The Ocean's Whistleblower: The Remarkable Life and Work of Daniel Pauly

By David Grémillet

“[Daniel Pauly] is an iconoclastic fisheries scientist ... who is so decidedly global in his life and outlook that he is nearly a man without a country.”—NEW YORK TIMES 

“Daniel Pauly is a friend whose work has inspired me for years.”—TED DANSON

Daniel Pauly is a living legend in the world of marine biology. He coined the influential term “shifting baselines,” in which knowledge of environmental disaster fades over time, leading to a misguided understanding of our world. He blew the whistle on the global fishing industry, alerting the public to the devastation of overfishing. And he developed data-driven research methods that led to groundbreaking discoveries. 

Daniel Pauly is also a man whose life was shaped by struggle. Born after the Second World War to a white French woman and Black American GI in Paris, Pauly’s childhood has been described as Dickensian. His father left before he was born and his mother, whose family did not accept her and her mixed-race son, fell prey to a manipulative Swiss couple who abducted Pauly under murky circumstances. He was taken to Switzerland, where he was treated cruelly as the couple’s servant.  

Pauly escaped to Germany to attend university and, as a young man, travelled to the United States during the 1969 civil rights movement, where he met his father’s family and experienced a political and racial reawakening. From there, he went on to have one of the most decorated careers in the field of marine biology. The Ocean’s Whistleblower “weaves together the challenges of marine research with an astonishing coming-of-age story” (Andrew Sharpless, Oceana) and is told through interviews with colleagues, friends, and Pauly himself. A brilliant book about a brilliant man, The Ocean’s Whistleblower finally profiles one of the most influential scientists of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781771647557

Book preview

Cover: A blurb from actor and ocean activist Ted Danson reads, “Daniel Pauly is an intellectual and human hero. His life story will change you.” A black-and-white photo shows Daniel Pauly wearing wire-rimmed glasses and smiling slightly. His fingers rest on his chin. A strip of blue and gold marbling runs down the left side of the page.Title page: The Ocean’s Whistleblower. The Remarkable Life and Work of Daniel Pauly. David Grémillet. Translated by Georgia Lyon Froman. Logos for the David Suzuki Institute and Greystone Books are at the bottom of the page.

For Yvonne and Jacques, who like biographies.

Table of Contents

I. ORIGINS

A Swiss Childhood

Youth in Germany

The Search for an American Father

II. CONSTRUCTIONS

From Oceanography to Fisheries Biology

Daniel’s First African Experience

Development Aid in Indonesia

Birth of a Career in the Philippines

San Miguel Bay and the Social Dimension of Fisheries

Tropical Statistics

A Pacific Heroine

A Man of Letters

Fish Stories in Peru

Nature in a Box

For All the Fish in the World

Photo Album

III. ON THE WORLD STAGE

The Big Leagues

Fishing Down Marine Food Webs

The Sea Around Us

Chinese Fisheries and Charles Darwin

Uncertain Glory

Reconstructions

Africa Forever

French Allies

First Loves, Final Battles

Epilogue

APPENDICES

Important Dates in the Life of Daniel Pauly

List of Abbreviations and Organizations

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Photo Credits

Index

NOTE FROM

THE TRANSLATOR

All notes included in this book are the work of the author, except those signed TN, for Translator’s Note. Additionally, for the reader’s convenience, when relevant, metric measurements in the text are followed by their equivalent in customary units rounded to the nearest whole number. Monetary amounts are in US dollars unless otherwise specified.

I

Origins

A Swiss Childhood

RENÉE HAD A limp, all because of the bombs. The ones she manufactured in Berlin, then in Frankfurt, and the ones the Allies dropped on her factory one February day in 1944. That year, hundreds of bombers came to pound the German industrial basins, the churches, and the population. Some of the victims were from among the two million French men and women who worked in Germany during the war, willingly or otherwise. Renée crossed the border voluntarily, along with forty thousand of her female compatriots.* French history, always careful to emphasize resistance against the enemy, hardly mentions these women, but German scholars have revealed their existence. They rarely went out of conviction, but rather to flee poverty, the law, or their families. The German occupiers did everything in their power to reduce unemployment in the French regions and recruit cheap labor for their factories.

