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needs of the users by means of a complementary, but organically independent, package of training programmes. All this clearly bears the stamp of a subtle mind.

    In real terms I will be involved in a tour that will take me firstly to Rouen for a duration of two weeks, then to Dijon for a week, and lastly to La Roche-sur-Yon for four days. I will leave on the first of December and be home again for Christmas, so as to enable me to `spend the holidays with my family'. The human aspect has not been forgotten, then. How splendid.

    I also learn - and it's a surprise - that I will not be alone in undertaking these training programmes. In effect my company has decided to send two people. We will work in tandem. For twenty-five minutes, and in an agonizing silence, the theoretician points out the advantages and the disadvantages of the tandem training. Finally, in extremis , the advantages seem to carry the day.

    I am completely in the dark about the identity of the second person who is required to accompany me. It's probably someone I know In any event nobody has seen fit to notify me.

    Cleverly taking advantage of an unrelated remark he has just made, the theoretician makes the observation that it is a real pity this second person (whose identity will remain a mystery until the last minute) is not there, and that nobody thought it wise to invite him. Pushing on with his argument, he contrives to implicitly suggest that in these conditions my own presence is itself just as useless, or at very least of limited use. Which is precisely what I'm thinking.

    10

    The Degrees of Freedom According to J.-Y. Fréhaut

    Afterwards, I go back to company headquarters. A good reception awaits me there; I have, it seems, succeeded in re-establishing my standing in the company.

    My head of department takes me to one side; he reveals to me the importance of this contract. He knows I'm a solid young man. He devotes a few words, of a bitter realism, to the theft of my car. This is verily a conversation between men, next to the automatic hot drinks machine. In him I discern a true professional in the management of human resources; I'm putty in his hands. He seems ever more handsome to me.

    Later that afternoon I will attend the farewell drink for Jean-Yves Fréhaut. A muchvalued asset is leaving the firm, the head of department affirms; a technician of the highest calibre. In his future career he will doubtless know successes at least as great as those which have marked this one; this is the very least he wishes him. And may he drop by whenever he likes, to drain the cup of friendship! Like a first love, a first job, he concludes in a ribald tone, is something that's hard to forget. I wonder right then if he hasn't drunk too much.

    Brief applause. Some movement is registered around J.-Y Fréhaut; he turns on his heel with a satisfied air. I know this young man slightly; we arrived at the firm at the same time, three years ago; we used to share the same office. We'd talked about civilization one time. He claimed - and in a sense he truly believed it - that the increase in the flow of information within society was in itself a good thing. That freedom was nothing other than the possibility of establishing various interconnections between individuals, projects, organizations, services. According to him the maximum amount of freedom coincided with the maximum amount of potential choice. In a metaphor borrowed from the mechanics of solids, he called these choices degrees of freedom.

    We were, I remember, sitting near the central processing unit. The air conditioning was emitting a slight hum. He was comparing society to a brain, as it were, and its individuals to so many cerebral cells for which it is, in effect, desirable to establish the maximum number of interconnections. But the analogy stopped there. For this was a liberal, and he was scarcely a partisan of what is so necessary to the brain: a unifying project.

    His own life, I would