005: 463-5).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Manci, undated, late March 1954 (DDOCS).\n\n Szasz (1992: 95).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Oppenheimer, 11 November 1949, LC Oppenheimer archive.\n\n Szasz (1992: 86, 95).\n\n Pais often told this story. See, for example, Pais (2000: 70).\n\n It appears that Dirac was excluded from a conference as early as 1951 because of Manci's Hungarian nationality. See interview with Lew Kowarski by Charles Weiner, 3 May 1970, AIP, pp. 203-4.\n\n The documents concerning the petition, dated 23 March 1950, are in the Bernal Papers, KV 2\/1813, UKNATARCHI.\n\n McMillan (2005: 12, 199).\n\n This letter, from Dirac to Oppenheimer on 17 April, does not appear to have survived. However, Ruth Barnett, of the Institute for Advanced Study, refers to it in her letter to Dirac of 28 April 1954, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n McMillan (2005: 214).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Oppenheimer, 24 April 1954, IAS Dirac archive.\n\n 'US-Barred Scientist \"Not Red\"', _Daily Express_ , 28 May 1954.\n\n 'US Study Visa Barred to Nobel Prize Physicist', _New York Times_ , 27 May 1954.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Christopher Freeman, Secretary of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, 26 April 1954, Dirac Papers, 2\/16\/9 (FSU).\n\n Pais (1998: 33).\n\n Letter from Wheeler, Walker Bleakney and Milton White to the _New York Times_ , published in the newspaper on 3 June 1954.\n\n The name of the woman is not known for certain. Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Dirac Papers, 2\/14\/5 (FSU).\n\n After the Diracs' stay in Mahabaleshwar, they returned to the Tata Institute in Bombay until 15 December. The Diracs then moved on to Madras and, on 20 December, travelled to Bangalore, where they spent Christmas. On New Year's Eve, they returned to Bombay and then travelled to the Indian Science Congress in Baroda on 5 January. Four days later, they travelled to Delhi and saw the Taj Mahal shortly afterwards. The Diracs were in Calcutta from 18 January to 23 January, before returning to Delhi for a few days and then, finally, back to the Tata Institute. They left India, sailing from Bombay, on 21 February 1955.\n\n Interview with George Sudarshan, 15 February 2005. In 1955, Sudarshan was a research assistant at the Tata Institute.\n\n Dirac's enthusiastic acceptance of the invitation to give this talk in his letter to Dr Basu, 23 June 1954, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Manuscript of the talk, corrected by Dirac, is in Dirac Papers, 2\/14\/5 (FSU). In the published version of this presentation, many of Dirac's finest touches are removed ( _Journal of Scientific and Industrial Research_ , Delhi, A14, pp. 153-65).\n\n Salaman and Salaman (1996: 68).\n\n _Science and Culture_ , Volume 20, Number 8, pp. 380-1, see p. 380.\n\n Perkovich (1999: 59). India became a nuclear power in 1974, eight years after Bhabha died in a plane crash.\n\n Letter to Oppenheimer from G. M. Shrum, 4 April 1955 (Oppenheimer archive, Dirac Papers, LC). Dirac may have caught this form of jaundice, homologous serum hepatitis, from a contaminated needle during a medical examination in December 1954, Dirac Papers, 1\/9\/3 (FSU).\n\n Note from Manci to Oppenheimer included in Dirac to Oppenheimer, 25 September 1954 (LC, Oppenheimer archive, Dirac Papers).\n\n The Diracs sailed into Vancouver on 16 April. Letters from Manci to Oppenheimer, 15 April 1955, 22 April 1955 and other undated letters written at about the same time (LC, Oppenheimer archive).\n\n Manci often remarked on the one time she saw her husband cry. See, for example, _Science News_ , 20 June 1981, p. 394.\n\n Interview with Tony Colleraine, 22 July 2004.\n\n Letter from Manci to Oppenheimer, 29 August 1955, Oppenheimer archive, Dirac Papers, LC.\n\n Medical report on 28 March 1955, Dirac Papers, 1\/9\/3 (FSU).\n\n The Diracs were in Princeton from 22 May to 30 June 1955, and they flew to Ottawa on 1 July.\n\n Letter from Manci to Oppenheimer, 29 August 1955 (LC, Oppenheimer archive).\n\n Interview with Jeffrey Goldstone, 2 May 2006.\n\n Talk on 'Electrons and the Vacuum' by Dirac at the Lindau conference. The manuscript, annotated by Dirac (June 1956) is in Dirac Papers, 2\/27\/14 (FSU).\n\n 'Electrons and the Vacuum', pp. 7-8.\n\n Dirac spent much of this year working on the fourth edition of _The Principles of Quantum Mechanics_ , which was published in the following year, 1957.\n\n For an account of Kapitza's activities between 1937-49 see Kojevnikov (2004: Chapters 5-8).\n\n Taubman (2003: Chapter 11).\n\n The quote is in a letter from Dirac to Bohr, undated, NBI. The lecture was plainly written after this visit.\n\n Dorozynski (1965: 61).\n\n Boag et al. (1990: 368). See also Knight (1993: Chapters 9 and 10).\n\n Taubman (2003: 256).\n\n Fitzpatrick (2005: 227).\n\n Dorozynski (1965: 60-1).\n\n Feinberg (1987: 185 and 197).\n\n Weisskopf (1990: 194).\n\n Dirac's writing is still preserved on the blackboard.\n\n Landau made this remark at a conference in Moscow in 1957. Interview with Sir Brian Pippard, 29 April 2004.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-six**\n\n Enz (2002: 533).\n\n Dirac probably heard the news through the grapevine in Cambridge before the news was published. One of the first accounts of the experiment was published in the _Guardian_ on 17 January 1957.\n\n Shanmugadhasan (1987: 56).\n\n Dirac raised the issue of left-right symmetry in quantum mechanics in the Ph.D.  examination of K. J. Le Couteur in 1948, see Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 159).\n\n On 25 August 1970, Dirac gave a piece of paper to the physicist Ivan Waller bearing the message: 'The statement that I do not believe there is any need for P and T invariance occurs in Rev Mod Phys vol 21 p 393 (1949). I never followed it up. PAM Dirac.' Waller archive, RSAS. See also Pais (1986: 25-6).\n\n Polkinghorne (1987: 229).\n\n Seven years later, in 1964, when two experimenters at Princeton University confirmed that some quantum processes that involve the weak interaction are not symmetric when time is reversed, most physicists were once again shocked. But not Dirac: he had also foreseen that possibility in the two paragraphs of his 1949 relativity paper.\n\n The 'wrong horse' quote is from a round-table discussion at the Fermilab Symposium in May 1980, Brown and Hoddeson (1983: 268). The 'complete crushing' quote is from Dirac's talk at the Argonne Symposium on Spin, 26 July 1974, see 'An Historical Perspective on Spin' Lecture notes, pp. 3, Dirac Papers, 2\/29\/3 (FSU).\n\n Taubman (2003: 302).\n\n 'The Soviet Crime in Hungary', _New Statesman_ , 10 November 1956, p. 574.\n\n Interview with Tam Dalyell, 9 January 2005. Dalyell recalls that his meeting with Dirac took place in either 1971 or 1972.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Kapitza, 29 November 1957, Dirac Papers, 2\/4\/12 (FSU).\n\n The connection with the anniversary was pointed out in the _New Statesman_ in 26 October and 9 November 1957.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 1 May 2006.\n\n Dirac often told his daughter Mary that he would like to travel to the Moon. Interview with Mary Dirac, 10 April 2006.\n\n Newhouse (1989: 118).\n\n Newhouse (1989: 118).\n\n The other two physicists at lunch with Dirac were Peter Landshoff and John Nuttall. Interview with Peter Landshoff, 6 April 2006.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Walter Kapryan, 19 July 1974, Dirac Papers, 2\/7\/6 (FSU).\n\n I thank Bob Parkinson and Doug Millard for their advice on the reasons why space rockets were launched vertically rather than horizontally.\n\n Interview with the Revd. Sir John Polkinghorne, 11 July 2003.\n\n Interview with the Revd. Sir John Polkinghorne, 11 July 2003. Dirac once asked 'What is a rho meson?', a particle then well known to almost all particle physics researchers.\n\n Interview with the Revd. Sir John Polkinghorne, 11 July 2003.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003. In 1967, Dirac's parking rights were further constrained, and, again, Manci was outraged. Letter from R. E. Macpherson to Dirac, 2 November 1967, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/3 (FSU).\n\n Interview with John Crook, 1 May 2003.\n\n After the Christmas vacation of 1959, Gabriel urged his mother to stop telling Dirac 'I will leave you' in front of them. Letter from Gabriel to the Diracs, 13 January 1960, Dirac Papers, 1\/8\/12 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Stanley Deser, 5 July 2006.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 10 April 1954 (DDOCS).\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Hardy (1940: 87). See, for example, letters to Dirac from Gabriel, 22 September 1957 and 8 October 1957, property of Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Dirac told Gamow in 1961 that he began his work on general relativity in the hope of finding a connection between the theory and neutrinos, but that the project had failed. Letter from Dirac to Gamow, 10 January 1961, LC, Gamow archive.\n\n The word 'graviton' appears to have been used for the first time in print by the Soviet physicist D. I. Blokhintsev in the journal _Under the Banner of Marxism_ ( _Pod znamenem marxisma_ ): Blokhintsev (1934). See Gorelik and Frenkel (1994: 96).\n\n 'Physicists Offer New Theories on Gravity Waves and Atomic Particles', _New York Times_ , 31 January 1959.\n\n Deser (2003). I am grateful to Sir Roger Penrose (interview 20 June 2006) and Stanley Deser (interview 5 July 2006) for advice on Dirac's contribution to general relativity.\n\n Pais (1986: 23) and Salam (1987: 92).\n\n Dirac describes the theory in this way in the notes for the talk he gave on 8 October 1970, 'Relativity Against Quantum Mechanics', Dirac Papers, 2\/28\/19 (FSU). See also Dirac (1970).\n\n This description of Oppenheimer is based on the one given by Stephen Spender in _Journals 1939-83_. See also Bernstein (2004: 194).\n\n Anon. (2001: 109-34).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Margrethe Bohr, 20 November 1962, NBA. Margrethe's reply, dated 19 December 1962, is in Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/9 (FSU).\n\n _Nature_ , 4 February 1961, pp. 355-6; see p. 356.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, pp. 5-7.\n\n Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 5 (text from the original tape).\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004.\n\n In my interviews with Leopold Halpern and Nandor Bal\u00e1zs, respectively on 18 February 2003 and 24 July 2002, they both noted that Dirac said he had 'loathed' his father - an extremely strong word for him to use.\n\n Letter from Kuhn to Dirac, 3 July 1962, Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/9 (FSU). Dirac subsequently gave four more interviews with Kuhn in 7 Cavendish Avenue, Cambridge, on 6, 7, 10 and 14 May 1963.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 30 April 2006.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-seven**\n\n Interview with the Revd. Sir John Polkinghorne, 11 July 2003.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Dirac co-signed a letter, dated 27 April 1964, to Professor H. Davenport as part of a campaign to oust Batchelor from the headship of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, UCAM, Hoyle archive.\n\n Interview with Yorrick and Helaine Blumenfeld, 10 January 2004.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Oppenheimer, 21 April 1963, Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/10 (FSU).\n\n The Diracs were in the USA in 1962 and 1963 (based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until late April 1962 and from late September 1962 to early April 1963); in 1964 and 1965, based mainly at the Institute for Advanced Study, from September 1964 to spring 1965; in 1966 in March and April, based in Stony Brook, New York; in 1967, based in the spring at Stony Brook and November and December at the University of Texas at Austin; in 1968 and 1969, in December 1968 based in Stony Brook until after Christmas, when they moved on to the University of Miami, where they stayed until spring 1969.\n\n Goddard (1998: xiv).\n\n Dirac (1966: 8). One of the themes of these lectures is Dirac's conclusion that the Schr\u00f6dinger picture of quantum mechanics is untenable when it is applied to field theory and that only the Heisenberg picture is satisfactory.\n\n Dirac (1963:53).\n\n Several instances of Dirac's declining to appear on BBC radio and television programmes are documented in Dirac's archive at Florida State University, notably when he refused to be interviewed in connection with his _Scientific American_ article (letter to Dirac from BBC radio producer David Edge, on 11 June 1963, Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/10 [FSU]).\n\n BBC _Horizon_ programme 'Lindau', reference 72\/2\/5\/6025. The recording was made on 28 June 1965 and broadcast on 11 August 1965.\n\n Barrow (2002: 105-12). Teller noted, however, that the experimental uncertainties in the calculations were so large that it was not possible definitely to rule out the hypothesis.\n\n Barrow (2002: 107).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Gamow, 10 January 1961, Gamow archive LC.\n\n Quoted in Barrow (2002: 108).\n\n Private papers of Mary Dirac. Dirac wrote the notes on 17 January 1933.\n\n Letter to Dirac from Gamow, 26 October 1957, Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/4 (FSU).\n\n John Douglas Cockcroft, _Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society_ (1968): 139-88; see p. 185.\n\n Mitton (2005: 127-9).\n\n Overbye (1991: 39).\n\n Letter from Gamow to Dirac, June 1965 (undated), Dirac Papers, 2\/5\/13 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Heisenberg to Dirac, 2 March 1967, Dirac Papers, 2\/14\/1 (FSU). Letter from Dirac to Heisenberg, 6 March 1967, quoted in Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 148).\n\n Letter from Geoffrey Harrison, HM Ambassador in Moscow, to Sir John Cockcroft, 19 April 1966, Cockcroft archive, CKFT 20\/17 (CHURCHILL).\n\n Kapitza gave the lecture at 5 p.m. on Monday, 16 May. Source: _Cambridge University Reporter_ , 27 April 1966, p. 1,649.\n\n Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 12 May 1966, LC (Gamow archive). Other information from an interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Letter from Manci to Rudolf Peierls, 8 July 1986, Peierls archive, additional papers, D23 (BOD).\n\n Boag et al. (1990: 43-4).\n\n Batelaan, H. (2007) _Reviews of Modern Physics_ , 79, pp. 929-42.\n\n Dirac greatly admired Gell-Mann's skills as a physicist but went out of his way to avoid him on social occasions. Source: interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.\n\n Gell-Mann (1967: 699). For more examples of Gell-Mann's initial scepticism about the reality of quarks, see Johnson (2000: Chapter 11).\n\n Gell-Mann (1967: 693).\n\n 'Methods in Theoretical Physics', 12 April 1967, Dirac Papers, 2\/28\/5 (FSU).\n\n Tkachenko was handed back to the Soviet Embassy on 18 September. The British authorities' story was that Tkachenko had 'freely expressed' his wish to return to Russia, but privately they were fearful that he was going to die in their custody. See _The Times_ , 18 June 1967, p. 1; _New York Times_ , 16 September 1967, p. 1. See also the obituary of John Cockcroft by Kenneth McQuillen, former Vice-Master of Churchill College. I thank Mark Goldie, a Fellow of the college, for providing me with this anecdote.\n\n E-mail from Chris Cockcroft, 17 May 2007. See also Oakes (2000: 82). The anecdotes were confirmed by Mary and Monica Dirac.\n\n Letter from Wigner to Office of International Affairs, 1 September 1965, PRINCETON, Wigner archive.\n\n See, for example, letter from Wigner to Manci, 2 September 1965 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers).\n\n Letters from the Wigners, 6 and 13 May, and 14 September 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers).\n\n Letter from Manci to Wigner, 10 February 1968, Wigner archive (Margit Dirac file) PRINCETON.\n\n Telegram 17 September 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers); interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006.\n\n Letter from Mary Wigner to the Diracs, 7 October 1968, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/6 (FSU).\n\n Letters from the Wigners to the Diracs, 20 and 25 September and 9 October 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers). Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006 and e-mail 7 June 2006.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006 and e-mail 7 June 2006.\n\n Interview with Helaine and Yorrick Blumenfeld, 10 January 2004.\n\n Interview with Philip Mannheim, 8 June 2006. See also the article on Kur\u015funo\u011flu, 'The Launching of La Belle Epoque of High Energy Physics and Cosmology' in Curtright et al. (2004: 427-46).\n\n An account of Dirac's time at the University of Miami is given by Kur\u015funo\u011flu's wife in Kur\u015funo\u011flu and Wigner (1987: 9-28).\n\n Manci wrote to Gamow's wife on 4 February 1969 to complain that Dirac had not accepted the offer made by the University of Miami: 'It makes me feel awful' (LC, Gamow archive, Manci Dirac file).\n\n The reaction of Rabbit and Janice Angstrom to _2001_ are in _Rabbit Redux_ , 1971, Chapter 1 (in the Fawcett Crest Book paperback edition, pp. 58 and 74).\n\n LoBrutto (1997: 277).\n\n I am grateful to Tony Colleraine, then Mary's husband, for his recollections of Dirac's first visits to see _2001: A Space Odyssey_ , interview 15 July 2004 and e-mails on 26 September and 22 October 2004.\n\n Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.\n\n Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 16 March 1971, Gamow archive LC.\n\n Letter from Manci to Wigner, 10 February 1968, PRINCETON, Wigner archive.\n\n These FBI documents were declassified in 1986. I thank Bob Ketchum for obtaining a copy of these documents under Freedom of Information\/Privacy Acts.\n\n Letter from Dirac to Alfred Shild, 29 August 1966 (copy held by Lane Hughston).\n\n See, for example, the letter from the Senior Secretary at the University of Texas at Austin to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 8 December 1967, part of the CIA file on Dirac in the 1960s and 1970s. I am grateful to Robert Ketchum for obtaining these documents.\n\n Tebeau (1976: 151-71 and 219-35). Stanford (1987: 54-5). Interview with Henry King Stanford, 3 July 2006.\n\n Wicker (1990).\n\n Letter from Wigner to Manci Dirac, 9 October 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers).\n\n _Miami Herald_ , 7 May 1970, p. 1.\n\n According to Morris (1972), the population of Tallahassee in 1970 was 72,000. The  total population of Miami in the same year was 335,000.\n\n The Physics Department at Florida State University had recently obtained a Center of Excellence grant from the National Science Foundation to assist in its aspiration to become such a centre.\n\n Letter from Colleraine to Dirac, 2 February 1970, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/9 (FSU).\n\n _Tallahassee Democrat_ , 29 November 1970.\n\n Interview with Peter Tilley, 2 August 2005; interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.\n\n Letter from Norman Heydenburg (Chair of the FSU physics department) to Dirac, 4 January 1971, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/11 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Helaine and Yorrick Blumenthal, 10 January 2004.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-eight**\n\n Press release from Dorothy Turner Holcomb, 'Barbara Walters . . . I needed you!', 9 March 1971, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/11 (FSU).\n\n Walters (1970: 173).\n\n Notes on 'The Evolution of our Understanding of Nature', 8 March 1971, in Dirac Papers, 2\/28\/21 (FSU).\n\n Between 1969 and 1983, Dirac gave about a hundred and forty talks, an average of ten talks a year. He gave about eighty-eight talks in the USA, and fifty-two talks overseas, mainly in Europe but occasionally further afield, notably in Australia and New Zealand in 1975. See Dirac Papers, 2\/52\/8 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004.\n\n Interview with Pam Houm\u00e8re, 25 February 2003.\n\n E-mail from Hans Plendl, 5 March 2008, and another from Bill Moulton, 5 March 2008.\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004. Hofer recalls that Dirac would melt when he realised that the person he had dismissed was a friend.\n\n Interview with Hofer. Leopold Halpern independently confirmed this description of Dirac's telephone manner.\n\n Pais (1997: 211). Many of Dirac's colleagues at Florida State University, including Steve Edwards (interview, 27 February 2004) and Michael Kasha (interview, 18 February 2003), attest to the enjoyment he took in telling this joke.\n\n M. Dirac (2003: 39).\n\n Interview with Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, 5 May 2003.\n\n Letter from Manci to Dirac, undated, August 1972, Dirac Papers, 2\/7\/2 (FSU).\n\n Letter from Manci to Dirac, 18 August 1972, Dirac Papers, 2\/7\/2 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Ken van Assenderp, 25 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Helaine and Yorrick Blumenfeld, 10 January 2004. Helaine Blumenfeld recalls: 'When I was pregnant with my second son, Manci called me all the time to check on things.' Shortly before one of Mrs Blumenfeld's appointments up at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Manci advised her, 'Well, you know they have a lot of black doctors there. Don't let them touch you, they're all dirty.' Monica Dirac recalls that her mother was 'the most anti-Semitic person I've ever met', quite surprising as Manci herself was Jewish. Monica learned of her Jewish ancestry when she was twenty-one years old. Interviews with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003 and 3 May 2006.\n\n Interview with Yorrick and Helaine Blumenfeld, 10 January 2004.\n\n Interview with Lily Harish-Chandra, 12 July 2007.\n\n Quoted in Chandrasekhar (1987: 65).\n\n The clearest account of Dirac's research agenda during his later years is in the summary he wrote for Joe Lannutti in November 1974, Dirac Papers, 2\/7\/9 (FSU).\n\n Halpern (2003: 25). Interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.\n\n Halpern (2003: 24-5).\n\n Leopold Halpern took me on this same trip on Sunday 26 February 2006. During this trip, and in earlier interviews, he described their trips down the river and their reception at home by Manci. In a separate interview, on 27 February 2004, Steve Edwards described the infamous incident in which Dirac dumped Kur\u015funo\u011flu in the Wakulla River\n\n Weinberg (2002).\n\n The special type of gauge theory, was first written down by Yang and his collaborator Robert Mills in 1954. Yang has described the theory as 'a rather straightforward generalization of Maxwell's equation' (quoted in Woolf 1980: 502).\n\n Crease and Mann (1986: Chapter 16).\n\n In the late 1970s Dirac erroneously analysed the opacity of the universe and his error involved a misunderstanding of the Kapitza-Dirac effect (e-mail from Martin Rees, 27 November 2006). Another error is noted in Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 175).\n\n Interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2002. Halpern recalled that Dirac took the discovery seriously and wanted to understand it. 'How can you explain this portrait of Jesus? How can this happen?' Dirac said several times. (The shroud was later proved to be a fake.)\n\n There is no record of Dirac's taking any interest at all in the modern theory of renormalisation. He did, however, acknowledge the brilliance of physicists who worked on the theory, including Abdus Salam, Gerhard 't Hooft and Edward Witten, whom he nominated for awards. Evidence of these nominations is in the Tallahassee archive.\n\n Interview with Rechenberg, 3 June 2003.\n\n Dirac (1977).\n\n Brown and Hoddeson (1983: 266-8).\n\n Interview with Lederman, 18 June 2002.\n\n Interview with Lederman, 18 June 2002. See Farmelo (2002b: 48). Einstein came close to predicting the existence of the positron in his 1925 paper 'Electron and General Relativity', see F\u00f6lsing (1997: 563-5).\n\n Many female acquaintances attest to Dirac's behaviour in this respect, notably Lily Harish-Chandra, Rae Roeder, Helaine Blumenfeld and Colleen Taylor Sen.\n\n Kur\u015funo\u011flu and Wigner (1987: 26). See Mill (1869), especially Chapter 3, 'Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being'.\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004.\n\n E-mail from Kurt Hofer, 6 March 2004.\n\n Letter from Manci to Rudolf Peierls, 23 December 1985, Peierls archive, additional papers, D23 (BOD).\n\n Interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004, and an e-mail, 27 March 2004.\n\n This incident occurred in 1978 as Dirac and Hofer passed the Mormon church on Stadium Drive, Tallahassee. Interview with Hofer, 21 February 2004.\n\n Talk on 'Fundamental Problems of Physics', 29 June 1971 (audio recording from LINDAU). See Dirac Papers, 2\/28\/23 (FSU).\n\n In the talk, Dirac suggested a probability for the formation of life that he considered would make it overwhelmingly unlikely without the presence of a God: a chance of one in 10100 (a power of ten also known as a googol).\n E-mail from Kurt Hofer, 28 August 2006.\n\n Halpern (1988: 466 n.). See also Dirac's notes on his lecture 'A Scientist's Attitude to  Religion', c. 1975, Dirac Papers, 2\/32\/11A (FSU).\n\n Isenstein contacted Dirac after meeting him at Bohr's home: letter from Isenstein to Dirac, 29 June 1939, Dirac Papers, 2\/3\/9 (FSU). Isenstein renewed contact with Dirac in 1969, see letter from Isenstein to Dirac, 29 June 1969, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/7 (FSU).\n\n For correspondence concerning the bust, see the correspondence in the summer of 1971, Dirac Papers, 2\/6\/11 (FSU).\n\n I thank Michael Noakes for his comments on Dirac's sitting for this portrait (interview, 3 July 2006). Noakes points out that Frank Sinatra did not sit for his portrait, though he much liked the result, which he hung on a wall of his study.\n\n Dirac liked the picture, though he grumbled slightly: 'It makes me look a bit old.' Dirac was sensitive about the mark on the left side of his nose, the remains of a pre-cancerous cyst, removed in the summer of 1977. For this reason, Noakes's portrait of Dirac shows only the right side of his face. Dirac looked rather more resolute in the two chalk drawings by Howard Morgan in 1980, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.\n\n Feynman's drawing is reproduced in the frontispiece of Kur\u015funo\u011flu and Wigner (1987). An example of Feynman's 'I'm no Dirac' is in interview by Charles Weiner of Richard Feynman, 28 June 1966, p. 187 (CALTECH).\n\n Lord Waldegrave points out that 'the award was largely the result of the intervention of Victor Rothschild, the late Lord Rothschild, who was well placed at that time as a Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office as Head of the Central Policy Review Staff of Prime Minister Edward Heath' (interview with Lord Waldegrave, 2 June 2004).\n\n Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 1 May 1973, LC.\n\n Salaman and Salaman (1986: 70). Dirac raised this issue in the context of the experience of his daughter Monica, who 'had studied geology but had given it up to look after her baby'.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.\n\n Interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.\n\n The British part of the project was eventually delivered by the British Aircraft Corporation in collaboration with the French company Sud Aviation, following an agreement signed in 1962. The British Aircraft Corporation had been formed in 1960 from the Bristol Aeroplane Company and other aeronautical firms. I thank Andrew Nahum for advice on this.\n\n The Diracs flew from Dulles to Paris on 5 May 1979 (DDOCS). Letters to Dirac from Abdul-Razzak Kaddoura, Assistant Director-General for Science at UNESCO, dated 29 March 1979, are in Dirac Papers, 2\/9\/3 (FSU).\n\n _New York Times_ , 5 May 1979.\n\n A copy of the speech is in Dirac Papers, 1\/3\/8 (FSU).\n\n Kapitza wrote to Dirac on 18 February 1982, 'Knowing of your going will certainly stimulate my travelling,' Dirac Papers, 2\/10\/6 (FSU).\n\n A recording of Dirac's 1982 talk to the Lindau meeting, 'The Requirements of a Basic Physical Theory' (1 July 1982), and other details are available at LINDAU.\n\n Details of the accommodation are in Dirac Papers, 2\/10\/7 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004; interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.\n\n Dirac gave this lecture on 15 August 1981, Dirac Papers, 2\/29\/45 (FSU).\n\n The Erice Statement is readily available on the internet.\n\n On 7 December 1982, Dirac wrote to the Master of St John's to apologise for not being able to attend a gathering at college on 27 December to toast Dirac's health in his eightieth year: 'For 59 years, the College has been the central point of my life and  a home to me' (STJOHN).\n\n Interview with Peter Goddard, 7 June 2006.\n\n#  **Chapter twenty-nine**\n\n The account of Ramond's encounter with Dirac is taken from an interview with Ramond on 18 February 2006 and from subsequent e-mails. Note that the date of the encounter given here is later than the one given in an earlier version of the story (Pais 1998: 36-7); Ramond confirmed the date quoted here, after checking his departmental records. It is not possible to give the precise date of the meeting.\n\n E-mail from Pierre Ramond, 22 December 2003.\n\n _Tallahasse Democrat_ , 15 May 1983, page G1.\n\n Letter to Dirac and Manci from Dirac's mother, 8 April 1940, Dirac Papers, 1\/4\/10 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Dr Watt on the telephone, 19 July 2004.\n\n Dirac's last talk, 'The Future of Atomic Physics', was in New Orleans on 26 May 1983: Dirac Papers, 2\/29\/52 (FSU).\n\n Dirac's surgeon was Dr David Miles. I thank Dr Hank Watt for providing me with a copy of the post-operation report.\n\n Solnit (2001: 104).\n\n Halpern (1985). Interview with Halpern, 24 February 2006.\n\n The essences Halpern used were echinacea, milk thistle and ginseng: interview with Halpern, 24 February 2006.\n\n Dirac (1987: 194-8).\n\n Letter from Manci Dirac to Lily Harish-Chandra, 30 September 1984 (property of Mrs Harish-Chandra).\n\n Letter from Manci Dirac to Lily Harish-Chandra, 16 March 1984 (property of Mrs Harish-Chandra).\n\n Interview with Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, 5 May 2003.\n\n Interview with Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, 5 May 2003.\n\n Interview with Peter Tilley, 2 August 2005.\n\n Dirac's death certificate says that he died of respiratory arrest. The coroner found that the final cause of his death was not kidney failure but clogged arteries. See Dirac Papers, 1\/9\/17 (FSU).\n\n Telephone call with Hansell Watt, 19 July 2004.\n\n Manci chose an Episcopalian service because the American Episcopal Church is the Anglican Church in America and is a province of the Anglican Communion under the Archbishop of Canterbury. Information from Steve Edwards, interview, 16 February 2006.\n\n E-mail from Pierre Ramond, 23 February 2006.\n\n I am grateful to Mary Dirac, Steve Edwards, Ridi Hofer and Pierre Ramond for their recollections of the funeral.\n\n The details of Judy's case are from Mercer County Surrogate's Office. The papers that closed the case of Judith Thompson are dated 29 October 1984.\n\n Letter from Dick Dalitz to Peter Goddard, 3 November 1986 (STJOHN; permission to quote this letter from Dalitz during interview with him 9 April 2003).\n\n Letter from Peter Goddard to the Master of St John's College, 26 May 1990, STJOHN.\n\n Interview with Richard Dalitz, 9 April 2003.\n\n Letter from Michael Mayne to Richard Dalitz, 20 May 1990, STJOHN.\n\n The memorial stone was designed and cut by the Cardozo Kindersley workshop in Cambridge, see Goddard (1998: xii).\n\n Letter from Dalitz to Gisela Dirac, 30 November 1995, property of Gisela Dirac.\n\n Goddard (1998: xiii).\n\n Interview with Richard Dalitz, 9 April 2003.\n\n Letter from Dalitz to Gisela Dirac, 30 November 1995, property of Gisela Dirac.\n\n Letter from Manci to Gisela Dirac, 4 July 1992, property of Gisela Dirac. Manci was wrong about Byron's burial. When his remains were brought back to England, burial in the Abbey was refused, and he was interred at Hucknall. Three subsequent unsuccessful attempts were made to insert a memorial to him in the Abbey, the last being in 1924, when the supporting letter was signed by Hardy, Kipling and three former prime ministers (Balfour, Asquith and Lloyd George). Permission for a plaque in Poets' Corner was finally given only in 1969.\n\n See, for example, the letter from Manci to the editor of _Scientific American_ , August 1993, p. 6.\n\n Letter from Manci to Abraham Pais, 25 November 1995, in Goddard (1998: 29).\n\n The Ledermans had become friendly with the Diracs since May 1980, when Dirac attended the conference on the history of particle physics. Lily Harish-Chandra was married to the mathematician Harish-Chandra, Dirac's colleague; Erika Zimmerman was the daughter of Wigner from a relationship he had in G\u00f6ttingen in the late 1920s.\n\n Interview with Peggy Lannuti, 25 February 2004.\n\n Manci did arrange for his Nobel Medal and certificate to be returned to St John's College (letter from Manci to 'Anna', 15 October 1986, Wigner archive PRINCETON). Manci's version of the story of Elizabeth Cockcroft's alleged ejection from Churchill College is told in Oakes (2000: 82).\n\n Letter from Manci to 'Anna', 15 October 1986, Wigner archive PRINCETON.\n\n Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004; interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.\n\n Interview with the Ledermans, 30 October 2003.\n\n Letter to Manci from Hillary Rodham Clinton, 12 February 1996 (DDOCS). Ms Rodham Clinton wrote: 'It is a pleasure to hear from individuals who share a vision of a better life for all Americans. It is particularly rewarding to hear from people who realize that achieving that vision will not always be easy.' Interview with Monica Dirac, 1 May 2006.\n\n#  **Chapter thirty**\n\n The prize was funded by Rolls Royce and British Aerospace. William Waldegrave recalls that Dirac supported this prize and asked him to send photographs of the Bishop Road School, where his formal education began.\n\n I am grateful to Laura Thorne, of Brunel 200, for details about the programme.\n\n These details and others in this paragraph were confirmed in a telephone conversation with John Bendall, 18 October 2007.\n\n Interview with Mary Dirac, 10 August 2006.\n\n This visit took place on 22 June 2004. Don Carleton, a historian of Bristol, kindly arranged it.\n\n Letter from Manci to 'Anna', 15 October 1986, in PRINCETON, Wigner archive (Margit Dirac file).\n\n These three statements are based on the more rigorous ones given by the autism  expert Uta Frith in her definitive introduction to the condition (2003: 8-9). Her statements are consistent with the most detailed and most recent scheme described in the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual_ of the American Psychiatric Association (2000), 4th edition, Washington DC, and a similar scheme issued by the World Health Organization, 'The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines' (1992).\n\n _Stockholms Dagblad_ , 10 December 1933.\n\n Walenski et al. (2006: 175); for the data on depression see p. 9.\n\n Wing (1996: 47, 65 and 123).\n\n Anon. (2007) 'Autism Speaks: The United States Pays Up', _Nature_ , 448: 628-9; see p. 628.\n\n Frith (2003: Chapter 4).\n\n Unlike people with autism, people with Asperger's Syndrome show a delay neither in acquiring language when they are young nor in other aspects of intellectual development. But people with Asperger's Syndrome, when they are older, have similar social impairments to people with autism. See Frith (2003: 11).\n\n Frith (2003: 182).\n\n Interview with Simon Baron-Cohen, 9 July 2003; Baron-Cohen (2003: Chapters 3 and 5).\n\n Fitzgerald (2004: Chapter 1).\n\n Frith (2003: 112).\n\n E-mail from Simon Baron-Cohen 25 December 2006.\n\n Grandin (1995: 137).\n\n Park (1992: 250-9); Temple Grandin's quote is from _Morning Edition_ , US National Public Radio, 14 August 2006. See <http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=5628476> (accessed 16 August 2006).\n\n Dirac (1977: 140).\n\n Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936, DDOCS.\n\n 'Many patients with tuberculosis present with general symptoms, such as tiredness, malaise, loss of appetite, weakness or loss of weight': Seaton et al. (2000: 516).\n\n There are insights into the childhood of autistic children in the memoir of Gunilla Gerland (translated by Joan Tate), _A Real Person: Life on the Outside._ Gerland writes powerfully of her perception of the misunderstandings in her early relationship with her parents, notably with her father. 'He had no respect for anyone's needs [. . .] The effect of my father's actions was one of pure sadism, although he was not really a sadist. He didn't enjoy my humiliation in itself - he couldn't even imagine it' (Gerland 1996). See also Grandin (1984).\n\n#  **Chapter thirty-one**\n\n Weinberg wrote these words for me to read aloud at the Centenary meeting. Text checked by Weinberg, 22 July 2007 (e-mail).\n\n Interview with Freeman Dyson, 27 June 2005.\n\n Quoted in Charap (1972: 332).\n\n E-mail from Sir Michael Atiyah, 15 July 2007.\n\n Woolf (1980: 502).\n\n Letter from Dirac to Abdus Salam, 11 November 1981, reproduced in Craigie et al. (1983: iii).\n\n 't Hooft (1997: Chapter 14).\n\n Stephen Hawking appeared in an episode of _Star Trek_ first broadcast on 21 June  1993, and in episodes of _The Simpsons_ first broadcast on 9 May 1999 and 1 May 2005.\n\n Letter from Nicolas Kurti to _New Scientist_ , 65 (1975), p. 533; letter from E. C. Stern (1975) to _Science_ , 189, p. 251. See also the comments by Dalitz in 'Another Side to Paul Dirac', in Kur\u015funo\u011flu and Wigner (1987: 87-8).\n\n Freimund et al. (2001). The Kaptiza-Dirac effect had been observed for atoms, but not for electrons, in 1986 (Gould et al. 1986). I thank Herman Betelaan for his advice on modern experiments on the effect.\n\n Deser (2003: 102).\n\n Interview with Nathan Seiberg, 26 July 2007, and e-mail, 20 August 2007.\n\n In his interviews, Leopold Halpern often stressed the importance to Dirac of the large numbers hypothesis (interview with Halpern, 26 February 2006).\n\n By conventional measure, the gravitational force is a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth the strength of the next strongest fundamental force, the weak interaction.\n\n Rees (2003). I thank Martin Rees for his advice on the status of Dirac's large numbers hypothesis.\n\n E-mails from James Overduin, 20-2 July 2006.\n\n Overduin and Plendl (2007).\n\n I thank Rolf Landua of CERN for his expert help on the current state of experimental research into anti-matter.\n\n See Yang (1980: 39).\n\n These words, written on 27 November 1975, seem to have been special to Dirac. He wrote them on a single sheet of paper and filed them among his lecture notes: Dirac Papers 2\/29\/17 (FSU). The words replaced by [this happened] are 'I have felt the mathematics lead me by the hand.'\n\n The first reference to beauty in Dirac's papers appears to be in the paper he co-wrote with Kapitza in 1933, 'The Reflection of Electrons from Standing Light Waves', where they refer to the beauty of the colour photography introduced by Gabriel Lippmann.\n\n Green and Schwarz's paper was received on 10 September 1984 by the academic journal _Physics Letters B_ , which published it on 13 December.\n\n For a popular account of modern string theory, see Greene (1999).\n\n Dirac told his student Harish-Chandra, 'I am not interested in proofs but only in what nature does': Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 156).\n\n Dirac's notes commend Witten's 'brilliant solutions to a number of problems in mathematical physics', Dirac Papers, 2\/14\/9 (FSU).\n\n Interview with Edward Witten, 8 July 2005, and e-mail, 30 August 2006.\n\n E-mail from Veltman, 20 January 2008. For a sceptical assessment of string theory, see Woit (2006), especially Chapters 13-19.\n**Bibliography**\n\nGenealogy\n\nThe genealogy of the Dirac family is presented at <http:\/\/www.dirac.ch>. The website is maintained by Gisela Dirac-Wahrenburg.\n\nReferences\n\nIn the text, I do not normally give a reference for Dirac's technical papers. They are listed in full in Dalitz (1995) and in Kragh (1990).\n\nAaserud, F. (1990) _Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, Philanthropy, and the Rise of Nuclear Physics_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\n\nAnnan, N. (1992) _Our Age: Portrait of a Generation_ , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.\n\nAnon. (1935) _The Frustration of Science_ , foreword by F. Soddy, New York: W. W. Norton.\n\nAnon. (1993) _Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts_ , Bristol, Institute of Physics Publishing.\n\nAnon. (2001) _The Cuban Missile Crisis: Selected Foreign Policy Documents from the Administration of John F. 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(1990) _The Joy of Insight_ , New York: Basic Books.\n\nWells, H. G. (2005) _The Time Machine_ , London: Penguin.\n\nWells, J. C. (1982) _Accents of English 2_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\n\nWerskey, G. (1978) _The Visible College_ , London: Allen Lane.\n\nWestfall, R. S. (1993) _The Life of Isaac Newton_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\n\nWheeler, J. A. (1985) 'Physics in Copenhagen in 1934 and 1935', in A. P. French and P. G. Kennedy (eds), _Niels Bohr: A Centenary Volume_ , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 221-6.\n\n\\- (1998) _Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam_ , New York: W. W. Norton & Co.\n\nWicker, W. K. (1990) 'Of Time and Place: The Presidential Odyssey of Dr Henry King Stanford', Doctor of Education thesis, University of Georgia.\n\nWigner, E. P. (1992) _The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner as Told to Andrew Szanton_ , New York: Plenum Press.\n\nWilson, A. N. (2002) _The Victorians_ , London: Hutchinson.\n\nWilson, D. (1983) _Rutherford: Simple Genius_ , London: Hodder and Stoughton.\n\nWing, L. (1996) _The Autistic Spectrum_ , London: Robinson.\n\nWinstone, R. (1972) _Bristol as It Was 1914-1920_ , Bristol: published by the author.\n\nWoit, P. (2006) _Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics_ , London: Jonathan Cape.\n\nWoodhead, M. (1989) 'School Starts at Five . . . or Four Years Old', _Journal of Education Policy_ , 4: 1-21.\n\nWoolf, H. (ed.) (1980) _Some Strangeness in the Proportion: A Centennial Symposium to Celebrate the Achievements of Albert Einstein_ , Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.\n\nYang, C. N. (1980) 'Beauty and Theoretical Physics', in D. W. Curtin (ed.), _The Aesthetic Dimension of Science_ , New York: Philosophical Library, pp. 25-40.\n**List of Plates**\n\n1. Dirac family, 3 September 1907 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n2. Paul Dirac, 17 August 1907 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n3. Felix, Betty and Paul Dirac _c_.1909 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n4. Technical drawing by Paul Dirac (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/10\/F5).\n\n5. Bristol University Engineering Society's visit to Messrs Douglas's Works (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/10\/F128).\n\n6. Charles Dirac, _c_.1933 (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/15\/F1D).\n\n7. Felix Dirac, 1921 (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/15\/FIJ).\n\n8. 6 Julius Road, Bristol.\n\n9. Max Born entertaining his younger colleagues at his home in G\u00f6ttingen, spring 1926 (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/14\/F6) _._\n\n10. Some members of the Kapitza Club, after a meeting c. 1925 (courtesy Giovanna Blackett).\n\n11. Patrick Blackett and Paul Ehrenfest, _c_.1925 (courtesy Giovanna Blackett).\n\n12. Isabel Whitehead and her husband Henry, with their son Henry, 1922 (c0urtesy Archives, The United Theological, Bangalore, India).\n\n13. Dirac at a meeting in Kazan, Russia, 12 October 1928 (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/14\/FI2).\n\n14. Heisenberg's mother, Schr\u00f6dinger's wife, Flo Dirac, Dirac, Heisenberg and Schr\u00f6dinger (AIP Emilio Segr\u00e8 Visual Archives).\n\n15. Extract from a letter from Dirac to Manci Balazs, 9 May 1935 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n16. Dirac and Manci on their honeymoon, Brighton, January 1937 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n17. The Dirac family in the garden of their Cambridge home, _c_.1946 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n18. Dirac and Manci with a party during a crossing of the Atlantic on the SS America, 2 April 1963 (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/14\/F63).\n\n19. Dirac and Richard Feynman at a conference on relativity, Warsaw, July 1962 (photograph by A. John Coleman, courtesy AIP Emilio Segr\u00e8 Visual Archives, Physics Today collection).\n\n20. Dirac at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, _c_.1958 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n\n21. The Diracs' home in Tallahasse, 223 Chapel Drive.\n\n22. Kapitza and Dirac at the Hotel Bad Schachen, Lindau, summer 1982 (FSU, Dirac archive, 1\/14\/F98).\n\n23. One of the last photographs taken of Dirac, Tallahassee, _c_.1983 (courtesy Monica Dirac).\n**Acknowledgements**\n\nArt is I, science is we.\n\nCLAUDE BERNARD (1865) 'Introduction' to _L'\u00c9tude de la m\u00e9decine experimental_\n\nClaude Bernard was right. Biographies of scientists, too, are 'we', not 'I', in the sense that none could be written satisfactorily without a good deal of help. So I'd like to begin by acknowledging the huge contribution of the scientists, historians, archivists and writers who have preserved memories and other information about Paul Dirac. My gratitude extends to Dirac himself, who evidently took care to preserve documents about many crucial events in life, right down to the row about his Cambridge parking permit.\n\nBut let me be more specific. First I should like to thank Dirac's closest family. His daughter Monica has been unfailingly helpful, welcoming my enquiries and going out of her way to make available family documents to me. Her friend John Amy has been immensely accommodating to me throughout the project, and I am duly grateful to him. No less kind than Monica was Dirac's other daughter, Mary, who died in Tallahassee on 20 January 2007. Her guardian, Marshall Knight, has been extremely generous and obliging to me, especially during my visits to Florida.\n\nOther family members who have given generously of their time in helping me: Gisela and Christian Dirac, Leo Dirac, Vicky Dirac, Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, Christine Teszler, Pat Wigner, Charles and Mary Upton, Peter Lantos and Erika Zimmermann. Past family members who provided valuable testimonies are Tony Colleraine and Peter Tilley. Gisela Dirac, the family genealogist, has been indefatigable in helping to clarify the French and Swiss provenance of the Dirac family.\n\nFour institutions to which I owe special gratitude are St John's College, Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Florida State University in Tallahassee and Bristol University.\n\nSt John's invited me to stay in the college several times, enabling me to experience day-to-day life there, to use its superb facilities and  to talk at length with several of Dirac's former colleagues and acquaintances. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of the college for this hospitality and for making available the facilities of the college to me, notably the library. For enlightening conversations, I thank the late John Crook, Duncan Dormor, Clifford Evans, Jane Heal, John Leake, Nick Manton, George Watson and Sir Maurice Wilkes. I have received a huge amount of support from the college library, especially from Mark Nicholls, Malcolm Underwood and the special collections librarian Jonathan Harrison, whose industry has enormously benefited the book. The university library has been most helpful, and I would like to thank Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Jackie Cox for taking so much trouble to answer my queries. Also in Cambridge, I should like to thank Yorrick and Helaine Blumenfeld, Richard Eden, Peter Landshoff, Sir Brian Pippard, the Reverend John Polkinghorne, KBE, and Lord (Martin) Rees.\n\nAt the Institute for Advanced Study, I was fortunate enough to spend four productive and very happy summers researching the book and writing it. I benefited considerably from conversations there with Yve-Alain Bois, Freeman Dyson, Peter Goddard, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg, Morton White and Edward Witten. The library facilities at the institute are peerless, and I should like to thank all the staff there who were unstinting in their support: Karen Downing, Momota Ganguli, Gabriella Hoskin, Erica Mosner, Marcia Tucker, Kirstie Venanzi and Judy Wilson-Smith. Among the other colleagues who made my stays there so rewarding: Linda Arntzenius, Alan Cheng, Karen Cuozzo, Jennifer Hansen, Beatrice Jessen, Kevin Kelly, Camille Merger, Nadine Thompson, Sharon Tozzi-Goff and Sarah Zantua. Also in Princeton, I should like to thank Gillett Griffin, Lily Harish-Chandra, Louise Morse ( _m\u00e8re et soeur_ ) and Terri Nelson.\n\nI should like to give my special thanks to Peter Goddard, formerly Master of St John's, now Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. No one has been more supportive of the project or shown more interest in its progress. I owe him an enormous debt.\n\nAt Florida State University, I have benefited from the excellent library facilities and from invaluable help from the staff responsible for the Dirac archive. Sharon Schwerzel, Head of the Paul A. M. Dirac Science Library, could not have been more helpful to me - her understanding of the challenges faced by a biographer working thousands of miles from the primary archive has been hugely beneficial.  It has also been a delight to work with Chuck McCann, Paul Vermeron, with Lucy Patrick and all the librarians in Special Collections: Burt Altman, Garnett Avant, Denise Gianniano, Ginger Harkey, Alice Motes, Michael Matos and Chad Underwood. On the past and present faculty of the university, I should like to thank Howie Baer, Steve Edwards, the late Leopold Halpern, Kurt Hofer, Harry Kroto, Robley Light, Bill Moulton and Hans Plendl. Through colleagues at Florida State, I also met many other people in Tallahassee who shared their memories of Dirac with me: Ken van Assenderp, Pamela Houm\u00e8re, Peggy Lannutti, Jeanne Light, Pat Ritchie, Rae Roeder and Hansell Watt.\n\nAt Bristol University, I have been supported by Debra Avent-Gibson, Sir Michael Berry, Chris Harries, Michael Richardson, Margaret and Vincent Smith and Leslie Warne. Many others in Bristol have also done much to shed light on Dirac's early life, especially Karen and Chris Benson, Dick Clements, Alan Elkan, Andrew Lang, John Penny and John Steeds. I was fortunate to be introduced to Don Carleton, a local historian, who has done an inordinate amount of work to illuminate the history of Bristol in the early twentieth century.\n\nI should like to thank the following institutions for granting permission to quote from their archives: American Philosophical Society; Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; University of Bristol Library; Bristol Record Office; British Broadcasting Corporation; Masters and Fellows of Christ's College, Cambridge; The Syndics of Cambridge University Library; Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Master, Fellows and scholars of St John's College Cambridge; Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, College Park, MD, USA; Archives for the Society of Merchant Venturers, held at the Bristol Records Office, UK; Provost and Scholars of King's College, Cambridge; Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen; Princeton University Library; Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851; International Solvay Institutes, Brussels; Special Collections at the University of Sussex; Archives at the United Theological College, Bangalore, India.\n\nDuring my research, many friends and colleagues at archives and other institutions have given me valuable support. At the California Institute of Technology archives: Shelley Erwin and Bonnie Ludt. At the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of  Physics, Maryland: Melanie Brown, Julie Gass, Spencer Weart and Stephanie Jankowski. At CERN, Geneva: John Ellis, Rolf Landua, Esthel Laperri\u00e8re. In the Archives Centre: Anita Hollier. At Christ's College, Cambridge: Candace Guite. At the archive of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851: Angela Kenny and Valerie Phillips. At the Archives in the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield University: John Harrington. At the Archives of Imperial College, London: Anne Barrett. At Lambeth Palace Library, London: Naomi Ward. At the Royal Society, London: Martin Carr and Ross MacFarlane. At the Max Planck Institute, Munich: Helmut Rechenberg. At the Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen: Finn Asserud and Felicity Pors. At the University of Madison, Wisconsin: Vernon Barger, Tom Butler, Kerry Kresse, Ron Larson, David Null and Bill Robbins. At Firestone Library, Princeton University: AnnaLee Pauls and Meg Sherry Rich. At the Solvay archive in the Free University of Brussels: Carole Masson, Dominique Bogaerts and Isabelle Juif. At the Science Museum, London: Heather Mayfield, Doug Millard, Andrew Nahum, Matthew Pudney and Jon Tucker. It is a special pleasure to thank past and present staff at the Science Museum Library: Ian Carter, Allison Pollard, Prabha Shah, Valerie Scott, Robert Sharp, Joanna Shrimpton, Jim Singleton, Mandy Taylor, Peter Tajasque, John Underwood and Nick Wyatt. Thanks also to Ben Whelehan at Imperial College Library. At the Tata Institute in Bombay: Indira Chowdhury. At the National Media Museum, York: Colin Harding and John Trenouth. At Special Collections, University of Sussex: Dorothy Sheridan and Karen Watson. For their help with determining the detailed weather conditions in towns and cities in the UK and USA, it is a pleasure to thank Steve Jebson at the Met Office and Melissa Griffin at Florida State University.