Renée left the French city of Nancy with the promise of training and better work conditions—and a strong desire to get away from her father, Henri Clément. Henri was a brute, a big, straitlaced policeman who had fought at Verdun and who worshipped Marshal Pétain. Shortly before the First World War, he married Marie Kaltenbach, whose Jewish family in Lorraine wanted nothing to do with him. The couple settled in the Champagne region and had nine children. Renée was the fourth, born in 1923. She had her father’s long face and her mother’s steely gaze and sharp mind. Everyone agreed that Renée should continue her studies, and her schoolmistress supported her as far as she could. But her father wouldn’t hear of it: She’ll work like the rest of them, he declared. And so, at the age of fifteen, Renée began her first job as a domestic in Nancy.

When that American bomb came down on her factory in Germany, Renée was hit in the leg. The woman next to her was killed. In the hospital, Renée risked gangrene and amputation, remaining bedridden for six months. During her convalescence, she was given work mending Wehrmacht uniforms. Because of fabric shortages, by the last few weeks of the war, they were made of crepe. As American troops surrounded Frankfurt, she witnessed the nurses discreetly remove their Nazi armbands. Renée survived the fall of the thousand-year Reich only a little worse for wear and returned, limping slightly, to France. For the rest of her life, she would receive a small disability pension from the German state.

She was back at her parents’ house in Avize by the summer of 1945, when the American military convoys came rolling through on their way east. Ninety miles to the south, in the Yonne, my mother, then fourteen years old, also saw them pass by. She remembers seeing the big Black men with their wide smiles riding atop the trucks. Blacks and whites did not mix in the US Army—the dark-skinned troops formed separate regiments commanded by white officers. These segregated units were generally unarmed and restricted to logistic support. Yet African American soldiers had already sought out combat roles and proved themselves in battle: during the First World War, the Harlem Hellfighters of the 369th Infantry Regiment, aided by the French, demonstrated their fighting prowess at the Battle of the Somme. As a result, the first foreigner to receive the French Croix de Guerre was an African American soldier.* It was not until much later, in 1948, at the beginning of the Korean War, that President Truman officially abolished segregation in the American armed forces.* In the meantime, many a military ambition went unfulfilled, though some African American soldiers pursued their dreams abroad. The most famous of these was James L. H. Peck: when he was not allowed to become a pilot at home, he went to fight in Spain, beginning in 1936. At the controls of a Russian-made Polikarpov fighter, he brought down a dozen fascist planes—including two from the Condor Legion, which had been responsible for the attack on Guernica—becoming the first Black fighter pilot in history. In 1941, a change in American law allowed a unit of African American pilots to begin training in Tuskegee, Alabama. After a half-hour test flight during an official visit to Tuskegee, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt declared, Well, you can fly, alright! The group would go down in history as the Tuskegee Airmen, participating in the Italian campaign aboard their famous Red Tail Mustang fighters.

Winston dreamed of joining them. He was born in 1919 in Little Rock, Arkansas, with the full name Winston R. McLemore. Though he wanted to be a pilot, Winston was a little too impulsive, a little too bad-tempered—and most significantly, he drank like a fish. He never joined the ranks of the elite Black airmen, but instead drove trucks during World War II before reenlisting to serve in Korea and Guam.

In 1945, the American soldier was passing through Avize. Winston met Renée, and the details of their brief affair are theirs alone. Renée was open about their relationship and the ones that followed. This was also a way to defy her father, and she did not hide the fact that the child she was expecting would be mixed race. Winston left for Germany, then returned to the United States. Renée’s father kicked her out of his house. She went to Paris alone and spent a few months working at the Saint-Maurice psychiatric hospital. Then, on May 2, 1946, north of the capital, a little boy was born. She named him Daniel Marc Roger. The life of a single mother, doubly stigmatized by everyday racism, was brutally difficult. Renée worked a factory job and entrusted Daniel, more or less successfully, to the care of various babysitters. The Parisian winter, insufficient ration cards, smoke from the factories, a baby passed from one pair of hands to the next—Daniel was constantly ill. A single photo survives from this period of his life: a wide-eyed toddler with brown hair opens his mouth in delight as he clings to the bar of an antique high chair. The family of two only came together in the evenings and on Sundays.

