One Hundred Twenty-One Days by Michèle Audin, Christiana Hills

of Danglars.
    Beautiful words, to describe the numbers he was studying, she had loved the irrational, the complex, the transcendental…
    And impassioned words, sweet words, words of happiness.
    She had so few of his words left. The words in the letter—a makeshift note, thrown at random to the will of the wind that would carry it far away from the tracks, away from the rain that would not destroy it, to the discretion or indiscretion of the person, a more or less considerate passerby, who would find it—friendly words, of course, but cautious words, so cautious that sometimes in rereading them, she doubted whether there had really been more passionate ones.
    She had so few of his words left. She also had a couple of photographs, the note thrown from the train, a mathematics article, and the book he had let her borrow, which she hadn’t been able to return to the family. Almost all of the young, carefree people in the photograph from the picnic were dead: that scatterbrain Madeleine, Simone, and André, André who had said, “I’m totallysafe because I’m publishing under the name of Danglars.” So few saved, so many drowned. A verse from André’s Dante came back to her as she looked at this photograph:
    And thus the Yawning Deep forever o’er us closed.
    in dodecasyllabic verse—even though the original Italian verses of the Divine Comedy all have eleven syllables. She had looked in the Sorbonne library for other translations of the end of Canto xxvi,
    Until the sea above us closed again.
    Hell and the sea, the meter of the poetry, the words and the numbers…

CHAPTER IX
    The Numbers
    The numbers, in order, starting with the negatives:
-25,    the temperature (in degrees Celsius) in Upper Silesia in January 1945 during the evacuation of Auschwitz
0.577215…,  Euler’s constant
0.625  or 5/8 Jewish would have been each of Mireille’s and André’s children
1        single bullet managed to remove one of M.’s eyes, his nose, and half of his jaw
1.414213…,  the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a square with a side of 1
2        grenadiers returning to France in a poem by Heine
3        croissants for a breakfast at the Hotel Raphael
3.14159…,  π, the constant allowing one to calculate the length and surface area of all circles
5        daughters (and one son) had Christian and Marguerite M.
6 TH     Artillery Regiment, the one in which Gorenstein was serving when he had the sense knocked out of him
7        kilometers, the distance between Monowitz and the main camp of Auschwitz
8        minutes, the length of time it took for Sacco to die on the electric chair
9        Rue de Médicis, the home of the Duvivier family
11,      answered the nurse when the numeromaniac polytechnician asked her for a number
12,      the number of syllables in a translation of one of Dante’s hendecasyllabic verses
12.3569111418…,  Gorenstein’s constant
13 TH   of August, the date the uprising started in Paris in 1944
14      years old, Claude Yersin’s age when he was looking for his uncle’s remains on the battlefield
14.134725…,  the imaginary part of one of the zeros in the zeta function
15      years old was the boy when they decided to send him to Paris
16      meters, the height of the cylinder Beckett describes in The Lost Ones
17      years old, Kürz’s age when he enlisted in the navy
18 TH   of January, the day the Auschwitz camps were evacuated
19      years old, the age of the future great poet when he jumped out of a trench
20      years that Meyerbeer studied Gorenstein
22      years old, Gorenstein’s age when he committed a triple murder
23 RD   of June, the date Christian and Marguerite were married
24 TH   of June, the last day Andre and Mireille saw each other
25      the only square that becomes a cube when you add 2 to