\n\nOthers who have been extremely helpful in responding to my enquiries: Sir Michael Atiyah, Tom Baldwin, John Barnes, Herman Batelaan, Steve Batterson, John Bendall, Giovanna Blackett, Margaret Booth (n\u00e9e Hartree), Gustav Born, Olaf Breidbach, Andrew Brown, Nicholas Capaldi, David Cassidy, Brian Cathcart, Martin Clark, Paul Clark, Chris Cockcroft, Thea Cockcroft, Flurin Condrau, Beverley Cook, Peter Cooper, Tam Dalyell, Dick Dalitz, Olivier Darrigol, Richard Davies, Stanley Deser, David Edgerton, John Ellis, Joyce Farmelo, Michael Frayn, Igor Gamow, Joshua Goldman, Jeffrey Goldstone, Jeremy Gray, Karl Hall, Richard  Hartree, Peter Harvey, Steve Henderson, Chris Hicks, John Holt, Jeff Hughes, Lane Hughston, Bob Jaffe, Edgar Jenkins, Allan Jones, Bob Ketchum, Anne Kox, Charles Kuper, Peter Lamarque, Willis Lamb, Dominique Lambert, Ellen and Leon Lederman, Sabine Lee, John Maddox, Philip Mannheim, Robin Marshall, Dennis McCormick, Arthur I. Miller, Andrew Nahum, Michael Noakes, Mary Jo Nye, Susan Oakes, James Overduin, Bob Parkinson, John Partington, Sir Roger Penrose, Trevor Powell, Roger Philips, Chris Redmond, Tony Scarr, Robert Schulmann, Bernard Shultz, Simon Singh, John Skorupski, Ulrica S\u00f6derlind, Alistair Sponsel, Henry King Stanford, Simon Stevens, George Sudashan, Colleen Taylor-Sen, Laura Thorne, Claire Tomalin, Martin Veltman, Andrew Warwick, John Watson, Russell Webb, Nina Wedderburn, John Wheeler, the late David Whitehead, Oliver Whitehead, Frank Wilczek, Michael Worboys, Nigel Wrench, Sir Denys Wilkinson and Abe Yoffe. Special thanks to Alexei Kojevnikov, who has been unstinting in the guidance and help he has given to me concerning the development of Russian physics in the past century.\n\nFor their help with primary research, my sincere thanks to Anna Cain, Martin Clark, Ruth Horry, Anna Menzies, James Jackson, Joshua Goldman, Katie Kiekhaefer, Tadas Krupovnickas and Jimmy Sebastian.\n\nFor technical support, thanks to: Paul Chen at Biblioscape (the marvellous bibliographic software) and Ian Hart.\n\nFor translating documents, I am indebted to Paul Clark, Gisela Dirac, Karl Grandin, Asger H\u00f8eg, Anna Menzies, Dora Bobory and Eszter Molnar-Mills.\n\nFor reading parts of the manuscript and for their constructive comments, thanks to: Simon Baron-Cohen, Paul Clark, Olivier Darrigol, Uta Frith, Freeman Dyson, Roger Highfield, Kurt Hofer, Bob Jaffe, Ramamurti Rajaraman, Martin Rees and Jon Tucker. And for reading the entire manuscript and for dozens of helpful comments, thanks to: Don Carleton, Stanley Deser, Alexei Kojevnikov, Peter Rowlands, Chuck Schwager, Marty Schwager and David Ucko. I am especially grateful to my friends David Johnson and David Sumner for reading several drafts of the book, each time providing extremely insightful and constructive feedback.\n\nFinally, I should like to acknowledge the huge contribution of my publisher, Faber and Faber, to the book. Kate Ward supervised the  production of the book with great attention to detail, and Kate Murray-Brown read the book with a keen and sensitive eye on content and style and provided many valuable suggestions and comments. Liz O'Donnell has been a dream of an editor - meticulous, sensitive, questioning and collegiate. I am indebted most of all to Neil Belton, who has supported the project from its inception, given me no end of wise advice and kept the bar high.\n\nThe concept of 'we' extends only so far: I take responsibility for any remaining inaccuracies in the book and for its portrayal of Paul Dirac's work and personality. In that sense, the book is 'I'.\n\nGraham Farmelo   \nJune 2008\n**Index**\n\n##\n\n'PD' indicates Paul Dirac\n\n##\n\n_2001: A Space Odyssey_ (film)\n\nAarhus, Denmark\n\nAbstein, Dr W. Robert\n\naction principle\n\nAdcock, Frank\n\nAdler, Dorothy and Sol\n\nAdrian, Edgar\n\nAesthetic Movement\n\nalgebra\n\nGrassmann\n\nnon-commutative\n\nAmerican Physical Society, annual meeting of (New York, 1959)\n\nAmerican Science News Service\n\nAmsterdam\n\nEhrenfest's suicide in\n\nBetty and Joe Teszler live in\n\nBetty and Joe flee from their home\n\nAnderson, Carl\n\nchooses the name positron\n\n'The Apparent Existence of Easily Deflectable Positives'\n\nAnglo-French Society of Sciences\n\nanti-electrons\n\nBlackett and Occhialini's discovery\n\n_see also_ positrons and anti-matter\n\nanti-matter\n\nanti-quarks\n\nthe Big Bang\n\nPD predicts its existence\n\nsurplus of matter over anti-matter\n\na universe made from equal amounts of matter and anti-matter\n\nanti-Semitism\n\nApollo space programme\n\n_Aquitania_ (liner)\n\nArbuckle, Fatty\n\nArmstrong, Neil\n\nArts School, Cambridge\n\nAsperger's Syndrome\n\n_Asuma Bura_ , MS\n\nAtiyah, Sir Michael\n\natomic bomb _see_ nuclear weapons\n\nAtomic Energy Commission\n\natomic physics\n\nand classical laws\n\nPD attends Tyndall's lectures\n\nPD writes on _see also_ quantum theory, quantum physics\n\natoms\n\natom visualized as a mechanical device\n\nBalmer's formula for hydrogen spectrum\n\nBohr's work on atomic structure\n\nelectrons as a constituent of\n\nenergy levels\n\nheavy\n\nRutherford's discovery of the nucleus\n\nAustria, Hitler's invasion of (1938)\n\nautism\n\naviation industry\n\nAvon Gorge\n\nAydelotte, Frank\n\nAyer, A. J.\n\n##\n\nBaker, Henry\n\nhis tea parties\n\nappearance\n\npersonality\n\nand the Greeks' love of beauty\n\nBal\u00e1zs, Nandor\n\nBal\u00e1zs, Richard\n\nBaldwin, Stanley\n\nBalmer, Johannes: formula for hydrogen spectrum\n\nBaltimore Dairy Lunch, Princeton (the Balt)\n\nbare electron\n\nbare energy\n\nBarnes, Julian: _Flaubert's Parrot_\n\nBaron-Cohen, Simon\n\nBatchelor, George\n\nBattle of Britain\n\nBBC (British Broadcasting Corporation (later Company))\n\nHome Service\n\nPD declines numerous interviews\n\n_Start the Week_ (Radioprogramme)\n\nBeatles, The\n\nBeaufort, Lady Margaret\n\nbeauty\n\nBaker's fascination with the Greeks' love of beauty\n\nconcept of\n\ndiscussion betweenand Heisenberg\n\nof a fundamental theory in physics\n\nKant and\n\nin mathematics\n\nMoore on\n\nPD's first recorded mention of\n\nin vogue as a concept at Cambridge\n\nBeeston Hall School, West Runton, Norfolk\n\nBelgium, Queen of (Elisabeth of Bavaria)\n\nBell, James\n\nBell Laboratories, New Jersey\n\nBendall, John\n\nBeria, Lavrentiy\n\nBerlin\n\nglobal capital of theoretical physics\n\nOppenheimer in\n\nEinstein in\n\nanti-Semitism\n\nnuclear fission discovered in\n\nDebye in\n\nBerlin Wall, fall of (1989)\n\nBernal, Desmond\n\nBerne, Switzerland\n\nBethe, Hans\n\nBhabha, Homi\n\nBialobrzeski, Czeslaw\n\nBig Bang\n\nBirge, Raymond\n\nBirmingham\n\nBishop Road Junior School, Bristol\n\nBishopston, Bristol\n\nBismarck, Prince Otto von\n\nblack holes\n\nblackbody radiation\n\nBlackett, Patrick\n\nserves in World War I\n\npersonality\n\ninfluences PD\n\nappearance\n\nresents Kapitza\n\nexperimental physics\n\nattempted poisoning by Oppenheimer\n\nand cosmic rays\n\nanger at Rutherford's despotic style\n\ndiscovery of the anti-electron\n\nrevelations at the Royal Society\n\nsupports the Labour Party\n\nfamily\n\nand nuclear fission\n\na wartime Government scientific adviser\n\nand manufacture of a nuclear weapon\n\nand the Manhattan Project\n\nrefused a visa for the Soviet Union (spring 1945)\n\nNobel Prize\n\nBletchley Park, Buckinghamshire\n\nBloomsbury Group\n\nBlumenfeld, Helaine\n\nBlumenfeld, Yorrick\n\nBlunt, Anthony\n\nBoer War\n\nBohr, Margrethe\n\nBohr, Niels\n\ntheory of atomic structure\n\nPD's mastery of his atomic theory\n\nNobel Prize for physics\n\nvisits Cambridge\n\nappearance\n\npersonality\n\nand Rutherford\n\ngloomy about the state of quantum physics\n\nand Heisenberg's theory of 1925\n\nPD's visit to the Institute\n\nconcern with words\n\nPD on\n\non PD\n\ncomplementarity principle\n\ncoat of arms\n\ndefends Heisenberg's uncertainty principle\n\nand a relativistic equation of the electron\n\nresponse to PD's hole theory\n\nand PD's Bristol lecture\n\nat the 1930 Solvay Conference\n\nand the neutrino\n\nrepresented in a special version of _Faust_\n\nand Hitler's appointment as Chancellor\n\nand philosophy\n\nand the positron\n\nand the bas-relief of Rutherford\n\nhis mansion\n\ncongratulates PD on his Nobel Prize\n\nparty to honour the Nobel Prize winners\n\nand Shankland's results\n\ndeath of his eldest son\n\nat Rutherford's memorial service\n\nand nuclear fission\n\nmeeting with Heisenberg (1941)\n\nescapes from occupied Denmark\n\nand genetics\n\ndeath\n\nBohr orbits\n\nBollob\u00e1s, Gabriella\n\nBolshevik Party\n\nBolshevik Revolution (1917)\n\nBolshevism\n\nBolshevo, near Moscow\n\nBombay (Mumbai)\n\nBordeaux, France\n\nBorn, Gustav\n\nBorn, Max\n\nquantum mechanics named by\n\nand's first paper on quantum mechanics\n\nworks with Heisenberg and Jordan at G\u00f6ttingen\n\nand Heisenberg's quantum theory\n\nand Jordan's work on Fermi-Dirac statistics\n\ninterpretation of Schr\u00f6dinger's waves\n\nquantum probabilities\n\nappearance\n\npersonality\n\nand Oppenheimer's behaviour\n\nsurprised at's knowledgeability\n\nand field theory\n\nand the rise of anti-Semitism in G\u00f6ttingen\n\nand the Dirac equation\n\nnervous breakdown\n\nconsiders emigration\n\nappointment at Cambridge\n\nresents's Nobel Prize\n\nmessage from the Nazi Government\n\nprofessorship in Edinburgh\n\nin the Lake District with PD\n\nPD asks him to support Heisenberg\n\nNobel Prize\n\ndeath\n\nBose, Satyendra\n\nbosons\n\nBoston, Massachusetts\n\nBoston University: PD's lecture (1972)\n\nBoulton, Edmund\n\nBoys Smith, John\n\nbra\n\nBradman, Sir Donald\n\nBragg, Sir Lawrence\n\nBragg, William\n\nBridges, Robert: _A Testament of Beauty_\n\nBrighton, PD's honeymoon in\n\nBristol\n\nCharles Dirac settles in\n\ndescribed\n\nand Catholicism\n\naviation industry\n\nFirst World War\n\nprotestors baton-charged by police (1932)\n\nSecond World War\n\nBristol Aeroplane Company\n\nBristol Central Library\n\nBristol Citizens' Recruiting Committee\n\nBristol Downs\n\n_Bristol Evening News_\n\nBristol Records Office\n\nBristol Shiplovers' Society\n\nBritish Aeroplane Company\n\nBritish Aerospace\n\nBritish Aircraft Corporation\n\nBritish and Colonial Aeroplane Company\n\nBritish Association for the Advancement of Science\n\nmeeting (Bristol, 1930)\n\nmeeting (Leicester, 1933)\n\nBritish Thomson-Houston Company, Rugby\n\nBroad, Charlie\n\nProfessor of Philosophy at Bristol\n\nas a lecturer\n\ntreatment of relativity\n\nand's interest in philosophy\n\nmoves to Cambridge\n\nBrookhaven National Laboratory\n\nBrown, Dan: _Angels and Demons_\n\nBrown, Miss Josephine\n\nBrunel, Isambard Kingdom\n\nBudapest\n\nBukharin, Nikolai\n\n_Bulletin of the Soviet Academy of Sciences_\n\nBullock, W.H.\n\nBunin, Ivan\n\nBush, George, Snr.\n\nButler, Samuel: _The Way of all Flesh_\n\nByron, Lord\n\n##\n\nCadet Corps\n\nCalifornia Institute of Technology (Caltech)\n\nCambodia, US invasion of\n\nCambridge\n\ndescribed\n\nManci's dislike of\n\nSocialist Society march (1933)\n\nwartime\n\nVE-Day celebrations\n\ncelebration of Japan's surrender\n\nCambridge Borough Cemetery (now\n\nCambridge City Cemetery), Bristol\n\n_Cambridge Review_\n\nCambridge Union\n\nCambridge University\n\nmathematics as its largest department\n\nsocial life\n\nopposition to the General Strike\n\nMarxist scientists' efforts to establish radical politics\n\napplications from refugee scientists\n\nin the Second World War\n\nwomen in\n\noffers a professorship to Oppenheimer\n\nDepartment of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics\n\nPD moves to Florida State\n\nCanadian Rockies\n\nCanford Cemetery, Westbury on Trym, Bristol\n\ncanonically conjugate variables\n\nCardoza Kindersley workshop, Cambridge\n\nCario family\n\nCarpenter, Edward, Dean of Westminster\n\nCarroll, Lewis: _Alice through the Looking Glass_\n\nCarter, Jimmy\n\nCarus, Paul: _Reflections on Magic Squares_\n\nCasimir, Hendrik\n\nCaucasus\n\nCavendish Avenue, Cambridge (No.7)\n\nCavendish Laboratory, Cambridge\n\nRutherford succeeds J. J. Thomson\n\nseminars\n\nPD talks on quantum discoveries\n\node to the electron\n\nMillikan's presentation on cosmic rays\n\nChadwick's work on the neutron\n\nsplitting of the atom\n\ndiscovery of the anti-electron\n\nand the Nobel Prize (1933)\n\nBragg succeeds Rutherford\n\nSecond World War\n\nCavendish Physical Society: annual dinner\n\nCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA)\n\ncentrifugal jet stream method\n\nCERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)\n\nChadwick, James\n\nand cosmic rays\n\n'Possible Existence of the Neutron'\n\nChamberlain, Neville\n\nChandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan\n\nChannel Islands\n\nChaplin, Charlie\n\nCharlesworth, Martin\n\nCher\n\nChicago\n\nChopin, Fryderyk\n\nChristie, Agatha\n\nChrist's College, Cambridge\n\nChukovsky, Korney: _Crocodile_\n\nChurchill, Sir Winston\n\nChurchill College, Cambridge\n\nCivil Defence offices, St Regis\n\nClark, Sir Kenneth (later Lord)\n\nclassical mechanics\n\nclassical physics\n\nCleese, John and Chapman, Graham: _Monty Python's Flying Circus_ script\n\nClifton Suspension Bridge\n\nClinton, Bill\n\nClinton, Hillary Rodham\n\ncloud chamber\n\nCockcroft, Lady Elizabeth\n\nCockcroft, Sir John\n\nCold War\n\nCole, Sir Henry\n\nColiseum ice-rink, Bristol\n\nColleraine, Tony\n\nColumbia Radiation Laboratory\n\nColumbia University, New York\n\nCommunism\n\nCommunist Academy\n\nCommunist Party\n\ncomplementarity principle\n\nCompton, Arthur\n\nelectromagnetic radiation behaving as discrete particles\n\nPD declines his offer of a post in Chicago\n\nCompton, Karl\n\nComte, Auguste\n\nConan Doyle, Sir Arthur\n\nConcorde\n\nCongress of Russian Physicists (1928)\n\nconservation of energy, law of\n\nCopenhagen\n\nPD in\n\nCoral Gables conferences\n\nCornwall\n\ncorrespondence principle\n\ncosmic rays\n\nMillikan's investigations\n\nBlackett's interest in\n\nAnderson's use of a cloud chamber\n\nBlackett and Occhialini's work\n\nAnderson identifies the muon\n\ncosmology\n\nCoughlin, Joseph ('Roundy')\n\nCouncil on Foreign Relations\n\ncounter-current centrifuge\n\nCoward, No\u00ebl\n\nCrimea, the\n\nCrowther, Jim _Soviet Science_\n\nCuban crisis (1962)\n\nCunningham, Ebenezer\n\nHass\u00e9's letter supporting PD\n\nPD asks to study relativity with him\n\non PD\n\nCurie, Marie\n\nCzechoslovakia\n\n##\n\n_Daily Express_\n\n_Daily Herald_\n\n_Daily Mail_\n\n_Daily Mirror_\n\n_Daily Telegraph_\n\nDaladier, \u00c9douard\n\nDali, Salvador\n\nDalitz, Dick\n\nDalyell, Tam\n\nDaniel, Glyn\n\nDarwin, Charles\n\nbottom-up thinking\n\ncompared with Dirac\n\ntheory of evolution\n\nDarwin, Charles (grandson of the naturalist)\n\nDavisson, Clinton\n\nde Broglie, Louis: wave theory of matter\n\nde Sitter, Wilhelm\n\nde Valera, \u00c9amon\n\nDebye, Peter\n\n\u22072V Club\n\nDelbr\u00fcck, Max\n\nDelhi\n\nDelta function\n\nDent, Beryl\n\nDepartment of Scientific and Industrial\n\nResearch\n\nDepression\n\nDescartes, Ren\u00e9\n\n_Deutsches Volkstrum_ ('German Heritage')\n\ndialectical materialism\n\nDicke, Robert\n\nDickens, Charles\n\ndifferential geometry\n\nDingle, Herbert\n\nDirac, Betty (PD's sister)\n\nbirth\n\nnames\n\nchildhood\n\neducation\n\nher father's favourite child\n\npersonality\n\nand Felix's death\n\nattends's Ph.D. ceremony\n\nlack of employment\n\nchauffeurs her father to and from work\n\nforced to sell her car\n\nand her parents' marriage crisis\n\ndegree studies\n\ngoes to Lourdes with her father\n\nsupports her parents\n\nmoves to London to become a secretary\n\nin Budapest\n\npossible reason for her parents' failed marriage\n\nmarries Joe Teszler\n\nlives in Amsterdam\n\nbirth of son\n\nin the Second World War\n\nstays in Cambridge\n\nher suffering in Budapest\n\nbirth of daughter\n\nrelationship with Manci\n\nin Alicante\n\nstroke\n\nDirac, Charente, France\n\nDirac, Charles (PD's father)\n\nbirth (in Monthey, Switzerland)\n\nchildhood\n\neducation\n\nin London\n\nteaches at Merchant Venturers' Secondary School\n\nsettles in Bristol\n\nappearance\n\npersonality\n\nmeets Florence Holten\n\nand religion\n\nmarries Flo\n\ninsistence on his children speaking French\n\nchampions Esperanto in Bristol\n\nrelationship with PD\n\ncareful with money\n\nwork ethic\n\neffects of his rigorous educational regime at home\n\ntyranny of\n\nhis favourite child\n\nforces Felix to study engineering instead of medicine\n\ndeceptions by\n\nacquires British nationality\n\nefforts to send PD to Cambridge\n\nhelps PD financially\n\ninterest in PD's career\n\nfamily radio\n\ndeeply affected by the death of Felix\n\ndeath of his mother\n\nattends PD's Ph.D. ceremony\n\nletters to his 'only son'\n\nvegetarianism\n\nPD continues to feel intimidated by\n\nand PD's FRS election\n\nretirement\n\ninfidelity\n\nmarriage crisis\n\nloses his grip on his family\n\ncontinues to teach from home\n\nplans to visit Geneva\n\nrediscovery of his childhood Catholicism\n\nvisits Geneva with Betty\n\nFlo attacks in the Swedish press\n\ntries to understand PD's work\n\ngoes to Lourdes\n\nill with pleurisy\n\nserial tax evader\n\nPD blames him for Felix's suicide\n\n'loathed' by PD\n\ndeath and funeral\n\nhis estate\n\ngravestone\n\nDirac, Felix (PD's brother)\n\nbirth\n\nnames\n\nappearance\n\neducation\n\nchildhood in Bristol\n\nbullied by his father\n\npersonality\n\nrift with PD\n\nforced to study engineering instead of medicine\n\nstudent apprenticeship in Rugby\n\nbased near Wolverhampton\n\na draughtsman\n\nBuddhism and astrology\n\nacquires a girlfriend\n\nsettles in Birmingham\n\nvolunteers for the Ambulance Corps\n\nleaves his job at a machine-testing laboratory\n\npersonality\n\nsuicide\n\nthe family's response to his death\n\nmemorial service and inquest\n\ngravestone\n\nDirac, Florence (n\u00e9e Holten; PD's mother)\n\nfirst meets Charles\n\nappearance\n\npersonality\n\nabsent-minded\n\nand religion\n\ncorrespondence with Charles\n\nmarries Charles\n\nbirth of Felix\n\nbirth of Paul\n\npoem about PD\n\nPaul as her favourite child\n\nand Charles's deception\n\ncorrespondence with PD\n\nfears competition for PD's affections\n\nasks PD for money\n\nand the death of Felix\n\npoetry\n\ninterest in politics\n\nattends PD's Ph.D. ceremony\n\nworried about PD's emaciated appearance\n\nevening classes\n\nadmits her unhappiness\n\nhousework, dislike of\n\nPD pays for a diamond ring\n\nPD's visits home\n\nvisits PD in Cambridge\n\nand PD's visits to Russia\n\nopposes the idea of a woman prime minister\n\nfussing over PD\n\nand PD's FRS election\n\ndreads Charles's retirement\n\nthe charade of her marriage\n\naffinity with the sea; _see also_ Richard Holten (her father)\n\nmarriage crisis\n\nMediterranean cruises\n\nat PD's Nobel Prize ceremony\n\nat Bohr's party in Copenhagen\n\nand Charles's pleurisy\n\nmeets Manci\n\ndisputes with Manci\n\nin the Second World War\n\ndeath and funeral\n\nDirac, Gabriel (PD's step-son)\n\nDirac, Gisela\n\nDirac, Judy (PD's step-daughter)\n\nDirac, Louis (PD's paternal grandfather)\n\nDirac, Margit (Manci; n\u00e9e Wigner; PD's wife)\n\nmeets PD\n\npersonality\n\nand PD's talk of his unhappy childhood\n\non her first marriage and divorce\n\nand religion\n\na keen follower of the arts\n\npursuit of PD\n\nPD visits her in Budapest\n\nIsabel Whitehead's assessment\n\nPD's proposal of marriage\n\nmarriage and honeymoon\n\nrelationship with Betty\n\n'Wigner's sister' appellation\n\nsettles in Cambridge\n\nin the Soviet Union\n\npregnancies\n\nas an alien in wartime England\n\nand air raids on Cambridge\n\nFlo helps with housework\n\norders Judy out of the house\n\nand the Nazi concentration camps\n\ncomplains about the exodus from Cambridge\n\nscorns Heisenberg\n\nin Princeton\n\nand politics\n\nmarriage under strain\n\na better wife than mother\n\nand disappearance of Judy\n\nworsening arthritis\n\nand PD's decision to move to Florida State University\n\nat Florida State\n\nJewish and occasionally anti-Semitic\n\nas a hostess\n\nfraught relationship with Halpern\n\nPD's death and funeral\n\nlively and active for ten years after PD's  death\n\nletter from Hillary Rodham Clinton\n\ndeath\n\nDirac, Mary (PD's daughter; later Colleraine, then Tilley)\n\nbirth\n\nchildhood\n\npersonality\n\neducation\n\nemigration to the USA\n\nDirac, Monica (PD's daughter)\n\nbirth\n\nchildhood\n\npersonality\n\nat PD's commemoration\n\n**Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice**\n\n**life story**\n\nbirth (8 August 1902)\n\nappearance and dress sense\n\ndigestive problems\n\nforesees the existence of the positron\n\nchildhood in Bristol\n\nrelationship with his father\n\nnicknamed 'Tiny'\n\nschool education\n\nvisits Switzerland\n\nBristol accent\n\nand technical drawing\n\nhandwriting\n\nhis mother's favourite\n\nrift with Felix\n\nengineering degree\n\npublic impact of relativity theory\n\ntrainee engineer in Rugby\n\napplied maths degree studies\n\nand projective geometry\n\nwins scholarships to St John's College, Cambridge\n\nsupervision by Fowler\n\nCharles helps him financially\n\narrives at Cambridge\n\nmanner at the dinner table\n\nattends Eddington's lectures\n\nBlackett and Kapitza become his closest friends\n\nand Soviet ideology\n\nand his mother's possessiveness\n\nfirst academic papers\n\nFelix's death\n\nfirst great epiphany\n\nfirst paper on quantum mechanics\n\nPh.D. thesis\n\ncombines logic and intuition\n\nas 'the strangest man' (Bohr)\n\nsuccessful period in Copenhagen\n\nin G\u00f6ttingen\n\nfriendship with Oppenheimer\n\nhis visits home\n\nelected Fellow of St John's College\n\nhis rooms in college\n\nmakes his most famous contribution to science\n\nrelationship with Isabel Whitehead\n\nfirst visit to Russia\n\nreductionism\n\nfirst visit to US\n\nelected Fellow of the Royal Society\n\nbuys his first car\n\nrepresented in a special version of _Faust_\n\nLucasian Chair\n\nWittgenstein, opinion of\n\nand moral philosophy\n\nworks with Kapitza in his laboratory\n\nlast meeting with Ehrenfest\n\nNobel Prize for physics\n\nfirst public comment on social and economic affairs\n\nsmitten with Rho Gamow\n\nfirst meets Manci\n\ncampaign for Kapitza's release\n\nsends the Gamows a baby alligator\n\nguardian of Kapitza's sons\n\ngraduate supervisor\n\nproposes to Manci\n\nmarriage and honeymoon\n\nfirst love letter\n\nwants his own children\n\nrefuses Princeton's job offer\n\nScott lecture\n\noffered war work\n\nBaker Medal\n\nand the death of his mother\n\nrefused a visa for the Soviet Union\n\ndeclines honours\n\nrefused a US visa\n\nvisits India\n\njaundice\n\nmarriage under strain\n\nmarginalised in Cambridge\n\nemigration to US\n\n_Scientific American_ article (1963)\n\n_Horizon_ interview (1965)\n\nquarks, likes concept of\n\ndecision to move to Florida State University\n\nroutine at Florida State\n\nbusts and paintings of PD\n\naccepts the Order of Merit\n\nvisits CERN\n\nflies on Concorde\n\nsees his life as a failure\n\nsurgery on tubercular kidney\n\ndeath (20 October 1984)\n\nfuneral\n\ncommemoration in Westminster Abbey\n\ncentenary of his birth\n\npossible autism\n\nnames\n\nmemorial stone\n\n**personality**\n\n\\- aloofness\n\n\\- confident\n\n\\- defensiveness\n\n\\- determination\n\n\\- diffidence\n\n\\- equability\n\n\\- frugality\n\n\\- inhibition\n\n\\- lack of social sensitivity\n\n\\- literal-mindedness\n\n\\- modesty\n\n\\- narrow-mindedness\n\n\\- objectivity\n\n\\- obsession with taking long walks\n\n\\- otherworldiness\n\n\\- passivity\n\n\\- physical ineptitude\n\n\\- private enthusiasms\n\n\\- reticence\n\n\\- rigid pattern of activities\n\n\\- self-centredness\n\n\\- shyness\n\n\\- stubborness\n\n\\- taciturnity\n\n\\- top-down thinker\n\n\\- verbal economy\n\n\\- work ethic\n\n**interests, aptitudes and opinions**\n\n\\- beauty, mathematical, fascination with\n\n\\- board games and mathematical puzzles, enjoyment of\n\n\\- driver, skills as a\n\n\\- fondness for Mickey Mouse films\n\n\\- food, tastes and appetite ,\n\n\\- gardening\n\n\\- Hamiltonian approach to mechanics, strong belief in\n\n\\- jokes, appreciation of\n\n\\- lecturer, skills as a\n\n\\- mountain-climbing\n\n\\- philosophy, opinion of\n\n\\- relativity, fascination with\n\n\\- religion, opinions about ,\n\n\\- renormalisation, distaste for and dislike of\n\n\\- swimming\n\n\\- team games and teams, aversion to participation in\n\n\\- technology of space flight, interest in\n\n\\- top-down thinking\n\n\\- tree-climbing\n\n**contributions to physics and mathematics**\n\n\\- action principle in quantum mechanics\n\n\\- antimatter, foresees, _see also_ positron and antiproton\n\n\\- anti-electron predicts, _see_ positron\n\n\\- anti-proton, predicts\n\n\\- blackbody radiation spectrum derived\n\n\\- bra and ket notation\n\n\\- classical theories of the electron\n\n\\- cosmology, thoughts on\n\n\\- density matrix\n\n\\- delta function\n\n\\- Dirac equation ,\n\n\\- Dirac sea\n\n\\- dispersion theory\n\n\\- ether, post-Einstein view of\n\n\\- Fermi-Dirac statistics\n\n\\- general relativity, Hamiltonian formulation of\n\n\\- gravity, weakening of - postulates, see also large numbers hypothesis\n\n\\- high-spin theory\n\n\\- hole theory\n\n\\- indefinite metric\n\n\\- jet-stream method of isotope separation\n\n\\- Kapitza-Dirac effect\n\n\\- large numbers hypothesis\n\n\\- magnetic monopole\n\n\\- many-times formulation of quantum electrodynamics by PD, Fock and Podolsky\n\n\\- neutron diffusion in matter, theory of\n\n\\- non-commutation in quantum mechanics\n\n\\- parity violation, foresees possibility of\n\n\\- philosophy of physical science\n\n\\- Poisson bracket in quantum mechanics\n\n\\- positron, prediction of\n\n\\- principle of mathematical beauty\n\n\\- quantum electrodynamics\n\n\\- quantum field theory, co-discovery _see quantum electrodynamics_\n\n\\- quantum mechanics of heavy atoms\n\n\\- quantum mechanics, later contributions\n\n\\- Schr\u00f6dinger equation (time dependent), independent discovery by PD\n\n\\- sphere, quantum-relativistic treatment of\n\n\\- spinors\n\n\\- string concept in quantum electrodynamics\n\n\\- transformation theory\n\n\\- vacuum polarisation\n\n\\- virtual states\n\n**the arts, taste and appreciation of**\n\n\\- art (visual),\n\n\\- cinema\n\n\\- comics and comic characters\n\n\\- music\n\n\\- novels\n\n\\- poetry\n\n\\- radio and television, appreciation of\n\n\\- theatre and opera\n\n**books**\n\n\\- _General Theory of Relativity_\n\n\\- _Principles of Quantum Mechanics_\n\nDirac, unofficial unit of frequency of speech\n\nDirac, Walla (PD's paternal grandmother)\n\n'Dirac stories'\n\nDNA, double-helix structure of\n\nDneproges hydroelectric power station\n\nDobb, Maurice\n\nDostoevsky, Fyodor: _Crime and Punishment_\n\nDouglas' Works, Kingswood\n\nDublin\n\nDublin conference (1942)\n\nDurango, Colorado\n\nDuranty, Walter\n\nDutton, S. T.: _Social Phases of Education in the School and the Home_\n\nDyson, Freeman\n\n##\n\nEddington, Sir Arthur\n\nmathematician and astronomer\n\nunderstanding of relativity theory\n\nsolar-eclipse experiments\n\non Einstein's _E_ = _mc_ 2 equation\n\nintroducesto relativity\n\nappearance\n\npersonality\n\nmathematical approach to science\n\nand Rutherford\n\ncongratulateson his Ph.D. thesis\n\nand the splitting of the atom\n\nmedia savvy\n\npilloried by his younger colleagues\n\nand nuclear energy\n\ndisagreement with PD\n\nDublin conference (1942)\n\ndeath\n\n_The Mathematical Theory of Relativity_\n\n_The Nature of the Physical World_\n\n_Space, Time and Gravitation_\n\nEdward VII, King\n\nEhrenfest, Paul\n\nEhrenhaft, Felix\n\nEinstein, Albert\n\npersonality\n\nmost successful spurt of creativity\n\nappearance\n\nstudies Mill's _System of Logic_\n\n_E_ = _mc_ 2 equation\n\nand Planck's blackbody radiation spectrum formula\n\nand solar eclipse results\n\nlight quanta idea\n\nand Bohr\n\nand Heisenberg's theory of 1925\n\nsuspicious of the new quantum mechanics\n\ntop-down approach to physics\n\non PD\n\nstimulated emission process and the laser\n\nattacks Heisenberg's uncertainty principle\n\ndiffers from PD in his approach to science\n\npraises PD's textbook\n\nat the 1930 Solvay Conference\n\ndespises Hitler\n\nNazis' view of his 'Jewish physics'\n\nand the photon\n\nand the splitting of the atom\n\nflees from Germany to the USA\n\nat Princeton\n\nand Kapitza's detention\n\ndislike of quantum electrodynamics\n\ntreats Heisenberg with contempt\n\nHoover's campaign against\n\nsuggests the existence of a positive electron\n\nin search of generalisations\n\ndeath\n\ncentenary of his birth\n\n'Electron and General Relativity'\n\n_see also_ relativity\n\nEisenhower, Dwight D.\n\nelectrical charge\n\nelectromagnetic interaction\n\nelectromagnetism\n\nlaws of\n\nMaxwell's theory\n\nPD's magnetic monopole theory\n\nelectron-positron pairs\n\nelectrons\n\nbare\n\nbehaving as discrete particles\n\nCavendish annual dinner, toast to\n\ndescribing behaviour of a single, isolated electron\n\ndiffraction by light\n\nDirac equation\n\ndiscovered by J. J. Thomson\n\nextended\n\nmoving in a straight line\n\nnegative-energy\n\norbiting the nucleus\n\nparticle-like\n\nPauli's exclusion principle\n\npositive-energy\n\nscattering\n\nself-energy of\n\nspin of\n\nwave nature _see also_ Fermi-Dirac statistics\n\nEliot, T. S.\n\nElizabeth, Queen (later the Queen Mother)\n\nElizabeth, Queen\n\nElsasser, Walter\n\nempiricism\n\nenergy quanta\n\n'Erice Statement' (1982)\n\nErice summer school, Sicily (1982)\n\nEsperanto\n\nether\n\nbelief in\n\nPD's ether\n\nEuclid\n\nEuclidean geometry\n\nevolution, theory of\n\nexclusion principle\n\n##\n\nFalklands War (1982)\n\nFaraday, Michael\n\nFarm Hall, Godmanchester, Cambridgeshire\n\nFarmelo, Amelia (n\u00e9e Jones)\n\nFaust, performance of special version (1932)\n\nFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)\n\nFen, Elisaveta _see_ Jackson, Lydia\n\nFermi, Enrico\n\nradioactive decay of nuclei\n\nquantum field theory of beta decay\n\nand nuclear fission\n\nbuilds first nuclear reactor\n\nweak interaction\n\nNobel Prize\n\nFermi-Dirac statistics\n\nFermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab)\n\nFermilab Symposium (1980)\n\nfermions\n\nFeynman, Richard\n\nat 'The Future of Nuclear Science' conference\n\npersonality\n\nnew version of quantum mechanics\n\nanalyst and intuitionist\n\nWigner on\n\nportrait of PD\n\nsays he is 'no Dirac'\n\nFilton, Bristol\n\nFirst World War\n\nFisher family\n\nFitzgerald, F. Scott\n\nFlexner, Abraham\n\nFlorida State University\n\nPhysics Department\n\nPD moves from Cambridge to\n\ntreatment of PD\n\nKeen Building\n\nand PD's funeral\n\nDirac Science Library\n\nfluid mechanics\n\nFock, Vladimir\n\nFolies Berg\u00e8re\n\nFord, Henry\n\nForeign Office\n\nFourier, Joseph\n\nFowler, Ralph\n\nPD's supervisor at Cambridge\n\nand Rutherford\n\nlectures on Bohr's theory\n\nworks with Bohr\n\nand's paper 'The Fundamental Equations of Quantum Mechanics'\n\nelected a Fellow of the Royal Society\n\nPD's visits to Copenhagen and G\u00f6ttingen\n\nco-edits the 'International Series of Monographs on Physics'\n\nfailing health\n\ndeath\n\nFranck, James\n\nFranco, General\n\nFrank, Anne\n\nFrank, Sir Charles\n\nFraser, Peter\n\nFrayn, Michael: _Copenhagen_\n\nFrench Circle\n\nFrench Riviera\n\nFrenkel, Yakov\n\nFriedmann, Alexander\n\nFrisch, Otto\n\nFrisch, Otto and Peierls, Rudolf:\n\n'Memorandum on the Properties of a\n\nRadioactive \"Super-Bomb\"'\n\nFrith, Uta\n\nFrost, Robert\n\nFuchs, Klaus\n\nfundamental interactions, unified theory of\n\nfundamental particles\n\n'Future of Nuclear Science' conference\n\n(Graduate College, Princeton, 1946)\n\nGabor, Dennis\n\nGalileo Galilei\n\nGalsworthy, John: _Forsyte Saga_\n\nGamow, Barbara (n\u00e9e Perkins)\n\nGamow, George\n\nGamow, Lyubov Vokhminzeva ('Rho')\n\nGandhi, Mahatma M.K.\n\nGardiner, Margaret\n\nGaspra, Crimea\n\ngauge invariance\n\ngauge theory\n\nGautier, Th\u00e9ophile\n\nGebhard's Hotel, G\u00f6ttingen\n\nGeiger counters\n\nGell-Mann, Murray\n\nGeneral Strike (1926)\n\ngenetics\n\nGeneva, Switzerland\n\ngeometry\n\ndifferential\n\nEuclidean\n\nnon-Euclidean\n\nPD immersed in at Cambridge\n\nprojective\n\nRiemannian\n\nGeorge, King\n\nGercke, Achim\n\nGermany\n\nYouth Movement\n\nthe Depression in\n\nnew militarism in\n\nEinstein flees to the US\n\nHitler becomes Chancellor\n\nbook-burning ceremonies\n\nannexes Austria\n\ninvades Czechoslovakia\n\ninvades Poland\n\nBritain declares war on\n\noverwhelms Norway and Denmark\n\nblitzkrieg on Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands\n\nU-boat fleet\n\nGermer, Lester\n\nGill, Eric\n\nGlacier National Park\n\ngluons\n\nGo (a.k.a. Wei Chi)\n\nGoddard, Peter\n\nGoethe, Johann Wolfgang von: _Faust_\n\nGog Magog Hills\n\n_Goldfinger_ (film)\n\nGoldhaber, Maurice\n\nGoldschmidt, Victor\n\nGonville and Caius College, Cambridge\n\nGottfried, Kurt\n\nG\u00f6ttingen\n\nPD visits\n\nMathematics Institute\n\nanti-Semitism in\n\nNazism in\n\nseething with political tensions\n\nHeisenberg returns to\n\nthe Diracs and Kapitzas in\n\ngramophone\n\nGrand Canyon\n\nGrandin, Temple\n\nGrant, Cary\n\n_Granta_\n\nGrassmann algebra\n\nGraves, Robert\n\ngravitational waves\n\ngraviton\n\ngravity\n\nand the general theory\n\nlaws of\n\nand Newton's falling apple\n\nand Riemann's geometric ideas\n\nand string theory\n\n_Great Britain_ , SS\n\nGreat Exhibition (1851)\n\n_Greater Soviet Encyclopedia_\n\nGreen, Michael\n\ngroup theory\n\nGroves, General Leslie\n\n##\n\nHaddon, Mark: _The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time_\n\nHahn, Otto\n\nHalpern, Leopold\n\nborn and raised in Austria\n\npersonality\n\nfriendship with PD\n\nopposes surgery on PD's tubercular kidney\n\nfraught relationship with Manci\n\nhomoeopathic treatment of PD\n\nand PD's funeral\n\nsatellite-based experimental programme\n\ndeath\n\nHamilton, William\n\nHamiltonian\n\nHarding, Gardner L.\n\nHardy, G. H.\n\nHarish-Chandra (Harish Chandra Mehrotra)\n\nHarish-Chandra, Lily\n\nHarvard University\n\nHarz Mountains\n\nHass\u00e9, Ronald\n\nHawking, Stephen\n\nHayward, F. H.\n\nHeath, Edward\n\nHeaviside, Oliver\n\nHebblethwaite, Cyril\n\nHeckmann, Otto\n\nHegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich\n\nHeisenberg, Werner\n\npersonality\n\naddresses the Kapitza Club\n\nquantum theory (1925)\n\nnon-commuting quantities\n\nand PD's first paper on quantum mechanics\n\nworks with Born and Jordan at G\u00f6ttingen\n\nand Schr\u00f6dinger's work on wave mechanics\n\nuncertainty principle\n\npianistic skills\n\nand PD's attack on religion\n\nappointed full professor in Leipzig\n\nand the Dirac equation\n\nvisits Japan with PD\n\nSoviet government's attitude to his work\n\npleased at Hitler's coming to power\n\nand the positron\n\natomic nucleus structure\n\nNobel Prize for physics\n\ncelebrations in Copenhagen\n\nmessage to Born from the Nazi Government\n\na 'White Jew'\n\nmeeting with Bohr (1941)\n\nattests to Betty's non-Jewish status\n\ninterned near Cambridge\n\nexplanation of his wartime conduct\n\nPD supports\n\nquarrels with Pauli\n\nat Lindau\n\ninterviewed with PD\n\nappearance\n\ndeath\n\nHeisenberg-Pauli theory\n\nHellman, Bruce\n\nHenri Poincar\u00e9 Institute, Paris\n\nHess, Rudolf\n\nHessen, Boris\n\nhigh-dimensional field theories\n\nhigh-energy particle accelerators\n\nhigh-energy physics\n\nHighgate Cemetery, London\n\nHilbert, David\n\nHippodrome theatre, Bristol\n\nHiroshima, bombing of (1945)\n\nHiston, Cambridgeshire\n\nHitler, Adolf\n\nHofer, Kurt\n\nHoffman, Dustin\n\nHolborn Registry Office, central London\n\nHolcomb, Dorothy\n\nhole theory\n\nHoliday Inn, Tallahassee\n\nHolmes, Sherlock, _see also_\n\nHolten, Beatrice (Flo's sister)\n\nHolten, Fred (Flo's brother)\n\nHolten, Nell (Flo's sister)\n\nHolten, Richard (PD's maternal grandfather)\n\nHong Kong\n\nHoover, Herbert\n\nHoover, J. Edgar\n\n_Horizon_ (BBC programme) 'Lindau'\n\nHorthy, Admiral\n\nHotel Britannique, Brussels\n\nHotel Metropole, Moscow\n\nHoum\u00e8re, Pam\n\nHousman, A.E.\n\nHoyle, Fred\n\nHubble, Edwin\n\nHubble's law\n\nHungary\n\nHuntingdon Road, Cambridge\n\nHuxley, Aldous: _Point Counterpoint_\n\nHuxley, Thomas\n\nhydrogen atom\n\nBohr theory and\n\nDirac equation and\n\nlamb-shift of\n\nquantum mechanics and\n\nhydrogen bomb\n\n##\n\nImmigration Act (1952)\n\nImperial Hotel, Bloomsbury, London\n\nindefinite metric\n\nIndia\n\nPD visits (1954)\n\nbecomes a nuclear power (1974)\n\nInfeld, Leopold\n\nInstitut de Physiology Solvay au Parc\n\nL\u00e9opold, Brussels\n\nInstitute for Advanced Studies, Dublin\n\nInstitute for Advanced Study, Princeton\n\nInstitute for Physical Problems (Soviet Union)\n\nInstitute for Theoretical Physics (Niels Bohr\n\nInstitute), University of Copenhagen\n\nInternational Congress on the History of\n\nScience and Technology, second (Science\n\nMuseum, London, 1932)\n\nInternational Esperanto Congress (Trinity\n\nCollege, Cambridge, 1907)\n\n'International Series of Monographs on\n\nPhysics'\n\nInyom, Revd. Sapasvee Anagami\n\nIsenstein, Harald\n\nisotope separation\n\nIsrael\n\nIvanenko, Dmitry 'Dimus'\n\n##\n\nJackson, Lydia (previously Elisaveta Fen)\n\nJapan\n\nPD and Heisenberg visit\n\nnew militarism in\n\nbombing of Hiroshima\n\nbombing of Nagasaki\n\nsurrender of\n\n'Jazz Band' (informal group of Soviet theorists)\n\nJeans, Sir James\n\n_The Mysterious Universe_\n\nJeffreys, Harold\n\n'Jewish physics'\n\nJohn Paul II, Pope\n\nJoliot-Curie, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric\n\nJoliot-Curie, Ir\u00e8ne\n\nJones, Norman\n\nJordan, Pascual\n\nworks with Born and Heisenberg at G\u00f6ttingen\n\nand groups of electrons\n\npersonality\n\nappearance\n\nand field theory\n\nand the Dirac equation\n\nNazi past\n\nJoyce, James\n\n_Finnegans Wake_\n\n_A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_\n\nJulius Road, Bristol (No.6)\n\n##\n\nKant, Immanuel\n\nand beauty\n\nand truth\n\nKapitza, Anna ('Rat')\n\nKapitza, Peter\n\nsettles in the UK\n\npersonality\n\ninfluences PD\n\nresented by Blackett\n\nobsession with the crocodile\n\nRussia's industrialisation and electrification\n\nrelationship with Rutherford\n\ncompared with PD\n\nsupports Communist goals\n\nunder surveillance\n\nsets up the Kapitza Club\n\nattitude to experimental physics\n\nmarries Anna Krylova\n\nco-edits the 'International Series of Monographs on Physics'\n\nat the Cavendish Physical Society annual dinner\n\nthe Bukharin visit to Cambridge\n\nMI5 monitors him\n\nvacation with PD in the Crimea\n\nand the anti-electron\n\nPD works with him in his laboratory\n\ndetained by the Soviet Government\n\nand Rutherford's death\n\nseeks Landau's release\n\nwartime telegram to PD\n\nnominated by PD for a Nobel Prize\n\ninvents method of liquefying oxygen\n\n'Hero of Socialist Labour'\n\nand Beria\n\nin disgrace\n\nletters to Stalin\n\nand PD's passion for beauty\n\nvisits Cambridge in 1966\n\nNobel Prize in Physics\n\ndeath\n\nPD spends his last hours talking about him\n\n'The Training of the Young Scientist in the USSR'\n\nKapitza-Dirac effect\n\nKapitza Club\n\nKeats, John\n\nKennedy, John F.\n\nKent State University\n\nket\n\nKeynes, John Maynard\n\nKharkhov\n\nKhrushchev, Nikita\n\nKierkegaard, S\u00f8ren\n\nKitchener, Lord\n\nKlampenborg Forest, Denmark\n\nKlein, Oskar\n\nKoh-i-Noor restaurant, St John's Street,\n\nCambridge\n\nKronborg castle, Denmark\n\nKubrick, Stanley\n\nKuhn, Thomas\n\nKun, B\u00e9la\n\nKur\u015funo\u011flu, Behram\n\nKyoto\n\n##\n\nLabour government\n\nLabour Party\n\nLagerl\u00f6f, Selma\n\nLagrange, Jopseph Louis\n\nLagrangian\n\nLake District\n\nLake Elmore\n\nLamb, Charles: 'The Old Familiar Faces'\n\nLamb, Willis\n\nLandau, Lev\n\nLandshoff, Peter\n\nLanger, Rudolph\n\nLannutti, Joe\n\nLarge Hadron Collider\n\nlarge numbers hypothesis\n\nLarmor, Sir Joseph\n\nlasers\n\nLawrence, Ernest\n\nLawrence, T.E.: _Seven Pillars of Wisdom_\n\nLederman, Ellen\n\nLederman, Leon\n\nLee, T..\n\nleft-right symmetry\n\nLeiden, Netherlands, PD visits\n\nLeipzig\n\nHeisenberg appointed full professor\n\nPD in\n\nLema\u00eetre, Abb\u00e9 Georges\n\nLenin, Vladimir\n\nLeningrad, PD in\n\nleptons\n\nLiberal Party\n\n_Life_ magazine\n\nlight\n\nviewed as photons\n\nin a continuous wave\n\nemitted and absorbed by atoms\n\nenergy of light tranferrable to atoms only in quanta (Planck)\n\nas particles\n\n_see also_ radiation, electromagnetic\n\nLindau, Germany\n\n1965 meeting\n\n1971 meeting\n\n1982 meeting\n\nLindemann, Frederick\n\nLindstrom, Andy\n\nLippmann, Gabriel\n\nLiverpool\n\nLloyd George, David\n\nLocarno, Treaty of (1925)\n\nlogical positivists\n\nLondon\n\nCharles Dirac in\n\nin Second World War\n\nDirac family stays in\n\nLondon Mathematical Society\n\nLos Alamos headquarters, New Mexico\n\nLost Lake, near Tallahassee\n\nLourdes\n\nLucasian Professorship of Mathematics\n\nLuftwaffe\n\nLyons, Eugene\n\n##\n\nMcCarthy, Joseph\n\nMacDonald, Ramsay\n\nmagnetic monopole\n\nManchester\n\n_Manchester Guardian_\n\nManchester University\n\nManhattan, New York\n\nManhattan Project\n\nMartineau, Harriet\n\nMarx, Karl\n\nMarxism\n\nmathematics\n\naesthetic view of\n\napplied\n\nbeauty of\n\nBohr's attitude to\n\nGod as a mathematician\n\nmathematical rigour\n\nPD's sometimes cavalier attitude to\n\npragmatic approach to the mathematics of engineering\n\npure\n\ngame in which people invent the rules, PD's view as\n\nmatrices\n\nand electron spin\n\nHeisenberg's quantum theory\n\nMAUD committee\n\nMaugham, W. Somerset\n\n_A Writer's Notebook_\n\n_Of Human Bondage_\n\n_Then and Now_\n\nMauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Austria\n\nMaxwell, James Clerk\n\nelectromagnetic theory\n\nthe universe as a giant mechanism\n\nMaysky, Ivan\n\nmechanics, laws of (Newton)\n\nMeitner, Lise\n\nMerchant Venturers' Secondary School, Bristol (later Cotham Road School)\n\nCharles teaches at\n\nPD's education\n\nrelocates to Cotham Lawn Road\n\ncelebration of's success\n\nMerchant Venturers' Society\n\nMerchant Venturers' Technical College, Bristol\n\nFelix studies at the Faculty of Engineering\n\nPD's studies\n\nwartime bombing of\n\nmesons\n\nMetropolitan Police Special Branch\n\nMI5\n\nMiami\n\nMiami Museum of Science\n\nMickey Mouse\n\nmicroelectronics\n\nMill, John Stuart\n\n_On Liberty_\n\n_A System of Logic_\n\nMiller, Arthur\n\nMillikan, Robert\n\nelectrical charge\n\ncosmic rays\n\nand Anderson's evidence for a positive electron\n\nand electron-positron pairs\n\nefforts to get Kapitza released\n\nMills, Robert\n\nMilne, Edward\n\nMiners' Union\n\nMinkowski, Hermann\n\nMoli\u00e8re\n\nM\u00f8ller, Christian\n\nMond Laboratory, Cambridge\n\nMonge, Gaspard\n\nMonk Road, Bishopston, Bristol (No.15)\n\nmonopole problem\n\nMonthey, Switzerland\n\nMoore, George _Principia ethica_\n\nMorgan, Howard\n\nMorrisville, Vermont\n\nMorse, Louise\n\nMoscow\n\nPD in\n\nKapitzka detained in\n\nscience community\n\n_Moscow News_\n\nMoscow Polytechnic\n\nMoscow University\n\nMoseley, Sir Oswald\n\nMott, Nevill\n\nMount Brocken\n\nMount Elbrus\n\nMount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena\n\nMountfield Nursing Home, London\n\nMuch Wenlock, Shropshire\n\nMunich\n\nMunich agreement\n\nmuon\n\nMussolini, Benito\n\n##\n\nNagasaki, bombing of\n\nnanotechnology\n\nNASA\n\nnature\n\nfundamental equations of Nature as only approximations\n\nlaws of\n\nmetaphor of a colossal clockwork mechanism\n\nunity and beauty of\n\n_Nature_ journal\n\nNazis (National Socialists)\/Nazism\n\nnegative energy states\n\nNehru, Jawaharlal\n\nneutrinos\n\nneutron stars\n\nneutrons\n\natomic nuclei\n\nChadwick's discovery\n\nRutherford proposes\n\nstrongly interacting\n\n_New Statesman_\n\nNew York\n\n_New York Times_\n\nNewlin's restaurant, Princeton\n\nNewman, Max\n\nNewnham College, Cambridge\n\n_News Chronicle_\n\nNewton, Sir Isaac\n\nchildhood\n\nEinstein's theory refutes his ideas\n\ntheory of gravity\n\nmechanics\n\nburial in Westminster Abbey\n\nand autism\n\nNightingale, Florence\n\nNixon, Richard\n\nNoakes, Michael\n\nNobel, Alfred\n\n'Nobel disease'\n\nNobel Foundation\n\nnon-commuting quantities\n\nnon-interacting quantum particles\n\nNorway, PD in\n\nnuclear fission\n\nnuclear industry\n\nnuclear weapons\n\ndestruction of incoming\n\nSecond World War\n\n##\n\nOcchialini, Giuseppe\n\n_Oklahoma!_ (film soundtrack)\n\nOld Faithful geyser\n\nOppenheimer, Frank\n\nOppenheimer, J. Robert ix\n\npersonality\n\ndislike of Cambridge life\n\nclinical depression\n\ntries to poison Blackett\n\nworks with PD\n\nfriendship with PD\n\nat Born's Department of Theoretical Physics\n\npoetry\n\nPh.D. on the quantum mechanics of molecules\n\nand the rise of anti-Semitism\n\ndisappointed with PD's work in G\u00f6ttingen\n\nat University of California at Berkeley\n\nand PD's hole theory\n\non the Heisenberg-Pauli theory\n\nand Anderson's positive electron\n\nquantum electrodynamics\n\nScientific Director of the Manhattan\n\nProject\n\ncelebrated as a hero in the USA\n\ndirector of the Institute for Advanced Study\n\nformer Communist sympathies\n\nadviser on nuclear policy\n\nUS withdraws his security clearance\n\nappearance\n\nretirement and death\n\nand black holes\n\nOrpington, south-east London\n\nOrwell, George\n\n_Coming Up for Air_\n\n_The Lion and the Unicorn_\n\nOseen, Carl\n\nOttawa\n\nOxford\n\n##\n\nPais, Abraham\n\n_Subtle is the Lord_\n\nPalais de la D\u00e9couverte, La, Paris\n\npantheism\n\nPapal Academy\n\nparity violation\n\nparticle accelerators\n\nparticle physics\n\nPauli, Wolfgang\n\nan analytical conservative analyst\n\nexclusion principle\n\npersonality\n\nand electron spin\n\nPD's harshest critic\n\nSecond Principle\n\npraises PD's textbook\n\nand PD's hole theory\n\nco-presents seminar with PD at Princeton\n\nappearance\n\nthe neutrino\n\nproblems in his personal life\n\nsecond marriage\n\nquarrels with Heisenberg\n\nNobel Prize\n\ndeath\n\nPavlov, Ivan\n\n'Peanuts'\n\nPearl Harbor, bombing of\n\nPeierls, Genia\n\nPeierls, Rudolf\n\nPenrose, Roger\n\nPeterhouse College, Cambridge\n\nPhillips, Leslie Roy\n\nphilosophy\n\nPhoney War\n\nphotography, amateur\n\nphotons\n\nand Einstein\n\nand Langer\n\nlight consisting of\n\nscattering by a single electron\n\nstimulated emission process and the laser\n\nPicasso, Pablo\n\nPickering, Arthur\n\nPincher, Chapman\n\nPippard, Brian\n\nPlanck, Max\n\nquantum hypothesis\n\nblackbody radiation spectrum\n\nPlanck's constant\n\nPlato\n\nPodolsky, Boris\n\nPoisson bracket\n\nPoland\n\nHitler's invasion of\n\ncollapse of\n\nManci's view of Poles\n\nPolkinghorne, John\n\nPoncelet, Jean-Victor\n\nPortishead, Bristol\n\nPortland Street Chapel, Bristol\n\nposition and momentum symbols\n\npositive energy states\n\npositivism\n\npositron emission tomography (PET)\n\npositrons _see also_ anti-electrons\n\nPottier family\n\n_Pravda_\n\n'primitive atom' theory\n\nPrinceton\n\nPrinceton University\n\nbicentennial celebrations\n\nFine Hall (later Jones Hall)\n\nFuld Hall\n\nGraduate College\n\n_Proceedings of the Royal Society_\n\nprojective geometry\n\nprotons\n\natomic nuclei\n\nnegative\n\nstrongly interacting\n\nPryce, Gritli (n\u00e9e Born)\n\nPryce, Maurice\n\npulsars\n\n_Punch_ magazine\n\nPythagoras's theorem\n\n##\n\nquanta\n\nenergy\n\nSchr\u00f6dinger's wave theory\n\n_see also_ photons\n\nquantum chromodynamics\n\nquantum electrodynamics\n\nquantum field theory _see also_ quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics\n\nquantum jumps\n\nquantum mechanics\n\nnamed by Born\n\nbirthplace of\n\nbuilding of the complete theory\n\nfirst prediction of\n\nmathematical symbols in\n\ncentral role of probability\n\nrelationship with classical mechanics\n\nrelativistic\n\nand miniaturisation\n\nquantum numbers\n\nquantum theory\n\ndiscovered by Planck\n\nEinstein lays its foundations\n\nlaws of\n\nPD introduces the mathematics of creation and annihilation\n\nthe universe as fundamentally granular\n\nquarks\n\nquaternions\n\n_Queen Mary_ (liner)\n\n##\n\nRabi, Isidor\n\nradiation\n\nelectromagnetic\n\ngravitational\n\nradio\n\nradioactive decay\n\n_Rain Man_ (film)\n\nRamond, Pierre\n\nReagan, Ronald\n\nRedlands Girls' School, Bristol\n\nreductionism\n\nrelativity\n\nas's passion\n\nBroad's teaching of\n\nEinstein's general theory\n\nEinstein's special theory\n\nHass\u00e9 speaks on the subject at Cambridge\n\nRembrandt van Rijn\n\nrenormalisation\n\nRetherford, Robert\n\n_Reynolds's Illustrated News_\n\nRichards, Sir Gordon\n\nRiemann, Bernhard\n\nRijksmuseum, Amsterdam\n\nRobertson, Andrew\n\nRobertson, David\n\nRobertson, Howard\n\nRobertson, Malcolm\n\nRobeson, Paul\n\nRoentgen Institute, Leningrad\n\nRolls-Royce\n\nR\u00f6ntgen, Wilhelm\n\nRoosevelt, Eleanor\n\nRoosevelt, Franklin.\n\nRoselawn cemetery, Tallahassee\n\nRosen, Nathan\n\nRosenfeld, L\u00e9on\n\nRothschild, Victor, Lord\n\n'Roundy' (Joseph Coughlin)\n\nRousseau, Jean-Jacques\n\nRoyal Air Force\n\nRoyal Astronomical Society, Burlington House, London\n\nRoyal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851\n\nRoyal Navy\n\nRoyal Society\n\nPD elected a Fellow\n\nfunds the Mond Laboratory\n\nBaker Medal\n\nand Heisenberg\n\nand Schr\u00f6dinger\n\nRoyal Society of Scotland\n\nRugby, Warwickshire\n\nRussell, Bertrand 'Zahatopolk'\n\nRutherford, Ernest, Baron Rutherford of Nelson\n\nand Eddington\n\npersonality\n\nappearance\n\ndiscovery of the atomic nucleus\n\nproposes the neutron\n\ndirector of the Cavendish Laboratory\n\nKapitza's nickname for him ('the  Crocodile')\n\nand Kapitza's support of Communism\n\nand Bohr\n\nrelationship with Kapitza\n\nloathes Bernal\n\nennobled\n\ndeath of his daughter\n\nand Chadwick's discovery of the neutron\n\nand the Cockcroft-Walton splitting of the atom\n\nleadership of Cambridge experimental physicists\n\nBlackett's anger at his despotic style\n\nbottom-up approach to physics\n\nbas-relief in the Mond Laboratory\n\nstays in Bohr's mansion\n\nand Kapitza's detention\n\nand's marriage\n\non Eddington\n\ndeath\n\nmemorial service at Westminster Abbey\n\n##\n\nSt John's College, Cambridge\n\nPD unable to take up a place at (1921)\n\nPD wins two scholarships (1923)\n\nPD arrives at\n\ndescribed\n\nencouragesto apply for a Fellowship\n\nawardsa special lectureship\n\nTamm's visit (1931)\n\nBorn's honorary position\n\nCombination Room\n\nFellowship extended for life\n\nIsenstein bust of PD\n\nPD's last visit to\n\nfirst women undergraduates\n\nnurturing environment for PD\n\nPD apologises for absence at eightieth birthday celebrations\n\nPD's Nobel Medal and certificate returned\n\nSt Maurice, Switzerland\n\nSakharov, Andrei\n\nSalam, Abdus\n\nSalaman, Esther and Myer\n\nscattering matrix\n\nSchnabel, Artur\n\nSch\u00f6nberg, Arnold\n\nSchr\u00f6dinger, Annemarie (Anny)\n\nSchr\u00f6dinger, Erwin\n\nhis quantum theory\n\nreputation as a polymath\n\nwave mechanics\n\nvisits the Bohr Institute\n\nNobel Prize for physics\n\npersonality\n\na refugee in Oxford\n\naffirms his loyalty to the Nazi regime\n\naccepts Dublin post\n\nDublin conference (1942)\n\nelected to the Royal Society\n\ndeath\n\nPD's obituary\n\nSchr\u00f6dinger's equation\n\nSchuster, Arthur\n\nSchwarz, John\n\nSchwinger, Julian\n\n_Science_ journal\n\nScience Museum, London\n\n_Scientific American_\n\nScott lecture\n\nSecond Physics Institute, G\u00f6ttingen\n\nSecond World War\n\nChamberlain declares war on Germany\n\nCambridge\n\nblitzkrieg of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands\n\nend of the war in Europe\n\nSeiberg, Nathan\n\nSen, Colleen Taylor\n\nShakespeare, William\n\n_Hamlet_\n\n_Love's Labour's Lost_\n\n_Richard_ 76\n\nShankland, Robert\n\nShaw, George Bernard\n\n_Getting Married_\n\n\\- Preface\n\n_The Irrational Knot_\n\nShelter Island Conference, Long Island, New York (1947)\n\n_Shinyo Maru_ (steamer)\n\nSidgwick, Henry\n\nSilver Lake, near Tallahassee\n\nSimon, Sir Francis\n\n_Simpsons, The_\n\nSinatra, Frank\n\nSkye, Isle of\n\nSlater, John\n\nSliger, Bernie\n\nSnow, C.\n\n_The Search_\n\nSocial-Democratic Workers' Party\n\nSocialist Society\n\nsociology\n\nsolar-eclipse experiments (1919)\n\nSolvay Conferences\n\n1927\n\n1930\n\n1933\n\n1961\n\nSommerfeld, Arnold: _Atomic Structure and Spectral Lines_\n\n_Sound of Music, The_ (film)\n\nSoviet Academy of Sciences\n\nSoviet Conference on Nuclear Physics\n\n(Leningrad, 1933)\n\nSoviet Embassy, Washington\n\nSoviet Union\n\nPD's first visit\n\nPD's second visit\n\nand the British press\n\nthe Soviet experiment\n\nthe Jazz Band\n\nPD falls foul of the censors\n\nPD's support for Soviet physics\n\nPD attends Leningrad conference (1933)\n\nPD unaware of the cost of the collectivisation programme\n\nPD in Bolshevo\n\nGreat Purge\n\ntrials in\n\nNazi invasion of\n\nPD and colleagues refused visas by Churchill\n\nFuchs passes secrets to\n\nearly detonation of the Soviet nuclear weapon\n\nSputnik missions\n\nspace programme\n\nCuban crisis\n\nspace-time\n\ncurved\n\nand de Sitter\n\nmore than four dimensions of\n\nspecial theory of relativity\n\nunified\n\nSpanishWar (1936-9)\n\nSpender, Stephen\n\n_Journals_\n\n_World Within World_\n\nSpielberg, Steven\n\nspinors\n\nspintronics\n\nSpinoza, Baruch\n\nSputnik missions\n\nSS\n\nStalin, Joseph\n\nrise to absolute power\n\nindustrialisation policy\n\ncollective farming programme\n\ninterviewed in _New Statesman_\n\nand the intelligentsia\n\nattitude to science\n\nCambridge students favour over Hitler\n\nhis government becomes more repressive\n\nnon-aggression pact with Hitler\n\nand Kapitza\n\ndeath\n\nKhrushchev denounces\n\nStalingrad\n\nStandard Model\n\nStanford, Henry King\n\nStanford University\n\n_Star Trek_ 8\n\n_Start the Week_ (Radioprogramme)\n\nsteady-state theory\n\nStockholm, Sweden\n\nStockman, Gertrude\n\nStokes, Sir George\n\nStony Brook, New York\n\nStoppard, Tom: _Arcadia_\n\nStrassman, Fritz\n\nStrategic Defence ('Star Wars') Initiative\n\nstress diagrams\n\nstring theory\n\nstrings\n\nstrong interaction\n\nsubatomic particle accelerators\n\nSudarshan, George\n\nSuez crisis (1956)\n\n_Sunday Dispatch_\n\n_Svenska Dagbladet_\n\nSwift, Jonathan: _Gulliver's Travels_\n\nSwirles, Bertha\n\nSwitzerland, PD visits\n\nSzil\u00e1rd, Le\u00f3\n\n##\n\n't Hooft, Gerard\n\nTallahassee, Florida\n\n_Tallahassee Democrat_\n\nTallahassee Memorial Hospital, Florida\n\nTamm, Igor\n\nat Leiden\n\npersonality\n\npolitics\n\nfirst Soviet theoretician to use quantum mechanics\n\nfriendship with PD\n\nmeets up with PD in Moscow\n\nand PD's hole theory\n\non 'brigade education'\n\nand the positron's detection\n\nin Bolshevo\n\nclimbing vacation in the USSR with PD\n\nsecret project to build the hydrogen bomb\n\nNobel Prize\n\nTata Institute, Bombay\n\ntechnical drawing\n\nTeller, Edward\n\nTennyson, Alfred, Lord\n\nTeszler, Betty (PD's sister) _see_ Dirac, Beatrice\n\nTeszler, Christine (PD's niece)\n\nTeszler, Joe\n\nTeszler, Roger (PD's nephew)\n\nThatcher, Margaret, Baroness\n\ntheoretical physics\n\nBerlin as its global capital\n\nPD introduces a new approach to\n\nWeyl's approach\n\nThomson, J. J.\n\nTilley, Peter\n\n_Times, The_\n\nTkachenko, Vladimir\n\nTodd, Horace\n\nTollast, Robert\n\nTolstoy, Count Leo\n\n_Anna Karenina_\n\n_War and Peace_\n\nTomonaga, Sin-Itiro\n\nTots and Quots dining club\n\nTrans-Siberian Railway\n\ntransformation theory\n\ntransistors\n\nTrieste symposium (1971)\n\nTrinity College, Cambridge\n\nTrotsky, Leon\n\nTroyanovsky, Aleksandr\n\nTruman, Harry S.