One summer day in 1948, Renée and Daniel spent a few hours on the banks of the Seine at the Quai de Bercy. A little blond girl played with Daniel while the grown-ups waded in the water. The girl was from Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and she had come to Paris with her parents and two older brothers for a family vacation. Much later, Daniel would call them my Thénardiers,* but I suggest calling them the G---s. Madame G chatted with Renée, presenting herself as a respectable person from La Chaux-de-Fonds. She had come to Paris with her husband (a man of few words) to visit her sister, who lived in Belleville and owned a café with her Algerian husband where immigrants drank tea and played dominos. The G---s thought Daniel was adorable, and Renée opened up about how hard life had been for her, how she worried constantly about her sick baby boy and was struggling to raise him alone.

The exact terms of the agreement that followed are unknown. During her long life, Renée would give slightly different versions of it. What is certain is that the G---s, who had recently lost a son Daniel’s age to meningitis, offered to take the little boy back to Switzerland with them for a few months to give his exhausted mother a break while Daniel recovered his health. Renée accepted the offer, and the G---s went back to La Chaux-de-Fonds with Daniel by steam train, stopping only once, at Besançon. With a mean annual temperature of 43 degrees Fahrenheit, La Chaux-de-Fonds is an austere town spread along the floor of a Swiss valley 3,280 feet above sea level. With its tidy grid-like layout, it reminds me of a military base, its large buildings sporting endless rows of windows, like so many eyes watching the town’s watchmakers toil within. Largely working class and politically communist, the town’s residents have long fought to secure labor rights, as well as many progressive social and cultural policies that can still be seen today.

I arrive there on a sunny afternoon in May of 2016. The train from Geneva runs along the edge of a lake until it reaches Neuchâtel, then climbs straight up the mountain to La Chaux-de-Fonds, a thirty-minute ride that turns out to be very painful for my sinuses. Neuchâtel is only twelve miles from La Chaux-de-Fonds, but the trip was always an expedition, Daniel remembers. Now, there’s a highway tunnel, but at the time, the only way out was through the pass of Vue des Alpes. As soon as there was a lot of snow, we would be cut off from the world, sometimes for several weeks.

I end up in a shabby hotel near the train station—the room is dimly lit and the bed is round, like in a brothel. The neighbors are listening to bad rap music on high volume, and as I walk down the hall, I hear a woman shout from her room: I’m comin’ with five Albanians! I’ll kick your ass!

Though its oversized, austere main street reminds me of a Soviet-style city, La Chaux-de-Fonds is actually a small town. In fact, the countryside is so close that a slight odor of cow manure wafts constantly through the streets. The European metropolises that tend to attract immigrants are a long way off, but the population here is quite diverse. Already, in the train, I was seated across from an African man, likely an Eritrean refugee. In town, school is letting out and a whole bevy of Black schoolchildren pours into the street. Later that evening, I see a jovial Congolese family leaving the municipal theater.

Thanks to some of Daniel’s old Swiss friends, I was able to track down the G---s’ children. The next day, I meet their daughter, who is now seventy-eight years old. When we came back to La Chaux-de-Fonds at the end of the summer of ’48, she recalls, everyone thought my mother had had a baby with an African in Paris. I was very happy, though. I took him everywhere in his pram—he was the town’s main attraction, the only Black child we had ever seen in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The G---s lived on Rue du Puits, on the northern fringes of the town center, across from a gas plant. Their apartment, in a prisonlike five-story building, was government-subsidized, and they were rag-and-bone men by trade. Daniel was another mouth to feed in this state of near poverty, and it seems surprising the family would have agreed to take on the extra burden so easily. In France, as in Switzerland, I am assured that the G---s never took a penny for Daniel’s care. Some even tell me they were motivated by a feeling of solidarity among the down-and-out. But the G---s soon cut ties with Renée—they were supposed to keep Daniel for three months, and initially, they sent news about the boy. When Renée asked to have him back, though, they refused. But she didn’t give up easily, sending letter after letter to the G---s.

