“Jacques,” chuckles Pierre Marseille, who was Attali’s schoolmate and next-door neighbor at the time, “Jacques!” He looks toward the ceiling as he pauses. “I will never forget what he did when his parents’ house caught on fire one autumn day.” He coughs and straitens up in his armchair. “He dashed into the burning kitchen to the consternation of his sobbing mother, and returned with a big bag of chestnuts in his hands.” Tears appear in his eyes. “And then he started baking them in the ashes of the collapsed roof to feed his destitute family and some of his hand-wringing neighbors.” He coughs again and wipes his eyes. “Never forget,” he stammers, “Jacques was only eleven!” After a few more coughs, he sighs with a beatific smile on his face: “The greatest optimist on earth!” At this point Pierre chuckles one more time and looks through the window. The house where the Attali family used to live is still there. It was rebuilt quite quickly.

From Marie-Louise Blanchard’s Jacques Attali: Childhood and Adolescence (translated by Erich Koch), Bristol: Red Robin Press, 2002 (first published in 1997), p. 34.