\n\n'Tube Alloys' project\n\ntuberculosis\n\nTurin Shroud\n\nTuring, Alan\n\nTyndall, Arthur\n\n##\n\nuncertainty principle\n\n_Under the Banner of Marxism_ journal\n\nUNESCO\n\nUnited States of America\n\ndevelopment of quantum mechanics\n\nPD's first visit (1929)\n\nPD's 1931 visit\n\ndepression in\n\nEinstein emigrates to\n\nprominent role in the Second World War\n\nAmerican-led experiments to build a nuclear bomb\n\nfunding of theoretical physics\n\nanti-Communist paranoia (1950s)\n\nspace programme\n\nJudy settles in\n\nPD's regular visits\n\nuniverse\n\nexpanding\n\n'primitive atom' theory\n\nUniversity of Aarhus, Denmark\n\nUniversity of Bristol\n\nUniversity Engineering Society\n\nDirac Centenary Meeting (2002)\n\nFaculty of Engineering\n\nmathematics department\n\nPD declines an honorary degree\n\nPD takes the qualifying examinations early\n\nPD's FRS election\n\nUniversity of British Columbia\n\nUniversity of California at Berkeley\n\nUniversity of Cambridge _see_ Cambridge University\n\nUniversity of Florida, Gainesville\n\nUniversity of Geneva\n\nUniversity of Leiden, Netherlands\n\nUniversity of Liverpool\n\nUniversity of London\n\nUniversity of Madison, Wisconsin\n\nUniversity of Manchester\n\nUniversity of Miami\n\nUniversity of Minnesota\n\nUniversity of Nebraska\n\nUniversity of Swansea\n\nUniversity of Texas at Austin\n\nUpdike, John\n\nuranium\n\n235 isotope\n\n238 isotope\n\nUrey, Harold\n\nutilitarianism\n\n##\n\nvacuum concept\n\nvacuum cleaner\n\nValais canton, Switzerland\n\nVan Vleck, John\n\nVancouver\n\nVE-Day celebrations\n\nVeblen, Oswald\n\nVeltman, Martin\n\nVermont\n\nVictoria, Queen\n\nVienna\n\nVietnam war\n\nVieux, Annette (n\u00e9e Giroud;'s paternal great-grandmother)\n\nViktor Frankl Institute, Vienna\n\nvirtual states\n\nVladikavkas\n\nVladivostock\n\nvon Neumann, John\n\nVSO (MI5 informant)\n\n##\n\nWakulla river\n\nWaldegrave, William, Baron Waldegrave of North Hill\n\nWall Street crash (1929)\n\nWaller, Ivar\n\nWalters, Barbara: _How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything_\n\nWalton, Ernest\n\nWalton, Sir William\n\nWashington, D.C.\n\nWatt, Dr Hansell\n\nWattenberg, Al\n\nWaugh, Evelyn: _Brideshead Revisited_\n\nwavicle\n\nweak interaction\n\nWei Chi (a.k.a. Go)\n\nWeimar Republic\n\nWeinberg, Steven\n\nWeinberg-Salam theory\n\nWeisskopf, Vicki\n\nWells, H. G.\n\n_The Time Machine_\n\n_The World Set Free_\n\nWestminster Abbey, London\n\nWeyl, Hermann\n\nWheeler, John\n\nWhewell, William\n\nWhiston, William\n\nWhite, Sir George\n\nWhitehead, Henry\n\nWhitehead, Right Reverend Henry\n\nWhitehead, Isabel\n\nWhittaker, Edmund\n\nWigner, Amelia (n\u00e9e Frank)\n\nWigner, Jen\u0151 (later Eugene)\n\nchildhood\n\nfield theory of the electron\n\npersonality\n\nand's impoliteness\n\naims to bring modern quantum mechanics to Princeton\n\nat the University of Madison\n\nmarriage to Amelia\n\nand nuclear fission\n\nmarriage to Mary\n\nand nuclear weapons\n\norganises 'The Future of Nuclear Science' conference\n\non Feynman and PD\n\nand Kuhn's interviewing of PD\n\nan elder statesman of American science\n\nand Judy's disappearance\n\nManci's response to his death\n\n_The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner_\n\nWigner, Mary\n\nWilczek, Frank\n\nWilde, Oscar\n\n_The American Invasion_\n\n_The Importance of Being Earnest_\n\nWilhelm II, Kaiser\n\nWilkinson, Sir Denys\n\nWilliams, Edith\n\nWillis, D. C.\n\nWiltshire, Herbert Charles (Charlie)\n\n_Wisconsin Journal_\n\nWitten, Edward\n\nWittgenstein, Ludwig\n\nWolverhampton\n\nWoolf, Virginia\n\nWordie, James\n\nWordsworth, William _The Prelude_\n\nWu, Chien-Shiung\n\n##\n\nX-rays\n\n##\n\nYang, C. N.\n\nYeats, W. B.: _The Living Beauty_\n\nYeshiva University, New York\n\nYosemite National Park\n\n##\n\nZimmerman, Erika\n\nZurich\n\nZweig, George\nCopyright \u00a9 2009 by Graham Farmelo\n\nPublished by Basic Books,   \nA Member of the Perseus Books Group   \nPublished in Britain in 2009 by Faber and Faber Limited\n\nAll rights reserved.   \nNo part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever   \nwithout written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied   \nin critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books,   \n387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10016-8810.\n\nBooks published by Basic Books are available at special   \ndiscounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations,   \ninstitutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact   \nthe Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut   \nStreet, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145,   \next. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.\n\nA CIP catalog record for this book is available   \nfrom the Library of Congress.   \nLCCN: 2009925681\n\neISBN : 978-0-465-01992-2\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\nThe author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com\/piracy.\nTo my mother,  \nMicheline Rosenberg-Sinclair\nCONTENTS\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright Notice\n\nDedication\n\nPrologue\n\nIntroduction\n\nRue La Bo\u00e9tie\n\nNumber 21 Under the Germans\n\nFloirac\n\nAt the Centre Pompidou\n\nGennevilliers\n\nDealer\n\nCh\u00e2teaudun, Op\u00e9ra, and Madison Avenue\n\nMother and Child\n\nPaul and Pic\n\nBoulevard Magenta\n\nPi-ar-enco\n\nA Long Relationship\n\nThe War Years in New York\n\nPreoccupations of the Heart\n\nThe Train, Schenker, and the Art of the Possible\n\nEpilogue\n\nBibliography\n\nAcknowledgments\n\nFrontispiece\n\nPhotographs\n\nA Note About the Author\n\nIllustration Credits\n\nCopyright\nPROLOGUE\n\nOn June 10, 2013, seventy-four years after my grandfather was forced to abandon his gallery located at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie in Paris, I had the honor to unveil a white marble plaque on the fa\u00e7ade of the building. The plaque bore his name and those of famous painters he used to show, many of whom were his closest friends\u2014Picasso, Braque, Matisse, L\u00e9ger among them. I was pleased that the plaque explained who my grandfather was and how the building, which had been devoted for twenty years to art, had been looted and transformed into a Nazi propaganda office during the German occupation of France.\n\nThe initiative was not mine. Rather, the owner of the building, of whom I had never heard, a certain M. Th\u00e9lot, a French \"entrepreneur,\" who used to rent offices in the building, unexpectedly sent me a very moving letter. He had just been browsing in a bookshop and had seen a book whose title was the exact address of the building he owned. Curious, he bought the volume\u2014the French edition of this book, 21, rue La Bo\u00e9tie\u2014and was so moved by the story that he offered to have a plaque made for the front of the building, as is commonly done for famous French or foreign citizens who have left their mark on a place. Moreover, he renamed the main room inside the gallery, the one where exhibitions had been held before the war, the Paul Rosenberg Room. (Previous tenants had improbably called it the Mississippi Room.) These initiatives were so selfless and elegant that I accepted with joy.\n\nThe homage took place on a late afternoon, when the sun was shining over Paris, so many years after the Nazis had seized the gallery.\n\nI could imagine how proud my grandparents, my uncle, and my mother, all of them now dead, would have been had they known their home would become celebrated in Paris, nearly three-quarters of a century after they were forced to flee arrest and deportation because they were Jewish and had refused to collaborate with the Nazi government that deemed modern painting \"degenerate art.\"\n\nFrom now on, thanks to M. Th\u00e9lot, everyone passing by will read the plaque, learn who the great art dealer Paul Rosenberg was, and discover how a criminal regime transformed my grandfather's gallery from a temple of beauty to a storeroom of depravity.\n\nThat is the story of this book.\nINTRODUCTION\n\nA day of rain and demonstrations, early 2010.\n\nMy neighborhood has been closed off by the police, the streets are jammed around the Bastille, and I am a prisoner in a car that I can't simply abandon in the middle of the road. At last, reaching a CRS (state police force) barrier blocking off the Boulevard Beaumarchais, near the Place de la Bastille, I wind down my window and ask the soaked cop if I can slip by like the other local residents. \"Your papers,\" he says wearily. I've just moved in, and I haven't got a driver's license or any ID with my new address on it. He's sorry, he can't take my word for it. I need proof of my new place of residence. I can't get home.\n\n* * *\n\nA little while later I write to the office in Nantes that issues copies of birth certificates to French citizens born abroad. When it sends me the document, I go to the police station nearest to my house, quai de Gesvres, armed with the necessary papers: the birth certificate they have asked for as well as my recently renewed identity card, valid for another seven years.\n\nA long queue. I take my ticket and wait for an hour and a half, long enough to look around at the people who have come to pick up IDs or passports and to hear the overworked clerks bluntly questioning the assembled supplicants. \"Madame, I must know whether or not you are from Guadeloupe!\" an old woman is asked in a tone that sounds a lot harsher than if she were asked, \"Are you originally from the Loire-Atlantique?\"\n\nAt last it's my turn. I take the papers out of my file. It is then that a man behind the counter is astonished to discover that I was born abroad. I tell him that since I was born in New York, my administrative papers had to come from the offices in Nantes. He then asks for my parents' birth certificates. I spare him their story: how they met after the war when my father had been demobilized from the Free French forces. I refrain from explaining that I was born in America by chance and stayed there for only two years before coming to France to spend the rest of my life here because my father couldn't find a job. I'm an inch away from trying to find excuses for being born outside French territory.\n\nOn the other hand, I am feeling a bit surprised by his insistence on asking for my parents' birth certificates. Besides, I add that on mine\u2014look, monsieur\u2014it clearly states that Anne S. is the daughter of Robert S. and Micheline R., both born in Paris, and that I'm therefore what's known as French by affiliation. I also hand him my identity card, issued three years ago and valid until 2017, which means that it's up to the administration to demonstrate that it is fraudulent, should it have any suspicion.\n\nBut he persists: the papers are necessary; there are new directives dating from 2009 for any citizen wishing to prove his \"Frenchness.\"\n\n\"Are your four grandparents French?\" asks the man behind the counter.\n\nFearing I may have misheard, I ask him to repeat the question.\n\n\"Your four grandparents, were they born in France, yes or no?\"\n\n\"The last time people of their generation were asked this kind of question was before they were put on a train to Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande!\" I say, my voice choking with rage, as I name the French camps where Jews were locked up by the French collaborating police before being deported by the Nazis to the death camps.\n\n\"What? What train? What are you talking about? I must repeat that I need that document. Don't come back until you have it in your possession.\"\n\nHe dismisses me abruptly, pushing toward me my file, which by the purest coincidence is yellow, the very color of the star Jews had to wear on their clothes.\n\nNo point in giving a history lesson to a clerk to whom the Vichy laws mean nothing and to whom no one responsible for the new regulations has taken the time to explain that there are unfortunate turns of phrase, reminiscent of more troubled times, that might be best avoided.\n\nI leave, more hurt than angry with this draconian desk clerk, feeling that my birth is somehow suspect, as if there were two categories of French people, some more French than others. I'm also thinking about the absurdity of this situation, given that other officials, years ago, unaware of the doubts surrounding my origins, appointed me the model for their statue of Marianne, the symbol of France, worthy to take pride of place in their town halls.\n\nThis isn't just an administrative bore. It's the revival of an unhealthy debate about national identity that has been poisoning France in the last few years.\n\nThe incident calls to mind a memory from my youth. In the 1970s the Holocaust blew up in our faces, especially through discovery of the Vichy regime's involvement in the final solution. We might think of the famous interview in L'Express with Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, the general commissioner for Jewish questions, in which, from his exile in Spain, he stated without the slightest remorse that \"only lice were gassed in Auschwitz.\" This was the starting point for the inquiries and investigations led by the lawyer and author Serge Klarsfeld* into crimes against humanity, chiefly directed\u2014this was before the trial of Maurice Papon\u2020\u2014at Ren\u00e9 Bousquet, the general secretary of the Vichy police. It was a time when significant books on the subject were starting to be published, the first of them, Vichy France and the Jews, by the American historians Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton.\n\nWe had had to wait for the research at universities abroad to bring to light the role of the Vichy administration in the arrest and deportation of the Jews of France. It was the start of a great outpouring about the \"dark years\" and, in a seemingly parallel universe, the emergence of the revisionists, like Robert Faurisson, who was convicted several times in France for \"denial of crimes against humanity.\"\n\n* * *\n\nTwenty years before, my parents had\u2014as they used to say in those days\u2014\"done up\" an old farm in Seine-et-Marne, a hundred miles from Paris, that served as a weekend retreat. My father, who worked in the cosmetics industry, had been pleased to meet a colleague in the same village, Jean Leguay, who ran Gemey, now a company affiliated with the L'Or\u00e9al group.\n\nLeguay and my father played golf at Fontainebleau from time to time. Leguay often came to our house for coffee, with his wife, Minouchette, who, when I was a girl, represented for me all the snobbery of the Sixteenth Arrondissement. She claimed, in this little village of three hundred souls, to have wanted to repaint her house in \"Dior gray,\" a color that wasn't listed in the Valentine paint catalog, but whose name had a pretty ring for her. In short, while Minouchette might have been silly and vain, her husband was pleasant and intelligent. My father enjoyed his company, and as a child happy to go out with her dad, I often followed them as they walked the golf course. Leguay had the smooth pink face of people who sleep soundly at night. My mother, who was always concerned about my father's pallor, frequently mentioned Leguay as an example of someone exuding health and well-being, a man at ease with himself.\n\n* * *\n\nA few years before this national reexamination of the scale of collaboration in Vichy and the treatment of the Jews, Robert Laffont published a book by Claude L\u00e9vy and Paul Tillard titled La Grande rafle du Vel d'Hiv, about the massive July 1942 roundup at a Paris sports stadium where Jews were held in hideous conditions for weeks before being deported to Auschwitz. Nowadays that event is well known to the French, especially because of the speech delivered by Jacques Chirac on July 16, 1995, acknowledging France's culpability in the deportation of the Jews. Various books and a few films, including La Rafle (The Roundup), helped bring the story to public attention. But that hadn't yet happened in the late 1960s, when the publication of excerpts from L\u00e9vy and Tillard's book in the national press caused an uproar.\n\nThe excerpts concerned a certain Leguay, no first name given. The reader learned that Leguay had been the secretary-general of the Vichy police, Ren\u00e9 Bousquet's delegate in the Nazi-occupied zone of France. Since Leguay himself was a prefect, he was in constant correspondence with his colleagues about the practical problems posed by the arrest of the Jews. He also witnessed the roundups in July 1943, which he had helped organize, and directed the transfer of Jews from the zone libre to the Drancy internment camp.\n\nLike Bousquet, who had long enjoyed the protection of his political friends, such as Maurice Papon, the only senior Vichy official to have been put on trial over the last twenty years, Jean Leguay was a disreputable character whose crimes remained unknown for a long time, thanks to countless collaborators whose pasts came to light only much later. Besides, at that time I would have laughed at anyone who had told me that some twenty-seven years later a book by Pierre P\u00e9an titled Une Jeunesse fran\u00e7aise (A French Youth) would reveal, with the consent of its chief protagonist, the dark years of the man who later became President Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand. At the Institut d'\u00c9tudes Politiques de Paris I had physically fought against the majos, the elite right-wing students who represented the majority of the school's students during the 1970s. Unlike us, the left-wing minos, these students maintained (rightly, alas) that Mitterrand had been awarded the Ordre de la Francisque, the highest honor given in Vichy France.\n\nSo P\u00e9an told this charged story about his old friends with murky pasts. But what startled me at the time wasn't so much the revelation of the dubious life of one Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, who had served the Vichy regime before becoming Fran\u00e7ois Morland and fighting with the Resistance, as the enduring nature of his dubious friendships, which he never denied. His links with Ren\u00e9 Bousquet, of course, confirmed by the president himself and attested to by photographs taken at Latche, Mitterrand's house in Les Landes in the southwest of France while he was financing his various political campaigns, were also alarming, as well as his closeness to Jean-Paul Martin, a former cagoulard\u2014a member of the French fascist organization La Cagoule\u2014for whose funeral, in 1986, Mitterrand, by then the president of the French Republic, had asked that the coffin be draped with the French flag.\n\nTo this day, I retain a sense of gratitude to former President Mitterrand for bringing the left back to power after twenty years and admiration for his tireless efforts on behalf of Europe. But by the time his past was discovered and even acknowledged by him, I had forever lost my faith in the sincerity of his moral and political commitments, and I was left with a powerful sense of betrayal. The indignation that I felt as my convictions about the past of the French nation were so cataclysmically overturned will never leave me.\n\nFor my father, the revelations about the Vel d'Hiv roundup were experienced as a searing pain, all the more excruciating for the fact that his own father, who had worn the yellow star before going into hiding under the name of Sabatier, had been denounced by the concierge of the building in which he had taken refuge with my grandmother. He had subsequently been arrested and interned in Drancy by the French police.\n\nHow could I fail, while bringing alive the story of my maternal family, to pay homage to my father's mother, Marguerite Schwartz?* In a wildly novelistic scene that I have never fully understood, she managed, thanks to a French officer with contacts in Drancy, to disguise herself as a nurse, borrow a Red Cross ambulance and some false papers, and get my paternal grandfather out of that antechamber to deportation. His health ruined by the long period of mistreatment he had undergone, he died just one year later\u2014but in his bed, rather than in the Auschwitz gas chamber, where the next convoy would have taken him.\n\n* * *\n\nMy father, that day in 1967, had difficulty believing that the official who had taken an active role in those deportation-related activities was the same Leguay with whom, the previous weekend, he had shared a friendly cup of tea.\n\nArmed with a photocopy of a letter from the Leguay in question, addressed to the Germans and found at the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation (CDSE; now part of the Shoah Memorial in Paris), my father went to the headquarters of the French Society of Perfumers and asked the chairman to show him a business letter signed by Jean Leguay, the president of Gemey. As he reviewed this document, my father turned very pale: the two signatures were identical. My father then told the chairman what he knew about this character and demanded that he be thrown out of the association. He was met with embarrassed refusal on the part of the chairman. It was not very courageous, and the times were not yet attuned to these injustices, the French lagging well behind the Germans in their desire to achieve transparency about their past. In those years the desire not to \"create a scandal\" outweighed all other considerations.\n\nAfter resigning from the professional association, my father wrote to Leguay to tell him what he knew about his past and asked him to walk on the other side of the road in their village, so that he would never run into him again. Leguay responded by sending my father the ruling by the High Court of Justice that had cleared him in 1949, as it had Bousquet and many others.\n\nOn a side note, during those years, Gemey was bought by L'Or\u00e9al, a company known for its recycling of notorious collaborators. These included Jean Filliol, who had tried to assassinate the Jewish French prime minister L\u00e9on Blum before the war and who had, after the liberation, taken refuge in Spain, where he ran the Spanish branch of L'Or\u00e9al. Filliol had been sentenced to death in absentia for having been a member of Joseph Darnand's militia and for facilitating the horrific Nazi revenge attack on the town of Oradour in 1944. Another senior executive with L'Or\u00e9al, Jacques Corr\u00e8ze, coincidentally lived in the same building as Jean Leguay in Paris at rue de R\u00e9musat, and had been an officer in Eug\u00e8ne Deloncle's fascist Cagoule organization, which was financed by Eug\u00e8ne Schueller, the father of Liliane Bettencourt, the wealthy socialite and major shareholder of L'Or\u00e9al.\n\nIn 1941, Jacques Corr\u00e8ze joined the Legion of French Volunteers (LVF) against Bolshevism, which fought alongside the Charlemagne Regiment, the Waffen-SS division that included Frenchmen who had decided to fight in the Waffen-SS uniform. Sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in 1948, he was freed a year later and was immediately hired by Schueller to become the chief executive of L'Or\u00e9al in America. Amnestied in 1959 and rehabilitated in the 1960s, he died in Paris in 1991, while the American Office of Special Investigations was investigating his possible involvement in crimes committed during the war.\n\nThe recent Bettencourt affair,* which has nothing to do with the above, did recall Schueller's past and put these episodes from the history of the founder of L'Or\u00e9al in the spotlight once more.\n\n* * *\n\nThe dossier painstakingly compiled by Serge Klarsfeld enabled the justice system to find Jean Leguay guilty of crimes against humanity. I remember taking my father along to the press conference at which Klarsfeld argued that the legal proceedings to charge Bousquet and Leguay with crimes against humanity were fully justified. This was in 1979. My father told me, as he left Klarsfeld's office, \"You'll see, he'll die after me, peacefully, in his sleep.\" Indeed, my father, who was the same age as Leguay, died the next year, while Leguay died in 1989, but before his trial could begin. According to the ruling that stated that legal action had been abandoned, \"there was information to establish that he had taken part in crimes against humanity.\"\n\n* * *\n\nMy mishap at the police station was pretty harmless in the scheme of things, but the questioning of my identity brought a tidal wave of family memories surging forward. For years I had refused to listen to the stories of the past told over and over again by my mother. Not out of a desire to reject my family, but the story of my maternal grandparents, even though I thought I knew it, never felt as if it belonged to me, as if it related to my life. It even bored me a bit. What I liked was politics, journalism; my father's world rather than my mother's. My father, who had joined the Free French in the Middle East during the war; my father, who, under the name of Jacques Breton, had delivered editorials on Radio Beirut on behalf of General Charles de Gaulle; my father, so proud to show me the agency dispatch in which Joseph Goebbels had condemned him to death and railed against \"the Jew Sinclair\"; my father, having returned to Paris after the liberation, paying a final visit to his own father, who had been seriously ill since Drancy. Even though my father himself built an industrial career as a business executive far from my own areas of interest, I felt closer to the war stories he recorded in his notebooks than I did to my mother's side of the family, which lived under the shadow of my art dealer grandfather, who had died when I was only eleven years old. In short, I secretly felt I was on the same side as \"My Father the Hero,\" who gently mocked \"My Mother Who Sat Out the War on Fifth Avenue.\"\n\nMy father, Robert Sinclair, who was called Robert Schwartz throughout his youth, was sent to the front in 1939 as a thirty-year-old soldier, on meteorological duty. He was stationed at a border post (might it have been the Maginot Line?) and played chess, one move per day with a colleague who had been sent to a different strategic location, taking advantage of their daily call to compare weather conditions on the front. They sat there and waited for the enemy, who never came because they had decided to avoid that predictable line of defense. (I like to imagine him moving his rook or his knight, occasionally sticking his hand outside and saying, \"It's raining,\" to his friend, who would reply, \"Here too!\") When he was finally demobilized, he returned to Paris and, like many others, wept at the sight of flags bearing the swastika fluttering over the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es. He remembered the day he had stood there with his mother, on November 11, 1918, applauding Marshal Ferdinand Foch's troops as they celebrated the victory of the First World War. He was just a nine-year-old boy, but he told me he knew that he was destined to enlist from that time.\n\nUnaware of the networks that would have enabled him to pass through England, he managed to reach the United States via a series of complicated routes, and it was there that he enrolled in Free France, which ultimately sent him to Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo. Before boarding the ship bound for the Middle East via the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, all lights extinguished so as not to alert the enemy, he was told that the Germans were aware of the surnames of French officers who had enlisted with de Gaulle and whose families had stayed in France. To protect his relatives, he was compelled to change his name. Wanting to retain his initials, he opened the New York City phone book to the letter S and stumbled upon the name Sinclair, perhaps no more unusual in the United States than Martin or Dupont in France.\n\nI have always been a bit irritated with him for wanting to keep the name Sinclair and then legally adopting it as his surname after the war. It meant losing a part of our identity. But he had earned a name for himself under that nom de guerre; he bore it proudly and probably wanted to allow his descendants\u2014me, as it happened\u2014to avoid the dangers that a Jewish name had inflicted on his family. This was not unusual among those traumatized by the war in the years that followed the liberation, but I confess that I've always experienced it as a sort of denial. That's probably why I laid claim to my Jewish identity very early on. And why I've been distressed by those who, playing with proportional representation, allowed the extreme-right Front National (FN) to exist politically in France. It's why I fought bitterly against the media access so generously granted to the FN in the 1980s and why for ten years I refused to have Jean-Marie Le Pen on my television program, 7 sur 7, which was a discussion of the previous week's political news. The pointlessness of this battle became apparent on April 21, 2002, and in the years that followed, when Le Pen came in second in the general election, the consequences of which we are still living with today.\n\nSo much for rummaging around in the cardboard boxes of family archives. As I went through all those random papers, I eventually came across my original birth certificate, rather than the copy generally required by the administrative services. What would the clerk at the prefecture, who prompted this book, after all, have said if he had seen that I had been born Anne Schwartz, dite Sinclair, and that my name was only officially changed in 1949, when I was one year old?\n\n* * *\n\nIn my youth I was more receptive to the story of my paternal grandparents, who had stayed in France, than I was to the fate of those who, pursued by the Nazis, had managed to flee and were then dispossessed, plundered, and stripped of their nationality. Besides, I wanted to build my own life, preferring television to art galleries, the public life to the artistic one, old newspapers to old paintings.\n\nIn 2006 my mother passed away. And as always after the death of a parent, you're struck by all the things you've neglected to ask or didn't want to know, whether out of laziness or weariness at hearing the same stories again and again. In my mother's flat, I emptied cupboards crammed with dusty memories: old keys, outmoded furs, family photographs, and stacks of papers that had accumulated over the course of decades.\n\nThen I turned sixty and happened to spend a few years in the United States, a country that constantly brought me back to my childhood and to the part of the family that had sought refuge there. And here were the French authorities, playing with dangerous ideas, reminding me that French nationality can't be taken for granted even if you've had it all your life. How fragile it is to those who bear it and how inaccessible to those who wish to lay claim to it. And reminding me that it wasn't the first time this had happened in my family.\n\nI realized I hadn't even had time to unpack the boxes from my mother's apartment, which I'd stacked in a closet. They were full of letters and old files that I'd picked up without even giving them a thought. Suddenly unable to contain my curiosity, I plunged into the family archives, in search of the story of my past. To find out who my mother's father really was: my grandfather Paul Rosenberg, a man hailed as a pioneer in the world of painting, of modern art, who then became a pariah in his own country during the Second World War. I yearned to fit together the pieces of this French story of art and war.\n\nI am the granddaughter of Paul Rosenberg, a gentleman who lived in Paris and who owned a gallery at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie.\nRUE LA BO\u00c9TIE\n\nNumber 21. I've passed by it hundreds of times. My mother liked to show me the 1930s fa\u00e7ade with its stone arches. I'd noticed various shops on that street\u2014ice cream, pizza\u2014but I'd never stopped to take a closer look. Now, seventy years after my grandfather had left the premises, I wanted to see the building for myself. I couldn't imagine that three years later I would unveil a plaque on this very building that I had not yet entered.\n\nToday it's an office of the Veolia Environmental Services company. I call them up: \"My grandparents used to live there. I'd love to take a look around, really just a look. I don't want to disturb you... It was before the war, I'm sure there are few traces left... Of course I understand if it's not possible.\" I detected the ambivalence in my own voice. It was almost as if I worried that they might actually let me in.\n\nThey did. Why would they resist? So one Wednesday in April 2010 off I went to Veolia, to 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, where I begin my story. Touched by my curiosity and possibly a bit incredulous that it's taken me to the age of sixty to set foot in the building where my grandfather's gallery was located, my hosts graciously show me around.\n\nThe hallway has been divided, and there are white stucco columns with Corinthian capitals, which I find a bit tasteless. Are they original? And a black-and-white damier marble floor. It's all been redesigned, modernized, the rooms, the spaces. There are spotlights affixed to the ceiling. The staircase with its old-fashioned banisters leading to the upper floors seems unchanged. Lots of Fernand L\u00e9ger's and Andr\u00e9 Masson's paintings used to hang on the walls of this interior stairway, which led to my family's private apartments: the one belonging to my grandparents and their children, then the one to my great-grandmother, Paul's mother, Mathilde Rosenberg. Of course no paintings now hang in this stairway, which leads to various offices. The overall impression is dreary. Yet the elevator is modern, surely in compliance with health and safety regulations. The rattling old cage of another age is gone.\n\nThe stairway within the gallery, the one with the cast-iron banister, seems to have retained its original look, from the 1930s, when my grandfather did some elaborate renovations. The floor is patterned with marble mosaics made with yellow stones. But there's no way of telling exactly where the mosaic plaques went, the ones designed by Georges Braque, who also supervised their installation. Above the stairs were arches, replicas of the ones outside, adorned with pieces of mirrored glass.\n\nI'm in the lower of the two exhibition halls, the one that appears in so many of the photographs I've seen of my grandfather situated in his domain. All the exhibitions at rue La Bo\u00e9tie were held in this large room. A month of Braque, another of Henri Matisse, a third of Pablo Picasso. It is now a boardroom for Veolia executives. The fine oak parquet floor is still there, and I immediately recognize the wood paneling, which I've seen in the photographs, as well as the glass ceiling with its little star-shaped windows, which, as in other galleries of the time, diffused the light so as to soften the hard edges of cubist painting.\n\nIf I half closed my eyes I could see them, those big paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, hanging on the walls. Soon after, those masterpieces would be replaced by portraits of the head of the Vichy government, Marshal Philippe P\u00e9tain.\n\n* * *\n\nIn 1927 E. T\u00e9riade, a famous critic and art publisher of Greek descent, described the Galerie Rosenberg in \"Feuilles volantes,\" the monthly supplement of the influential journal Cahiers d'art: \"We are introduced into a huge room, high-ceilinged, bare walls, naked light, a room in which sober brown curtains weigh down on the collection, in which two solitary armchairs upholstered with dark velvet reach toward you like two grand inquisitors; no, they're not reaching toward you, they're going for your throat, as masterpieces do. Hurricanes of solitude, of austerity, pass through the room... Paul Rosenberg: he's dressed in black. He has the anxious face of an ascetic or a passionate businessman.\"\n\nHere's another description of the setting, particularly interesting when you consider that the author is the notorious, extreme-right-wing writer Maurice Sachs, who later defined himself as a Jew, a homosexual, and a collaborator before being killed by a bullet to the back of the head by the Germans in whose service he had worked: \"His grand seigneur bearing was part of his particular genius... You step into Rosenberg's gallery as if entering a temple: the deep leather armchairs, the walls lined with red silk, would lead you to think you were in a fine museum... He knew how to cast an extraordinary light on the painters he took under his wing. His knowledge of painting was deeper than that of his colleagues, and he had a very sure sense of his own taste.\"\n\nPaul, who had taken over his father's gallery with his brother, L\u00e9once, in 1905, decided to set up on his own in 1910 and moved alone to 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, in the Eighth Arrondissement of Paris. Nineteenth-century works were shown on the mezzanine; contemporary art, on the ground floor. If visitors were unsure about Braque or L\u00e9ger, Paul invited them upstairs to see softer-contoured works by Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or Auguste Rodin. He hoped they might buy some of these, which would allow him to support his unknown friends, such as Picasso or Marie Laurencin, the muse of the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1913 she became the first artist to sign an exclusive deal with Paul, an arrangement that stood until 1940. She was joined by Picasso in 1918, Braque in 1923, L\u00e9ger in 1926, and Matisse in 1936.\n\n* * *\n\nIn 1912, almost as soon as he had moved in, Paul sent out an announcement just as anyone opening a shop might do, describing his new venture: \"I will shortly be opening new modern art galleries at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, where I plan to hold periodic exhibitions by the masters of the nineteenth century and painters of our own times. In my view, however, the shortcoming of contemporary exhibitions is that they show an artist's work in isolation. So I intend to hold group exhibitions of decorative art... Not only do I plan to offer my spaces for free, I shall not take a percentage in the event of a sale. For each exhibition I shall publish at my own expense a catalog of the paintings, sculptures, furniture, etc.\"\n\nThe critic Pierre Nahon stresses Paul's desire to establish a connection between French painting of the past and the modernist trends of the twentieth century, noting that in the late 1930s Paul had on his walls and in his inventory a collection of G\u00e9ricault, Ingres, Delacroix, Courbet, C\u00e9zanne, Manet, Degas, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, ToulouseLautrec, Picasso, Braque, L\u00e9ger, Le Douanier Rousseau, Bonnard, Laurencin, Modigliani, and Matisse. \"The gallery,\" Nahon writes, \"is becoming an essential meeting place for everyone who wants to follow the development and the work of the innovative painters.\"\n\nMy own research is centered on an attempt to conjure the grandfather I barely knew. And to summon up the riches heures of the thirties and the grim ones of the forties that are integral to his story.\n\n* * *\n\nMy grandfather had great difficulty regaining possession of his gallery after the war. The state had confiscated the building from the collaborators in August 1944 and made it the headquarters of the Saint-Gobain construction company, before finally returning the building to my grandfather. By then it had endured the sinister events that I am about to relate, events with which my grandfather could never make peace. Paul finally sold 21 rue La Boetie in January 1953. He was determined never again to live in that place, its basement filled with propaganda from the darkest years, its rooms still haunted by the ghosts of the occupation.\n\nFor a long time the building was home to the French General Information Service, Renseignements G\u00e9n\u00e9raux, the French police intelligence service, and the secrets of the Republic were buried with the secrets of the collaborators.\nNUMBER 21 UNDER THE GERMANS\n\n21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie was piled to the rafters with those \"accursed\" or decadent works, the kind that the Nazis called entartete Kunst (EK), \"degenerate art.\" The term referred to any art that, for the new German regime, departed from the canon of what the Nazis considered traditional.\n\n\"German people, come and judge for yourselves,\" said Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Visual Arts, as he infamously opened the Munich exhibition of degenerate art on July 18, 1937.\n\nThis vast exhibition of six thousand works, taken from every museum in Germany, was hastily assembled. The intention was to ridicule modern art before imposing a ban on its sale. These works were deliberately shown among drawings by children or the mentally handicapped: there were two adjacent halls, with official German art hung in the first and the art identified as \"degenerate\" (Picasso, Braque, Matisse, L\u00e9ger, Mir\u00f3, Masson, Dal\u00ed, Chagall) exhibited in the second. Many of the works shown in the second hall had been confiscated from museums or private galleries mainly managed by Jews. Some were intentionally destroyed, while others were auctioned off for the benefit of the Nazi regime. Ironically, this attempt to ridicule modern art was to the great advantage of art lovers throughout the world. Vincent van Gogh quickly became the bestselling \"degenerate\" painter on the market. By the time the Reich Chamber exhibition closed on November 30, 1937, it had drawn more than two million viewers.\n\n* * *\n\nJoseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, had planned the show as a counterpoint to the Great Exhibition of German Art, which opened simultaneously in Munich. It celebrated female farmers and soldiers, brave mothers, and rural landscapes of Greater Germany. In Goebbels's words, a distinction had to be made between \"the art of those days and the art of these days.\" He felt that German museums had to be cleansed of works produced after 1910.\n\nThe German rejection of novelty in art was nothing new. As Lynn H. Nicholas explains in her remarkable book The Rape of Europa, the antimodern tradition had a long history, \"reaching back to Kaiser Wilhelm's 1909 firing of Hugo von Tschudi, director of the Nationalgalerie, for buying Impressionist paintings.\" In 1893 a very influential book was published by the Jewish social critic Max Nordau, who first used the word Entartung, \"degeneracy,\" to refer to artistic disciplines. In his most famous book, Degeneration, Nordau describes modern art as symptomatic of the degeneracy of society at the end of the nineteenth century. He declares all modern art, including that of the impressionists, \"pathological.\" Nordau was both a Zionist and a Dreyfusard and a man developing conservative ideas about the founding principles of German culture. In the 1920s a group of philosophers put forward the concept of \"degenerate art\" on the basis of Nordau's work, at the risk of somewhat misrepresenting his ideas.\n\nAfter Hitler came to power in 1933, many artists chose to go into exile. Not only could they no longer show their work or sell it, they were forbidden to buy brushes, canvases, or paint. \"The smell of turpentine in the air or a container of wet brushes was grounds for arrest,\" writes Nicholas.\n\nOn June 30, 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of war, the Germans held a massive auction in Lucerne, featuring 126 paintings and sculptures from the most important museums and private collections in Germany. Many collectors, unable to resist the temptation to buy outstanding works of art at low prices, attended. Paul warned potential buyers that any currency the Reich harvested from this sale \"would fall back on our heads in the form of bombs.\" Alfred Barr, the director of the prestigious Museum of Modern Art in New York, also tried to alert those museums that had announced their intention to buy. But to no avail. \"Acceptance of these warnings was not made easier by the very mixed reception all modern art had endured for many years,\" writes Nicholas.\n\nFrom that moment Karl Haberstock, the Nazis' chief art buyer, became one of the F\u00fchrer's personal dealers. As Haberstock began to amass a collection of old masters for Hitler, he found intermediaries in France through whom he could purge all modernist impurities. Among them was the author and Nazi apologist Lucien Rebatet, who proposed the \"Aryanization\" of our fine arts.\n\nThere was a great deal of debate on this subject among Nazi officials, in particular between Goebbels and Alfred Rosenberg (Hitler's ideological theorist, who later was placed in charge of the \"occupied Eastern territories\"\u2014in other words, the massacres that took place there). This unfortunate namesake of Paul's considered any form of physical distortion on a canvas \"degenerate art,\" while Goebbels believed that modern painting could become part of a National Socialist revolutionary art movement. As in any totalitarian regime claiming to define a \"new man\" and a new world order, art was a priority for the apostles of National Socialism. Indeed, the Nazis were obsessed with the idea of turning art into an instrument of propaganda. In her book L'Art de la d\u00e9faite (Art of the Defeat), Laurence Bertrand Dorl\u00e9ac relates how, several days after the armistice between Germany and the French Third Republic, the looting of artworks began on a massive scale. In fact, on June 30, 1940, Hitler issued an order to put artworks belonging to Jews in \"safekeeping.\" The term was chosen deliberately as a cover for what could only be described as theft. It was then that Alfred Rosenberg set up the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR). This became the chief organization in the Nazi looting operation, which put its stamp of infamy on all works of art confiscated by the occupying troops.\n\n* * *\n\nFrom early July 1940, Rosenberg instructed the army to raid the big Parisian art dealers and seize their collections. This represented the triumph of the Rosenberg-G\u00f6ring clan over the tribe based around Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Reich foreign minister, and Otto Abetz, Hitler's ambassador to Paris during the Second World War. And as we know, G\u00f6ring was immoderate about helping himself.\n\nFrom October 1940, organized theft followed upon random robbery. \"The artworks were first assembled at the Mus\u00e9e du Jeu de Paume and the Louvre, then photographed, valued, recorded, and wrapped ready for transport to Germany,\" writes Dorl\u00e9ac. Naturally, this contraband included both the classical paintings from the Parisian galleries and modern works, which, as Dorl\u00e9ac puts it, served as \"bargaining chips for pieces more in line with the Nazi aesthetic.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIn her classic account, Le Front de l'art, Rose Valland, the heroic protector of French artworks, relates that at the height of the war in 1943 she witnessed a column of smoke rising from the terrace of the Tuileries; it rose from paintings stamped with the letters EK (entartete Kunst), and signed Masson, Mir\u00f3, Klee, Ernst, L\u00e9ger, Picasso. \"The men of the ERR planned to attack these paintings, run them through with swords, slash them with knives, and carry them to the pyre, as in those gigantic autos-da-f\u00e9 that had taken place in the German museums, in a bid to destroy those works identified as 'degenerate.'\"\n\nValland was one of two people who tried to keep works of art from museums or private collections from being scattered across Germany. In this saga of art saved from the Nazi madness, the other hero working in the shadows was Jacques Jaujard, the director of the National Museums at the time, and the director of the Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts after the war. It was he who suggested that the Germans draw up an inventory under Valland's direction. In Le Front de l'art, she tells how she managed to remain in her post at risk of her life in order to create a precise inventory of the stolen paintings. Rising to the post of captain in the French Army, she was sent to occupied Germany after the war to help France recover its stolen property.\n\nThis property came into consideration in the Nuremberg trials. Certainly, compared with the atrocities perpetrated upon human beings, the looting of art in Nazi-occupied territory seemed negligible. Still, the court considered it a war crime, on the ground that by attacking a culture, the Nazis were trying to destroy a people.\n\n* * *\n\nConsistent with their plan, as soon as the Nazis occupied Paris on June 14, 1940, they made their way to 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie. But they were disappointed not to find the family patiently awaiting their arrival.\n\nOn July 4, 1940, the Reich ambassador, Otto Abetz, demanded that the building on rue La Bo\u00e9tie be sequestered by the police and that the artworks be seized. He had in fact just drawn up a list of Jewish dealers or collectors for the Gestapo: Bernheim-Jeune, Alphonse Kann, Jacques Seligmann, Wildenstein, and Paul Rosenberg.\n\nThis outrage continued with the German requisition of rue La Bo\u00e9tie in May 1941. On the eleventh day of that month, the brand-new Institut d'\u00c9tude des Questions Juives (IEQJ, Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions), was installed in the building with great pomp.\n\nI've examined the few existing pictures of that installation, and more particularly, I've listened to Radio Paris on tapes supplied by the National Sound and Video Archives. The quality of the recording is excellent, with the nasal voice and wounding words of the speaker unmistakably clear: \"Today saw the rechristening of the building previously occupied by Rosenberg; the name alone tells you all you need to know.\"\n\nThe ceremony opens with remarks on the \"disastrous moral influence of Judaism,\" delivered by Cl\u00e9ment Serpeille de Gobineau, a descendant of the more famous Arthur Comte de Gobineau, the author of the 1853 An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.\n\nIn the photographs and in the National Sound and Video Archives, you can see Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line, a star guest with impeccable far-right credentials, parking his bike in front of my grandfather's gallery, on which the name of that formidable new office stands out in capital letters. The porch and the famous exhibition hall are easily recognizable. A huge panel on the wall shows a woman on the ground covered with a French flag, a vulture perched on her belly, with the caption \"Frenchmen, help me!\"\n\nIn the exact place where my grandfather had hung paintings by Renoir, Picasso, and L\u00e9ger over the previous few years, a tricolor flag, a portrait of Marshal P\u00e9tain, and quotations from \u00c9douard Drumont, the author of La France juive, who, according to commentary of the time, \"first raised the issue of the Jewish problem in all its magnitude\": \"The Jews came poor to a rich country. They are now the only rich people in a poor country.\"And that other quote on the opposite wall: \"We are fighting the Jews to give France back its true, its familiar face.\"\n\nCapt. Paul S\u00e9zille was soon appointed secretary-general of the institute, a post he held until December 1942. He was a former right-hand man of the anti-Semitic activist and far-right politician Louis Darquier de Pellepoix and his prewar Anti-Jewish Union. A retired officer of the Foreign Legion, S\u00e9zille was, according to the historian Laurent Joly, a man drowning in booze and vitriol. \"He was considered one of the most grotesque figures in anti-Semitism between 1940 and 1944, trying to give voice to a healthy France as it seeks to regain its true soul,\" writes Joly.\n\nHe was followed shortly afterward, in January 1943, by the physician, anthropologist, and racial theorist George Montandon, who remained in office until the last days of August 1944, just before the liberation of Paris. The institute then assumed the name Institut d'\u00c9tude des Questions Juives et Ethno-Raciales (IEQJER, Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions). From that date, the Germans wanted to make the institute appear to be what we would now call a research center with the creation of six educational courses, including \"Ethnoraciology,\" taught by Montandon himself, \"Eugenics and Demographics,\" and \"Judeocracy.\"\n\n* * *\n\nFrom the outset, the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, established in my family house, was an association created in accordance with the French Associations Law of 1901 and was devoted to anti-Semitic propaganda. Founded in May 1941, and cofinanced by the German Embassy and the Gestapo, it was not dependent on the Commissariat G\u00e9n\u00e9ral aux Questions Juives (set up by the Vichy government and run first by Xavier Vallat, then by Darquier de Pellepoix) but was in a direct line of command from the office of Otto Abetz. It was also controlled by \"specialists\" from Germany, including a certain Dr. Schwarz, a representative of an anti-Jewish institute in Frankfurt.\n\n* * *\n\nThe IEQJ was in fact directed by Theodor Dannecker, the head of the Jewish Section (Judenreferat) of the Gestapo. Apparently, he had little confidence in the Vichy administration and wanted to set up\u2014under the cover of a seemingly French organization effectively run by the Nazi services\u2014an organization of anti-Semitic propagandists answerable to him alone. According to Joseph Billig, in his three-volume work devoted to the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions, \"The 'final solution of the Jewish question' was from the very start in the hands of Dannecker's Judenreferat. The Judenreferat considered that it had been promised 'supreme power' over the Jews in France in the future... It was not primarily concerned with Jewish property. Its focus was the Jewish masses themselves. While awaiting the deportations, it organized the Jews into ghettos and prepared the raids.\"\n\n* * *\n\nSecretary-General S\u00e9zille\u2014was he sitting at Paul's desk?\u2014took his orders only from Dannecker, whom he called, in the German style, \"mein Leutnant.\" He often asked the Propagandastaffel to support his private militia. He denounced \"the spirit of indecision and the inadequate application of the [German] orders by the Commissariat for Jewish Questions.\" And he had no qualms about writing to Dannecker to thank him for the order requiring all Jews to wear the yellow star.\n\nThough it was an organization under Nazi supervision, S\u00e9zille nevertheless sent the press a communiqu\u00e9 on August 21, 1941, affirming that the IEQJ \"is an eminently French association, in accordance with the law of July 1, 1901, consisting of resolutely anti-Jewish men of good will... determined to resolve, at all cost and by all means, the Jewish question in France.\"\n\nThe institute's mission was to spread propaganda, and to collect letters of denunciation and ensure that they were \"followed up.