In 1949, Renée married Louis Pauly, whom she had met at the Compagnie française des métaux, a French metallurgy company, in Paris. Louis had been raised by social services—after growing up in various orphanages, he had generous ideas about family ties, and he adopted Daniel without even meeting him. I could have had you with an Antillean woman, he would tell Daniel much later. And so, Daniel Clément became Daniel Pauly. Renée informed the G---s and asked again to see her son. By way of answer, they threatened to report her for child abandonment. The little people of France have never trusted the police or the state, so Renée let it go, telling herself that Daniel was better off in Switzerland. She went on to raise seven children with Louis Pauly in public housing in Maisons-Alfort, where her other children would see her cry every year on the second of May without knowing why.

Sometimes, however, Daniel wasn’t far from his real family. When Madame G visited her sister in Paris and left the rest of the brood in Switzerland, she would bring Daniel along—without alerting the Paulys. Daniel remembers that he came home from these trips with fleas, and Madame G with crabs (there were few secrets in the G--family). Growing up in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Daniel never received any of the numerous letters and packages that his mother sent for him, though no one tried to hide his Franco-American origins either. They always let me know that I was different. They told me over and over again that my mother had rejected me, that I should be grateful, that without them, I would have died of hunger. Little by little, their grief over losing their youngest son turned into greed, and I became their servant. As soon as I was old enough to work, I was seen as a resource.

DANIEL DOESN’T REMEMBER much about his early childhood, but some things do stick out. One day, he was in a shop trying to exchange some bottles for the deposit when the cashier asked him why he wasn’t in school. Another day, the school nurses came to give checkups and asked all the little boys to strip down to their underwear. Daniel was embarrassed—he didn’t have any. Later, something similar happened during vaccinations when a nurse cleaned Daniel’s arm with a cotton swab. The cotton came away all black, and his skin changed color. At home, his foster mother yelled at him: You piece of shit kid, I’ll teach you! And after the words came the blows, and after the blows, the closet or the basement.

When I ask her about it, the G---s’ daughter denies everything: "Our moutre* never hit anyone. Tightening her grip on her walker, she tells me, No, Daniel didn’t get any schlagées.† No, we didn’t lock him in the basement, he was nicely dressed and coddled . . . No, it’s not true that he didn’t have a coat in the winter. . . We liked Daniel—he was a little brainiac, I called him my little lawyer. Look how sweet he was. And there, in her cabinet with the other family photos, she points out a frame with four photographs of Daniel as a child, looking serious enough to make a person cry. You would think they had been there for decades, but I know that the G---s’ daughter has taken them out specifically for our interview: on the phone beforehand, she told me, I’ll look . . . I must have some photos of Daniel somewhere. Then the eldest brother arrives. At eighty-four years old, he has survived three bouts with cancer. Maintaining a united front, the two of them tell me a pretty story: We got along well with Daniel, we never understood why he left without saying goodbye, we’d like to have his address so we can write to him. At last, it’s their youngest brother, interviewed in a comfortable café, who confirms Daniel’s version of events: May she rest in peace, but my mother was a horrible person, and she beat Daniel." He chooses to break the silence because he took a few good schlagées himself back in the day. We discuss Daniel’s childhood at length—the cat is out of the bag. More recently, one of the G---s’ relatives also came forward to testify to the fact that Daniel had been mistreated, remembering a little dark-skinned Parisian boy who spent a great deal of time on the sidewalk out in front of their building.

The interesting thing is that almost all the children who did survive very quickly elaborated theories of life that combined dreams and intellectualization. Almost all resilient children have to answer two questions. Asking Why do I have to suffer so much? encourages them to intellectualize. How am I going to manage to be happy despite it all? is an invitation to dream. If this inner determinant of resilience can find a helping hand, the prognosis for these children is not unfavorable.*

Primary school would be Daniel’s first refuge. After a great deal of searching, I manage to find the names of his first three schoolteachers: Mademoiselle Lorette Lüdi (1953–54), Madame Pierre Pantillon (1954–55), and Madame Eva Grandjean (1955–56). These are the women who taught Daniel how to read and write. The Freinet Movement, an approach that encourages children to express themselves freely, was all the rage among Swiss teachers at the time. Though I can’t prove it, I believe that Daniel benefited from this tolerant teaching style. In particular, his teachers never tried to change his left-handedness. I learned to write on a slate, and I remember that, as I went along, I would erase everything I’d just written—my palm was covered in chalk. Later on, he continues, I enjoyed the rapid mental calculation contests, which are still helpful to me today. During Daniel’s first year of school, his health remained fragile: his records show fifty-two absences for illness and ten for convalescence. Things improved during his second year, but the year after that, he racked up thirty-eight absences for helping parents.

