Hayseed Genius

At a quick glance, mop-haired Jean Frene, 20, seems to be a French version of Li'l Abner. The ninth of eleven children, he grew up in a dirt-floor stone hut on a hardscrabble farm near the hamlet of Longes (pop. 500), 30 miles south of Lyons. Life was so poor that ten years ago his father went to work in a steel plant, where he earns $100 a month. At 14, Jean quit school to work on the farm, seeing little future beyond hard labor and a draft call to Algeria when he reached 18.

The call came--and what the army discovered about Jean is currently the talk of France. The mind of the peasant boy, it turned out upon testing, is comparable to that of Pascal or Leonardo da Vinci.

When Draftee Frene took the usual aptitude exams, he scored so high that he was given the tough officer-candidate test, which is scored from i to 20. Taken in 35 minutes, it consists of 20 quotations from such eminences as Bacon, Bergson, Darwin and Descartes, with multiple-choice questions that reflect concepts and vocabulary at U.S. graduate-school level.

Jean's score: 17. Startled, the colonel in charge suspected cheating, had Jean re peat the test. This time he scored 19.

"Absolutely astonishing," said the colo nel, who in 40,000 previous tests had found only one comparable score, that of a draftee with a doctorate. After high-level dickering, the French ministries of the armed forces and education deferred Jean from military service, enrolled him in a Lyons normal school, rough equivalent of a U.S. college.

Last fall Jean went to work with 33 classmates who were already five to seven years ahead of him in France's dead-earnest schooling. In six months, Jean did five years of work in humanities and six years in science -- earning good to excel lent grades all the way. In addition to formal school, Jean also studies for six hours a day with five university professors. Next fall he plans to enter Lyons' National Institute of Applied Sciences to become an engineer, though he refuses to be pigeonholed too soon. "I am interested in everything I'm studying," he says. "I need time to learn and reflect." As newsmen swarmed over Jean's fam ily farm, his mother grumbled at him: "We haven't had a moment's peace." Jean has already learned the art of evading re porters ("I really haven't seen enough ab stract paintings to have an opinion").

Asked by the Paris journalistic hot shots, "Are there many more bright boys like you out here?" Jean answers casually: "Of course, but they haven't had my luck."

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