\" In a letter of January 31, 1942, addressed to Xavier Vallat, S\u00e9zille boasted of having thirty-three thousand members and seventy thousand signatures in his visitors' book. The institute published its journals, Le Cahier jaune and La Question juive en France et dans le monde (The Jewish Question in France and the World), and it put on its pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance, the exhibition The Jew and France at the Palais Berlitz in 1941. Otto Abetz later claimed that it had been organized by the Nazis themselves, but under the cover of the IEQJ for the benefit of the public. Which is to say that the offices at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie were working full tilt to organize the exhibition in time.\n\nI went along to 30 boulevard des Italiens, to the Palais Berlitz, to see what remained of that space. But the walls are silent now. They've been replaced by the chain Bistro Romain and a multiplex cinema.\n\nThe cover of the September 6, 1941, issue of L'Illustration is well known. It reproduces the official poster of the exhibition, described by the magazine as a \"large allegorical composition showing a kind of long-bearded vampire with thick lips and a hooked nose, with bony fingers like the claws of a bird of prey clutching a globe.\"\n\nIn the cinemas, audiences watched news reports devoted to the famous exhibition.* The commentary accompanying the pictures is, like everything else, difficult to listen to, even more so sixty years on: \"Out of every one hundred Frenchmen of old stock, ninety are true whites pure of any other racial mixture. The same cannot be said of the Jews. They are the product of racial mixing that occurred several millennia ago, between Aryans, Mongols, and Negroes. Consequently the Jew has his very own attitudes, gestures, and physiognomy. It is comforting to see the French going to see this exhibition. Henceforth they will be able to identify the Jew and protect themselves against his actions.\"\n\nIn this terrifying exhibition, life-size portraits, in black and white, are arranged like targets at a shooting gallery, with a picture of the former prime minister L\u00e9on Blum at the center. Below each portrait is the individual's name with a ribbon identifying his nationality followed by a question mark\u2014\"French?\"\u2014and the invariable exclamation \"No, Jewish!\"\n\nSome five hundred thousand tickets to the exhibition were sold. Counting half-price entrants, there were a million visitors in Paris before it traveled to other French cities, including, for a time, Bordeaux, Nancy, Marseille, Nice, Cannes, Toulouse, and Lyon, meaning that it also went to the unoccupied zone. History tells us little about whether people came out feeling informed and convinced or indignant and repelled.\n\n* * *\n\nVarious odd characters anonymously frequented the offices at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie. Others, more famous, sometimes complained that they hadn't been treated very well. On October 21, 1941, S\u00e9zille received a letter of rebuke from C\u00e9line, who was \"a little hurt not to see in the bookshop of the exhibition] either one of his recent books: Bagatelles [pour un massacre] or L'\u00c9cole [des cadavres],[* while there was a flurry of insignificant little books... I observe once again the lamentable shortage (so sensitive in this case) of intelligence and Aryan solidarity.\" S\u00e9zille replied three days later: \"I am myself terribly sorry not to have been able, in spite of all our requests of the publishers, to acquire the books of which you speak and which, I know, are ideally suited to wage the anti-Jewish struggle. But I wish to inform you that we have already had for sale in our shops large numbers of Beaux draps and Mea culpa [two other anti-Semitic tracts by C\u00e9line], and that these two books continue to be requested on a daily basis. Please believe me when I say that we have always done and will continue to do the impossible to distribute your works and make sure they have their rightful place.\"\n\nWho was this man, Capt. Paul S\u00e9zille, who was lucky enough to die on April 20, 1944, four months before the liberation of Paris? What hatred inspired him, what blindness afflicted him, what bitterness had he suffered to run this vile organization and publish his shameful books? After the liberation, my grandparents were stunned to discover whole cases of books published by the institute in the cellar of the building. Unfortunately, the notion of \"bearing witness,\" of the \"obligation to remember,\" that spread through France in the 1990s had not yet taken hold, and my grandparents, rather than keep the archives, got rid of that library of shame at the first opportunity.\n\nI kept for a long time the sole survivor of this collection, a book by Captain S\u00e9zille himself, whose oeuvre once filled the basement of rue La Bo\u00e9tie. And then, through the various comings and goings of the Rosenberg and Sinclair families, this literature and the trail of the sinister captain disappeared.\n\n* * *\n\nDuring the refurbishment of his gallery, which took several years and wasn't completed until 1934, Paul asked Picasso to make some marble patterns to be inlaid into the tile floor. Giving him lots of sketches in the hopes that Picasso would create something unique, he first asked him for his designs in August 1928. But since Picasso never met deadlines and took a lot of persuading to carry out any commission, Paul ended up commissioning Braque to complete the project. In each of the four corners of the gallery, Braque created a rectangular marble mosaic, faithfully scaled-down copies of four of his large still lifes: pitchers, plates, lemons, cutlery, and tablecloths well known in his paintings. It was no longer the cubist period\u2014gray, green, and brown\u2014when Braque and Picasso were painting similar pictures with the eternal guitar and the front page of Le Journal. So similar that partly out of a spirit of mischief and partly because they themselves no longer knew who had painted what, the paintings were signed arbitrarily.\n\nThe still lifes in question on the floor of my grandfather's gallery were brighter, more colorful, and more luminous than the works of that period. They lent themselves to mosaic treatment, recalling the designs on the floors of the patrician Roman villas in Pompeii or Volubilis.\n\nAfter the war, when Paul sold the building he no longer wanted to live in, he had Braque's four marble mosaics cut out of the floor and made into low tables, framed in black marble. I lived alongside two of those tables throughout my youth and often stroked the marble, unaware of the innocent people, denounced and arrested, who had stepped upon them before being handed over to their executioners. The family house on rue La Bo\u00e9tie would have sheltered the executioners. I have never been able to watch Henri-Georges Clouzot's masterpiece The Murderer Lives at Number 21, without thinking about this.\nFLOIRAC\n\nFrom the earliest days of Nazism, Paul rejected the regime with every fiber of his being. He actively opposed the sale by the German government of \"degenerate art.\" And as the president of the SNA, the French association of dealers in fine art and antiques, he tried to persuade his colleagues across Europe to boycott the sales. Yet few people resisted the often exceptional paintings cast onto the market in this way. But Paul would not relent. \"Not a cent to the German Reich\" was the slogan for a small group that saw masterpieces acquired by less scrupulous dealers disappearing before their eyes.\n\nThe Germans didn't forget Paul Rosenberg. In fact, they blacklisted him.\n\nHe had thwarted them to some extent, sending a number of works to safety in London and New York and lending others to American museums, notably to the Museum of Modern Art for the first big Picasso retrospective, which my grandfather himself had put together during several months in New York with his friend Alfred Barr in 1939. Not surprisingly, in August of that year, my grandfather wrote to Picasso from \u00c9vian speaking of \"dark events\" as an inevitability.\n\n* * *\n\nOn September 3, 1939, the day war is declared, my grandfather is with his family in the Touraine, near the Loire River, at Cinq-Mars-la-Pile. He closes his gallery and, for fear of bombing raids, takes some of his paintings to Tours. There he stores them under the name of his chauffeur, Louis Le Gall. These would be the first paintings recovered after the war because neither the Nazis nor the French authorities were aware of their existence.\n\nThen the whole family leaves for Bordeaux, where, on February 7, 1940, they rent a house, Le Castel, at 12 Route de la Tresne, in Floirac La Souys, three miles east of Bordeaux. Le Castel belongs to a couple named Ledoux, who continue living on the first floor despite the presence of the Rosenbergs. They take over the whole house again after the war and sell the property to the town council during the 1960s.\n\n* * *\n\nI'd never been to Floirac before and wanted to visit the house that I'd seen only in photographs. It was, after all, where my family spent the beginning of the war.\n\nThe Garonne River is gray and overcast that morning in September 2010. After arriving at Bordeaux M\u00e9rignac Airport, I cross the river toward Floirac and begin to search for the route de la Tresne, as it is spelled on the family's ration cards. I imagine that the street has been renamed several times by now and soon discover that ever since the socialist council was elected, it's been called avenue du Pr\u00e9sident Fran\u00e7ois-Mitterrand. Of course...\n\nEventually I find Le Castel, which, according to postwar trial records, was looted during the months following the armistice, under the indulgent eyes of the Ledoux family.\n\nIn the middle of a freshly mown lawn stands a cedar, plainly several hundred years old. At the foot of that tree, in May 1940, Henri Matisse and my grandfather engaged in spirited conversations about nature and its representation in painting. Massive, harmonious, reassuring, the tree was perhaps more damaged by the hurricane of 1999 than by the German invasion. The grounds are well tended, while the house itself looks rather weary. It's a curious building, at once charming and distasteful. Designed in the nineteenth century and modeled on a fortress, it combines all the attributes\u2014a keep, stone walls, carved rose windows in the fa\u00e7ade\u2014needed to turn it into a sort of Wuthering Heights.\n\nI push open the heavy glass-and-wrought-iron door. The hall looks a bit dingy and clearly hasn't undergone any refurbishment in many years. The big mirror hanging on the wall lends it a certain elegance though the worm-eaten staircase is crumbling into dust.\n\nI climb the shaky stairs and ring the second-floor bell. The door is opened by a startled elderly gentleman, a clerk from the town hall, lodged there by the council. He ushers me into a three- or four-room flat that may have been the bedrooms, and perhaps the dining room, of Le Castel. There's still a dumbwaiter set into one of the walls.\n\nThe gentleman listens, slightly baffled, to my babbling (\"my family lived here, left in June 1940; I'd like to see the downstairs\") and calls the town hall. Two deputies kindly join us and open up the property.\n\nPart of the house hasn't been touched since those days; the other was clearly added on by the Ledoux family over the course of the subsequent decades. Might this work have been paid for, gossips suggested after the war, by the booty hidden inside the house?\n\nDespite its fancy name, the house isn't very big, although the grounds are imposing. I inspect the whole building room by room, saving the drawing room for last. The kitchens are on the ground floor, as they are in all the houses in Haut-Floirac, which were the properties of the affluent Bordeaux bourgeoisie since the end of the nineteenth century. \"It dates from the nineteen-thirties or forties,\" I am told. \"The pipes are rusty, the wiring was installed by the occupying Germans,\" and the office is used as a storeroom for the drinks and mineral water that would be served at private or municipal events.\n\nThe Rosenbergs stayed at Le Castel until June 1940, when they decided to flee France. With a clear-eyed view of the deteriorating situation, but perhaps placing too much confidence in the Maginot Line of fortifications against Germany, Paul brought dozens of his paintings to Le Castel so as not to be separated from them, and especially to keep them safe, far from Paris. He rented a vault for them in the town of Libourne, at the Banque Nationale pour le Commerce et l'Industrie (BNCI), which later became the Banque Nationale de Paris, when it was nationalized after the war.\n\nThere 162 paintings were stored; they included a van Gogh self-portrait and paintings by C\u00e9zanne, Delacroix, L\u00e9ger, Matisse, Sisley, Picasso, Vuillard, Utrillo, Corot, Monet, and Braque. On September 5, 1941, when the Nazis opened vault number 7, every piece was taken away to the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. All G\u00f6ring had to do was seize them.\n\n* * *\n\nSo the Rosenbergs spent the winter of 1940 in Floirac. It was as if time itself had been suspended.\n\nDuring this period Braque came to visit. Troubled and dispirited about the outbreak of hostilities, he found it difficult to stand before his easel. In October 1939 he wrote to Paul: \"I'd started a few canvases, but the turbulence that arose put a stop to all that. I haven't gone back to painting, and for about a month now I've been making sculptures, which I am greatly enjoying. It's athletic work because I've got to bring stones up from the beach that sometimes weigh more than 20 kilos.\" Clearly, this work was as therapeutic as the defeat was traumatic: 120,000 dead, 200,000 wounded in a few weeks, a people humiliated. \"Hitler did in seven weeks what the Germans had dreamed of doing for seventy years.\"\n\nWhen the Reich troops arrived in Dieppe, six miles from his property at Varengeville, Braque took his finest paintings and sought temporary refuge with the Rosenbergs in Floriac. He and his wife, Marcelle, also brought with them the little gold in their possession. On Paul's advice, Braque put everything in the vault next to Paul's in the same bank in Libourne. Of course, the vault was later forced open, its contents, along with Paul's paintings, plundered by the Germans.\n\nIn 1942 Braque received an almost comical letter from the BNCI about the lock that had been broken by the Nazis and had to be replaced at the bank's expense: \"We would be obliged if you would repay the expenses thus accrued\u2014namely, 1,000 francs for expert advice and 200 francs for our trouble.\"\n\n* * *\n\nAs for Matisse, he moved to Nice.\n\nOn July 16, 1939, Matisse and Paul renewed the contract that had bound them together since 1936, adding a clause to the effect that it would become invalid in the event of war. On October 10 Matisse proposed a third contract, a \"war contract\" to be signed on the thirtieth of the month. \"Given the uncertainty of the market, a one-year contract strikes me as reasonable... I foresaw a return of the golden age of the arts, a time when artists wouldn't have to put their joys and torments on display... delivering their works not as soon as they hatched, but after living with them long enough to see them mature... Impossible in the present state of our civilization, and we must resign ourselves to parting company from our children before we've seen them grow,\" Matisse says, referring to his paintings. \"And your indomitable work arrives to rouse me from this state, which is so conducive to meditation even though it is imposed by circumstances. I succumb to temptation; the golden calm remains!\"\n\nOn both sides, the renewal of this exclusive contract revealed a certain optimism despite everything in the years to come. Paul then announced to Matisse that he wanted to move from Tours to Bordeaux so that his son, Alexandre, \"wouldn't yield to idleness\" and could continue his studies (Tours was not a university town at the time) and begin his military training.\n\nAccording to Paul's correspondence, it seems that in Floirac during those first months of 1940, before the catastrophe took place, the passion for art took precedence over commentary on events whose outcome remained uncertain. Many people were apparently unaware of how serious things were. In April 1940 the Art Institute of Chicago had planned a tour for Paul in America, so that he could come, along with his paintings, and deliver lectures on French painting of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.\n\nThat same year, during the so-called Phoney War,* Paul traveled all the way to Nice to see Matisse in his studio and came back by train with canvases under his arm. Clearly enchanted by his visit, he wrote to the painter as soon as he got home. Apparently, hanging his friend's canvases to their greatest advantage was a more pressing matter than seeing his family after his absence: \"I found you in a most excellent state... I've seen your new works which, the more I think about it, are the very best quality and the very best of Matisse... The ones I have brought here were hung on the walls of the living room in Le Castel at 2:30. After contemplating them again, I went to say hello to my family. I was very tired after an 18-hour journey, the sight of your canvases revived me... I'm very flattered and honored to have your esteem and trust... I'm going to Paris next week, and I will reopen the gallery with five new paintings by Matisse, five by Braque, five by Picasso: what a fine reopening that will be!\" But he didn't go back to Paris. The letter is dated April 4, 1940. The German assault on the Ardennes was about to begin.\n\n* * *\n\nIn an article published in Sydney in 1941, the great art critic Andr\u00e9 Breton was asked to talk about the writers who remained in France during the war, and the magazine, Art in Australia, commissioned Paul to try to imagine the lives of his favorite artists under the occupation. Paul described one of his meetings with Matisse, who had, in his turn, come to Floirac just before the German attack.\n\nTheir conversation, just a few weeks before the rout, seemed surreal. As usual, they talked about art and painting and contemplated the budding trees and the first flowers to bloom in that spring of 1940. Matisse marveled, Paul relates, at the white and yellow daisies that made the lawn a carpet lovelier than a fourteenth-century tapestry. \"That is what we should create,\" the great colorist told him. \"There is the expression of freshness and color that I seek in my canvases. These are the harmonies that nature suggests to us but does not oblige us to reproduce objectively.\" This was in May 1940.\n\n* * *\n\nPicasso was in Royan, not far from Floirac.\n\nHe and my grandfather went on writing, phoning, seeing each other. Meanwhile, the rest of the family arrived from Paris and crammed themselves into the house. Paul told the Matisses that he would put them up, but there wasn't so much as a free sofa. On June 11, 12, and 13, there were heated family discussions taking place in the ground-floor living room. The Germans had entered Paris on June 10, and the question the family struggled with was whether or not to flee.\n\nSeventy years later, this September afternoon in 2010, here I am back in the same room, with the same fireplace, the same cupboards, and the same chandelier. It's strange watching a scene played out by ghosts. I imagine the evening: chairs crammed together, the children on the parquet floor, the half-packed suitcases in a corner. The room is alive. I hear the sighs, the murmurs, the anxieties, the certainties, the fears of all the people who are there camping out at Le Castel in those days in June 1940.\n\n* * *\n\nFor most French families, there was no question of leaving France, but for some, especially the Jewish ones who knew that they were targets of the Germans and that they were close to the border, the debate was: exile or maintain the status quo.\n\n\"Fearful of Vichy, or concerned that they would quickly become pariahs, some French citizens, and also some expatriates living in France, opted to flee,\" writes Emmanuelle Loyer in Paris \u00e0 New York. \"Even the most unwilling began to imagine the possibility of going elsewhere as the noose began to tighten. While the first anti-Jewish statute dates from October 1940, the machinery of exclusion had been set in motion as early as July of that year. Time was short. As David Rousset would later say with gallows humor, France and the rest of Europe would soon offer only two exit routes: Marseille and Auschwitz.\" Bordeaux might be added to the list.\n\nJacques Helft, Paul's brother-in-law, was adamant that the family leave France for Portugal, via Spain. As for my grandmother, she was unsure. Paul himself was of two minds. Everyone seemed to be guided by his own temperament when it came to the question of exile. Loyer sums up the dilemma of families by noting the \"ultrasensitive balance between the agony of departure and the potentially dramatic implications of the stubborn will to stay.\" She quotes a letter from Marc Bloch* written in May 1941, stressing the heartache of the historian crushed between \"bureaucratic obstructions of the U.S. State Department, family matters and perhaps the growing convictions of the author of L'\u00c9trange d\u00e9faite that by remaining in his country one could better serve it.\" Bloch was shot by the Germans in 1944 near Lyon, where he was in the Resistance.\n\nThe problem of passports was the first one that needed to be solved. Seventeen were needed for the Rosenberg family and their dependents, if parents, grandparents, children, brothers, sisters, and nephews were going to get out of France. Marianne, my grandmother Margot's youngest sister, had a childhood friend whose husband, having retreated to Bordeaux with the French government, happened to be secretary to the country's president, Albert Lebrun. Although the republic was stripped of its powers and its territory, it retained the capacity to stamp and validate passports. And this was accomplished. As for the Portuguese consul, he bravely delivered visas, against the will of Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.\n\nThe second challenge was the crossing of Spain. Franco granted the refugees amassing at the border the right to pass through his country, but not to stop in Spanish territory. Paul and his brothers-in-law ultimately negotiated permission to cross Spain in three days and three nights.\n\nOn June 16 they were ready to leave and crammed into the family cars for the trip of approximately 125 miles. Two miles before the border at Hendaye, the controls were strict, and the queue was interminable. They ate butter biscuits, opened sardine tins, and slept in their cars.\n\nIr\u00fan, Burgos, Salamanca: as predicted, it took them three days and nights to cross Spain. At the French border, there was a poignant separation from my mother's brother, Alexandre, and his cousins Fran\u00e7ois and Jean, who had decided to stay and fight for their country. They boarded the last Polish ship to leave Bordeaux, the Batory\u2014named for a sixteenth-century Polish king\u2014and left Libourne on June 17, 1940. Alexandre was nineteen and had been brought up in the comfort of an affluent family. Why would a young man just past adolescence embark on such an odyssey? The love of his country, a taste for adventure, the need to stand on his own two feet? Exactly what drove my own father to reject a comfortable life in America to go fight in the Middle East?\n\nSo Alexandre and his cousins set off even before General de Gaulle issued his landmark appeal for support of the Resistance. As soon as they arrived in Great Britain, they joined what in 1943 would become the Second Armored Division, the Division Blind\u00e9e of the future hero of the Free French forces, Marshal Philippe Leclerc. On August 24, 1944, my uncle and cousins were among the troops who liberated Paris.\n\nMeanwhile, the rest of the family had reached Portugal and temporarily settled in Sintra, fifteen miles from Lisbon. On a daily basis, the adults laid siege to the consulates and embassies to obtain\u2014the number of refugees in the family had grown by now\u2014twenty-one visas for anywhere: Paraguay, Argentina, Chile. But those visas were extremely precious.* Paul later told an American newspaper that having arrived in Portugal as a refugee, he went to the British Relief Fund, which gave him a boiled egg and a piece of bread: \"Imagine a man who has everything in life... and who, a week later, has lost his business, his fortune, his friends. I was sitting on a stone wall with a boiled egg and a crust of bread and I couldn't help laughing.\"\n\nTo be able to board a ship, you needed, as Emmanuelle Loyer writes, to have enough to pay for \"a crossing, have a certain reputation, enterprising American friends, or colleagues, a lot of energy and a bit of luck.\" Not to mention the fact that the Americans' asking refugees to bring some kind of written guarantee that they would be able to earn a living in the United States made it impossible for many to leave.\n\nIn August the situation was eased thanks to Paul's old friend Alfred Barr. The distinguished director of the Museum of Modern Art had to fight to explain to the American authorities, who had never or barely heard of Paul Rosenberg, the potential artistic advantage that the United States might gain by welcoming him onto its soil. Barr was a persuasive man, and the Rosenbergs managed to obtain those precious visas. The Helft family (my grandparents' sisters, brothers-in-law, and cousins) received theirs four days later.\n\nThanks to various networks, between three and four thousand French citizens managed to reach the United States in this way. On September 20, 1940, Paul and his family disembarked in New York. They were lucky: about 75,000 French citizens died in Nazi concentration camps.\n\nSeventy years later my visit to Floirac brings their exodus chillingly to life. I now understand why my mother never wanted to see that house again, even though it would be her last link with France for five years.\n\nI too am more unsettled by the house than I'd anticipated. I must be visibly shaken, because the mayor's deputies suggest stopping off at the town hall, just around the corner, for a glass of water. It's oppressively hot. The mayor, Conchita Lacuey, who is also the Socialist Party deputy of the Gironde, the department that includes Bordeaux, drops in to greet me warmly, to tell me how amazed she is by life's coincidences, and turns the moment into a photo opportunity. \"You never know,\" she says, on that late-summer day. Her own grandparents, hard-line republicans, arrived from Spain more or less as my fleeing family was entering the country.\nAT THE CENTRE POMPIDOU\n\nThe war and the mark that it left on our house on rue La Bo\u00e9tie, the conditions under which my family stayed in Floirac, and finally their desperate quest for refuge in the United States are consuming me.\n\nI need to retrace my steps, to get back to the very core of things, to my grandfather's work, and to scour the family archives. I plan to immerse myself in them when I am in New York, though I am mostly living in Washington, D.C., at this point. But on a visit to Paris, I take the opportunity to call the Centre Georges Pompidou, to see if its archives have any information about my grandfather.\n\nAfter a chilly reception from the director, Alfred Pacquement, I am welcomed more warmly by Didier Schulmann, who is in charge of the Kandinsky Library. We arrange a meeting for May 10. May 10? The twenty-ninth anniversary of Mitterrand's victory? What's the connection? Only that which leads from politics to modern art and back again.\n\nUnfortunately, there's nothing much of interest about my grandfather in the museum, Schulmann tells me, except for some photographic plates that are stored off-site. I have another pleasant interview with one of the curators at the Centre Pompidou, Christian Derouet, who was responsible for the Kandinsky exhibition there several years ago. Derouet worked for a long time on L\u00e9once Rosenberg's archives and told me he'd come across L\u00e9once's brother, Paul, in the course of his research.\n\nThe reception I get from M. Pacquement indicates that he still bears a certain degree of rancor toward my family, which had some ten years before retrieved from the Centre Pompidou basement a painting stamped \"MNR, Mus\u00e9es Nationaux R\u00e9cup\u00e9ration: National Museums Recovery.\"* At the time the museum had been unwilling to return that painting by Fernand L\u00e9ger, Woman in Red and Green, also called Knight in Armor, on the pretext that the museum directors didn't know whether the painting, which they acknowledged had been stolen from rue La Bo\u00e9tie, belonged to Paul or to L\u00e9once. So the court decided, quite logically, that if there was any doubt, the painting should go to both families and that the heirs\u2014my mother, my aunt, and L\u00e9once's descendants\u2014were to share the work, as was done without difficulty. It was understandable enough that the Centre Pompidou didn't know to which part of the family it should restore the painting, and it wasn't hard to grasp its unwillingness to part with such a beautiful work of art.\n\nBecause it was not realistic for all the Rosenberg cousins to share the painting, a decision was made to sell it. I wasn't very interested in it at the time since I'd barely been aware of the research done by my family, especially my aunt and cousins in New York, who had sought the painting's retrieval. But I do remember my mother's telling me about the strange feeling she had had as she gazed at that painting, which was completely new to her, its having passed through the gallery without her ever setting eyes on it.\n\nI subsequently learned that between September 1939 and June 1940 my mother and her parents had left Paris, but L\u00e9once, my grandfather's brother, hadn't wanted to follow them. He spent the war in the capital, proudly wearing his yellow star, and miraculously escaped the roundup before dying in 1947. A great discoverer of new talent but always penniless, he often asked my grandfather for money in return for paintings that he owned and stored at rue La Bo\u00e9tie. That was what happened during the winter of 1939\u201340, in a transaction with Paul, who was based in Floirac. L\u00e9once received a wire transfer from his brother and put his L\u00e9ger in Paul's gallery, where it was stolen in July 1940, when the property was handed over to the Germans and a few French opportunists. Subsumed by the state after the war, Woman in Red and Green slumbered peacefully at the Centre Pompidou, labeled \"MNR,\" while neither the family nor the museum were aware of its resting place.\n\n* * *\n\nThough there are no archives on my grandfather at the Centre Pompidou, I am granted exceptional permission to consult the photographic plates taken in the family gallery, which are kept in the Kandinsky Library archives in one of the museum's warehouses. All collections not on display have been transferred to massive storerooms for fear that a flood, which seems to happen every hundred years or so, might once again inundate the basements of the Paris museums, as happened in 1910.\n\nIt's the largest of those great warehouses, or at least the one that houses the treasures of the Mus\u00e9e d'Art Moderne that aren't on display. Mile after mile, seemingly endless avenues are filled with mysteriously numbered crates containing sculptures that may never have been seen by anyone. Great cabinets mounted on wheels contain countless paintings that remain hidden from the human eye. Dozens of unmounted canvases on rollers, like the shelves in a rug showroom. I spot a Warhol and a Mir\u00f3 crying out to be hung.\n\nIn another high-security section behind a reinforced double door, for which you need a special badge to enter, I step inside the rooms where the photographic archives are kept. There are thousands of glass plates, all meticulously cataloged. A number of filing boxes represent the Paul Rosenberg collection. My mother and my uncle donated it to the Ministry of Culture in 1973 to grant researchers access to the works in their original state. Here they are, dusty and fragile, like memory itself. Dozens of cartons marked Bissi\u00e8re,* Braque, Laurencin, Matisse, and L\u00e9ger hold heavy plates of glass, artifacts of a photographic process used before the war. Most were taken by a famous art photographer at the time who went by the name Routhier and are of peerless quality.\n\nIn those prints I see the exhibition halls that I recently visited at rue La Bo\u00e9tie, the paneling reaching halfway up the wall and the unmistakable glass ceiling with its little star-shaped windows. The black-and-white photographs look strange, given that these are such famous and vivid paintings, but the prints are so magical that you can almost imagine they're in full color.\n\nThe glass plates that move me most are the ones commemorating exhibitions by Matisse or Braque in the late thirties, probably because I've seen other photographs taken only a few months later in the same settings; only this time the paintings of the two great masters have been replaced by the portrait of P\u00e9tain and violently anti-Semitic slogans.\n\nI open these boxes more or less at random and delicately lift the pictures from their yellowed envelopes, those plates of glass so fragile that some of them are broken or cracked. The cracks disturb me: Is it just the damage wrought by time, or is it abuse by the occupying forces that pilfered them? Perhaps it doesn't matter; the damage cannot be reversed. And deep in the recesses of the archives, the past somehow feels beyond reach. Why only now do I want to know who my grandfather was, what kind of person he was, how he lived? Why only now am I exploring his world?\nGENNEVILLIERS\n\nI decide to try to visit all the places where my family's memory is preserved. So: to the furniture depository where I've stored most of the papers and photographs that I hurriedly gathered from my mother's house after her death. It's freezing in this big unit at Gennevilliers, where moving men bring in the containers on casters and open them up in my presence, as in a morgue. Why do I feel like a gravedigger, when emptying my mother's cupboards did not make me feel that way?\n\nI set off again quickly, very quickly, with a big cardboard box in the trunk of my car, chosen from the twenty-five or so boxes that had been stored. I'll spend the next two nights sifting through photographs and letters. Most of these chests contain the papers of France Forever, of which my mother was secretary-general. The U.S.-based information organization was set up to relay to the Americans the efforts of the Free French and the Resistance. In 1940 and 1941, before Franklin Roosevelt entered the war, the Americans needed proof that the French deserved to be helped and weren't just a nation that had simply capitulated to the occupying forces, as it was fashionable to write in the 1960s and 1970s. Emmanuelle Loyer speaks about France Forever as \"an association set up on the initiative of a group of French who had settled in the United States, to 'drum up sympathy and material help for Free France.'\"\n\nI unwrap these relics as if they were remnants of a vanished world: a Cross of Lorraine (de Gaulle's symbol of resistance); a photograph of General de Gaulle signed to my mother, Micheline Rosenberg, which she kept even after becoming a fervent anti-Gaulliste. And the collection of pamphlets published by France Forever, written and designed by my mother.\n\nI feel guilty. She would have loved me to have shown an interest in her wartime efforts while she was alive. And yet I'd always found her glorification of France Forever a bit tiresome. I'd even told her, dismissively, in that sullen teenage way, that Roosevelt had entered the war only because of Pearl Harbor and that it certainly had nothing to do with France Forever. This wasn't necessarily untrue, but it was cruel to try to disparage her work as an activist and to prefer the heroes of the shadows that clashed in Kiev or skirmished in the desert.\n\nFor my mother, the war years in New York were\u2014shocking though it may seem\u2014captivating. Though they were not the happiest years of her life, they were certainly the most fulfilling. These were the years when she had genuinely exciting tasks to perform, ones to which she had committed herself completely, with talent and imagination.\n\nFrom the boxes I take notebooks and drafts of letters and reports, wondering how such an intelligent woman could allow herself to be locked away in a conventional life of marriage and motherhood without ever searching for the freedom and the friends she missed once the war was over. Such a life seemed such a waste to the young woman that I was in the 1970s and 1980s. For me, as for my contemporaries who tried to \"have it all,\" that conventional way of being was out of the question.\n\nIn addition to these notebooks, these brochures emblazoned with red, white, and blue rosettes, Lorraine crosses, and editorials dissecting the ideological differences between General de Gaulle and General Henri Giraud (who was preferred by the Americans since they mistrusted the head of the Free French), I find a treasure trove of personal papers and letters.\n\nI stay up till the small hours sorting and filing that huge archive: heating bills from the Floirac residence at the beginning of the war; ration cards from the Gironde in 1940 and Paris in 1945; the rulings from cases brought\u2014and won\u2014by my family against certain vultures; letters from L\u00e9ger or Matisse to my grandfather from 1939\u2014so many other letters! My grandfather's tiny, slanting handwriting, expressing a little bit of himself.\n\nThese letters date both from the war and from the years that followed and reveal the grand obsession of Paul's life: his paintings, which he loved as if they were living beings. For him, their recovery after the war, a source of so much anguish, reflected his determination to see his rights acknowledged and to ensure that his children would have a comfortable life. There is much humility in these letters, and some shy and tender outpourings to his son, Alexandre, who relieved him of the worry of running the gallery during the 1950s; to his daughter, Micheline, who lived far away in Paris; and to me, his granddaughter, whom he called \"my darling sweetie.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThere are heaps of photographs, all quite unreal to me. In this picture, the thin, distant-looking old man of my childhood appears young and gaunt. He is wearing a sleeveless bathing costume in a swimming pool in Monte Carlo (necessarily elegant). He is teaching my mother to dive. Or in 1930 he is with his wife and two children skating at Saint Moritz (elegant, always elegant), in baggy Tintin-style trousers, his hair blowing in the wind.\n\nWas he tender? Was he cheerful, my grandfather who was a father first and foremost, a papa who asked his children to call him by his first name? That shocked the gentle Marguerite Blanchot, who worked for my grandparents for fifty years and who always said, \"People will say that Monsieur is not the children's father!\"\n\nIn fact, Paul was an anxious and shy man who relaxed more easily in his letters to his beloved daughter than in his conversations with her.\n\n* * *\n\nDuring the 1950s, and throughout his life, Paul complained with less and less detachment about his health, which was poor, and about his business, which was actually thriving but which he thought was in a terrible state. He worried about political instability in France and about the Korean War, which he thought might worsen at any moment. He pleaded with my mother to come back to New York with my father and me for our own safety and suggested leaving for Argentina, which was described by relatives who had emigrated there as the new El Dorado. To Argentina, like so many former Nazis? To flee again, when there was no real threat? To resume the immigrant lifestyle, in a remote corner of the world, farther from a danger that had already passed?\n\nSanity prevailed. Having set off on a reconnaissance trip to Juan Per\u00f3n's Buenos Aires, Paul came back posthaste and made us unpack all the suitcases that stood in the hallway. Had he sensed that the country, once the richest in South America, was about to go into decline, into a period of galloping inflation under a series of bloody dictatorships?\n\nHe remained concerned about the future, finding little relief or reassurance in the fact that the nightmare was now over. It was as if with each successive international event, his identity and his family's might once more be called into question. The letters were largely devoted to the arrangements he wanted to make so that my mother and her brother could keep the gallery running, reflecting his life's work: the need to introduce people to contemporary culture, to make them understand it, to spread its message in a barbaric world.\n\nHe asked Alexandre to develop and manage this gallery, and my uncle did so scrupulously until his death in 1987. As for his sister, my mother, she had to defer to Alexandre, to place blind trust in his instincts for running the business. And above all, the two Rosenberg children were supposed to remain united. In fact, my uncle Alexandre fulfilled the promise he made to his father so loyally that he often took greater care of his sister than he did of his own family.\n\nAlexandre was an aesthete, the first president of the Art Dealers Association of America, and a connoisseur in great demand for the infallibility of his eye. His family\u2014his wife, cousins, sister, niece\u2014called him Kiki, the nickname his parents had given him when he was born in 1921 in the apartment at rue La Bo\u00e9tie, with Picasso as witness. They probably wouldn't have guessed that this childish nickname would later be applied to a very serious man behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses. Although he retained his French nationality, Alexandre eventually married an American woman, my aunt Elaine, and became a true New Yorker. Yet he remained attached to French culture and was keen that his children, my cousins Elisabeth and Marianne, take advantage of their dual nationality to pursue their higher education in Paris.\n\nUnlike his father, Alexandre had embarked on his journey through the art world more out of filial duty than his own personal taste, which inclined more toward literature, philosophy, and fifteenth-century incunabula. He was less sociable than his father\u2014more brusque\u2014and while his love of art was limitless, his love of commerce was not. So much so that after my grandfather's death the Galerie Paul Rosenberg lost its dynamism and relied on its existing inventory. Though the two families were kept very comfortable for more than fifty years, the holdings gradually dwindled. Of the more than three hundred works recovered from the original collection, four major works have stayed with me.\n\n* * *\n\nI knew my uncle well but still have trouble envisioning Paul, his father, who lived through the final years of the nineteenth century and the first exhilarating yet tragic half of the twentieth. I have to banish the anxiety-ridden letters written at the end of his life and imagine what must have given him joy: to discover works of artistic genius by his contemporaries and to become entwined with their stories. I must immerse myself in his world, the world of a passionate and original art dealer.\nDEALER\n\nFor a long time the language of the dealer irritated me. Words like \"objets d'art,\" or \"rare and beautiful things,\" to quote the phrase on the fa\u00e7ade of the Mus\u00e9e de l'Homme, made me cringe. If my grandfather had sold jeans or tins of sardines, I wouldn't have considered it unseemly, but when I was young, getting rich by trading in objets d'art carried the same sulfurous whiff as the banking profession does today. Nothing dishonest, exactly, but an \"impure\" quality amplified by the French disdain for money.\n\nThe image of bohemian painters dying in garrets made me mistrust the trade of those who prospered from selling paintings. The idea of commerce, of trade, of buying canvases from indigent painters before selling them at a considerable profit troubled me. Julius II ensuring the glory of Michelangelo or Peggy Guggenheim buying a painting a day: these were noble efforts to preserve the arts.\n\nOn the other hand, I would have been hugely impressed by a man motivated entirely by the love of art, a kind of patron whose raison d'\u00eatre was the survival of good taste and the disinterested promotion of penniless young artists.\n\nAnd then I got older. I learned that the world according to Proudhon exists mostly in books, that making money isn't necessarily a sin (that is, if you don't exploit anybody), that you might even consider it moral to produce wealth rather than simply benefit from the wealth of society.\n\nSo yes, my grandfather Paul Rosenberg was a dealer. It wasn't a new profession. Rembrandt bid up the prices of his paintings at public sales in order to increase the value of artists' work. Bernini did the same in the seventeenth century. Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin also understood the workings of the market. Ambroise Vollard wasn't just an intermediary for the impressionists; he wasn't just the dealer of C\u00e9zanne and Gauguin: he was also their advocate. Paul Durand-Ruel was another who knew how to create interest in his beloved impressionists, engaging qualities transcending those of the mere businessman.\n\nPaul was a dealer, just as they were, a successful dealer, even though his aesthetic judgments governed his decisions more than a desire for commercial success. Certainly, his passion for modern painting developed gradually. The same was true of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, whose biographer Pierre Assouline says that his attachment to contemporary art was not apparent at the start of his career. Kahnweiler was a banker who knew little about art, and his fascination with the painters of his day was \"the fruit of a slow process of maturation,\" an apprenticeship.\n\nThe parallel between the two men is interesting, given the importance of their respective images in the art world. Kahnweiler was a gifted art dealer who first set up his business during the early years of the twentieth century, but whose success was finally established after the Second World War, according to Assouline. A character not very dissimilar, in my view, to Paul: \"sober,\" \"imperious,\" \"tough in his professional dealings,\" \"a bit old-fashioned,\" \"sensitive to the slightest hint of fawning, and enormously proud.\"\n\nTheir backgrounds were quite similar, one from a family of art dealers only recently arrived in France from Bratislava, the other from a German banking family; both members of a bourgeois class sheltered from material hardship. Both men understood the revolution in twentieth-century painting, although Paul's tastes inclined toward Picasso and Braque, while Kahnweiler was drawn more to Juan Gris, his great friend, and to Maurice de Vlaminck. Both men refused to show the surrealist painters in their galleries, asserting that while surrealism was legitimate and innovative in literary terms, it was not sufficiently pictorial. Both dealers completely ignored Salvador Dal\u00ed and Max Ernst, Joan Mir\u00f3 and Ren\u00e9 Magritte.* Neither man was willing to write a memoir. Paul considered it vulgar and inappropriate to dwell on himself, while Kahnweiler set out his life story in broad terms in his book on Gris.\n\nThere the similarities end. The differences are many.\n\nFirst of all, their relationship to the wars. Paul had been a soldier, mobilized in 1914, and very concerned about what was going on politically in the 1930s. He campaigned against the acquisition of the art that was being sold off cheaply by the Nazis, and was forced to flee his country in 1940, hunted by the Germans. Kahnweiler, on the other hand, had been an ardent pacifist, refusing\u2014and this took courage\u2014to fight for either side in the First World War. He was thoroughly anti-Nazi, but did not believe in a second world war right up to the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, and managed to hide in France between 1940 and 1944. He sold his gallery to his sister-in-law Louise Leiris, a Burgundian Catholic, and was somehow able to maintain his place within the establishment under the occupation.\n\nPaul's and Kahnweiler's careers also took different trajectories: my grandfather, who had made a name for himself in impressionist painting, rose to fame in the world of modern art after the First World War. Kahnweiler was initiated into contemporary art earlier, at the very start of the twentieth century, and carved out a fine reputation for himself fairly quickly. But then he spent a long period in the shadows before returning with full strength in 1945. By that time Paul was far beyond the shores of France.\n\nPaul quickly developed a sense that the United States would overtake Europe both in the art market and in terms of cultural excitement. From 1922 onward he set about awakening Americans to the exhilaration of modern art. Kahnweiler was still convinced that Paris was the global art capital, and he maintained his belief in the supremacy of old Europe until he died in 1979.\n\nThe century's turbulence affected the two men in similar ways: the Second World War cut Paul off from his artists, just as the First World War had done for Kahnweiler. Much the same may be said of their success: Paul's fame in the art world exploded only after the First World War was over. Kahnweiler's triumph came chiefly after the liberation, when he won back his representation of the painters who had left him during the 1920s, becoming, most important of all, Picasso's exclusive dealer.\n\nOn a personal level, the two men did not get on well. There are no records of any unpleasant remarks from Paul about Kahnweiler, but Pierre Assouline portrays the subject of his biography as harsh in his treatment of all his colleagues, notably my grandfather. He was probably angry and hurt about the behavior of Paul's brother L\u00e9once, who had attracted the cubist painters to his gallery while Kahnweiler was exiled in Switzerland during the First World War. Besides, L\u00e9once's reputation was tarnished by the fact that he had agreed, during the 1920s, to be an expert consultant in the liquidation of Kahnweiler's property, which had been confiscated by the French because of his German citizenship. But the severity of Assouline's subject also seems to extend to Paul, whom Kahnweiler treated with a degree of contempt.\n\nPaul, who had chosen to sell nineteenth-century canvases so that he could buy twentieth-century works and thereby provide his artists with a livelihood, decided to put more money than his colleagues did into funding the painters he represented. He wanted to pay his artists (notably Picasso, Braque, L\u00e9ger, and Matisse) handsomely, in order to give them the freedom to paint. Kahnweiler, whom Picasso may have aptly described as miserly, made it a point of honor not to pay his artists more than he had to and never to bid up prices.\n\nWhen L\u00e9ger came to him and said, \"Paul Rosenberg gives me twice what you do,\" Kahnweiler replied, \"Very well, then, go to Rosenberg.\" So in the 1920s and 1930s, after Picasso, Braque, L\u00e9ger, and even, for a time in 1930, Andr\u00e9 Masson, signed with Paul, de Vlaminck left for Bernheim-Jeune, and Andr\u00e9 Derain for Paul Guillaume. Kahnweiler was left only with his beloved Juan Gris, in perpetual rivalry with Picasso and other less important painters.\n\nIt is easy to imagine why Kahnweiler might have been bitter, but Paul had opted to pursue a policy that favored contemporary artists, providing them with both fame and material comfort. And he was one of those who embodied the golden age of French painting between the wars. This is the central thesis put forward by Michael C. FitzGerald, who writes that \"the market was not peripheral to the development of modernism but central to it.\"\n\nIf Picasso's painting took off in the 1920s, it did so not least because Paul knew how to promote the painter and guide him in directions other than cubism. Paul also understood that it was important to view Picasso's work in the context of the tumultuous forces of the twentieth century and French painting of the past. This was more important, in the end, than constantly promoting cubism. As the American press has often pointed out, Paul was, until the war, the biggest art dealer in Europe, dealing in a wide range of artists, from Delacroix to Picasso. \"Imagine,\" a major California newspaper wrote in the 1940s, \"being able to step inside Matisse or Picasso's studio twice a year, being allowed to look at forty of their best paintings and saying, 'I'll take the lot!' Until the War broke out, that was just what Paul Rosenberg did.\"\n\nFinally, Kahnweiler and Rosenberg differed in their attitude toward museums. Kahnweiler was surely resentful about the confiscation of his property and, believing that he had already been forced to give quite enough to the state against his will, \"didn't like to give to museums. It was beyond the limit of his generosity.\" Paul, on the other hand, was overly generous. Grateful to America for welcoming him as a refugee in 1940, he gave large numbers of paintings (by artists including Picasso, Renoir, and van Gogh) to American museums in New York and elsewhere. After the war, happy to have recovered many of his stolen paintings, he gave the French state, including the Mus\u00e9e d'Art Moderne in Paris, roughly thirty large and beautiful works.\n\n* * *\n\nAt the start of the 1950s, Paul's innovative tendencies were still in evidence when he signed a contract with Nicolas de Sta\u00ebl, for example, or in his attempt to launch the paintings of Le Corbusier, which never really caught on. He also made forays into American painting previously known only to a select circle, such as the works of Max Weber, Karl Knaths, and Abraham Rattner.\n\nBut he never moved on to the next stage, which might have led him, during his lifetime, to two very different types of contemporary painter, Edward Hopper and Willem de Kooning. He probably wouldn't have liked Jasper Johns or Mark Rothko, had he come across them. And he would not have inclined toward the pop art of Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol. Everyone has his or her own limits in the appreciation of modernity.