Accordingly, Raksmey promptly began work on a doctoral degree in quantum electrodynamics at the Polytechnique. He was offered, after some testy political negotiation within the department, a coveted fellowship at CERN, the international particle physics laboratory straddling the border between France and Switzerland. Only twenty-one at the time, Raksmey was the youngest doctoral student in CERN’s history. Under the mentorship of the theorist Dr. Abdus Salam and the experimentalist André Rousset, Raksmey wrote his dissertation, “On the Electroweak Interaction of Neutrinos with Quarks via Z Boson Exchange,” utilizing experimental research from CERN’s newly constructed Gargamelle bubble chamber. Several key points of Raksmey’s dissertation would later contribute to Dr. Salam’s winning the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979.
Fig. 4.8. “A neutral current event, as observed in the Gargamelle bubble chamber”
Image from R. Raksmey’s 1974 dissertation, “On the Electroweak Interaction of Neutrinos with Quarks via Z Boson Exchange,” as reproduced in Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 651
Raksmey was quite clearly an eager and brilliant disciple of Salam, but he also struggled with social interaction. He had a small collection of English poetry in his apartment, as well as “several novels by Latin American authors” (653), including Julio Cortázar, and he enjoyed listening to Bach, Debussy, Shostakovich, and Britten. When not doing lab work, he often went hiking alone in the Swiss Alps.
In Spesielle Partikler, Røed-Larsen also cites rumors — although these remain unconfirmed — that Raksmey developed an intimate (possibly sexual) relationship with an older man, Dr. Alan Ferring, who was visiting the Gargamelle team from Berkeley, California. This relationship — if indeed it existed at all — must have been brief, for in September 1974 Ferring returned to his wife and family in California. Dr. Ferring apparently refused to be interviewed for Røed-Larsen’s book.
Fig. 4.9. Manifest from AF 931, Bangkok — Phnom Penh, March 2, 1975
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 670
This much we do know: on March 2, 1975, Raksmey flew back to Cambodia after hearing news of his father’s death. Raksmey was listed in the passenger manifests of the Air France flights from Paris to Bangkok and from Bangkok to Phnom Penh — Flight 931, one of the last commercial flights to land in Cambodia.
Regarding the circumstances of Jean-Baptiste’s death, Røed-Larsen, lacking much concrete evidence, contends that a small squad of Khmer Rouge troops, possibly heading southwest from their camp in Ratanakiri, near the Vietnam border, came upon La Seule Vérité by accident. Their movement was in the context of a larger dry-season mobilization of Khmer Rouge troops to Kampong Thom before a final push toward Phnom Penh down Highway 5.
According to Røed-Larsen, the encounter at La Seule Vérité was not without precedent. During the two years before, there had been plenty of fighting in the area between Khmer Rouge rebels and various divisions of Lon Nol’s woeful Khmer National Armed Forces. In 1973, an American B-52 had mistakenly dropped a payload of phosphorus bombs on the lycée, only three kilometers upriver, killing seventeen schoolchildren and the two missionaries from Texas. The school had burned for three days. Yet for the most part, La Seule Vérité had remained relatively unscathed by both the American war in Vietnam and the civil war raging in Cambodia. Rubber collection had completely ceased about five years earlier, following Capitaine Claude Renoit’s suicide, in 1969, and only a skeleton crew of five or six men remained with Jean-Baptiste at the time, maintaining the grounds, cooking, and ostensibly providing protection from hostile factions. On several occasions, representatives from the undermanned Cambodia National Army had recommended that Jean-Baptiste abandon his home and retreat to Phnom Penh, as they could no longer guarantee his safety. He had politely but firmly dismissed their counsel each time.
What happened on the night in question is not known. Tien managed to escape, but the plantation was burned, and it is unclear what was rescued from the fire. One can assume that all of Jean-Baptiste’s notebooks on Raksmey’s development — numbering perhaps 750—were destroyed, though less certain is the fate of André’s and Henri’s ledgers, which presumably remained locked in the basement safes. And what of Jean-Baptiste’s wager with himself concerning the fate of his only son, squirreled away in a rosewood box beneath the floorboards? Or the Reamker masks on the mantel? Or the strange wooden puppet discovered in place of his mother, which had found a home next to the inkwell in his study?
Fig. 4.10. Map showing movements of Northern Sector Khmer Rouge
rebels from Ratanakiri to Phnom Penh (January — April 1975)
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 650
In the years of conflict that followed, the plantation was used as a refuge for several Khmer Rouge divisions, vagrants, and prisoners of the regime, and then by the Vietnamese troops during their 1979 invasion. Over the course of this period, the grounds were apparently picked clean. Røed-Larsen recounts how, many years later, in 1995, the property was examined by a ministerial housing inspector and the resulting report made no mention of a safe in the basement or any miscellaneous scientific equipment. The property was valued at 290 million riel, or about $75,000, a prohibitive price to anyone but the most elite provincial ministers.
Not surprisingly, given the site’s obscure location and the country’s ongoing economic woes, the property was never redeveloped. The state attempted to seize the plantation on several occasions, but the estate’s legal status remained unresolved, particularly since Raksmey Raksmey de Broglie was never officially located. Many travelers on the Mekong have remarked at the unusual sight of the main house’s grand ruins, just visible from the river, surrounded by rows and rows of overgrown hevea trees. Locals pass along several competing stories about its onetime inhabitants, involving sorcerers, the CIA, and even Pol Pot himself. The name La Seule Vérité has been completely lost to time.
After landing in Phnom Penh in March 1975, Raksmey attended a brief funeral ceremony for his father inside a small wat near the university, as it was no longer possible to travel back through Khmer Rouge territory to the plantation. The Mekong was now mined all the way up to the Laotian border. Days after this, flights out of the country were suspended, and Raksmey was prevented from returning to his lab in Switzerland. He and Tien shared a small flat in the Khan Chamkarmon district of Phnom Penh for a little over a month, waiting, with the rest of the city, for the imminent arrival of the Khmer Rouge. No one knew what this would mean, though many diplomatic organizations, including the U.S. embassy, took no chances and evacuated all of their members.
Finally, on April 15, 1975, trucks and tanks full of battle-weary Khmer Rouge soldiers streamed into the city down Highway 5 and “liberated” Phnom Penh. They were met by a jubilant populace, who hoped that this signaled the end of the endless civil war. Peace could now prosper in a region that had not seen peace in many years. It was not long, however, before Cambodians came to terms with the reality of these liberators. Within days, the entire city — all two million inhabitants — was ordered to leave for the countryside. The Khmer Rouge had begun its surreal war against time.