Location: Bonaparte family apartment, Paris (France)
Date: Summer 1966 – Autumn 1968
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The first year of his new life was a torture of absolute purity, a waking nightmare from which no military training could have protected him.
Lazare Bonaparte, a former Service Action agent and complex systems architect at ARM Holdings, the man who had held a line of fire for seven minutes with an AK-47 in his hands, was a prisoner. His cell was no more than one meter twenty long by sixty centimeters wide. It was lined with white wooden bars and lined with pastel-coloured blankets.
The real hell was not physical confinement, but the betrayal of one's own flesh. His mind was spinning at the dizzying speed of an overclocked processor, analyzing its environment, formulating hypotheses, structuring complex logical architectures. He remembered the perfect syntax of the C language, the equations of thermodynamics, the coppery smell of blood on the tarmac of N'Djamena, the curve of a 7.62 caliber magazine. He possessed the conceptual vocabulary of a sixty-year-old man.
But his central nervous system was that of an infant of a few weeks old.
It was a humiliation at every moment. When hunger gripped him, his intellect politely made the rational request for a caloric intake. Yet his body took over with primitive violence. His vocal cords contracted against his will, his tiny lungs filled with air, and he began to scream, his face flushed, his fists clenched, unable to suppress this archaic survival reflex. He was crying with hunger, but deep down, he was crying with rage at this helplessness.
He didn't control anything. Neither his sphincters, which he released with silent and burning shame, nor his neck, unable to support the weight of a skull whose fontanelles were not even fused yet. His hands, which knew how to dismantle a breech in less than ten seconds in total darkness, were nothing more than chubby little appendages, agitated by uncontrollable spasms, unable to grasp the slightest shape with precision. His eyes took months to focus, condemning him to observe the world through a blurry, milky filter.
So, in order not to go mad in this sarcophagus of flesh, Lazarus did the only thing he still mastered: he observed.
The cradle was his lookout post. The family apartment, located in the upscale districts of the capital, exuded order, bourgeois discipline and austere elegance. It was a structured, hushed universe, punctuated by the ticking of a great Comtoise clock and the footsteps of his parents on the Pointe de Hongrie parquet floor.
Very quickly, Lazarus identified the two forces that governed this new world.
The first was a towering shadow, a block of certainties carved out of rock. Auguste Bonaparte. His father. Lazarus studied it through the bars of his bed with the focus of an intelligence analyst. Auguste was a soldier at heart, an internal intelligence officer at the DST, a man accustomed to secrecy, mistrust and the perpetual assessment of threats. When Augustus bent over the cradle, Lazarus did not see the blissful wonder of a young father, but the scrutinizing gaze of an examiner. The man smelled cold tobacco, printing ink and leather. His gestures were precise, economical, devoid of any sentimental embellishment. He loved her, Lazare understood him, but it was a demanding love, a love that was already waiting for results, solidity, staying steady. Augustus sought in his son's eyes the spark of intelligence, the promise of strength.
The second force was the light that softened the stone. Madeleine Bonaparte, née Dufresne. His mother. She was the heiress to a long line of textile industrialists from the North, but she had left the bitterness of business to her elder brother, Henri. Madeleine was all sweetness, intuition and enveloping warmth. When she took him in her arms, the scent of his rice powder and lavender calmed Lazare's existential terrors. She walked quietly, anticipated her simulated tears, guessed the variations in her temperature with the precision of a measuring instrument. She was the balm on the rigidity of this apartment.
But Magdalene also posed, unwittingly, the greatest danger to Lazarus' mind.
It was during his eighth month that Lazarus became aware of the seismic fault on which he was standing. He was lying on his play mat, in the center of the living room. Auguste read the Figaro in his club-chair, while Madeleine folded some laundry. A ray of autumnal sunlight hit a crystal prism on the coffee table, projecting a miniature rainbow onto the carpet.
Lazarus had stopped. He looked at the decomposed light. His engineering mind calculated the angle of refraction, remembering the laws of optics, the wavelength of photons. He remained like this for long minutes, his face serious, his eyebrows furrowed, lost in a complex analytical meditation that had absolutely nothing to do with the wonder of a baby.
He suddenly felt a gaze weigh on him.
Auguste had lowered his newspaper. The father observed his son with a disturbing fixity. The domestic intelligence officer narrowed his eyes. The infant's attitude was not normal. She was too still, too concentrated, too... adult. The silence in the room thickens. Lazarus read in his father's eyes the beginning of a question, the birth of a rational doubt in the face of an anomaly.