\n\nFor its December 1941\u2013January 1942 issue, Art in Australia had, as we have seen, asked Paul to articulate his vision of painting and speak about the painters who had stayed behind in France during the war. Having arrived in the United States only a year before, Paul was presented as the man best acquainted with the artists of the previous era. \"Painters before their time do not exist,\" he said. \"They are always of their epoch. It is the public who is ever behind in the pictorial revolution. The public eagerly accepts the formula of a 'recent past' when it has been definitively accepted, but refuses to regard or even attempt to understand that of their immediate present. How many errors have been committed, and how many great young painters have been forced to know misery because of the buyer's ignorance and his refusal to support them; refusal because they 'don't like that aspect' or because they 'do not understand'... Too often the spectator looks for arguments within himself against the works rather than attempting to free himself from those conventions which he believes he understands, agrees with and likes.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIn a similar spirit, there was an article that Paul always kept close at hand, so that he could refer to it often, notably using it as an appendix to the catalog of the last big exhibition that he devoted to Picasso in Paris in 1936. It's a delightful piece by Albert Wolff, an art critic from the early years of the Third Republic, which was published in Le Figaro in 1876. The \"impressionists,\" a term that was intended as an insult, but that the artists themselves brandished as a badge of honor, had made headlines just two years before, and curators had trouble accepting the genius of something they couldn't understand. Paul kept this text as an antidote to the incomprehension of his contemporaries:\n\n\"Rue Le Peletier is suffering great misfortune. After the fire at the Op\u00e9ra, here comes another disaster crashing down on the neighborhood. An exhibition, said to be of paintings, has just opened at Durand-Ruel... There are people who explode with laughter when they see such things. As for me, it makes me heartsick. These so-called artists call themselves the intransigents, the impressionists; they take canvases, paint and brushes, throw on a few colors and sign the thing. So it is that at the Ville-Evrard, lost souls are gathering pebbles along their way and imagining they have found diamonds... So please be so kind as to inform M. Pissaro [sic] that the trees are not purple, that the sky is not the color of fresh butter, that in no country will you see the things he paints... Try to make M. Degas see reason... Try to explain to M. Renoir that a woman's torso is not a heap of decomposing flesh with purple and green patches denoting the state of complete putrefaction of a corpse!... And it's this pile of vulgarities that is being displayed in public with no thought for the fatal consequences that they might provoke! Yesterday, on rue Le Peletier, they arrested a poor man who, leaving this exhibition, was biting passersby.\" The article is well enough written, the charge is effectively leveled, but the mockery was turned against its author a few decades later.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul was combatting precisely this sort of thinking. But was he a visionary or merely\u2014and this in itself would be something\u2014going along with innovative painters and showing their work alongside the masters of the previous century in order to gain acceptance for the modernists? How daring was he, really? How did he see the role of an art dealer in a profession that was rapidly becoming organized?\n\nAfter the war he wrote to Lucienne, L\u00e9once's daughter, who wanted to open a gallery herself: \"Don't make the same mistake as your poor father did, restricting yourself to very avant-garde painting. Mix up your exhibitions in such a way that they attract the whole of your clientele, the part of it that considers itself advanced and the other, more conservative part. Maintaining without money a policy entirely ahead of its time is a cul-de-sac. These things have to be done gradually.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThat was basically how Paul started out, like his own father before him.\n\nMy great-grandfather Alexandre was a grain merchant. A long way from the world of art. When he was nearly ruined by a cargo of rotten goods, he decided to put his last savings into the thing that he really loved, \"objets d'art and curiosities.\" Farewell to the grain trade. He became an antiques dealer, at 38 avenue de l'Op\u00e9ra.\n\nI remember looking at the building's fa\u00e7ade indifferently. It's at the end of the avenue, practically on the place de l'Op\u00e9ra, one of those buildings that now house insurance companies and airlines. I still have trouble imagining an art gallery in this setting, a place that seems designated for trade, for the tourists, in the shadow of the Palais Garnier.\n\nOne day, turning up early at the Salle Drouot, my great-grandfather, who had recently become an art dealer, bought a painting he liked for 87.50 francs. It was a Sisley, the first impressionist painting he brought home, and at a time when practically everyone, apart from Vollard and more particularly Durand-Ruel, was ignoring this new artistic school. The great battles fought to win it recognition were drawing to a close, but still the public hadn't come. Intrigued, my great-grandfather went on to discover Manet, Monet, and Renoir.\n\nIt was probably this that reconciled me to the word \"dealer.\" Coming from nowhere, my great-grandfather trained his eye, trusting his own instincts, his own daring taste. So was it really about commerce, if the canvases that he bought\u2014and that sold badly\u2014were the work of illustrious unknowns? It seemed a passion first and foremost, a calling that had become a profession.\n\n* * *\n\n\"One day when I was about ten, my father led me to the shop window of a dealer who kept a gallery on the rue Le Peletier, to show me a painting that made me shriek with horror,\" writes my grandfather in the fragment of an autobiography that he began during the war years in New York. \"Imagine a very thickly painted picture made with violent colors, representing a modest bedroom with a wooden bed covered with a red blanket, an ordinary wooden table with a water jug, a bowl and, hanging from the walls, shapeless old clothes. The floor looked oddly bowed to me, and the furniture seemed to be dancing, as if it wanted, as in a cartoon, to leap off the canvas and fly out through the window. My father calmed me down and said, 'I don't know this artist, and the canvas isn't signed, but I'm going to find out about him because I'd like to buy some of his paintings.' The canvas [Room in Arles] was by van Gogh, it's the one that's in the Art Institute of Chicago, and which, by an irony of fate, I myself sold about 30 years later.\"\n\nThe impressionists, van Gogh, C\u00e9zanne: this was where all of my great-grandfather's savings ended up, much to the distress of his wife. \"My mother\"\u2014Paul continues in his sketch of a family memoir\u2014\"claimed her husband had gone mad and that he was ruining his children. 'What are our friends and customers going to think?' she groaned. Her dismay reached its peak when a van Gogh and a C\u00e9zanne came into the house. She would call upstairs, 'Children, your father's going completely mad: he's buying vann Govoghs and Ces Anes.' It's true that everyone who came to the house, even collectors and connoisseurs, guffawed at the sight of a blue or yellow Monet, saying that no one knew an equivalent in nature. One day, we were having lunch when the phone rang. My father picked it up. 'How much do I want for my C\u00e9zanne? 6,000 francs, I can't go any lower than that. So you'll take it?' He was delighted to be able to show his wife that there was someone even crazier than he was!\"\n\nSo the impressionists entered the home of Rosenberg p\u00e8re, at a time when not many art lovers were interested in them, and when dealers themselves preferred to sell paintings by the Barbizon school. Works by Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Sisley, Courbet, Daumier, Toulouse-Lautrec, C\u00e9zanne, and van Gogh now decorated the gallery on the avenue de l'Op\u00e9ra. Renoir too, whose A Girl with a Watering Can my great-grandfather acquired, a painting that my grandfather sold much later to the great American collector Chester Dale. It was the first painting, and one of the most beautiful, in the series hung in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., at the impressive exhibition of the Chester Dale collection in 2009.\n\nI went there to see if it was as graceful as its familiar reproduction and was dazzled by the sun that illuminates the child's blond hair, bringing alive the shadows on her cheeks.\nCH\u00c2TEAUDUN, OP\u00c9RA, AND MADISON AVENUE\n\nI have found Paul's torn and yellowed birth certificate: he was born on December 29, 1881, in the Ninth Arrondissement of Paris, in rue de Ch\u00e2teaudun, the son of Alexandre Rosenberg and Mathilde Jellinek. The strange-sounding names come from Hungary\u2014Bratislava, in fact, which is now the capital of Slovakia and was at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.\n\nMy mother always said proudly\u2014no doubt a legacy of the traumas of 1940\u2014that she had been French for two generations. And yet that's somewhat inaccurate: her father, even though he was actually born in France, wasn't automatically French by birth. The law of June 26, 1889, which sought to grant full citizenship to all children born on French soil, applied to children born in France of foreign parents, but only once they had reached their maturity. So in 1902, when he turned twenty-one, Paul should have applied for naturalization. But at the time he was in London learning his trade, and he let the deadline slip. Is it possible that our family's national identity has been imperiled since the start of the twentieth century?\n\nSo it is that I find, in my dusty boxes, a second piece of paper from 1913, reminding Paul that he had to apply for naturalization if he wanted to become a French citizen. The paper is signed by Louis Barthou, who was the minister of justice at the time and was killed in Marseille in 1934 by a stray bullet during the attempted assassination of Alexander of Yugoslavia by the Ustashe.\n\nAlthough he was born in Paris, my grandfather became French as the result of will in a France that, on the brink of the First World War, was keen to call up as many of its young men as possible. In short, my Frenchness is fairly recent on that side of the family. There were, at this time of the Third Republic, no French laws especially favorable to the children of immigrants.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul joins his father's business in January 1898, at the age of sixteen. \"He wanted me to learn the trade while I was still young. He started by making me copy out letters and file them. After eight days, I told him I'd only keep on doing that when I'd finished my art studies. He agreed, and here I am running around museums, taking notes.\" He begins by studying the arts of antiquity\u2014of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks\u2014before ending up with the moderns. During the holidays he travels around the museums of Europe and ends up well acquainted with them. \"Knowing the primitives, having studied their expression, their writings, the modes of expression they had adopted, allowed me to understand at a very young age that there was no process, that all that mattered was the laws of construction, relationships of values, volumes, lines and what it was that they wanted to express... I went out with my father, who initiated me into the antique dealer's trade and corrected my impressions. I became presumptuous and criticized the artistic purchases he made without me.\"\n\nFor better or worse, however, he is learning. \"We had an old china dinner set, pink background, and we had a barrel in the same color. One day one of our clients, the Prince de St. L., came to the house and I sold him the set, including the barrel, which cost on its own more than the rest of the set. Amazed by the price, the buyer insisted on taking the pieces away in person. Very proud of the sale, I told my father, who called me all the names of the day and declared that I would never be fit for the trade! I must admit that I wasn't proud of my beginnings as a businessman.\"\n\nBut over time his eye improves, and Paul thinks he's made it. \"Because you know your way around,\" his father tells him, \"go to London, open a gallery, do some business and try not to make any mistakes.\" So the young man sets off at the age of nineteen, sure that he will be lavishly praised upon his return. \"Alas, my first experiences were no more successful. Without my father, I had no one to guide me.\" Looking for paintings by the rather academic Belgian painter Alfred Stevens, he hurries to buy a work by an A. Stevens, who turns out to be Agrippa rather than Alfred, that has no commercial value whatsoever. But he soon makes progress. He buys two Monets for 250 pounds, two drawings by van Gogh for 40, and wins the trust of his father. Having retired from dealing in objets d'art to devote himself entirely to paintings, Alexandre hopes that his sons will become dealers in paintings in turn.\n\nIn 1906 Alexandre, now in poor health, sets up his two sons at 38 avenue de l'Op\u00e9ra, where Paul realizes that selling the impressionists isn't going to bring in enough to earn a living. \"We were forced to buy 'salable' paintings.\" By this he means the Barbizon School, which continues to dominate the taste of the times. Still, Paul tries unsuccessfully to sell a painting by the Barbizon painter F\u00e9lix Ziem to a buyer who thinks that six thousand francs for a view of Venice with a crooked campanile is pretty steep. He also tries to off-load a portrait of Louis XIV on a descendant of the Bourbons, who is disappointed when Paul naively tells him that he doesn't look a bit like his ancestor.\n\n\"I was successful, but I was troubled by the idea that I was selling paintings I didn't like, certain that they wouldn't be recognized in the future. It was then that I determined to sell everything I owned and invest in the impressionists. I realized that if I were going to compete with the big auction houses of the day, I needed to buy only the highest-quality works, and rely on time to make a name for myself.\"\n\nThese were in fact the two lessons that he drew from his apprenticeship and put to good use some years later. First repeating, with modifications, his experience with the impressionists, he deliberately chose to sell paintings that he truly loved and waited for art lovers to recognize their beauty. Over the course of ten years and two distinct phases, he moved from the Barbizon School to the works of Pablo Picasso. He would bide his time.\n\nFrom that moment on, he forged the reputation that stayed with him throughout his life. In forty years, from Paris to New York, from his father's gallery on avenue de l'Op\u00e9ra, to his own near Madison Avenue, his imprimatur was the absolute quality of the works he sold.\n\n* * *\n\nBut his passion for the modernists never allowed him to forget his great love of Renoir. Sometime ago, in Paris, I forced myself to go to the Grand Palais to see the exhibition of late Renoirs, the ones he painted at the start of the last century. I confess to finding Renoir's paintings facile, more tiresome than enchanting, perhaps because they have been reproduced once too often, printed on a thousand-and-one posters, tea towels, or place mats. It's a bit like a lover of classical music's not wanting to hear Mozart's Forty-first Symphony\u2014the Jupiter\u2014for the umpteenth time, after it's been played over and over again by every orchestra on the planet.\n\nI was convinced that Renoir's late style\u2014vague, reddish, and allegorical\u2014debased the oeuvre of his glorious years. A judgment inherited, I believed, from Paul and then passed on to me by my mother, it struck me as irrefutable.\n\nAnd yet that exhibition, Renoir in the Twentieth Century, was a real gift. It brought together the paintings from 1880 to 1890, when Renoir was distancing himself from the impressionist revolution, painting en plein air, in favor of a series of portraits of sweet, dreamy girls: Gabrielle\u2014his son Jean's nanny\u2014with her charming profile; bathers at their toilet; scenes of ordinary bourgeois life (girls doing their hair, reading, sewing, or taking piano lessons); voluptuous nudes not unlike those of Boucher or Rubens. Among the very last paintings was Les Baigneuses, given to the state by Renoir's sons in 1923, just after his death. I don't like this painting, although Renoir himself called it a \"success\" and a \"springboard for experiments to come.\" I don't like his soft, fleshy odalisques and as a result agreed with the blunt judgment of Renoir's work that my family history attributed to Paul.\n\nI say \"attributed\" because the exhibition finished with a big surprise: a whole wall covered with huge photographs of the 1934 exhibition that Paul had devoted to Renoir in his gallery, showing a selection of the canvases from the painter's last years. In it I saw all the paintings that were the real treasures of the retrospective at the Grand Palais, including those baigneuses that seem so flabby and pink to me today.\n\nAnd it was one of those canvases, known by its American name, Reclining Nude, that my grandparents donated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1956, the first painting by Renoir to enter that museum, which sold it only a few years ago to buy a van Gogh, since American museums have the right to buy and sell the works in their collection. And it was one of the stellar paintings at the big Renoir exhibition at the Grand Palais in September 2009, one of the paintings that, by their own accounts, inspired Picasso and Matisse.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul carefully recorded two of his visits to Renoir's studio, one that occurred on November 21, 1919, just before the artist died, and one on December 6, 1919, the day of his funeral.\n\nIn November he found the old painter in the studio that he had built on the edge of his property, Les Collettes, in Cagnes-sur-Mer in the south of France: \"He seemed pleased to see me, and although I had a sense that he had lost weight, he was always cheerful, happy to paint, and as charming and clever as he was always said to have been... I brought him a photograph of a big Corot figure that I had just bought. 'Corot,' he said to me, 'is a creature apart in the nineteenth century, he is timeless.'...\n\n\"Before sunset, we brought Renoir back from his studio to his villa... he in his wheelchair, wrapped in furs and with a beret on his head. I walked beside him, bareheaded, talking to him about the beautiful spectacle of nature. The path was lined with olive trees, women picked the ripe olives, children played, dogs rested in the last rays of sunlight and the women paused to say, 'Good evening, M. Renoir'; the children stopped playing and the dogs came to greet their master. And he, like a grand priest, lowered his head and, smiling, replied, 'Good evening, good evening.'\n\n\"At that moment, through olive trees that seemed to become increasingly gnarled, the sea became bluer, the women more beautiful, the sun warmer, to cry out their admiration for the man who had known how to paint women, nature, sun.\"\n\n* * *\n\nPaul returned to Les Collettes only two weeks later for Renoir's funeral, after his death on December 3. He was one of the few people present at the burial of one of the greatest symbols of French art of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.\n\n\"His coffin rested in a modest hearse, without horses, adorned with ostrich feathers... The cort\u00e8ge set off, slowed down by a number of men, down the steep coast road that leads from Les Collettes to the little village of Cagnes. A church, really more of a simple shed, welcomed the crowd and friends from the neighborhood, with rudimentary pews, the coffin placed in front of the altar against two half doors with lowered blinds.\n\n\"The service began very simply, with no sermons, no music, no ceremonial dress, as Renoir himself would have wished. The priest, his friend, a great man, uttered the ritual prayers, but he did so with an emotion that affected the entire congregation: words of praise for the great painter, the great man of goodwill as well as the great believer who, behind his rebellious fa\u00e7ade, always sang the beauty of nature... I think that in other times, other ages, he would have had a national funeral.\"\n\nApart from the story of his initiation into the business, Paul wrote very little: a preface here and there, an article in an art magazine. Besides these fragments of memoir, he felt that it was not his role or his destiny to write. Was this a result of an inability to sit still, shyness, indifference, depression, or lucidity? It is hard to know. Though Paul was keen for recognition, publishing his opinions on the theory of art did not seem a necessary part of his identity.\n\nNor do I have testimony of his experiences in the First World War. I haven't found any of the letters from the front that he should have written to the pretty young wife he had married in July, a month before war was declared. They were probably lost in the upheavals of 1940. Having enlisted, like all the young men of his age, in 1914, he was demobilized in 1916 for poor health, the first signs of the ulcer that was to plague him for the rest of his life. All I have of him from this period is a brittle, yellowed photograph of a soldier with a mustache like those worn by the poilus of times past.\n\nThere isn't much evidence of his political opinions either. Yet we do know that having been a fervent admirer of the de Gaulle of the Free French, he strenuously distanced himself from the man on May 13, 1958,* to become openly anti-Gaullist. Living in New York, he had harsh words for the arrogance of the general.*\n\nHaving lived a bourgeois life, Paul was a wise man who came from the calm left and might have been called a radical socialist. As a student he had fought the anti-Dreyfusards, and he admired the French socialist leader Jean Jaur\u00e8s. In 1936 he voted for the Front Populaire, the left-wing coalition. In his own way, from within the art market itself and through his actions, he resisted the fascist ideas that were poisoning Europe. The heroism of his son in the Second Armored Division was also something with which he deeply identified.\n\nLater I found many letters from the 1950s, including the one he wrote to my mother in 1952, in which he tells of the \"mass of workers who can't make ends meet, who live in deprivation and on pitiful wages, will in due course rise up... Too many foreign-made luxury cars, too many overpriced restaurants. Too much poverty, too much outward luxury... and only charity for those who have nothing.\" This certainly wasn't a revolutionary diatribe, but the sentiments are clearly of the left. I am not trying to pretend that my grandfather was of the extreme left; far from it. Nor am I trying to minimize his bitterness at the time toward a France that had cast him out. But such expressions of outrage\u2014and I've found many of them in his correspondence\u2014testify to his personal revolt against injustice and inequality.\n\nAnd yet Paul Rosenberg led a very comfortable life, and he certainly hadn't made his way from bohemia to the bourgeoisie and then to the Communist Party, as his friend Picasso had done. Still, he didn't judge current affairs purely in terms of his membership in the class that he lived within. Gauche caviar, we would now call it, \"champagne socialism,\" a term used to mock anyone who doesn't automatically assume the dominant political opinions of his social milieu. As if a person's bank account determined his actions more than his convictions; as if the wealthy could vote only for the interests of their own.\n\n* * *\n\nFew ideological confidences are revealed in his papers, but in 1927 he did give a very strange interview about his family origins to \"Feuilles volantes,\" a supplement of the magazine Cahiers d'art. The interviewer was E. T\u00e9riade, the famous art critic and publisher. Oddly, T\u00e9riade asks his questions very seriously and doesn't seem at all put off by Paul's fantastical replies, which are clearly intended satirically: \"I come from a very old family lost in the mists of time. My ancestors, repelled by the mood in Palestine at that time, had wanted to sell the Tablets of the Law, but experts contested the sale. One of my ancestors authenticated the vase of Soissons... I find one of my ancestors among the Knights Templar. He died at the stake, and for the first time in his life he gave something away: his soul, to God... My father went to Mesopotamia, to examine the remains of the Tower of Babel. He visited India, Lutetia, Belleville and Montparnasse. He was a very noble man, very cultured and so generous that he saw to it that I was born on December 29, 1881, at three o'clock in the afternoon... At the age of 16, I entered the family firm. For starters, my father gave me copies of all the letters to archive. That task, which could have been terribly dreary, gave me a passion for invoices, and I already dreamed of the ones that I would later sign with my own name... My chief concern was to know whom the paintings I was to examine were by, and whether or not they were authentic. So I was obliged to find an infallible way of gathering information on those two points. For the first, I had discovered that by secretly reading the signature on the painting, I could discover the name of the painter. As to the authenticity of the canvases... I looked to see whether the paintings submitted to me were reproduced in catalogs or books. If that was the case, I maintained with great authority that they were entirely authentic. Even today, I behave in a similar fashion!\"\n\n\"What do you think about your painters?\" the interviewer asks. My grandfather's response bears more than a trace of irreverence: \"I am protected by every possible guarantee, and by the opinion of appeal court experts, distinguished chemists and manufacturers of canvases and frames, and I can assure you that I sell good, fault-free merchandise... My greatest ambition is to show in the L\u00e9pine* competition all the tricks I'm forced to come up with to convince my clients that what I'm selling are paintings.\"\n\n\"What do you think of your fellow dealers?\" asks the unfortunate critic, undeterred.\n\n\"I hold each of them in exactly the same esteem as he holds me.\"\n\nDoes that mean that this Paul, whom I see as more austere than playful, more of an ascetic than a bon vivant, also had an amusing and frivolous side? In truth, I think his character tended to be more on the gloomy side, as suggested by his correspondence with Picasso, to which I shall return.\n\nA four-page handwritten letter that Paul sent to Henri Matisse on December 2, 1939, three months after World War II had begun, adds to this portrait of a complex soul. He is writing to the painter with questions about his art. \"It seems to me that you want too much out of life,\" Paul replies to Matisse's nostalgic letter. \"What is it? A quarter of an hour of happiness, the rest all troubles, suffering and doubt! Do you want to be even more privileged than you are, do you want the heavenly gift of creating, of expressing yourself, without the pain that that entails? Everyone pays for what he has with what he doesn't have.\n\n\"Why wouldn't you doubt it? It's what gives you your strength, the expression of youth and creativity that are in your works. Don't you think that others doubt as well?... I am filled with doubts, I have feelings of despair like yours... Look at our friend Picasso, who not only doubts but is gnawed by torment... Are you sure that Corot doesn't doubt just as much as C\u00e9zanne, the master of masters, the greatest of martyrs alongside Michelangelo?... We are all moving irrevocably toward an ideal that we will never attain, and I say we are fortunate in this because [otherwise] it would mean the end of life... If you knew the despair I feel at being inactive... you would be calmer, because you at least can take refuge in your art.\"\n\nWe encounter this idea of being an intermediary rather than a creator several times in his correspondence. There is, for example, this letter dated December 28, 1949, again to Matisse: \"If only I could create something, if God had given me that gift, I would find boundless pleasure in doing it. But alas, I must content myself with enjoying my own admiration for the creations of others, not least your own works.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThose who knew Paul less well give a more effusive description of him.\n\nPierre Nahon depicts him as a \"man of middle size, of meticulous elegance,\" \"enterprising and tenacious,\" \"pursuing audacious strategies... He has a rare flair, his eye is excellent, he has contacts in the best society.\"\n\nAccording to Alfred Daber, a great dealer between 1920 and 1970, as cited by Hector Feliciano, Paul's \"body began to tremble like that of an impatient child when he saw a work that he craved. A trembling that subsided only when he had obtained the painting.\"\n\nRen\u00e9 Gimpel gives a less flattering picture of him: \"A fox's face with too short a muzzle. Prominent, grainy cheekbones.\" A displeasing portrait, not least because Gimpel was a friend of Marie Laurencin, who complained that Paul had treated her harshly when she asked for an advance of the pocket money she needed to settle the bill for her Chanel coats. \"Stop ordering them, then!\" Paul was supposed to have said to her one day when he'd had enough of her complaints, provoking a furious response.\n\nHowever, having read much of their correspondence, I had a sense that even though Laurencin sometimes pleaded poverty, she adored Paul and later my mother too. Their correspondence is more than affectionate. \"My darling Marie,\" Paul writes to her, adding, \"Can I say that without seeming forward?\"\n\nThe delightful, feminine paintings of Laurencin, who was loved by the poet Apollinaire, stood out in the male-dominated cubist world. They have fallen out of fashion today, as paintings for gray and pink boudoirs, but they have a grace that touches me, grace in a time of war and fragmentation. Laurencin painted gentle figures when L\u00e9ger was painting his industrial structures, violent in form and color. Was Laurencin behind the times? Perhaps it was more that she was out of step with a brutal world, and that strikes me as refreshing.\n\nDo I treat her indulgently because she painted my portrait\u2014at my grandfather's request\u2014when I was four years old? Sitting still like that was a form of torture for me at that age. Apparently I had the temerity to say to her, \"Don't forget, my eyes are blue!\" She smilingly obliged, blessing me with two luminous lavender orbs. My mother had hung this portrait in her bedroom, but I have trouble recognizing myself in this little girl with a pale pink smock dress and eyes that are unreasonably blue.\n\nThere are various descriptions of the gallery owner Rosenberg, in which he is depicted as \"a shrewd dealer with good taste.\" Certainly, his eye was legendary. In 1952 he wrote to Braque, sending him a photograph for the authentication of a painting, but he had already made up his mind: \"Looking at the knife, the lemons and the ace of clubs, I think it's very unlikely that the painting's one of yours.\"\n\nIn 1954, when he was in poor health, he sent his son to a Parisian auction in his stead. He was interested in several paintings and wrote Alexandre a letter giving him some suggestions merely on the basis of what he had seen in the catalog: \"The Renoir number 27 isn't interesting. Number 32, the Vuillard, is really a little masterpiece that you can buy. The Bonnard, number 82, not bad but a bit early. The Modigliani, number 91, I'm not sure it's authentic, as to number 95, the Renoir, stay away, it's too well known, it's been retouched and it's been on sale in all the markets in the world.\" All this perspicacity from an ailing old man who had examined an auction catalog.\n\n* * *\n\nIt would be an understatement to say that Paul was aware of his instinct for identifying art. He could be arrogant about his gifts and about the importance of his gallery, of both the unique quality of the works shown at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie and the catalogs published under his auspices for his own exhibitions. He was especially proud to have financed the publication of two important catalogues raisonn\u00e9s, one of the work of C\u00e9zanne, written by Lionel Venturi in 1936, and the other, in 1940, of Camille Pissarro's work, which was assembled by the painter's son Lucien in collaboration with Venturi.\n\nIn large part, my grandfather attributed his success to his belief that \"Great paintings sell themselves.\" Knowing that outstanding work would be coveted by collectors, he refused to bargain when masterpieces were at stake.\n\nPaul held his colleagues and rivals in high esteem, but not excessively so. He particularly valued Ambroise Vollard, his mentor and colleague of more than fifty years, who represented Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro and was, most important of all, the dealer and friend of C\u00e9zanne's. He gives a wonderful portrayal of Vollard in one of his letters: \"You never had a sense that he was trying to sell you anything. Quite the contrary: as soon as he had mentioned the price of the painting in question, he would feel his client's lapel and ask him who had made his suit. Then he moved on to something else that had nothing to do with paintings, leaving the client to his own devices.\" Though Vollard was the predecessor of the great French art dealers, his gallery, on rue Laffitte in the Ninth Arrondissement, was famously shabby, crammed with dusty canvases, the only furniture a cot on which Vollard would sometimes sleep. Vollard's gallery was far from the comfort of 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie.\n\n* * *\n\nAt the Galerie Rosenberg, exhibitions were held year-round and lasted three weeks each. My grandfather hung the paintings himself, a sacred ceremony for any art dealer, and one to which he gave his full concentration. It was only when I saw the profusion of his catalogs that I realized the wealth of works that he'd hung over the years.\n\nIn 1962, when Paul had been dead for three years, his colleague Alfred Daber wrote to my uncle Alexandre, who had succeeded his father as head of the New York gallery: \"Between 1924 and 1937, such lovely exhibitions I saw at his gallery on rue La Bo\u00e9tie! We sometimes talked until eight o'clock at night about subjects that seemed to have nothing to do with painting, but that painting brought us to: philosophy, metaphysics. I already wanted to correct the prevailing taste, and he told me with lucidity that it was as vain an idea as wanting to channel the waves of the sea.\"\n\n* * *\n\nDisplays of paintings by Picasso, Braque, Derain, Matisse, L\u00e9ger, and Laurencin were interspersed with exhibitions by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1914); of French art of the nineteenth century, the preimpressionists (1917); Ingres and C\u00e9zanne (1925); Pierre Bonnard (1936); and Henri Rousseau, known as Le Douanier, or customs officer, in 1937.\n\nDuring the Great Depression, Paul returned to the nineteenth century, which was easier to sell than modern painting during those difficult economic times. In 1933 there was a Monet exhibition, and in 1934 one by Renoir. Indeed, 1936 was dazzling: Braque in January, Seurat in February, Picasso in March, Monet in April, Matisse in May, Laurencin in July.\n\nPaul's big exhibitions of works by Picasso were always an event. The first one, in 1919\u2014and I shall come back to it\u2014was devoted to 160 unpublished noncubist drawings. The 1926 exhibition was one of the most imposing and was followed ten years later by a one-man show, featuring twenty-nine paintings and drawings, that attracted six hundred visitors a day, and in which Rosi (Picasso's nickname for Paul) was so excited, it was \"as if the paintings had been created especially for him,\" observed a colleague amazed by the beauty and profusion of the works.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul loaned many canvases to other institutions. For example, he contributed to the first French retrospective of Picasso's works in 1932 at the Galerie Georges Petit, but also on the other side of the Atlantic at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934. Picasso was a huge draw in the art world and caused an enormous stir in the United States. Paul had insisted that the exhibition contain a verse from a fable by La Fontaine, \"The Camel and the Floating Sticks,\" which he then republished in the catalog of the 1936 Paris exhibition and which he thought might open the eyes of the skeptics:\n\nThose things we find uncanny or alarming,\n\nCustom can make acceptable and charming;\n\nYour earlier intense desire to flee them\n\nIs lessened further every time you see them.\n\nHe spent months with his friend Alfred Barr selecting the works and undertaking the preparation for the first big Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and then in Chicago, at the Art Institute. That was in 1939 and 1940. Paul loaned more than thirty canvases to this exhibition, which meant these paintings had escaped the clutches of the Nazis. Barr was deeply grateful for Paul's willingness to enable this momentous show.\n\nThe other great painters of the Rosenberg \"stable\" followed in the aftermath of the Picasso exhibition. For instance, Paul devoted to Braque three major exhibitions\u2014in 1936, 1937, 1938\u2014and one, from April 4 to April 29, 1939, probably one of the last to be held at the Galerie Rosenberg in Paris, on the eve of the war. To complete the trio, L\u00e9ger had joined the roster of artists represented at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie in 1924.\n\nAs for his \"fourth musketeer,\" Matisse, Paul had also known him for a very long time. The correspondence between Matisse and my grandfather is still the property of the painter's family, kept, like all his archives, in the house where he lived at Issy-les-Moulineaux, near Paris. The house hasn't changed since Matisse's day, but the street, formerly route de Clamart, has been renamed avenue du G\u00e9n\u00e9ral-de-Gaulle.\n\n* * *\n\nIt's autumn. I push the gate open. It's cold; dead leaves are scattered on the lawn. I step inside an old-fashioned little house that makes a sharp contrast with the modernity of the conservation of the family archives. All the documents are digitized, and I'm settled at a computer by the curator, beside the radiator, in the very room that served as the painter's model for one of his most important transitional period paintings, The Piano Lesson,* a key canvas in the Matisse oeuvre. The double windows, the railing of the balustrade, the garden: They're all there, just as they are in the 1916 painting, giving me an immense appreciation of the artist's genius for conveying light and color.\n\nThe exchange of letters between Paul and Matisse began that same year. Their correspondence was regular and warm, apart from a few digs from Pierre Matisse, the artist's son, who thought that his father had become too dependent on Paul for representation.\n\nIn 1922 Matisse loaned Paul some canvases from his own collection, a C\u00e9zanne and a Courbet, for the Galerie Rosenberg exhibition The Great Masters of the Nineteenth Century. \"This exhibition,\" my grandfather writes, \"will also prove that the artists of our time... remain within the tradition, and that in their turn they honor French painting.\" He was still obsessed with the idea of showing the through line of art, that the works that he showed and that provoked howls of outrage from the bourgeoisie were in the tradition of the art history of his country.\n\nOn December 22, 1934, Henri Matisse writes to his son Pierre that \"business isn't going well. I sense a general feeling of apathy. Only Rosenberg has shown any warmth and offered me an exhibition.\" Two days later, in another letter to his son, Matisse confides: \"I saw Rosenberg, who galvanized me, told me I was wrong to allow myself to be forgotten. He told me he had big names\u2014the likes of Matisse and Picasso. That he wanted me to have an exhibition at his gallery, that he would put his exhibition space at my disposal... He showed me many beautiful paintings, van Gogh, Corot, Renoir, all new on the market. He told me how painting was everything for him, that it was the place where he lived.\"\n\nBut things aren't always idyllic between a painter and his dealer. On January 22, 1938, again in a letter to Pierre, who was based in New York and was warning him against the exclusive deal he had made with the Galerie Rosenberg, Matisse acknowledges that he has no illusions about his dealer, even though he knows that he can't do without him: \"As for Rosenberg... I've known him for a long time... Particularly when he yelled at me before signing a deal with me. I'm not with him for sentimental reasons, it's just so that I can use him... And then there are all the favors he has done me, and above all he knows how to glorify painting.\"\n\nThat was exactly what Picasso had understood in 1918, and it was likely one of the reasons that he made an extremely rare gift to Paul.\nMOTHER AND CHILD\n\nInitially it was called Portrait de Madame Rosenberg et sa fille. Later it appeared in various postwar catalogs, under the more American title of Mother and Child, before reacquiring its original name. Today it is prominently displayed in the Mus\u00e9e Picasso in Paris.\n\nThis portrait of my mother on my grandmother's lap was Picasso's gift to his new dealer, to mark the agreement they signed in Biarritz in 1918, even though Paul had tried to commission the piece. The painter even used the gesture to switch genres.\n\nThe painting is large, very large, and a bit academic, in the style of Ingres or Renoir but without the innate grace of those painters. It shows my grandmother sitting in an old tapestry armchair, holding my mother on her lap, a plump little doll in a white dress with blue ribbons. This painting, which scandalized the cubists, who thought that Picasso was \"betraying\" them, marks his return to neoclassicism.\n\n* * *\n\nI saw that painting throughout my childhood, first at my grandparents' Parisian apartment, then at my mother's. Paul attached great importance to it, and it was one of the first paintings he tried to retrieve after the war. The painting was said to have been stolen for G\u00f6ring, perhaps because it reminded him of the old masters.\n\nI used to look down on it a little, finding it too conventional, a sort of Virgin and Child on an Henri II armchair. Now I come to sit and meditate before it at the Mus\u00e9e Picasso, where I always thought it belonged. Since the days of Andr\u00e9 Malraux, the minister of culture under de Gaulle, the state has allowed anyone inheriting a work of art to donate it to a museum in lieu of paying a considerable inheritance tax. This measure was introduced to enrich French collections, which were poorer than many collections abroad, and to keep works that belong in national museums from being dispersed. That was what nearly happened to this family portrait: a rich Texan offered to buy the painting for a very good price, much higher than the inheritance tax that I was obliged to pay. But the idea of seeing this treasured painting leave for Houston was too painful in the end. It certainly would have distressed my mother. Fortunately, I recognized that donating it to the Mus\u00e9e Picasso was the right thing to do for the legacy of my family. I'm proud that the painting now adorns the walls of this Parisian institute of the arts.\n\nIn autumn 1918 the portrait was a sensation. On September 27, Paul wrote to Picasso: \"Everyone knows that Picasso has painted the portrait of my wife and my daughter. L\u00e9once heard Cocteau talking about it, and obviously he was hoping it would be cubist, even though Miche is rondiste.\"\n\nMy grandmother's face is, more than the rest of her, characteristic of Picasso, in a vein that is similar to the portraits of Olga, his wife. The painting is highly valued by art historians, even though I find it rather severe. Looking at it for the hundredth time, I try to work out why Picasso gave my grandmother such a melancholic face. At the same time I wonder why my mother, who seems so vital, is made to look so plump. Might Picasso have been prefiguring his series of Giants?\n\nSurely my grandmother would have preferred to have had her portrait painted by Giovanni Boldini, a mundane painter of the early twentieth century. Margot, who was inclined to be outspoken, admitted as much to Picasso. In response, Picasso drew a sketch in Boldini's most flattering manner, with flounces, a parasol, collars, and feathers, and sent it to my grandmother, signing it \"Boldini.\" I'm not sure which one Margot found more gratifying in the end... The Picasso was stolen by the Germans but recovered just before it left for Berlin. The fake Boldini disappeared during the war, never to be seen again.\n\nThere were other family portraits by Picasso. A gouache of my mother, in a blue dress by the sea, a little girl with red cheeks and windblown hair, was painted a year after Mother and Child, in 1919, on the beach at Biarritz. Amazingly, this was identified by an alert collector having an anisette in a caf\u00e9 in central France in the 1960s, who recognized it as the portrait of Mlle Rosenberg. The caf\u00e9 owner, who had been given it during the occupation by a man in need of a sandwich, kindly returned it to my grandmother, who rewarded him handsomely.\n\nThe portrait of Paul himself, a drawing whose lines have faded since 1919, is even more touching. Paul is an elegant figure: mustache, high-buttoned shoes, and double-breasted suit. He is sitting in a relaxed pose, on an armless chair, his left arm casually resting on its back. His well-manicured right hand, holding the inevitable cigarette, rests on his knee. This little picture is drawn, like the big family portrait, in the style of Ingres, but with a particular focus on the piercing, mischievous eyes of my grandfather; very Picasso. In the words of Michael FitzGerald, it is \"[a] blend of ease and sophistication... coupled with the intense scrutiny of [Paul's] gaze [that was] noted as his trademark.\"\n\nI still have the photographs of two vanished portraits of my mother, Micheline with Rabbit and Micheline as a Nurse. She must be four or five years old at the time of their creation. The drawings were done in charcoal. Stolen like the others by the Germans but never recovered, they may have gone up in smoke in the courtyard of the Mus\u00e9e du Jeu de Paume, in the bonfires of the occupying forces, or perhaps they were hung in a child's bedroom somewhere in Russia, or Berlin, or Paris, between the Seventh and Sixteenth Arrondissements, in the apartment of a wealthy French family that either collaborated with the Nazis or looked away from the question of the drawings' provenance.\nPAUL AND PIC\n\nThat Mother and Child sealed a covenant, an unshakable agreement. Rosenberg and Picasso: Was theirs a story of fraternal friendship or a professional alliance? Where did it come from: this mutual fascination between the establishment dealer and the bohemian painter? What did these two men have in common: the gallery owner (accustomed to the work of Renoir and Monet) and the painter who once pronounced dealers \"the enemy!\" to L\u00e9once, when he was one of Picasso's dealers between 1914 and 1918? How was it possible for Picasso and Paul to have had such a close friendship when the artist saw the artist-dealer relationship in class terms?\n\n* * *\n\nIn fact, much more bound the two men than a commercial contract. Theirs was an intense collaboration and aesthetic alliance. Indeed, my grandfather was recognized as the man who had orchestrated Picasso's career, as his \"impresario.\"\n\nMore than any other artist, it was Picasso who set up the dealer not only as his spokesperson and intermediary but essentially as his agent. He had very quickly realized that if a painter were to effectively address the public, he had to have just the right dealer, someone with a deeply compatible aesthetic sensibility and nature who would thoughtfully exhibit his work and advocate for him so that the public would understand his originality, his creativity. Picasso intuitively understood the necessity of forging a deep personal bond with the person who would be identified with the exhibition of his canvases.\n\nPaul knew how to comply with these requirements, enabling Picasso to turn his dealer into a close adviser and traveling companion. \"The artist and the gallery owner made one another,\" Pierre Nahon later said.\n\nPicasso was born in October 1881; Paul, in December of the same year, so they were exact contemporaries. But Paul belonged to the bourgeoisie; Picasso, to the avant-garde. Picasso soon recognized, however, that he could count on Paul to sell his paintings and even though Paul sold hardly any before the mid-1920s, the artist was in a position to wait. Paul could sell the work of his impressionists while gathering support for the contemporary painters who were his passion. Picasso quickly understood that Paul would be able to make and maintain his reputation. Both men readily grasped the significance of the press and cultivated those critics or writers like Pierre Reverdy, who understood this new style of painting and knew how to bring it to the attention of the broader public. Here again a new collaboration was inaugurated among artist, dealer, and art critic.\n\nIt was Paul's mission to move Picasso from his position in the avant-garde to that of a master of modern painting, \"the greatest of the twentieth century,\" as Michael FitzGerald was to call him. Between 1918 and 1939 Pablo Picasso and Paul Rosenberg promoted each other, creating Picasso's image and definitively establishing the reputation of my grandfather's gallery.\n\nFrom the outset Paul felt boundless admiration for the painter's genius. This was an enthusiasm that was all the more surprising, given that, unlike his brother, he had originally been drawn to a more classical form of painting\u2014that of Corot, of Courbet, of the impressionists, of C\u00e9zanne and van Gogh\u2014and had never been particularly convinced by to the vogue for cubism.\n\nIn January 1918 Picasso, in straitened financial circumstances, approached my grandfather to sell him a Renoir. But it was not until a face-to-face meeting in the summer of that year that the spark of friendship was ignited.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul called Picasso his spiritual brother, and what he felt for him was certainly something like a coup de foudre (love at first sight) of friendship. Indeed, something happened between them\u2014to the extent of complicity, affection, and I would daresay fraternity.\n\nThey met at Biarritz, in the villa La Mimoseraie of Eugenia Err\u00e1zuriz. This beautiful Chilean woman, a patron of the arts of the belle \u00e9poque, was a leading light in the world of dealers in fine arts in the 1920s. Picasso had met her through Jean Cocteau. She was a friend of Arthur Rubinstein and Sergei Diaghilev and devoted to the Ballets Russes, probably explaining the connection with Picasso, who also had strong ties with the ballet company. It was in ballet circles that he met Olga Khokhlova, whom he later married and with whom he had a son, Paulo.\n\nIn July 1918, Eugenia invited Olga and Picasso to spend their honeymoon at her house in Biarritz. Picasso happened to be looking for a new dealer at the time. Berthe Weill's gallery had probably been the first to sell a painting by Picasso (for 150 francs) around 1901, just as she was the first to show paintings by Matisse in 1902. But Picasso soon felt that he needed the financial stability that would allow him to paint with peace of mind. Vollard, notable for discovering C\u00e9zanne, bought twenty paintings from him for 2,000 francs in 1906, but this was not enough to free Picasso from financial worry.\n\nIn 1910 Picasso charmed Kahnweiler, who became his dealer in his gallery on rue Vignon, near the Madeleine in Paris. In 1913, Picasso made his first \"serious\" money when Kahnweiler bought twenty-three paintings from him for 27,250 francs. This was the equivalent of $117,500 today, or just over $4,800 per canvas. Picasso had never had so much money in his life.\n\nHis sense of security didn't last long. In 1914 Kahnweiler was forced to shut down his gallery because he held German nationality. Picasso was compelled to find a new gallery.\n\n* * *\n\nL\u00e9once Rosenberg succeeded Kahnweiler as Picasso's dealer in 1915. At the time L\u00e9once, passionate about cubism, said to Picasso, \"Together we will be invincible. You will be the creation, I the action.\"\n\nL\u00e9once, who had professionally parted company with his brother in 1910, was the more adventurous of the two. More avant-garde and more of a spendthrift too, acquiring more paintings than he sold. Paul, who was more prudent by nature, betting on nineteenth-century French painters and the impressionists, made calculated incursions into the art of his contemporaries.\n\nPaul the traditionalist and L\u00e9once the modernist? For a long time the accepted wisdom was that L\u00e9once was a gifted talent spotter but a terrible businessman, and Paul an astute businessman, more inclined toward business than art for its own sake. In fact, Paul wasn't very interested in old masters, unlike his colleagues who did a thriving trade in these safe bets, and instead took risks by taking on contemporary painters. Laurencin was one of the first of these, in 1913.\n\nAs late as 1943 Paul wrote, \"It would be so much simpler and more lucrative for me to make exhibitions of the great French nineteenth-century masters rather than contemporary works that unsettle our visitors.\"\n\nBesides, in the early years of the twentieth century, dealing in Renoirs meant promoting the art of the recent past. As for the delicate masterpieces of Monet, who died in 1926, they had not yet attained the classic status they have today.\n\nPaul wasn't interested in Jean-Honor\u00e9 Fragonard or Fran\u00e7ois Boucher, both then in vogue, or, unlike his brother, in Gris or L\u00e9ger. Indeed, L\u00e9once saw cubism as the culmination of all painting, much like those who saw the fall of the Berlin Wall not just as the end of a historical period but as the end of history itself.