courses in applied mathematics at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon, the teacher's college. I had genuine quantitative gifts, and yet the academy held no appeal for me. I wanted something else. The ozone-scented arcana of number theory held little allure. I wanted to affect the real world, the realm of the everyday. I lied about my age when I first sought employment in the accounting department of Trianon. Emil Menard was already heralded as a prophet among CEOs, a true visionary. A man who had forged a company out of disparate parts, where no one had previously seen any potential for connection. A man who realized that by assembling once segmented operations you could create an industrial power infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. To my eyes, as an analyst of capital, Trianon was a masterpiece-the Sistine Chapel of corporate design.
Within a matter of months, word of my statistical prowess had reached the head of the department for which I worked, Monsieur Arteaux. He was an older gentleman, a man of few hobbies and a near total devotion to Menard's vision. Some of my coworkers found me cold, but not Monsieur
Arteaux. With us, conversation flowed as if between two sports fans. We could discuss the relative advantages of internal capital markets or alternate measurements of equity risk premiums, and do so for hours. Matters that would stupefy most men, but which involved the architecture of capital itself ~rationalizing the decisions of where to invest and reinvest, how risk was best to be apportioned. Arteaux, who was nearing retirement, put everything on the line by arranging for me to be introduced to the great man himself, catapulting me over endless managerial layers. Menard, amused by my obvious youth, asked me a few condescending questions. I replied with rather serious and rather provocative responses in truth, responses that verged on rudeness. Arteaux himself was appalled. And Menard was, so it seems, captivated. An unusual response, but it was, in capsule form, an explanation of his own greatness. He told me later that my combination of insolence and thoughtfulness reminded him of no one so much as himself. A magnificent egotist, he was, but it was an earned egotism. My own arrogance for even as a child I was tagged with that attribute was perhaps not unfounded, either. Humility was a fine thing for men of the cloth. But rationality decreed that one be sensible to one's own capabilities. I had considerable expertise in the techniques of valuation. Why shouldn't it logically extend to the valuation of oneself? My own father was, I believed, handicapped by a deferential manner; he esteemed his own gifts too little, and persuaded others to undervalue them in turn. That would not be my mistake.
I became, in a matter of weeks, Menard's personal assistant. I accompanied him absolutely everywhere. No one knew whether I was an amanuensis or a counselor. And in truth I moved, smoothly, from playing the first role to playing the second. The great man treated me far more like an adopted son than a paid employee. I was his only protege, the sole acolyte who seemed worthy of his example. I would make proposals, sometimes bold ones, occasionally proposals that reversed years of planning. I suggested, for example, that we sell off an oil-exploration division that his managers had spent years in developing. I suggested massive investments in still unproven technologies. Yet when he heeded my advice, he almost invariably found himself pleased by the results. L'ombre de Menard the shadow of Menard became my nickname in the early 1950s. And even as he fought the disease, the lymphoma, that would ultimately claim his life, he and Trianon came to rely increasingly upon my judgment. My ideas were bold, unheard of, seemingly mad and soon widely mimicked. Menard studied me as much as I studied him, with both detachment and genuine affection. We were men in whom such qualities enjoyed an easy coexistence.
Yet for all the privileges he granted me, I had sensed, for a while, that there was one final sanctum to which I had not been granted entry. There were trips he made without explanation, corporate allocations I could not make sense of and about which he would brook no discussion. Then the day came when he decided that I would be inducted into a society I knew nothing about, an organization you know as Sigma.
I was still Menard's wunderkind, still the corporate prodigy, still in my early twenties,