In fact, Daniel regularly joined Monsieur G on his daily rounds in his red van to pick up all sorts of recycled materials. They also put him to work cleaning out the apartments of people who died without succession. The G---s stored then resold everything: furniture, rugs, clothes, dishes, books . . .

Daniel washed whole vanloads of plates, but he also salvaged several cubic meters’ worth of books. Once he’d gotten started, Daniel read absolutely everything, from the highest to the lowest literature. As soon as he got home, someone would shout at him to get to work, but he read in secret. "Turli!* Lazy boy!" became the war cry of the Moutre, who was after him constantly. If there’s one habit that I kept from that time, he says, it’s that I always feel guilty when I’m not working. The books and the wisdom they contained became Daniel’s refuge. He was already the know-it-all of the family and had no other hobbies besides sledding now and then, or picking mushrooms with Monsieur G, a good man who was dominated by a terrible shrew.

Daniel made it from primary to middle school by forging the G---s’ signatures on the registration form. Thanks to pressure from his teachers, his foster family gave in and let him continue his education, but he would have all sorts of odd jobs over the years. After school, he worked in a pastry shop, then in a secondhand clothing store. In all, he brought home a hundred Swiss francs a month to the G---s. Around that time, social services moved the family to Rue Fritz-Courvoisier, then to Rue du Collège (just a stone’s throw from their old home on Rue du Puits). On Rue Fritz-Courvoisier, they lived in an enormous building that had been a boarding house for young girls. When they moved in, it was still being used to store furniture and other equipment for the mayor’s office. Over the years, the G---s sold everything in the building, even the bronze lettering that spelled the name of the establishment across the front. Aside from that, they weren’t big-time criminals, though they did mix with all sorts of petty crooks, burglars, pimps, and prostitutes of both sexes. On Rue du Collège, where they moved after that, there was a lot of drinking. It was the main drug available at the time. I saw all of it, but the G---s made sure I understood that I wasn’t one of them. They put a wall up between me and their shadier activities. They never let me be an accomplice, Daniel remembers. And it was a good thing, too, because I probably would have turned out badly. But as a result, I didn’t get into that much trouble after that, and I never smoked or touched a drop of alcohol. All those things that young people have to learn for themselves, I never had to learn.

Daniel could only stand so much, and when he was ten years old, he tried to run away. With two francs in his pocket, he set out for France to find his mother, but his escape attempt stopped short on the banks of the Doubs River, which he was too afraid to cross. That same night, he was back on Rue du Collège. Unable to reach France at that age, he sometimes ran away to a friend’s house instead. "We would get to his house, and his mother would give us each a glass of milk and let us play. I couldn’t believe my eyes because when I would go home, they would yell at me and tell me to get to work."

But if there is a wicked witch in this story, there is also a fairy godmother, and Daniel’s was every bit as pretty as the ones in the movies. She makes her first appearance in his earliest childhood memories. He was three or four years old, running around a fountain downtown across from the Migros supermarket. Marguerite Rognon, who was twenty years old at the time, worked at Migros, and with her, Daniel began living a double life. At the G---s’, I was dirty, dressed like something the cat dragged in, not well cared for. But from time to time, I would go stay with Marguerite’s family. Her father was a foreman in a watch factory and her mother was a housewife. I would take a bath, get dressed in clean clothes. I learned table manners, all the things that make a child into a civilized person. Just knowing that another world existed—that was enough to keep me from being broken.

Marguerite also gave him his first dictionary, an illustrated Nouveau Petit Larousse from 1952, which Daniel still has. He would read it obsessively, then drive his teachers crazy by articulating some unusually decisive opinions on semantics during class. When he was eight and nine years old, Marguerite took him on vacation with her to Tarragona, near Barcelona, two summers in a row. By then, she had married Mateo Roqué, a watch salesman from there. Daniel made friends with one of the family’s little nephews, and they had a lot of fun together in Catalonia. They were so kind to me. I was treated the way all children should be treated, Daniel recalls. But at the end of the first trip, he turned difficult, crying and fighting, angry without knowing why.

