ABSTRACT
A few months ago I was asked to propose a story about Évariste Ga-lois, the French mathematician, for the French comic books market. I decided from the very beginning that I didn’t want it to be a biographical sketch; I wanted to use the (admittedly interesting) historical character to do something else, something closer to my own personal obsessions. So I started playing around with a few tales I’d heard, a few people I’d met, a few books I’d read. . . And Héloïse was born, asking for her story to be told. And Auguste Dupin, the original Poe detective, was living more or less at the same time as Galois, a coincidence too good to let pass. And I was also sort of thinking (well, fiddling around might be a better expression for what I was actually doing) about possible relationships between magic and mathematics, and their different but sometimes uncannily similar ways of the exploring unknown world. . .