\n\n* * *\n\nIn his Galerie de l'Effort Moderne on rue de La Baume not far from rue La Bo\u00e9tie, L\u00e9once wanted to make Picasso the standard-bearer of a school of which the painter himself had wearied. Picasso wanted to break with artist theorists such as Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger and aspired to alter his style of painting. This was a time when he was distancing himself from the cubists and turning his attention instead to Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, whose stage sets he wanted to design (much to the displeasure of L\u00e9once, who believed that Picasso was keeping the wrong company if he wanted to fulfill his destiny as emblem of the new school of painting).\n\nYet Picasso was in fact returning to his roots in his Rose Period and to his harlequins, who had vanished among the pure, hard lines of cubism. He fell under the influence of Cocteau and his famous Le Rappel \u00e0 l'ordre, in which the poet rebuked him for allowing himself to become the prisoner of other painters who had copied him and limited the scope of his art. So partly for personal reasons that marked a genuine evolution in his work, but also to attract the patronage of cultural figures such as Cocteau and Eugenia Err\u00e1zuriz, Picasso began to move from cubism toward a neoclassical style.\n\nBy 1918 relations had cooled between Picasso and L\u00e9once, and Picasso was ripe for his encounter with Paul, even though the artist had until then been L\u00e9once's most cherished artist. I have found no trace of what must have been a fraternal crisis of conscience for Paul, a source of jealousy for L\u00e9once, or, at the very least, the basis for heated debate between the brothers. All I have found is a statement from L\u00e9once made much later. He was a man who knew how to make the best of things, who saw that he was going to lose his painter anyway, and who concluded that it was better if Picasso stayed in the family.\n\n* * *\n\nThe meeting between Paul and Picasso took place that summer before the end of the First World War. The Rosenbergs had taken a villa in Biarritz, a few hundred yards away from the one owned by the Err\u00e1zuriz family. Also nearby was Georges Wildenstein, friend and colleague. In fact, the entire Parisian art world convened at the home of Mme Err\u00e1zurriz, La Mimoseraie. Eventually a verbal agreement was reached: Paul would become Picasso's representative in France and Europe, and Wildenstein would assume that role in America, where he had already established a gallery. But Wildenstein remained in the background, and when the two dealers fell out in 1932, Paul became Picasso's international representative and remained so until the end of the war. No actual contract was signed, but Paul was given premi\u00e8re vue, or the right of first refusal, on Picasso's works. This was a model to which he later returned, first with Braque, then Matisse.\n\nThat summer marked a milestone in the family, for both good and ill. The positive was the freedom enjoyed by Paul and Picasso to develop their business dealings and personal friendship. The downside was the deterioration of the relationship between the Rosenberg and Wildenstein families.\n\nFrom that time onward there was a very warm bond between Picasso and Paul. The painter savored the peace of mind that came from his contract with L\u00e9once's brother; he saw the possibility of escaping the lure of cubism, which Paul wasn't so keen on. Picasso knew that if he showed his work at the Galerie Rosenberg, he wouldn't be cataloged as just another avant-garde painter but would win his place in the company of masters of the century just past.\n\nPicasso understood early on the connections that existed between artistic creation and the marketplace, and he sought to impose careful control over the exhibition of his works. As Roland Penrose writes, \"Picasso's friendship with Paul Rosenberg was increased by the dealer's usefulness as a protector of his interests and the organizer of exhibitions in his fashionable Gallery.\"\n\nPicasso was thrilled to find a dealer who grasped his desire to transcend cubism. Paul's genius lay in his ability to effectively juxtapose Picasso and Turner, Monet and Delacroix. But Picasso was not the only one to have been guided in that direction by his dealer. Paul took the same approach with Matisse. As for Braque, with Paul as his dealer, he moved from cubism to... Braque. Paul encouraged all his artists to reintroduce the subject into their painting, even in abstract works. His sense of aesthetics aligned with his commercial instincts, and time ultimately proved him right.\n\nFor the first Picasso exhibition at my grandfather's gallery, in October 1919, it was Picasso who personally paid for and designed the invitation to the opening. Both men saw this exhibition as representing a break with Picasso's previous style: there was not a single cubist work to be found among the 167 drawings and watercolors whose variety delighted visitors to the exhibition.\n\nBy selecting these particular works, both painter and gallery owner opted to display a direction for Picasso that was less radical and largely unknown to the public. Picasso had found a way of announcing his return to neoclassicism, while at the same time revealing himself to be a more open painter than was generally thought. He was essentially declaring his refusal to be pigeonholed, to be limited to the one style with which people identified him.\n\nAt 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, the public discovered a profusion of drawings of harlequins, bullfighting scenes, circuses, the Ballets Russes, open windows giving out over the sea at Saint-Rapha\u00ebl, portraits and still lifes closer to the classics than anything that people had known of Picasso until then.\n\nIn the autumn Paul persuaded Picasso to move to the building next door, 23 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, where he and Olga occupied two floors. The two men became intimate in the manner of brothers\u2014inseparable.\n\n* * *\n\nI had a palpable sense of that intimacy when I read through a cache of 214 letters that Paul wrote to Picasso between 1918 and his death in 1959, many of them composed at the end of the First World War and continuing through 1940, when the Second World War altered the terms of their relationship.\n\nWhat remains of this correspondence is accessible to researchers at the Mus\u00e9e Picasso. I had suspected that a trove of letters was kept in the archive there but had never taken the trouble to consult it, especially since I had so desperately wanted to make a life for myself apart from the history of my family. Once I decided to look into the past, I spent several days perched at the end of a long table in the library, on the top floor right under the rafters, with those letters before me, hoping to gain a better understanding of what it was that linked two such seemingly different men.\n\nIt's strange, this one-way correspondence, in which you're forced to imagine the absent replies, trying to fill in the blanks, to tease out the nuances of my grandfather's relationship with Picasso in those years. Apparently, Picasso didn't write much, and the few letters he did send to Paul were stolen by the occupying forces or by French colleagues during the war. Perhaps one day I'll stumble across letters to my grandfather in an old chest of drawers somewhere, ones that begin \"Mon cher Rosi\" and that are signed by \"Pic,\" as my grandfather called the painter.\n\nI am trying to reconstruct that relationship, that singular dialogue between the two men. What did they have to say to each other? Did they exchange platitudes, details about married life, or, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Peter Eckermann in their famous Conversations, did they talk about Racine and Delacroix? What is certain is that like children, they called to each other from the windows of their respective kitchens, which looked out on the same courtyard. Apparently it wasn't unusual for Picasso to hold up the painting he was currently working on so that Paul could see it through the window. And few days passed without Picasso's visiting his dealer, who already seemed a genuine friend.\n\nThese letters have the elegant slanted cursive handwriting typical of the early twentieth century. \"Mon cher ami\" is followed by \"Mon cher Pic\" or \"Mon cher Casso\" (as my mother called Picasso when she was a child). For Picasso, these lighthearted notes were at odds with those he received from L\u00e9once, who was more formal in his bearing, despite his predilection for the avant-garde.\n\nThe familiar tu, absent for twenty years, suddenly appears with the liberation and remains throughout the 1950s, as if these two men, still almost brothers even though they were never again as close as they had once been, had decided that the turmoil of the twentieth century had swept away the polite distance of the prewar years.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul is plainly feeling his way at first, discovering the art of the painter whose greatness he senses but is still trying to grasp. \"L\u00e9once says you're a greater painter as a cubist than you are as a painter from nature... Am I too narrow-minded?\"\n\nIn the 1920s, Picasso is having a grand time in London. Paul is fascinated by Picasso's celebrity and the excitement with which he is received into British high society. Picasso becomes a member of the \"ultra chic\" as described by Michael FitzGerald.\n\n* * *\n\nPicasso himself confirms that in London he is \"seeing the beau monde,\" and he seems to love every minute of it. In fact, he retains his taste for the high life until his surrealist years, when he falls under the spell of his young girlfriend Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter and locks himself away in his ch\u00e2teau at Le Boisgeloup.\n\n* * *\n\nIn essence, these letters, which I read to soak up as much of this close male friendship as possible, deal with holidays, travels, when one or the other of them is away from Paris. And in fact, why would they have needed to write to each other when they lived within shouting distance, apart from the friendly little notes that you might drop off at your neighbor's house? \"Can we come up and see you after dinner? Please reply through the window,\" Paul writes in 1918. Or in 1931, in a playful tone: \"I dropped in at yours, you weren't there. I hereby summon you to my house.\"\n\nPaul stays in Paris or leaves for Deauville in the summer, while Picasso\u2014before the 1950s, the days of Brigitte Bardot and the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave\u2014discovers the C\u00f4te d'Azur, Juan-les-Pins, Antibes (later Cannes and Mougins), and settles there for several weeks to paint. He is as intoxicated as C\u00e9zanne or van Gogh by the colors and the dazzling sunlight of the south. In those sultry days of summer Le Midi is a wild world spurned by the bourgeoisie, who prefer the cooler climates and more snobbish atmosphere of Normandy.\n\n* * *\n\nPicasso, with his paint, his brushes, and his imagination, had no need to travel far to discover new worlds. In fact, he tended not to travel much at all and never set foot in the United States, despite the fact that he was celebrated there. Paul, however, was a passionate traveler; travel delighted his senses, and he wanted his wife and children to discover Europe. Europe\u2014or rather the museums of Europe. For the Rosenberg family, there was no time for hanging around in the square, going shopping, or dancing flamenco in Spanish bars. These holidays were studious affairs that moved from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to the Prado in Madrid and from the Accademia in Venice to the National Gallery in London. Paul adored Italy. From Florence, in 1923, he wrote to his friend Pic, \"I'm getting more and more disgusted by mediocre painting. Three painters transcend admiration: Corot, C\u00e9zanne, and you. The primitive painters and the old masters make me love your painting even more.\"\n\nHe discovered Egypt in January 1936 and was overwhelmed by the beauty of the Egyptian Museum, the Pyramids, and Luxor. \"Such artists, unencumbered by the weight of convention!\" he wrote. Jerusalem, on the other hand, left him cold. \"I don't recognize my ancestors at all. I'd rather complain in Paris than wail like my fellow Jews by a wall.\" (In those years, during the British mandate period, the Wailing Wall was accessed only through a tiny alleyway, an arrangement that persisted until the Six-Day War in 1967, when the wall was wrested from Jordan.) There was no mystical revelation for Paul, no emotion at the sight of those ancient stones from the temple that had been destroyed.\n\nMy grandfather was Jewish by name, by affiliation, by tradition, but not by assertion. I have many memories of my grandmother, a very pious woman who recited her prayers in her bedroom every morning and evening and had a regular seat in the synagogue on rue de la Victoire, like the old prewar families who were referred to as Israelites. But I have no memory of a strong connection, if it ever existed, between my grandfather and Judaism. A heavy smoker (several packs a day), he made it a point of honor not to touch a cigarette on Yom Kippur, if only to emphasize that he was making more of a sacrifice than the rest of the family in terms of fasting and piety.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul and Pic obviously came from very different social backgrounds, and if Picasso had his bourgeois period\u2014suit, waistcoat, cigar\u2014it was during the years when he was close to Paul, geographically and socially. \"My dream,\" he once told L\u00e9once, is \"to be rich but to live like a pauper.\"\n\nThe invoices from 1920 to 1921 that I found among the family papers reveal that by the standards of the day Paul offered his painters generous terms: Paul bought a large painting by Picasso for fifty thousand francs, a watercolor for twelve hundred francs, a cubist still life for twenty-four hundred francs (as early as October 1923 Picasso, having acquired a flair for business, more than doubled his prices). In 1941 Paul told Newsweek: \"From Picasso's studio I choose the paintings I'm interested in acquiring, then we talk prices, and that's when the fun begins. We exchange harsh words but always in a friendly tone. Once I told him I'd like to bite one of his cheeks and kiss the other!\"\n\nSo one of them had what the French would now call his bobo (bourgeois-bohemian) period. The other, who wasn't bohemian at all, frequented a society in Deauville, \u00c9vian, or Saint Moritz, yet constantly complained about everything, especially the rain in Normandy. He dreamed of the sun of the Midi.\n\n* * *\n\n\"We're very busy here... meeting people we see every day in Paris.\" And Paul jokes to Picasso: \"It's the sort of country you'd like, very cubist and full of proportions. It's also full of the French and foreigners, (1) of flirtatious and respectable women, (2) of gamblers and serious people, (3) of crooks and honest people, (4) of people who have gone to prison, and people who will, (5) of people who are enjoying themselves and others who just show their faces out of snobbery. There is, in fact, a disproportion,\" he adds, although it's impossible to tell in which of these categories\u2014the amused or the snobbish\u2014he puts himself.\n\n* * *\n\nBut these jeremiads, which were not unusual as far as Paul was concerned, are a bit hypocritical because he didn't really dislike those holidays among Parisian high society. He marveled at his children's rosy cheeks and, like everyone else, stayed up late playing baccarat every night, dressed like the others in his tuxedo, while criticizing those, including his own wife, who intoxicated themselves with sybaritic pleasures during those ann\u00e9es dor\u00e9es, which were ann\u00e9es folles for a small sector of French society.\n\nPaul complains of being far from his paintings, which are still in Paris, and says he can't wait to get back to his gallery once summer is over. \"All the top people are here,\" he writes to Picasso. \"The higher the class of society, the lower their morals.\" In September 1929 he writes: \"I'm coming back from Deauville. No rest, it's busier than in Paris, doing nothing useful, just parading about the place.\"\n\nA year later we hear the same refrain: \"It's all very phoney here. Everyone comes here to see and be seen. The children have the beach and the countryside; the parents have the casino and the car; and the men have the fillies. No shortage of them in Normandy! All snobs, us most of all, Margot loves all that. Soon everyone will be going to the Midi.\"\n\n* * *\n\nThat little society in Deauville in the 1920s was a privileged one, consisting of the partygoers and socialites who later flocked to Saint-Tropez or the fashionable islands of the Antilles.\n\n\"The exhibition of the artist by the name of Picasso is announced with great fanfare for the 14th February next,\" Paul tells Picasso in their typically jocular tone. But in January 1921 he reminds his friend of \"my harlequins, my harlequins, my harlequins!\" as he is clearly concerned that the artist has fallen behind. Similar concerns are sounded in August 1929, and one feels Paul's mounting frustration. \"You left without delivering my harlequin, you're terrible!\" he says. For Paul, who is meticulous in his business dealings almost to the point of mania, Picasso's casual approach to his commitments is maddening.\n\nPaul also writes, \"I have not yet seen your new style,\" not in the tone of a fashion designer's backer asking for photographs of his latest collection but in that of a child who thinks somebody's hidden his new toy. He is thrilled by the painter's genius, as the painter is well aware.\n\n\"Your trip to Russia is the talk of the town,\" he writes to Picasso, who has gone to Moscow to meet Stalin and his henchmen. \"I can't wait to see your 1926 production... Give me a vision of the 'new Picasso.'\" Paul understood that Picasso's paintings would change almost year to year.\n\nOccasionally, as on July 13, 1921, Paul issues orders that sound a bit brusque: \"I need a large number of canvases for this winter. I'm ordering 100 from you, to be delivered at the end of the summer.\" It's odd to hear Paul talking like the manager of a retail store, placing his orders with the wholesaler on the corner.\n\nOften, in his correspondence with Picasso and later with Matisse, he expresses his regret at being only the intermediary, never the creator. Paul knew very well that he was addressing a monumental figure of contemporary art, even as he urged him to produce new work (just as Durand-Ruel did with \"his\" impressionists). What fascinated Paul was the process of artistic development, which Picasso must have appreciated. Between 1918 and 1932 all of Picasso's major works passed through Paul's hands.\n\nIn the 1920s Paul told visitors to his gallery who were intrigued by these paintings, so different from anything they were familiar with, about \"my dear friend Picasso, whom I look upon as a brother and whom I have known since 1906,\" as he puts it in his 1941 article in Art in Australia: \"Picasso always goes beyond the boundaries; he is the greatest painter of the present day, and I am always delighted by each new series of his.\" He adds: \"It was he, Picasso, who overthrew past conventions and at his whim created others, and who, bored at seeing the same forms reproduced, devised his own... He has opened new horizons to us, and has brought painting to its only goal: 'to be works of art,' not mere decorative creations.\"\n\n* * *\n\nBack in Paris, the social whirl at rue La Bo\u00e9tie continued apace. In 1929 Paul bought some racehorses. Was he keeping up with the Wildensteins? \"I've got ten horses,\" he writes to Picasso. \"I'm going to name them after my painters. And if a horse with the name of Picasso wins, it'll be excellent publicity for your work,\" he jokes, while complaining about the expense of the horses.\n\nThe same year Paul was made a member of the L\u00e9gion d'Honneur. When Picasso congratulates him, Paul replies: \"My dear Picasso, the chevalier thanks you for your congratulations; they've brought me one more autograph.\" That didn't stop him, in the same letter, from discussing his friend's current domestic and financial affairs, for which he himself assumed responsibility, and the canvases he was impatiently awaiting: \"Your bills are paid... But you don't talk about your painting, or about what you've done, what new genre you've adopted. Your Dinard Stations of the Cross alarm me. You are massacring humanity so violently that I worry you'll do still worse damage by giving your characters a human face.\" Picasso's paintings of the 1930s already bear the early signs of his own internal turmoil and that of the world, as in the portraits of Dora Maar, which are distorted by the master's genius, and paintings that evoke the approaching civil war in Spain.\n\n* * *\n\nIn 1927 the Rosenbergs started \"taking the waters\" in Vittel or \u00c9vian, to treat Paul's fragile health, his frequent attacks of ulcers. \"No stress, just a calm, tranquil life. It's a dream, except for my wife, who isn't really enjoying herself. She wants to go to Deauville. I'll agree, for a bit of peace,\" he writes to Picasso.\n\nWhat remains surprising about these letters from between the wars is the extent to which references to contemporary events in Europe are absent. It is as if the two men wanted to immerse themselves entirely in art and friendship, far from the affairs of the real world. Only the signing of the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War and the celebrations that followed are talked about with some emotion. But the stock market crash of 1929, the far-right leagues of the 1930s, the Popular Front, the Spanish Civil War, Hitler's coming to power: none of these things is mentioned in these letters, even though the correspondence spans more than forty years. Probably such matters were mentioned in conversation. In their writings, however, it's painting, always painting, and the daily concerns of a life shared by friends.\n\n* * *\n\nAt times Paul seems the neglected friend who requires attention; he demands a letter or some news at the very least. The tone is affectionate, deferential, and intimate, even tender: \"I haven't seen you for a week. I'm getting worried, and my friendship with you is suffering.\" There is something intense and exclusive about this friendship, almost as if Picasso were his only friend. Was Picasso perhaps the only one who understood his inner being? \"I see your closed shutters, it's sad,\" Paul writes to his dear friend. \"Your paintings are on my walls and I miss your daily visits.\" There is a sense of brotherhood not unlike that shared by the great essayist Michel de Montaigne and his friend \u00c9tienne de la Bo\u00e9tie.\n\nThen come the laments about the ceaseless work needed to modernize the Galerie Rosenberg, the sluggish art market, the scarcity of collectors, and the shortage of art lovers: \"I've spent a fortune on antique frames. But paintings are getting so rare that it's the frames I'm going to sell. The sauce will help people swallow the roast!\" And yet, in spite of his grievances, there were splendid times when \"the paintings, a real stock exchange,\" soared in value, toward the end of the 1920s in France or immediately after the First World War in the United States. But to listen to Paul, business was dreadful throughout his career as an art dealer.\n\nMy grandfather was prone to depression, often related to his poor health and his chronic stomach troubles. This must have been what gave him that thin, almost gaunt look that struck me even when I was a little girl. My grandmother was all plump and gentle, her ample bosom perfect for childhood cuddles.\n\nIn September 1929 Paul confides in Picasso: \"My hell must lie within, if I feel fine only wherever I happen not to be.\" Such a marvelous phrase. It's rare to read Paul's divulging anything about his state of mind or his private life. For instance, there were disagreements between him and my grandmother that strained their relationship. In Paul's correspondence with Picasso, however, I never found a single word on these stormy and violent episodes, despite what family members told me in confidence.\n\nHad he ever opened up to his next-door neighbor? Perhaps it wasn't in the spirit of the times, because Paul makes no further allusions to Picasso's separation from Olga (although at the painter's request he drew up the inventory for the divorce) or to the various companions who passed in and out of his life: Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se Walter, most often hidden away in Le Boisgeloup, Dora Maar, Fran\u00e7oise Gilot, or Jacqueline Roque, who became his wife only after my grandfather's death.\n\n* * *\n\nYet there are some genuine surprises; Paul sometimes allows himself to doodle shamelessly. My grandmother has no hesitation in doing the same. With her penholder (until she died in 1968, I never saw her write with anything but a Sergent-Major quill pen dipped into a big inkwell) she would try to draw the view from her bedroom in Deauville, most often ending up with a bunch of scribbles.\n\nIt must have been around this time that the painter drew an open window for Paul to use as an ex libris, that personal seal affixed to the first page of his books, which was used for both the Galerie Rosenberg's publications and its business cards until the death of my uncle Alexandre.\n\nAt times Paul and Picasso seem like mischievous adolescents. One of the letters from my grandfather to Picasso, dated July 4, 1919, is edged in black, the border hand drawn with a shaky pencil to convey mourning. My grandfather offered his most sincere condolences. \"The parrot is dead,\" he writes (deliberately echoing the petit chat in Moli\u00e8re's L'\u00c9cole des femmes). This was Paul's announcement of the sad demise of the bird that Picasso had kept at the Rosenberg house, whose final moments Paul so liked to describe. And this followed immediately by \"I've sold the Renoir you liked so much, Woman Taking Off Her Blouse,\" which put the gravity of the death announcement in context.\n\nBoyish jokes, intimacies, even teasing erupt. \"My dear quitter\" Paul says to him, \"I'm going to throw myself into painting, I'm jealous of your light. But what style should I adopt? Cubist, rondiste, loyalist, royalist, republican and monarchist? In fact I want to be a brushist.\"\n\nThrough all those years of complicity, they mix business, friendship, and favors: Paul takes charge of the practical side of Picasso's life: he orders him sheets of plywood that he needs for his collages or sells him packets of tobacco. Picasso, in turn, sends Paul sweets, which he loves, from Vogade, a confectioner in Nice celebrated for almost a hundred years. \"Thank you for the beautiful fatma, the beautiful Negro, your picture and candies,\" writes Paul, thanking him also for his battered canvases and chocolate truffles.\n\nAnd when Picasso is in London, Paul sends him off on a reconnaissance mission: \"There's going to be an exhibition with two Daumiers, a Degas, a Monet. Can you tell me if it's worth me crossing the sea to go to it?\"\n\nMy grandfather even gets into technical details with Picasso: \"Can you paint with English pigment and brushes, on English canvas? Don't use taffeta, it curls when it gets wet.\"\n\n* * *\n\nPaul never missed an opportunity to promote his painter and friend, introducing the younger painter's work, for example, to the seventy-eight-year-old Renoir. \"Saw Renoir. Told him about you. He was amazed by some things. And even more shocked by others.\" Picasso was thrilled by the fact that his revered master should be interested in his work. In fact, during those years he seemed engaged in a kind of painterly dialogue with Renoir that would mark his style throughout the early twenties.\n\nPaul also liked to assert himself in his friend's eyes as the expert with the infallible eye, whose business sense never interfered with his artistic vision. \"I had a visit from someone who thought he had a real one and a fake,\" he writes Picasso. \"I reassured him by telling him they were both by you.\" But Paul remained oddly old-fashioned in his response to the representations of sexuality in Picasso's painting, and God knows there were plenty of those! (Pierre Daix, one of Picasso's biographers, went so far as to call Paul prudish.) Apparently, Paul rejected the most graphic works, including a nude of Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se of which Paul was supposed to have said, \"I refuse to have assholes in my gallery!\"\n\n* * *\n\nYet for all their closeness, the relationship cools. Picasso becomes detached and increasingly involved with the surrealists from whom Paul, like Kahnweiler, maintains a distance, and their neighborly complicity gently turns into a more conventional commercial association. Paul, ever sensitive, realizes this, calling Picasso his invisible friend. It must also be noted that by the early 1930s, Picasso is spending less time on rue La Bo\u00e9tie and more in his residence at Le Boisgeloup, forty miles northwest of Paris, with Marie-Th\u00e9r\u00e8se, the lover with whom he would have a daughter and who would inspire some of his most important works. This is a new Picasso, \"lord of Bois Jaloux,\" as my grandfather writes to him, seeing the chasm open up between him and his friend.\n\nAfter the Second World War and four years of silence, it will be even more difficult to regain their former closeness. The infrequent letters between them are no longer handwritten but typed, particularly after my grandfather suffers a stroke that keeps him from writing, and indeed from talking. However, in August 1944, when postal deliveries resume after the liberation of Paris, he warmly confesses: \"There's no point telling you how much I have missed you during my exile.\"\n\nIt is then that the two men start addressing each other with the familiar tu, probably after they meet when Paul returns to Paris in 1945, to assess the state of his looted property and resume his former life. And once again, they renew their relationship with its curious blend of business and friendship, even though Picasso is no longer my grandfather's client.\n\nPicasso has returned to Kahnweiler, his dealer before the First World War. \"My dear Picasso, I can tell you that I have landed on my feet in New York. How much would you charge me for the little still life with the fruit bowl on the right and the bunch of cherries? Je t'embrasse, Paul.\"\n\nOn July 15, 1947, my grandfather expresses to Picasso his irritation over an attempted breach of copyright: \"I'm learning right now that somebody in New York is about to produce some fabrics in 'Picasso gray.' It's illegal to use a name as famous as yours to launch any kind of merchandise. A parfumeur took Renoir's name, and after a case brought by the family they had to change the name. Will you give me the legal power to represent and defend you?\"\n\nWhat would Paul have said at the sight of the ubiquitous Citro\u00ebn Xsara Picassos being driven around the streets of all the cities in France?\n\nBetween 1945 and his death in 1959, Paul would see Picasso only once a year at La Californie, his residence in Cannes. The days of calling from one window to the next were over.\n\n* * *\n\nIt had to have been painful for my grandfather when Picasso resumed his business relations\u2014interrupted in 1914\u2014with Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, who remained his dealer until the painter's death in 1973. But Paul was in New York at the time, and he was often ill. Picasso, who had drifted further away from his former dealer with every war, now returned to one of his first admirers from the early years of the century.\n\nBut my grandfather's passion for this extraordinary artist remained unbounded. \"The greatest artist in the world today,\" he said in the 1930s. \"The most prolific painter in history,\" he affirmed in the 1950s.\n\nMy grandmother and then my mother kept the connection alive with a few letters and visits first to La Californie, then to the farmhouse in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, near Mougins, which I remember.\n\nMy first memories of Picasso are from a long time ago. He is wearing his striped sailor's jersey, the one handed down to posterity in Robert Doisneau's famous photograph, in a restaurant in Saint-Tropez, to which he invited my grandparents and me in the 1950s, one of those lunches that seem interminable to children, and at which the patronne scurried over to collect the pieces of paper tablecloth that Picasso had scribbled on.\n\nI went often with my parents to his house in Mougins, though I surely would have preferred an outing with my cousins on the beach at Cannes. The ritual was always the same. The electronic gate opened; these were the days of Jacques Tati's films, and the gadget seemed to me the height of modernity. Jacqueline in her capris and colorful blouse welcomed us outside the house. She was a woman filled with admiration of, devotion to, and love for the great man who was her husband. I can still envision her after Picasso's death, when we visited her each year, always in the same place. I remember her as a somewhat haughty widow with Spanish posture\u2014straight as a statue\u2014and the long neck whom Picasso painted so often, either bareheaded or wearing a scarf, turban, or mantilla.\n\nI wasn't old enough to appreciate, let alone be amazed by, the paint-spattered parquet or the incredible disarray in the house, which at the time merely struck me as untidy. Picasso's room was in absolute shambles, and I couldn't understand how my mother, meticulous as she was, could swoon over such chaos. In his bedroom a recent canvas was used for a headboard, its face to the wall, so that the pillows would not rest against the paint.\n\nMost of the time I ran about in the garden with Catherine, Jacqueline's daughter, or Claude, the son of Picasso and Fran\u00e7oise Gilot, climbing their famous bronze oak. In those days I didn't care for its neighbor in the garden, the bronze statue of Little Girl Skipping, a sculpture that was somehow less accessible than the oak tree. As a little girl, assuming that the child must be suffering some kind of infirmity, I was unsettled by the one shoe turned inward.\n\nBack in the 1960s \u00c9vian bottles were made of glass and sealed with little metal caps. At the Picasso house, there was one glass case in particular that enchanted me, a curiosity that was, for once, accessible to children: it contained dozens of those little \u00c9vian caps, tortured and transformed into magical or monstrous animals by a man who could reinvent a set of bicycle handlebars, an old rake, or a bottle stopper into a work of art.\n\nI must confess that I sometimes thought\u2014like those back in 1920 who had criticized my grandfather for exhibiting scribbles \"that a four-year-old could have done\"\u2014that too much of a fuss was made over the slightest creative gesture of Picasso. The lack of comprehension and skepticism of the prewar years was over, making way for unconditional admiration for contemporary art in general and for Picasso in particular.\n\n* * *\n\nAnd now more recent images come to me, of Picasso in his last years, once he had stopped leaving the house: his blue-and-white-checked peacoat; his powerful, intimidating gaze; his Spanish-inflected French, which was excellent; his approximate spelling; and especially his affection for my mother.\n\nOne day when my parents had taken me along after a hiatus of a few years, he noticed that I was growing up. \"I'm going to paint your daughter,\" he told my delighted mother. \"I see eyes all over her face!\" \"No!\" I squealed, fleeing in terror, imagining a face that would have been distorted like the one he had painted of Dora Maar and his wartime paintings, which have never been my favorites. A fourteen-year-old girl isn't necessarily going to understand such a harsh artistic style. For me at the time, \"that guy\" Picasso was more of a predator of faces than a towering figure of the twentieth century. Would he have carried on if I hadn't run away? Probably not. At least I still have a photograph of myself at the age of eighteen, standing next to him, leaning against the walls of his villa. And I love his expression in that now-fading photograph: it is intensely magnetic, much like the gaze he gave himself in his earliest self-portraits in the 1900s, when he was already probing the deepest mysteries of the soul.\nBOULEVARD MAGENTA\n\nNumber 1 place de la R\u00e9publique. I was following the route of the demonstrations against the National Front. On May 1, 2002, there were still several hundred thousand of us jammed outside that door, hour after hour, so dense was the crowd that had come to protest the danger represented by Jean-Marie Le Pen, the far-right candidate for president, who had moved into the second round of the election behind Jacques Chirac. It was hot, we were anxious and thirsty, and I was, at that point, more interested in getting hold of bottles of water than in making a family pilgrimage. So I looked at the building without quite seeing it. That heavy, pompous Baron Haussmann\u2013style edifice.\n\nIt was the building where my grandmother had lived as a girl. Margot Lo\u00e9vi got engaged in that building and left it on the morning of July 7, 1914, to become Mme Paul Rosenberg. (My great-grandfather Lo\u00e9vi, the father of Margot, her brother, Michel, and her sisters, Marianne and Madeleine, was a wine trader.) I don't think the family knew the first thing about art, modern or otherwise. And I don't know who introduced this old Alsatian family to the Rosenbergs, newly arrived from Bratislava. But for my great-grandfather, the important thing in the end was to let his daughter marry a businessman like himself, no matter that he sold canvases covered with daubs of paint rather than bottles of fermented grape juice. Apparently the entire family was fine with this, and my grandmother's dowry was generous. My cupboards are still full of her monogrammed tablecloths and sheets that have never been used and are slowly turning to dust.\n\nPaul courted her for several months. My grandmother was a beautiful girl, and my grandfather was smitten with her. Twice a week he sent flowers from Moreux, the opulent florist's shop in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, which remained on the corner of the place Victor-Hugo until only a few years ago.\n\n* * *\n\nHe talked endlessly about painting to my grandmother, who, according to family lore, knew nothing about it. I can just imagine Paul, hoping to dazzle her, boasting about a painting he'd bought, and hoping to show her a famous van Gogh from the series showing the town hall of Auvers-sur-Oise. And I imagine my grandmother, a naive, sheltered young girl, going home and asking, \"'My green curtains,' 'my green curtains,' why is this young man always going on about 'green curtains'?\" She would not have realized that in French, \"my green curtains\" (mes rideaux verts) and Mairie d'Auvers sound virtually identical.\n\n* * *\n\nAs a young woman Margot had a pretty voice and was a lover of opera and operettas. She was the first to take me to see The Merry Widow, La Belle H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, and Faust, passing on to me her love of song, of the human voice, whether by Franz Leh\u00e1r, Jacques Offenbach, or Charles Gounod. When I was ten, she took me for the first time to the traditional opera house in Paris, the Palais Garnier, and I was impressed by the majesty of the building, with golden ornaments on the fa\u00e7ade and the impressive staircase, where I could imagine Maria Callas, whom I admired and still cherish, sweeping down in evening dress, followed by countless admirers and photographers... A dream for a little girl.\n\nShe had been cheerful and outgoing at the time of their marriage, but later she became depressive and lethargic. When my father started criticizing people who complained about their lot, aiming his ire first at his mother-in-law, then at my mother, he would say, \"That's the Lo\u00e9vi side of the family,\" contrasting it with the philosophy of his own mother, Marguerite Schwartz, an exceptional woman, whose motto was to \"button up\"\u2014in French, literally to grit your teeth and get on with it. In the Lo\u00e9vi household, you didn't button up in the face of adversity; you complained a lot and wallowed in your misfortune.\n\n* * *\n\nFor me, on the other hand, Margot Rosenberg was what the French call a grand-m\u00e8re g\u00e2teau. Not just because every walk I took with her ended with a stop at the pastry shop. Nor because I had only to mention my desire for a book, a record, or a four-color pen of the kind I'd craved for several months during the 1960s, only to be given them the following day. But also because she embodied the warm, generous bosom against which a child's sorrows were swiftly comforted. She indulged my every whim, and sleeping at her house allowed me to escape my mother's watchful eye. For me she was a very sweet old lady, and I was her cosseted granddaughter. Like my cousins, the daughters of her beloved son, Alexandre, I was spoiled rotten. And as the eldest I had all the advantages.\n\nMy grandmother spent six months of the year in New York and six months in Paris from the end of the Second World War until her death in 1968. Very stylish, she was always concerned with her wardrobe, never went out without makeup, wore hats with little veils, which I found mysterious, like a movie star of the thirties, and long black suede gloves, even in the summer, because she believed a woman couldn't go out bareheaded or gloveless, even in the sixties. She was a very comme il faut woman, whom I liked to shock with the slang that we spoke at school. Her favorite pastime was meticulously keeping her domestic account books in ink, with her big, regular, sloping handwriting. She also wrote every day to whichever of her children happened to be on the other side of the Atlantic. Each and every morning when my grandmother was in America, the postman delivered to her a sky-blue envelope bordered with red, which became her daily reading matter. I found many of these letters, numbered one to one thousand, crammed into the shoe boxes I recovered from the furniture warehouse where my mother's things were stored after her death. My grandmother's letters were full of trivia, of mundane preoccupations, as well as a few words of loneliness and of admiration for her three granddaughters, whom she adored. And so many ellipses standing in for sighs and despondency.\n\nShe never went out in the evening, had few friends, and mostly spent money on household staff: maids, cooks, chauffeurs. She didn't require this lifestyle, but she'd gotten used to it as my grandfather became increasingly successful. I remember that while my grandfather was still alive, she would ask him for a few francs before setting off to the kitchen to arrange the meals for the following day. I was aware of Paul's irritation as he reached into his pocket for such tedious expenses. If I wasn't consciously aware of the humiliation that she must have felt as she stretched her hand out toward the man with the wallet who, each evening, protested, I at least understood that a woman should try not to be dependent on her husband and that my grandmother would have been better off working. But it was not the way of her generation.\n\nMorning and evening she said her prayers in her bedroom, far from the synagogue that she attended on Friday evenings. If you risked visiting her during the morning or late afternoon, she would lift her head from her prayer book, delighted by the family visits that penetrated her solitude. Religious practices aside, my mother was very much like her. She too was lonely throughout her life, which was punctuated\u2014after my father's death\u2014only by my daily visits or by the arrival of my children when they were home from school.\n\nMy grandmother didn't eat pork or shellfish and might have memorized a few words of Yiddish, yet she didn't speak or read Hebrew. She had her seat, which her mother and her grandmother had occupied, in the synagogue on the rue de la Victoire, where the cantor, the young and charming M. Adolphe Attia, was showered with compliments for his golden voice when he chanted the Sabbath prayers.\n\nShe was, like my grandfather, the epitome of those prewar Jewish families that were known in France as Israelites until the 1960s: people of Jewish descent, more or less observant, but deeply assimilated into French society, even after the horrors of the 1940s.\n\n* * *\n\nThat was how I had always thought of my grandmother, who died in July 1968, at least until April 2010, when I opened those shoe boxes in the warehouses at Gennevilliers. Since then I've had a terrible time reconciling my memory of my grandmother with what I found.\n\nApparently she had had an affair with a man who was one of my grandfather's major competitors in the art world, Georges Wildenstein, who (as I have said) for a time was Paul's business associate. I remembered how it was decided in 1918 that Paul would represent Picasso in France and Europe and Wildenstein would represent him in America. I had never understood why the association collapsed in 1932, when Paul became the artist's sole representative. Or why it was taboo to utter the name of this family in ours.\n\nBut then one suddenly unearths artifacts from the realm of the unspoken, tucked away at the back of a chest of drawers. Do we pass over these secrets in silence? There's nothing shameful about them, even though they must have been painful at the time. Why reveal them now? They have nothing to do with anybody, except the protagonists, who died so long ago... I loathe absolute transparency, finding it voyeuristic at best and a bit totalitarian at worst.\n\nBut these letters provide a better understanding of my grandfather's psychology, which was skeptical and suspicious, and of my grandmother's personality, which became so withdrawn, in total retreat from the social world.\n\nI feel unmoored in the face of such intimacy, and I turn the letters around in my hands, trying to work out what to do.\n\n* * *\n\nFor my grandparents, it was a family crisis. For their children, my mother, my uncle, it was a secret shame (my mother never talked to me about it before her death) much like an open wound. My mother, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, in 1932 or 1933, was sent off to spend a few weeks with my grandmother's youngest sister, Marianne, and her husband and children, while Alexandre, who was only eleven, went to stay with my grandmother's other sister, Madeleine. The atmosphere at rue La Bo\u00e9tie must have been very tense. The servants, the family, their Parisian milieu: everyone must have known, and that open secret must have been the talk of every prewar Deauville soir\u00e9e.\n\n* * *\n\nI'm still pacing, clutching those letters as if I'd stumbled upon a written piece of the Kabbalah that could singe my fingers if I were ever to hide it again, leaving me with a curse lasting seven generations.\n\nI wouldn't even have mentioned this affair if I hadn't also discovered, in the boxes recovered from the depository, a poignant document written by my grandfather in 1942, when Alexandre was fighting with Philippe Leclerc's army in Africa, sometime between the battles of Bir Hakeim and El Alamein. Paul had planned to visit his son, whom he missed terribly, but he abandoned the idea at the last minute in the face of such a difficult journey and the risk of being shot down by the Germans. It was in this period that he filled a ten-page letter with his delicate handwriting and tucked it away in the drawer of an office on Fifty-seventh Street in New York. The desk went with him to his gallery on Seventy-ninth Street, but the drawer remained locked. A few months after my grandfather's death, Alexandre, while sorting through his father's papers, happened upon this document, typed it out to make it more legible, and sent it to my mother\u2014my grandmother had just arrived for one of her extended stays in Paris.\n\n\"You will weep as I did when you read this letter,\" Alexandre writes his sister. \"We have understood our father even less than we thought... I think that in any event you will have to show this letter to our mother.\" Did my mother do this? Something tells me she did not. It would be better to assume that my grandmother Margot died peacefully in Paris, in 1968, a few weeks after the May \u00e9v\u00e9nements.\n\nBecause the letter is harsh, very harsh. Written by Paul, it was intended to be read posthumously, as indeed it was. The letter was addressed to his wife and daughter\u2014\"his two darlings\"\u2014and the son he had been preparing to visit in Africa. It is a meditation on life, his life, on what he wanted for his family, and on the pain he felt over not having brought happiness to his beloved wife.\n\n\"My own youth was not as happy as my children's,\" he begins. \"But when I met you, my dear Margot, I hoped I might at last hold that happiness in my hand. I thought I had found in you the companion I would cherish, the one for whom I would do anything at all to make your life more beautiful.\"\n\nIt seems that Margot's disappointment dated back to the First World War, which broke out immediately after her wedding in July 1914. Paul, old enough to be conscripted, was sent to the front, causing them to miss out on the first carefree years that a young couple should enjoy. He goes on at length about his nerves, his desire to establish himself, and his need to earn a living in order to keep his family in comfort. \"Alas, the more I worked, the more money I made, the more I became a slave to business, a slave in chains, a Sisyphus with his rock,\" he writes.\n\nHe had always been financially prudent by temperament. But his anxiety about keeping up with his wife's expensive tastes was palpable. Right before her eyes she had the model of the Wildenstein family, whose lavish lifestyle must have dazzled her, though the life she led with my grandfather was certainly luxurious by any measure.\n\n* * *\n\nThen, in that letter that overwhelmed me, as if I had opened a door that should have stayed firmly shut, out came the rancor and jealousy that remained an undercurrent, a constant presence in the ensuing years. \"Sadly, you didn't give me time to put a roof on my building, before the evil words of a serpent were whispered in your ears. They distorted, ridiculed my every deed,\" my grandfather writes in bitter, biblical terms. \"I have much to reproach myself for. I should have spent less time on my business and devoted myself more to you... Life became torture for me in 1923, I loved you with all my heart and felt that I was losing you. Alas, you were given empty promises for the future the better to seduce you, promises that never came true, but that you thought were real, as if happiness didn't lie in the devotion of a close family.\"\n\nPaul had come from a family that was doubtless filled with the anxieties of Jews from Mitteleuropa. His wife, who had been integrated into French society for a longer time, was more playful and carefree; she needed love, and mostly what she got was money. How could anyone have imagined that the \"devotion of a close family\" would have satisfied a woman in 1930? Meanwhile, her suitor dazzled her with a vision of the high life, the flashiness of a society that, as we know, was dancing toward the abyss in the interwar years. And yet Paul, a pessimist by temperament, gloomy by nature, was already on that brink.\n\n\"You were beautiful, everyone found you amusing, you were wooed and desired by many men, and while thinking that you were making yourself happy, you made us both unhappy... Your sarcasm, relying on a so-called protector, about whom I hope my son will one day ask for an explanation, your way of saying 'too late' when I declared my love to you, darkened my character, and I had to seek consolation and oblivion in work, as indeed I continue to do,\" he writes in his own defense.\n\nApparently, my grandmother got bored with the marriage. Perhaps she was frivolous, responsive only to surface and luxury. That's what seems to underlie my grandfather's thinking.\n\n\"I want to tell you all this on the eve of my departure so that you know, my dear Margot, that your ambition for wealth was a desire for appearance, for possession. As for me, my sole desire was to make you happy (the children and you), and assure you that I would grant you all a secure future that would enable your independence. No, Margot, I can't rebuke you anymore. Time masks all wounds, but my own still bleed with the loss of my happiness. In order that your heart may cease to suffer, that posthumous remorse may not be too much of an affliction, I shall shoulder some responsibility myself. My own character, I confess, is very self-contained, and I should have liked to find in you a less skeptical person, someone more profound, with whom I could have exchanged ideas, shared my aspirations, and talked about something other than trivial matters. And if at root your being is devoted solely to goodness, then your spirit and your mind are incompatible with the needs of a serious, loving and devoted man.\"\n\nI don't believe my grandmother was ever aware of this letter with its very accusatory, self-justifying language and tone. I very much hope that is so.\n\nShe wanted a divorce, but my grandfather was adamantly opposed to the idea. Since, according to their marriage contract, all property was held jointly, I suspect that love and rage were not the only reasons for his refusal to divorce. From the moment Margot gave up her life as Wildenstein's lover and sacrificed her life as a woman, she punished Paul by relinquishing all interest in his social and professional world; by refusing to do any of the things that might, in my grandfather's eyes, have been expected of the wife of a major Parisian art dealer.\n\n* * *\n\nSixty years later, and the Wildenstein name pops back into the public eye. I'm skimming one of the newspaper stories in which you never know what's true and what's made up, gossip about inheritance scandals, unscrupulous art evaluations, or suspect fiscal investigations of them. The French have little sympathy for people with vast fortunes, and there can be no doubt that this family of prosperous art dealers falls into this category. Although it's also possible that malice dictates what the papers say.\n\nOn the other hand, I remember a story from about ten years ago, when the Wildenstein family brought a case against Hector Feliciano, the author of The Lost Museum. He was said to have defamed them by claiming that Georges Wildenstein, my grandmother's alleged lover, had done deals with the Nazis. That was what suddenly prompted me to seek out the details of the case when my own family's private history came to light.