In 2008, when he received the Ramón Margalef Prize in Ecology, Daniel saw Catalonia again. In the speech he gave at the award ceremony in Barcelona, he talked about visiting the region as a child. And I started crying in front of everyone—it was very embarrassing. I thought about that eight-year-old child who didn’t want to go back to Switzerland, and I felt so sorry for him. But when Daniel was twelve or thirteen years old, things started to look up. He had finally gotten big enough to fight off the Moutre when she tried to slap him around, and he freed himself from the constant work, finally carving out some time for fun. With a few friends, he joined one of the many clubs in town where young people could make model airplanes using little two-stroke engines that choked and sputtered. Around that same time, on the other side of the world where he was stationed in Guam, Winston McLemore, for want of opportunities to become a fighter pilot, also enjoyed making model airplanes. Summer, 1960. The city of Lausanne would have liked to organize the Olympic Games, but they ended up taking place in Rome during a heat wave of historical proportions amid extreme tension between the United States and the USSR. The American delegation got off to a rocky start, the Soviets trouncing them thoroughly during the first week. But African American athletes saved the day: Cassius Clay, an eighteen-year-old boxer, won the heavyweight gold medal that launched his legendary career. Above all, it was one Wilma Rudolph who made headlines. Born twenty years earlier in a Black neighborhood in Clarksville, Tennessee, the twentieth of twenty-two children, she survived double pneumonia, scarlet fever, and a bout with polio that left her in a leg brace. Going directly from physical therapy to intensive sports training, Miss Rudolph made a series of fabulous wins in Rome. Ultimately, she went home with three gold medals, one for the 100 meters, one for the 200 meters, and one for the 4 × 100-meter relay. A black-and-white movie immortalizes the historic 100-meter race where she finished three meters ahead of all the other competitors: she dashes past the finish line, then slows down, looking straight ahead, then at the ground. Finally, she turns around and heads for the locker room. No expression whatsoever, no wave to the crowd—Wilma looks as though she’s just finished a training session. Her hair is cut short, her physique incredible, with legs that make up two-thirds of her height. Back in the United States, she would force her hometown’s segregationist mayor to organize a celebration where all of the city’s residents would be invited, regardless of the color of their skin.

In La Chaux-de-Fonds, Daniel heard talk of the Olympic Games in Rome, but at the end of the summer of 1960, his mind was elsewhere. It was time for the grape harvest, and he had decided to participate. The hills of Neuchâtel produce an excellent Chasselas and the harvest is an important social event: boys from good families sign up months in advance. It was the kind of activity that was completely out of reach for a guy like me, and I was tired of always being left out, Daniel recalls. Using a visit to one of the G---s’ sons in Neuchâtel as an excuse, Daniel showed up at the gate of one of the big wine-growing estates. The main house was empty; everyone was out working in the vineyards except for an elderly woman who greeted him bluntly: It’s too late now, you should’ve asked six months ago. But suddenly, her attitude seemed to change: Say, it’s funny, you look a lot like Wilma Rudolph. Why don’t you run down to the vineyard and see if they have something for you? And so Daniel has one of the pioneers of the Black Consciousness Movement in the United States to thank for being able to participate in the Swiss grape harvest of 1960. He earned a hundred francs and bought himself his first record player, along with some 45s, including Roy Hawkins’s The Thrill Is Gone and Ray Charles’s rendition of Hit the Road Jack.

Despite a chaotic early education, Daniel was accepted into La Chaux-de-Fonds’s business high school in 1960. The establishment was housed in a pink sandstone structure reminiscent of a pastry confection, located high up on the west side of town, about fifteen minutes and 135 imposing steps up from Rue du Collège. It was a prestigious technical high school, set up to train future bank directors and other notables.

I’ll never understand how a literary type like Daniel managed to land in that school instead of a normal high school, his classmate Suzy remembers with astonishment. At the time, Suzy was Mademoiselle Mauerhofer, and her parents owned one of the largest bakeries in town. Suzy was always first in her class, the blondest, the most expressive, the most authentic, the most headstrong of all the girls from good families. She was perfect, Daniel remembers.