And Lazarus understood, with the lightning lucidity of a survivor.
If they see who I am, if they understand what's in my head, they'll be scared. The year was 1967. Child psychiatry was in its infancy. A child who behaved like an adult would not be considered a divine prodigy, but a neurological aberration, a frightening case study. Auguste would drag him from specialist to specialist, looking for the clinical cause of this too old look. Madeleine would cry in terror at this son who didn't need to grow up. He would be a monster in his own house. He would be the subject of permanent dissection.
It had to disappear. The sixty-year-old man had to bury himself alive. The engineer had to build his most complex masterpiece, his most vital line of code: an impenetrable social mask.
Survival required lying. A total, absolute lie, every second.
Lazarus' heart beat wildly. He broke off eye contact with Augustus, turned his head toward the crystal prism, opened his mouth wide, and, mobilizing facial muscles he hated, he let out a high-pitched, meaningless chirp. He stretched his chubby little hands toward the colored light and stupidly slammed the carpet with his palms, simulating the primal excitement of an animal attracted to what glittered. He forced himself to drool slightly.
Auguste relaxed his breathing, invisibly. The newspaper went up in front of his face. The anomaly was ruled out. It was just a baby.
That day, in the center of the bourgeois salon, the agent of the Action Service was back on duty. The mission was no longer to infiltrate a militia in the Middle East or protect civilians in a shopping mall. The mission was called "Childhood". The objective was to reassure the target. The field of operation was the Parisian apartment.
From then on, Lazarus' existence became a choreography of exhausting mental cruelty.
He learned to dose information. He knew perfectly well how to sit, how to crawl, the principles of balance and gravity having no secrets for him. But he forced himself to fail. He dropped to the side, feigning weakness in his spine. He cried when his rattle slipped from him, when he knew very well that all he had to do was stretch out his arm. He was playing the comedy of ignorance.
But the mask came at a price.
Every evening, when darkness invaded the room and silence finally set in, fatigue struck him down. Playing at being stupid required a phenomenal expenditure of cognitive energy. It was necessary to permanently inhibit his logical reflexes, to stifle his analytical capacities, to simulate naivety.
The worst was at bedtime. Madeleine was slowly entering the room, shrouded in the amber light of the hallway. She approached the cradle, bent over it. She stroked his cheek with the backs of her warm fingers and whispered sweet words, in a voice charged with unconditional love.
"Sleep, my little angel. Mommy is there. »
Lazarus closed his eyes under the caress. He absorbed this maternal warmth, he who had been orphaned so quickly in his first life, he who had grown old and died without anyone holding his hand. He loved her, with that visceral, desperate love that is typical of those who know the price of fragile things.
But under her closed eyelids, a dull pain crushed her chest. Madeleine loved a mirage. She was putting her lips on the forehead of an innocent child who did not exist. Little did she know that beneath that fragile skull were hidden cryptography calculations, the memory of corpses in the sand, and the relentless vision of future technological empires. Lazarus stole his affection by deceit.
The impostor slept in the fresh sheets. The soldier wept in silence.
The months passed, slow and heavy. As 1968 progressed, when the outside world seemed to be agitated by political upheavals whose muffled echoes reached the double-glazed windows of the apartment, Lazare perfected his covering. He learned to walk, voluntarily stumbling over the Persian carpets under the watchful eye of Augustus, dosing his progress to stay within the high, but clinically acceptable, curve of modern pediatrics.
He was preparing the ground. He must have been a brilliant child, of course, because he would need this head start to build his empire and accomplish his mission of sovereignty for France. But he must have been a child, with his weaknesses, his laughter and his innocent nonsense. The balance was terrifyingly precarious.
Lazare Bonaparte had just celebrated his second birthday. He knew how to walk. Soon, the real ordeal would begin. We were going to have to talk. And language, he knew, was the weapon by which one always betrayed oneself.
Does this first part translate the psychological violence of his state as a "prisoner" and the foundation of this great emotional lie that underlies the whole dynamic with his parents?
If the tone suits you, I can write you Part 2, where we will discuss the comedy of language (until he is 4 years old), Auguste's suspicious look at this "little soldier", and the definitive consolidation of this invisible wall between him and his family.
