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then realized, to know the joys of high speed without having to pedal back up a hill. And you could make it your job. I made up my mind, the way you can when you are nine years old. I would be a race-car driver. From that day on, my life was centered only around motor racing. Nothing else interested me, and I did not see the point of learning all they taught me at school, since I was going to be a racing driver. Children’s comics were replaced by serious motor magazines, and I impatiently began counting off the years that separated me from the age when I could obtain a driver's license. It was also at the age of nine that I had my first experience of boarding school. My mother was in despair because I no longer wanted to do anything at school, and I constantly told her that such learning was useless for motor racing drivers. So she decided to send me to the Notre-Dame-de-France boarding school in Puy-en-Velay. She hoped that, without motor racing magazines, I would apply myself to school work, and in a way she was not far wrong. But I have very bad memories of that first boarding school, almost certainly because I was too young when I was sent there. I remember that I spent many nights crying in a huge dormitory, where what I now believe I missed most was the chance to be alone This need, which caused me to spend entire nights crying, further increased my already great sensitivity, as will any emotional or affectionate need that is denied. I had always been more attracted to literature than to mathematics, although only as an interested and passive reader. Then came the desire, the need to write - in verse if possible. I remained uninterested in mathematics, yet I had now achieved a solid average in that subject as in all others. But in French language, and especially writing, I regularly came first, as long as I liked the set subject. I even wrote an entire collection of poems and won first prize in a poetry 127 My Lire UNTIL THE First ENCOUNTER - POETRY and meditate. Then I discovered poetry. competition.