When you saw this round, twinkling-eyed man, so mischievous with members of the press, it was easy to forget that he’d been one of youngest students ever admitted to the École Polytechnique, or that he’d been a classmate of Laurent Wauquiez at the École Nationale d’Administration in 2001, the year the students honored Nelson Mandela as their class patron. Ben Abbes had the kindly look of a neighborhood grocer—which is just what his father had been, a Tunisian neighborhood grocer, although his shop was on a tony street in Neuilly-sur-Seine, not the Eighteenth Arrondissement, much less the
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