Location: Bonaparte family apartment, Paris (France) Date: 1968 – 1970 (from 2 years to 4 years) Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Omniscient (internal focus)
The mastery of the body had only been the first test. Lazarus' real prison closed in on him when it was time to learn to speak.
On the eve of his second birthday, in the spring of 1968, when the streets of Paris were ablaze and the distant smell of tear gas sometimes filtered through the windows of the bourgeois apartment, Lazare was waging his own trench warfare, intimate and silent. Language is the mirror of thought. Now, Lazarus' thought was that of a microprocessor engineer, a military strategist, a man who had gone through the twilight of death. His brain was bubbling with complex concepts: geopolitics, silicon architecture, interest rates, ballistics.
But her mouth must have stammered.
Each speech was an exercise in reverse translation, a deliberate degradation of his intelligence. When he was thirsty, his mind would formulate a clear and courteous sentence. Still, he had to contract his jaw, force his tongue against the roof of his mouth and make a broken sound, a ridiculous "lolo" or "ba", pointing a hesitant finger at the crystal decanter.
It was exhausting. Lying by silence was one thing; Lying by words required constant vigilance. He had to simulate phonetic hesitation, stumble over double consonants, invent syntax mistakes that he would then, over the months, have to "correct" to simulate a natural learning curve.
Sometimes, the desire to shout the truth seized him. At family dinners, when the conversation deviated on the future of France, on General de Gaulle's industrial policy or on tensions with the Soviet bloc, Lazare, sitting in his high chair, the spoonful of mashed potatoes halfway between his lips, burned to intervene. He knew what was going to happen. He knew about the fall of the Wall, the advent of the Internet, ferocious globalization, American hegemony that was going to crush technological Europe. But he swallowed his carrot puree and let out a silly laugh, his eyes fixed on the chandelier. The invisible man now wore a mask of childlike flesh.
However, this mask almost cracked on a Sunday afternoon in November 1969. Lazarus was then three and a half years old.
The living room of the apartment was bathed in that sharp, gray light typical of the Parisian autumn. Auguste Bonaparte, in his shirt sleeves, was poring over files on the large cherry wood table. The DST's files never left the official offices, but Auguste always had a cryptic notebook that he went through on weekends, his eyes heavy with state secrets.
Lazarus was seated on the great Persian carpet, surrounded by a wooden building set. Theoretically, he was "playing". In reality, his mind was wandering. He handled the small oak cubes with mechanical dexterity, lost in an arduous reflection on the architecture of the future RISC processors that he should design in the next ten years. How can you reduce energy consumption while doubling the clock speed? How can we circumvent Intel's future patents even before they are filed?
Absorbed in his thoughts, Lazarus forgot his surroundings. He forgot the gravity of his child's body. Above all, he forgot who was in the room.
Without realizing it, he had aligned the cubes with millimeter precision, building not a child's castle, but the spatial, three-dimensional representation of a matrix of logic gates. His hands no longer trembled. His gestures were of surgical fluidity. And, worst of all, his posture had betrayed him.
Lazarus' back had straightened. His spine formed a straight, perfect line, his shoulders were slightly thrown back, his chin raised. This was the waiting posture of an agent of the Action Service during a briefing before an airborne mission. A predatory, economic, absolute immobility. A three-year-old child slumps, rounds himself, leans on his elbows. Lazarus, on the other hand, was enthroned on the carpet like a veteran waiting for the order to assault.
The crumpling of the paper ceased.
Lazarus felt the change in pressure in the room even before he heard the voice. Auguste had raised his eyes from his notebook. The silence stretched out, heavy, electric. Lazarus, torn from his silicon mental schemas, became aware of his mistake with an icy shudder. His father's gaze was fixed on him, analytical, piercing, dissecting the anomaly. The intelligence officer did not see a little boy playing. He saw a behavior that did not fit with the psychological and motor profile of the target.
Madeleine entered the living room at that very moment, carrying a tray with two cups of steaming coffee.
"Auguste, you should take a break from your files..." She began, before pausing when she saw the fixity of her husband's gaze.
Augustus did not blink. He pointed to Lazarus with the tip of his fountain pen.
"Magdalene, look at him," said Augustus, in a low, almost whispered voice, but which cracked like a whiplash in Lazarus's mind. "He already stands like a little soldier."
The phrase resounded in the living room. Lazarus felt a drop of cold sweat slide down his spine. His father had just touched the exact truth, without knowing it. If Augustus continued to pull on this thread, if he began to observe his son with the same clinical paranoia that he applied to KGB spies, Lazarus' cover would explode in flight.