\n\nThe trial took place in 1999. The Wildenstein family was furious: \"What could be more horrible for the members of a Jewish family than to find themselves implicated in an act of betrayal, of collusion with the German occupiers against France!\"... \"The Wildensteins loved France so much that even then they didn't buy German cars,\" their lawyer, Ma\u00eetre Chartier, declared. This is a curious response, one that negates sixty years of Franco-German reconciliation and throws history back in the faces of the Germans who are so dedicated to consigning it to oblivion. But in the end, I'm more concerned with the family-related intrigues of the past than with the German cars of today.\n\nThe Georges Wildenstein Gallery was actually run during the war by a certain Roger Dequoy. This is where the stories diverge. According to the Wildenstein family, Georges had severed all communication with his former employee, who was going so far as to disparage him in letters that he, Dequoy, sent to the General Commissariat for Jewish Questions. As far as the family was concerned, Dequoy's assertions were false and malicious.\n\nAccording to Antoine Comte, the prosecution lawyer, Dequoy acted as an intermediary between Wildenstein and the German authorities. As evidence for this he cited a meeting in November 1940 in Aix-en-Provence among George Wildenstein, his employee Dequoy, and Hitler's art dealer, Karl Haberstock. In the course of this conversation, Comte claimed, an agreement was reached: Wildenstein recovered some of his confiscated property and was able to reopen his gallery under Dequoy's name; in exchange, Dequoy is said to have agreed to work for the Nazis.\n\nA serious accusation but one that, according to the prosecutor, was based on papers in the American archives of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, later the CIA), which were declassified in 1998 and were said to contain a special report on the Wildenstein Gallery that had been compiled in 1945. The existence of both the agreement and the OSS report is confirmed by Lynn Nicholas in her book The Rape of Europa: \"In November [Haberstock] and Dequoy went to Aix, where they met Wildenstein and came to certain agreements... It was proposed that Wildenstein would exchange 'acceptable' pictures from his stock for the modern works so unacceptable to the Nazis, which Haberstock would send to him in the United States. Wildenstein would sell them through the New York branch of his firm.\"\n\nInitially, the Wildensteins were denied the six million francs in damages and interest that Alec and Guy Wildenstein, Georges's grandsons, had demanded for the assault on their grandfather's memory, which resulted in the family's decision to appeal the case.\n\nAfter the court of appeal refused to overturn the initial judgment, the daily newspaper Lib\u00e9ration, quoting the court's final statement, said that Georges Wildenstein \"can legitimately be presented as one of those individuals who on the one hand cultivated 'ambiguity,' both as a 'victim of the looting of the occupying forces,' and on the other, 'in parallel pursued, via an intermediary, operations on the Parisian art market' under the occupation.\n\n\"In the court's opinion, 'the allegations of contacts with the Nazis by Georges Wildenstein cannot be called manifestly erroneous' since it is established that Wildenstein 'had, before the war, entered into a business relationship with Karl Haberstock, who was known to be one of the F\u00fchrer's artistic advisers and a high-ranking Nazi. During the occupation, Haberstock acted as a protector of Roger Dequoy... who was running the gallery in Paris at the time, and who 'one may imagine was keeping up relations with Georges Wildenstein,' in exile in New York. There is 'much evidence to suggest' that the famous art dealer, whose collection had been partly looted by the Germans, 'maintained business contacts with the occupying forces.'\"\n\nThis ruling, disobliging at the very least, led the Wildensteins to appeal once more in the Cour de Cassation, which is supposed to judge only procedural matters. A new disappointment for the family: the court declared that the statute of limitations on the action had passed; the Wildensteins should have brought their suit within three months of the publication of Feliciano's book The Lost Museum.\n\nThis troubling story, on which I shall not attempt to give an opinion beyond citing the three successive rulings of the French judicial system, casts a deep shadow over my grandmother's love affair.\n\nDid their relationship last for a long time? At this point it would be virtually impossible to tell. But who, really, was this man who slipped into my grandparents' lives, coming between them? Was he a passing fancy or an archrival delighted to destabilize his competitor? Could he have been worth the suffering he caused?\n\nAnd who, really, was my grandmother? A passionate woman in need of love or a socialite fascinated by appearances? My grandfather was a good husband, in the sense of the phrase in those days, but in all likelihood he wasn't terribly exciting from a romantic point of view. My grandmother wanted to enjoy the carefree years between the wars. She was undoubtedly more hedonistic, more intoxicated by glamour than her husband, who was so preoccupied with the development of modern art. She wanted to dance, to enjoy herself, to be loved. He wanted only to work. This was the classic story of the romantic Emma and her stodgy Charles in Madame Bovary, or the flamboyant Ariane and the fool Adrien Deume in Albert Cohen's novel Belle du Seigneur. But my grandfather was neither a killjoy nor a petty bureaucrat; he was a curious and innovative spirit. All he needed to do was look away from his Picassos for a moment to gaze at the Renoir\u2014pretty, charming, and curvaceous\u2014that he had in his bed.\n\nEighty years have passed since then. \"Et la mer efface sur le sable \/ Les pas des amants d\u00e9sunis,\" as Jacques Pr\u00e9vert wrote and Yves Montand sang: \"The sea washes away \/ The footprints of parted lovers in the sand.\"\nPI-AR-ENCO\n\nNew York, once my family's city of refuge, and also my birthplace. The family archives are still on East Seventy-ninth Street, in the four-story town house that was home to the last Galerie Rosenberg.\n\nMy grandfather, who arrived with his wife and daughter in the autumn of 1940, initially moved into a house closer to midtown, on East Fifty-seventh Street, where he set up his gallery in 1941 and which he left thirteen years later.\n\nI have few memories of Fifty-seventh Street. Paul rented that stately old house, owned by the queen of England, who had a considerable property portfolio in Manhattan, but he had grown weary of the old building and wanted to live in a home of his own.\n\nHe bought his house on Seventy-ninth Street, between Madison and Fifth avenues, from Chester Dale, one of his major clients. After a lot of renovation, the family moved into the building in 1953. Paul was seventy-one. He lived there for only six years, increasingly passing responsibility for the running of the gallery to my uncle Alexandre.\n\nThis location on the prosperous Upper East Side, a bit sedate but elegant, wasn't a bad spot for business in the 1950s. In setting up shop there, my grandfather started a trend among gallery owners. Soon all his competitors who had established their galleries in midtown, just as he had, moved north, to within a few blocks of his new address at 20 East Seventy-ninth Street. By the time I was a child, it was bustling with art dealers.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul Rosenberg and Company was the name of the business. PR & Co. \"Pi-ar-enco\" to my childish ears, making me wonder what crazy-sounding person we were sharing our house with. I spent so many childhood Christmases there that until recently New York was an enchanted place as far as I was concerned.\n\nMy parents and I had returned to France when I was three, but I loved that town house on Seventy-ninth Street, every corner of which I knew so well. It was a beautiful limestone building, typical of New York, opulent looking, and right beside Central Park. In fact, it was just a few steps away from one of just two roads that ran all the way through to the west side of the park. I loved the sound of the crosstown bus that stopped before the front door. It was for me the sound of New York. Yes, New York was magical. With smoke billowing out of the street, it seemed the opposite of Paris, where I was living in a very quiet street near the Bois de Boulogne, in the Sixteenth Arrondissement. Today the building belongs to my aunt Elaine, Alexandre's widow, my mother's brother having died in 1987 at the age of sixty-six.\n\n* * *\n\nThe steps were once framed by Rodin's Thinker and its companion, The Age of Bronze. But the black-and-white marble mosaics of the entrance hall\u2014similar to those in rue La Bo\u00e9tie\u2014are still there, as they were in the exhibition halls that I wasn't allowed to enter as a small child. The elevator, modern in the 1950s, is practically an antique today, with its sliding aluminum door. I know by heart the sound it makes and the way it slows, shuddering, as it reaches each floor. My parents and I lived on the third floor, but I sometimes slipped out on the floor below, hoping to spot some \"clients,\" as my grandfather grandly called them, although I couldn't see how they were any more important than the customers at the Zitomer pharmacy on the corner of Seventy-eighth Street and Madison.\n\nMy grandparents shared a bedroom in their apartment on the second floor but had separate bathrooms, which always intrigued me. The television was in their bedroom, and it was there that I saw my first westerns, vintage ones with cowboys and Indians, covered wagons in a circle, and flaming arrows. The first television shows too, with women in New Look fashions created by Christian Dior in the fifties: women in wide gathered skirts and crewneck twinsets. There weren't many anchorwomen, no women journalists; women just presented the commercials\u2014so deliciously dated today\u2014for huge blue and pink American cars that created Detroit and then left it in ruins, cars you come across only in Cuba these days: \"See the USA in your Chevrolet\"... The refrain from the 1950s still echoes in my head.\n\n* * *\n\nNew York was snow, Central Park, my sled, and the magic of the Santas ringing their bells to draw in the window-shoppers outside Bloomingdale's.\n\nNew York was chocolate sundaes spilling over with whipped cream in the modern ice-cream parlors with their fake red leather banquettes, my first Walt Disney cartoons, mountains of toys at FAO Schwarz, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and East Fifty-eighth Street where the iciest gusts in the city blew, but where children like me were warmed by the consoling sight of those immense teddy bears that we never bought but that filled our dreams.\n\nAbove all, New York meant a month off from school, the only drawback being the math lessons my mother insisted on giving me. Faced with my inability to grasp problems about the distances between train tracks and the gaps between fence posts, she would end up throwing pencils and scraps of paper at me, telling me I'd never make anything of myself. The pencils were the ones with which Americans wrote on lined yellow paper\u2014the \"legal pads\" you see in Mad Men\u2014less formal than the shiny sheets in my Parisian Clairefontaine school notebooks.\n\nFifty years later on TV, I see Obama's advisers coming out of the West Wing carrying the same lined yellow pads and those inevitable sharpened pencils, blissfully unaware that those same pencils once grazed the head of a little math dunce. This is the retro side of an America that still prefers its shops to have old wooden doors with rattling, gilded knobs rather than the big glass doors that open automatically as soon as you cross the threshold of any French pharmacy.\n\n* * *\n\nNew York meant endless family discussions between parents and grandparents about France, which was imploding, even though news of the unstable Fourth Republic* reached us only in fragments. Politics? It was talked about, of course. As a little girl I vaguely understood that it was a world intended for grown-ups, something grave and mysterious, to which I was unbelievably lucky to have been exposed.\n\nI had always preferred to act beyond my years around things I didn't understand. Before I was even two years old, I imitated my parents by pretending to read The New York Times\u2014if upside down. At four, I assumed a look of great concentration when my father summoned me to discuss what he called serious matters. This happened whenever governments fell, every month or so. My father would address me, struggling not to laugh: \"Anne, some serious things are happening: the cabinet [that was what the government was called in those days] has been overturned.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" I would say, horrified at the apocalyptic vision he had just evoked, because the word for \"cabinet\" also meant \"water closet.\" \"Something has to be done.\" My father went on. \"Me, I'll take charge of foreign affairs.\" \"Me, I'll take the train,\" I invariably replied, without understanding a word he was saying, but delighted that my beloved father thought me a worthy partner for his grown-up conversations. My grandfather would burst out laughing, and I was very proud to amuse my family even without understanding what was so funny. On reflection, I took my first steps in political debate at the town house on Seventy-ninth Street, an experience that must have stayed with me in my twenty years as a political journalist in France.\n\nNew York in those days was synonymous with happiness, treats, holidays. My parents and I went there at first by ocean liner, which meant four or five long seasick days, and then, before the first Boeing flights began, by Super Constellations, big carrier planes that stopped at Shannon in Ireland and at Gander in the northeast of Newfoundland.\n\nPinned to my little coat was the Cours Hattemer, the \"cross of honor,\" awarded by my school to the term's best pupils. It was utterly ridiculous, that cross, a miniature copy of the Croix de la L\u00e9gion d'Honneur. On the bus, passengers would ask my mother what heroic deeds I had performed to deserve that military-style decoration.\n\n* * *\n\nAs New York winters were notoriously harsh, my grandfather's frail condition meant that he didn't go out much. His health had further deteriorated over the previous few years after a stroke that, while leaving his mind intact, deprived him of fluent speech and gave him a dreadful stammer. I was sometimes frightened by his damaged voice and by his little finger, gnarled with arthritis.\n\n* * *\n\nIn Paris, Paul and I often visited his colleagues, outings that I found slightly boring, but that were always followed by a fresh-squeezed orange juice at the Relais du Bois in the Bois de Boulogne, where we drank in silence to keep from frightening the squirrels.\n\nOne day he took me to see Paul P\u00e9trid\u00e8s, who ran a well-known gallery but whose reputation had been tarnished by collaborationist activities during the war. Back in the car, Paul grumbled, \"That man is a pheasant,\" which seemed an odd expression to use for someone. When I asked what he meant, he said he was referring to a rotten game bird. I brought that hunting term back home with me, much to my family's amusement.\n\nMy grandfather had an amazing eye: long after looking at a painting that he found interesting at a colleague's gallery, he would ruminate over it. Driving toward the Bois de Boulogne, he would suddenly announce: \"That painting is a fake!\"\n\n* * *\n\nEvery summer, I set off with my grandparents for the south of France, along the old Route Nationale 7, a road lined with plane trees that were magnificent to look at but lethally distracting to those driving cars. The highway leading to the south didn't yet exist, and it took us three full days to get to Cannes. We always stopped at the same places\u2014Saint-\u00c9tienne on the first day, Avignon and Aix on the second day\u2014before we arrived, the third stop being on the shores of the Mediterranean. Once we were there, within two days we absolutely had to go to the Galerie Maeght in Saint Paul de Vence and above all to see Picasso in Mougins.\n\nBy visiting museums with my grandfather\u2014the Louvre, one bit at a time, the Orangerie, and the Mus\u00e9e d'Art Moderne\u2014I learned what was worth looking at and what wasn't worth so much as a second glance. The quality of the works was gauged by the speed with which I crossed those exhibition halls at my grandfather's side. The Flemish masters or, of course, the Italian quattrocento were carefully examined, but paintings of the French and English seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were skipped over. The Gainsboroughs, with their very English solemnity, weren't considered particularly noteworthy. Our interest revived again with Corot (at last), Courbet, and, obviously, the impressionists. Looking at certain paintings by fashionable painters\u2014I'm thinking of Bernard Buffet, for example, whom Paul couldn't stand\u2014Paul allowed himself the luxury of saying that \"they weren't worth a fig.\" Some were simply declared \"ugly\" or \"without genius,\" if not \"without talent.\" Various minor paintings by Renoir, Gauguin, or Monet were decreed \"too red\" or \"too dark,\" \"too vague\" or \"too soft,\" \"lacking mastery\" or \"lacking power.\" And these judgments, fifty years on, still have the force of law as far as I'm concerned. \"Don't waste your eyes,\" my grandfather would say to me, \"on works that are not exceptional.\" The moderns\u2014Braque, Matisse, L\u00e9ger, and, above all, Picasso: they were his world.\n\nBut that gentle life belonged to Paris. In New York the rhythm was different: my grandfather worked, I strolled about the city with my mother and my grandmother, and for the child I was in those days it was a paradise.\n\n* * *\n\nDuring the winter of 2009 I couldn't wait to board the train from where I was living in Washington, D.C., to get back to New York, to East Seventy-ninth Street. That's where the gallery's archives are kept, devotedly guarded by my aunt Elaine, who worshipped her father-in-law. She had done a marvelous job organizing all this material with the help of an archivist from the Museum of Modern Art, to which the papers had been donated.\n\nI immersed myself in those files for days at a time, in the course of several visits. An old desk in a little room, six feet by ten, windowless\u2014I'm sure it's the room where I suffered my mathematical torments\u2014but with a skylight, rather gloomy, old linoleum, all on the same floor where I had lived with my parents as a child.\n\nThe internal staircase that leads both to this room and to my aunt's apartment is the one on which I used to hide. Often when I couldn't sleep, I would sit on the steps, hiding in a corner, and try to make out what the grown-ups were saying downstairs. From there, I would also listen to the classical music that my uncle was passionate about. And so it was, that in my pajamas I was allowed to listen to my first concerts of baroque music. I remember noticing, for example, that Georges Bizet had borrowed his tune for L'Arl\u00e9sienne from a theme by Michel-Richard Delalande, and having heard my grandmother humming the music from Carmen when I was very young, I felt it was a dreadful fraud.\n\n* * *\n\nMy aunt wonders about my recent obsession with a grandfather and a family history that I'd barely acknowledged until now. She and my mother didn't really get on and never truly understood each other. My mother was so close to her brother that my aunt often felt excluded. Alexandre seemed to pay my mother more attention than he did his wife. Not surprisingly, this caused my aunt, who was excluded from the affairs of Pi-ar-enco on which my uncle faithfully reported to my mother, a great deal of torment.\n\nIn short, my aunt Elaine, still laser sharp and quick on her feet at eighty-nine,* looks over my shoulder at the documents I'm consulting and the notes I take. Should I tell her that I'm feeling my way around the archive? She's taken the trouble to file away even the most insignificant scraps of paper from the Galerie Rosenberg. Should I express my surprise at my grandparents' personal life, which I'm sensing was more turbulent than legend allowed? I'm not sure. So I go on investigating, making sense of the voluminous papers as best I can.\n\nPhotographs of every prewar exhibition at rue La Bo\u00e9tie. Invoices for wine bought in 1928. Letters to Alfred Barr in the years before and after the war. Pieces of paper scribbled on by my grandfather, the beginning of an autobiography that wouldn't get beyond page ten. Fairly dry letters from Paul to unknown painters who wanted him to represent them. A bill from a picture framer in the 1920s and, most of all, telegrams or letters from 1942 revealing the ignorance of refugees about what was happening in occupied France. Files in Russian too, containing archives looted from the gallery in Paris by the Germans in 1940, then by the Russians in Berlin in 1945, carefully filed away in big boxes with titles written in Cyrillic. These archives were recovered a few years ago, thanks entirely to the perseverance of my cousin Elisabeth and the postglasnost transparency of the Russian authorities, who gave them to the French government, which in turn was gracious enough to restore them to us.\n\nThat precious immersion in the family archives on Seventy-ninth Street allowed me to reconstruct my grandfather's life after the upheavals of the 1940s. Upheavals, sure. But at the same time, he felt close to this continent, which he had so loved exploring twenty years before.\nA LONG RELATIONSHIP\n\nPaul knew America quite well, as he had tried hard to establish his beloved modern painters across the Atlantic.\n\nJohn Quinn, an American lawyer and collector, corresponded with Paul in the 1920s and tried to explain to him that his efforts to sell modern art in America were premature. \"Just five or six years ago,\" he explains in a letter found in the family archives, \"Knoedler had put on a C\u00e9zanne exhibition and people laughed, which they wouldn't do now...\" In May 1922, Quinn tried to convince Paul that no New York gallery, \"not Knoedler, Gimpel, Wildenstein or Durand-Ruel, will show any Picassos because their clients aren't open to this kind of painting. Dealers don't believe in modern art.\"\n\nBut Paul persisted. He was in Chicago that same year. And from New York to Kansas City, of all places, he preached contemporary art and was keen, in spite of the lack of enthusiasm from the American public, to show his beloved Matisse, Picasso, and Braque to the New World, which didn't get it at all.\n\nOn November 23, 1923, Paul put on\u2014probably at the Georges Wildenstein Gallery, with which he was affiliated at the time in the transatlantic representation of Picasso's works\u2014the Spanish painter's first New York show. He wrote to Picasso, \"Your exhibition is a great success, and like all great successes, we're not selling a thing! You'd have to be mad like me, or a crank like me, to embark on such an undertaking.\"\n\nIn a letter written to Picasso in November 1923, he was critical of America: \"Order reigns here, but there is a lack of European sophistication. The golden calf is more revered than ever, and the moneyed class is all that matters. Everything is colossal, even the museums. The worst of our painters is the best here... They have a collection of Rembrandts, just as I have a collection of Picassos, an incalculable number of them. Every self-respecting gallery has its Rembrandt or its Titian... Your paintings have arrived, they're wonderful, but I fear they don't like that kind of thing here. I'm expecting a vast crowd, meaning three visitors a day!... When nostalgia takes hold of me, I talk to my paintings, including yours. Ah, mon cher Paris, it's the only place one can live.\"\n\nA few weeks later he looks more favorably on the excitement of New York: \"I'm enjoying myself more: there's a spirit of will and strength,\" but he still rails against the aesthetic limitations of the Americans: \"Your exhibition is a great succ\u00e8s d'estime. But while in Paris there would have been a great crush, not many people came. Out of a population of six million, sixty visitors a day! But it's all over the papers, so what do buyers need? The New Continent doesn't go and see the New Painting, that is, the painting that is essentially timeless. They feel more at home with the painting of the past, with conventions.\"\n\nIn 1934, during one of his trips to New York, he writes to Picasso again. And he is still skeptical: \"The Bonnard exhibition was totally unsuccessful here. It's too fine for them. Too tasteful. Too tasteful and without enough forms!\"\n\nEven at the start of the war, when he was still able to correspond with Matisse, he could be severe in his judgment of those citizens of the New World, after seeing portraits by Matisse and other French artists in Life magazine. \"Very late,\" he notes, \"because the ones shown have been established in the rest of the world for over thirty years! Better late...\"\n\n* * *\n\nIn 1934 Paul decided to mount a major exhibition devoted to three great artists, Braque, Matisse, and Picasso. He wrote to Picasso: \"This exhibition will do a lot of good because it brings to the eyes of the public the new forms of expression of artists they had heard about but never seen. The public is divided, they all stay for a long time, upset that they don't understand... My previous exhibition, from Ingres to C\u00e9zanne, was splendid, but its splendor was rehashed. It was from the past, and there was no merit in admiring works that, dating as they did from 1814 to 1910, have had time to enter men's minds. But this exhibition represents our era, more than thirty-three years of our lives. Since it is the first of this kind, it has an absolute virginity, it must create the same effect as the impressionist show.\"\n\nHe himself attended to the smallest details of the exhibition, just as he did in Paris, and sent Picasso the plans for the hanging of each individual painting. \"Evidence of the power [of your paintings]. I had to balance them out with two Braques!\" These words, which might come across as so much flummery, are in fact meant quite sincerely. Paul was not given to effusive language. He could even be severe in his judgment of certain contemporary geniuses who were recognized as such, not least by him. \"The only weak point is Matisse,\" Paul writes. \"He can't take it. He flickers and goes out between the two of you [Braque and Picasso]. He... has forgotten about forms and volumes. Color is too important and you have the feeling you could add layers of color by painting the walls themselves. And that gives a sense of painted canvases, while you are creating the sense of colored sculptures.\" To me this assessment seems unfair because the light that floods Matisse's paintings makes them masterpieces in blue or yellow. It's true that Matisse's work, which is more accessible than that of the great abstractionists, struck Paul as more decorative and less innovative.\n\nIn that same letter Paul spoke bitterly about a different exhibition elsewhere in the city\u2014apparently dedicated to artists he didn't represent\u2014that enjoyed great success with the public, \"with 2,000 idiotic paintings that represented the most grotesque parodies imaginable. People must actually realize this! But I shall stick my neck out and say that stupidity and bad faith will always prevail among the living, and both of us may be in our graves when the same people's descendants glorify this art, demolishing the achievements of the creative generations to which you yourselves have given birth... But Galileo is right, 'eppur si muove' nothing will stop the progress of truth; beauty will always be beauty.\"\n\nSadly, this country, which my grandfather had initially seen as a continent to explore, was about to become his land of exile.\nTHE WAR YEARS IN NEW YORK\n\nPaul disembarked in New York with his wife and daughter in September 1940. They stayed at the Hotel Madison on Fifty-eighth Street until Paul decided to rent a new gallery on Fifty-seventh Street in 1941. Still in the throes of despair, Paul remained as anxious as refugees throughout the ages have been: \"No one can understand how comforted I felt when an immigration officer said to me, 'Don't worry, you're among friends now.'\"\n\nHe managed to correspond with France to a certain extent. His letters seemed to reach Nice, at any rate, in the unoccupied zone, where Matisse was still living. On November 27, 1940, he writes to the painter from his hotel room: \"I don't yet know what I'm going to do, but I might settle here as I did in Paris... No news of Pablo, or the other Parisians, which disturbs and worries me. I have in front of me a C\u00e9zanne of the area around Aix, with an atmosphere so clear and pure that it delights my eyes and sings to my heart.\"\n\nGrieving for his gallery on rue La Bo\u00e9tie, Paul corresponds with his painter friend as frequently as possible: \"We miss your paintings here because we've severed contact with Europe. The market needs your works, the American school is already taking advantage of this. They're bringing out all the Sunday painters, people who started painting when they were 72 and who are 92 now. I'm going to San Francisco to give a lecture as I did in Chicago, about art in general and about all of you in particular. It's the only thing that amuses or interests me. Too many things that I was once fond of, which were my life, are far away from me now. Even the beautiful countryside of Provence, that mild, gentle light, that serene landscape, comes to mind as I write to you.\" He continues, on February 18, 1941, after Matisse has had surgery and Paul is inquiring after his health: \"You are lucky to have painting; by creating you forget the hardships and anxiety of our times. Separation is painful, because everything I love is far from me.\" He adds in semicoded language, alluding to the last canvases that he had bought from the artist and that he suspected had been stolen from him: \"I don't know what became of your children of 1940. They were close to my heart, they were my joy. What can we do to get them back... [?]\"\n\nIn November and December 1940, in two letters to his son Pierre, who had himself opened a gallery in New York, Matisse asks for news of his dealer and friend, disguising his name for the benefit of the censor who opened the mail: \"How is Paul Floirac? Tell him plenty of things from me, but don't tell him that I'm writing to tell you that Pablo is worried about his future. Essentially he has lots of resources, and might return to his Blue or Rose periods, which are still highly prized.\"\n\nPaul becomes increasingly homesick and loses contact with his family, who remained in Paris and miraculously escaped the roundups of the Jewish population, as well as his friends. Though he is anxious about the situation in occupied France, he's unable to find out much.\n\nLater, in March 1942, he writes to his friend Henri de Vilmorin: \"You must have news about France and know what's happening there. The massacre of innocent people, whether from malnutrition or from cold, whether from diseases contracted in the concentration camps... Oh, how our brothers are suffering, and I imagine their pain at seeing our beautiful country looted and exploited by its enemies... Luckily we are confident and we have the firm hope that we will once again see the whole country purged and regenerated.\"\n\nPaul is frustrated, going on about feelings of impotence in the face of war, and tries to make himself useful. His wife and especially his daughter are working for France Forever. He himself organizes benefit exhibitions for the Free French, donating considerable sums to the effort. In February 1941 Paul gives the Free French Relief Committee a Stinson 105, the first air ambulance to be deployed in French Equatorial Africa. General Edgard de Larminat, one of the first French officers to have joined the Free French Forces, who is later made a Compagnon de la Lib\u00e9ration, sends a telegram of appreciation from Brazzaville to the \"generous donor\" who wishes to remain anonymous.\n\nPaul, in a state of agitation, writes to absolutely everyone. To his French friends, even though there is no hope that his letters will reach them. To his comrade and modern art collector Alphonse Kann, who is in England. To the efficient and generous secretary in his London office, Winifred Easton, who is taking care of the \"children\" that arrived in June 1940 and who is to survive the blitz: \"I know you are working hard, and that your morale has not been affected. We too are keeping our chins up, and we do not doubt for a second that we have been through the worst of the war, and that the end will soon come, with victory for all of us. Yes, the situation in France is terrible. That is why we are working so hard to identify and describe those horrendous characters who are insulting the reality of my country. We are publishing pamphlets and books that show the true face of France. But don't worry: when the war is over, the French will sweep all that aside, and those who did not resist will perhaps pay with their lives for the dirty job they've done...\" This letter, with its forced optimism, dates from October 1942, the darkest hours of Europe at war.\n\n* * *\n\nPaul is consumed with worry about Alexandre, having had no news of him since he left England, except that he is somewhere in Africa. Naively, he imagines that he might be granted leave. He doesn't know that this is the eve of the Normandy landings. On May 24, 1944, he writes to Gu\u00e9rin de Beaumont, the agent general for the Provisional Government of the French Republic in New York, hoping in vain to have Kiki brought over, after having been separated from him since June 1940: \"We're very depressed. His mother is in despair. It's really a miracle that she goes on despite her enormous pain... As for my own personal activities, apart from the Renoir Centenary exhibition organized for the benefit of the Free French Relief Committee, and the exhibition of C\u00e9zanne's works organized for France Forever and the Fighting French Committee, I don't need to mention them. My every action is that of a patriot who loves his country, particularly when it is in danger. I can say that I have spent my whole life fighting against the Germans who are after me, and that if I had stayed in France I would certainly have been taken hostage and faced the firing squad a long time ago.\"\n\nIn fact, he will find out nothing for a long time, either about the atrocities of the Nazis and their Vichy accomplices or about the looting. Above all, this \"patriot,\" as he terms himself, is unaware that on July 23, 1940, while he was still in Portugal, a law stripping nationality of any French citizen who has gone abroad was passed by Vichy France.\n\nThough he probably did know that on October 3, Le Journal officiel published the Jewish Statute, with its notorious Article 1: \"In terms of the application of the present law, any person will be regarded as Jewish if he is descended from three grandparents of the Jewish race or two grandparents of the same race if the spouse is also a Jew.\" After this come prohibitions concerning posts or honors awarded by the state and access to teaching positions, the army, high administration, or the courts. Jews would also be excluded from journalism and the management of newspapers, as well as work in cinema or the theater.\n\nThe Casino de Paris, other clubs, and certain parks and gardens were \"forbidden to dogs and Jews,\" as the signs put it. But as the writer Dan Franck notes bitterly, \"the duck with blood sauce at the Tour d'Argent retained its reputation.\" Franck also relates how the Op\u00e9ra and its director, Serge Lifar, a French ballet dancer and choreographer, welcomed Hitler and Goebbels, and how the young Herbert von Karajan conducted Tristan and Isolde there. As for the famous actor Sacha Guitry, \"all was just fine.\"\n\nPaul knew only scraps of all this. One thing he was certainly in the dark about was the deportations that followed upon the loss of nationality. On February 23, 1942, an order decreed the \"denationalization\" of Paul Rosenberg and his family. These orders complemented the law of July 23, 1940.\n\nA month later, on March 26, 1942, Paul sent a telegram to \"The President of the Commission for the Examination of Cases of Forfeiture of Nationality, Ministry of Justice, Vichy, France,\" stating: \"I am learning of my denationalization by order of 23 February 1942. Protest energetically and have strong reservations. Letter follows.\" A letter, addressed to the same commission, did in fact follow, on April 16, 1942, revealing great ignorance of the situation as well as total candor. Five pages in which Paul made rather clumsy attempts at self-justification: \"I learn that by an order of 23 February 1942, in accordance with the law of 23 July 1940, I have been stripped of French nationality for leaving France without a valid reason, between 10 May and 30 June 1940... I protest indignantly against the interpretation of the aforementioned text as regards my case... I have always fulfilled all my duties, my past is one of honor and probity, etc.\" This is a \"flagrant injustice... It was only during my stay in Portugal that I discovered the conditions of the armistice. This prompted me to continue my journey. In fact, after some reflection, I determined that I could make myself more useful by staying in the United States than by going back to France... Being stripped of one's nationality implies a dishonor that no worthy man can accept without attempting to defend himself. I am not begging for clemency for a crime I have not committed, but calling for justice to which I have a right like any other citizen.\"\n\nThe opening words of this letter reflect the state of mind of French Jews in 1940: unable to believe that while they were good enough to serve as cannon fodder in the First World War, they could be dismissed as traitors twenty years later just because they had been born Jewish. We come across this uncomprehending reaction in every country that has known discrimination and deportations, even in the state of mind of the people crammed into the cattle cars. It was impossible for a sane mind to imagine the Shoah in 1940.\n\nPaul obviously knew little about what was happening in his homeland. He had asked his friend Gilbert L\u00e9vy, in whom he had complete trust, to keep his papers and to ensure that wages were paid to the staff who remained at the gallery. To L\u00e9vy, who was to be deported and gassed in Auschwitz while one of his sons fought with my uncle Alexandre in the African campaign and died in his arms in Normandy, he writes with disconcerting naivet\u00e9 on March 20, 1942: \"I learn that I've been denationalized. Can you contact my brother, as I am asking him to find a lawyer should I need to defend my case to the commission[?]\" Paul was as yet unaware that there are some cases that cannot be pleaded.\n\n* * *\n\nBut let's return to the letter my scandalized grandfather sent to Vichy in 1942. The last paragraph, about the dishonor inflicted and the refusal to ask for a pardon that he judged to be defamatory, captures his state of mind. On the other hand, the feeble excuse that he would be more useful to France in the United States does not seem to match his indignation. My grandparents fled because their lives were in jeopardy, and they had no need to be ashamed. Yet admitting that others stayed on in their homeland and actually risked and often paid with their lives undoubtedly filled him with shame.\n\nAs Emmanuelle Loyer writes, \"Unlike the history of Poland, in which the exile is integral to the national story of the last two centuries, the French tradition is characterized by a disparaging image of the exile, which places him somewhere between flight and treason... Since the French Revolution, the exile has been accused of antipatriotism, and assimilation is seen as an active metonymy of the France of the Counterrevolution.\"\n\nPaul experienced the loss of his nationality inflicted by a regime he loathed as a wound and humiliation that imposed upon him a constant need for self-justification. If he had no plans to move his gallery back to Paris after the war and chose instead to stay in New York, it was probably because the art market was more vigorous there, although many Parisian art dealers, beginning with Kahnweiler, did prosper in France after the liberation. But the deepest reason was that unlike the French, who had stripped him of his nationality and some of whom were even involved in the theft of his property and would doubtless have had him deported, the Americans welcomed him along with his family, protected him, and enabled him to relaunch his career. They recognized him as a great practitioner of his trade and helped him recover his soiled dignity.\n\nI found the same tone in my father's war diary. Demobilized in 1940, unable to bear life in occupied France, he managed to leave for the United States. Once in New York, he felt very uneasy about being \"sheltered.\" He enrolled as a noncommissioned officer with the Free French and embarked with two compatriots on a British troop carrier, the only Frenchmen among eight thousand American soldiers. Traveling via South America and the Cape of Good Hope, he eventually came back up the Red Sea, disembarked, and went on fighting.\n\nMy father kept a journal throughout those three years, and even in his account of that two-month zigzag voyage across an ocean infested with mines and German submarines, followed by his time fighting for the Free French Forces in Beirut and Cairo, he expresses a constant need to rehabilitate himself, to \"redeem\" himself for his supposed passivity. Consumed with anxiety about his relatives who had stayed in Paris or were hidden away somewhere in France, he was hardly any happier about his life as a Gaullist envoy to the Middle East than he was with his life as a refugee in New York.\n\n* * *\n\nMy grandfather would refuse all contact with Vichy to \"plead his own case.\" To someone who had suggested acting as an intermediary, he wrote on April 24, 1942: \"Given recent events in France, I do not wish to communicate in any way with a government run by a man like Laval.* I would rather lose all I possess.\"\n\nAnd that was what happened to his paintings, indeed to his illusions of a just world.\nPREOCCUPATIONS OF THE HEART\n\nMy grandfather thought constantly about the lives of the painters who stayed behind in France, hoping they would be hostile to the occupying forces. Some of them were, but overall, the artists who remained in Paris didn't distinguish themselves one way or another. \"As soon as the Nazis were the adversaries of culture and freedom, any free expression of the spirit became an act of courage,\" wrote Laurence Bertrand Dorl\u00e9ac.\n\nIn fact, as Paul suspected, Braque, Matisse, and Picasso showed no sympathy for the Germans. Other artists, like Andr\u00e9 Derain, Otto Friesz, van Dongen, Paul Belmondo, and de Vlaminck, did not hesitate to go on tour in Germany. Some even returned as propagandists, so in thrall were they with the Nazi regime.\n\nBraque wasn't even invited along. \"Fortunately my painting didn't please them; I wasn't invited, otherwise, perhaps I would have gone, on account of the promised exchange of prisoners,\" he candidly confessed in retrospect. He had been a close friend of Derain, who had taken this politically charged tour, but he had no wish to disavow him. As Braque's biographer Alex Danchev writes, \"He was a moraliste, not a moralizer... But something was broken. Braque and Derain were never as close again.\"\n\nPaul was aware that Braque was no activist and that a painting like Guernica was not his style. Besides, Braque could not understand Picasso's commitment to communism or, later on, his decision to paint a peace dove. Braque's sole concern was the validity of his art. \"There is no scream in Braque, just a whisper,\" Danchev explains. But the war destabilized him, and he even dreamed of going to Switzerland. For the first time since 1917 he had stopped painting, as he wrote to my grandfather when Paul was still near Bordeaux, in Floirac.\n\nAfter he returned to Paris and before settling in Pacy-sur-Eure, where his aged mother lived, Braque started painting very dark still lifes (including his famous black fish). Until 1943, only his two great writer friends Jean Paulhan and Francis Ponge, both r\u00e9sistants, had the privilege of seeing his paintings.\n\nBut in 1943, a small exhibition was held in a room dedicated to Braque in the Salon d'Automne and hailed by the collaborationist Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but denounced by Lucien Rebatet in Je suis partout, the emblematic publication of the collaboration.\n\nGeorges Braque had rejected the advances of the Reich, refused to prostrate himself before the Reich's official sculptor, Arno Breker, unlike Jean Cocteau, and dared turn up at the funeral of Max Jacob, who had died to general indifference in Drancy, shortly before his convoy left for Auschwitz. Braque also declined Marshal P\u00e9tain's invitation to design the Vichy emblem, \"Work, Family, Homeland.\" \"He wasn't part of the Resistance. But he was dignified,\" writes Dan Franck, \"a serious quality in a time of compromises.\" My grandfather, who for his article in Art in Australia imagined Braque \"in blue smock, confined to his home, standing before his easel, his pots of colour ground by himself, hand full of brushes, creating another new canvas for our pleasure,\" was right about the character of his old friend, to whom he displayed the most brotherly attachment. Paul described Braque as being very different from Picasso, \"always placid and a quiet conversationalist.\" \"He never sings out of tune,\" Picasso once declared about him. \"He seeks only harmonies and symphonies in his canvases. There is never the clash of colour like some strident note of a cymbal or trumpet. He represents all the beautiful French tradition of Corot, Chardin, and like these painters he is full of humility.\n\n\"Like Picasso,\" my grandfather continued, \"he [Braque] never paints from nature. His works are re-creations... He is never a mixer, living quite isolated, abhorring honours and receptions... The sight of certain uniforms must trouble his heart and soul.\"\n\nPaul was severe in his judgment of artists like Derain when he learned that they had accepted Vichy honors, but he moderated his condemnation. In August 1942, according to papers found in the family archive, Paul abandoned an exhibition of twentieth-century artists in New York: \"It is impossible to show artists who have been in Germany, while at the same time it is not a French custom to condemn people without having heard their side of the story, so it is impossible to hold this exhibition.\"\n\nHe was mistaken about other standard-bearers for fauvism, such as de Vlaminck, however, believing that they were resisting the occupying forces. Conversely, de Vlaminck, who was jealous of Picasso, took advantage of the occupation to tear into \"that Catalan with the look of a monk and the eyes of an inquisitor,\" as he wrote in the magazine Com\u0153dia. \"Cubism! Perversity of spirit, inadequacy, amoralism, as far from painting as pederasty is from love.\"\n\nPicasso couldn't afford to reply. He had left rue La Bo\u00e9tie, where the Nazis were now his next-door neighbors, and was living at 7 rue des Grands-Augustins, in an apartment found by Dora Maar, his companion at the time. He represented \"the ultimate scapegoat meant to embody the thousand and one facets of evil, displacement, disorder and blasphemy,\" writes Dorl\u00e9ac. The Gestapo could have arrested the painter at any time, but at Cocteau's request, he was given some protection on the German side by the all-powerful sculptor Arno Breker.\n\n* * *\n\nSince Picasso had opposed Franco very early on in the conflict, the republicans had appointed him honorary director in exile of the Prado. After the April 26, 1937, bombing of the small Basque village of Guernica on a market day by the German pilots of the Condor Legion, Picasso, who had been commissioned to create a mural for the Spanish Republic Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, painted Guernica, one of his greatest masterpieces. Picasso never forgot that P\u00e9tain had been the French ambassador to Franco's Spain, which may also explain his antipathy toward the Vichy regime.\n\nThere is a legend about this world-famous painting. German officers, visiting Picasso in his studio in rue des Grands-Augustins and seeing that most accusatory of paintings in a corner, were said to have asked him: \"Did you do that?\" According to legend, the painter shot back, \"No, you did.\" A sublimely dramatic reply, although I suspect it may be apocryphal. My grandfather and my mother visited Picasso in the same studio just after the liberation. As they congratulated him on the courageous statements he had made, statements that had crossed the seas as a symbol of the resistance of artists and intellectuals to the occupying forces, Picasso replied, slightly embarrassed, \"Yes, I must have said something like that. Well, all right, let's say I did...\" This was a story often told by my grandfather and later by my mother.\n\nBut I have no other evidence of Paul and Picasso's discussing the war, not even at its start. At that point in early 1940, Picasso was at Royan, a small fishing village on the Atlantic coast, while my grandparents were living in Floirac. In any case, the letters don't so much as mention the declaration of war on September 3, 1939. Perhaps they spoke on the phone that day.\n\nOn October 25, 1939, Paul alludes to the war when he sends birthday wishes to \"mon vieux Pic,\" roughly two months before his own: \"It's a sad birthday,\" he writes. On December 29, 1939, Paul, who turned fifty-eight that day, sends Picasso \"my best wishes for 1940. You will cost me two times two 30 franc stamps for the telegram. And yet our authorities said we had to economize!\"\n\nSo the war always seems to be mentioned with some detachment in the correspondence between the future refugee and the Spanish republican. Certainly, this battle-free conflict must have seemed like an abstraction at that point, but I am still struck by the fact that there was so little room for it in their exchanges, in which they continue to \"talk paintings.\" My grandmother even sent a message to Picasso expressing her relief that my grandfather finally had paintings on his walls in Floirac, which had been bare until then. He had in fact had them sent from Paris, thinking they would be safe south of the Loire. \"Your paintings from 1940 are in the dining room,\" Paul writes. These were probably the tormented paintings the artist made that year, such as the Standing Female Nude, cited by Laurent Fabius as an example of the art of a painter devastated by the war. \"Thanks to you,\" Paul continues, \"our meals are less monotonous, your canvases provoke both appreciation and hilarity.\" In the same letter, he announces the death of Diola, his children's dog; my uncle Alexandre gave the dog's name to the plane he piloted in the Second Armored Division.\n\nThe last letter from Paul to Picasso, before they met again in the painter's studio on rue des Grands-Augustins, is dated May 9, 1940, the eve of the Nazis' offensive in which the Allies were taken by surprise in the Ardennes. Paul tells Picasso about his plan to go to Paris on May 14. After all, for almost everyone, this phase of the war\u2014which became known as the Phoney War\u2014had turned out to be only virtual. My grandfather fled Floirac through Spain and Portugal one month later.\n\n* * *\n\nAnd yet Picasso is very attuned to current events. During the Phoney War, he takes a quick trip to Paris from Royan. It's spring 1940, and Picasso bumps into Matisse. \"Where are you going like that?\" asks Picasso. \"To see my tailor,\" replies Matisse. \"What, you don't know that the front has been broken? The Germans will be in Paris by tomorrow!\" \"What about our generals?\" Matisse asks him. Picasso looks at him seriously and replies (his response is in all the books): \"Our generals are equivalent to the \u00c9cole des Beaux-Arts!\" Which tells us a lot about both these painters' attitudes toward that school, so fearful of innovation, as well as of the French Army, which was stuck in the days of the First World War.\n\n* * *\n\nPicasso returned to the capital after the armistice. Why did he stay in Paris? My grandfather thought he was frightened by the idea of exile. \"Staying wasn't a form of courage, but... of inertia,\" Picasso later said to Jean Leymarie, an art critic and the future director of the Mus\u00e9e d'Art Moderne. Picasso wanted to devote himself exclusively to his work.\n\nIn 1943, Picasso met Fran\u00e7oise Gilot, who became his companion and the mother of two of his four children, Claude and Paloma. Around that time he invited to his house some of his politically committed friends, figures like poet Robert Desnos, but he didn't join the Resistance, as his friend Paul \u00c9luard had done. \"He refused the Germans' coal, and the material advantages they wanted to give him,\" writes Franck. \"He was primarily concerned about his artistic work. Picasso was entering an intensely prolific phase that was to last the rest of his life, and he abstained from anything that kept him away from that 'galleon's rhythm.'\"\n\nIn 1941 Paul imagined his Pic in a state of revolt, since he was \"the freest of men.\" \"What pleasure can he possibly have in painting now?\" Paul wonders. \"It had always been his joy to confront a canvas, mold it, work it meticulously in terms of depth, form and color, knead it, even torture it, and force it to give way to his titanic will.\" That suffering doubtless existed, as did the artist's anxiety and discomfort with fascism. But they didn't stop him from making art.\n\nIn April 1940 Picasso had once more petitioned for naturalization, but this had been refused on the grounds of his alleged anarchist sympathies. He chose to stay, even though he still feared being handed over to Franco. Police reports from 1939\u2014they would still have been the police of the Third Republic\u2014had him on record for making \"anti-French\" statements at the Caf\u00e9 de Flore. \"A curious way of thanking the country that welcomed him, and in the current circumstances his conduct is inconvenient at the very least,\" said one police report of the time.