École Polytechnique was notable for the variety of its courses. The course in mechanics was in a certain sense a masterpiece, in other senses rather peculiar. But the fact was that so many different fields, which in fact made no sense to give to students, were being presented - I say, "made no sense" because most students were mostly worried about the ranking. The ranking changed life. If you are number five you went into one civil service; if you're number six you go to a different one; if you're number twenty-one, your life was different from that of number twenty-two. So most students had no choice but to become extraordinarily focused. And there again the good thing at the École Polytechnique for me was due to a certain Catch-22. To be a regular student had to be a civil servant, and a French citizen for five years, which I was not, well, A had to follow B and B had to follow A. Now, I was very naive on these matters, and the École Polytechnique was very ill informed, so it told me that that was life and I could not do any differently. In fact, had I been well-informed I would have asked someone in the Council of State to review the conditions of my admission and so on, and they would have decided almost certainly to have me become a regular student. That would have been a tremendous change in my life, perhaps a catastrophe, because that would have put me in a position of having to model myself around a certain profession, a very well defined one. But I didn't have to do so and therefore in the École Polytechnique I was at the same time viewed by everybody as being on top of the class, but in fact free from the constraints of having to prove myself on every exam. I could - well, chemistry was pretty awful, I just did not study chemistry; but other fields were very exciting. I studied them in great detail. I even read all the appendices, of which there were just hundreds of pages accumulated over the years. So all in all, the École Polytechnique was a very good - I wouldn't say training for me, but the kind of circumstances in which I could- well- seek my role in life, and hope it will come soon.