The former agent's survival instinct took over in a split second.
Lazarus abruptly relaxed his lumbar muscles. He let his shoulders slump and tipped over to the side with exaggerated awkwardness, knocking over the wooden cube structure in the process, which collapsed with a disorderly clatter. He raised his head to his father, widened his eyes, and let out a crystalline little laugh, perfectly innocent, before grabbing a red cube to bring it to his mouth as if he were about to nibble it.
The illusion was perfect. The predator had once again become harmless prey.
Auguste blinked, as if coming out of a trance. The tension went down. The officer rubbed his temples, no doubt showing the fatigue of his long week. Madeleine set down the tray, smiling tenderly.
"He is a Bonaparte, Auguste. What else did you want it to be? she replied gently.
But Lazarus, his mouth full of the taste of varnish from the wooden cube, knew that he had come close to disaster. Augustus was the eye of Moscow. He would be the greatest threat to the empire that Lazarus was to build. We should be extra careful, build thicker smokescreens. To be brilliant, yes, because his future required it, but to wrap this genius in an unassailable childlike candor.
If Augustus' lucidity terrified Lazarus, Magdalene's blindness devastated him.
The winter of his four years marked the definitive end of his hope of one day being understood. The apartment was white-hot, fighting against the frost that froze the windows overlooking the avenue. It was bedtime. The moment that Lazarus dreaded and cherished at the same time, the moment when the deception reached its emotional climax.
Madeleine had tucked him into her sheets. She smelled of cleansing milk and that slight touch of Shalimar that gave her a protective aura. She sat down on the edge of the bed. The glow of the night-light cast soft shadows on the face of this mother, whom Lazarus observed with the acuteness of a man who knows the fragility of life.
She laid her cool hand on Lazarus' forehead. Her fingers gently parted a lock of her brown hair.
"You look so serious sometimes, my Lazarus," she whispered, her thumb stroking the child's temple. "What's going on in this little head? Are you thinking about planes? Cars? »
Lazarus looked into her eyes. What to say to him? I'm thinking of the architecture of a processor that will make France sovereign in thirty years. I think of the seven minutes when I held a line of fire with a Kalashnikov to save a thousand people before dying of internal bleeding. I think about the fact that I'm older than your own father, Madeleine.
But her lips formed only a drowsy little smile.
The silent drama of Lazare Bonaparte unfolded at that precise moment. He understood, with the implacable coldness of a mathematical equation, that the love of this woman would be forever inaccessible to him in its pure truth. Madeleine loved a son. She loved this four-year-old child, with his fake skinned knees and his feigned laughter. She would give her life for him. But she would never know the man hidden behind her son's eyes. If, by miracle or curse, Lazarus were to confess the truth to her one day, this unconditional love would turn into fear, disbelief, madness.
To protect his mother, he had to lie to her until his last breath. To be loved, he had to accept to be loved only through fiction.
A lonely, uncontrollable tear slid down Lazarus' cheek and died in the pillow. Madeleine wiped it away with a tender gesture, thinking of a childish nocturnal anguish, a banal fleeting nightmare. She leaned over and placed a kiss on his forehead, a seal of blind love.
"Sleep, my love. Mom is watching. No one will hurt you. »
She left the room on tiptoe, leaving the door ajar to let a ray of reassuring light filter through from the hallway.
Alone in the half-light, the sixty-year-old man erased the sweetness of his mother's kiss with an annoyed wave of the hand, furious at his own weakness. He sat up in bed. Her tears ceased instantly. His face closed, smooth, hard, impenetrable.
The year 1970 had just begun. Lazarus was four years old. Its interior architecture was now complete. The foundation of his lie had hardened like reinforced concrete. He would no longer expect anything from his parents, except a façade of normality. He no longer hoped to be understood, neither by them, nor by his older brother Victor who already looked at him as an alien, nor by the outside world.
His mind left the nursery to project itself into the future. Fourteen years separated him from 1984, the year he came of age, the year he could finally act overdraft. Fourteen years of gnawing at the brakes, accumulating intellectual capital, preparing the plans for his future empire.
In the darkness of his Parisian room, the little boy with the eyes that were too old looked at his tiny hands. One day, these hands would shape the silicon that would subjugate the world. One day, France would understand why he had to remain silent.
In the meantime, he would be the perfect son. The silent student. The absolute impostor.