A half-century later, Suzy’s eyes still sparkle when she talks about the young Pauly and their school years between 1960 and 1962. She is married to Jean-François Blaser, another classmate, whom everyone calls Jef, and they split their retirement between Switzerland and the middle of nowhere in the Ardèche region of France. Jef had a serious heart attack in 2015, and they decided to renew ties with Daniel. Fortunately, they contacted him soon after I began my research for this biography, in which they became active participants. They are the ones who found the G--- children when I was about to give up all hope of interviewing them. One of their main sources of information was the online archives of the Feuille d’avis de Neuchâtel, the first francophone newspaper in Switzerland, established in 1738. Even more surprisingly, they were able to track down one of their old teachers from the business school, Jacques Barbier, who now lives in Morocco. Thanks to the Blasers, I was up to my ears in unusually sprightly septua- and octogenarians.

I START UP my old bucket of bolts and drive several hours down the twisting country roads between Montpellier and Lagorce, where the Blasers have been restoring an eagle’s nest above the gorges of Ardèche for the last twenty-five years. They give me a fascinating account of Daniel Pauly as a high school student.

He was svelte, handsome, with an explosive laugh. Like a lot of teenagers, his legs were so long compared to the rest of his body that he looked like he was walking on stilts, Suzy says. She also tells me about his hands—As big as a delivery doctor’s, or a pianist’s!—and his ragged clothes. I can still remember that gray sweater he wore summer and winter, with sleeves that were too short, the stitching a complete mess, and a big hole in the front. His pants were just as bad. The Blasers ruminate for a while and conclude: We never did see him in a coat, not even in the middle of winter when there was so much snow on the side of the road that it covered the cars.

Jacques Barbier backs them up: Suzy and Jef were from very bourgeois families compared to Daniel, who literally came from the very bottom, from a very unsophisticated family. He certainly wasn’t well treated, he was punished, yelled at, beaten some.

La Chaux-de-Fonds must have been like a prison for him, Suzy concludes, but he wouldn’t stop fighting.

In class, Suzy sat just behind Daniel, which turned out to be very entertaining, at least for her. He was a troublemaker, a joker, a real clown who didn’t do any of his work. He spent most of his time disrupting class and making us laugh. That’s a gifted student for you; he must have been bored to death. The beautiful Suzy suddenly drops her reserve: Daniel has always bothered idiots, and we had some teachers who were real jerks, who criticized his clothes or the color of his skin. Daniel talked back, of course. He did it without being aggressive, but that didn’t help anything. It was incredible how he drove the teachers crazy.

He was more intelligent than most of his teachers, which is always problematic, Jacques Barbier adds politely. Daniel knew how to mock people, but with such subtlety and sensitivity that they couldn’t get mad. Only a math teacher would lose his head over something like that! As a student, Pauly was vexing—he questioned everything, even things that didn’t affect him. When a new circular came around declaring that it was forbidden to smoke within the school walls, Daniel—who didn’t smoke then and never would—promptly took himself to the principal’s office to ask on behalf of his classmates if the imposing steps leading up to the school building were included in the nonsmoking area.

During his years at the business school, Daniel showed no interest in scientific subjects, nor in anything having to do with nature. In his language classes, he wasn’t much better—the German teacher, not exactly a thrilling character, was promptly nicknamed Schneckelette (Little Slug), and Daniel remained totally immune to declensions. Because it was a technical high school, there were also classes in industrial drawing. Daniel, despite being very handy, spent most of his time spreading the contents of the inkpots on his classmates’ papers. The same chaos reigned in gym class, where he often hijacked the various exercises, using the climbing ropes to board imaginary vessels. Daniel’s only safe harbor turned out to be Jacques Barbier’s French and history classes. Daniel owes everything to that teacher, Suzy concludes. The others were very tough, they got on our last nerve, insists Jef, who also struggled during those years.

In French class, Daniel finally felt like a person. He had a very rich vocabulary, and he didn’t mind writing essays, he just wrote and wrote, recalls Barbier, who was a young professor at the time, only ten years and couple of lessons ahead of his students. He