La rentree

Since I am back to Paris every day got closer to “la rentrée”, for me a particular Parisian syndrome of everyone getting back into town, summer being over and normal life starting again. For the ones having stayed in town during August, it means at the same time friends coming back and social life starting again, but also having the slowed down summer habits invade by a crowd of sun tanned families with screaming kids. No more parking places, no more empty tables on the terrace of your favorite café, but huge lines in every supermarket.

My last days have been devoted preparing the rather particular rentrée we had this year at the lab: the term of our former director, Jean-Eudes Augustin finished end of August and on Friday, a little celebration was organized in the lab by our new director, Pascal Debu to thank Jean-Eudes and to start "officially" his term. First we had some hesitation, if Friday would not be too early and everyon back to work, but we were about 100, and it was a very nice way to start the French "New Year". Over the summer we thought about what to do on this occassion. Jeannie organized a wonderful apperif, and it was clear that Pascal will be giving an outline of his vision of the lab and his policy, but it was up to us to figure out how to thank Jean-Eudes. So since July delirious brainstorming occurred on spontaneous occasions and we made up our mind on the speakers from the lab.

It all happened yesterday at our weekly Friday 11 o’clock meeting: Christian de la Vaissière our former deputy director recollected on the time he worked with Jean-Eudes. Then Murat Boratav  (apparently in charge of after dinner talks at the Auger experiment) made us laugh a lot with internet findings of Augustin, the fact that France was overlooked for the Nobleprize in 76, despite J.E. Augustin (and on the other coast J.J. Aubert) being first authors of the relevant papers and an imaginary biography of Jean-Eudes: he made an allussion on Jean-Eudes flooding elemenatry school while expeimenting with faucets, where I still don't know the background storry to it. With the word “tradition” he gave me a good transition to offer Jean-Eudes the gift we prepared for him: in the lab personalized T-shirt were offert to a new doctor by his fellow students as a welcome to his life as a physicist. After being director and now becoming physicist again, a similar welcome seemed appropriate. However the “thing” handed over to Jean-Eudes, didn’t have anything of the shape of a T-shirt. Jean-Eudes looked first astonished, then intrigued and finally gave it a good laugh – sorry I don’t have the complete picture sequence: I got so emotional that I lacked operating the camera properly.

The T-shirt was actually framed, and with all the photos of the lab-members, their signatures and some little funny things we associated with Jean-Eudes. I spent most of the lasts days preparing all the pictures and collecting the signatures, which was a very enjoyable way to say hello to everyone back in to work. Hey, and we even have the signature of a Noble prizewinner on the T-shirt: Jim Cronin stays actually a couple of weeks in the lab, and it was very nice to have a chat with him during the aperitif: besides being such an eminent physicists, he is also very human, talking about doing things because one is interessted and enjoys them, and not with the aim of getting recognition or having sucess. Even though the later behavior is often accounted for as "human nature", I would rather say, that it is a type of personality structure and it doesn't seemed the motivation that was driving Jim for doing his researches.

In the end, it was still Jean-Eudes who had the final laugh: from time to time during his term he affirmed his view concerning "working hours", which was divergent from a more flexible approach of some lab-members. So his final advice was a French saying: "The future belong to those who get up early..." 

Merci Jean-Eudes pour tout et bienvenue Pascal!

PS: and Jose is back to the lab!