\n\nThat same report, written even before the German invasion, stresses that \"this foreigner who has made a reputation for himself in France in so-called modern art, allowing him to make considerable sums of money, is said to have declared several years ago to some of his friends that when he dies he wants to leave his collection to the Russian government and not to the French government.\" The stage was set for blacklists and xenophobia.\n\nSo Picasso was the holder of a residence permit, weirdly confused at the time with a kind of identity card, renewed on November 30, 1942, and valid until November 30, 1945. In the margin of the document was a note: \"Catholic.\" And this, written by hand: \"I certify on my honor that I am not Jewish in terms of the law of 2 June 1941\"\u2014the law that repeated and hardened the terms of the 1940 Jewish Statute. It was signed \"Picasso.\"\n\nTroubling. Paul would have been shocked. But the artist needed to survive both the tragic events around him and the looting.\nTHE TRAIN, SCHENKER, AND THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE\n\nAugust 27, 1944, and the troops of the Second Armored Division under the command of General Leclerc had just liberated Paris. Members of the Resistance had alerted them that a train containing one final convoy of looted works of art was about to leave the capital for Germany. A detachment of six volunteers, led by Lt. Alexandre Rosenberg, planned to stop the train at Aulnay, in the suburbs of Paris. On board were some dazed, homeward-bound old German soldiers and 148 crates of modern art, a small percentage of which belonged to the father of the lieutenant in question. Alexandre had last seen their contents on his parents' walls at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, in 1939.\n\nThat train, which was leaving for Germany, was the final act of the huge program of looting that the Nazis had pursued in France and in all the countries of occupied Europe. Two weeks after the armistice, Hitler, on the pretext of bringing these works to safety, issued an order that all art objects belonging to the Jews should be \"protected.\" \"It is not an appropriation,\" said the memo that had come from Berlin, with the cynicism of those who think that the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed, \"but a transfer under our guard, as a guarantee for the peace negotiations.\"\n\nThe first of the raids had begun in the summer of 1940. It was then, as the art historian and r\u00e9sistant Rose Valland writes, that \"the German Embassy became the Nazi ministry of culture in an occupied country.\" It was not until October 30, 1940, that about 450 crates left the rue de Lille (where the Reich Embassy was located) for the Mus\u00e9e du Jeu de Paume, to be submitted to the meticulous and systematic classification process perfected by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR).\n\nOn July 4, 1940, Otto Abetz, the Reich ambassador in Paris, sent the Gestapo a list of the leading Jewish collectors and dealers in the city: Rothschild, Rosenberg, Bernheim-Jeune, Seligmann, Alphonse Kann, etc. It was on that day that the house at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie was sequestrated, along with the works of art that Paul had left there, a library of over twelve hundred books, all the furnishings (from the antique furniture to the kitchen utensils), several hundred photographic prints, and the whole of the gallery archives dating back to 1906.\n\nThe objects looted included a number of sculptures, which had remained in Paris because they were difficult to transport, among them a large Aristide Maillol and the two famous Auguste Rodin statues Eve and The Bronze Age, which had adorned the foyer. The same fate awaited The Thinker, which was recovered after the war and which as a child I saw so many times, welcoming visitors, while I looked down from the top of the stairs to the gallery at Seventy-ninth Street.\n\nThe French police supplied the trucks; the Gestapo, the men. As for the paintings that came from the most important collections in Paris, these were stacked up at the German Embassy.\n\nThe route taken by the stolen art objects is now well documented: the German forces looted about thirty-eight thousand apartments. The German dealer Gustav Rochlitz acted as a clearinghouse, exchanging the art favored by the Nazis\u2014old masters\u2014for works that appealed to Parisian dealers with their more contemporary taste. From this immense act of larceny perpetrated in France by the Nazis, about two thousand works have been recovered and remain unrestored to their rightful owners. Stamped \"MNR,\" they belonged to families who had fled or been deported and will never return to claim them.\n\nIncluding the paintings remaining at rue La Bo\u00e9tie, the 75 on the walls of the house in Floirac or rolled up in the garage there, and the 162 from the vault in Libourne, a total of 400 paintings were stolen from Paul. About 60 of them are still missing (are they in France, in Germany, in Russia?), most of which will probably never be found. The paintings that were recovered by Paul himself formed the inventory of the Seventy-ninth Street gallery, which has been almost entirely depleted since his death more than half a century ago.\n\nSome of these works still show up from time to time, in estate sales or auctions. How I wish I could make them speak, so that they could tell the story of their odysseys, or rather of how they ended up tucked away in the apartments of families that never mentioned a word to anybody after fraudulently getting hold of them. In most cases the people who inherit them today know nothing of their provenance, which is buried along with the memory of those who appropriated them during those dark years.\n\n* * *\n\nAfter the conclusion of the last restitution cases in the mid-1960s, the subject of the looting of artworks during the Second World War remained hidden until the early 1990s, when the issue of the wartime persecution of the Jews in France slowly reemerged in the public eye. The books of Lynn Nicholas and Hector Feliciano also helped bring the issue back into public scrutiny.\n\nIn 1997 the Matteoli Commission, set up by Alain Jupp\u00e9's government and continued under Lionel Jospin, was charged with studying the spoliation of Jewish assets during the occupation. \"The looting had nothing to do with the circumstances born of the conditions of the victory of the Reich, but only with a fundamental and founding intention, matured and developed along with Nazi expansionism,\" as one of the contributors to the commission put it.\n\nIn an article based on this investigation titled \"From Spoliation to Restitution,\" Annette Wieviorka brings out the subtle distinction between spoliation and looting: \"Spoliation, as defined by G\u00e9rard Lyon-Caen, is 'legal theft.' It is essentially a product of the Aryanization process, in which a property passes from 'Jewish' to 'Aryan' hands... Beyond the spoliation is the problem of looting. This is essentially undertaken by the German authorities. Two kinds are identified: First is targeted looting planned by the Germans. The Germans kept their eyes on the artworks of the great Jewish art dealers or collectors such as Alphonse Kann, Paul Rosenberg, Wildenstein, and the Rothschilds. This spectacular haul involved valuable works that were taken to Germany. The second type of looting began in 1942 and involved emptying Jewish apartments of all they contained.\"\n\n* * *\n\nIn the course of my research into the recovery of artworks owned by my grandfather, I discovered an extensive document that I'd never heard of before, the name of which reminded me of the title of the Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List. In contrast with the plot of that film about a righteous gentile who saved Jews from the Nazis, this is a collection of documents titled the Schenker Papers, which was declassified in 1995. Drawn up by the German Schenker transport company and reproduced on microfilm by the OSS, it lists the galleries and individuals that sold works of art to German museums, providing thirty-seven names. These include the dealers \"who never declared sales made to the Germans, even though they had, to our knowledge, concluded numerous deals with the occupying forces\u2014we have proof of it.\" Among the names on this document were Martin Fabiani and Roger Dequoy, the latter being, as we have seen, employed by the Wildenstein family, as manager of its gallery during the occupation.\n\nAn exhibition organized in 2008 by the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Direction des Mus\u00e9es de France, and the R\u00e9union des Mus\u00e9es Nationaux, in collaboration with the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, set out a clear account of suspicious purchases made by equally suspicious dealers: \"Martin Fabiani\"\u2014compromised in all the documents and quoted in the context of that exhibition\u2014\"sold many paintings during the Occupation and was found guilty for this after the liberation.\" My grandfather would describe Fabiani's reaction after being shown pictures of various paintings he was trying to retrieve. Fabiani denied having possessed any of them, including the ones he himself had returned to my grandfather. \"He probably hadn't noticed,\" my grandfather said ironically, \"that all the paintings stolen by the Germans bore on the back of the frame the words 'Paul Rosenberg\u2014Bordeaux,' followed by the initials PR and a number, a note appended by the Germans, and which would still have been there when he bought the paintings. And he handed over several canvases without asking for either proof or photographs!\" In the end, Fabiani returned twenty-four artworks without a word of protest.\n\nRegarding Paul P\u00e9trid\u00e8s, who died in 1993 at the age of ninety-two, the same 2008 exhibition said that he had been sentenced to three years in prison in 1979 but was freed at seventy-eight because of old age. His claims, after the liberation, that he knew nothing about this illegal trade and that like his colleagues, he had not knowingly bought a single canvas stolen from a Jew, left my grandfather cold: \"It is not customary in the trade to buy canvases without first investigating their origins, and to be satisfied with the explanations of German intermediaries unknown to the Paris market.\"\n\nIn the end my grandfather did not bring a case against either P\u00e9trid\u00e8s or Fabiani. So why did he instead decide to pursue unscrupulous Swiss dealers, and why was he more lenient toward the French dealers when some of his paintings were recovered? Was it because he feared that political networks favored those dealers who had collaborated, as they did many civil servants who had been even more seriously compromised? Or because he suspected that the entire art market would be discredited if the public were told about dealers who had behaved badly? Or because he preferred to force them to return his property in his presence and to recover his paintings one by one, in a kind of Count of Monte Cristo\u2013style personal vendetta?\n\nAnother paradox that makes me uneasy: my grandfather treated the petty thieves with even greater severity than he did the major crooks, suing them for fraud, abuse of trust, theft, or embezzlement. This was the case with M. Picard, the concierge at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie, who had worked there since 1931.\n\nPicard had stolen some objects with the intention\u2014he said in a 1945 statement he prepared for the trial\u2014of safeguarding them before ultimately returning them to the Rosenberg family. \"One day,\" Picard testified, \"I was instructed not to let anybody into the house that had been sequestrated by the Germans. On April 25, 1941, the Gestapo moved into the building and I had to give all the keys to the Germans. Two days later they moved out M. Rosenberg's library. On May 2 they moved the furnishings into German cars and replaced them with office materials.* On June 28, I was ordered to leave the premises. In the meantime, I had managed to take various objects from the apartment and the Galerie Rosenberg with the intention of giving it back and only with a view to saving them. It was never my intention to take anything at all for myself.\"\n\nThe testimony of Marguerite Blanchot, the Rosenbergs' housekeeper since the 1920s, is categorical about the building's concierge. \"I had the keys to number 21, and Monsieur Rosenberg had told me to move into his apartment. But M. Picard advised me against it and even added that it would be unwise to keep the keys. So I returned them to M. Picard and I came every day until November 1940 to wrap up the linen and the silverware with M. and Mme Picard. It was he who sealed the cases that we filled, and he refused to do it in my presence in spite of my requests. I went back to rue La Bo\u00e9tie several times, but the Picards refused to let me in. The concierge at 20 bis can testify to that. The day before the building was occupied by the Germans, I went to the apartment. When I wanted to get the furniture out, the concierges wouldn't let me.\"\n\nRen\u00e9 Duval, who worked at the office in the Galerie Rosenberg, testified that he too tried to save some of the belongings from rue La Bo\u00e9tie but that the Picards were opposed. \"I never saw anyone taking anything, but I noticed a number of gaps among the paintings, some of which were hung on the walls at the homes of the concierges who told me they had only put them there to save them.\"\n\n* * *\n\nL\u00e9a Roisneau had been Paul's secretary since 1936. It was she who first alerted him to the looting. In March 1941 she sent my grandfather a letter, saying, \"There's nothing left, nothing, nothing, nothing.\" Her former boss, three thousand miles away in New York, was unaware of so many things. He had no idea that the looting was orchestrated at the highest level of the Nazi hierarchy and that the raids were being carried out against \"all the enemies of the Reich\" in the occupied territories.\n\nRoisneau also went several times to rue La Bo\u00e9tie, to try to rescue the objects that struck her as most important: the library and the photographs of the paintings. She too observed that the Picards not only took refuge behind the Germans but were further distinguished by their ill will. \"One day he\u2014Picard\u2014told me that he wasn't going to let me back into the building, and added that if the Jew Rosenberg came back, he would throw him out the door,\" said Roisneau in the records.\n\nIn fact, Picard had stored objects everywhere: with neighbors, with his relatives. He had even taken Rodin's Thinker to an expert, along with a big wood-and-bronze clock. Initially he said he had given my grandfather's youngest brother, Edmond, everything that belonged to Paul; then he confessed that he had lied. Edmond began the inventory of looted objects after the liberation and before Paul returned to France. Mme Picard confirmed: \"My husband didn't tell the truth. And after the exodus, we took different things out of M. Rosenberg's house and stored them at the furniture depository: bronzes, a marble bust, an inlaid side table. Also between 140 and 150 bottles of fine wine and champagne (we consumed about fifty of those bottles), and a portrait drawing of Mme Rosenberg.\"\n\nPathetic, petty larcenies! Picard had his curtains cut from my grandfather's tapestries and confessed that the Regency barometer mentioned by his wife was actually found in a furniture depository stored in his name. But was my grandfather really more appalled by this than he was by the crimes of the collaborationist art dealers?\n\nThe rest\u2014the antique tables, the mahogany chests of drawers, the buffet tables, the chairs\u2014was sold by Captain S\u00e9zille, the secretary-general of the IEQJ, to his own employees or used at the Palais Berlitz to furnish the notorious IEQJ exhibition The Jew and France.\n\n* * *\n\nIn Floirac the scenario was almost identical: enter, in order of appearance, the occupying forces and the innocent bystanders who, by their own accounts, only wanted to help the family but who ended up taking advantage of the situation.\n\nOn September 15, 1940, the Germans arrive at Le Castel de Floirac at dawn; five vehicles filled with German soldiers and policemen stop outside the house.\n\nThe Germans demand to see Louis Le Gall, Paul's chauffeur, who has unsuccessfully been trying for days to persuade the hauler Lamarthonie to send the paintings that have remained in Floirac to Lisbon: some Monet water lilies, a Delacroix, some works by Picasso, L\u00e9ger, Matisse, Sisley, Vuillard, and Utrillo. In a letter of July 6, 1940, three weeks after his hasty departure from Floirac, Paul has asked Louis for an inventory of all the objects he wants dispatched, including the seventy-five paintings stored at Le Castel. \"Don't forget the ones that were left in the chest above the garage, and please be kind enough to check that none is missing,\" writes my grandfather.\n\nThe Germans are well informed and already know everything about Louis. \"I was stunned by the amount of information they had about me,\" Louis later said. Lamarthonie, the trucking company based at 17 cours du Chapeau-rouge in Bordeaux, was to accept delivery of the trunks and crates. It never did so, however, instead requesting the list of objects twice, also asking for the number of paintings. \"Then Lamarthonie told me the border was closed. The attitude of M. Lamarthonie and M. and Mme Ledoux toward the 'Israelites' led me to think it unlikely that they were strangers to the information [that the Germans had about me],\" Louis Le Gall would testify.\n\n* * *\n\nThe German police search the house from top to bottom and take everything they find to the German Embassy in Paris, before it is transferred to the Jeu de Paume and then dispersed around Germany and Switzerland, or in France.\n\nA certain Comte de Lestang and someone by the name of Yves Perdoux, probably an obscure art dealer, had apparently made a pact with the Nazis: they would tell them the two addresses in the department of Gironde, that of the house in Floirac and that of the vault in Libourne, where Paul had stored his paintings. In return for this spectacular bounty, they asked for 10 percent of the value of the collection. They tried several times to negotiate their price before finally supplying the Libourne address. In the end, they accepted three Pissarros and a Renoir, far beyond their wildest dreams. But even if you're an informer, do you really negotiate with Nazis?\n\n* * *\n\nWhat was the actual conduct of M. and Mme Ledoux? It was probably not very different from that of many people who witnessed the looting, who were powerless but often indifferent and sometimes opportunistic. The postwar trials were not categorical about whether M. and Mme Ledoux did or did not take part in the embezzlements; the Germans weren't given to sharing the fruits of their plunder. But it's more than likely that they did take advantage, even if only by preventing Louis Le Gall from removing the crates that could have been saved.\n\nLater, when objects were found hidden under a woodpile in the garden shed, Mme Ledoux revised her initial statements: \"Contrary to what I claimed before, I was in fact able to salvage a painting by Renoir, another by Degas, a case of silverware, a case of books. My intention was to keep them from the Germans. I planned to return them to M. Rosenberg as soon as possible.\"\n\nThe Germans occupied the property in Floirac until August 27, 1944, when Bordeaux was liberated. M. Ledoux was detained for a time at the camp of M\u00e9rignac because of his behavior during the occupation, and then M. and Mme Ledoux regained their property, which they enlarged during the 1950s and ultimately sold to the municipality. That was the same Le Castel to which I paid my emotional visit, seventy years later.\n\nAs for Lamarthonie, the hauler, he declared: \"I was not aware of any request for transportation being made to me in 1940 by a M. Rosenberg or any of his representatives. However, it is possible that such a request was received by my authorized representative, now deceased, but I can find no trace of this matter in my archives...\"\n\nThe BNCI vault in Libourne, in which my grandfather had imagined his paintings would be safe, was broken into on April 28, 1941, at the request of and in the presence of the occupying authorities. Everything was transferred to a second safe, and this time, on September 5, 1941, a German ERR officer removed the 162 paintings from the BNCI vault. The works were immediately dispatched to Paris, where they fell into G\u00f6ring's clutches. They were major paintings: Degas, Manet, Bonnard, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, Ingres, Corot, van Gogh, C\u00e9zanne, Renoir, Gauguin.\n\nSome of these paintings from Libourne found their way to Parisian dealers. Others found takers in Switzerland and were recovered after several suits brought by Paul against certain Swiss dealers who demonstrated a remarkable lack of curiosity regarding the provenance of the works they were selling. After all, the backs of many of the canvases that passed through their hands in those years bore labels put there by the ERR meticulously identifying the collections from which they came.\n\n* * *\n\n\"No case,\" Lynn Nicholas writes, \"illustrates these difficulties better than the decades-long struggle of Paul Rosenberg and his heirs, whose possessions reposed not only in France and Germany but also in the neutral country of Switzerland.\"\n\nIronically, the most delicate battle of all was fought on Swiss soil.\n\nIn September 1945, Nicholas relates, Paul arrived in Zurich armed with lists as well as photographs of paintings that belonged to him. He went straight to the dealers, one after the other. \"The dealer Theodor Fischer, in Lucerne, acquired numerous paintings belonging to Paul Rosenberg in Germany, and sold them to private individuals. Paul Rosenberg at last discovered this and launched an action against the Federal Tribunal of Switzerland. The claim was granted, and the defendants were condemned to restore to the plaintiff the paintings demanded from each of them.\" It was then up to them to make their own claims against the Germans!\n\nPaul's complaints referenced thirty-seven paintings, twenty-two of which were in Fischer's possession. It is easier for me to understand his determination in this case than it is to grasp the impulse that led him to bring suit against small-scale profiteers.\n\nPaul discovered one of his paintings by Matisse, Woman in a Yellow Armchair, at the Neupert Gallery in Zurich, where he was even told it was from a private collection. Going higher up the chain, he went to see Emil B\u00fchrle, another dealer, \"who was surprised to see me, because he had chosen to believe the rumor that I was dead,\" as Paul told the story. Paul then accused him of knowingly buying stolen goods. B\u00fchrle replied that he would return them to Fischer if he got his money back. The two dealers tried to bargain with Paul: he could take back 80 percent of his paintings, leaving the rest. \"But Rosenberg was on a crusade and wanted an official, government-to-government settlement,\" believing that the Swiss government would be willing to negotiate at any price, in order to avoid a scandal.\n\nIf my grandfather had to wait for the liberation to find out the extent of the dispersal of his art, as early as 1942 he had been concerned about the fate of stolen paintings all across Europe. He saw it as an attack on the artistic legacy of the war-torn continent. Trying to motivate the Allies, he offered his assistance and cooperation to the profession as a whole, pro bono.\n\nPaul was resolved to return to Paris, to hunt down his scattered collection since 1944, but the War Ministry had not yet authorized French citizens to come back to their country.\n\nAs soon as he was able to make contact with the painters closest to him, he asked them for certificates, as he did in this telegram to Matisse in November 1944: \"Do you have pictures of last paintings I bought from you, because all taken by Boches [Germans] and resold.\"\n\nHe also insisted, as he did with Braque and Picasso, that Matisse provide a statement that when he visited Floirac in May 1940, he saw one or the other of his own paintings on the walls, proof that Paul had not had sufficient time to sell them before his hasty departure.\n\n* * *\n\nIt was up to the countries in which these acts of plunder had taken place to decide who rightfully owned the recovered works. In France, this task fell to the Commission de R\u00e9cup\u00e9ration Artistique (CRA, the French Restitution Commission), which was set up in 1944 under the tutelage of Jacques Jaujard, the director of the National Museums of France under the occupation, and of the intrepid Rose Valland.\n\nThe CRA quickly returned the works recovered on the Aulnay train, and these were followed by others found at Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria. As an expression of gratitude, Paul donated thirty-three of these paintings to major French museums, including the Louvre.\n\nEven today there are works stamped \"MNR\" and found by the Allies but whose owners have never been identified. And I dare to say it: lying in the basements of prestigious French museums there are still unidentified paintings, whose owners disappeared into the camps and whose inheritors may one day be traced after a vetting of the archives. The museums make no secret of this. They are awaiting the return of those who will not come back.\n\n* * *\n\nAll those battles waged in Paris (whether against big fish or small) or in Switzerland revitalized Paul after long years of waiting. They made him feel that he was achieving a measure of personal justice. At the same time he was gaining perspective. He was clearly aware that these battles were trivial compared with the catastrophe of the Shoah, the atrocities of which were just coming to light. In April 1945 he writes: \"We recovered some paintings looted by the Germans, or by dishonest Frenchmen. But I am not going to complain, it's as nothing when you look at the horrors that the Nazis inflicted on human beings of all races, creeds, and colors.\"\n\nLike the other dealers whose collections had been plundered, he applied for reparations from the Federal Republic of Germany, which in July 1957 passed a law providing financial restitution for losses caused by spoliation. Two years later, in 1959, the Germans proposed a settlement of less than half the sum Paul had claimed. He had died by then, and my grandmother, my uncle, and my mother, wearied by all the procedures involved, accepted their offer.\n\nIn 1970, and again in 1980, restitution was back on the agenda, and my mother and my aunt reclaimed paintings by Monet and L\u00e9ger. Alexandre went so far as to buy back a Degas from its illicit owners. \"I do not like so enriching the successors to thieves,\" he said, as Lynn Nicholas records, \"but have come to learn that the defence of one's own and one's family interests is somewhat like politics and indeed life itself. It is principally the art of the possible.\"\n\nMy grandfather's battle to recover his assets, which occupied the latter years of his life, was certainly legitimate, but I can see how it might have been perceived as unseemly by families whose relatives' ashes are forever buried beneath the crematoriums at Auschwitz or even to those who survived the camps. My grandfather was safe, and so was his family. His son had come back a hero of the Second Armored Division, and he still had enough paintings to do business and live well.\n\nWithout wishing to play psychologist, I think he needed to make the thieves pay, to do his part in the work of remembrance and of bringing the truth to light. Perhaps he had adopted the phrase that the French Jesuit and scholar Michel de Certeau applied to his historical research, and that was quoted by Annette Wieviorka in the conclusion to her work for the Matteoli Commission, as his credo: \"a burial of the dead, that they may return less sadly to their graves.\"\nEPILOGUE\n\nWhen I began my research, I didn't set out to write a biography. Rather, I wanted to create an homage to my grandfather, a series of impressionist strokes to evoke a man who was a stranger to me yesterday, yet who today seems quite familiar. I wanted to conjure a world, the world of modern painting, one that was mysteriously restored to me, in a random sequence of opened cardboard boxes, and was a product of the French national obsession with security that manifested itself as a bureaucratic aberration.\n\nYes, this improvised portrait is about a forgotten era, that of France in its greatest glory, the expression of a resplendent artistic culture in the early years of the twentieth century.\n\nAbout the mutilations of the \"world of yesterday\"\u2014to quote the title of Stefan Zweig's moving autobiography\u2014which disemboweled Europe, tested the planet, and shattered millions of lives.\n\nAbout a family that is mine, which I might at last describe\u2014if I allow myself to borrow from Jean-Paul Sartre\u2014as a whole family, composed of all families and \"as good as all of them and no better than any.\" But a family dearer to me than I would have believed and to which I owe more than I could have imagined.\n\n* * *\n\nIn May 2011, under painful circumstances, I found myself forced once more to live in New York, a prisoner, to some extent, of America. The city of New York itself, which seemed enchanted to me in my childhood, had now become, for both me and my family, a place synonymous with violence and injustice. I had trouble regaining the pleasure of wandering along its streets.\n\nI went back, of course, to Fifty-seventh Street, to the stretch of pavement once occupied by the first Galerie Rosenberg, where the luxury boutiques now extend, between Fifth and Madison. I walked along Seventy-ninth Street, in front of the last of the family galleries, on the Upper East Side, which now strikes me as prodigiously ordinary.\n\nIn midtown, I sauntered through the Museum of Modern Art, where, in the room reserved for the impressionists, so rich in dazzling works, I fix my attention on the portrait that stares pointedly at the visitors: that of van Gogh's friend and model Joseph Roulin, the famous postman with the bushy beard, the word \"Postes\" proudly emblazoned on his cap. That painting was given to the museum by my grandparents, who were so grateful to Alfred Barr and his country for offering them asylum and the recovery of their dignity. How could I allow the chaos of my recent reality to trample cherished childhood memories? How could I resent the entire city over one grueling experience? I never expected these pages, which opened with an identity denied in France, to finish on a forced, turbulent stay in America.\n\nBut that of course is another story. If I were a journalist, I might one day write a book about it.\nNOTES\n\nRUE LA BO\u00c9TIE\n\n. E. T\u00e9riade, \"Feuilles volantes,\" supplement, _Cahiers d'art_ 10 (1927).\n\n. Quoted in Pierre Nahon, _Les Marchands d'art en France, XIXe et XXe si\u00e8cles_ (Paris: \u00c9ditions de la Diff\u00e9rence, 1998).\n\nNUMBER 21 UNDER THE GERMANS\n\n. Quoted in Neil Levi, \"'Judge for Yourselves!': The 'Degenerate Art' Exhibition as Political Spectacle,\" _October_ 85 (Summer 1998): 41\u201364.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Lynn H. Nicholas, _The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War_ (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).\n\n. See the historical and intellectual treatment of this passage in ibid.\n\n. Ibid., 13.\n\n. Ibid., 7.\n\n. Laurence Bertrand Dorl\u00e9ac, _L'Art de la d\u00e9faite, 1940\u20131944_ (Paris: Seuil, 1993).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Rose Valland, _Le Front de l'art: D\u00e9fense des collections fran\u00e7aises, 1939\u20131945_ (Paris: Plan, 1961; repr. Paris: R\u00e9union des Mus\u00e9es Nationaux, 1997).\n\n. Laurent Joly, _Vichy dans la \"solution finale\": Histoire du Commissariat g\u00e9n\u00e9ral aux questions juives, 1941\u20131944_ (Paris: Grasset, 2006).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Joseph Billig, _Le Commissariat g\u00e9n\u00e9ral aux questions juives, 1941\u20131944_ (Vichy: \u00c9ditions du Centre, 1955).\n\n. Quoted in Dorl\u00e9ac, _L'Art de la d\u00e9faite._\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line, _Lettres_ , edited by Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).\n\nFLOIRAC\n\n. Correspondence quoted by Alex Danchev, Braque's authorized biographer, in _Georges Braque: A Life_ (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Document quoted in the lawyers' notes for recuperations after the war. Family archives.\n\n. Henri Matisse archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Paul Rosenberg, \"French Artists and the War,\" _Art in Australia_ , December 1941\u2013January 1942.\n\n. Emmanuelle Loyer, _Paris \u00e0 New York: Intellectuels et artistes fran\u00e7ais en exil 1940\u20131947_ (Paris: Grasset, 2005).\n\n. Quoted in ibid.\n\n. See Dan Franck, _Minuit_ (Paris: Grasset, 2010).\n\n. Family archives.\n\n. Loyer, _Paris \u00e0 New York_.\n\nGENNEVILLIERS\n\n. Loyer, _Paris \u00e0 New York._\n\nDEALER\n\n. Pierre Assouline, _L'Homme de l'art: D.-H. Kahnweiler, 1884\u20131979_ (Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Michael C. FitzGerald, _Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art_ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).\n\n. Family archives.\n\n. Assouline, _L'Homme de l'art._\n\n. Rosenberg, \"French Artists and the War.\"\n\n. Albert Wolff, \"Le Calendrier parisien,\" _Le Figaro_ , April 3, 1876.\n\n. Family archives.\n\nCH\u00c2TEAUDUN, OP\u00c9RA, AND MADISON AVENUE\n\n. Paul Rosenberg: \" _Je suis n\u00e9...,_ \" autobiographical sketch, from which the quotations in this chapter are taken. Family archives.\n\n. T\u00e9riade, \"Feuilles volantes.\"\n\n. Henri Matisse archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Nahon, _Les Marchands d'art._\n\n. Hector Feliciano, _The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art_ (New York: Basic Books, 1997).\n\n. Ren\u00e9 Gimpel, _Journal d'un collectionneur: Marchand de tableaux_ (Paris: Calmann-L\u00e9vy, 1963).\n\n. _The New York Times_ , December 7, 1953.\n\n. Family archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Henri Matisse archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nMOTHER AND CHILD\n\n. Picasso archives, Mus\u00e9e Picasso.\n\n. FitzGerald, _Making Modernism._\n\nPAUL AND PIC\n\n. The language is from FitzGerald, _Making Modernism_.\n\n. Nahon, _Les Marchands d'art._\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. FitzGerald, _Making Modernism._\n\n. Family archives.\n\n. Roland Penrose, _Picasso: His Life and Work_ , 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).\n\n. All the letters that follow in this chapter are from the Picasso archives.\n\n. FitzGerald, _Making Modernism_.\n\n. Pierre Daix, _Dictionnaire Picasso_ (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995).\n\nBOULEVARD MAGENTA\n\n. Vincent Noce, \"L'Histoire contre Wildenstein,\" _Lib\u00e9ration_ , May 13, 2000.\n\nA LONG RELATIONSHIP\n\n. Henri Matisse archives.\n\nTHE WAR YEARS IN NEW YORK\n\n. Henri Matisse archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Franck, _Minuit_.\n\n. Loyer, _Paris \u00e0 New York._\n\nPREOCCUPATIONS OF THE HEART\n\n. Dorl\u00e9ac, _L'Art de la d\u00e9faite._\n\n. Danchev, _Georges Braque._\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Franck, _Minuit._\n\n. Rosenberg, \"French Artists and the War.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Maurice de Vlaminck, \"Opinions libres... sur la peinture,\" _Com\u0153dia_ , June 6, 1942.\n\n. Dorl\u00e9ac, _L'Art de la d\u00e9faite._\n\n. In his book _Le Cabinet des douze_ , Laurent Fabius mentions this canvas, as well as _The Charnel House_ of 1945, showing how during this period Picasso's clashing, violent, broken painting symbolizes the trauma of war.\n\n. Picasso archives.\n\n. Dorl\u00e9ac _, L'Art de la d\u00e9faite._\n\n. Franck, _Minuit._\n\n. Dorl\u00e9ac, _L'Art de la d\u00e9faite._\n\n. Rosenberg, \"French Artists and the War.\"\n\n. \"Picasso\" file, document requesting naturalization, November 30, 1942, Archives of the Paris Police Prefecture.\n\nTHE TRAIN, SCHENKER, AND THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE\n\n. Valland, _Le Front de l'art._\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Le pillage de l'art en France pendant l'Occupation et la situation des 2,000 \u0153uvres confi\u00e9es aux mus\u00e9es nationaux\" (The Looting of Art in France During the French Occupation and the Location of the 2,000 Works Confiscated from the National Museums), a contribution from the administration of the Mus\u00e9es de France and the Centre Pompidou to the works of the Matteoli Commission on the spoliation of Jews in France, 2000.\n\n. Annette Wieviorka, \"Des spoliations aux restitutions,\" in Tal Bruttmann (ed.), _Pers\u00e9cutions et spoliations des Juifs pendant la seconde guerre mondiale_ (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2004), 13\u201322.\n\n. Records of the Office of Strategic Services (RG 226); formerly Security Classified Intelligence reports (\"XL\" Series), 1941\u20131946. Document in English and French. For the latter, the list is signed \"Michel Martin, charg\u00e9 de mission au D\u00e9partement des peintures, rue de Tocqueville, November 7, 1944.\"\n\n. Family archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Trial record, family archives.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Nicholas, _Rape of Europa_ , 415.\n\n. _Journal des tribunaux_ , Geneva, August 1948.\n\n. Nicholas, _Rape of Europa_ , 418.\n\n. Ibid., 421.\nBIBLIOGRAPHY\n\nAssouline, Pierre. Le Dernier des Camondo. Revised and expanded edition. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1999.\n\n______. L'Homme de l'art: D.-H. Kahnweiler, 1884\u20131979. Paris: Gallimard Folio, 1989.\n\nBillig, Joseph. Le Commissariat g\u00e9n\u00e9ral aux questions juives, 1941\u20131944. 3 Volumes. Vichy: \u00c9ditions du Centre, 1955.\n\nCabanne, Pierre. Le Si\u00e8cle de Picasso. 4 volumes. Revised and expanded edition. Paris: Gallimard Folio-Essais, 1992.\n\nC\u00e9line, Louis-Ferdinand. Lettres. Edited by Henri Godard and Jean-Paul Louis. Paris: Gallimard, 2009.\n\nDaix, Pierre. Dictionnaire Picasso. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995.\n\nDanchev, Alex. Georges Braque: A Life. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2005.\n\nDesprairies, C\u00e9cile. Paris dans la Collaboration. Paris: Seuil, 2009.\n\n______. Ville lumi\u00e8re, ann\u00e9es noires: Les Lieux du Paris de la Collaboration. Paris: Deno\u00ebl, 2008.\n\nde Sta\u00ebl, Fran\u00e7oise. Nicolas de Sta\u00ebl: Catalogue raisonn\u00e9 de l'\u0153uvre peint. Neuch\u00e2tel, Switzerland: Ides et Calendes, 1997.\n\nde Vlaminck, Maurice. \"Opinions libres... sur la peinture.\" Com\u0153dia, June 6, 1942.\n\nDorl\u00e9ac, Laurence Bertrand. L'Art de la d\u00e9faite, 1940\u20131944. Paris: Seuil, 1993.\n\nDuncan, David Douglas. Goodbye Picasso. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1974.\n\nFabius, Laurent. Le Cabinet des douze: Regards sur des tableaux qui font la France. Paris: Gallimard, 2010.\n\nFeliciano, Hector. The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art. New York: Basic Books, 1997.\n\nFitzGerald, Michael C. Making Modernism: Picasso and the Creation of the Market for Twentieth-Century Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.\n\nFranck, Dan. Minuit. Paris: Grasset, 2010.\n\nGee, Malcolm. Dealers, Critics, and Collections of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981.\n\nGimpel, Ren\u00e9. Journal d'un collectionneur: Marchand de tableaux. Paris: Calmann-L\u00e9vy, 1963.\n\nGreen, Christopher. Cubism and Its Enemies: Modern Movements and Reaction in French Art, 1916\u20131928. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.\n\nJoly, Laurent. Vichy dans la \"solution finale\": Histoire du Commissariat g\u00e9n\u00e9ral aux questions juives, 1941\u20131944. Paris: Grasset, 2006.\n\nLevi, Neil. \"'Judge for Yourselves!': The 'Degenerate Art' Exhibition as Political Spectacle,\" October 85 (Summer 1998): 41\u201364.\n\nLoyer, Emmanuelle. Paris \u00e0 New York: Intellectuels et artistes fran\u00e7ais en exil 1940\u20131947. Paris: Grasset, 2005.\n\nNahon, Pierre. Les Marchands d'art en France, XIXe et XXe si\u00e8cles. Paris: \u00c9ditions de la Diff\u00e9rence, 1998.\n\nNicholas, Lynn H. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.\n\nNoce, Vincent. \"L'Histoire contre Wildenstein.\" Lib\u00e9ration, May 13, 2000.\n\nPenrose, Roland. Picasso: His Life and Work. 3rd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.\n\nRosenberg, Paul. \"French Artists and the War.\" Art in Australia, December 1941\u2013January 1942.\n\nT\u00e9riade, E. \"Feuilles volantes,\" supplement, Cahiers d'art 10 (1927).\n\nValland, Rose. Le Front de l'art: D\u00e9fense des collections fran\u00e7aises, 1939\u20131945. Paris: Plon, 1961; reprint edition, Paris: R\u00e9union des Mus\u00e9es Nationaux, 1997.\n\nVollard, Ambroise. En \u00e9coutant C\u00e9zanne, Degas, Renoir. Paris: Grasset, 2003.\n\nWieviorka, Annette. \"Des spoliations aux restitutions.\" In Pers\u00e9cutions et spoliations des Juifs pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, edited by Tal Bruttmann, 13\u201322. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 2004.\n\nWolff, Albert. \"Le Calendrier parisien.\" Le Figaro, April 3, 1876.\nACKNOWLEDGMENTS\n\nAll the letters and quotations from Paul Rosenberg cited in this book are previously unpublished. Most of them come from my personal archives, as well as those kept by my aunt Elaine Rosenberg. I should particularly like to thank her, as well as my cousin Elisabeth Rosenberg-Clark, for graciously granting me access to the many boxes of documents from my grandfather's gallery, from before and after the war. These archives were preserved in New York, at my aunt's house, before being passed on to the Museum of Modern Art.\n\nThanks, of course, to Anne Baldassari, the director of the Mus\u00e9e Picasso, who, before the construction that forced the museum to close for more than two years, granted me shelter in its library so that I could dig around in the ample collection of letters from Paul Rosenberg to Pablo Picasso, which were given to the museum by the Picasso family. She generously and enthusiastically allowed me to reproduce extracts from that correspondence here.\n\nWanda de Gu\u00e9briant, the director of the Matisse archives that were kept in the painter's house at Issy-les-Moulineaux, helped me access the archives of Henri Matisse and allowed me to reproduce some of the painter's correspondence with my grandfather, again previously unpublished. I am extremely grateful to her.\n\nFinally, I should like to mention Didier Schulmann, the curator at the Mus\u00e9e National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, who was so kind as to grant me access to the photographic documents of the exhibitions at the Galerie Paul Rosenberg and to allow me to reproduce them.\n\n1. My grandfather in morning jacket before the First World War\n\n2. My uncle Alexandre \"Kiki\" Rosenberg, a lieutenant in the Second Armored Division, at the liberation of Paris. He served for four years under General Leclerc. After the war he succeeded my grandfather as the director of the gallery Paul Rosenberg & Co.\n\n3. The catalog of a 1926 exhibition of recent works by Picasso\n\n4. Paul Rosenberg & Co., East Fifty-seventh Street, New York, 1941\u20131953\n\n5. Micheline en infirmi\u00e8re (Micheline as a Nurse), a drawing of my mother by Picasso that disappeared during the Second World War and has yet to be found\n\n6. The foyer of the gallery on rue La Bo\u00e9tie, featured on the cover of a 1935 exhibition catalog\n\n7. A view of the interior of the gallery on rue La Bo\u00e9tie, featured on the cover of a 1936 exhibition catalog\n\n8. Micheline au lapin (Micheline with Rabbit), another Picasso drawing of my mother that vanished during the Second World War and has not yet been recovered\n\n9. Portrait de Madame Rosenberg et sa fille (Mother and Child), painted by Picasso in 1918, at the Mus\u00e9e Picasso\n\n10. Postcard sent by Picasso to my mother from London in 1919, when she was two years old\n\n11. The catalog of a 1927 exhibition of one hundred drawings by Picasso\n\n12. A photograph of Picasso in the 1920s, which he inscribed to my grandfather\n\n13. The main stairway of the gallery on rue La Bo\u00e9tie, with paintings by Picasso and Andr\u00e9 Masson\n\n14. The gallery on rue La Bo\u00e9tie during a Picasso and Marie Laurencin exhibition\n\n15. A broken photographic plate of a 1937 Braque exhibition at rue La Bo\u00e9tie\n\n16. The photograph of a painting by Georges Braque that was used as a model for the design of the marble mosaics set into the floor at rue La Bo\u00e9tie\n\n17. An exhibition of drawings by Matisse at rue La Bo\u00e9tie, June 1937\n\n18. The Matisse exhibition of October\u2013November 1938\n\n19. My grandfather with a Matisse painting in the 1930s\n\n20. The Institut d'\u00c9tude des Questions Juives (IEQJ, Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions) was inaugurated at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie in May 1941. This photograph shows the notoriously anti-Semitic author and guest of honor, Louis-Ferdinand C\u00e9line (left), in front of the building.\n\n21.\/22. Posters advertising The Jew and France, an exhibition organized by the IEQJ and on view at the Palais Berlitz in 1941\n\n23. The installation of a portrait of Marshal P\u00e9tain in the foyer of 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie for the inauguration of the IEQJ\n\n24. C\u00e9line at the IEQJ in May 1941\n\n25. The slogan in the events hall at the IEQJ reads, \"We fight against the Jew to give France back its true face: a native face\"; beneath it is a poster \"explaining\" genetics.\n\n26. A poster of the \"Jewish bird of prey\" devouring a bloodied France in the IEQJ's events hall. The paneling and glass of my grandfather's exhibition space are visible in the photograph.\n\n27. My grandfather, in one of his favorite poses, examining a painting\n\n28. My grandfather in New York, cigarette holder dangling from his lips, showing a magnificent Renoir to W. Somerset Maugham\n\n29. With my grandparents Paul and Margot in the summer of 1950, when I was two years old\n\n30. Marie Laurencin painted my portrait when I was four.\n\n31. With Picasso at his farmhouse in Notre-Dame-de-Vie, near Mougins, in 1968\n\n32. My grandfather at rest\u2014a rare sight. This photograph was taken by my aunt Elaine in the 1950s.\n\n33. My grandfather as he remains in my childhood memories\n\n34. With my grandfather in the early 1950s. In his hand is an ever-present pack of Lucky Strikes.\nA NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nAnne Sinclair is Paul Rosenberg's granddaughter and one of France's best-known journalists. For thirteen years she was the host of 7 sur 7, a weekly news and politics television show for which she interviewed world figures of the day, including Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Madonna. The editorial director of Le Huffington Post (France), Sinclair has written two bestselling books on politics.\nILLUSTRATION CREDITS\n\nFrontispiece: Private collection\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\nCOLOR INSERT\n\n1: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n2: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n3: Mus\u00e9e Picasso, Paris\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n4: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n5: Family archives\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n6: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n7: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n8: Family archives\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n9: Mus\u00e9e Picasso, Paris\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n10: Mus\u00e9e Picasso, Paris\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n11: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n12: Mus\u00e9e Picasso, Paris\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n13: Family archives\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n14: Centre Pompidou\u2014Mnam\u2014Biblioth\u00e8que Kandinsky\u2014Fonds Paul Rosenberg\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n15: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n16: Centre Pompidou\u2014Mnam\u2014Biblioth\u00e8que Kandinsky\u2014Fonds Paul Rosenberg\/ADAGP, Paris, 2012\n\n17: Centre Pompidou\u2014Mnam\u2014Biblioth\u00e8que Kandinsky\u2014Fonds Paul Rosenberg\n\n18: Centre Pompidou\u2014Mnam\u2014Biblioth\u00e8que Kandinsky\u2014Fonds Paul Rosenberg\n\n19: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n20: \u00a9 Roger-Viollet\n\n21: \u00a9 LAPI\/Roger-Viollet\n\n22: \u00a9 LAPI\/Roger-Viollet\n\n23: \u00a9 Roger-Viollet\n\n24: \u00a9 Roger-Viollet\n\n25: \u00a9 Roger-Viollet\n\n26: \u00a9 Roger-Viollet\n\n27: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n28: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n29: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n30: Private collection\/ADAGP, Paris, 2012\n\n31: Family archives\/Succession Picasso, 2012\n\n32: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n33: Family archives\/All rights reserved\n\n34: Family archives\/All rights reserved\nFarrar, Straus and Giroux\n\n18 West 18th Street, New York 10011\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2012 by \u00c9ditions Grasset & Fasquelle\n\nTranslation copyright \u00a9 2014 by Shaun Whiteside\n\nAll rights reserved\n\nOriginally published in French in 2012 by Bernard Grasset, France, as 21, rue La Bo\u00e9tie\n\nEnglish translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux\n\nFirst American edition, 2014\n\nOwing to limitations of space, illustration credits appear at the back of the book.\n\neBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nSinclair, Anne, author.\n\n[21, rue La Bo\u00e9tie. English]\n\nMy grandfather's gallery : a family memoir of art and war \/ Anne Sinclair; translated by Shaun Whiteside.\n\npages cm\n\nISBN 978-0-374-25162-8 (hardback) \u2014 ISBN 978-0-374-71179-5 (ebook)\n\n1. Sinclair, Anne\u2014Family. 2. Rosenberg, Paul, 1881\u20131959. 3. Journalists\u2014France\u2014Biography. 4. Art dealers\u2014France\u2014Biography. I. Whiteside, Shaun, translator. II. Title.\n\nPN5183.S54 A313 2014\n\n709.2\u2014dc23\n\n[B]\n\n2014004038\n\nwww.fsgbooks.com\n\nwww.twitter.com\/fsgbooks \u2022 www.facebook.com\/fsgbooks\n\nFrontispiece: Drawing of Paul Rosenberg by Pablo Picasso, winter 1918\u20131919\n*A French lawyer who, along with his wife, Beate, dedicated his life to deportees. The Klarsfelds were known as Nazi hunters.\n\n\u2020Maurice Papon was sentenced in 1998 for \"complicity in crimes against humanity\" for his actions between 1942 and 1944, when he was the official representative of Vichy in the prefecture of Gironde, and especially for deporting Jews.\n\n*Translator's note: Both of Anne's grandmothers were named Marguerite. For clarity, Anne's paternal grandmother is referred to here and throughout as Marguerite, while her maternal grandmother is called by her family nickname, Margot.\n\n*Translator's note: The Bettencourt affair was a 2010 French political scandal that erupted over Liliane Bettencourt's illegal political campaign donations to members of the French government associated with Nicolas Sarkozy.\n\n*Marcel Ophuls, in his film The Sorrow and the Pity, shows pictures of the exhibition that always haunted me, even before I knew that it was at 21 rue La Bo\u00e9tie that the show had been conceived.\n\n*Translator's note: Bagatelles pour un massacre and L'\u00c9cole des cadavres were two rabidly anti-Semitic pamphlets written by the respected novelist.\n\n*The period from September 3, 1939, to May 10, 1940, after Britain and France had declared war on Germany but before any Western power had mobilized land forces against the German Reich.\n\n*Historian, founder with Lucien Febvre of the Annales School, and author of one of the finest books about the end of the Third Republic, L'\u00c9trange d\u00e9faite.\n\n*At first, Roosevelt's isolationist America wanted to maintain good relations with the Vichy government and was therefore reluctant to welcome refugees with open arms.\n\n*A formula applied to works of art recovered from the Nazis and kept in the national museums while their owners were not yet identified.\n\n*A French painter contemporary with Braque and Gris, whose first exhibition was held at the Rosenberg Gallery in 1921.\n\n*One day when Salvador Dal\u00ed politely approached Paul in a restaurant to ask him to represent him, Paul's reply was harsh, crude, and lacking in vision: \"Monsieur, my gallery is a serious institution, not made for clowns.\"\n\n*Translator's note: The Algiers Putsch, which led to General de Gaulle's return to power.\n\n*General de Gaulle conducted a very personal and independent foreign policy, which was not always in line with the American one, especially when he removed France from NATO.\n\n*An exhibition of do-it-yourself inventions, where the most original or useful thing gets an award.\n\n*Now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.\n\n*The regime that was in effect from the end of World War II through its collapse in 1958, when de Gaulle established the Fifth Republic.\n\n*Ninety-three, in 2014.\n\n*Pierre Laval (1883\u20131945) served as prime minister of France from 1931 to 1932, as vice president of Vichy's Council of Ministers in 1940, and as head of government from 1942 to 1944. Convicted of high treason, he was executed in 1945.\n\n*For the Institute for the Study of Jewish Questions, see the chapter \"Number 21 Under the Germans\" (p. 27).\n\n## Contents\n\n  1. Title Page\n  2. Copyright Notice\n  3. Dedication\n  4. Contents\n  5. Prologue\n  6. Introduction\n  7. Rue La Boetie\n  8. Number 21 Under the Germans\n  9. Floirac\n  10. At the Centre Pompidou\n  11. Gennevilliers\n  12. Dealer\n  13. Chateaudun, Opera, and Madison Avenue\n  14. Mother and Child\n  15. Paul and Pic\n  16. Boulevard Magenta\n  17. Pi-ar-enco\n  18. A Long Relationship\n  19. The War Years in New York\n  20. Preoccupations of the Heart\n  21. The Train, Schenker, and the Art of the Possible\n  22. Epilogue\n  23. Bibliography\n  24. Acknowledgments\n  25. Frontispiece\n  26. Photographs\n  27. A Note About the Author\n  28. Illustration Credits\n  29. Copyright\n\n## Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Table of Contents\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}